Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

Wired:

I've written several answers about what I believe constitutes doctrine (and you can search the archives for some of those), but here's where I see the issue.

Indisputably, the scriptures and the articles of faith are official, canonized doctrines. But "official declarations/proclamations" need to be submitted to the church as revelation and presented for a sustaining vote by the general body of the church according to the Law of Common Consent. This is according to the (frustratingly non-doctrinal) source of President Harold B. Lee when he said:

If anyone, regardless of his position in the Church, were to advance a doctrine that is not substantiated by the standard Church works, meaning the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price, you may know that his statement is merely his private opinion. The only one authorized to bring forth any new doctrine is the President of the Church, who, when he does, will declare it as revelation from God, and it will be so accepted by the Council of the Twelve and sustained by the body of the Church. And if any man speak a doctrine which contradicts what is in the standard Church works, you may know by that same token that it is false and you are not bound to accept it as truth.

Now that LDS newsroom article has always confused me a little bit: do The Family and The Living Christ count as official proclamations? They certainly don't count as binding doctrine according to President Lee's definition, but one could also say that President Lee's definition was a policy rather than a doctrine and may not apply to our time for some reason.

When I had previously read the LDS Newsroom article, I had sort of assumed that President Lee's definition may not apply to The Family, which is really about as "official" and institutionalized as a proclamation could be. However, given the changes made to President Packer's talk, I'm inclined to change my mind — I don't think The Family counts as an official source of doctrine for the church. I'm not saying it's not true, or not revelation — but it's not yet binding doctrine.

Now if we get more theoretical, it gets a little more convoluted than that — like you said, the doctrine of the plan of salvation, as contained in the scriptures, doesn't include the nice diagram that we all know and love. Our understanding of scriptural principles comes from institutional interpretations of the scriptures. This theoretical distinction is highlighted in Acts 8, where Philip meets the Eunuch in the chariot:

And Philip ran thither to him, and heard him read the prophet Esaias, and said, Understandest thou what thou readest?
And he said, How can I, except some man should guide me? And he desired Philip that he would come up and sit with him.

Now, if someone had only the official doctrinal sources, and were to spend an entire year reading and studying them on their own, with no discussion with anyone in the church, without following our cross references or knowing what we believe to be our core principles, would they understand the doctrine of the church the same way we do? I think absolutely not. Theoretically the source doctrine is not only in the scriptures, but also in the cultural discourse we have about the scriptures—the patterns and principles we find in the scriptures, the ways we apply them to our lives, the ways we talk about them and teach about them, the ways we link them together, etc. In this sense, I think it's just silly to say that the doctrine in any way "resides in" the scriptures — the doctrine is our culturally agreed-upon interpretation of the scriptures and thus cannot be located in any particular text. But again, in this definition of doctrine, the agreed-upon canon is still important, which is why it's easiest to use the word "doctrine" as shorthand for canonical texts.

Waldorf and Sauron wrote:We have plenty of extra-doctrinal sources on what constitutes doctrine...

This doesn't seem to solve the problem.

This is a talk given by J. Reuben Clark about the subject. It's not technically doctrine under his own definition, but I think that it is completely applicable.

http://emp.byui.edu/marrottr/ClarkWhenAreWritings.pdf