General Conference is coming up in 10 days! It will be held April 1-2, and will have morning and afternoon sessions on Saturday and Sunday, along with an evening session for everyone on Saturday. More information is available here.

In preparation, we are doing a daily countdown with posts from different people explaining how they feel about General Conference, how they prepare, tips for getting the most out of it, how to deal with associated social media posts, etc.

Contextually Concrete Revelation

by Samuel Major

When I moved to Chicago to begin my master’s degree in marriage and family therapy, I went with the intention to be unashamed about the gospel and a desire to be fully prepared to defend it. From orientation week forward I made it well known that I was one of those “Mormons” and that my religion was everything to me. I was going to be an intellectual missionary for the church. I would prepare for General Conference with the intention of figuring out new ways to clearly defend the gospel so that I could articulate its precepts to a room full of hostile, secular academics. This meant that I would watch General Conference like I would listen to a university lecture in a philosophy department- organizing notes about gospel doctrines logically and preparing rebuttals for the arguments I anticipated would be brought up in class. 

And then something interesting happened. The hostility did not come nearly as often as I thought it would. At least, apart from a few exceptions, hostility due to my religious convictions did not come nearly as often as I thought it would. In fact, many of my classmates routinely expressed interest in my religious beliefs and wanted me to speak to how that affected my views on therapy. A strange schism started to grow between what I thought was most important for me to learn from General Conference (e.g., I thought I needed to be an intellectual missionary), and what the Lord wanted me to learn. Even as I grew intellectually, every conference there was always a clearer prompting to first and foremost be a friendly peacemaker to my classmates. At that time, the Lord did not need me to be an intellectual defender of the Kingdom.

Through the years since then, I have had many similar experiences where I went into General Conference thinking I needed an answer to one thing, but, if I was willing to listen, the Lord would instead prompt me with something else. To be clear, the Lord almost always enlarged and broadened my understanding so that I could speak more clearly and intelligently about the gospel. Primarily, however, the Lord would always accompany such intellectual growth with promptings to do something differently in my life, tailored to my current situation. Sometimes the prompting was in fact to prepare to present or write on a topic intellectually defending gospel doctrines. And sometimes not. Unless the Lord prompted me to do something to defend the gospel, the intellectual clarity I sought seemed to come secondary to promptings to do something different in my life that was needed at the time (e.g., be a better husband). The phrase contextually concrete revelation speaks directly to this lesson I have learned. 

The word contextual denotes the idea that personal revelation in General Conference will apply to my current needs and context in life. The Lord almost never gives me revelation for something that has not yet happened, for a context I have not yet found myself in, or for what is not actually happening in my current context even if I think it is occurring or might occur (e.g., the hostility about my religious convictions was not actually happening so how could I receive revelation about it). He mostly speaks to me at this moment of my life. He speaks of the current obligations, covenants, stewardships, and responsibilities that I have. 

The word concrete is meant to remind me that revelation received at General Conference is not just an intellectual exercise in which the Lord lectures at me, I decide what I agree with, and I then memorize what He says to store in my memory for later. Even though intellectual growth most often accompanies the revelatory process, revelation seems to be primarily focused on getting me to actually do something. Another way I think about this is that teachings from General Conference are not an abstract set of logical propositions which I choose to believe in and need to prepare myself to lecture about. Rather, revelation at General Conference is meant as direction for how to live my life. God is an active God. A God that does things. The gospel is meant to teach me how to do what He does and live as He lives. General Conference is the place where I learn how to live the gospel, not simply memorize the facts of the gospel so I can trivialize and debate them.

And finally, the word revelation simply reminds me that at General Conference, I am not the one in charge of what I need to hear for my eternal welfare, and I do not decide what revelation will come. The Lord is in charge of all that. By definition the word revelation assumes that God is the one speaking. He speaks wisdom and instruction to me through the voice of the prophet and the Holy Ghost. He is in charge and knows what is best for me. It also means that the revelation I must seek will follow the pattern revelation given to me in scripture and by the mouths of living prophets. I cannot receive revelation for the church. The revelation is for me and how to act in relation to those over whom I have stewardship. I can ask questions, but I cannot dictate or demand answers that I want. 

In sum, the principle of contextually concrete revelation reminds us to go to General Conference seeking ways that we can more fully live on the covenant path in our lives now. It does not mean that we never defend the gospel or grow in our understanding of its teachings. It does mean that we shift our priorities though. The priority for General Conference shifts to seeking revelation that deepens conversion in our current life situations. Moreover, we challenge ourselves to put the desire for debates about doctrines and disagreements aside for a moment so that we can “hear Him.” We do this by putting aside our preconceptions about what we will learn at the current General Conference, coming with questions concerning current life struggles, and focusing on seeking revelation about things we can do, not just ways we should think about the gospel. As I’ve shifted my own understanding to adhere to this principle, I’ve received more insight, peace, comfort, and I can hear the Lord’s directions more clearly. My heart has begun to both strengthen and soften so that when the times do come that I must intellectually defend the gospel I can do so with less anger and malice in my heart. And the world needs a little less malice and anger.

Sam earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Brigham Young University, and later earned his master’s degree in marriage and family therapy from Northwestern University in Chicago. He is currently earning a PhD in psychology at BYU. His research interests at BYU focus on critical analysis of the philosophical assumptions and implications of prominent theories in psychology and psychotherapy, and often focuses his work on comparing those theories to the worldview of the Restored Gospel. He currently works as an LMFT at the Center for Couples and Families where he specializes in treating people struggling with compulsive pornography use.

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by Jennifer Ann Mackley

Willing to Sacrifice

On August 7, 1839, a very ill Wilford Woodruff prepared to leave his pregnant wife, Phebe, and his one-year-old daughter, Sarah Emma, to serve a mission with other members of the Quorum of the Twelve in the British Isles. He wrote, “I make a sacrifice of my all for Christ’s sake to do his work. It is no small trial of faith.”

In November 1839, he was still recovering from his illness and preaching the gospel in New York while awaiting the departure of their ship to England. Over the course of three weeks, he recorded three dreams about his wife and child. On November 8, he wrote, “I saw Mrs. Woodruff in deep affliction in a dream at Montrose. I did not see Sarah Emma.” Three days later he noted, “I had a dream during the night and had an interview with Mrs. Woodruff, but did not see Sarah Emma.”

On November 28 he recorded the third dream, “I saw Mrs. Woodruff & notwithstanding we rejoiced much at having an interview with each other, yet our embraces were mixed with sorrow, for after conversing a while about her domestic affairs, I asked where Sarah Emma was (our only child). She says weeping, and kissing me, she is dead. … Is this dream true? Time must determine.”

Eight months later, July 14, 1840, Wilford Woodruff, recorded the occasion of Sarah Emma’s second birthday in his journal and added, “May the Lord preserve my wife and children from sickness and death until my return.” He then added, “O Lord, I commit them into thy hands; feed, clothe, and comfort them, and thine shall be the glory.”

Sarah Emma died on July 17, 1840 and a grief stricken Phebe wrote a letter to her husband the following day expressing her feelings: “Yesterday I was called to witness the departure of our little Sarah Emma from this world — yes she is gone — the relentless hand of death has snatched her from my embrace.” Phebe did not think she could bear losing her sweet child while also enduring Wilford’s absence, but shared her faith that “the Lord has taken her to himself for some wise purpose.” She then added “the Lord has stood by me in a wonderful manner.”

Her knowledge of the resurrection and eternal life sustained her, “I can see and feel that he has taken her home and will take better care of her than I possibly could for a little while until I shall go and meet her — Yes Willford we have one little angel in heaven.”

Wilford Woodruff did not receive Phebe’s letter for three months. It was accompanied by a poem written by Margaret Smoot. The closing stanza read:

“Yes, little Sarah, lovely one, sleep on sleep on, ‘till Christ shall come.

Then thou wilt rise shake off thy dust, And be numbered with the just.”

The Gospel Brings Life and Light

In addition to Sarah Emma, four of Wilford and Phebe Woodruff’s nine children died as infants, two sons within a month of each other in Winter Quarters. The heartbreak they faced, the loss they endured could have shattered their faith in a loving God. Instead they put their faith in God’s revealed truths. Wilford taught, “The resurrection of the dead presents itself before the enlightened mind of man, and he has a foundation for his spirit to rest upon. That is the position of the Latter-day Saints today. We do know for ourselves, we are not in the dark with regard to this matter; God has revealed it to us and we do understand the principle of the resurrection of the dead, and that the gospel brings life and immortality to light.”^[1]

 Records of Divine Truth

After the loss of thirteen of his own children, and so many other children of the early pioneers, Wilford reminded them that, “Children are innocent before the Lord; as to their death and the cause thereof, that is in the hands of God, and we should not complain of the Lord or his dispensations any more than Job did. … There is this consolation connected with the matter—they are innocent, they are not in transgression. … They will come forth out of their graves in the morning of the resurrection, … clothed with glory, immortality and eternal life . . . This, to Latter-day Saints, who believe in the resurrection, should be a source of comfort and consolation. … we have to put our trust in the Lord in these afflictions, we have to lean upon his arm and to look to him for comfort and consolation. We do not mourn under these afflictions as those who have no hope; we do not mourn the loss of our children as though we were never going to see them again, because we know better. The Lord has taught us better, and so has the gospel.”^[2]

He acknowledged that “through Adam all have died, that death through the fall must pass upon the whole human family . . . . It is a law that is unchangeable and irrevocable.” But he was grateful for his understanding of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and testified that our Savior “died to redeem the world; . . . He was the first fruit of the resurrection.” He then testified, “Through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, all children who die before arriving at the years of accountability will inherit celestial glory. There is no infant or child that has died before arriving at the years of accountability, but what is redeemed, and is therefore entirely beyond the torments of hell. … I will defy any man to find in any of the records of divine truth any ordinance instituted for the salvation of little innocent children; it would be unnecessary on the face of it, and the only thing that can be found is where Jesus took the little ones in his arms and blessed them, which is and would be perfectly right to do according to the order of God. … They are redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ.”^[3]

Enlightened by Inspiration

Wilford Woodruff’s mother died when he was only 15 months old. Five of his six half siblings died when they were young, and only one lived long enough to embrace the gospel and marry. He stated that “Without the gospel of Christ the separation by death is one of the most gloomy subjects it is possible to contemplate; but just as soon as we obtain the gospel and learn the principle of the resurrection the gloom, sorrow and suffering occasioned by death are, in a great measure, taken away. I have often thought that, to see a dead body, and to see that body laid in the grave and covered with earth, is one of the most gloomy things on earth; without the gospel it is like taking a leap in the dark. But as quick as we obtain the gospel, as soon as the spirit of man is enlightened by the inspiration of the Almighty, he can exclaim with one of old—’Oh grave, where is thy victory, Oh death, where is thy sting?’ The sting of death is sin, and the gift of God is eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.”^[4]

 Wilford Woodruff didn’t think it necessary to mourn the death of any one who had been true and faithful to God and to their covenants. Because, he said, “There is an eternal reality—which the whole world will find out—in life. There is an eternal reality in death. There is an eternal reality in the resurrection, and in the future judgments, and in God’s dealing with all men in the future according to the deeds done in the body; and when a man or a woman who has entered into covenant with the Lord, who has received the Gospel and the ordinances thereof, and been true and faithful in his or her day and generation, has been called home into the spirit world, where is the man who comprehends these principles that can mourn for that brother or sister? . . . Such men and women have filled their mission here upon earth with honor, with labor, with love, until they have been called home.”^[5]

In Every Death There is a Birth

He expressed his firm belief “that in every death there is a birth; the spirit leaves the body dead to us, and passes to the other side of the veil alive to that great and noble company that are also working for the accomplishment of the purposes of God, in the redemption and salvation of a fallen world.”^[6]

Wilford Woodruff’s most powerful message about death was to the living. He repeated Matthew 24:48, “Be ye also ready” and asked the Saints “to labor in the cause of God, while we are permitted to tarry; living up to the light and knowledge that we have been blessed with.”^[7] Echoing Alma’s admonition in Alma 34:32, “this life is the time for men to prepare to meet God.” Wilford promised, “Put your trust in God and rely on His promises, living up to the light and knowledge you possess; and all will be well with you whether living or dying.”^[8]

^[1] Discourse given by Wilford Woodruff on June 27, 1875, at the funeral service of 6-year-old John and 4-year-old Willie, sons of William and Ann Wheeler.
^[2] Discourse by Wilford Woodruff, June 27, 1875.
^[3] Discourse given by Wilford Woodruff, May 14, 1882.
^[4] Discourse by Wilford Woodruff, June 27, 1875 at the funeral service for John and Willie Wheeler.
^[5] General Conference Address by President Wilford Woodruff, October 9, 1887.
^[6] Discourse by Wilford Woodruff, January 29, 1882, at the funeral service of Elizabeth H. Cannon.
^[7] Discourse by Wilford Woodruff, January 29, 1882, at the funeral service of Elizabeth H. Cannon.
^[8] Discourse by Wilford Woodruff, January 27, 1883.

Jennifer Ann Mackley is the Executive Director of the Wilford Woodruff Papers Foundation. The mission of the Wilford Woodruff Papers Foundation is to digitally preserve and publish Wilford Woodruff’s eyewitness account of the Restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Thousands of documents are available at wilfordwoodruffpapers.org/documents, including Wilford’s journals, missionary records, dreams and visions, autobiographies, and histories. The individuals, places, and topics contained in the documents are linked for searchability and all the contextual information is free and universally accessible.

The post The Gospel Brings Life and Immortality to Light appeared first on FAIR.

by Maddie Christensen and Kristy Wheelwright Taylor

Wilford Woodruff kept a journal from the time of his baptism at the close of 1833 until his death in 1898, saying, “I have ever been impressed . . . of the deep importance of keeping a journal and record of the dealings of God with his people.”¹ His sixty-plus years of records comprise over 115,000 written pages (26,000 of which have been located), left to us as journals, letters, discourses, autobiographies, and personal papers. These records document a large part of the early Restoration of the gospel. Three years ago, Jennifer Mackley and Don Parry created the Wilford Woodruff Papers Foundation, whose mission is to digitally preserve and publish Wilford Woodruff’s eyewitness account of the Restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It seeks to make Wilford Woodruff’s records universally accessible to inspire all people, especially the rising generation, to study and to increase their faith in Jesus Christ. In celebration of these newly published documents, the Foundation hosted its first conference, Building Latter-day Faith. The conference was held at the Hinckley Center on the campus of Brigham Young University on Saturday, March 4, 2023, with over 350 people in attendance.

In the three years since the Project’s beginning, we have published more than 10,000 pages on our open website, wilfordwoodruffpapers.org. These pages are indexed with tags for the people Wilford Woodruff encountered, the places he visited, and the topics he wrote about. Making these documents and these features available to all has introduced a valuable research tool for those who are interested in expanding their personal study, writing a talk for sacrament meeting, working on a lesson for church, or writing an academic paper for a religion class or journal. Publishing these records expands Wilford Woodruff’s reach to a broad range of searchers of the truth. The conference was aimed at these seekers of truth who want to be instructed, inspired, and motivated by Wilford Woodruff’s witness of the Restoration.

The event began with lunch and an introduction from the Foundation’s Executive Director and Co-Founder, Jennifer Mackley, author of Wilford Woodruff’s Witness: The Development of Temple Doctrine. After studying Wilford Woodruff for the last twenty-five years, Jennifer says, “He not only recorded the daily process of revelation and the Restoration, but the strength it took to find joy when enduring loneliness, separation, and heartache. His testimony of God’s love and forgiveness is timeless.” Following Jennifer’s remarks, we heard from our keynote speaker, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, known for the quote, “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” In Laurel’s book A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835–1870, she describes the strength and influence of Latter-day Saint women, relying heavily on Wilford Woodruff’s journals and letters as primary source material. She spoke to us on the depth of Wilford’s records and what we in the twenty-first century can take from them.

The afternoon session included presentations from the student winners of the Carol Sorenson Smith awards, Ellie Hancock and Hovan Lawton. Both are recent college graduates who have studied and researched Wilford Woodruff’s life. Ellie spoke on the topic of missionary faith in persecution. Before the conference, she commented, “I feel like this is a topic that’s not often talked about in Church history and I’m really excited to talk about it!” Hovan Lawton discussed the sacrifices of those called to serve. Hovan shares, “One thing that struck me about the mission acceptance letters was the variety in challenges and obstacles of those nineteenth-century missionaries.”

After the student presentations, we were privileged to hear from Josh Matson, a religious educator and decoding expert. He gave a presentation called “Decoding Wilford Woodruff’s Journals.” Dr. Matson shares, “Participating in a conference dedicated to the Papers of Wilford Woodruff is a dream come true for me. I have been fascinated with Woodruff’s Papers since I was an undergraduate at BYU and many of the resources to study his life were inaccessible at the time. Today these papers are becoming more accessible by the day and re-introducing them to the public through this conference is a magnificent opportunity and privilege to be a part of.”

Amy Harris, BYU history professor and Director of the Family History Program at BYU, then offered insights related to the world of British converts. Dr. Harris found inspiration in her extensive study of British families during the period young Elder Woodruff served in England, saying, “The most rewarding part about studying history and genealogy is the sense of the humanity of people in the past, that they’re real people making real choices in their time.”²

Steven C. Wheelwright, former president of BYU–Hawaii and an advisor to the Foundation, was the final speaker. He discussed how Wilford Woodruff’s missionary service aided in preparing Wilford to become the future prophet. Dr. Wheelwright shares, “The more we get to know Wilford Woodruff as a husband, father, priesthood leader, all of the things that he was, the more we admire him, the more we think other people need to know this because they will get the blessings from knowing him and knowing how he lived his life.”

Historian, BYU professor, volume editor of The Joseph Smith Papers, and Executive Editor of the Wilford Woodruff Papers, Steven C. Harper gave the conclusion of the conference and moderated a Q&A session with some of the speakers. Of Wilford Woodruff’s contribution to Church history, Steve has said, “Wilford Woodruff largely made the glasses through which we see the [Latter-day Saint] past.” The Wilford Woodruff Papers Project has been blessed by Dr. Harper’s insightful leadership, and we were richly fed by his participation at the conference.

In conjunction with the conference, the Foundation hosted an arts contest with submissions in visual art, literature, dance, digital art, and music from high school students, college students, and pre-professionals. All art pieces were on display at the conference and the winner received the Carol Sorensen Smith Award. In addition to student art, works by artists Kendra Burton³ and Vicki Walker⁴ were also showcased at the conference.

The Foundation commissioned two artists to create pieces specifically for the conference. Julie Rogers contributed two works, “The Dawning of a Brighter Day” and “Language of Inspiration.” She shares, “I love to record the simple things people do each day and capture the emotion of the moment. I love to paint light as it dances around a subject, especially the human figure. It is my desire to not only paint the physical being, but the personality and sense of the soul.”⁵  To see more of Julie’s work, visit her website, julierogersart.com.

The second artist commissioned for the conference, Sam Day, created a piece inspired by Wilford’s baptism, sharing that his work is “a declaration of [his] faith.”⁶ The piece he created was called “I did not feel the cold,” and it depicts the historically accurate scene of Wilford being baptized in a frozen river. For more information on Sam Day, visit his website, samday.com. Some of the artwork was available for sale in an online auction, with all proceeds benefiting the Wilford Woodruff Papers Foundation.

We were also blessed to have a few of Wilford Woodruff’s personal items on display from various collections, including the trunk discovered by Foundation advisor and Woodruff descendant, Stephen Woodruff Owen, which contained a treasure trove of Wilford Woodruff’s possessions.⁷ The Church History Library also allowed the Foundation to display items like Wilford Woodruff’s fly-fishing rod, his glasses, his revolver, a door plate, and many paintings of the Woodruff family. Additionally, many items were on display from the private collection of Brent Ashworth, including Wilford Woodruff’s saddle, a letter to his wife Phebe, and a silk cover.

Between sessions of the conference, attendees had the opportunity to browse various booths of partners of the Foundation, including FAIR, the Church History Museum, the Church History Library, the Joseph Smith Papers, FamilySearch, Meridian Magazine, Book of Mormon Central, Mormonr, The Interpreter Foundation, and the Come, Follow Me Foundation. To learn more about partners associated with the Foundation, visit wilfordwoodruffpapers.org/about/partners.

Wilford Woodruff shared that “as wickedness increases in the world, we should increase in righteousness, in faith, and in knowledge.” The research and scholarship presented at the conference through the speakers and displays gave us that opportunity.

All conference presentations will soon be available for all to read and learn from on this page:  2023.wilfordwoodruffpapers.org. To learn more about the Foundation, visit wilfordwoodruffpapers.org.

¹ “Autobiography 1857-1858 Draft 1,” p. 39, The Wilford Woodruff Papers, wilfordwoodruffpapers.org/autobiography/draft-one.
² Interview with Fiona Fitzsimons, “Interview: Professor Amy Harris of Brigham Young University,” irishfamilyhistorycentre.com/article/interview-professor-amy-harris-of-brigham-young-university/.
³ To learn more about Kendra Burton, visit her website at kendraburton.com.
⁴ To learn more about Vickie Walker, visit her website at vickiwalkerart.com.
⁵ To learn more about Julie, visit her website at julierogersart.com.
⁶ To learn more about Sam Day, visit his website at samday.com.
⁷ “Treasure Box,” filmed by James Dalrymple, featuring Stephen Woodruff Owen, Carolyn Woodruff Owen, and Wilford Woodruff, The Wilford Woodruff Papers, wilfordwoodruffpapers.org/treasure-box.

Maddie is the Public Relations Manager for the Wilford Woodruff Papers Foundation. She is currently a student at Brigham Young University working towards a degree in Public Relations with a minor in Global Studies. She will graduate in December of 2023. She is originally from Missouri and enjoys cooking, traveling, reading, and spending time with friends and family. Maddie has always loved learning about Church history and loves to read the words of Wilford Woodruff. She is passionate about sharing those words with everyone and is grateful to be part of such an incredible work.

Kristy Wheelwright Taylor is the Board Secretary for the Wilford Woodruff Papers Foundation. She has a master’s degree in Humanities from Brigham Young University. She spends much of her time in volunteer work, Church service, and writing for various websites and publications. Along with serving on the Board and working with the team and our donors, Kristy volunteers as a transcriptionist of the Wilford Woodruff Papers. She has loved getting to know Wilford Woodruff better through his writings and is always inspired and surprised by his dedication, tenacity, personality, hard work, and faith.

The post History Came to Life in First Ever Wilford Woodruff Papers Foundation Conference appeared first on FAIR.

General Conference is coming up in 11 days! It will be held April 1-2, and will have morning and afternoon sessions on Saturday and Sunday, along with an evening session for everyone on Saturday. More information is available here.

In preparation, we are doing a daily countdown with posts from different people explaining how they feel about General Conference, how they prepare, tips for getting the most out of it, how to deal with associated negative social media posts, etc.

Today Jennifer Roach returns to talk about what you can do to help others that are upset about something they hear in General Conference. And if you missed yesterday’s post, it’s available here.

Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities. She is the host of the podcast Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions.

The post FAIR’s Countdown to Conference – 11 Days! appeared first on FAIR.

General Conference is coming up in 12 days! It will be held April 1 – 2, and will have three sessions on Saturday and two on Sunday that everyone is invited to watch. More information is available here.

Please join us for another Countdown to Conference to help prepare. You might remember some of the posts from last time, but it’s good to review, and you might see something you missed before. Each post will feature someone explaining how they feel about General Conference, how they prepare, tips for getting the most out of it, how to deal with associated social media posts, etc.

Today we will start things off with a video from Jennifer Roach, who has been hosting a new podcast for us this year. She addresses the question “What should you do if you hear something in Conference that you really don’t agree with?”

Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities.

The post FAIR’s Countdown to Conference – 12 Days! appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: “Certain Women”

by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC

Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about Women and their role in the church. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand.

Today’s verse comes from Luke 8:1-3:

Soon afterward he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. And the twelve were with him, 2 and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, 3 and Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s household manager, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their means.

So here we have Jesus and his disciples going around doing what they do – and we also have a group of women who are supporting them financially, and though the text doesn’t say it they were probably offering lots of other practical means of support as well. And so the question presents itself about the role of women in various churches. This is not an easy question answer on a number of fronts, but one of the most complicating factors is that “Evangelical Churches” are not 1 single entity.  “Evangelical” is not a denomination or formal group. Evangelicals are a subset of Protestants whose tradition and way of thinking developed about 75 years ago – around the time when the Billy Graham crusades began. But they can be of any denomination – like Baptists or Methodists – or they can be of no denomination at all. So when we say, “What is the Evangelical stance on women?” there is no one single answer to that.  There are some general trends and I’ll talk about those, but there are also lots of exceptions. Explaining our LDS understanding is complicated for other reasons. Unlike Evangelicals who have a decentralized structure, we have a very centralized structure so the official list of what women can and can’t do isn’t hard to identify – the difficult thing for us is that there are a lot of feelings around this. And I’ll talk about that a little today too.

The Evangelical View on Women

First, let’s gain some understanding on how Evangelicals view women and why they see it like they do. And the first thing I’ll say is that I’m not talking about the characteristics of Evangelical women. The reality is that they’re not all that much different than Latter-day Saint women in many ways. They love Jesus, they serve their families and community tirelessly, and they want good things for their children. But I’m going to talk about how they’re viewed in their churches, what they’re allowed to do, and why. 

I want so badly to be able to explain this to you in a simple way by saying, “there are two groups, and here is what they think,” but the on-the-ground reality is very different than that. I’m going to tell you how I understand it, even though it’s a bit messier.  And I know that even though this series is aimed at Latter-day Saints that we have some Evangelical friends who are listening along and I’d love to hear your experience on this issue in the comments – there really is a wide variety of how this plays out here. 

So, according to the Pew Research Center roughly 10% of American churches (in all their varieties) will ordain women and allow them to take the top leadership position in a church. And about half of those are Evangelical churches. So a pretty small minority of churches will say that women can be the lead pastor in a congregation. Of the largest 100 Churches in America – churches that have between 10,000 and 40,000 members (a few outliers have up to 100,000 members) 3 have a woman in the senior role, and 4 others have had one in the past, but not now. So the number of churches that have women in top leadership positions is very small, and we’re going to set that group aside for moment.  The only reason I really point them out is that sometimes I think Latter-day Saint women look at other churches with a sort of misunderstanding that they all have women who are allowed to do as much as they want, and that’s just not true. 

Public Role of Women

Of all the remaining churches, which is the vast majority, there are limits on what women are allowed to do, but those limits vary from church to church. Latter-day Saint women might find it amusing to hear that is that many, many of those churches women are not allowed to speak (meaning teaching or preaching) in a public service. I say that’s amusing because we let 12 year-old-girls teach us on Sunday morning on a regular basis. So sometimes when I hear Latter-day Saint friends complain about women not having enough of a role I just chuckle to myself because right out of the gate girls and women in our church already have a greater role than in many places. Churches that have this practice – women not being allowed to teach a mixed group in public – are doing so because they are trying to obey their understanding of Paul in the New Testament when he says, “a woman should remain silent in the church.” They take that very literally – this doesn’t mean that all of them like it, but they get respect for trying to take scripture seriously. 

In other churches women are allowed to speak or teach, but they are restricted from doing other things like bless and serve communion, or perhaps are restricted from being on a governing board or something similar. And here is where women in our church have a lot in common with Evangelical women as girls and women in our church do not do these things either. And it is probably fair to say that Evangelical women have mixed feelings about this just as Latter-day Saint women do. And they manage those feelings much like women in our church do. 

In terms of public worship outside of speaking/teaching Evangelical and Latter-day Saint women are pretty similar. In both traditions women are frequently found leading worship – for us that looks like a song leader helping the congregation with hymns, and for them it might look like a praise-band on a stage.  In both traditions women are often found doing things like teaching Sunday School, leading youth, planning events, coordinating various service efforts, and more. We sometimes joke that our church would not run without the Relief Society, well their churches wouldn’t run without the women who do the equivalent work. 

Ordination

When it comes to ordination it’s an interesting view. Many Evangelical churches don’t even practice ordination, so it’s not an easy comparison to make. Of those who do, they think about it differently. Ordination is usually not about being able to lead priesthood ordinances. There are a few minor exceptions to this and those have to do with who is authorized to do something like perform a wedding. But for the most part ordination is a process through which the community recognizes that a certain person has a call to some kind of ministry and they become ordained as a way for the congregation to say that they will sustain this person in their call. In function this is what we do too. I know that there are women – some whom I like and respect a lot – that would feel really frustrated with that explanation because they feel using the word “ordained” is important. And I sympathize with that pain. But in function, the callings that women experience in our churches work the same way that ordination works in most other churches. It’s recognition that someone is going to be filling a role and the community pledges their support. 

Interestingly enough, Evangelical women do not usually receive this formal kind of calling and declaration of support or sustaining. If the 3rd grade class needs a Sunday School teacher, a woman might volunteer, get a bit of training and some materials to use, and that is that. There is no calling and setting apart, no sustaining. While we don’t use “ordination” language for women in our church, the apples-to-apples comparison puts us in a situation that is often better than is recognized.

