As They Suppose

The best-dressed tare in the field

Some justifying logics wear work clothes. This one wears the scriptures themselves.

"For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth." "He that is idle shall not eat." "I'm rebuking out of love." "They need to learn self-reliance." "The truth hurts." Every sentence in that list is either a quotation from the canon or a close paraphrase of one — which makes the tough-love tare the best-camouflaged justifying logic this series has examined. The tare at the gate of the Book of Mormon dressed a killing in the language of deliverance; this one dresses withholding and wounding in the language of love, and it quotes chapter and verse while it does it.

But a tare, we have learned, is known two ways: by its fruit, and by the small grammatical seams where the counterfeit doesn't quite match the original. The tough-love rhetoric fails both tests — and remarkably, scripture pre-weeds its two main varieties by name, quoting the justifying sentence verbatim and condemning it, as if the Lord knew exactly which lines would be recited at the doors of the hungry and over the heads of the struggling.

The self-reliance tare: Benjamin's pre-weeding

Begin with the variety King Benjamin executes in public, because he puts the modern sentence — word for word in spirit — in the mouth of the withholder before striking it down:

"Perhaps thou shalt say: The man has brought upon himself his misery; therefore I will stay my hand, and will not give unto him of my food, nor impart unto him of my substance that he may not suffer, for his punishments are just — But I say unto you, O man, whosoever doeth this the same hath great cause to repent... For behold, are we not all beggars? Do we not all depend upon the same Being, even God, for all the substance which we have...?" (Mosiah 4:17–19).

Read the anatomy of the condemned logic. It is not cruelty; it is a justice argument — "his punishments are just," suffering as pedagogy, withholding as help. It is, precisely, tough love: I stay my hand for his good. And Benjamin's refutation is not a counter-argument about economics. It is a mirror: are we not all beggars? The entire deservingness framework collapses on one fact — God did not apply it to you. Grace was received on no-merit terms; it cannot be re-dispensed on merit terms without denying what it was when it arrived. The unmerciful servant's sin was not that he collected a real debt. It was that he collected it after the ten-thousand-talent forgiveness, as though the forgiveness had never happened (Matthew 18:23–35).

Now mark the seam honestly, because self-reliance has genuine wheat. "Thou shalt not be idle; for he that is idle shall not eat the bread nor wear the garments of the laborer" (D&C 42:42). Section 56 pronounces wo in both directions — on the rich who will not impart, and on the poor "whose hearts are not broken... and whose hands are not stayed from laying hold upon other men's goods, whose eyes are full of greediness, and who will not labor with your own hands" (D&C 56:16–17). Labor is doctrine. Provident living is doctrine. The dole that fosters idleness is condemned in the same revelations that condemn the stayed hand.

But watch the addressing on every labor verse, because the addressing is where the tare grows. The counsel is always spoken to the receiver, about his own heart: thou shalt not be idle; wo unto you poor whose hearts are not broken. Nowhere is the giver instructed to administer that examination on the beggar before opening his hand. The register shift that creates the tare is exactly this: counsel-to-self converted into a screening tool for others. I was handed the self-reliance standard to audit my own labor; the moment I point it at the man at the gate, I have stolen an instrument aimed at me and turned it on him. Benjamin closes even the loophole of inability: "I would that ye say in your hearts that: I give not because I have not, but if I had I would give" (Mosiah 4:24) — the heart is examined even when the hand is empty. And the final judgment scene contains no exemption clause for the undeserving hungry. The sheep of Matthew 25 are not commended for their means-testing.

The chastening tare: a stolen subject

The second variety is subtler, because its proof-text is real and beloved: "For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth" (Hebrews 12:6), echoing Proverbs 3:12, echoed again by the risen Christ — "As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten" (Revelation 3:19).

Read the subject of every one of those sentences. The Lord loveth; the Lord chasteneth; I rebuke. The verses license God's chastening. Quoting them to justify mine performs a quiet substitution — I cast myself as the Lord in the sentence — and that substitution has a name in this series: it is the golden calf of D&C 124:84, my counsel established instead of the counsel ordained. The chastening tare is not an error about whether love can be severe. It is a stolen subject: a divine prerogative claimed by a man who was never assigned the part.

What humans are actually licensed to do is spelled out — and it is spelled out in the same revelation that diagnoses the theft, which is one of the canon's quiet mercies. D&C 121:41–44 is not a softening of tough love; it is a protocol, with five conditions, and the tough-love rhetoric is the flattened-conditional tare running one more time: keep the sharpness, delete the conditions.

