Written in about 1975
The traditional training for the ministry in Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism has been basically sophic. It has been a rational approach which emphasizes scholarship as the basic approach. Scholarship is taken as the key because it is to the basic written sources that each of these religions goes for its direction and justification.
It is interesting to note, however, that the basic written sources of those religions are not sophic in origin but are mantic. They are the eye-witness accounts of persons who knew God as a person. The sophic or scholarly approach is the basis of those religions only because the mantic element is gone: revelation has admittedly ceased. But revelation is yet venerated in the scholarly investigation of its written remnants.
Training for the ministry in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is basically mantic and only secondarily sophic. First and foremost the Elder must recognize and live by his own personal revelation from God. By this means he is able to identify those who are truly given presiding authority by God, to make correct interpretations of doctrine, and to order properly the affairs of the Kingdom which are placed in his charge. Only secondarily does he need and use the sophic approach, but he definitely and necessarily needs it. But his interpretations of the written records are always guided by revelation even when maximally enriched by the fruits of sophic scholarship.
Thus the training of an LDS Elder is of necessity mostly a field training. It involves substantial schooling after the manner of other religions, but depends principally upon the ability of the Elder to discern and live by the personal revelations he receives in the daily course of working within the Church in his assigned stewardship and in his contacts with the world.