Both reason and revelation are indispensable in the quest for light and truth at Brigham Young University, and BYU students have a responsibility to help maintain that “peculiar mandate,” the speaker said Tuesday at the first devotional of the spring term.
Harvard and many other schools that set out to be both intellectually enlarging and spiritually strengthening encountered conflict between the temple of faith and the hall of reason, said Hal Boyd, chief of staff to BYU President Shane Reese and executive editor of Deseret Magazine.
“No such conflict ought to exist here. Here at BYU we synthesize illumination from both temples,” Boyd said at the Marriott Center on the school’s campus on a drizzly spring morning.
The design of education in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which sponsors BYU, is rooted in the teachings of Joseph Smith, who sought to build temples and schools, and Brigham Young, who did the same, Boyd said.
“We say revelation enhances reason; sainthood exalts scholarship; discipleship adds to deliberation,” he said.
BYU is designed to nurture both until Jesus Christ comes again, part of what late BYU President Franklin S. Harris called its peculiar mandate, Boyd said.
“For 150 years, Brigham Young University has been the bearer of a ‘peculiar mandate,’ the keeper of a flame. Don’t let it dim. Don’t let it diminish, because in the days ahead, that flame must become a spiritual conflagration for Christ,” he said.
That bonfire of BYU’s spiritual mission, which he said, is dimming or dead in most corners of the academy, needs to be fed by BYU students and employees whom he called “keepers of the flame; you guardians of the light.”
“So, my brothers and sisters, my fellow disciples, my friends, bring your kindling to the great bonfire of faith — add a branch, or a twig or two; or better yet, toss in an entire cord of wood," he said. “Because it‘s here we must love more purely, learn more deeply, and serve more effectively.”
Boyd listed some of the academic and athletic accolades recently showered on BYU, but warned that external validation can become a temptation to drift from the school’s mission.
BYU’s impressive rankings, new classification as a Research 1 institution and status as one of two schools with football and men’s basketball teams that finished in the top 15 can’t distract from the church’s and school’s top priority, he said.
“It‘s worth stating that no win on the field, no top tier peer-reviewed publication is worth even the slightest drift away from Christ or his kingdom,” Boyd said.
Maintaining that spiritual mission will also require students who embrace repentance because sin dampens the fires of faith, he said.
“It will require more than resisting the temptations mentioned. It will require great leaps of faith, it will require living true to your primary identities as children of God, children of the covenant and disciples of Christ; it will require more charity, more service, more goodness, more light and more truth,” he said.
Boyd said that university surveys show that graduates report having grown both academically and in their testimonies of Jesus Christ and living prophets and apostles.
“I don’t expect those kinds of data points to show up in national rankings, but they are the trends that transform souls,” he said.
Boyd talked about ways BYU blessed his life, which includes meeting and marrying his wife, Holly.
“I’m a living testament that if you give to this place, it will give back to you 10-, 20-, a hundred-fold,” he said. “Ecclesiastes teaches: ‘Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.’ In other words, serve, participate, pitch in. Cast your bread in abundance on this campus, and not just at the duck pond.”