The conditions: the default posture is total — "only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned; by kindness, and pure knowledge." Sharpness is, first, exceptional — a parenthesis, never a personality. Second, it is Spirit-gated: "reproving betimes with sharpness, when moved upon by the Holy Ghost" — the constraint-of-the-Spirit protocol, the same one that governs the mysteries; sharpness is dispensed like a sacred thing or not at all, and the discharge of temper does not qualify. Third, "betimes" — early, promptly; not stored in a magazine and delivered as a payload of accumulated grievance. Fourth, the aftermath is commanded: "showing forth afterwards an increase of love toward him whom thou hast reproved, lest he esteem thee to be his enemy" — the reproof is not complete until the increase lands. Fifth, the whole exchange lives inside a faithfulness "stronger than the cords of death."

And the revelation names what the deleted conditions were covering: "when we undertake to cover our sins, or to gratify our pride, or our vain ambition, or to exercise control or dominion or compulsion upon the souls of the children of men, in any degree of unrighteousness, behold, the heavens withdraw themselves" (121:37). Which yields a field test of unusual reliability: real reproof under 121 is expensive to the reprover. Long-suffering costs. The afterwards-increase costs. Love unfeigned costs most of all. Counterfeit tough love is cheap — it discharges the reprover's irritation and bills it to God's account, and it feels good going out. If the rebuke felt good, be suspicious of whose need it served. Chastening that gratified the chastener has already identified its author.

The root: authority "as they suppose"

Both varieties share one root, and the fifth Article of Faith exists to cut it: "We believe that a man must be called of God, by prophecy, and by the laying on of hands by those who are in authority, to preach the Gospel and administer in the ordinances thereof." Behind it stands Hebrews 5:4 — "no man taketh this honour unto himself, but he that is called of God, as was Aaron" — and behind that, Korah in the wilderness, whose rebellion was not atheism but self-commissioned holiness: "all the congregation are holy, every one of them... wherefore then lift ye up yourselves?" (Numbers 16:3).

The tough-love economy runs entirely on self-commissioning. The man who quotes "whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth" and appoints himself the Lord in the sentence has performed an unauthorized ordination in his own living room; he administers an ordinance of reproof under a calling nobody extended. And Section 121 — again, the same revelation — names the phenomenon with four words that could stand as this essay's title: "as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion" (121:39). Supposed authority. Credentials the issuer imagined. Nearly all of them, the verse says — "it is the nature and disposition of almost all men" — which means the reader should assume the diagnosis applies to himself before applying it to anyone, on pain of committing the essay's own sin in the act of reading it.

The seam must be marked on both edges here. Article of Faith 5 fences administration — preaching by commission, ordinances by authority — and it protects the flock from every self-installed voice; its quiet partner is common consent, since every calling is sustained by the raised hands of the body, which means no one can install himself over anyone. But the fence is around administration, not around the Spirit — and Moses himself does the weeding on the opposite tare. When Eldad and Medad prophesied in the camp, uncommissioned, and Joshua demanded "my lord Moses, forbid them," Moses answered: "Enviest thou for my sake? would God that all the LORD's people were prophets" (Numbers 11:26–29). Held together, the two texts give the balance the whole series has taught: order in what binds the body, open current to every seeker. No one commissions himself to rebuke; no office dams the Spirit. The tough-love tare is what grows wherever someone hops the first fence while quoting the scriptures that built it.

And genuine stewardship exists — that seam matters too. A parent with a child, a bishop with a ward, a teacher with a class: reproof lives lawfully inside real callings, which is why the 121 protocol was given at all. The protocol presumes a steward. It exists because even commissioned sharpness runs on Spirit-constraint and afterwards-increase — how much more the uncommissioned kind, which fails the test before it begins.

The gradient: where the Lord's sharpness ran

The proof-text tough love always reaches for last is Jesus himself — the whip, the woes, "ye generation of vipers," "get thee behind me, Satan." His sharpness was real, and no honest reading softens it. But map the targets, and a law appears that refutes the reach.

The sharpness runs up the power gradient, every time: Pharisees and scribes in their seats of honor; money-changers operating a concession inside the temple courts; the establishment that devoured widows' houses and made long prayers; Peter — in the one moment Peter presumed to redirect the Messiah. And the tenderness runs down the gradient, every time: the woman taken in adultery, whom the law's quoters had surrounded; the publicans and sinners at whose tables he ate; the lepers he touched before healing, when the word alone would have served; the children the disciples were shooing; the woman at the well, whose five marriages he named without one syllable of the sermon she braced for. Isaiah had published the pattern in advance as the Messiah's identifying mark: "A bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench" (Matthew 12:20, quoting Isaiah 42:3).