Heavenly Mother

Another difference to point out is that only the most liberal of Evangelical or Protestant churches would talk about having a Heavenly Mother. And to be fair, it’s not like we know a lot about how to do with her or even have a very developed theology around her – but we do have the concept of her. The only comparison that comes close for Evangelical women is that they can sometimes talk about God having feminine qualities – maybe a reference to the verse about Jesus being like a “mother hen gathering her chicks under her wings.” But it stops there.  Before I joined our church I did not know that Latter-day Saints had a belief in a Heavenly Mother. The way I found out went like this…I wasn’t even studying with the missionaries yet, but I wanted to visit a LDS service and just see what it was like.  It happened to be Father’s Day. We sang the hymn “Oh my Father,” and I was shocked to see the line about, “I have a Mother there.”  But I think I told myself that it was only a song and didn’t think too much about it. But one of the speakers that day was a middle aged man whose children were teenagers. He talked about the work of being a father with all its rewards and challenges, and admitted that he could not have begun that journey in any way without his wife. And then he said something like: It’s just like our Heavenly Father…a Mother is required for someone to become a Father and aren’t we grateful to have a Heavenly Mother.”  To say that I was shocked was an understatement. Only the most liberal of liberal churches would talk about God in that way. I was very confused.  Later I messaged a friend to ask about it – the only sense I could make of it was that this idea must have belonged to that individual man and he was saying something provocative but it was based in his own belief and logic – it couldn’t possibly be a teaching of the Church. 

The Two Trees

Before we are done here I want to make one recommendation. I know this is a tough topic for some women in our church. If nothing else I hope this comparison has helped you see that when you compare like-to-like, we actually have quite a bit to be very pleased with. And still, I think any of us can struggle from time to time. And I have a thought for something that might help. 

On the FAIR website (and YouTube channel) there is a talk called The Two Trees by Dr. Valerie Hudson. Dr. Hudson is a member of our church and also a professor at Texas A&M in the Department of International Affairs, previously she taught at BYU. Her list of impressive credentials is longer than my arm. I say all of that to say that this woman is no dummy. She is incredibly impressive. And she gave a talk called The Two Trees that addresses this topic so well. It’s a long and dense talk. I won’t do justice to it with this summary but her main point is that both men and women are required in this work. Without a woman (Eve) the whole human project would have never got off the ground. And without another woman (Mary), Jesus Christ could not have come to save us. But men have their role too. Without the man Jesus Christ we would be stuck in our sin forever. And without a priesthood bearing man we have no ability to accomplish ordinances. It took women to usher us into this world, and it takes men to usher us into the next. If this is at all interesting to you please go listen to Sister Hudson’s talk. It was the single most helpful thing for me to get all of this settled in my head. 

So there you have it.  There are many similarities – and some important differences between Latter-day Saint women and Evangelical women. I hope this conversation encouraged your faith and sparks something in you to learn more. 

Join us next week and we’ll tackle another topic from the New Testament.

More Come, Follow Me resources here.

Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities.

The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Matthew 13; Luke 8; 13 appeared first on FAIR.

I have deep respect for all of the Book of Mormon witnesses. The things they went through because of their testimonies are, in parts, both devastating and galvanizing. Putting their names onto those documents truly became a trial by fire. And, as is usually the case with lifelong trials,  sometimes they rose to the occasion and sometimes they didn’t. That makes them relatable and human, but it also makes them inspiring examples that we can follow in our own difficult situations.

Over the past two years, I’ve learned something about standing by your testimony in the face of vicious opposition. Since I first started my CES Letter series, and especially since I put my real name and face to it, I’ve had people attack my intelligence, my character, my writing ability, and my appearance. I’ve had people call my testimony, sincerity, and integrity into question. I recently compiled a list of more than 60 personal insults directed at me on a fairly large LDS-related subreddit that still stand today, despite direct appeals to moderators that I consider friendly acquaintances. I’ve had Jeremy Runnells and John Dehlin sic their followers on me in attempts to flood my social media accounts with abuse. I’ve had people attempt to dox me and publish my private information. I’ve had people call me the vilest names you can think of. I’ve even had someone spit on me because I was willing to stand up for my testimony.

And my experiences are nothing compared to what the Witnesses had to endure for their testimonies.

We’re going to spend the next few weeks talking about those Witnesses and their experiences. The Letter For My Wife spends the next six pages on this topic, and though I haven’t read them in detail yet, I did skim over them in preparation for this post. From what I saw when I did, we’re in for quite a ride.

Faulk begins:

Losing confidence in the truthfulness of Joseph’s claims made me think of the witnesses to the plates and how their testimonies lend credibility to the entire narrative; however, research turns up issues of their own.

The Witnesses do lend credibility to Joseph’s account, that’s true. That isn’t their only purpose, but it’s a big one. I’m curious to see exactly what that “research” entails, though, because by now, Faulk has already given us numerous incorrect assertions as fact. Either he’s been blatantly lying, or his research up to this point has failed him.

These included the fact that no scribe ever saw the plates, the 3 and 8 witnesses only saw the plates with their spiritual eyes, the printed testimony did not reflect literal events, and nearly all the witnesses left the Church.

Okay, I guess we’re starting early on the inaccuracies. Everything in this sentence is incorrect. Several of the scribes eventually saw the plates in person; the Witnesses saw the plates with their actual eyes; the printed testimony absolutely reflected literal events; and only about half the witnesses fully left the Church, though none of them ever recanted their testimonies despite their disagreements with Joseph Smith. I’m sure we’ll delve into all of those points in more detail as we go on.

• The Scribes

During the translation process, Joseph was either behind a curtain or the plates sat underneath a cloth in a box in another room. No scribe to the translation process (Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris or Emma Smith) was ever allowed to see the plates.

Um. So, at this point, I have to ask: does Faulk actually know who the Witnesses were? Because both Martin Harris and Oliver Cowdery did see the plates. It didn’t happen during the translation process, granted, but they did see them.

There were other scribes, as well. John Whitmer was another Witness who served as a scribe at some point during the translation and also saw the plates. According to Emma Smith, her brother Reuben Hale was another of the early scribes. Reuben was not one of the Witnesses. And according to Evidence Central, Samuel Smith and Christian Whitmer, both Witnesses, also served as scribes.

So, there are seven scribes that I’m aware of, and of those, five physically saw the plates at some point.

Emma only felt the plates through a cloth on the table.

This is true. According to her final testimony, however, she also never asked to see them:

Q. Are you sure that he [Joseph] had the plates at the time you were writing for him?

A. The plates often lay on the table without any attempt at concealment, wrapped in a small linen table cloth, which I had given him to fold them in. I once felt of the plates, as they thus lay on the table, tracing their outline and shape. They seemed to be pliable like thick paper, and would rustle with a metallic sound when the edges were moved by the thumb, as one does sometimes thumb the edges of a book…

Q. I should suppose that you would have uncovered the plates and examined them?

 A. I did not attempt to handle the plates, other than I have told you, nor uncover them to look at them. I was satisfied that it was the work of God, and therefore did not feel it to be necessary to do so.

 Major Bidamon [Emma’s second husband] here suggested: Did Mr. Smith forbid your examining the plates?

A. I do not think he did. I knew that he had them, and was not specially curious about them. I moved them from place to place on the table, as it was necessary in doing my work.

 In her own words, she knew he had them, but she wasn’t very curious and didn’t need to see them. I personally would have been dying to see them, but apparently, we are very different women!

It’s interesting to me that she doesn’t remember Joseph ever forbidding her from looking at them, though. According to her father, Isaac Hale, Joseph did forbid him from seeing them, and that’s why he wouldn’t allow the plates into his home:

Soon after this [Joseph and Emma moving to Harmony], I was informed they had brought a wonderful book of Plates down with them. I was shown a box in which it is said they were contained, which had, to all appearances, been used as a glass box of the common sized window glass. I was allowed to feel the weight of the box, and they gave me to understand that the book of plates was then in the box—into which, however, I was not allowed to look.

I inquired of Joseph Smith Jr., who was to be the first who would be allowed to see the Book of Plates? He said it was a young child. After this, I became dissatisfied, and informed him that if there was anything in my house of that description which I could not be allowed to see, he must take it away; if he did not, I was determined to see it. After that, the Plates were said to be hid in the woods.

As soon as they were able, Joseph and Emma moved out of Hale’s home and into a smaller cabin elsewhere on his property. This cabin is where they kept the plates and where most of the translation happened.

Emma’s statement is interesting for another reason. In the famous revelation given to her in which she’s called an elect lady, verse 4 says:

Murmur not because of the things which thou hast not seen, for they are withheld from thee and from the world, which is wisdom in me in a time to come.

I always assumed this was regarding the plates and her desire to see them. But maybe it was about something else entirely. It was a personal revelation given to her, and only she and the Lord can really know what was in her heart and mind during that time. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I’m more than happy to take Emma at her word. As strange as the idea is to me personally, maybe she honestly didn’t care whether she ever saw the plates or not. Different people have different wishes and desires.

Why wouldn’t Joseph want anybody to see the plates?

Because he was commanded not to show them to anyone who wasn’t authorized to see them. It wasn’t his decision. Joseph wasn’t shy about explaining that. It’s even in our scriptures:

Again, he [Moroni] told me, that when I got those plates of which he had spoken—for the time that they should be obtained was not yet fulfilled—I should not show them to any person; neither the breastplate with the Urim and Thummim; only to those to whom I should be commanded to show them; if I did I should be destroyed.

I mean, that’s a pretty good reason, don’t you think? If an angel of the Lord told me not to do something or else I’d be destroyed, I wouldn’t do it either.

Faulk then lists his sources for the information so far:

(By the Gift and Power of God, Elder Neal A. Maxwell January 1997 Ensign quoting David Whitmer Interviews: A Restoration Witness, ed. Lyndon W. Cook, [1991], p173) and (Joseph Smith III, “Last Testimony of Sister Emma,” pp289–90).

I find these sources to be very curious. I’ve already linked to Emma’s testimony twice and quoted a portion of it. It conveniently answered the question he had about Emma not seeing the plates, but he neglected to quote from that part.

I don’t know if he didn’t actually read it and is pulling his words from a different source entirely, or if he’s deliberately misconstruing his actual sources. The third option is that he didn’t understand what his sources were saying. Personally, though, I think Faulk has shown that he’s smart enough to understand a simple Q&A without difficulty, which only leaves the other two options.

As for the other source listed, I’m a big fan of Elder Maxwell. Again, Faulk seems to be citing things he hasn’t fully read, or is deliberately lying about what he read. The part of the article where the David Whitmer interviews was cited gives further clarification on this point:

With regard to the physical circumstances of the Prophet Joseph Smith and his scribe, Martin Harris was quoted as saying there was a blanket or curtain hung between himself and Joseph during the translation process. If Martin is accurately quoted, perhaps this occurred when the Prophet was copying characters directly from the plates in the sample to be taken to Professor Charles Anthon, since the dates mentioned are several months before Martin Harris’s brief scribal duties began. I say this because although David Whitmer mentions a blanket being used—it was only to partition off the living area in order to keep both the translator and scribe from the eyes of visitors (see David Whitmer Interviews: A Restoration Witness, ed. Lyndon W. Cook, [1991], 173).

In fact, Elizabeth Anne Whitmer Cowdery, Oliver’s wife, said, “Joseph never had a curtain drawn between him and his scribe” (quoted in John W. Welch and Tim Rathbone, “The Translation of the Book of Mormon: Basic Historical Information,” F.A.R.M.S. report WRR–86, p. 25). Emma likewise said of her days as scribe, early on, that Joseph dictated “hour after hour with nothing between us” (“Last Testimony of Sister Emma,” 289).

Maxwell said specifically that there was nothing between Joseph and his scribes during the translation process, even if the plates were covered by a cloth. Faulk appears to take this to mean that the scribes never saw the places, which is demonstrably untrue for five of the seven listed above. One of the other two testified that she was not specifically forbidden from seeing them, though she never asked if she could.

So, that only leaves one of the seven scribes who definitely did not have the opportunity to see the plates uncovered. That is very different from Faulk’s claim that “no scribe ever saw the plates.”

• The 3 Witnesses

The History of the Church records the event where Martin Harris, David Whitmer and Oliver Cowdery became the first witnesses to the gold plates after Joseph Smith. Joseph describes how the men gained their witness of the plates in a purely visionary setting.

 Again, this statement is somewhat misleading, in more ways than one. For one thing, The History of the Church was written by scribes and compiled from multiple different sources. Those sources included dictation by Joseph, but also other documentation like letters, journal entries, meeting minutes, etc. It was written in Joseph’s voice as if he was the one speaking, but often, he wasn’t. This particular section probably was dictated and approved by Joseph, but it’s difficult to know that for certain.

As the Joseph Smith Papers Project explains:

JS dictated or supplied information for much of A-1 [this notebook], and he personally corrected the first forty-two pages before his death. As planned, his historian-scribes maintained the first-person, chronological narrative format initially established in the volume. When various third-person accounts were drawn upon, they were generally converted to the first person, as if JS were directly relating the account. After JS’s death, Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, George A. Smith, and others modified and corrected the manuscript as they reviewed material before its eventual publication….

Aside from the material dictated or supplied by JS prior to his death, the texts for A-1 and for the history’s subsequent volumes were drawn from a variety of primary and secondary sources including JS’s diaries and letters, minutes of meetings, the first edition of the Doctrine and Covenants, church and other periodicals, reports of JS’s discourses, and the reminiscences and recollections of church members. … While it remains difficult to distinguish JS’s own contributions from composition of his historian-scribes, the narrative trenchantly captures the poignancy and intensity of his life while offering an enlightening account of the birth of the church he labored to establish.

So, just bear in mind, while the following quotation is probably from Joseph’s own words, there’s the possibility that it was taken from elsewhere and rewritten to sound like Joseph speaking. This is within the first 42 pages of the notebook, so he definitely approved it, but it’s unclear whether or not he actually said it.

The other and more important way that Faulk’s sentence is misleading is his characterization of the following account as being a “purely visionary setting.” That is not what any of the witnesses ever claimed. We’ll go into that in detail a bit later in this post, but this is not an honest claim by Faulk.

“Not many days after the above commandment was given, we four, viz., Martin Harris, David Whitmer, Oliver Cowdery and myself, agreed to retire into the woods, and try to obtain, by fervent and humble prayer, the fulfilment of the promises given in the above revelation—that they should have a view of the plates. We accordingly made choice of a piece of woods convenient to Mr. Whitmer’s house, to which we retired, and having knelt down, we began to pray in much faith to Almighty God to bestow upon us a realization of these promises.

According to previous arrangement, I commenced by vocal prayer to our Heavenly Father, and was followed by each of the others in succession. We did not at the first trial, however, obtain any answer or manifestation of divine favor in our behalf. We again observed the same order of prayer, each calling on and praying fervently to God in rotation, but with the same result as before.

 Upon this, our second failure, Martin Harris proposed that he should withdraw himself from us, believing, as he expressed himself, that his presence was the cause of our not obtaining what we wished for. He accordingly withdrew from us, and we knelt down again, and had not been many minutes engaged in prayer, when presently we beheld a light above us in the air, of exceeding brightness; and behold, an angel stood before us. In his hands he held the plates which we had been praying for these to have a view of. He turned over the leaves one by one, so that we could see them, and discern the engravings thereon distinctly. He then addressed himself to David Whitmer, and said, ‘David, blessed is the Lord, and he that keeps His commandments;’ when, immediately afterwards, we heard a voice from out of the bright light above us, saying, ‘These plates have been revealed by the power of God, and they have been translated by the power of God. The translation of them which you have seen is correct, and I command you to bear record of what you now see and hear.” (Joseph Smith, History of the Church, vol.1, pp.54–55)

Nowhere in this quote does Joseph say this wasn’t a real experience, or that it was “purely visionary.” Look at the language he does use. He describes it as a literal, physical event that they both saw and heard.

Joseph Smith, David Whitmer, and Oliver Cowdery saw an angel and the plates after Martin Harris withdrew from the group. Joseph goes on to tells how he, “…left David and Oliver and went in pursuit of Martin Harris, whom I found at a considerable distance fervently engaged in prayer.” Then they both joined in prayer, and according to Joseph, “the same vision was opened to our view.” Remember, the word “vision” means dream not reality.

No, the word “vision” does not always mean “dream.” It can mean that, but it can also mean a bunch of other things. According to the 1828 Webster’s Dictionary, in Joseph’s day it also meant, among other things, “the act of seeing external objects” or “actual sight.” It also has a definition that says, “In Scripture, a revelation from God; an appearance or exhibition of something supernaturally presented to the minds of the prophets, by which they were informed of future events.” Revelation can occur in your mind, as this particular definition says, but it can also occur in front of your eyes, as one of the other definitions says.

As the book of Ether explains, the things we see with the eye of faith are things we also see with our physical eyes:

And there were many whose faith was so exceedingly strong, even before Christ came, who could not be kept from within the veil, but truly saw with their eyes the things which they had beheld with an eye of faith, and they were glad.

When Christ appeared to Mary and His apostles after His death, or His appearances on the Mount of Transfiguration, or Joseph’s experience in the Sacred Grove, it was both a spiritual and a physical experience. Particularly in the case of Christ appearing to the Apostles, where they touched the nail wounds in His hands and thrust their hands into the spear wound on His side, it was not a dream. He was physically there in front of them.

However, in each of those experiences transfiguration was necessary. Moses explains:

But now mine own eyes have beheld God; but not my natural, but my spiritual eyes, for my natural eyes could not have beheld; for I should have withered and died in his presence; but his glory was upon me; and I beheld his face, for I was transfigured before him.

By this definition, seeing something with your spiritual eyes doesn’t mean seeing it in a dream. It simply means being transfigured.

That it’s not an experience any of them can easily describe makes perfect sense to me. I doubt I’d have the vocabulary to explain what that truly feels like, either. Would you?

It is important to note that Joseph never claimed to have carried the plates into the woods where they prayed.

Faulk doesn’t quote anyone suggesting otherwise, so I’m not sure what the point of this statement is. We already knew Joseph didn’t carry the plates into the woods with him when he knelt with the Three Witnesses in prayer.

 Praying to see the plates in the woods seems rather odd if Joseph actually possessed physical plates.

 No, it doesn’t. One of the conditions of seeing the plates was that they had to demonstrate faith. What better way to do that than by praying?

 Why was prayer necessary to see the plates if they were in fact, a physical object?

 Joseph tells us exactly why in that same account quoted above:

Martin Harris, David Whitmer, Oliver Cowdery and myself, agreed to retire into the woods, and try to obtain, by fervent and humble prayer, the fulfilment of the promises given in the above revelation—that they should have a view of the plates.

 They were praying for permission. “The above revelation” states that it’d be by their faith that they could obtain a view of the plates, the sword of Laban, the interpreters, the breastplate, and the Liahona. It also says that after they’ve obtained that faith, they’ll see them with their eyes, not in a dream. The prayer was to demonstrate that faith.

 Martin Harris’ behavior also seems strange if the plates actually existed.

Without any elaboration on what he means here, this is difficult to respond to. Martin Harris’s behavior doesn’t come across as odd to me at all, so it’s unclear what Faulk actually means. Is he talking to the secondhand statements from decades later claimed to be by Martin? Or his actual firsthand statements, and if so, which ones? Is he talking about his behavior in the time period leading up to this miraculous experience? Or the behavior immediately afterward, or years later? Is he talking about Martin leaving the Church for a time, or his returning? Or the activity he got up to in the interim?

Faulk doesn’t clarify. That’s something I’ve noticed he does a lot. He’ll make a statement and then not elaborate on it, leaving us to guess what the issue is and what he thinks about it. Because these things aren’t personally controversial to me, I have to take time to figure out what might be considered controversial about them, and then respond to that. It’d all be a lot easier if Faulk just explained why he thinks something is controversial.

• The Testimony of The 3 Witnesses is Not Accurate

 Printed in the Book of Mormon is the Testimony of the Three Witnesses. It is not an accurate account of the events, but a reconstruction of multiple experiences.

It’s actually both an accurate account of the events and a reconstruction of the experience of Joseph and Martin, as well as that of Joseph, David Whitmer, and Oliver Cowdery.

“And we also testify that we have seen the engravings which are upon the plates… And we declare with words of soberness, that an angel of God came down from heaven, and he brought and laid before our eyes, that we beheld and saw the plates, and the engravings thereon; and we know that it is by the grace of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, that we beheld and bear record that these things are true.” (Testimony of the Three Witnesses, The Book of Mormon)

Yeah, that’s an accurate retelling of the events. Read their full testimony:

Be it known unto all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people, unto whom this work shall come: That we, through the grace of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, have seen the plates which contain this record, which is a record of the people of Nephi, and also of the Lamanites, their brethren, and also of the people of Jared, who came from the tower of which hath been spoken. And we also know that they have been translated by the gift and power of God, for his voice hath declared it unto us; wherefore we know of a surety that the work is true. And we also testify that we have seen the engravings which are upon the plates; and they have been shown unto us by the power of God, and not of man. And we declare with words of soberness, that an angel of God came down from heaven, and he brought and laid before our eyes, that we beheld and saw the plates, and the engravings thereon; and we know that it is by the grace of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, that we beheld and bear record that these things are true. And it is marvelous in our eyes. Nevertheless, the voice of the Lord commanded us that we should bear record of it; wherefore, to be obedient unto the commandments of God, we bear testimony of these things. And we know that if we are faithful in Christ, we shall rid our garments of the blood of all men, and be found spotless before the judgment-seat of Christ, and shall dwell with him eternally in the heavens. And the honor be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, which is one God. Amen.

Oliver Cowdery 

David Whitmer

Martin Harris

At no point does it say that they all saw those things at the exact same time and place. It just says that they all had those experiences. Martin had the same experience as David and Oliver did; he just had it a short time later.

It was a brief summary of the events, but it was an honest one. Nothing in that testimony was a lie or a distortion of the truth. They were bearing their testimonies of the things they’d seen, not giving a moment-by-moment account of every single thing that happened in those woods.

The language in this statement makes it seem as if all four men experienced this event together.

 Where does it say anything of the kind? I just quoted the entire thing, and it doesn’t say or even imply that anywhere. It simply says that it happened.

However, the History of the Church passage clearly shows that the Martin Harris’ vision happened separately.

Right, so does every Church history book or manual on the topic. This isn’t something the Church ever tried to hide. This was the story told right from the very beginning, in the very first history they ever tried to write of the organization of the Church. At no point did anyone ever claim that Martin had his vision at the same time that David and Oliver had theirs. This is just Thomas Faulk inventing controversy out of nothing.

Not only that, but later statements made by David Whitmer and Martin Harris show that the angel brought additional objects for them to see. This is curiously left out of the signed Testimony of the Three Witnesses.

Yep. The revelation stating that there would be witnesses to the plates said that too, in the very same History of the Church passage that Faulk quoted from above. This revelation is today’s D&C 17:

1 Behold, I say unto you, that you must rely upon my word, which if you do with full purpose of heart, you shall have a view of the plates, and also of the breastplate, the sword of Laban, the Urim and Thummim, which were given to the brother of Jared upon the mount, when he talked with the Lord face to face, and the miraculous directors which were given to Lehi while in the wilderness, on the borders of the Red Sea.

2 And it is by your faith that you shall obtain a view of them, even by that faith which was had by the prophets of old.

3 And after that you have obtained faith, and have seen them with your eyes, you shall testify of them, by the power of God;

4 And this you shall do that my servant Joseph Smith, Jun., may not be destroyed, that I may bring about my righteous purposes unto the children of men in this work.

5 And ye shall testify that you have seen them, even as my servant Joseph Smith, Jun., has seen them; for it is by my power that he has seen them, and it is because he had faith.

6 And he has translated the book, even that part which I have commanded him, and as your Lord and your God liveth it is true.

7 Wherefore, you have received the same power, and the same faith, and the same gift like unto him;

8 And if you do these last commandments of mine, which I have given you, the gates of hell shall not prevail against you; for my grace is sufficient for you, and you shall be lifted up at the last day.

9 And I, Jesus Christ, your Lord and your God, have spoken it unto you, that I might bring about my righteous purposes unto the children of men. Amen.

Again, this is not obscure or buried information. It’s in the D&C for everyone to read. In their Witness statement, they testified of the Book of Mormon and the reality of the golden plates, shown to them by an angel of the Lord. Did they need to say that the angel also showed them other objects at the same time?

I don’t personally think so, especially when people were already trying to physically harm Joseph in order to steal the plates. If they knew he also had a sword and a golden ball and ancient armor, wouldn’t they try even harder to get them?

You might disagree and feel that they needed to list all of those things. That’s okay; you’re entitled to your opinions. But it seems clear to me that between the Witness statement and the revelation in the D&C, we know what happened that day. The accounts given by those involved backed this information up in its entirety, as well as added additional detail. Again, it’s not hidden information.

“We not only saw the plates of the Book of Mormon but also the brass plates, the plates of the Book of Ether, the plates containing the records of the wickedness and secret combinations of the people of the world down to the time of their being engraved, and many other plates … there appeared as it were, a table with many records or plates upon it, besides the plates of the Book of Mormon, also the Sword of Laban, the Directors i.e., the ball which Lehi had-and the Interpreters [Urim and Thummim].” (David Whitmer, interview by Orson Pratt, Book of Mormon Compendium, 1878, pp.55-56)

Why fail to mention the other plates and important Nephite artifacts?

I gave one possible reason already—the persecution they were already enduring from those trying to steal the plates. Maybe they didn’t want to draw further attention to them and risk putting their lives in danger.

Or perhaps they didn’t feel it was necessary, since the golden plates were the truly important part. The others, while cool objects to see, were not vital, essential parts of the translation process. You could make a solid case for the interpreters being vital, of course. However, Joseph’s use of his own personal seer stone for part of the translation process tells us that, while important, they weren’t necessary.

I don’t know why they didn’t include them in the Witness statement. I didn’t write it, and neither did any of you. Maybe we would have phrased it differently in their place; who knows? But we know what happened, and the Witness statement covers the essential parts of their experiences. As I said, it was a brief summary of what happened, not a moment-by-moment recounting of the details. Maybe I just don’t expect as much from other flawed human beings as Thomas Faulk seems to. I don’t know.

I do know that the Witnesses saw what they said they saw. The Holy Ghost has confirmed this to me many times over. He’ll confirm it to you too, if you only ask. Remember, we have to ask before it’ll be given to us. We have to seek before we’ll find. We have to knock before the door will be opened unto us. We have to do our part, and then the Holy Ghost will do His.

Sarah Allen is relatively new in her affiliation with FAIR. By profession, she works in mortgage compliance and is a freelance copyeditor. An avid reader, she loves studying the Gospel and the history of the restored Church. After watching some of her friends lose their testimonies, she became interested in helping others through their faith crises. That’s when she began sharing what she’d learned through her studies. She’s grateful to those at FAIR who have given her the opportunity to share her testimony with a wider audience.

The post Letter For My Wife Rebuttal, Part 8: The Early Church – The Witnesses [A] appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: Why Don’t You Pray to Jesus?

by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC

Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about Prayer. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand.

Today’s verse comes from Luke 11:1-2:

“And it came to pass, that, as he was praying in a certain place, when he ceased, one of his disciples said unto him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples. And he said unto them, When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name….”

If you’ve ever visited an Evangelical church for a worship service you’ve probably noticed a lot of differences from how we conduct worship in our church. A couple videos back I talked about this at length and if you want a more thorough discussion on that take a look at the episode about honoring the Sabbath. And one of the things you may have noticed is that they address prayers directly to Jesus, while we do not. 

…And here’s a bit of an aside…All of the issues I’m discussing are addressed in depth on the FAIR Latter-day Saints website. And many other issues this series won’t touch. Almost every video in the comment section (“Hi people who leave comments!! Love you!”) someone will ask about addressing some other aspect of the same topic, but sometimes it’s just far beyond the scale of what I’m trying to do here. But FAIR has a massive collection of articles and research that explores every nook and cranny of just about every issue you can think of. One of my hopes for this series is actually that something you hear makes you curious about the topic and you set out to learn more. And the FAIR website is just a treasure trove of information for you to dive into. Okay, back on topic…

So before we talk about why Latter-day Saints pray differently, we need to work to understand why Evangelicals are praying directly to Jesus and what it means to them to do so. 

First we should say that Evangelicals also pray to the Father. And some also pray directly to the Holy Spirit. That’s not off limits to them and you will hear plenty of this in their services or private prayer. But they have special affinity for praying to Jesus that’s a bit hard for us Latter-day Saints to understand. 

Evangelicals would start with the Bible and say that we have examples from the New Testament of people praying to Jesus and it seems to work out for them.  There are 3 main examples of this plus one other, and we’ll quickly look at all of them. 

The three examples are Stephen, Saul, and Ananias – their stories are found in Acts chapters 7-9. The other instance is in Revelation 22:20, the second to last verse of the Bible. There are some other examples that people quibble about, but these are the ones where there is agreement that these are prayers directed toward Jesus. 

Stephen

So first let’s look at Stephen’s example and try to see  how Evangelicals see it.  In Acts 6 we see that Stephen is a man full of the Spirit and working to spread the Gospel.  The ruling council called the Sanhedrian – they’re a ruling council for Jews during this era – if you remember Jews are under Roman occupation so the rule of Rome is still enforced, the Sanhedrian is a ruling body or court for religious matters the Roman government didn’t concern itself with. The members of the Sannhedrian are upset with Stephen, they conspire to make false charges against him and haul him into court. The charge is that he has spoken blasphemous words against Moses and against God. Stephen is asked if the charges are true and he gives a passionate speech explaining how Moses points directly to Jesus. The Sanhedrian is furious – they “gnashed their teeth at him” – and then they drag him outside the city limits and start stoning him.  Stephen looks up to Heaven, sees Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ in a vision, and prays, “Lord Jesus, receive my Spirit.” 

Stephen’s prayer is very short and directed at Jesus, despite the fact that Heavenly Father is there too. Evangelicals take this to reinforce the idea that Jesus is the mediator between God and man. They’re not taking this passage to say, “You shouldn’t pray to Heavenly Father,” but they do take it to reinforce the idea that no longer did people need to consult a priest or make an animal sacrifice to approach God. Praying in Jesus’ name is now the key to communication with God. For them, “praying in Jesus’ name includes praying directly to him.” They see Stephen taking this option – even though God the Father was right there too. 

Bruce R. McConkie addresses this in his Doctrinal New Testament Commentary by basically saying the prayer was consistent with what Stephen had just preached, and was being stoned for – calling Jesus God. Jesus, showing his approval for Stephen’s actions, reveals himself to Stephen as he is dying, and Stephen addresses him directly because that’s how he got in this spot in the first place. 

Saul

We’ll look at the example of Saul, but Evangelicals basically make the same argument here. In Acts 9 Saul (who becomes Paul) is traveling around persecuting Christians for many of the same reasons the Sanhedrian was persecuting Stephen. He and his companions are walking on the road to Damascus. Saul sees a great light and hears a voice asking, “Saul, Saul why do you persecute me?” Saul answers back directly to the voice, “Who are you?” and the voice tells him that it is Jesus speaking and then gives him some further directions. Paul’s “who are you” is a kind of prayer directed at Jesus. Evangelicals would say that this is an example of praying to Jesus when things worked out. 

Is it?  Technically, yes. Paul speaks to Jesus, speaking to the divine is prayer, so Paul prayed to Jesus. And it worked out for him. 

But the experience does seem like an outlier. It’s not a normal occurrence to be traveling down the road, blinded by a light, and have Jesus speak directly. And I suppose if you have this experience, answering directly is the right thing to do. But these are not the normal circumstances of how most of us are going to pray our entire lives. 

Ananias

The final example Evangelicals would cite is Ananias.  He’s a disciple living in Damascus, where Saul is headed. Now, Saul had been blinded by his encounter with Jesus on the road and Ananias is who gets called on to restore Saul’s sight. Ananias has a vision of Jesus asking him to go to a certain house where Saul will be to restore his sight. Ananias’ first response is, “Yes, Lord.”  And I think we Latter-day Saints would agree that if Jesus appears to you and aks you to do something, the correct response is, “Yes, Lord.” 

But none of these examples – Stephen, Saul, or Ananias – are typical. They happen very soon after the resurrection of Jesus, they all happen within a short time of each other (Acts 7-9), they all involve Jesus appearing to someone, speaking to them, and the person speaks back. Evangelicals see this as a prototype of prayer, while we would probably see it as an understandable exception. 

Revelation 22:20

And there is one other example that helps explain why Evangelicals see praying directly to Jesus as a good thing.  Revelation 22 is the last chapter of the Bible. It’s not the last chapter that was written – that’s probably 2 Peter, though there’s plenty of debate – but it is the last chapter of how the New Testament is arranged, and this verse is one of the final verses we read, so it has some weight. 

The verse goes like this, “He who testifies to these things says, “Yes, I am coming soon.”

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.”  And, ‘he who testifies to these things,’ is Jesus himself, and the phrase “Amen, Come, Lord Jesus,” is seen as a prayer in agreement that he does so. 

And that phrase, “Come, Lord Jesus,” has a history. It is considered the second oldest formulation of prayer, second only to the Lord’s prayer. Part of how we know this is that Paul quotes it in 1 Cor. 16:22 – but he quotes the Aramaic version, Maranatha. The people living in Corinth are Greek speakers. So for Paul to assume they would know an Aramaic phrase suggests that it was a well known prayer. The phrase also appears in another book from that era called the Didache, which is kind of like an early “church handbook” and teaches about how the church should be run in practical terms. The phrase, “Come Lord Jesus” or Maranatha is suggested as a way to end a prayer, much like we would say, “In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.” Early Christians could say, “Come, Lord Jesus. Amen,” and they meant the same thing. And the phrase, “Come, Lord Jesus,” goes on to have an important place in Christian worship for many centuries. 

Evangelicals aren’t usually super interested in ancient church history though. And they don’t understand the history and development of how that phrase has been used. Remember the entire Evangelical movement is about 70 years old, so they don’t care much about history before that except to jump way back into time to the days of the New Testament. And when they see “Come, Lord Jesus” in the New Testament they take it to be a prayer toward Jesus. But they miss the fact that the phrase was being used as something much closer to, “In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.” Their desire and motivation here is not bad. They want to get as closely connected to Jesus as they can, and that is admirable. But in doing so they miss the fact that Jesus himself asked us to pray in the name of the Father. 

One of the weaknesses of the Evangelical movement is that because they hold a view of the Bible as inerrant, they take things in it more literally than context and history would allow. They take “Come, Lord Jesus” as a literal prayer, not a formation of praying in Jesus’ name. Their hearts are in the right place, but they get a bit lost in the weeds of obeying the Bible vs. obeying Jesus. I say that kindly, and I think they have very good motives for doing so, but the resulting practice has some issues. 

Repetition in Prayer

The other issue I want to briefly introduce here is repetition in prayer. For the most part we would be on the same page as Evangelicals about scripted prayers. Like us they would say scripted prayers are to be avoided because it’s too easy to pray them without your heart in it. However, there is a sizable minority in the Evangelical world who experiment with scripted prayers, and they have an interesting motivation for doing so that I want to point out. 

Now, usually scripted prayers are not new prayers. They are very old prayers that have been written down and repeated throughout the centuries. You’ve probably heard of The Book of Common Prayer which contains the Anglican prayers assigned to any given Sunday. Evangelicals who are interested in this kind of thing have a soft spot for Anglicans so that’s usually their go-to source.  These prayers have been prayed by Christians for many centuries. And there is a decent sized minority in the Evangelical culture that longs for learning about ancient ways. They have an innate understanding that their so-called “happy clappy” churches are actually missing something. And they know the thing they’re missing is ancient. Using very old scripted prayers is one attempt they make to learn ancient practices. They know that something has been lost, and they long to have it restored. I’ll push my luck here and say: they long for a restoration. And what they long for in theory and vagueness, we have in specificity. Just something to think about as you talk with your Evangelical friends about these kinds of things. 

I hope you will join us next time. I love getting your questions in email – you can find me at Jroach@fairlatterdaysaints.org And I will see you next time. 

More Come, Follow Me resources here.

Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities.

The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Matthew 11–12; Luke 11 appeared first on FAIR.

Most of us are familiar with Joseph Smith’s well-documented stay in Liberty Jail, and the later criminal charges at Carthage that led to his murder. Many of us also know about the different lawsuits for debt collection, particularly concerning the Kirtland Safety Society. Church history geeks will be familiar with two back-to-back sham trials in 1830 while Joseph was still in New York, in which his enemies scoured the countryside for anyone willing to testify against him with any ridiculous story they could invent. After he was acquitted at the first trial, he was immediately handcuffed and re-arrested for the second trial. It lasted well into the early hours of the morning before he was acquitted a second time.

However, those weren’t the only legal trials in Joseph’s life. In fact, Joseph was involved in over 200 court cases, whether as a defendant, plaintiff, witness, or judge. Brigham Young once estimated that Joseph had been the defendant in about 48 of those cases. According to Joseph Bentley at the previous link, that estimate appears to be pretty accurate. He was found liable for some incurred debts over the years. In none of those criminal cases, however, was he ever confirmed to have been found guilty.

The case being discussed today is Joseph’s 1826 trial for “glass-looking,” another term for using a seer stone. Not much is known of this trial, and several of the records conflict in different ways. The basic gist, though, is that Joseph went to work for Josiah Stowell in November of 1825, trying to locate buried treasure. After about a month, he convinced Stowell to give up the venture, but stayed on with him as a farmhand for several months. In March of 1826, one of Stowell’s relatives brought charges against Joseph, claiming he was scamming Stowell. The outcome of this trial is one of those details that conflict across the different records.

So, what does the LFMW have to say about this trial?

• Trouble With the Law

Between 21-25 years old, Joseph Smith was arrested 4 separate times for fraud.

Sort of. He was arrested four times, but he wasn’t charged with fraud four times. There were the two 1830 cases mentioned above in which he was charged with being “a disorderly person,” which was the corresponding charge in New York for using a seer stone. There was this 1826 case in which he was charged with “glass-looking” as well as being “a disorderly person.” And the fourth case came in 1829, in which Lucy Harris, the wife of Martin, claimed Joseph defrauded her husband. So, he was only charged with fraud once.

The two 1830 cases were dismissed for lack of valid evidence against him, as was the 1829 case. In fact, Lucy Mack Smith recounts that in the 1829 fraud case, the testimony against Joseph was so absurd the judge “told them that they need not call any more of their witnesses but to bring that which had been recorded of the testimony that had been given. This he tore in pieces before their eyes and told them to go home about their business and trouble him no more with such ridiculous folly.”

There’s a reason critics don’t usually mention these three cases. When your evidence is so bad that even the judge calls your claims ridiculous, you don’t really have a leg to stand on.

The outcome of the 1826 case is more murky, though, as we’ll come to see.

Josephsmithpapers.org displays a trial bill for Justice Albert Neely where Josiah Stowell brought charges against Joseph for glass looking and was convicted of misdemeanor.

This sentence is incorrect. The Joseph Smith Papers Project does indeed have the bill for the justice’s trial fees. We also have a bill for the constable. However, that’s the only factual information in that sentence.

Josiah Stowell did not bring those charges against Joseph, and it is unknown whether he was convicted of the misdemeanor. It also doesn’t actually appear to be a trial, but a pre-trial hearing to determine whether or not to bring a trial.

Though one account by William Purple states that Josiah’s sons brought the charges against Joseph, most accounts list Peter G. Bridgman as the accuser. Bridgman was Stowell’s nephew. Stowell actually testified on Joseph’s behalf. So did several of his family members. Stowell later joined the Church and remained a faithful member for the rest of his life. That’s not the behavior of someone who distrusted Joseph and tried to charge him with fraud.

As far as the judgment itself goes, the reports range from Charles Marshall’s purported transcript saying he was found guilty to Abram Benton and Joel King Noble both claiming he was convicted but allowed to escape and/or “took leg bail” to William Purple claiming he was discharged without penalty to Oliver Cowdery saying he was “honorably acquitted” in a letter to W.W. Phelps. You can see why there’s confusion over the outcome.

These are the accounts we have: the William Purple statement, three Pearsall statements, the two court bills, and Oliver Cowdery’s brief comments on the matter.

William Purple claimed to be a friend and associate of Albert Neely, the justice in this case. He says that he was asked to take notes during the hearing. This statement was produced from his note and his memory, though it’s important to note that it was published decades later and Purple had recounted his story many times. This means that inaccuracies were bound to have crept in over the years.

The Pearsall accounts are three purported transcripts of the docket entry of the case, originally provided by Emily Pearsall. However they all differ in places, the original source is missing, and it’s unclear whether the original transcript was altered. According to the Joseph Smith Papers Project:

Although Neely’s docket book is not extant, three documents purporting to be based on the docket entry for State of New York v. JS–A later appeared in print. The published docket entry includes the case name, the date of the proceedings, the name of the complainant—Peter G. Bridgman, Stowell’s nephew—and the charge that JS was a “disorderly person and an Imposter.” It also includes detailed summaries of testimonies by JS and five witnesses recounting JS’s use of a seer stone while in Stowell’s employment. The docket entry concludes with Neely’s purported verdict, “and therefore the court finds the defendant guilty,” as well as the justice’s itemized fee bill totaling $2.68. Several of these details are consistent with Neely’s and De Zeng’s 1826 bills, strongly suggesting that the published transcript was based on an authentic source.

Because of uncertain provenance, however, questions remain regarding the reliability of the printed document, and it is included here as an appendix item. According to later accounts, following Neely’s death the original docket book was inherited by his niece, Emily Pearsall, who served as a Methodist missionary in Utah in the early 1870s. At some point, Pearsall reportedly “tore the leaves” pertaining to the case “out of the record.” In 1872, British journalist Charles Marshall visited Utah, where Pearsall permitted him to copy the “original papers” of Neely’s “judicial proceedings,” which he published in Fraser’s Magazine in England. After Pearsall’s death in 1872, the excised pages passed to Episcopal bishop Daniel S. Tuttle, with whom she had lived in Utah. Unaware of Marshall’s earlier publication, in 1883 Tuttle published a transcript of the document in Philip Schaff’s Religious Encyclopaedia. Finally, in 1886 the anti-Mormon Utah Christian Advocate published a transcript of “the Manuscript” they had obtained from Tuttle. Although “the Manuscript” likely referred to the “original papers” torn from Neely’s docket, it is also possible that the term refers to a copy made by Tuttle. Each printing was apparently made independent of the others, as each contains unique omissions and errors. Without the original source, it remains unknown how accurately any of the published versions represents Neely’s original docket entry.

So, as you can see, it’s convoluted. That makes it difficult to ascertain the facts. I’m sure you’re asking the same question I did: what actually happened?

Well, according to Gordon A. Madsen, the leading expert in this case, 19th century New York courts presided over by a single justice like this in this instance were “on the bottom rung of the legal ladder.” They were called courts of special sessions. These justices weren’t trained lawyers or judges, but affluent men in the community who were tasked with presiding over matters that didn’t amount to serious crimes, but that upset the locals. For criminal cases, they had a few options. They could sentence someone to be held in the house of correction until the next general session of the court for an actual trial, up to a maximum of six months. They could also sentence someone to 60 days of hard labor at the house of corrections instead of a trial. The general session court could fine up to $25 and an additional six months of hard labor for a misdemeanor.

Joseph was not sentenced to any of those things. He was also not brought before a general session court. The bills were sent to the county government for court services, not to Joseph. There is no record of any fine against him, or of him serving any time in relation to this charge. His life is pretty well-documented, so if he served jail time for any length of time longer than about a week, we would be aware of it. There is also no conviction mentioned by any of his detractors from this time period, despite their affidavits being quoted in full in Howe’s Mormonism Unvailed. This all suggests that he was not found guilty.

Additionally, under the law at the time, only Josiah Stowell could bring a complaint against Joseph as the victim of the fraud, but he testified in favor of Joseph. As Madsen explains:

The pivotal testimony, in my view, was that of Josiah Stowell. Both accounts [the Purple and the Pearsall accounts] agree on the facts. The Pearsall account states: “[Joseph] had been employed by him [Stowell] to work on farm part of time; …that he positively knew that the prisoner could tell, and professed the art of seeing those valuable treasures through the medium of said stone.” The Purple account states:

Justice Neely soberly looked at the witness and in a solemn, dignified voice said, “Deacon Stowell, do I understand you as swearing before God, under the solemn oath you have taken, that you believethe prisoner can see by the aid of the stone fifty feet below the surface of the earth, as plainly as you can see what is on my table?” “Do I believe it?” says Deacon Stowell, “do I believe it? No, it is not a matter of belief. I positively know it to be true.”

From the array of the other witnesses there was no testimony that any of them parted with any money or other thing of value to Joseph Smith. Only Josiah Stowell did so, and then for part-time work on his farm in addition to services rendered in pursuit of treasure. More to the point, he emphatically denied that he had been deceived or defrauded. On the contrary, he “positively” knew the accused could discern the whereabouts of subterranean objects. In short, only Josiah Stowell had any legal basis to complain, and he was not complaining. Hence Purple’s concluding comment: “It is hardly necessary to say that, as the testimony of Deacon Stowell could not be impeached, the prisoner was discharged, and in a few weeks he left the town.” Indeed Justice Neely had no other choice.

The Pearsall account he describes is the Marshall account found in Fraser’s Magazine. This same account is partially quoted by Thomas Faulk in the LFMW:

Prisoner examined: says that he came from the town of Palmyra, and had been at the house of Josiah Stowell in Bainbridge … That he had a certain stone which he had occasionally look at to determine where hidden treasures in the bowels of the earth were; that he professed to tell in this manner where gold mines were at a distance under ground, and had looked for Mr. Stowell several times, and had informed him where he could find these treasures, and Mr. Stowell had been engaged in digging for them.

Josiah Stowell sworn: says that prisoner had … pretended to have skill of telling where hidden treasures in the earth were by means of looking through a certain stone; that prisoner had looked for him sometimes; once to tell him about money buried in Bend Mountain in Pennsylvania [and] once for gold on Monument Hill.

Jonathon Thompson: says that prisoner was requested to look for chest of money; did look, and pretended to know where it was … Smith looked in his hat while there, and when very dark, and told how the chest was situated…That the last time he looked he discovered distinctly the two Indians who buried the trunk, that a quarrel ensued between them, and that one of said Indians was killed by the other, and thrown into the hold beside the trunk, to guard it, as he supposed.

And therefore the Court find the Defendant guilty.” (Joseph Smith’s 1826 court transcript)

Again, there are issues with omitting part of the text and not showing it. Faulk at least added some editing marks this time around, so I’ll give him props for that, but he also cut out multiple paragraphs of text without indication.

Additionally, this is not the “court transcript.” There was no official court transcript made. Madsen explains:

What really happened? What can we draw from the statutory and case law, the bills, the admittedly incomplete and inconsistent reports of the notetakers, and the even more inconsistent conclusions of the commentators? Let us first resort to The Justice’s Manual as a basis for judging the reliability of the Pearsall and Purple notes and their pretensions at being official. Purple claimed that Justice Neely was his friend and asked him to make notes of the trial. He also admitted telling the story repeatedly over the more than forty years before he submitted his article to the Chenango Union in May 1877. Miss Pearsall, according to Tuttle, had torn her notes from her Uncle Albert Neely’s docket book. How close does either come to meeting the requirements of a transcript of testimony required of a justice of the peace at that time?

The statute provides that in all cases where any conviction shall be had before any court of special sessions, in pursuance of the act hereby amended, it shall be the duty of the justices holding such court of special sessions, to make a certificate of such conviction, under their hands and seals, in which shall be briefly stated the offence, conviction and judgment thereon; and the said justices shall within forty days after such conviction had, cause such certificate to be filed in the office of the clerk of the county in which the offender shall be convicted, and such certificate, under the hands and seals of such justices, or any two of them, and so filed, or the exemplification thereof by such clerk, under his seal of office, shall be good and legal evidence in any court in this state, to prove the facts contained in such certificate or exemplification….

 So, if … a court of special sessions convened, and the Pearsall notes were “The Official Trial Record” (as he maintains), where is the certification “under their hands and seals” wherein is “briefly stated the offence, conviction and judgment thereon”? The Purple notes are equally lacking such certification. On the other hand, if (as I maintain) Justice Neely alone tried the matter, and if a conviction resulted, far more particularity would have been needed in such notes demonstrating jurisdiction, the regularity of the proceedings, the conviction, and the sentence. In either event, the record of conviction would have needed to be filed with the county clerk within forty days. No such record as to date been unearthed in the office of the Clerk of Chenango County.

The “he” in question is Reverend Wesley P. Walters, the man who apparently found the two court bills linked above. He wrote a few articles bundled together into a book titled Joseph Smith’s Bainbridge, N.Y. Court Trials, which included an adjoining pamphlet titled “From Occult to Cult With Joseph Smith,” which Madsen was responding to.

This is almost certainly not an official court transcript that Faulk quoted, and neither is the other record. Both are lacking required elements to meet that designation, and neither of them were ever filed with the county. This suggests that, instead, these are simply the personal notes of Neely regarding the case.

It also needs to be remembered that the provenance of this account is in dispute. No one can confirm where it came from. Neely’s niece just showed up with them one day, and there’s no telling what was altered or where she got them. There’s also no telling what they actually said, because all three transcripts of the papers differ from one another in key points and the originals no longer exist to compare them to.

Those aren’t the only issues with this account. Let’s talk about the word “pretend” for a minute.

The Pearsall account claims that Josiah Stowell said that Joseph “pretended” to have the skill of using a seer stone. However, as we quoted above, in the same account Stowell says he “positively knew” it was true. Stowell did not use the word “pretend.” Neely or Pearsall—or whomever wrote those original papers—did.

Of the word “pretend,” religious anthropologist Manu Padro wrote:

[T]he use of the word “pretended” to describe supernatural claims of miraculous power is not a clear-cut statement about fraud. It is a recategorization of disparaged religious beliefs and practices to better police and penalize them. This is most commonly seen in skeptical English demonologists’ descriptions of non-Calvinist religious traditions from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. This understanding of the word “pretended” also appears in the Pearsall narrative’s depiction of the 1826 pre-trial.

The Pearsall narrative follows this tradition. It relies almost entirely upon “pretended” powers, claiming that Joseph Smith “had pretended to tell by looking at this stone, where coined money was buried in Pennsylvania, and while at Palmyra he had frequently ascertained in that way where lost property was of various kinds.” Oddly, it depicts Josiah Stowell as claiming that Joseph Smith Jr. “pretended to have skill of telling where hidden treasures in the earth were by means of looking through a certain stone.” When compared to statements in both narratives that assert Stowell’s belief in Smith’s abilities, this statement seems to be an insertion or a scribal distortion. In the Pearsall narrative, Johnathon Thompson testified that Joseph Smith Jr. “pretended to know” where the treasure was buried and “pretending that he was alarmed” when they thought their shovels had hit a chest. The Pearsall narrative then claims that Johnathon Thompson believed “in the prisoner’s professed skill, that the board he struck his spade upon was probably the chest but on account of an enchantment, the trunk kept settling away from under them while digging.” This should be compared to the Purple narrative’s version of Johnathon Thompson’s testimony. There, Thompson never presents these alleged practices or beliefs as pretended. On the contrary, the Purple document’s version of the Johnathon Thompson testimony portrays Smith’s folk-Christian beliefs as genuine even if it later repackages them as delusional beliefs leading to unprofitable diabolical witchcraft. Thus, potential scribal distortion also appears in the Johnathon Thompson testimony. The Pearsall narrative’s consistent depiction of Smith’s activities as “pretended” also occurs in its presentation of the Horace Stowell and McMaster testimonies.

 The two literary sources for the 1826 pretrial diverge strongly on their description of Smith’s activities as pretended witchcraft and diabolical witchcraft. Of these two accounts, the Purple narrative matches the allegations of diabolism that Smith’s neighbors claimed to have of his activities after 1824. However, the Pearsall account contains the justice’s itemized fee bill, which matches Justice Neeley’s and Constable De Zing’s bill of costs. This conundrum would suggest that the Pearsall account is not a faithful reproduction of the original trial notes. It would appear that working with the original notes, Emily Pearsall may have fabricated an account of the trial by removing elements of folk-Christian belief frequently associated with witchcraft and the allegations of diabolical witchcraft. For example, Joseph Smith Sr.’s and Joseph Smith Jr.’s testimonies, which explicitly characterize treasure seeking as a Christian act in the Purple narrative, are both completely omitted in the Pearsall narrative. These elements of Joseph Smith’s early life would have triggered the skepticism of a late nineteenth-century audience. Their absence in the Pearsall narrative reflects a later reframing of the events. … If the original trial notes included Smith’s confessions’ folk-Christian belief conflated with witchcraft or if it contained allegations of diabolical witchcraft, the recreation of these elements in the Pearsall articles from later in the century would have triggered skepticism among people from Emily Pearsall’s generation of Americans. William Purple, on the other hand, was from an antebellum generation of nineteenth-century Americans who had not internalized this understanding of Salem or skepticism about diabolical witchcraft. Hence, Purple’s account included the folk-Christian confessions from both Joseph Smiths. For William Purple and other believers in diabolical witchcraft, the conflation of folk-Christianity with witchcraft meant that the Smiths’ confessions of folk-Christian activity would have been seen as blasphemous confessions of implicit pacts, which believers imagined to be witchcraft. On the other hand, Emily Pearsall would have been motivated to modify an account of the 1826 pretrial by stripping the actual trial notes of inconvenient and embarrassing material, focusing instead on post-Enlightenment concerns with pretended witchcraft, painting it as fraud. … The Pearsall narrative’s scribal insertion portraying Josiah Stowell as describing Joseph Smith’s practices as pretended suggest that Emily Pearsall may have added and embellished material in her account. This is suggested by alleged accounts of deliberate deception in the Horace Stowell, Arad Stowell, and McMaster testimonies. These accounts of deliberate deception do not appear in the Purple narrative. Further evidence for selective distortion in the Pearsall account can be found in the Pearsall narrative’s guilty verdict, which strongly contradicts William Purple’s claims that the prisoner was discharged on Josiah Stowell’s testimony. The motive and the ways the Pearsall account do not match the larger body of evidence would strongly suggest that such a chain of events shaped the final document used to generate this account. The divergences in these narratives suggest that the allegations in the pre-trial as remembered by William Purple focused on diabolical witchcraft while Emily Pearsall heavily edited her account to create a narrative that focused on post-Enlightenment concerns with pretended powers.

Essentially, there is good evidence to suggest that Emily Pearsall heavily altered her uncle’s trial notes before allowing anyone to copy them. Her papers don’t match the other account’s testimonies, nor do they match the types of stories being told in the testimonies from the 1829 and 1830 trials. The Pearsall papers don’t match the rest of the evidence pointing to an acquittal/dismissal either, as outlined above. So, there’s valid reason to be skeptical of the account Faulk labels as the official “court transcript.”

He continues:

• Context

BYU Professor, Ronald Walker, states that the events surrounding Joseph and the gold plates were very typical of early 19th century folk magic practitioners.

Oof. I’m a big fan of putting things back in context, but that context needs to be correct and this…isn’t. That isn’t what Walker said at all.

For this, we’re jumping back to one of the papers we discussed last week.

What Walker actually said was that Joseph Smith’s personal use of a seer stone was typical of early 19th century folk-magic practitioners. He also said, “I wish to make another point explicit. Nothing in my study should be taken as suggesting that Joseph Smith was merely a product of his folk culture environment. No English or American village adept ever produced a Book of Mormon. None produced a Vision of Moses, the Olive Leaf, the Three Degrees of Glory, or such magisterial ideas as sections 93 and 98 of the Doctrine and Covenants. At every major point in his career, there were second and third witnesses for Joseph Smith’s work. And when he died, he left a church that dwarfed anything that might have been built by a run-of-the-mill village holy man.”

He literally said the opposite of what Faulk claims here. Things like that irritate me. If your position is so strong and your argument is so solid, why do you have to lie in order to make your claims? Why do you have to erase chunks from the quotes you choose, and blatantly twist what the papers you cite actually say? When you pull stunts like that, why do you think we’ll actually trust you over the Holy Ghost and the prophets? I just don’t get it.

Faulk then presents a little table to back up his assertion:

These are again simplistic distortions of what Walker actually said. For example, Walker’s paper doesn’t discuss divine visitations, unless you consider attempts to conjure ghosts and other spirits as divine. There is no discussion of those spirits or ghosts ever actually appearing to anyone.

As explained in footnote 60 of the paper, the number three was seen as a signifier of completeness in the New Testament: the three gifts of the wise men to the baby Jesus; the three temptations of Christ in the wilderness; the three denials of Peter; the three falls on the road to Golgotha; the three days between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection; the three appearances of the risen Christ to His disciples; etc. It was long taught in Christian mythology that the number was symbolic of the Godhead/Trinity. We actually see the number three popping up all over our society in secular places as well, and it has been a prominent number for centuries. We see it in nursery rhymes such as “Three Blind Mice,” fairy tales such as “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” and idioms like “the third time’s the charm.” Ancient cultures prominently used triskelions, tridents, shamrocks, and other symbols with three prongs to also symbolize completeness, power, or unity. The number three pops up in multiple other incidents Walker lists, in a variety of ways. It’s not actually referred to as being involved with visions in Walker’s paper either, but rather with recurring dreams. Those dreams were not likened to visions, and the trend has scriptural backing. It wasn’t something Joseph just absorbed from his community.

Additionally, he never said he was overcome by “the Devil” when he went to pray, but that it was “thick darkness” in one account, and that his tongue felt swollen so that he could not speak and he heard someone walking behind him but saw no one in another account.