Tough-love rhetoric almost always inverts the gradient. It is sharp toward the struggling child, the poor at the gate, the wayward member, the bruised reed — and deferential toward power, where sharpness would cost something. The inversion is the fruit by which you know it. When a man's "prophetic candor" consistently punches downward, it is not Elijah's fire. It is temperament in a robe, and the robe is borrowed.

The wheat on the firm side

An honest weeding names the wheat growing beside these tares, because permissiveness is not the righteousness that severity fails to be.

Eli is condemned in scripture not for harshness but for restraint: "his sons made themselves vile, and he restrained them not" (1 Samuel 3:13) — and the house of Eli fell for it. A love that watches a beloved soul destroy itself and calls the watching gentleness has amputated the other half of the law; boundaries, consequences, and the direct naming of sin are all scriptural, and the parent or steward who withholds them out of conflict-avoidance has failed the second commandment while flattering himself that he kept it.

The model for the firm side is Alma with Corianton — three chapters of it (Alma 39–42). Alma names the sin without one euphemism: "these things are an abomination in the sight of the Lord" (39:5). Then he reasons — not one verse of rebuke followed by silence, but three full chapters of doctrine answering the boy's actual unspoken questions about resurrection, judgment, justice, and mercy, as though the father understood that behind the sin stood confusions that deserved theology, not just censure. And then he restores: "And now, O my son, ye are called of God to preach the word unto this people" (42:31) — and the record quietly confirms the restoration took, listing Corianton among the preachers whose work brought peace (Alma 49:30). Sharp, explanatory, restorative — all three movements, or it is not the pattern. Reproof that names without reasoning is a verdict; reproof that reasons without restoring is a sentence. Alma's is a reclamation.

And Paul supplies the discriminator for whether firmness landed as love: "godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death" (2 Corinthians 7:10). The fruit test, applied to reproof: chastening that produces repentance-and-return was chastening; reproof that produces shame-and-distance was wounding, whatever it called itself on the way out. Hebrews 12 builds the same audit into its own promise — chastening "yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby" (12:11). If the fruit is fear, estrangement, and a child who esteems you his enemy — the precise outcome 121's afterwards-clause exists to prevent — the text has already ruled on what the sharpness was.

Doest thou well to be angry?

The canon closes its case with a book-length portrait of the tough-love heart, and the portrait is Jonah.

Jonah is right. The message God gives him is real; Nineveh's wickedness is real; the warning he finally delivers is accurate to the letter. And when the city repents and God relents, Jonah is not relieved. He is furious — "it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry" — and his complaint to God is that mercy was the outcome he'd feared all along: "I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness" (Jonah 4:1–2). He is the man who wanted the chastening more than the repentance it was for; the reprover invested in the sentence rather than the reclamation; righteous severity revealed, at the moment of mercy, as something that was never about the sinner at all.

God's answer is not a rebuke. It is a question, asked twice, left hanging over the book's unresolved ending and over every tough-love heart since: "Doest thou well to be angry?" (4:4, 9). And then the last verse of the book — God explaining himself to his angry prophet — "should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?" The final word of the book of Jonah is the cattle. The mercy of God, defending itself to the tough-love heart, reaches past the deserving question so far that it gathers in the livestock.

The summary, in the series' grammar

Tough love is what the two great commandments look like when one has been amputated and the stump renamed. Every variety is a register shift wearing love's vocabulary: chastening shifted from God's prerogative to my license; self-reliance shifted from counsel-to-me into a means test for thee; sharpness shifted from the Spirit's rare, gated parenthesis into a personality's default voice; consequence shifted into contempt; the steward's protocol flattened into a proof-text. And the accuser — whose native tongue is accusation dressed as concern, who indicted Job's faith and Nineveh's worth and the beggar's deserving from the beginning — has no easier costume than this one, because it lets a man serve him in full view of the ward and be thanked afterward for his candor.

The balance is not a midpoint between soft and hard. It is Section 121 kept whole: love unfeigned as the constant atmosphere; sharpness as the Holy Ghost's rare parenthesis inside it, promptly spent and never stored; and the increase of love afterward as the signature that proves whose voice it was — because the Lord's reproofs end in binding up, and the counterfeit's end in distance. The hand stays open at the gate because all of us are beggars. The subject of "whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth" stays the Lord. And the question that weighs every severity before it leaves the mouth is the one still hanging over Jonah outside the city wall, in the shade of a withered gourd, wanting the fire more than the rescue:

Doest thou well to be angry?

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And showing forth afterwards an increase of love toward him whom thou hast reproved, lest he esteem thee to be his enemy.