Moroni did not “protect” the golden plates the way a treasure guardian would. The extent of his protection was simply to bury the plates before he died where they would not be damaged or found until the time was right. God was the one protecting them, not Moroni. A treasure guardian’s job was not to lead a seeker to the treasure and to then teach him all about where it came from and the people it belonged to. It’s job was to stop anyone from ever finding the treasure, either by moving it whenever they got close or by inducing them to speak and break their silence, thereby destroying their ability to find the treasure a second time.

The only thing that actually aligns on that table is that seer stones worked best when put inside a hat to block out the light. In Joseph’s day, that was the best means of creating darkness black enough for it to work properly, without straining his eyes.

If Joseph was using the same stone to defraud people as he later used to write the Book of Mormon, then it speaks to the credibility of his claims.

If that were true, I’d agree. But there is no valid evidence whatsoever that Joseph ever committed fraud against anyone. Faulk certainly didn’t provide any, and neither has anyone else. The closest they can find is the Pearsall accounts, which appear to have been heavily altered and do not match the other existing evidence.

It appears that Joseph used a seer stone to sell treasure-hunting services and when that didn’t turn out well for him, he used the same stone to sell religious services.

One of the big points made by many of the papers cited is that Joseph wasn’t selling anything. He didn’t advertise his services. He didn’t seek out people who would hire him. They all approached him, not the other way around. And when it became clear it wasn’t working the way they hoped it would, Joseph was the one to call it off.

Using his personal seer stone sometimes for convenience’s sake instead of dealing with the spectacles that didn’t fit is not “selling religious services.” It’s using one of your spiritual gifts in the service of God, the way that you’re meant to use them. He wasn’t charging God money to translate the plates.

(“sell religious services” is both referring to collecting tithing and also to Joseph’s attempt to sell the copyright to the Book of Mormon shortly after publication. He sent Oliver Cowdery, Hyram Page and Josiah Stowell to Toronto, Canada but they returned unsuccessful. http://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/revelationbook-1/15)

Well, that took an abrupt detour, didn’t it? Tithing has been a principle in place since before the time of Abraham. It is also not “selling religious services.” It is giving some of your blessings back to God because He is the one who gave them to you in the first place.

As for the copyright, that deserves more than a quick paragraph of explanation. However, I’m running short on room, so this will have to do for now. The copyright that Joseph attempted to sell was not the intellectual copyright over the contents of the Book of Mormon. It was the printing rights, because certain publishers have the right to publish certain books in certain countries. They were trying to find a publisher who would buy the Canadian publishing rights. Moreover, they were commanded to do so. We have a copy of the revelation at the Joseph Smith Papers Project. That’s a very big difference from what Faulk is trying to imply. Once again, he is incorrect in his statements.

Considering that Joseph did not even use the plates during the translation, considering that folk magic was common in the New England area, and he had been in trouble with the law for treasure hunting, it seems hard to feel confident in the authenticity of the official translation story.

Joseph absolutely used the plates during the translation. He couldn’t read them, but he never claimed to be able to do that. “Translate” is not the proper word for what Joseph did with the plates, though it’s the word that we frequently use. A better word might be “transmit,” and he was the receiver, not the one doing the transmitting. The Spirit was the transmitter.

But the plates were a tangible evidence that his story was true. Numerous people were aware that he had them. They saw them, they held them, they saw the corner peeking out from under a cloth, they rustled their edges, they carried them in a box, etc. There is no denying that Joseph had something that resembled the plates. Why do you think some of his neighbors tried so hard to steal them from him so many times if he didn’t have anything to back up his story?

He also didn’t have the money or the ability to fake them, and no stories ever emerged of anyone helping him create them, the way they did for similar hoaxes.

I don’t find Joseph Smith’s story of the translation of the Book of Mormon difficult to believe. It is not hard for me to feel confident in that. You know why? Because my testimony isn’t built on Rough Stone Rolling or any other history book about Joseph’s life. It’s not built on whichever instrument Joseph used to aid his revelatory process during that translation.

My testimony is built on the Spirit of Christ. That Spirit testifies of the truth, and He has testified to me that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God. He has testified to me that the Book of Mormon is exactly what it claims to be. He has testified to me that Christ’s Priesthood was restored to the Earth. He has testified to me that this belongs to Him. He has testified to me that His prophets still lead our church today.

And because He has testified of that to me, I don’t personally care what hobbies Joseph may have had that are a little on the weird side. He’d probably think my hobbies are weird, too.

None of that changes the truthfulness of his claims. None of it changes the facts that the Book of Mormon is both an ancient record of people who really lived and holy scripture. And none of it changes this church from being the true Church of Christ.

Sarah Allen is relatively new in her affiliation with FAIR. By profession, she works in mortgage compliance and is a freelance copyeditor. An avid reader, she loves studying the Gospel and the history of the restored Church. After watching some of her friends lose their testimonies, she became interested in helping others through their faith crises. That’s when she began sharing what she’d learned through her studies. She’s grateful to those at FAIR who have given her the opportunity to share her testimony with a wider audience.

The post Letter For My Wife Rebuttal, Part 7: The Early Church – The Translation [C] appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: No Authority Needed?

by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC

Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful answers to New Testament questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about Authority. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand. 

Today’s verse comes from Luke 9:1-2:

Then he called his twelve disciples together, and gave them power and authority over all devils, and to cure diseases. And he sent them to preach the kingdom of God, and to heal the sick.

Why Authority?

A common Evangelical question that would come up here is something like: Why are Latter-day Saints obsessed with authority? In our church authority comes straight from Jesus.” And it’s interesting because there are several spots in this week’s readings, and in the readings coming up, where Jesus’ authority is questioned. People want to know under what authority he is doing this or that. And in our church we talk a lot about authority…proper authority…priesthood authority…general authorities. Who has authority to do what is an important question to us. We would say its part of how Jesus Christ has ordered his church. Evangelicals see questions of authority differently.  I want to explain how they see authority and what they mean by it, so that we might see a way our church’s point of view might be thoughtful or a blessing to them. 

First, I need you to set aside, just for a minute, the worry about the Bible being corrupted and translated incorrectly. Yes, those are true, but if that is your whole focus in conversation about the Bible you’re going to be butting heads with Evangelicals and not seeing a way to understand them, or to let them see the beauty in our beliefs. So, yes, there are issues in the Bible’s translation and transmission process. We will just let that sit to the side for a moment. In this video I want you to think of the parts of the Bible that are inspired, that truly show God, that are translated correctly – all the best parts of the Bible. 

And this topic gets a little heady – and we need to geek out a bit to get to the point – stay with me there is a pay off, I promise. 

If you’ve been following along with these videos you are starting to see that because Evangelicals hold a certain set of values, they prioritize different concepts differently. 

When Evangelicals use the word “authority” it’s usually in the context of, “the authority of scripture.” And they put a lot of effort and priority into demonstrating how and why the Bible is the source of authority. They have a sincere desire to live in a way that is resisting the pull of culture (to some degree) and place themselves under the authority of scripture. This value goes all the way back to the earliest Protestant roots.  At least part of what the Reformation was about was the question: Who or what gets the final say? Is it the Pope? Who?  

The Reformation

Prior to the Reformation (which was not a singular event, but a process over many years) authority was contained in the Catholic Church. Few people had access to a physical Bible, few could read, and frankly few had time to devote to study as their lives were primarily about doing what needed to be done to sustain life. Leisurely sitting and studying the scriptures is not easily compatible with agrarian life. So before the Reformation the Catholic Church holds all the authority. The scriptures mean what they say it means – very few people could open up their Bible and check their work. And it wasn’t just Martin Luther who saw some of the contradictions between what the text said, and what the Catholic Church taught that the text said. Plenty of priests saw this, some were even writing about it. But it took a Martin Luther to have the courage to take the argument public. And he does it in spectacular fashion – and with excellent timing. If he had been born even 100 years earlier his argument wouldn’t have mattered much because there was no way to get scripture into the hands of average folks since the printing press had not been invented. But Luther comes along and makes a good point at a time in history when there is technology to actually apply it. And all of this is a very good thing. However, what happened when the Bible itself was given ultimate authority, and the church took a back seat. Anyone with enough education to read could access the Bible – their level of understanding the context of what they were reading didn’t matter much because the Bible itself was the ultimate authority. As long as they read with as “plain” a reading as they could, the Bible could replace the authority of the priest.  This is referred to as Sola Scriptura – meaning “Scripture alone” has the final say. Today’s Evangelicals very much follow in this tradition. The idea for them is that God is the ultimate authority, and he has given us a book, therefore that book has to have authority too. 

Did God come to us as a Book? Or did he send a Son?

But here’s the problem. We don’t say, “God so loved the world that he sent us a book.”  That feels pretty cold, a bit lonely, kind of disconnected. We say, “God so loved the world that he sent us his son.” Sending his son came with all kinds of messiness and pain and difficulty, but the experience Jesus had while on Earth was very human so that is to be expected. It just seems odd that God would go to this great, messy length to send us a Son, and then expect those who come after that Son to be given a book to represent him and whose authority to follow, and not an actual real-live human being who can act in his authority. 

We believe, as the first 1500 years of Christianity believed, that the authority to act in Christ’s name is best located in a human being who can understand the messiness of life – not in a book. Further – without even talking about the problems with translation and transmission of the Bible – all written words have to be interpreted. You have to take the written word and understand what it means. This requires a human mind. There is no bypassing this where God just dumps words straight from his mouth into your head. (Michael Ash’s book, “Rethinking Revelation: The Human Element in Scripture” is 700 pages explaining why this is true if you’re interested.) God’s project of communicating to us has to involve humans. Evangelicals want to place it in an object, a book.

What is the Authority of the Bible?

And it’s easy to see how some problems develop right away when a book is the container for God’s authority on the Earth, instead of a human being who represents him. The biggest question seems to be, How can an ancient narrative text hold authority over modern people who do not understand the culture and context from which it came?

Here is what Evangelicals do, and it’s interesting, they simply open the scripture, read what it says, and apply it to themselves. The end. Or so they think. They understand themselves to be doing a “plain reading” of scripture, and that they have within themselves all that is needed for understanding – anyone who understands differently is at best dull-minded, and at worst outright evil. But most of the Bible is not a list of things to do and things to avoid, or even a list of things to be believed. It’s a story, a narrative. And even when it lists things to be believed or things to do, those are in the context of some story. But if you can’t understand the story, you have no way to understand the do’s and don’ts. It can kind of be a grab-bag approach – just reach into the text and pull out some meaning, doesn’t really matter if it was ever intended to apply or not. 

A low view of Scripture

Evangelicals then think about the Bible as something that represents God – He has placed his authority into the Bible. When they say, “authority of the Bible” it’s a kind of short-hand for, “God has authority and he has vested it into the book we call the Bible. We can turn to the Bible to learn what we need to learn.”  But we think of it sort of the other-way around. And it’s the same point that NT Wright makes in some of his writing. We would say that according to the Bible itself authority is vested in God – and God gets to decide what to do with it – and the narrative of the Bible shows us, over and over, that God vests it in his representatives. To say that God now vests the authority in a book takes a complete left-turn away from where the story of the Bible is leading you. It’s actually a very low view of scripture because what it’s saying is that: God’s plan within the pages of the Bible is to cooperate with humans to do his work, but we feel ambivalent about that, so we’re going to change the plan and let God place it all in a nice neat book, not a messy human race. By taking the authority away from where God was pointing it, we disrespect him and the very book he gave us. 

So what about your Evangelical friends? They want – desperately want – to get things right about God. And having everything all neat and tidy inside a book seems like a good way to do that. So they remove authority from human leaders and place it in a book. They’re trying to keep things “pure” and not let the humans mess them up. That’s an understandable desire and goal. But it’s not God’s desire. God partners with us to create, to organize, and to lead. And to remove authority from the humans God partners with, and placing that authority in a book might feel safe, but it’s not because it’s not God’s plan. 

In other words, Jesus gives authority to his apostles in this story. That’s what we read in Luke 9. Evangelicals are saying, “That’s scary because humans mess things up – remember the Reformation.”  And they’re not wrong. But the answer isn’t to change God’s way of operating in the world, the answer is to try and get better at following the very pattern the Bible has laid out for us – listening to God’s representatives on the Earth. The Evangelicals desperately want to have a high view of scripture. But they undermine themselves because they’re pivoting away from scripture when they place the Bible as God’s partner instead of the humans God has decided to partner with. Think of it this way, the Bible is kind of like a 5-act play…Creation, the Fall, the story of Israel, Jesus, and then the book we call, “The Acts of the Apostles,” where the gospel is taken to the ends of the Earth. And that is the stage we’re still in. We don’t call it, “The Acts of the Book.”  Books don’t commit acts. They’re objects. Everything in the Bible is intended to teach us how to carry on the story of the Bible, and that includes placing authority in humans, not books. 

I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. Come back next week and we’ll look at some more. 

More Come, Follow Me resources here.

Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities.

The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Matthew 9–10; Mark 5; Luke 9 appeared first on FAIR.

Two topics that are often misunderstood in Latter-day Saint circles are those of folklore and what is sometimes termed “folk magic.” When we hear those words, as a people we tend to think of something negative or spiritually dangerous. We might think of examples such as Ouija boards or tarot cards. But the actual definitions are a lot more benign than that.

Folklore, for instance, is simply pieces of knowledge or stories that are passed down from one person to the next over the generations. Santa Claus; the Tooth Fairy; the Easter Bunny; vampires and werewolves; George Washington and the cherry tree; the seagulls eating the crickets in the Salt Lake Valley; the family stories you tell over and over again about how your brother microwaved a fork and fried the appliance or how your sister used to eat a single bite out of the center of a piece of bologna and discard the rest; or perhaps the oft-told story of how your friend once bit into an apple and found half a worm; these are all examples of folklore.

Folk magic is a little different. As Greg Smith points out, “folk” means “of the common people.” It was something the educated class looked down on, but that the common people engaged in. They often mixed these practices with Christianity, believing they were gifts and knowledge from God. Yes, Ouija boards and tarot cards fall under this umbrella. So does energy healing. Voodoo might also be considered an extreme example that falls under this category.

But it can also be equally as innocent as folklore. Examples can include your grandmother’s home remedy for colds; your co-worker’s favorite hangover cure; hanging mistletoe at Christmas to draw kisses; drinking sugar water to get rid of hiccups; the old man in your ward who can use his bad knee to predict the weather; singing to your plants while gardening to make them grow; using essential oils on your menstrual cramps; drinking ginger ale for an upset stomach; people who listen to their “gut instinct” or “mother’s intuition”; etc. Even things as innocent as painting Easter eggs or decorating Christmas trees can fall under this category.

Examples of divinely sanctioned “folk magic” also abound in the scriptures: Joseph of Egypt’s divining cup; Jacob’s rod of poplars that he used to make sheep bear more of the types of lambs Laban had given him; Moses’s staff; the ephod or Urim and Thummim the Levite priests used; the Ark of the Covenant; Oliver Cowdery’s divining rod; the lots the Apostles cast; the Liahona; the glowing stones that guided the Jaredites; Abraham’s Urim and Thummim; Christ spitting in the dirt to make clay to cure blindness; the words the Savior used to raise Jairus’s daughter from the dead being similar to a magic spell of the day; the use of consecrated oil; the brass serpent; and, of course, the Nephite interpreters.

We don’t think of those things as being “magic” or “occultish” or anything spiritually dangerous, because they’re not. The word “magic” in this sense is incorrect. Heavenly Father has a long history of using physical objects as well as the knowledge and beliefs of His followers to teach them lessons and help them receive revelation. If someone believes in the power of casting lots to receive direction from God, for example, He will sometimes give them direction through that means.

“Magic” doesn’t inherently equal “bad” or “wrong.” It just depends on how the word is being used. When it’s sanctioned by God, it’s an effective teaching tool. It’s simply a means to achieving His goals. That’s an important concept to understand before we dive into what the Letter For My Wife has to say about the topic.

President Oaks once clarified this difference:

It should be recognized that such tools as the Urim and Thummim, the Liahona, seer stones, and other articles have been used appropriately in biblical, Book of Mormon, and modern times by those who have the gift and authority to obtain revelation from God in connection with their use. At the same time, scriptural accounts and personal experience show that unauthorized though perhaps well-meaning persons have made inappropriate use of tangible objects while seeking or claiming to receive spiritual guidance. Those who define folk magic to include any use of tangible objects to aid in obtaining spiritual guidance confound the real with the counterfeit. They mislead themselves and their readers.

The use of these physical objects or unusual means has to be sanctioned by God, or it’s not appropriate. But when it is appropriate, there’s nothing wrong with it. It might be a little weird to us in our day and age to think about, for sure. It’s not common in our society, so it’s not something we’re used to. But “different” doesn’t mean “bad.” Remember, God works in mysterious ways, and those ways are not always our ways.

And because there was some confusion on Reddit over what I am trying to say, I am not defining “folk magic” as “the use of all tangible objects to aid in obtaining spiritual guidance” the way that President Oaks told us not to do. I am saying that some people define it that way. Some people consider things like crystal balls or tarot cards, or perhaps people who claim to be psychic, as gifts from God. They conflate those things with spiritual gifts and mix the pagan with the divine. They use the same umbrella term of “folk magic” regardless of whether it was a spiritual gift or not.

The Church does not define it that way and states that only sanctioned use of physical objects to channel faith is legitimate and appropriate. In those cases, the common umbrella term of “folk magic” is incorrect. Because it’s confusing to use such a broad term to discuss such nebulous concepts, there is now a trend away from this term in religious scholarship. Even Joseph Smith separated his ability to use a seer stone for the mundane (like finding lost objects) and for the holy (like translating ancient records by the power of God) as being two different things. My intention was to show what was being implied by the “folk magic” label vs. what the reality actually is when it comes to divinely sanctioned objects and gifts. I hope that clarifies what I’m trying to say here.

So, with that said, what does Thomas Faulk think about all of this?

• Folk Magic

Could Joseph Smith’s experiences actually be products of his family’s practice of local folk magic? BYU Studies Quarterly describes the Smith family culture when it stated, “In frontier America, seer stones or ‘peep stones’ were commonly used by lost object finders, people engaged in the widespread practice of lost treasure digging.” (BYU Studies Quarterly, Vol.55, No.1, 2016)

It took me a moment to hunt this paper down, since Faulk didn’t name it or link to it. I was pleasantly surprised when I did, though. I’d never read it before, but I found it fascinating and very helpful in explaining some things I’d had questions about.

Faulk positions this quote as though it’s casting doubt on Joseph’s prophetic calling, but in context, it’s not. The author, Eric Eliason, instead spends his time defending the use of seer stones against claims of “weirdness” or of its being “a troubling problem” in our Church’s history. Faulk actually cuts the quote off mid-sentence, again without any indication that the quote has been edited down. I still maintain that using a partial quote made to look like a full quote is dishonest behavior.

The actual quote, in context, reads:

In frontier America, seer stones or “peep stones” were commonly used by lost object finders, people engaged in the widespread practice of lost treasure digging, and sometimes by people seeking to uncover the kind of truths we might call a private or police detective for today. It is unclear how much of this kind of activity Joseph Smith was involved in, except for water divining and treasure digging, which are widely attested. The “seer” in seer stone is a biblically literate early American culture’s reference to the biblical term seer explained in 1 Samuel 9:9 as an earlier term for a prophet—more specifically one who saw visions, dreams, or scenes in the mind’s eye, or even with the natural eyes. Moreover, God gives the seer insight into the meaning of his or her visions (2 Sam. 24:11; 2 Chr. 9:29; Jer. 1:11–18). All of this fits quite nicely with how Joseph Smith saw himself.

To Bible scholars, the Urim and Thummim is one of several items similar to the ephod and lots used to determine the will of God or seek information from him. (The Liahona in the Book of Mormon follows this pattern.) It seems that early Mormons began to use the terms seer stone and Urim and Thummim interchangeably, with the latter convention winning the day. But both terms emerge from biblical practices and understandings.

As you can see, his point was actually that Joseph using a seer stone was perfectly in line with the Biblical patterns of “seers,” something that Joseph was specifically called to be.

In fact, there is a late, thirdhand account of the First Vision in which Joseph is described as saying that the Father touched Joseph’s eyes, which allowed him to see the Savior. Joseph apparently physically touched his eyes to show how this was done as he recounted the vision. (This account can be found in full at the link by scrolling to pages 755-756. It can also be found in Paul Cheesman’s infamous thesis, as well as in many of the following links.)

Now, this account was recorded in 1893 in the journal of a man named Charles Lowell Walker. Walker heard it from John Alger, the brother of Fanny Alger, who heard it from Joseph. The Algers were obviously quite close to Joseph, and this account was apparently given in an intimate gathering in Joseph Sr.’s home. This sets it apart from other second- and thirdhand accounts. However, it came very late and it is a thirdhand account, so we do need to treat it with the proper caution.

Scholars such as Matthew Brown and Dan Peterson don’t believe this was a literal, physical touch if the account is accurate, but a metaphorical one.

Conversely, historian Don Bradley argued passionately for its literalness in both a FAIR presentation and a paper published in the Journal of Mormon History, which can be downloaded here for free. A prominent reason he gives for taking the account literally is that it follows scriptural pattern. Isaiah describes his mouth being touched by a seraphim, allowing him to speak on the Lord’s behalf. The Savior cures one blind man by anointing his eyes with clay, and two more by simply touching their eyes. In the Book of Abraham, the Lord touched Abraham’s eyes, letting him see all of creation. In the Book of Moses, the Lord also had Enoch anoint his own eyes with clay, letting him see things that were not visible to the normal eye and calling him as a seer. And the Brother of Jared saw the Lord’s finger touching the stones to light the barges, as well as the interpreters given to him for the record he would later write.

Greg Smith also covered some of this in a fantastic fireside, seeming to agree with Bradley that it was a literal touch.

However, regardless of where we come down on the physical touch vs metaphorical touch issue, Bradley lays out some strong supporting evidence. In that light, I do think we need to at least consider the possibility that this thirdhand account is accurate. Again, it should be viewed skeptically, but I think there’s enough there to grant it hesitant legitimacy.

If true, it’s an absolutely beautiful detail that I wish was preserved in other accounts. Whether a literal touch or not, it follows the Lord’s pattern. And the Lord does love patterns. In each of those scriptural instances, the touch was a manifestation of the prophet’s call to see and to speak. When it was the Savior Himself doing the touching, it was as a manifestation of His own divine role. It would stand to reason, then, that Joseph also received a manifestation of his calling as a prophet, seer, and revelator.

Next in the letter comes a series of quotes. The first is a lengthy one from Ronald W. Walker:

1. Director of Center for Western Studies at BYU and president of the Mormon History Association, Ronald W. Walker, put the Smith family’s activities in historical context.

“From Colonial times to at least the age of Jackson [1776-1837] Americans dug for magical treasure. There were hundreds and probably thousands of these money diggers all seeking troves of fabled coins, mines, jewels and other valued prizes.

 “The money diggers placed faith in conjuring elemental spirits, thrice spoken dreams, seeric gifts and enchanted treasure.”

 “Clearly the ideas of hidden but guarded treasure with their secondary and accompanying motifs of ancient texts, animals, boxes, devils, caves, gold, incantations, mountains and even the ratifying number three, were an ancient bequest.”

 “A treasure-finding device used by adepts was the “peep” or “seer” stone, whose acclaimed gifts excelled even those of the divining rod. Such stones seemed to be everywhere and were of every possible description. Joseph Smith’s various stones reportedly included a smooth, grey, egg-shaped rock found in a neighbor’s well, a second which he reportedly dug up near Lake Erie after espying it in his neighbor’s stone, and still others collected from the Mississippi River sands near Nauvoo, Illinois.”

 “With most village seers requiring that the light be secluded, this stone-in-the-hat procedure was standard. By this method, an adept could see within the stone crystal a helpful spirit or the precise locality of the underground treasure.”

 “While finding the right moment to dig was important, the need to circumvent the treasure’s guardian was crucial. Like its Old World antecedents, the American treasure keeper might be demonic or divine. Or it could be a cat, dog, snake or some other protecting animal. But generally the American treasure guardian was a murdered youth or man whose body had been left with the buried valuables to ensure their protection. Guardian Indians were a frequent motif while a murdered pirate protected Captain Kidd’s troves.”

 “As Vermont’s early nineteenth century emigration swept into upstate New York the money digging frenzy came with it. Such superstition was frequent in the new settlements. The Palmyra Reflector labeled the New York money hunting mania, “Men and women without distinction of age or sex became marvelously wise in the occult sciences, many dreamed and others saw visions disclosing to them, deep in the bowels of the earth, rich and shining treasures (Palmyra Reflector, February 1, 1831).”

 “Rumors constantly swirled about hunters’ smiling fortunes, which excited still others to further digging. Smith family reportedly found objects as a cannon ball, a cache of gold watches, and according to the viewpoint of some of their neighbors, the golden plates which produced the Book of Mormon. Indeed in ways that are yet to be explored, money digging may have influenced two of the nineteenth century’s major social and religious movements Mormonism and Spiritualism. Its touch on American society was not light.” (Ronald W. Walker, The Persistent Idea of Treasure Hunting in America. https://ojs.lib.byu.edu/spc/ index.php/BYUStudies/article/viewFile/5447/5097)

Before I dive into the actual quoted material, I do just want to point out that the paper in question begins with this caution, which Faulk appears to have ignored:

I wish to make another point explicit. Nothing in my study should be taken as suggesting that Joseph Smith was merely a product of his folk culture environment. No English or American village adept ever produced a Book of Mormon. None produced a Vision of Moses, the Olive Leaf, the Three Degrees of Glory, or such magisterial ideas as sections 93 and 98 of the Doctrine and Covenants. At every major point in his career, there were second and third witnesses for Joseph Smith’s work. And when he died, he left a church that dwarfed anything that might have been built by a run-of-the-mill village holy man. Some may see this success as simply the work of a “religious genius.” My own conviction is that Joseph  was a religious genius because of an active and guiding Providence.

Walker also states that this paper was written in an academic, neutral tone and advises the reader not to be thrown off by that. He confirms that he does believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet guided by the Lord. This paper was also not written to cast doubt on Joseph’s calling. It was merely to research the history of “money digging” in New York and New England during the 1800s, and to see what kind of affect that may have had on Joseph’s family and upbringing.

And again, there are huge chunks of omitted text from this quoted portion. Multiple paragraphs and even full pages were removed and there are more partial sentences, all without any indication that they were edited. I know I keep stressing how shady this practice is, but there’s a reason for that. It truly is dishonest to imply that you’re quoting the full material when you aren’t. I don’t have the space to quote the full thing here, and I don’t begrudge Faulk for not quoting the entire thing either. But you have to show omission marks when printing an edited quote. Please, don’t accept these quotes at face value because they are not complete.

For one notable example, the line, “Such superstition was frequent in the new settlements,” is actually a line by a fictional character from a James Fenimore Cooper novel, not Walker’s own words. Faulk completely cut out the attribution, as well as the acknowledgment that it was a quoted passage.

Also missing are several passages describing those who engaged in this practice as upstanding and respectable citizens who were honest, hard-working Christians. These people were not acting under any demonic influences, nor were they lazy men and women unwilling to work. Though in certain places and times, the practice was looked down on, in other times and places, it was highly regarded. It was commonplace and a well-accepted practice in Vermont, where the Smith family was from, as well as in upstate New York, where they eventually moved. Joseph wasn’t even the only “village seer” in and around Palmyra. As recounted last week, he found his first seer stone by looking in the stone of another Palmyra seer, Sally Chase.

However, by the early 19th Century, these practices were starting to fall out of favor in the Americas. Parts of the country shunned the practices on religious grounds. And, as stated, in many places the educated class, which often included the clergy, looked down on these folk practices as either superstition and nonsense, or as something evil or dangerous. Joseph, in particular, became a target of this religious wrath after his First Vision became publicly known.

As Mark Ashurst-McGee explained, “Joseph wrote that because he had claimed to see a vision the local ministers united against him and spoke against him to their congregations, but they did not speak against his visions. As Joseph had claimed that Jesus told him all current churches were false, he posed a threat to the clergy. By denouncing Joseph’s treasure dowsing, the minsters could undercut his visionary claims to any who might have heard it without informing any of the flock who had not.”

I know that’s straying a little far from the quoted sections Faulk cited, but I think it’s an important point to note. Joseph’s character and his practices of treasure hunting and using a seer stone were condemned while others engaging in the same practices in his town were not. A significant reason for this is because his claims threatened the beliefs and the livelihoods of the local clergy.

Faulk continues:

2. “Like many other New Englanders, they were familiar with searches for lost treasure by supernatural means. Joseph Smith’s father was reputed to be one of these treasureseekers, and Joseph Smith himself had found a stone, called a seer stone, which reportedly enabled him to find lost objects. Treasure-seekers wanted to employ him to help with their searches. One, a man named Josiah Stowell, hired Joseph and his father in 1825 to dig for a supposed Spanish treasure near harmony, Pennsylvania. The effort came to nothing, and the Smiths returned home, but the neighbors continued to think of the Smiths as part of the treasure-seeking company.” (http://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Smith,Joseph)

Again, this is an edited quote and an incorrect URL. The paragraph in question is as follows:

The discovery of gold plates in a hillside resonated strangely with other experiences of the Smith family. Like many other New Englanders, they were familiar with searches for lost treasure by supernatural means. Joseph Smith’s father was reputed to be one of these treasure-seekers, and Joseph Smith himself had found a stone, called a seer stone, which reportedly enabled him to find lost objects. Treasure-seekers wanted to employ him to help with their searches. One, a man named Josiah Stowell (sometimes spelled Stoal), hired Joseph and his father in 1825 to dig for a supposed Spanish treasure near Harmony, Pennsylvania. The effort came to nothing, and the Smiths returned home, but the neighbors continued to think of the Smiths as part of the treasure-seeking company. Joseph Smith had to learn, in his four years of waiting, to appreciate the plates solely for their religious worth and not for their monetary value. The angel forbade Joseph to remove the plates on his first viewing because thoughts of their commercial worth had crossed his mind. Joseph had to learn to focus on the religious purpose of the plates and put aside considerations of their value as gold.

The point of the paragraph was not to highlight the weirdness of Joseph engaging in treasure-hunting. It was to show that he ironically found the buried treasure he was looking for, but couldn’t use it for financial gain. He wasn’t allowed to obtain it until he could put aside those desires for money and seek instead to glorify God and help build His kingdom.

3. “By 1825, [19 yrs old – 5 years after the First Vision] young Joseph had a reputation in Manchester and Palmyra for his activities as a treasure seer, or someone who used a seer stone to locate gold or other valuable objects buried in the earth.” (Elder Steven E. Snow, Church Historian, Ensign, September 2015)

Yep. Putting this quote back in context, the article in question says:

Joseph Smith first arrived in Harmony in the autumn of 1825. Joseph’s mother, Lucy Mack Smith, wrote that earlier that year “a man by the name of Josiah Stoal [Stowell] came from Chenango County, New York, to get Joseph to assist him in digging for a silver mine. He came for Joseph from having heard, that [Joseph] was in possession of certain means, by which he could discern things, that could not be seen by the natural eye.”

 Stowell was a prominent resident of South Bainbridge, New York, and for a man of his standing to be searching for buried treasure was not at all unusual, since it was a common folk practice of the time. By 1825, young Joseph had a reputation in Manchester and Palmyra for his activities as a treasure seer, or someone who used a seer stone to locate gold or other valuable objects buried in the earth. Thus, it was no surprise that Stowell specifically sought out Joseph’s services.

What this article doesn’t say is that, during Joseph’s 1826 trial for “glass-looking,” which we’ll discuss next week, Stowell testified on Joseph’s behalf. During that testimony, he explained that while he was considering hiring Joseph, he tested his seeing ability. Joseph looked into one of his seer stones and perfectly described Stowell’s farm and buildings, as well as a tree that had a man’s hand painted on it. This is what convinced Stowell that Joseph really could see things in his stone.

4. “Yet on that visit there was an attempt to reconcile Joseph and his father-in-law, for an invitation was extended to Joseph and Emma to make their home in Harmony. Isaac, with evident paternal concern and with some compassion, indicated to Joseph that if he would move to Pennsylvania and work, giving up “his old practice of looking in the stone,” Isaac would assist him in getting into business. Isaac claims, “Smith stated to me he had given up what he called ‘glass-looking,’ and that he expected and was willing to work hard for a living.” (Isaac Hale, father of Emma Hale Smith, History of the Church, Vol.1. Ch.2)

This quote is not from The History of the Church, Volume 1, Chapter 2, as claimed. It’s from the notes of the Annotated History of the Church found at the Book of Abraham Project website. In turn, this footnote information was taken from Susan Easton Black’s chapter in Regional Studies in Latter-day Saint Church History: New York, “Isaac Hale: Antagonist of Joseph Smith.” The ultimate source of this information is from an article titled “Mormonism,” containing several affidavits of the Hale family and others from Harmony. This article was published in the Susquehanna Register on May 1, 1834. The Isaac Hale affidavit is dated March 20, 1834, and claims to be taken largely from a letter Hale wrote to D.P. Hurlbut in December, 1833. The affidavits collected by Hurlbut comprised some of the material used in the creation of E.D. Howe’s Mormonism Unvailed. Howe paraphrased some of Hale’s affidavit in the text.

There’s some slight controversy over whether or not this affidavit was fake. Apparently, there were accusations that Hale had gone blind in his old age—he was in his 70s by this time—and was incapable of signing his name to the affidavit or of knowing what it truly said as written. However, most historians do accept it as accurate, as there is no record of Hale ever disputing its contents.

The following information was taken from Susan Easton Black’s chapter cited above.

Hale was openly hostile to Joseph by this time, and blamed Joseph for stealing away his daughter. He personally had engaged in treasure-hunting with his brother, and allowed Joseph and the other diggers working with Josiah Stowell to live on his property while they searched for the treasure. Ultimately, he had soured on the practice after no treasure was found. He seemed to hold Joseph personally responsible for this failure and refused him permission to marry Emma. Later, they eloped, which caused a lot of strain with the Hale family.

However, for a time, Hale was willing to let Joseph and Emma live in a house on his property and to defend them against the neighbors’ persecutions. This only extended so far, unfortunately. When his brother-in-law, Nathaniel Lewis, a local Methodist preacher, ramped up his own vitriol against Joseph, Hale unfortunately followed suit. The last time Emma ever saw her parents was in 1830. Things had grown so hostile between them all that she never returned to visit. By 1834, Hale was quite bitter against Joseph, and it showed in his affidavit.

Of course, he made no mention of his own history of treasure-seeking, and used it instead as an attack against Joseph. And by the point in time that Joseph allegedly made that promise, he was done with “glass-looking” for profit. He hadn’t yet figured out how to translate the plates, and was actively looking for someone else to do it for him. Though he shortly began translating through the Interpreters and his own seer stones, I don’t believe that Joseph was lying when he gave that promise to Hale. If he did indeed make the promise, I think that he considered using his stones in his calling as a prophet to be entirely different from using his stones to seek treasure and other lost objects. That was a hobby; translating the plates was a calling.

Faulk wraps up this topic with one last sentence:

The Smith family’s use of seer stones to find buried gold treasure was a common folk magic practice in New England.

Yes, it was—but the treasure Joseph ultimately found was far from common.

At this stage of my life, my testimony is pretty unflappable. I’ve read most of this stuff many times before. I’ve spent years studying Church history as a hobby. I read a lot, and I’ve taken the time to sort through how I really feel about all of these topics. These things simply don’t bother me.

But they might bother you, and that’s okay. It really is okay to take the time to sort through your feelings and to pray and study the information. It’s why I source as much as I can, and why I try to link to as many online resources as possible. I want you all to be able to read it for yourselves. I want you to learn how to study this kind of thing with the Holy Ghost’s help. You can access the Spirit when you study secular things. You can do it when you study Church history, too.

His help isn’t just for studying the scriptures or for asking questions about doctrine or leadership. He doesn’t just guide us to the truth of the Gospel. He guides us to the truth of all things. That means that, with His help, we can sort through the lies and distortions and come to an understanding of what really happened. We can pray for enlightenment and the ability to understand why things happened the way they did.

In closing out this post, I just wanted to touch briefly on the words of President Monson:

We live in a time of great trouble and wickedness. What will protect us from the sin and evil so prevalent in the world today? I maintain that a strong testimony of our Savior, Jesus Christ, and of His gospel will help see us through to safety. If you are not reading the Book of Mormon each day, please do so. If you will read it prayerfully and with a sincere desire to know the truth, the Holy Ghost will manifest its truth to you. If it is true—and I solemnly testify that it is—then Joseph Smith was a prophet who saw God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ.

 Because the Book of Mormon is true, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the Lord’s Church on the earth, and the holy priesthood of God has been restored for the benefit and blessing of His children.

 If you do not have a firm testimony of these things, do that which is necessary to obtain one. It is essential for you to have your own testimony in these difficult times, for the testimonies of others will carry you only so far.

When you study the history of Joseph Smith, you’re studying the history of the Restoration of the fulness of the Gospel. When you study the Book of Mormon, you’re studying the fruits of Joseph’s calling as a prophet. They go hand in hand.

While you study these topics and other events in Church history, do it with the scriptures and the Holy Ghost at your side. Don’t neglect those things for the sake of academic pursuit. They work together. Keep praying, and keep Heavenly Father apprised of your progress. Ask Him your questions. Lean on His Spirit to guide you to the truth. We all need to learn how to obtain and also maintain our testimonies. We all need to become as unflappable as possible. Otherwise, the prophets have warned that it won’t be possible to survive spiritually in the coming days. That’s a dire warning that we all need to take seriously. We need to learn to rely on the Holy Ghost, and that includes while we’re studying difficult or controversial topics. It’s the only way we’re going to see the truth.

Sarah Allen is relatively new in her affiliation with FAIR. By profession, she works in mortgage compliance and is a freelance copyeditor. An avid reader, she loves studying the Gospel and the history of the restored Church. After watching some of her friends lose their testimonies, she became interested in helping others through their faith crises. That’s when she began sharing what she’d learned through her studies. She’s grateful to those at FAIR who have given her the opportunity to share her testimony with a wider audience.

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Evangelical Questions: But I thought Jesus said we don’t have to follow the Sabbath anymore?

by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC

Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about Sabbath. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand. 

Today’s verse comes from Mark 2:23-27:

One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and as his disciples walked along, they began to pick some heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?” He answered, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? In the days of Abiathar the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions.” Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. 28 So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.

A common Evangelical question that would come up here is: WHY does your church teach that we should obey the Sabbath when clearly Jesus says we don’t have to. First we’ll address what that looks like during Sunday worship and then what it looks like for the rest of the day on Sundays.

So, how do Evangelicals understand what “keeping the Sabbath” means?  As we’ve talked about in another video the history of Evangelicalism really goes back about 70 or so years and it’s growth happens right along side the Baby Boom. And those initial churches that called themselves Evangelical were pretty much following the pattern churches had followed forever – Sundays were for worship, no working, no shopping, no extravagant entertainment, spend time with family, try to keep a reverent spirit about the day. But by the late 60’s that starts to change and it’s a Southern California church called Calvary Chapel they’re at the forefront of that change. They were hugely successful. They become the hub of the “Jesus Movement” of the 1970’s where churches and a tension starts to develop between the rules and expectations that churches, even Evangelical Churches had, and what the Jesus Movement/Hippies were looking for. But for most of the 1970’s this tension is located Southern California and isn’t an issue.  Most Evangelical churches across the country would still have been thinking about something like the Sabbath Day in traditional ways. The members probably would have still been dressing up for church, men in ties and women in dresses. But by 1979 the younger leaders at Calvary Chapel wanted to take the church culture they had created there, and start churches with the same mind set around the country. And so during the 1980’s the Evangelical movement takes a radical turn toward a more casual worship style. It doesn’t happen all at once, but by the end of the 1980’s most Evangelical churches are encouraging people to come “dressed as you are” to church, and have also de-emphasized most rules on Sunday behavior. This is the history of how they got there, but why did they do it?

Ultimately Evangelicals place high priority on the pragmatic – does something work – and far less priority on the long term consequences. Beginning in the 1980’s and certainly into the 1990’s the kinds of Evangelical churches that were embracing a casual style of worship were growing. They were exciting places to be. Families with youth flocked to these churches because they had fun programs that kept the teenagers engaged. But by the 1990’s and into the 2000’s a pragmatic practice that had begun for a good reason (to accommodate the Jesus Movement culture) had turned into the normalized practice. By 2000 you would be hard pressed to find any Evangelical church where members and clergy alike were not dressing in casual clothes on Sunday morning. And when that shift happened along with it was the shift away from “rule keeping” around other Sunday practices like not working or shopping. Nobody really saw a point in emphasizing what was relevant because embracing what was casual was working for them from a pragmatic point of view. The casual style did draw in young families and lots of excitement. By the time this had spread to most Evangelical Churches there really wasn’t a way to put the Genie back in the bottle. The change happened and that was that. 

Interestingly enough, about 15 or so years ago, a movement started within some corners of Evangelicalism to embrace more traditional practices, to have services that were quiet and not full of rock music. Many of the people who embraced that ultimately move out of the Evangelical world and become Anglicans, Lutherns, Catholics or Eastern Orthodox.   

One thing I’ve noticed in our church is that it can sometimes be hard for Latter-day Saints to look at Evangelical services and not be a little jealous. They’ve got exciting music, lots of energy, worship bands, and more. And so sometimes I think that a conversation with an Evangelical friend would end with a Latter-day Saint saying something like, “Yeah, I kind of wish we were doing what you’re doing.”  And I sympathize. Our hymns are old, organ music is not the most exciting, even when the hymn says it should be “sung vigorously” it’s usually not. But I’d like to make the case about why a more reverent style of worship sets the tone for a day where the Sabbath can be kept, and that keeping the Sabbath is a blessing, not a rule we chaff against. 

When Evangelicals started to dismantle a more formal style of worship for the sake of the Jesus Movement they had the best of motives. But as it grew into a standard practice without the underlying motivation it also came with an unspoken message that said something like: We can follow Jesus without traditional constraints, and in fact, it is our obligation to do so. “We need to show people that church is not about following your grandmother’s rules for church, it’s for us fun, modern people too.”  Do you hear the change there? It went from, “We want to change our worship style for the sake of the Jesus Movement people who seem to need an honest accommodation,” into “We make the change for ourselves because we’re not old and boring.”  The goal moved from accommodating others to expressing one’s own coolness. And if the point of worship is about me and what makes me feel comfortable, it’s really hard to accept that anyone else, even God, should place any expectations on me. So the idea that God gets a say in how worship goes gets tossed aside. But none of them really looked far enough into the future to say, “If we start to throw out God’s expectations in one area, it becomes pretty easy to throw them out in other areas.”  And a deep cynicism starts to develop of God’s right to have any say in our behaviors. If his opinion doesn’t matter on Sundays, soon it won’t matter on Friday night either. 

Instead, what we are trying to do in our church is to say that God asks us to have an attitude of reverence when we worship him, especially on the Sabbath day. And that attitude should be carried throughout the day. And it’s true that the expression of reverence might look different in different cultures, but there is no culture where failing to express reverence in at least some way is obedience to that command. God is the object of our worship, His day is Sunday, we modify our behavior to worship him as he would like – not as we would like. And so while I see what the Evangelicals are trying to do, at least historically, I think that project ultimately failed. It became about what makes the members of that church feel good – and when they stop feeling good at that church, they can move to another one across town where they might feel good again. 

But what about after church?  How do Evangelicals think about keeping the afternoon/evening holy?

In our church there has been some change over time here as well. Some of the more strict practices of the past seem to have softened. If you were to peek in on a Latter-day Saint family during a Sunday afternoon and an Evangelical family during the same time, you might not see much difference. It’s subtle, but let me try to tease it out for you. 

In the last 10 years or so there has been a flurry of books published in the Evangelical world on the topic of the Sabbath. I’ve read many of them, one of the classes I had in Divinity School was simply titled, “The Sabbath.” Those books have titles like, “Finding Renewal on the Sabbath”…”The Sabbath for Soul Rest”…and one simply titled, “Breathe.”  The thesis of most of these books is that God wants you to feel good and mentally healthy, and taking time for yourself on the Sabbath is God’s plan for how to do that. Now, you know this, I’m a mental health therapist so I’m all about good self-care and doing things in your life that will bring about more mental health. This is not a bad pursuit and I’m certainly not making fun of them for it. You should be taking care of yourself and you do need breaks from your obligations and that is certainly part of what is going on in observing the Sabbath. But is that it?  Is it just for me to feel better?  You can hear in this the same logic that is used for an Evangelical Sunday worship service playing out here too. This is “you time” which is quite different then,“This is a day where we focus on worshiping God all day long, and in various ways, even when that requires quite a bit of effort from us.” The traditional understanding of keeping the sabbath day holy was that this is God’s day, and we use it for him. But for Evangelicals that has turned into “this is a day for you to rest and feel better.”   

So, how do we explain our beliefs to an Evangelical friend without their eyes glossing over and them thinking, “that doesn’t sound like Sabbath day rest to me at all.”  Well, let me tell you what it was like for me when I was investigating our church.  

I noticed the external differences in worship right away, anyone would. But eventually I noticed the spirit of reverence behind the differences and found that very attractive. It’s impossible to be both reverent and cynical. Those two things repel each other. And, while this isn’t true for every Evangelical, my experience of it was that all that striving to be cool also came with a deep river of cynicism.  When you form a church to suit your own preferences, you have to edge out at least some of God’s preferences, and things get confusing. It’s hard to tell which of God’s commandments even matter any more. Or what things about God are even true. Not everyone’s experience, but it was mine. So when I encountered a very typical, boring service at my local ward it didn’t take me long to see the lack of cynicism as very comforting. I came to enjoy being able to worship reverently with friends, but also to have a hilarious time with those same friends in other contexts. But when we’re together doing the things of God we act like God wants us to act. That’s the feeling of community and purpose. There are very few feelings that are better than that. 

I hope you enjoyed this discussion on the Sabbath day. Join us again next week when we look at more Evangelical questions as they come up in our Come Follow Me text. 

More Come, Follow Me resources here.

Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities.

The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Matthew 8; Mark 2–4; Luke 7 appeared first on FAIR.

By David W. Smith

In the October 2022 general conference, Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf announced an updated version of the youth standards guidebook For the Strength of Youth: A Guide for Making Choices. Elder Uchtdorf explained that the booklet “has been updated and refreshed to better cope with the challenges and temptations of our day.”

With the purpose of pointing youth to Christ, this new version is focused on “teach[ing] you eternal truths of His restored gospel” and “how to make righteous choices based on those eternal truths. . . . It focuses on values, principles, and doctrine instead of every specific behavior.” [1]

Have the Standards Been Relaxed?

Because the updated guidebook lacks many of the behavior-specific instructions of the previous version, some people feel that the new guidebook allows youth to do many things they were previously prohibited from doing. Or in other words, they feel the standards are “being relaxed” or “being weakened.”

For example, one young man approached his father and “said his friends told him that Elder Uchtdorf announced in conference that now tattoos are OK,” and so this young man wanted to get one. [2] This young man thought the standards had been relaxed because the guidebook no longer contained a specific prohibition against tattoos.

However, a lack of behavior-specific instructions does not mean the standards have been relaxed. In fact, the opposite is true: the standards have been enhanced. Young Men General President Steven J. Lund addressed the idea of relaxing standards and responded, “It’s never really been that way, has it? When we speak of a higher and holier way, that calls for us to be more vigilant about making sure that we’re complying to what Heavenly Father would have us do.” [3]

President Lund further explained:

We’re moving to a higher and holier way, where the guidance that we receive from the brethren, from the Church, from each other, is less prescriptive and more spiritually-based. We’re being asked to, you know, not look to somebody else to decide what our standard should be, but recognizing the weight of membership and the weight of holiness that belongs to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will by itself prescribe how we behave and how we are, how we dress and how we comport ourselves.

Sister Michelle D. Craig of the Young Women General Presidency affirmed this: “I think it’s important to know that it’s not a relaxing of standards . . . But now we hope that they’re very intentional about getting on their knees and praying to find out, ‘What does this look like in my life?’” [4]

Instead of having more relaxed standards, the new guidebook requires a more diligent form of discipleship.

Principles and Doctrines

Returning to the experience of the young man: his father invited him to listen to Elder Uchtdorf’s talk (the young man hadn’t watched that session of conference) and read the updated guidebook. After doing so, the son approached his father again:

I [the father] asked, ‘Did Elder Uchtdorf announce that tattoos are OK?’ He [the son] said, ‘No. In fact, he said, The Lord is not saying, “Do whatever you want.”’ I asked, ‘Does the guide say tattoos are OK?’ He said, ‘It says we are supposed to honor the sacredness of our bodies, even when that means being different from the world. It says that we must make wise decisions — especially when they can have lasting effects on our bodies. But, Dad, it doesn’t say we can’t.’

I responded: ‘It doesn’t say we can’t rob a bank either but that doesn’t make it a smart choice. What does your discipleship call on you to do? You know how I feel about it. Maybe it is time to ask how Heavenly Father feels about it?’

At this point the experience ends, and the son may or may not have decided to get a tattoo. But “the point is not what these particular youth decided. Rather, it is to emphasize how these parents used questions to guide the youth toward values, principles and doctrines. Most importantly, they asked their children to seek personal revelation.” And that is the model we should follow for ourselves and when helping others choose how to apply the standards.

President Russell M. Nelson exhorted: “Set a standard for the rest of the world. . . . Embrace being different. The booklet entitled ‘For the Strength of Youth’ should be your standard. It is the standard that the Lord expects all His youth to uphold.” [5]

Role of Parents and Other Adults

So what should parents and other adults do? They first provide counsel and wisdom to youth. The new guidebook encourages youth to “be wise and faithful, and seek counsel from your parents and leaders.” [6]

The guidebook also reminds youth that “having questions is not a sign of weakness or lack of faith. . . . Seek answers in the scriptures, in the words of God’s prophets, from your leaders and faithful parents, and from God Himself. If answers don’t come right away, trust that you will learn line upon line. Keep living by what you already know, and keep seeking for truth.” [7] So parents and others shouldn’t discourage questions or accuse youth of being faithless when asking honest questions. (Of course, there is a difference between faithful questions and faithless questions, or put another way, “the term question is not synonymous with the term doubt.”) [8]

Parents and others can also ask questions to youth to prompt spiritual seeking. The Young Women General Presidency reminded us that “our desire is to see them [the youth] turn to their Father in Heaven for answers and learn ways to strengthen their individual relationship with Him.” [9] As adults ask questions like “What do you already know about the topic or question?” and “How did Jesus Christ live the truth/principle?”, the youth will be inspired to find answers from divine sources.

The Young Women General Presidency also reminded us, “It is important during this process that we are not too quick to give our own responses to their questions.” In fact, the most important thing parents and leaders can do is not give the answers but rather help youth recognize when the Spirit is giving the answers. One young woman noted, “So what can leaders do? They can maybe help us learn what it’s like for you when you feel the Holy Ghost. Talk to us about that and tell us specific stories about it. . . . I think the whole point of ‘For Strength of Youth’ is to learn this lesson so we can make choices based on what the Holy Ghost is telling us.” [10]

One way parents and leaders can help youth recognize the Spirit is to ask “a few simple questions like, ‘What did you learn from that choice? Would you do anything different next time? Did it bring you closer to Jesus Christ or take you further away from Him?’” These types of questions “are essential in helping them continue to process what is happening for them. The Holy Ghost can help them see things ‘as they really are’ (Jacob 4:13) when they pause to take a moment and review what they are learning and experiencing.” [11]

Hope of Israel

So instead of providing long lists of things to do and things not to do, the updated guidebook teaches the doctrine of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ and invites youth to seek revelation about how to act on that doctrine. The result will be a generation of members who have more experience than any previous generation in studying Christ’s restored doctrine and seeking revelation for their lives. And that will be sorely needed, as President Russell M. Nelson warned in his April 2018 general conference address on revelation: “In coming days, it will not be possible to survive spiritually without the guiding, directing, comforting, and constant influence of the Holy Ghost.” [12]

We see that this updated guidebook is focused on helping youth “take unto [them] the whole armour of God, that [they] may be able to withstand in the evil day” (Ephesians 6:13). The final piece of the armor is “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (Ephesians 6:17). And so we arrive at the imagery in the beloved hymn “Hope of Israel”:

Hope of Israel, rise in might
With the sword of truth and right, . . .
Onward, onward, youth of Zion;
Thy reward the victor’s crown. [13]

Notes

[1] Dieter F. Uchtdorf, “Jesus Christ Is the Strength of Youth,” October 2022 general conference.

[2] Young Men and Young Women General Presidencies, “Young Men and Young Women general leaders: Changing how we talk with youth about standards,” The Church News, 26 October 2022.

[3] In Sarah Jane Weaver, “Episode 106: The Young Men general presidency on how the new ‘For the Strength of the Youth’ guide helps youth choose Christ,” The Church News, 18 October 2022.

[4] In Sydney Walker, “‘Parents, we need to be all in,’ Young Women general presidency says of new ‘For the Strength of Youth’ guide,” The Church News, 5 February 2023.

[5] Russell M. Nelson, “Hope of Israel,” worldwide youth devotional, 3 June 2018; as cited in Walker, “Parents, we need to be all in.”

[6] “Your body is sacred,” For the Strength of Youth: A Guide for Making Choices.

[7] “Truth will make you free,” For the Strength of Youth: A Guide for Making Choices.

[8] “Answering Gospel Questions,” Gospel Topics in Gospel Library. See also Adam Kotter, “When Doubts and Questions Arise,” Ensign, March 2015.

[9] Young Women General Presidency and advisory council, “Young Women general presidency: Using the ‘For the Strength of Youth’ guide to increase discipleship,” The Church News, 10 February 2023.

[10] In Walker, “Parents, we need to be all in.”

[11] Young Women General Presidency, “Using the ‘For the Strength of Youth’ guide to increase discipleship.”

[12] Russell M. Nelson, “Revelation for the Church, Revelation for Our Lives,” April 2018 general conference.

[13] “Hope of Israel,” Hymns of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (1985), no. 259.

David W. Smith has volunteered with FAIR since August 2019. He has had an article published in BYU Studies, and he presented at the Joseph Smith Papers Conference in 2019. He has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and a master’s degree in public administration, both from Brigham Young University.

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Yesterday the Church History Department made public the Prison Journal of Belle Harris. Harris spent approximately three months in prison in 1883, along with her baby, for refusing to testify about her plural marriage to her ex-husband, Clarence Merrill, during the time when the federal government was attempting to crack down on the practice of plural marriage in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While there, she was received visits and support from various leaders such as Eliza R. Snow, Emmeline B. Wells, Presendia Huntington Kimball, Zina Huntington Young, Mary Isabella Hales Horne, Romania Bunnell Pratt, Bathsheba Bigler Smith, George Reynolds, Charles W. Penrose, and A. Milton Musser.

In her journal, Harris is described multiple times as a “plucky” woman, and her personality and faith really come out. Here are a few examples:

Well another day has <passed> nothing of importance to record axcept that I had a visit from Marshal [John W.] Greenman and Mr Putman the latter expressed great sympathy for me and thought it a shame that I should be made to suffer because he said he knew that I was pursuaded to act as I was doing and that I never would go in to plurality again I told him I supposed he had a right to his own opinion regarding the matter and he talked for some time regarding the wick[ed]ness of the mormon system of marrig [marriage] said he would cut his right arm off before he would place a woman in such a situation said I ought to an[s]wer those question and get away from this place I spoke for some time and gave him a few ideas about afairs genealy [generally] regarding my what I thought to be my rights as well as the priveiledes [privileges] of the latter day saints. So <he> said he didnt come to try to pick any informat[i]on but simply as a friend. I could meet an avowed enimy but a wofl [wolf] in sheeps clothing I do despise. it is a perfect mystery to those who do not understand our faith how I can think of staying here when to an[s]wer 2 or three questions would insure my liberty [p. 5] and yet that abominable sheet the S. L. Tribune5 says I have not the courage to say that I am married while holdeing a babe in my arms I wonder who they think I am afraid of I should think I have proved that I dare am not so great a cowerd for rather than assist in giveing evidence which I know was calculated to mark [make] mischief I dared to brave the terrors of a fellons [felon’s] den. those who accuse me of cowerdice are in my extimation not worthy the notice of a woman who is not afraid to assert her wrights and the wrights of her people. (24 May 1883)

it is just a month to day since I was arrested but it seems much more than that to me Sister Jospehine smith [Josephine Groesbeck Smith] wife of John Henry smith visited me to day and I was so glad to se[e] her for I felt very lonely havent had mayy [many] visitors lately one of the guard told me that there was a letter on there table this morning requesting them to have nothing to say to me I suppose the Marshal thinks that this will make me feel so badly that I will surrender immediately though luckily I did not come here to be entertained by any of the guard and therefore shall not feel to lament a great deal (10 June 1883)

tomorrow I persume I will know how wheither I am to make this wreched place my home for the summer. S. A. Kenner visited me yesterday and said they had apointed friday to consider this case but I am afraid they will have to consider it a week or two before coming to a decision I had quite a conversation with the warden this evening he said I was to leave here at 9 o clock tomorrow morning he also expressed a hope that I would not have to return and said he, if your Lawyer dont get you out of here he ought to be shot he didnt say what he thought of the man that got me in here but said he thought it was a fearful thing that people would beleave in a religion that it was <could> possibly get them into this place he doesnt understand our religion nor the persecution we have to put up with. I asked him if he intended staying in utah if so he ought to visit among the mormons and become aquaint [acquainted] for himself he would then know how false a great ma[n]y statements were, which had been given him for facts [p. 20] he said he excepted that was true I told him he could not find <amore [a more]> industrious, honest upright people. he did not answer me for I persume he did not beleave all I said for he is terribly predigiced against us but he and his wife have been very kind to me and have repeatedly expressed their sentiments with regard to my being brought here though they do not place the blame where it ought to be. (21 June 1883)

July 16 To day Sister Musser and her daughter Flora [Stenhouse] came to see me they brought me callicoes and other materials for mysels [myself] and baby. they also brought many presents sent by different ones among which was half dozzen cans of suggar of lemonade Miss Musser [Flora Stenhouse] perposed making some lemonade which I heartly endorsed and she accordingly made a pi[t]cher full we all drank the gaurds joing [joining] us and so cheerfull and hapy were we that one not knowing would scarcely take me for a prisoner and the gentlemen who were so kind and court[e]ous for my jailors Sister Musser said my friends were joining togather to buy my baby a carri[a]ge How kind and generous they all are to me I often ask myself if I am worthy the friendship and esteem which has been universely expressed for me by all the Saints and many who are not have expressed decided admiration for my [p. 43] conduct I feell to give thanks to my Heavenly Father for thus surrounding me with so many friends in my hour of trial I know that the Lord will overrule for the benefit of those who seek to serve him and I know that he has blessed and sustained me and also enabled me <to> answer the inquisitive questions that have been asked me by non mormon reporters and others who were desirous to learn something about my affairs without giveing any information which I did not wish them to know (16 July 1883)

This journal adds to the available opportunities to see this turbulent time through the eyes of the people involved. It is valuable for historical purposes and is also an inspiring read. It is freely available to read at the Church Historians Press website at https://www.churchhistorianspress.org/belle-harris?lang=eng

Other recent projects that are freely available:

The Discourses of Eliza R. Snow

The Diaries of Emmeline B. Wells

There will also be a symposium on “Women, Religion, and Records” held this weekend on Saturday, February 25. Admission is free and it will also be available via Zoom. More information here: https://www.churchhistorianspress.org/news/announcing-a-symposium-on-women-religion-and-records?lang=eng

Trevor Holyoak is the Vice President of FAIR. He has been actively involved with FAIR for many years and received the John Taylor Defender of the Faith Award in 2014. He graduated magna cum laude from Weber State University with a BS in computer science and now works as a programmer and systems administrator. He is currently serving as a stake emergency preparedness director and in the leadership of the Utah Valley Amateur Radio Club. He and his wife have five children and live in Cedar Hills, Utah.

The post The Prison Journal of Belle Harris now available from Church Historians Press appeared first on FAIR.

This week, we’re moving on to the Book of Mormon translation method. Faulk opens this section with a banner of several paintings showing Joseph apparently reading from the plates without the Urim and Thummim anywhere in sight. These exact same paintings were part of the collage featured on the similar section of the CES Letter. Since we’re talking about Book of Mormon artwork, I’m sure you can guess where this is going.

He begins:

The Church has always taught that the translation process of the Book of Mormon looked like this: Joseph Smith read the golden plates like a book, translating the text out loud to Oliver Cowdery, who served as scribe.

This is a claim Faulk makes without any supporting evidence. He doesn’t link to a single source from any Church leader, manual, or website to back his allegation. That’s because, as far as I’m aware, there aren’t any. I looked, but I couldn’t find a single instance of anyone with any degree of authority saying what Faulk claims “the Church has always taught.”

Could certain members have taught this in Sunday School or Primary? Sure. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that some did. But that isn’t “the Church.” That’s an individual member. We aren’t a monolith. Unless something comes directly from the Church itself—from the prophets, apostles, website, magazines, or manuals—it’s individual opinion. And passing something along out of ignorance is very different from passing it along in order to deceive.

Notice that Faulk doesn’t go into specifics on his claim. That’s a little problematic because thoughts are going to vary on the details. Was there a curtain between Joseph and his scribes? Were the plates on the table beside him, or kept out of view? Were they wrapped in a cloth, or open on the table like you see in those paintings? Did Joseph wear the spectacles with the Nephite interpreters to “read” the translation from the plates themselves? Because he wasn’t wearing them in any of those paintings. Or did he look in them and see the words without looking at the plates? Did he attach the spectacles to the breastplate and wear them both, or just the spectacles, or neither? Did he take the stones out of the spectacles, or did he try to wear them the entire time? If he took the stones out, what did he do with them? Did he cup them in his hands, or place them on top of the plates, or put them in his hat? The questions are endless, and the witness statements and other contemporary accounts allege most of these things at different times.

Beyond that, Faulk’s only provided evidence for this claim is that the artwork reflected the idea that Joseph “read” from the plates like from a book. But how did he do that? The interpreters aren’t found in any of those paintings, so how exactly was Joseph supposed to read from a book featuring a language he’d never seen before? If that’s how “the Church” taught Faulk the translation method, did he even know about the interpreters at all? Is he claiming those are brand new pieces of information, too?

This entire argument is silly. Art is subjective. It’s meant to evoke feelings and atmosphere, not to be 100% historically accurate. There are many famous works of art that aren’t historically accurate: Washington Crossing the Delaware, Guernica, the Pietà, etc.

Arnold Friberg’s Book of Mormon paintings are iconic, for example, but they aren’t very accurate to the text, either. The Nephites weren’t riding horses while carrying metal swords and wearing Roman battle armor. They didn’t stand up on brick walls 50 feet high. I doubt Abinadi had a 6-pack and arms that rival Chris Hemsworth’s. And in 600 BC, Israeli men had an average height of 5 feet tall. This means that Nephi would have been “large in stature” at 5’5”. That’s not exactly the tall, broad-shouldered He-Man body double we picture when we think of Nephi.

How many times have we seen a movie “based on actual events” that ends up bearing little resemblance to the facts? Or a movie adaption of a book that only vaguely resembles the source material? It happens all the time, because artists have their own vision of how to best portray something.

Historian Anthony Sweat illustrated this dichotomy between history and art:

[T]rue art and true history rarely, if ever, fully combine. They are intertwined entities (history needs to be visually represented, and artists need meaningful history to create impactful images), but their connection more often creates difficult knots instead of well-tied bows that serve both art and history. These knots often result because the aims of history and the aims of art are not aligned, often pulling in entirely different directions. History wants facts; art wants meaning. History wants to validate sources; art wants to evoke emotion. History is more substance; art is more style. History wants accuracy; art wants aesthetics. The two disciples often love, yet hate, one another as they strive to serve their different masters….

The tension lies in that historians, scholars, and teachers often want paintings that are historically accurate because images often shape our perceptions of history as much as, or perhaps more than, many of the scholarly works about history. … Thus, when paintings carry apparent egregious historical errors, manipulations, or complete fabrications, there are some who bristle and wonder why the artist didn’t paint it more accurately, wishing that painters and sculptors and the like wouldn’t engage in revisionist history by distorting reality.

 However, artists often have little to no intent of communicating historical factuality when they produce a work. Artists want to communicate an idea, and they want to use whatever medium or principle and element of art that it takes to communicate that idea to their viewers. In doing research on this topic, I interviewed a handful of well-known and talented Latter-day Saint artists and asked them various questions regarding the responsibility of an artist to paint historical reality. Almost unanimously, they said the artist carries no responsibility to do so.

Faulk continues with a preview of what’s coming up in the rest of this section:

The context surrounding the translation process raises issues that are not evident to members of the Church. These issues involve the actual translation using a seer stone, Joseph’s use of folk magic, and his trouble with the law regarding these circumstances.

Again, I don’t know that these things are “not evident to members of the Church.” Individual knowledge on these topics will vary, as with all things. However, I think that most members of the Church, at least in the US, are aware that Joseph experienced legal troubles throughout his life. Most of us are also now aware of the seer stone if we weren’t aware before.

Knowledge of these issues isn’t the only thing that will vary. So will whether or not we deem these topics to be controversial, and if so, to what degree. I don’t find them to be particularly controversial, personally. You might, and that’s okay.

• The Actual Method

“Joseph Smith would put the seer stone into a hat, and put his face in the hat, drawing it closely around his face to exclude the light; and in the darkness the spiritual light would shine. A piece of something resembling parchment would appear, and on that appeared the writing. One character at a time would appear, and under it was the interpretation in English. Brother Joseph would read off the English to Oliver Cowdery, who was his principal scribe, and when it was written down and repeated to Brother Joseph to see if it was correct, then it would disappear, and another character with the interpretation would appear. Thus the Book of Mormon was translated by the gift and power of God, and not by any power of man.” (Russell M. Nelson, A Treasured Testament Ensign, July 1993. Quoting David Whitmer’s Address to All Believers In Christ. 1887)

Yep. I’ve said this before, but this article was where I first learned of Joseph’s personal seer stone and its role in the translation process. I was 12 years old, and had been flipping through my parents’ copy of the Ensign. I thought it was really interesting, reading these details I’d never read before.

It did catch me off-guard, obviously. But almost immediately, the questions came into my mind, “Does it matter? Does it change anything?” And I thought about it for a minute, then realized it didn’t. It didn’t affect my testimony at all. Joseph Smith using two seer stones in spectacles and Joseph Smith using his personal seer stone in a hat were essentially the same thing to me. All that was different was that I was learning more of the actual details. To me, it was like the way I’d added pre-algebra to my knowledge of math that year in school. It was just adding new knowledge to my existing knowledge.

However, some people reacted very strongly to the information. I don’t dismiss that at all; it just wasn’t my experience. To me, it only warranted a temporary pause and then I shrugged and said, “I guess I didn’t know as much about it as I thought I did.” But to others, it was deeply unsettling. I don’t know why we reacted so differently to the information. I just know what I’ve said before: that, as with all things in this Church, individual knowledge and experiences will vary.

Contrary to general Church teachings, Joseph did not read the gold plates like an open book at all.

What “general Church teachings” taught that? Faulk didn’t point to any, he just pointed to a few paintings. I couldn’t find any manuals, Church magazine articles, quotes from Church leaders, Conference addresses, or anything else that said that’s how the translation process happened. Joseph couldn’t read Reformed Egyptian, and the spectacles notably were too large to fit his face. Numerous reports said as much. And again, those paintings don’t show Joseph using the Nephite interpreters at all. How was he supposed to “read the gold plates like an open book” without any translation aids when he couldn’t read the language on them?

And it’s odd that Faulk would make this statement immediately after citing President Nelson saying otherwise in the Ensign, the Church’s largest, most widely-read publication of the time period. That article was also the transcript of a talk that was given to more than 100 mission presidents, who were then directed to disseminate the information to their missionaries. It was being sent out to as many missionaries and families as possible. Wouldn’t that constitute a “general Church teaching”?

Rather, during the translation process he buried his face in a hat that contained a common rock.

Seer stones are not “common rocks.” They are stones “specially designated” for a “sacred purpose.” There are numerous myths and legends from all over the world about special stones that glow, heal people, and allow their owners to see things. Joseph’s main stone actually has a pretty cool history of its own, apart from its purpose in aiding Joseph in his role as a seer.

As for putting his stone in a hat to block out the light, that was the common method of using seer stones in Joseph’s day. It may sound weird to us today, but it wasn’t weird to Joseph. That was the most effective way he had of blocking out the light so he could see more clearly.

The gold plates were either covered by a cloth where no one, including Joseph, could see them or they were in a different location altogether.

Typically, they were beside him and covered with a cloth, yes. At times, they were nearby in a safe location, but not within easy reach.

I’m curious as to why Faulk seems confused by this. If they were sitting out in the open every day, why would it have been a momentous and special occasion when the Witnesses saw the plates? Wouldn’t every single person living in or visiting the Whitmer, Hale, and Smith homes have seen them on too many occasions to count? The idea of Joseph “reading” from the plates in front of his scribes is completely incompatible with the stories we’ve all actually been taught about the Witnesses. How exactly did Faulk imagine that worked? He doesn’t say. What he does say leaves far too many questions to be sure of his intent.

But of course the plates had to have been hidden by a cloth or box. There’s no other way for the testimonies of the Book of Mormon Witnesses or any of the translation witnesses to make sense.

The Church knew the true method, yet commission works of art and film and use the education system to teach otherwise.

How does the Church “use the education system to teach otherwise”? Again, Faulk offers no evidence or examples to back up his claims.

As for the Church commissioning works of art that show otherwise, Anthony Sweat quotes an artist as saying that he’d been commissioned by the Church several times to try to create works showing the use of the hat. However, each time he tried, it didn’t look right. It didn’t evoke the feelings he wanted it to evoke, and it just looked weird rather than inspiring. He said that some things don’t translate visually. This is why you see the same scenes from scriptures depicted multiple times, and other events don’t get depicted at all.

Sweat’s own attempts at drawing Joseph with the hat came off looking like Joseph was ill and was vomiting into his hat. He joked that he should have called it “The Sick of Joseph.”

So, it’s not that the Church wasn’t trying to commission the art pieces. It’s that they just didn’t look right. They didn’t create the atmosphere the artists wanted.

Emma explained that she “frequently wrote day after day” at a small table in their house in Harmony, Pennsylvania. She described Joseph “sitting with his face buried in his hat, with the stone in it, and dictating hour after hour with nothing between us.” (Last Testimony of Sister Emma,” Saints’ Herald 26, Oct. 1, 1879. https://www.lds.org/topics/book-of-mormon-translation?lang= eng#28)

Yes, that’s what she said, and the historical record bears that out. There are numerous similar accounts, both by friendly eyewitnesses and by hostile sources.

Emma Smith and David Whitmer describe Joseph’s use of the seer stone and hat, but this information had all but been buried.

“All but been buried” is a stretch, in my opinion. They both did describe the translation process that way, and they were far from the only ones. FAIR has compiled many of the accounts by year:

• Accounts from 1829-1835
• Accounts from 1836-1840
• Accounts from 1841-1845
• Accounts from 1846-1900
• Accounts from 1901-2000

A great many of them describe Joseph putting one or several stones in his hat and looking into it to read the plates.

And a lot of them also say other things, which is part of the reason for the confusion. Most of the eyewitness accounts conflict with each other in various ways. These aren’t like the First Vision accounts, where they all tell the same story though some have additional details others don’t. Some have a curtain between Joseph and his scribe, some say it was all done out in the open. Some say the Nephite interpreters were used, some say it was Joseph’s brown seer stone. Some say he used the spectacles, some say he used his hat. Some say he read the plates, others say the words appeared in the stone. Etc. It has since been determined that most of those things are correct for different portions of the translation. Initially, though, it did create rather a lot of confusion for historians.

Furthering that confusion was the fact that both the Nephite interpreters and Joseph’s personal stone were referred to as the “Urim and Thummim.” That became a generic term used by the early Saints for any kind of seer stone. This made it difficult to understand which stone or stones was being used.

And unfortunately, as both David Whitmer and Emma Smith left the main body of the Church and refused to go West, and both actively denounced plural marriage, they were looked on with suspicion and even hostility by several generations of Latter-day Saints. That made the Saints less inclined to believe their testimonies. In fact, Joseph Fielding Smith referred to accounts of Joseph’s seer stone as “hearsay” in Volume 3 of Doctrines of Salvation, saying he didn’t believe it was used at all.

Over time, however, historians began finding more and more sources to corroborate the story, and they began taking the issue more seriously. And yet again, the Hofmann forgeries proved to be a blessing in disguise. Because so many of his forgeries were initially confirmed by multiple agencies to be genuine, historians began trying to integrate some of his claims into Joseph’s history. By doing so, they uncovered many of these accounts for the first time in decades. With the new information coming to light, perceptions began to change. Though Hofmann’s more outlandish claims were proven false, new discoveries had been made that needed to be added to the story.

So, the situation was more nuanced than Faulk would have us believe. It wasn’t exactly that the information was being deliberately buried or hidden. It was that many Church leaders in the mid-1900s didn’t believe it was true and didn’t understand that “Urim and Thummim” meant more than just the Nephite interpreters. They rejected the accounts they were aware of as being “errors,” to quote President Smith. They simply weren’t aware exactly how many accounts there were backing up the claims. Again, doing something out of ignorance is not the same as doing it out of malice. Deception requires intent.

There was a span of 35 years between 1939 and 1974 in which the Church didn’t publish this information in any official publication due to the reasons outlined above. However, they did still publish this information repeatedly both before and after that span of time. I’ll link to some of those other mentions momentarily.

In December 2013 the Church released an essay addressing the translation of the Book of Mormon issue. Finally, after public criticisms, the seer stone is again mentioned for a new generation of members.

Again, this is not an accurate statement. Faulk seems to be employing the same tactic Jeremy Runnells did, insinuating that the Gospel Topics Essays were the first time the Church had ever published the information found inside. The 2013 Essay was not the first time this topic had been addressed by the Church, its leaders, and its historians. It wasn’t even the first time it’d been addressed in the current generation.

I already linked to two mentions in official Church publications, the October 1939 Improvement Era and the September 1974 Children’s Friend. There was also the previously linked article in the July 1993 Ensign. Additionally, this information was mentioned in the September 1977 Ensign, the January 1988 Ensign, the January 1997 Ensign, the very popular second edition of Mormon Doctrine by Bruce R. McConkie, a book by Elder Maxwell, a book by B.H. Roberts, and a 2005 book put out by the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute (which was closed that same year after many of the historians moved over to the Joseph Smith Papers Project). This last book mentions the seer stone approximately 30 times. Other publications include BYU Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, the FARMS Review, and more.

The mentions were not frequent, coming every few years rather than every few months. However, most of those mentions were in prominent publications, ranging from official Church magazines to books written by apostles. Opening the Heavens was a precursor to the Joseph Smith Papers volumes. The second edition of Mormon Doctrine in particular was a staple feature in many Latter-day Saint homes in the 1970s-80s. It didn’t go into much detail and it did quote part of President Smith’s negative opinion. But it also equated Joseph’s personal seer stone with the Urim and Thummim, despite coming in the middle of the period in which it was believed those accounts were erroneous.

“The other instrument, which Joseph Smith discovered in the ground years before he retrieved the gold plates, was a small oval stone, or ‘seer stone.’ As a young man during the 1820s, Joseph Smith, like others in his day, used a seer stone to look for lost objects and buried treasure.” (Book of Mormon Translation, LDS.org/topics)

 On August 4th, 2015, LDS.org published an article titled, Joseph the Seer. It contains the first ever, official image of one of Joseph Smith’s seer stones. It is the very same stone Joseph found while digging a well on the property of Willard Chase in 1822.

There are actually multiple stories of how Joseph discovered his stones, and some of them conflict. Mark Ashurst-McGee traces much of the history and clarifies many of the conflicted stories in his Master’s thesis, which is archived at Book of Mormon Central. The Ensign article in question does not specify exactly how Joseph came to be in possession of this particular stone.

According to Ashurst-McGee, he seems to have discovered the brown stone first by looking into his neighbor Sally Chase’s seer stone, and then discovered the white stone second, in the Chase property well. He also eventually found two others in and around Nauvoo.

The white stone is the one that Martin claimed Joseph used to find lost objects, including a pin Martin had dropped into a pile of straw and wood shavings. It also appears to be this stone that Martin switched, leaving Joseph temporarily unable to translate. However, later translation witnesses described Joseph using his brown stone. So, he potentially used at least four stones to translate the plates: the white one, the brown one, and the two Nephite interpreters.

Essentially, the brown seer stone pictured in the Ensign article is not “the very same stone Joseph found while digging in a well on the property of Willard Chase in 1822.” However, it is one of two of Joseph’s personal seer stones potentially used during the translation process.

For nearly 200 years the Church has had the stone in their possession yet never actively taught about it; and in the case of former president of the Church, Joseph Fielding Smith, has denied its role. (Doctrines of Salvation Vol.3)

That the Church had some of Joseph’s seer stones in its archives was perhaps not well-known prior to the publication of the Ensign article, but it was also not unknown. Historians were aware of it, having access to the archives. And the stones had certainly been referenced in the past, as was the acknowledgment that the Church had at least one in its possession. Even Joseph Fielding Smith says as much on that very same page in Doctrines of Salvation that Faulk references here. It was the same page I cited above when describing Smith’s “hearsay” and “errors” quotes:

The statement has been made that the Urim and Thummim was on the altar of the Manti Temple when that building was dedicated. The Urim and Thummim so spoken of, however, was the seer stone which was in the possession of the Prophet Joseph Smith in early days. This seer stone is now in the possession of the Church.

Again, this information was not widely known nor discussed in most circles, but it was available. It was information published by an apostle and prophet, among others. Obscure, yes. Hidden, no.

And yes, as mentioned repeatedly, President Smith didn’t believe that the seer stones were used during the translation. As he goes on to say, this was because he believed so intently in the statements made in Ether 3:22-24 and by the Angel Moroni that the Nephite interpreters were preserved for the translation that he didn’t think it was possible that Joseph would use other stones for convenience’s sake.

More work has been done in this area since President Smith’s tenure as leader of this Church. We obviously know more now about the translation process than he did. He was mistaken. It happens. It was also probably a lapse in judgment to state his opinion so directly when there was a chance others would see it as revelation rather than opinion.

However, he did clarify that it was his personal belief that it was incorrect. He also said that reports of Joseph using the Urim and Thummim after the plates were given back to Moroni were “evidently” errors. And he was right that all of the accounts including this information are from people other than Joseph himself. Technically, they could be classified as “hearsay,” though many of the accounts were given firsthand from people who witnessed the translation unfolding in front of their own eyes.

He maybe should have taken his position and audience into account when giving his opinion, but he was clear that it was his opinion. His statements were not nearly as forceful as critics would have us believe. They aren’t even as forceful as Faulk himself, who has so far made several declarations of fact that were incorrect. And frankly, President Smith was entitled to hold those opinions. We know now that he was mistaken, but that doesn’t lessen his calling as a prophet. It also doesn’t change the fact that we’re all allowed to hold opinions that may end up being wrong. We’re human. It happens. It’s what happened here.

But as Elder Holland said, the limitations of human frailty are not limitations in the divinity of the work. Rather, those limitations are in our fallen, human vessels. Getting little things wrong occasionally doesn’t mean we can’t be called to serve God in whatever capacity He calls us to serve in. He’s used to working with mortals and our limitations. He understands we’ll make mistakes sometimes. That’s why we need to show each other the same grace He shows us.

Charity is the pure love of Christ, remember. So, let us have charity toward President Smith in this regard. He made a mistake. He didn’t do anything we haven’t all done many times before.

Sarah Allen is relatively new in her affiliation with FAIR. By profession, she works in mortgage compliance and is a freelance copyeditor. An avid reader, she loves studying the Gospel and the history of the restored Church. After watching some of her friends lose their testimonies, she became interested in helping others through their faith crises. That’s when she began sharing what she’d learned through her studies. She’s grateful to those at FAIR who have given her the opportunity to share her testimony with a wider audience.

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Evangelical Questions: Why Do You Need Prophets Anyway?

by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC

Matthew 7:15-20 Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. 16 By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? 17 Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.

Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful answers to New Testament questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about prophets. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand. 

A common question from Evangelicals is why do we think we need prophets?  Aren’t they easily identified as false prophets? And to be honest, when I was investigating the church this was the hardest issue for me to grapple with. The idea of having prophets made literally no sense to me.  These days I can see it how other Latter-day Saints see it – it’s a blessing and a gift – but back then I felt suspicious. So why is it so hard for Evangelicals to understand the need for modern prophets?  I think there’s two reasons and we’ll talk about both of them.

First, Evangelicals are suspicious of the idea because they have a belief that Jesus is the last prophet – and to call anyone who comes after him a prophet is to be disrespectful to Christ. Where does this belief come from?  Let’s look at Hebrews 1:1-2 “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe.” I know, to your Latter-day Saint ears there is no problem with that verse. You don’t hear it how they hear it.  For them that verse sounds more like, “but in these last days we will only hear from Jesus.” As with most scripture quagmires, a careful reading of the text helps us out a bit. All they hear is, “Jesus was the final prophet, no more prophets will come.” But that’s not what the text says, and it’s not what the New Testament shows. 

“In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets, at many times and in various ways” – We have no disagreement with Evangelicals there. The problem comes here, “but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things.” In that they hear that Jesus is the last and greatest prophet, that him being the “heir of all things” means that no other “heirs” are needed. The problem here, of course, is that we’re talking about prophecy in a few different ways. When we say that we have a living prophet on the earth today we are not saying that the prophet is greater than Jesus. The Old Testament prophets pointed to a future day when God would save his people. Then Jesus came. Now modern prophets still point to Jesus. Evangelicals are confusing the role of Jesus as prophet with the role of all the Old Testament and modern day prophets. It’s a bit nonsensical since they don’t literally think Daniel or Habakkuk are in competition with Jesus. But they feel very sensitive to the idea of upstaging Jesus. One way to talk about this with them is to talk about what a modern prophet does – points us to Christ over and over. 

And then the second issue comes up. Evangelicals wonder why they would need someone to, “point to Jesus” when they already have a few reliable sources of doing that. They see the New Testament as pointing to Jesus (and we certainly wouldn’t disagree with them there); they see the Holy Spirit testifying to them of Jesus (again, no disagreement, we believe the Holy Ghost does that too); and they rely heavily on the concept of the, “priesthood of all believers” meaning that they themselves contain all the needed gifts to hear from God, no “mediator” needed. We’ll talk much more about the priesthood of all believers and what that means when we get to that section of scripture but for now we’ll just say that Evangelicals basically believe that no leader can hear from God any better than they can. Their own pastors teach them, but if the individual doesn’t like what is being taught then they move to another church where they like the teaching better. 

Latter-day Saints may find it odd to say it this way, but there is a sense in which Evangelicals believe that by doing this they are emulating, as closely as possible, the New Testament church. They would say they’re just trying to boil down to the essence of the gospel and follow that as much as they can.  And it might sound odd to you, but underneath that is a desire for Restoration. 

They can easily look around and see that the Evangelical world is in trouble in some very real ways. And they long for God to reach down and set things straight. Sound familiar? What a fascinating opening to talk about what it means that we have a restored church. It might surprise you, Latter-day Saint to learn that many, maybe even most, Evangelical churches sometimes talk about how they’re really just trying to live in a way that contextualizes the New Testament for today’s world. They think they’re living a kind of restoration. I want to talk a little more about that in way you might be somewhat familiar with. 

This comes from the work of Dr. RoseAnn Benson. She previously had been in the Ancient Scripture department at BYU and now teaches at Southern Illinois University. Her book is Alexander Campbell and Joseph Smith: 19th-Century Restorationists and it’s worth reading. Let me explain what she says and then you’ll see how it relates to Evangelicals. My apologies to Dr. Benson for this simplistic summary. Her work is layered and deep and beautiful and I cringe at the way I’m about to summarize it for you, but summarize it I will. 

The year is 1830 and Parley P. Prat (PPP) has been corresponding with his friend Sydney Rigdon. You know from church history that Rigdon is a Campbellite preacher at this time. PPP and other missionaries convert him and about 100 others including 5th President of our church Lorenzo Snow and his sister Eliza R. Snow. This is the basic church history information that you probably already know. What you might not know is that the Campbellite movement considered themselves a Restorationist movement. They thought they were doing the work of bringing the restoration, but they were going about it with an entirely different strategy. The Campbellites believed at that time that in order to restore the Lord’s true church they needed to pare down the essence of the gospel and remove everything that wasn’t essential.They wanted to strip away everything that was not the very basics. They wanted to clear things to the side that didn’t support the goal of restoring the the very essence of the gospel.  They were trying to take the very heart of what the Bible teaches and bring it into their day in a way that would get rid of all the errors that had crept into the church over the decades. You can kind of see the logic in what they’re doing. 

What happens when PPP and Sydney Rigdon meet in person is that PPP is able to agree with him about the need for a restoration – but that Joseph Smith was teaching the restoration doesn’t come from paring everything down. Joseph doesn’t want to take everything away that isn’t the rock-bottom essentials. Joseph wants to restore everything. Every, everything. He didn’t want to push anything to the side – he wanted to open everything up. To restore it all. Once Rigdon, and 100 others including the Snow family, hear this they understand. They already believed a restoration was necessary – but now they understood it wasn’t going to come through removing parts of what God had established, it was going to come through restoring everything. 

Back to our Evangelical friends. 

They already know things need to be restored. This is where the mental health therapist comes out in me.  If they don’t trust you, or you don’t have enough relationship with you, they are not going to feel safe admitting that any kind of restoration is needed. They will feel defensive and not open up. That’s okay, it just means you need to earn more relationship collateral with them. But if they trust you enough to admit that there can be some issues with their church from time to time, you can probably have a pretty cool conversation about what restoration would look like – is it a paring down of everything so that an individual person sitting alone with their Bible is enough?  Or is it a restoration of everything – so that the individual can certainly sit alone with their Bible, but they are also guided by a Prophet from time to time to keep them headed in the right direction? 

Now, I told you I would tell you how I gained a testimony of having a Prophet and here it is. 

Three and a half years ago I was in the middle of taking lessons from the missionaries. (If you haven’t heard my conversion story it’s a fun one and I’ll put a link to it in the description below where you can listen to it on the FAIR website. But, warning, it has some difficult themes in it and probably isn’t great to listen to around small kids – teens and up would be fine.) From Anglican Minister to Relief Society Sister – Interview with Jennifer Roach – FAIR (fairlatterdaysaints.org) And honestly I was struggling with the idea of having a Prophet. I’ve seen the worst of what can happen in churches when people in power take advantage of that power (listen to my story if you want to know more about that) and I was skeptical that a man with that much power could be trusted. 

One day the missionaries say, “The Prophet is coming to Seattle and we have tickets for you.” At the time I didn’t know that this was an unusual thing. Maybe the Prophet just drops by from time to time. But it was a very special event and it was held at Safeco Field, the baseball stadium. It was a beautiful summer evening and 50,000 people showed up to see Russel M. Nelson. And he was great, just like you’d imagine. But it wasn’t his talk or anything in the evening’s program that made me change my mind.  What helped me was that when I arrived about half an hour before the event was to begin and sat with friends from my ward. While we were waiting everyone around us was talking about “their prophet” – usually the one who had been leading the church when they were young, and what it meant to them to have a leader like that. To be totally honest I think my own skeptical nature on this topic would have kept me from trusting a man I didn’t know and will never meet. But I saw what having a Prophet did in the lives of my friends and how much goodness it brought to them. And I was converted to the idea that very night – not by President Nelson’s words, though they were great, but by the testimonies of my friends. 

I hope these words have given you some thoughts about how to talk with your Evangelical friends about the idea of Prophets. If you have a question an Evangelical friend has asked you that you’d like to get some insight on please email me at jroach@fairlatterdaysaints.com. I got an email this week from some Sister Missionaries in the Houston, Texas mission so shout-out to Sister Cox and her companions. I’ll be answering their question in an upcoming episode. And I look forward to seeing you all next time.

More Come, Follow Me resources here.

Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities.

The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Matthew 6–7 appeared first on FAIR.

As we wind down on the First Vision discussion, I want to take a moment to say again how important this topic is. This event truly was the foundation for everything that came afterward. As such, this is also a pillar that we need supporting the firm foundation of our personal testimonies. There’s been a lot of conversation online recently over Kevin Hamilton’s excellent BYU devotional, “Why a Church?” In that talk, Hamilton pointed out that you can’t separate Jesus Christ from His church or His chosen representatives. Christ Himself endorsed these men to lead His earthly church. That means that He also endorsed Joseph Smith. Therefore, when you stand in opposition to the Church or to the prophets, you are also standing in opposition to Christ. When you criticize the Church or the prophets, you are also criticizing Him for giving them His stamp of approval. And when you dismiss Joseph Smith as a fraud, you are also dismissing The One who called Him to help restore His Priesthood to the Earth.

That’s not the same thing as having questions. Not having a testimony of Joseph Smith yet is not equivalent to openly attacking him and his character. But when you go beyond questioning and start protesting, you’re crossing a line the prophets have repeatedly warned against. There is no room for activism or “loyal opposition” in this Church, just as you can’t stand in opposition to Joseph while still claiming a testimony of the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, Priesthood power, or the fulness of the Gospel. It just doesn’t work. As President Oaks taught in the April 2016 General Conference, “However appropriate for a democracy, there is no warrant for this concept in the government of God’s kingdom, where questions are honored but opposition is not.”

We all come to have our favorite prophets and apostles over time. Different teaching styles resonate with different people, so those favorites will vary. Someone who loves President Oaks’s matter-of-fact approach may be somewhat tired of Elder Uchtdorf’s frequent plane analogies. Someone who needs President Nelson’s guidance on learning to receive personal revelation may not gravitate as strongly toward President Monson’s focus on charity. Someone who feels heard and seen by Elder Holland’s deep empathy for those struggling with depression or anxiety may not be as grateful for President Eyring’s unfailing cheerfulness. All of that is okay. But when you start criticizing them for not being exactly what you want or need in that exact moment, you’re also criticizing the Savior, who deeply felt every moment of pain you have ever experienced.

Similarly, when you attack the First Vision, you also attack Joseph Smith. And when you attack Joseph, you attack everything that he helped to bring forth. And when you attack this Church and its prophets, you also attack Jesus Christ. I fully respect having honest questions. Every single member of this church has unanswered questions. This church was restored precisely because Joseph had unanswered questions of his own. But I can’t respect using those questions to attack Joseph, this church, the other prophets, and especially my Savior.

As I read through this portion of the LFMW and noticed the doublespeak and the criticism masquerading as confusion and doubt, it annoyed me. It’s manipulative. It’s condescending. And it cheapens the experiences of those who legitimately struggle with this issue.

Faulk picks up his letter with a debate on which First Vision account we should trust:

• Which One is Correct?

In 1902 The Church decided to adopt the 1838 version of Joseph’s First Vision as the official account now contained in The Pearl of Great Price – Joseph Smith History.

So, again, Faulk’s facts are incorrect. Elder James E. Talmage did separate the text into chapters and verses in 1902 to make it more readable. Those changes were approved in that October’s General Conference. However, the Joseph Smith—History, including the account of the First Vision, was a part of the Pearl of Great Price from its very first printing in 1851. It was also included in the 1878 version, which was canonized as scripture in 1880.

At this time, the only two widely known accounts of the First Vision were this 1838 version and an account from 1842 from what is known as the Wentworth Letter. Presumably, the 1838 account was included in the Pearl of Great Price over the 1842 Wentworth Letter account because it was much more detailed, but I don’t know that for certain. It seems clear, though, that it wasn’t chosen over the 1832 account for any nefarious purposes.

Though the 1832 and 1835 accounts were included in a compiled record now titled Joseph Smith’s History, 1834–1836, this book was neither finished nor published. Its contents, along with Joseph’s journals, found their way to Salt Lake City with the main body of the Saints, but were put into the Church archives and largely forgotten over the years.

The title of this portion, “Which One is Correct?” also positions these accounts as somehow being in conflict, or battling it out for which one is the accurate one. I think that’s where a large part of the difference between us is, because to me, the different accounts all complement one another. They go hand-in-hand. It’s not that if one is correct, the others all have to be incorrect. They can all be accurate. They can all be truthful. They don’t contradict one another. They’re remarkably consistent. Some of the accounts have more detail than others, and some of them focus on different things, but they all tell the same story.

As the Gospel Topics Essay on this subject says, “The various accounts of the First Vision tell a consistent story, though naturally they differ in emphasis and detail. Historians expect that when an individual retells an experience in multiple settings to different audiences over many years, each account will emphasize various aspects of the experience and contain unique details. Indeed, differences similar to those in the First Vision accounts exist in the multiple scriptural accounts of Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus and the Apostles’ experience on the Mount of Transfiguration. Yet despite the differences, a basic consistency remains across all the accounts of the First Vision. Some have mistakenly argued that any variation in the retelling of the story is evidence of fabrication. To the contrary, the rich historical record enables us to learn more about this remarkable event than we could if it were less well documented.”

Next, the LFMW quotes from the Pearl of Great Price account:

• Pearl of Great Price – Official account

15 After I had retired to the place where I had previously designed to go, having looked around me, and finding myself alone, I kneeled down and began to offer up the desires of my heart to God. I had scarcely done so, when immediately I was seized upon by some power which entirely overcame me, and had such an astonishing influence over me as to bind my tongue so that I could not speak. Thick darkness gathered around me, and it seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed to sudden destruction.

16 But, exerting all my powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the power of this enemy which had seized upon me, and at the very moment when I was ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction—not to an imaginary ruin, but to the power of some actual being from the unseen world, who had such marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being—just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me.

17 It no sooner appeared than I found myself delivered from the enemy which held me bound. When the light rested upon me I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other—This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!

18 My object in going to inquire of the Lord was to know which of all the sects was right, that I might know which to join. No sooner, therefore, did I get possession of myself, so as to be able to speak, than I asked the Personages who stood above me in the light, which of all the sects was right (for at this time it had never entered into my heart that all were wrong)—and which I should join. (Pearl of Great Price, Joseph Smith History 1:15-18)

This bit is all very straightforward. We’re all familiar with this account. Faulk then provides a little table, contrasting the 1832 account with the 1838 account:

Looking at that table, the first thing that jumps out at me is that he has two lines, “desired for mercy vs prayed” followed by “prayed vs overcome by power of Satan.” Those are juxtaposed as being two separate differences between the accounts. But he easily could have put “prayed vs prayed” and “desired for mercy vs overcome by power of Satan.” He put “saw a pillar of light vs saw a pillar of light,” after all, so he wasn’t only listing differences. For some reason, though, rather than acknowledge the identical aspect of Joseph praying in each account, he positions it as being two separate discrepancies. That feels dishonest to me.

As far as the first line goes, critics also like to point out that this exact same dilemma occurs within the span of a few verses in the 1838 account. However, as Steven Harper explains, it’s a dilemma with an answer. The conflict was between Joseph knowing something intellectually, in his mind, and having it confirmed to him in his heart by the Spirit. Joseph may have thought that no churches matched Christ’s Biblical church, but he hadn’t fully grasped the fact that none of them were uncorrupted. He grew up surrounded by numerous feuding Protestant sects. Protestants believe that the church had become corrupted too, and needed a Reformation to correct it. Joseph hadn’t yet understood that it actually needed a Restoration instead.

His desire for mercy/wanting his sins forgiven is mentioned in several of the accounts, and so is the acknowledgment that they were forgiven. However, it’s absent from the 1838 account. I don’t personally consider this a conflict between the accounts—people often have more than one reason for praying, especially if something is weighing on them on for some time the way this was.

He doesn’t mention being overcome by that thick, gloomy darkness in the 1832 account, that’s true. He does mention it in the 1835 account, but it’s a fair criticism. Again, though, different accounts highlight different things for different audiences. That’s normal and to be expected when someone gives multiple accounts of the same story—unless they’ve rehearsed it.

And let’s not forget how difficult writing was for Joseph. In another blog post, Steven Harper discusses a letter that Joseph wrote to Emma about five years into their marriage. Joseph was away from home at the time, helping Newell Whitney recover from an accident. This is how Harper describes the letter and the subsequent First Vision account:

The letter is in Joseph’s hand. It is composed of just two sentences. Their average length is about 300 words. In them, Joseph jumped from topic to topic. He was a jumble of emotions. He spelled creatively. He asked Emma to excuse “my inability in convaying my ideas in writing. [sic]”

The inability to convey his ideas in writing was one of the horns of Joseph’s dilemma. The other was that he had been commanded to convey his ideas in writing…. 

Joseph confessed and exposed his mere literary abilities on the opening page [of the 1832 account]. Here in his earliest autobiography, he highlights the horns of his dilemma: he has a marvelous experience to share, and he feels inadequate to share it. In a single sentence of 137 words, there are misspellings, awkward phrases, misplaced modifiers, and no punctuation. It’s natural to wonder why Joseph waited twelve years to write an account of his vision. Discovering how burdened he felt by that task leads us to appreciate the fact that he ever wrote it at all. (emphasis added)

Joseph was not a man who had any confidence at all in his writing ability. Of the few handwritten letters we have from him, several contain apologies for his lack of skill. All of them have poor spelling, grammar, punctuation, and missing words and phrases. The vast majority of his words throughout his lifetime were captured by scribes, not by his own hand.

As a 2020 article for the Church News points out, “Consider the many dramatic events in young Joseph’s life that were not recorded until 1832: Almost losing his leg as a child. Moroni’s visit. Joseph’s courtship and marriage of Emma Smith. The death of their first four children. ‘Joseph did not make any sort of historical record,’ said Elder [Kyle S.] McKay, ‘until the Lord gave him the commandment: ‘There shall be a record kept among you.’’”

Also consider this: it was a common thing for various articles and letters to be repurposed by the early Saints and repeated multiple times across different publications. This account was never published a first time, let alone multiple times. Each time he tried to write the account, he soon abandoned it and started again, rather than polishing and publishing the prior accounts. This tells me that neither of them were good enough to Joseph. He considered the two prior accounts inferior in some way to the 1838 account, because he wasn’t comfortable capturing exactly what happened.

He didn’t know how to tell his own story, because he was trapped by his inability to write clearly. So, if there are things in those early accounts that were left out or that are unclear, to me that makes perfect sense. I’d be surprised if they didn’t have those problems.

As for the last line of the table, Faulk addresses that discrepancy in more detail:

• “I saw the Lord” vs. “I saw two Personages”

The difference is quite significant, especially in the most important piece of information they are communicating. If they are both supposed to be of the same event, then why would the official account say he spoke to God and Jesus, while Joseph’s journal say he only saw theLord?

We discussed the question of whether Joseph mentioned both God the Father and the Savior in his 1832 account last week, but just to recap, it’s possible that he didn’t. The Savior did the bulk of the talking, so Joseph may have just concentrated on Him. Not mentioning the Father’s presence doesn’t mean He wasn’t there. Again, Joseph struggled with how to express his thoughts and feelings, and writing was very difficult for him. If you look at the original manuscript, he skipped a lot of words and phrases that had to later be corrected. It’s entirely possible he just focused on the Savior because it was easier than trying to explain in full detail what he’d experienced.

However, it’s equally possible that Joseph did mention the Father in this account. As Greg Smith demonstrated, in Joseph’s day, “testimony from on high” was very commonly used to refer to the times in the Bible in which the Father announced that the Savior was His Son and to listen to Him. That’s exactly what happened during the First Vision, and “testimony from on high” is mentioned in the introduction to the 1832 account as being the first event that helped shape Joseph’s role as a prophet.

Additionally, multiple scholars have posited that on two occasions where Joseph used “the Lord,” he may have meant God in the first instance and Christ in the second.

Since Joseph accidentally skipped the word “Lord” in the original manuscript and had to later edit it in, it’s possible he originally had a different word in mind that would have further clarified the situation.

Also, his motivation for praying seem to be different and his experience with Satan is missing.

We’ve already discussed both of those points in this post, so there’s no need to do it again.

No priesthood or Sunday school manual has ever mentioned that Joseph himself originally wrote that he only saw one personage, not two.

I didn’t have time to try to hunt down and go through every single Sunday School manual the Church has ever put out, but I did find something that calls this line into question. The original LFMW was written and posted to Reddit in 2016. The Foundations of the Restoration Teacher Manual for Seminary and Institute, which was first published in 2015 and then updated in 2016, spoke about the different accounts of the First Vision. Additionally, the Gospel Topics Essays were written and posted to the Church’s website in 2013, several years before this letter was written. While those were not Sunday School manuals, the Essays were actively discussed in many of our Sunday School classes when they were newly released.

It’s possible there are other manuals that discuss the various accounts. There are hundreds of manuals you’d need to wade through to confirm or refute that allegation. Faulk made a claim like this precisely because it’d be extremely time-consuming, if not nearly impossible, to debunk it.

However, in addition to that manual and the Essay, these various accounts were discussed at length in numerous official Church magazines. You can search them by year at FAIR, but here’s the major ones:

• April 1970 Improvement Era
• September 1976 Ensign
• September 1978 Ensign
• January 1985 Ensign
• January 1986 Ensign
• April 1996 Ensign
• January 2005 Ensign

Faulk continues:

• Continued Concealment

 Using the vast resources of the Church education system, members are not informed of the inconsistencies relating to Joseph’s visions.

I would again advise Faulk to speak only for himself, as this is not true of every member of the Church. Experiences will vary depending on the teacher’s knowledge and focus, as well as the student’s willingness or ability to retain information.

You can also hardly claim the Church was hiding these accounts when they were published repeatedly over the span of decades in the Church’s official magazines, on their website, and in at least one of their manuals.

I honestly don’t remember when or where I first learned of the different accounts of the First Vision. I do know it was prior to the Gospel Topics Essays. It wasn’t a surprise when I read the Essay about this topic, but that’s all I can say for certain. I can’t claim to have learned about this topic in Seminary, for example, or from reading my parents’ Ensign, because I simply don’t remember.

It also appears that average members are not the only ones surprised by this evidence. President of the First Quorum of the Seventy, S. Dilworth Young, published a statement in the Improvement Era on this subject.

“I cannot remember the time when I have not heard the story, concerning the coming of the Father and the Son to the Prophet Joseph Smith. I am concerned however with one item which has recently been called to my attention on this matter. There appears to be going about our communities some writing to the effect that the Prophet Joseph Smith evolved his doctrine from what might have been a vision, in which he is supposed to have said that he saw an angel, instead of the Father and the Son. According to this theory, by the time he was inspired to write the occurrence in 1838, he had come to the conclusion that there were two beings.

This rather shocked me. I can see no reason why the Prophet, with his brilliant mind, would have failed to remember in sharp relief every detail of that eventful day. I can remember quite vividly that in 1915 I had a mere dream, and while the dream was prophetic in nature, it was not startling. It has been long since fulfilled, but I can remember every detail of it as sharply and clearly as though it had happened yesterday. How then could any man conceive that the Prophet, receiving such a vision as he received, would not remember it and would fail to write it clearly, distinctly, and accurately?” (S. Dilworth Young, Improvement Era, General Conference edition, June 1957)

This rather shocks me, actually, for several reasons. There are two omissions in this full quote that are not marked by ellipses. Additionally, the first paragraph here was actually two different paragraphs originally. The context of the quote is also missing, giving it an entirely different spin than the one Young did in his Conference talk. The quote, given in context, should read:

I cannot remember the time when I have not heard the story, quoted by Brother Bennion, concerning the coming of the Father and the Son to the Prophet Joseph Smith. I am convinced as I grow older and become proportionately wiser that if boys and girls in our Church could keep that story uppermost in their hearts, believing it, having a testimony of it, much of the ills of our youth which President Richards so graphically portrayed this morning would not be.

I am concerned however with one item which has recently been called to my attention on this matter. There appears to be going about our communities some writing to the effect that the Prophet Joseph Smith evolved his doctrine from what might have been a vision, in which he is supposed to have said that he saw an angel, instead of the Father and Son. According to this theory, by the time he was inspired to write the occurrence in 1838, he had come to the conclusion that there were two Beings.

This rather shocked me. I can see no reason why the Prophet, with his brilliant mind, would have failed to remember in sharp relief every detail of that eventful day. I can remember quite vividly that in 1915 I had a mere dream, and while the dream was prophetic in its nature, it was not startling. It has been long since fulfilled, but I can remember every detail of it as sharply and clearly as though it had happened yesterday. How then could any man conceive that the Prophet, receiving such a vision as he received, would not remember it and would fail to write it clearly, distinctly, and accurately?

It seems to me, too, that had he evolved such a thing, his enemies would have used it against him. In 1838 there was a crisis in the Church. Men were falling away. It was at that time that Oliver Cowdery became disaffected. If any man in this Church had ever heard that story of the first vision, Oliver Cowdery must have heard it. Yet his reasons for disaffection were never given as an evolution of the first vision. Other men of that time did not use it as their excuse. In 1844 when the final conspiracy was concocted to murder Joseph Smith, the reasons given by those men were not discrepancies in his story of the first vision, but rather other matters far removed from it.

When Joseph wrote the story in 1838, men and women who had known him ever since he had started this work took the story in their stride, that is, it was common enough knowledge from the beginning that no one took an exception to it. Everybody knew it; everybody had heard it; not exactly in the words in which he wrote it—I believe no man will speak extemporaneously in the same manner that he will write something—but essentially the same, and when the Saints read it, it merely confirmed what they had heard over and over again.

His mother should have known something about it. You will remember, he walked into her house that morning and told her that the church to which she had given her allegiance was not true. To my way of thinking, he must have told her all about the vision. When she chose to write the story of her son’s experience, she did not put it in her own words. I suspect that she must have felt that so nearly was what he had written the way he had described it to her, that she quoted his written statement.

This statement was given in 1957, 8 years before the 1832 account was first published. It was also well before an analysis showed that in Lucy’s autobiography, her interviewer/ghostwriter padded her memories with direct quotes from many different sources that Lucy herself did not quote. This would have included Joseph’s account of the First Vision.

However, Young’s point remains that nobody accused Joseph of adding to or altering his recollections of the First Vision when additional accounts with further details were written or published. His account in 1838 matched the stories that had already been floating around, as we went over a few weeks ago. Even his harshest critics never made that accusation against him. That’s the point Young was making, not that Joseph couldn’t possibly have given accounts with slightly different details.

The rumors Young described were in reference to the then-mostly unknown 1832 account. Surprisingly, Faulk doesn’t go into its history, even though it’d have given him a stronger case if he had. But since I am all about providing context, I’ll outline it here.

As I went over above, Joseph’s handwritten account was buried in the Church archives for a good century or more before it was finally published. His account is found on the first few pages of a notebook that was later repurposed as a letter book (where copies of his letters were recorded before being sent, something that was popular in that day and age). That letter book eventually made its way to Salt Lake, and was stowed away in the Church Historian’s Office.

That office was originally quite small, and things were haphazardly stored. None of the people called to work in that office were actually professional historians, and many of them didn’t know how to properly care for older records. Any avid student of history will wince at the treatment this notebook received in that office.

You see, sometime between its arrival in Salt Lake and its publishing in 1965, someone cut the account out of the letter book and stashed the pages in the safe in the Head Historian’s Office. The best guess is, this was done sometime after 1930. One of the pages did not tear out properly, and a corner was left in the book. It was removed and taped onto the corresponding page with clear tape that was not invented until 1930. It’s possible that the corner was taped years or even decades after the pages were removed, but most likely, it was done at the same time.

We also do not know for certain who did this, or why they did it. There are some good guesses, however. Joseph Fielding Smith had been a worker in the Historian’s Office since 1901, and was made the official Church Historian in 1921, where he served until 1970. As he was the Church Historian at the time the pages are believed to have been removed, he is the likely person who removed them. However, one of his senior assistants, A. William Lund or Earl E. Olson, also could have done it. They all had access to that office and that safe.

Several people were given access to this account during the time it was locked in the safe. Eventually, Jerald and Sandra Tanner learned of it and demanded to see it. They were refused, but the contents were published later that same year by sources more friendly to the Church.

FAIR explains one possible motive for their removal:

While apparently someone from the Church Historian’s Office was responsible for the excision of the leaves from the notebook, we don’t know exactly who did it or why. A possible motive was trying to maintain complete consistency with the 1838 account that was available in the Pearl of Great Price. At that time, any differences between accounts could have been seen as possibly faith destroying. 

If it was done to keep it hidden, it is odd that it was shown to enough people that there were rumors loud enough to be addressed during General Conference and passed along to the Tanners. It is also odd that it was subsequently returned to the letter book and published. Especially since this happened still while under Joseph Fielding Smith’s tenure as Church Historian. Those aren’t the actions I would personally expect to see if it was being purposely hidden.

Another motive, as speculated in the comments of a 2019 post on Dan Peterson’s blog, could be because the Historian’s Office at that time separated the different documents by content rather than by source. It wasn’t just Joseph’s First Vision account that was removed, but the entire history he began. So, it’s possible that the historians wanted to keep the history separate from the letter book, as they were two different things. And, since they were loose pages in Joseph’s own handwriting, maybe they were moved to the safe to preserve them better than they would be otherwise.

But again, we just don’t know. Either of those theories could be correct, or neither of them. Both theories are speculation.

The 1832 account first came to light in a thesis paper by a BYU student named Paul Cheesman. It was then published to a much wider audience in 1969 by historian Dean Jesse, along with the also newly discovered 1835 account from Joseph’s journal.

So, we don’t know for sure who removed the pages; we don’t know for sure when they removed them; we don’t know for sure why they removed them; and we don’t even know for sure if they kept the pages hidden away. The pages were restricted to those with special permission, but some people still saw them, and they clearly talked about them.

Faulk wraps up the First Vision section with one last recap paragraph:

Considering that First Vision-like accounts were common in New England, that it took 60 years for leadership to become aware of the “two personages”, and the active suppression of this information, it feels hard to be confident in the truthfulness of the First Vision.

Visions in New England and elsewhere in the United States were indeed fairly common in Joseph’s day. Again though, the Lord has a history of preparing His people for significant events in His church’s history. And remember, Joseph was the only one called to help restore the fulness of the Gospel; the only one called to bring forth new scripture; the only one prophesied to be spoken of for good and evil by the entire world; the only one who organized a thriving church that still exists today; and the only one whose name we actually still know today.

Moving on, it most certainly did not take over 60 years for Church leadership to become aware of the two personages in the accounts, as we went over several weeks ago. The Church leaders he quoted from all had additional quotes clearly discussing both personages in the vision. “Angel” was also a synonym for “Christ” in Joseph’s day. And, as stated, the Lord is described as an angel multiple times in the Bible.

There was no “active suppression” of the 1832 account after its initial publication, as the Church was repeatedly publishing them in their official publications, on their website, and in their Seminary and Institute manuals. And prior to its initial publication, there is no actual evidence that the account was being “actively suppressed.” That is only speculation. It may be true, or it may not be. We simply don’t know. Regardless, even if it was being suppressed, people were still shown the account, and it was still published more than half a century ago.

It is not hard to feel confident in the truthfulness of the First Vision. That is what the Spirit is for. All you need to do is get on your knees and ask Heavenly Father if it truly happened. He will tell you. The Holy Ghost testifies of the truth of all things, and the Savior Himself promised us that there is no greater witness than that of the Spirit.

Sarah Allen is relatively new in her affiliation with FAIR. By profession, she works in mortgage compliance and is a freelance copyeditor. An avid reader, she loves studying the Gospel and the history of the restored Church. After watching some of her friends lose their testimonies, she became interested in helping others through their faith crises. That’s when she began sharing what she’d learned through her studies. She’s grateful to those at FAIR who have given her the opportunity to share her testimony with a wider audience.

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Evangelical Questions: Why You So Judgy?

by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC

Luke 6:37 Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. 

Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about worthiness. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand. 

A common question from Evangelicals is why our church spends so much time and energy, “being judgy” – meaning, why do we care about worthiness?  Why do we say our Bishops are, “Judges in Israel.” Can’t we just follow Jesus’ words and refrain from all the judgment?

This is a huge issue, and there is not enough time in a video like this to parse through all of it, so I’m just going to cover the parts the average Evangelical would be worried about. And they are worried about it. If you remember a couple videos back we talked about the history of the Evangelical movement and how they can be considered “Double Protestants” because they come from a tradition that protested against the Catholic Church, and then they did it again and protested against their own Protestant churches. And that same dynamic is going to come into play here, especially as it comes to them being Protestants who have moved away from the Catholic Church. 

So, an Evangelical’s understanding of what is happening in a Catholic Church is that the priest sets himself up as God and directly forgives sins, or refuses to forgive them, and that people have no direct access to God. Now, that is not what is happening in a Catholic Church – all of you who have a Catholic background can take a deep breath, I know that is not what is happening in a Catholic Church, but that’s what Evangelicals (largely) think is happening. And in reaction to that they have a very high value on the idea that only God can judge and no other human ever has to be involved in the process at all. It’s actually a really unfortunate over-reaction to their misunderstanding because what happens is that the individual is left utterly alone to learn how to repent and change and grow. There is no communal support for how to repent. They’ve created that culture for what they think is a good reason – a really important reason – which is that they see themselves as the ones who take down barriers between people and Christ. 

How Does This Work

So you, Latter-day Saint, you know how this works in our church. Let me try to explain how this works in Evangelical churches. You remember from our previous videos that Evangelical churches place a really high value on the conversion experience or, “saying the sinner’s prayer.”  Not all Protestant churches function this way, but at least historically in Evangelical churches the entire point of everything is to get people to say the sinner’s prayer….and what happens next varies greatly, depending on the particular church. Some churches are content to pretty much stop there – oh they certainly want people to keep attending, and keep learning about God, but not much more is going to be expected of them. They’ve already done the thing – they said the prayer. One hugely popular Evangelical author says it’s like going around the bases in baseball, once you’ve gotten to home plate you’re done and now your main job is to cheer on the other members of your team so that they can get to home plate too. Sure, you probably need to learn and grow a bit, and that includes confession of sin, but that’s a private thing that you do alone on purpose. No one else is to be involved because that would be putting a barrier between you and God. They don’t even really have a conceptualization of getting help in the repentance process because if a person asked for such help they would be told to go pray in private, confess their sins, and move on. The best case scenario is that this is a system which fosters self-reliance and forces a person to build up their own relationship with God – and the worst case scenario is that it leaves people without much help or hope on difficult issues when they know what they should be doing but can’t quite bring themselves to do it. 

So, when your Evangelical friends or family members learn that we require adults and teenagers to sit for worthiness interviews, or that we sometimes say bishops are to function as a, “judge in Israel,” their defenses go up pretty high. They’re worried that we’re doing unnecessary gate-keeping and leaving people separated from God unnecessarily. Interestingly enough we both have the same worry about each other – we worry a bit about them abandoning people to have to handle every act of repentance entirely alone; and they worry that we are causing people to feel abandoned by God because we’re putting up barriers for them to repent. 

Common Ground

But at the end of the day, we both want the same thing – for people to repent from their sins and grow in holiness. And still it seems kind of hard for many Latter-day Saints to explain why we do what we do. I don’t have the definitive answer on that, but I do have some thoughts about why what we’re doing is worthwhile and how you might be able to talk about it with your Evangelical friends in a way they can understand, and might even learn from. 

Maybe you’ve had this experience, I certainly have….if the topic of worthiness interviews comes up, your Evangelical friend is going to look at you like you are a crazy person for voluntarily submitting to that. They’re going to think you are handing over your autonomy and will probably quote Jesus’ words to you about, “judge not lest ye be judged.”  But what is Jesus actually saying there?

In my day-job I’m a mental health therapist and this question comes up all the time. A client will be participating in a certain activity, or spending time with a certain person and the activity or person turns out to not be very good for them. They leave that person’s presence feeling more anxious, or they have some other bad consequence from spending their time that way. If I, as their therapist, suggest that they might need to reconsider who they spend their time with I am often met with the objection, “Well, I can’t judge them.”  But, I don’t even know what that means, to be honest.  When I go to the grocery store and want to buy a nice piece of salmon I have some choices to make.  I can buy the piece that looks like it came off the boat that morning, or I can buy the piece that looks like it’s been sitting in the case for 5 weeks. Buying the fresh fish has one set of consequences, and buying the weeks old piece of fish has a different set of consequences. I get to choose which consequences I’d like. These days I know exactly how to go to the store and notice the signs of freshness in a fish, but I didn’t always. Someone had to point them out to me so that today I can properly judge which piece of fish is going to give me the consequences I want. Am I judging the fish?  Yes. But what I’m really judging is the consequences of my own actions. The topics that come up in a worthiness interview are kind of the same thing. Let me use an old example to explain.

As you know, the worthiness interview questions have changed over time. A previous version of the questions asked members if they had, “stolen irrigation water from their neighbor.” I grew up in an agricultural area where irrigation water was, and still is, fiercely debated. Stealing water that does not belong to you is going to have bad consequences for you (you will be used to a certain amount of water for your crops, and when it becomes restricted after you get caught the crops you planted with that extra water will die); it’s bad for your neighbor (their crops will die), and it’s bad for the entire ecosystem (I don’t have time to explain that piece, just trust me). So if we’re looking at a behavior called, “stealing irrigation water” we can demonstrate how it will have negative effects on the individual and community. It will be negative in the same way that eating a bad piece of fish from the store will be bad. In our modern worthiness interview when you are asked, “Do you live the law of chastity?” is that an improper use of judgment, the kind Jesus was talking about? Or is that designed to help people consider the consequences of their actions and decide if those actions are going to have good or bad consequences for them and their neighbors? I think most members would say that this is intended as – and functions as – a question about considering consequences. Infidelity is an act that is not between two people in private, that’s an act that impacts everyone they love and have influence over. And those consequences – the natural consequences of infidelity – are far more devastating than eating a piece of bad fish. 

Despite the fact that your Evangelical friends or family members largely are left to confess sin in private they could probably see the benefit of worthiness conversations when we think about them this way. The word, “judgment” has a bad reputation these days, and probably for some good reasons, but we’re left without a better word to explain what we’re after in those interviews. In this topic my mind often goes to the youth.  Youth in Evangelical churches are going to be expected to sustain some form of chastity (for the most part) but without a vehicle to talk about that and potentially get help repenting over that, it’s an incredible burden to place on them and ask them to manage it alone. In this sense the very concept of a worthiness interview is similar to teaching someone how to choose good fish at the market.  It’s not the kind of judgment that tells the person, “you’re a bad person,” it’s the kind of judgment that helps them discern which outcomes they would like to have the best chance at getting. 

I hope this episode helps you think through how to talk about these things with your Evangelical friends and family members. The unique gift that our church has in this realm is that we provide a private place for every member to have a private chat with their local leader to think through these things, and that’s not just limited to a worthiness interview, but includes going to your bishop when an issue comes up where you can’t figure out how to repent on your own. If you’ve grown up in the church you might not realize how rare it is to have that option. There may be a few exceptions but for the most part Evangelicals don’t have that option – and at the larger churches their local pastor won’t even know their name, nevermind how they or their family are doing managing the challenges of life. 

Join us next week as we take up another Evangelical question. If you have a specific question you’d like to see answered shoot me an email at jroach@fairlatterdaysaints.org See you next time.

More Come, Follow Me resources here.

Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities.

The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Matthew 5; Luke 6 appeared first on FAIR.

There are different accounts of the First Vision. That surprises some people, which always surprises me in turn. Who tells a momentous, notable story only one time in their life? Additionally, some people are troubled that the different accounts don’t match up exactly, word for word, each time they’re told. But when someone tells the same stories and same jokes in exactly the same way every single time, what does that tell you? That they’re rehearsed. And that can often have a negative connotation. Even the Department of Justice website advises not to memorize your testimony for court because it sounds unconvincing and insincere.

That’s why the four Gospels differ in many areas, but overall tell a coherent story. The sequence of events, phrasing, and finer details are often different—Matthew 1:16 says that Jacob was the father of Joseph, for example, while Luke 3:23 says that Heli was Joseph’s father. None of those discrepancies mean that the Savior didn’t exist or that the events described didn’t actually happen.

Though all four Gospel accounts tell the story of the Savior’s earthly life and ministry, they don’t all give the same information. Matthew skims over the birth of the Savior and doesn’t even mention the Nativity. Instead, he focuses much of his attention on the Wise Men. Mark and John don’t discuss the Savior’s birth at all and jump straight to His baptism. Luke is the only Gospel where we receive the account of the shepherds and the angelic hosts. That doesn’t mean the authors were lying. It just means they focused on different details and messages. There are variations in the accounts of Paul’s vision and Alma the Younger’s vision, too.

I myself had a profound spiritual experience about 14 years ago that I don’t talk about much. It wasn’t a vision, but it left a deep impression on me and things were revealed to me at that time. On the few occasions I’ve discussed this experience, I’ve highlighted different things, combined things, left other things out, etc. Each time I’ve told it to someone, it’s differed from the account I wrote in my journal after it happened.

And in another recent example, George W. Bush and Seth MacFarlane both gave various accounts of their experiences on 9/11 that don’t match up exactly, either. They even had video of their previous interviews they could watch to refresh their memories, but still got some details wrong. That’s simply the way that memory works, especially when it comes to notable experiences that deeply affect us. Even the law makes a distinction between “discrepancy” and “contradiction” because witness statements will often include inconsistencies.

So, there are different ways to approach the same information. Can you look at each of those things described above and decide that they must be lies because the stories don’t perfectly align? Yes, of course you can—and many have. Can you also look at that those same things and conclude that they’re true because they’re largely consistent stories overall? Yep, you can do that, too. And again, many people have done so. Can you also study the accounts with the Spirit by your side, helping you decipher what’s true and what isn’t? Yes. This is my approach, and that of many others.

As the Gospel Topics Essay states, “The various accounts of the First Vision tell a consistent story, though naturally they differ in emphasis and detail. Historians expect that when an individual retells an experience in multiple settings to different audiences over many years, each account will emphasize various aspects of the experience and contain unique details. Indeed, differences similar to those in the First Vision accounts exist in the multiple scriptural accounts of Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus and the Apostles’ experience on the Mount of Transfiguration. Yet despite the differences, a basic consistency remains across all the accounts of the First Vision. Some have mistakenly argued that any variation in the retelling of the story is evidence of fabrication. To the contrary, the rich historical record enables us to learn more about this remarkable event than we could if it were less well documented.”

That said, let’s see what the LFMW has to say about the different accounts:

• Multiple Accounts of the First Vision

 Josephsmithpapers.org records 4 separate accounts of the First Vision by Joseph between 1832-1842.

 Yes, and here they are, along with the corresponding links to the Church’s website in case anyone wants transcripts with proper spelling:

• 1832 account original | 1832 account transcript
• 1835 account original | 1835 account transcript
• 1838 account original | 1838 account transcript
• 1842 account original | 1842 account transcript

You can compare and contrast them for yourselves. Most of them are brief, so don’t let that put you off of reading them. Only the 1838 account is somewhat long, and that’s the one we’re all familiar with.

Earliest account – Joseph Smith’s journal. Letterbook 1A, 27 November 1832:

In his first account written in 1832, Joseph mentions that he had already concluded that the world had apostatized from the faith and that “there was no society or denomination built upon the Gospel of Jesus Christ as recorded in the New Testament.” He then has an encounter with “the Lord,” but makes no mention of two separate personages. Joseph then writes that his sins are forgiven and the Lord agrees with Joseph’s conclusion about the corruption of Christianity.

Just as a point of clarification, Joseph’s wording is that he found there was no society or denomination that matched what he read about in the New Testament, and that his mind was “exceedingly distressed” over it. He didn’t say he concluded it, or determined it, or settled on it, or anything of the sort. It’s something he found, or discovered, and it really upset him. The reason I point out his phrasing is because that doesn’t sound to me as though he’d made up his mind yet. He was still struggling with the question, trying to fully understand what his heart realized.

This entire account is an emotional one that describes the battle between his mind and his heart. Though the other accounts also describe that same battle, and though they describe events that were clearly emotional for Joseph, the language used is different. They’re more rational, more focused on his thoughts than his feelings.

This account  was written when Joseph was still early in his transition from uneducated farm worker to devout student of languages and theology. He was still working on the JST during this time. He hadn’t read or considered the deeper doctrine contained in the Book of Abraham, hadn’t yet studied Hebrew or Greek, hadn’t held the School of the Prophets, hadn’t restored the Endowment or work for the dead, hadn’t given the King Follett discourse, etc. He was still learning how to speak to the entire church as its leader. And he was writing down for the very first time an overwhelming experience that brought him and his family pain and derision. For example, Joseph’s sister Katharine described how their oldest sister, Sophronia, became sick and frail because of the way her own friends treated her in the wake of Joseph’s vision being spread around the town.

So, when he says that his mind was “exceedingly distressed” over something he’d “found” in the scriptures, that tells me that he was still grappling to understand it. It wasn’t something for which he’d already made up his mind and accepted in his heart.

As to Joseph’s references to “the Lord,” multiple scholars, including those who wrote the Gospel Topics Essay on the subject, have pointed out that because his uses of that phrase are separated by time and action, it could just as easily be referring to two beings instead of one. As in, “the Lord [God the Father] opened the heavens, and [then] I saw the Lord [Jesus Christ].”

Supporting this is the original handwritten manuscript. If you zoom in and look at the actual written page, what he originally wrote was, “…I was filled with the spirit of god and the opened the heavens….” The word “Lord” was inserted later when he realized he’d skipped it accidentally. We don’t know what Joseph intended the original word or words to be. Maybe it was “Lord,” or maybe it was “he,” referring back to “the spirit of god.” Or maybe it was “the first personage.” Or maybe it even could have been “they.” We don’t know. All we know is that it was later corrected to say “the Lord.” That may have been his original intention, or it may not have been. If you’re going to claim that Joseph later embellished his accounts to include two Gods instead of one based on this passage, that is quite a stretch when you don’t even know what he originally meant to say.

In a recent fireside, Greg Smith proposed a different theory. The typed account on the Church’s website/LDS Tools picks up with the beginning of Joseph’s first-person narration. However, the handwritten accountcontains a third-person preface. This preface lists four things that Joseph experienced: first, receiving the “testimony from on high”; second, the ministering of angels; third, the reception of the Priesthood in order to administer ordinances; and fourth, the confirmation and reception of the high Priesthood and its authority and keys. These come in order of when they were received. First, Joseph received that testimony from on high. Then, he received visits by Moroni and other heavenly messengers. Third, he received the Aaronic Priesthood. And lastly, he received the Melchizedek Priesthood.

Greg looked up what “testimony from on high” meant in various other writings from the beginning of the 19th Century onward. In those accounts, he discovered something interesting. They all pointed to references from the scriptures, such as the Mount of Transfiguration or at Christ’s baptism, in which the Father testified of the Son, saying, “This is My Beloved Son.” We know from two of Joseph’s later accounts that those words were exactly how God introduced the Savior to Joseph. So, according to vernacular from Joseph’s day, the preface of his first account heavily implying that God the Father was present and testified of His Son, Jesus Christ.

However, you might disagree with these theories. To that, I would argue that it doesn’t really matter if Joseph only described the Savior or both the Savior and God the Father. The Savior did the bulk of the talking during the First Vision. Only mentioning Him does not mean that the Father wasn’t also there.

Say you were hanging out with a group of friends, and later, you saw a mutual friend of one of them. You tell that person that the two of you hung out. That’s completely true, even though the statement leaves out the fact that other people were there with you.

As James B. Allen and John W. Welch wrote:

Finally, remembering that the 1832 manuscript was an unpolished effort to record the spiritual impact of the vision on him, and that the main content of the heavenly message was delivered by the Son, it is understandable that the Prophet simply emphasized the Lord in the 1832 account. Thus, nothing precludes the possibility that two beings were present.

The next three accounts are all lumped mostly together in the LFMW with very little commentary:

Second account – Joseph’s 1835 account notes that while one of the two personages testifies that Jesus is the Son of God, neither personage is specifically identified as God or Jesus. Also sees “many angels.”

 Third account – 1838 (draft 2) account adopted as the official version.

 Fourth account – 1842 account from the Wentworth Letter notes two personages; again neither identified as God or Jesus.

The very first thing to mention in response to this is that none of the accounts identify either being as God or Jesus.

In the 1835 account, it says, “A personage appeared in the midst of this pillar of flame, which was spread all around and yet nothing consumed. Another personage soon appeared, like unto the first. He said unto me, ‘Thy sins are forgiven thee.’ He testified unto me that Jesus Christ is the son of God.”

In the well-known 1838 account, it says, “When the light rested upon me I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other—This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!”

And in the 1842 account, it just says, “I was enwrapped in a heavenly vision and saw two glorious personages who exactly resembled each other in features and likeness, surrounded with a brilliant light which eclipsed the sun at noonday. They told me that all religious denominations were believing in incorrect doctrines and that none of them was acknowledged of God as his church and kingdom.”

From those passages, we can infer that it’s God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, but no account explicitly confirms that.

As for the comment about “many angels,” the amount of First Vision references that refer to “angels,” whether from Joseph or others, is fairly high, as the author himself lays out in his very next point. One notable account he omits is Joseph’s second 1835 journal entry, which discusses his “first visitation of Angels which was when [he] was about 14 years old.” It’s not listed as an official First Vision account since it’s only a passing reference.

Regardless, it was a somewhat common description for the First Vision:

• Contemporary Accounts

It appears that Joseph told the elders of the Church a very different experience than any of his written accounts.

The LFMW then gives quotes from Brigham Young, Wilford Woodruff, George A. Smith, and John Taylor in which they all describe Joseph being visited by “an angel” during the First Vision. I’ll list and comment on each quote in turn, but I wanted to talk about the point as a whole first.

You see, the premise of this section is incorrect for at least three reasons. I’m not saying this to insult Thomas Faulk, but if it’s not meant to be purposely dishonest, it does show a surprising ignorance of both Biblical scholarship as well as LDS Church history for someone who supposedly studied all of this out as a voracious student while writing his list/letter.

The first reason this is a bad argument is because “angel” held a variety of meanings in the mid-1800s. Now, I don’t blame Faulk for not being an expert on American English linguistic history—the vast majority of us aren’t. But that’s why we turn to the handy 1828 Webster’s Dictionary as a reference for how the word was used in Joseph’s day. And what do we find? A definition that says the word could mean “Christ, the mediator and head of the church,” and cites Revelation 10:1 as a reference. What does that verse and chapter describe? A mighty angel coming down from Heaven amid clouds and pillars of fire, carrying a book through which comes the restoration of prophesy to “many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings.”

Seriously.

So, if the word was a synonym for Jesus Christ, then all of the different uses of the word “angel” are not in any way contradictory with Joseph’s claims to also have seen the Savior that day. It’s just another way of saying the exact same thing.

The second reason is that the Bible further backs this up. The most common Hebrew word translated as “angel” in the Bible is “ma’lak.” This word has various meanings which are all used in the Bible, including: a messenger or representative (such as a prophet or a teacher like John the Baptist); an angel (a divine messenger who is not God, but has a message for someone from God, such as the Angel Gabriel); and a being who is called the theophanic angel, AKA “The Angel of the Lord,” a being who appears frequently throughout the scriptures and speaks as God, identifies Himself with God, and claims the attributes of God.

By way of explanation, a theophany is when someone has a literal visitation from God, not just a feeling of the Spirit. So, a “theophanic angel” is when God delivers a message to someone while in a human form, as opposed to a cloud of smoke or a burning bush. Most Biblical scholars define the Angel of the Lord as exactly that, a manifestation of Jehovah Himself.

The “Malak Yahweh,” as he is sometimes called, is a figure that was described by many pre-Christian Jews and was “a divine figure, properly denominated Yahweh, but nonetheless distinct from another called Yahweh. The earliest Christians, as well as many other Christian worthies throughout the centuries, have also viewed the Malak Yahweh as a distinct divine person within the Godhead, further explicating it as a Christophany, that is, an appearance of the pre-incarnate Logos or Word of God—the Lord Jesus Christ.”

A “Christophany” is exactly what it sounds like: an appearance of Jesus Christ to someone. Several early Christians believed that this Angel of the Lord/Malak Yahweh was a pre-earthly Jesus Christ appearing as a messenger sent by His Father. And who is the pre-earthly Jesus Christ? Jehovah/Yahweh.

So, basically, all of these different scholars are saying the exact same thing: Jehovah was sent at various times to deliver messages on God the Father’s behalf to His people. That is not just contemporary Bible scholarship; early Christians, Muslim scholars, and Jewish teachers prior to the birth of Christ all believed this figure was a manifestation of Jehovah and/or Jesus Christ, and that He was a separate being from the Father but still part of the Godhead.

And what are angels in LDS theology? Ministers from the Lord who are either pre-resurrected beings made of spirit or resurrected beings made of flesh and bone. Though the Bible Dictionary is not an official statement of doctrine, by the definition of the word that our church typically uses, as a resurrected being the Savior does fall into this category.

Therefore, saying that a visitation from an angel could also be a visitation from Jesus Christ is not a stretch at all. It’s not some absurd twisting of the word that you’d have to be desperately reaching to make. It’s something that numerous scholars from many denominations and world religions across multiple centuries have believed; it aligns with LDS theology; and “angel” was a synonym for “Christ” in Joseph’s day.

And there’s still a third reason this point is poorly made. While Faulk lists a handful of accounts that used “angel” instead of “Jesus Christ,” all of them are quoted from the Journal of Discourses, which should be taken with a grain of salt. The reporters took it upon themselves to edit, delete, add to, and rephrase the sermon transcripts before publishing them, often substantially (also see here, here, and here for further details). We do not have the original transcripts for these four sermons, which means that we can’t be certain any of them are quoted properly.

But even accepting them all at face value and granting that they did indeed say “angel,” Faulk ignores the multiple other contemporary accounts that say otherwise.

William and Katharine Smith both each variously referred to Joseph conversing with an angel, the Lord, and the Father and the Son in his vision. However, most of the contemporary secondhand accounts from others given closer in time to the vision do not say “angel.”

In 1840, Orson Pratt described “two glorious personages” who appeared to Joseph. In 1842, Orson Hyde mentioned “two glorious heavenly personages.” In 1843, Levi Richards wrote in his journal that Joseph “enquired of the Lord” which church to join and “received for answer that none of them were right.” He doesn’t mention how that answer came to Joseph. In a newspaper interview from 1843 that was reported in both the Pittsburgh Weekly Gazette and the New York Spectator, Joseph is quoted as describing “a glorious personage in the light, and then another personage.” And in 1844, Alexander Neibaur wrote in his journal that Joseph “saw a personage in the fire” and then, “after a wile a other person came to the side of the first[sic].”

Orson Pratt and Orson Hyde were both apostles. Claiming that Joseph told “the elders of the Church” a very different story than the one he told everyone else is demonstrably untrue. He was telling a consistent story all along.

The first of these quote in question is from Brigham Young:

“The Lord did not come with the armies of heaven … but He did send his angel to this same obscure person, Joseph Smith jun., who afterwards became a Prophet, Seer, and Revelator, and informed him that he should not join any of the religious sects of the day, for they were all wrong.” (Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, vol. 2, 1855, p.171)

As Greg Smith advised to do in a different fireside given on the CES Letter, the first thing I did when looking this quote up was to check what was removed by the ellipsis. The full context says:

[T]he Lord sent forth His angel to reveal the truths of heaven as in times past, even as in ancient days. This should have been hailed as the greatest blessing which could have been bestowed upon any nation, kindred, tongue, or people. It should have been received with hearts of gratitude and gladness, praise and thanksgiving.

But as it was in the days of our Savior, so was it in the advent of this new dispensation. It was not in accordance with the notions, traditions, and pre-conceived ideas of the American people. The messenger did not come to an eminent divine of any of the so-called orthodoxy, he did not adopt their interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. The Lord did not come with the armies of heaven, in power and great glory, nor send His messengers panoplied with aught else than the truth of heaven, to communicate to the meek, the lowly, the youth of humble origin, the sincere enquirer after the knowledge of God. But He did send His angel to this same obscure person, Joseph Smith jun., who afterwards became a Prophet, Seer, and Revelator, and informed him that he should not join any of the religious sects of the day, for they were all wrong; that they were following the precepts of men instead of the Lord Jesus; that He had a work for him to perform, inasmuch as he should prove faithful before Him.

Brigham was not giving a recitation of the First Vision, though he described some of its details. His point was that when God restored the fulness of the Gospel to the Earth, He followed the same pattern for prophetic revelation He always had. It did not come from a thundering army announcing the news to the entire world. Instead, it came by delivering a one-on-one message to a single prophet.

Additionally, none of these quotes are from the only time these people ever referenced the First Vision. Brigham Young referenced elements of it, or was in the proximity of others mentioning it, on numerous occasions throughout his life. Sometimes he used the word “angel,” other times he didn’t. In fact, in this exact same sermon Faulk quoted, Brigham used several phrases from the 1838 First Vision account.

“The same organization and Gospel that Christ died for … is again established in this generation. How did it come? By the ministering of an holy angel from God, out of heaven, who held converse with man, and revealed unto him the darkness that enveloped the world … He told him the Gospel was not among men, and that there was not a true organization of His kingdom in the world … Joseph was strengthened by the Spirit and power of God, and was enabled to listen to the teachings of the angel. . . . The man to whom the angel appeared obeyed the Gospel.” (Wilford Woodruff, Journal of Discourses, vol.2, 1855, pp.196-197)

When I looked this one up, my mouth actually dropped open a little bit. Those ellipses are shady:

That same organization and Gospel that Christ died for, and the Apostles spilled their blood to vindicate, is again established in this generation. How did it come? By the ministering of an holy angel from God, out of heaven, who held converse with man, and revealed unto him the darkness that enveloped the world, and unfolded unto him the gross darkness that surrounded the nations, those scenes that should take place in this generation, and would follow each other in quick succession, even unto the coming of the Messiah. The angel taught Joseph Smith those principles which are necessary for the salvation of the world; and the Lord gave him commandments, and sealed upon him the Priesthood, and gave him power to administer the ordinances of the house of the Lord. He told him the Gospel was not among men, and that there was not a true organization of His kingdom in the world, that the people had turned away from His true order, changed the ordinances, and broken the everlasting covenant, and inherited lies and things wherein there was no profit. He told him the time had come to lay the foundation for the establishment of the Kingdom of God among men for the last time, preparatory to the winding up scene. Joseph was strengthened by the Spirit and power of God, and was enabled to listen to the teachings of the angel. He told him he should be made an instrument in the hands of the Lord, if he kept His commandments, in doing a good work upon the earth, that his name should be held in honor by the honest in heart, and in dishonor throughout the nations by the wicked. He told him he should be an instrument in laying the foundation of a work that should gather tens of thousands of the children of men, in the generation in which he lived, from every nation under heaven, who should hear the sound of it through his instrumentality. He told him the nations were wrapt in wickedness and abomination, and that the judgments of God were ready to be poured out upon them in their fulness; that the angels were holding the vials of His wrath in readiness; but the decree is that they shall not be poured out until the nations are warned, that they may be left without an excuse. 

This man to whom the angel appeared obeyed the Gospel; he received it in meekness and humility, and bowed down before the Lord and worshipped Him, and did the best he could in his illiterate state; he was as it were but a mere plow-boy. 

Woodruff calls the angel “the Lord” twice in the omitted passages. The entire thing also testifies strongly of Joseph’s call as the Prophet of the Restoration. No wonder those portions were cut out.

And again, Wilford Woodruff spoke often of the First Vision, and he used a variety of terms while doing so: the angel; the Lord; the Son of God; God Himself; the Father and the Son (at least five separate times); the God of heaven; and God the Father and God the Son. To claim he was unaware of the details of the First Vision is absurd.

“He [Joseph Smith] went humbly before the Lord and inquired of Him, and the Lord answered his prayer, and revealed to Joseph, by the ministration of angels, the true condition of the religious world. When the holy angel appeared, Joseph inquired which of all these denominations was right and which he should join, and was told they were all wrong.” (George A. Smith, Journal of Discourses, 1863, vol.12, pp.334)

Unlike the last one, this quote doesn’t have any omissions. George A. Smith did refer to Joseph being visited by an angel during the First Vision on two different occasions, but he also quoted from and read sections of the 1838 First Vision account on several public occasions, including just the year after this particular sermon.

Additionally, George A. Smith was called as the Church Historian in 1854. The Church Historian surely knew the details of the First Vision. And we know that Smith did, because while serving in that capacity, he published in the Deseret News a history of the Church that included the First Vision. This history stated that Joseph saw “two glorious Beings wrapped in a brilliant and glorious light.”

“How was it, and which was right? None of them was right, just as it was when the Prophet Joseph asked the angel which of the sects was right that he might join it. The answer was that none of them are right. What, none of them? No. We will not stop to argue that question; the angel merely told him to join none of them that none of them were right.” (John Taylor, Journal of Discourses, vol.20, 1879, pp.158-171)

The above statement from 3rd president of the Church, John Taylor, reveals that as late as 1879 (35 years after Joseph Smith’s death; 59 years after his vision) the Church was still not teaching that Joseph saw two personages but only an “angel.” This makes it seem that the official version in the Pearl of Great Price must be a much later revision.

This one is such an insane claim, I’m actually a little surprised it wasn’t in the CES Letter instead. Not only does John Taylor have a lengthy history of discussing the First Vision in some detail, but this particular sermon was given the exact same day as another sermon by Taylor that also referenced the First Vision. In that other sermon, Taylor said, “When the Father and the Son and Moroni and others came to Joseph Smith, he had a priesthood conferred upon him…”

Like the others on Faulk’s list, he used a variety of terms to describe the vision. Many of them came before this quoted sermon. Those terms included: an holy angel; two glorious personages; the Lord; the Father and the Son; God Himself through his Son, Jesus Christ; God Himself accompanied by the Savior; the Lord accompanied by his Son Jesus; the Lord together with his Son Jesus; both the Father and the Son; God the Father, and God the Son; God and His Son Jesus; Heavenly Father pointed to the Savior; etc.

Imagine having the audacity to claim that “the Church was still not teaching that Joseph saw two personages but only an ‘angel’” after John Taylor himself used all of those other terms. And this is just John Taylor we’re talking about. It isn’t even counting all of the dozens of other references and accounts from multiple people prior to 1879 that clearly say two personages were there. Faulk claims to have been an avid student of Church history. For him to then make a statement like this is mind-boggling. Or blatantly dishonest, take your pick. This is right up there with the very worst things in the CES Letter. It’s a flat-out lie. And he expects any of us to trust anything he has to say after this?

Personally, I’m not in the habit of trusting sources that lie to me. And I hope none of you are, either.

Sarah Allen is relatively new in her affiliation with FAIR. By profession, she works in mortgage compliance and is a freelance copyeditor. An avid reader, she loves studying the Gospel and the history of the restored Church. After watching some of her friends lose their testimonies, she became interested in helping others through their faith crises. That’s when she began sharing what she’d learned through her studies. She’s grateful to those at FAIR who have given her the opportunity to share her testimony with a wider audience.

The post Letter For My Wife Rebuttal, Part 3: The Early Church – The First Vision [B] appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: What Must I Do To Be Saved?

by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC

John 3:16-18 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.”

Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about what it means to be saved. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand. 

Well, if there ever was a topic where Latter-day Saints and Evangelicals get confused over language it’s this one…What is salvation? Our agenda for today is this: First we’ll talk about how Evangelicals understand salvation and why they think the way they do, next we’ll answer their questions hopefully in a way they can hear, and then we’ll talk about the unique contributions our faith makes to this part of the conversation. 

What Does it Mean to be Saved?

In our church when we talk about life after death we have a conceptualization that pretty much everybody is “saved.” We get anxious about what exactly that will look like, and especially anxious over what the relationships will be there, but the actual question of salvation isn’t really all that interesting to us. But it is huge to Evangelicals and I want to help you understand why. First I’m going to talk about Evangelicals broadly, and then about the two subsets of Evangeliclas who view these issues slightly differently. 

First, in general Evangelicals believe that after this life is over each person will face judgment where there really is only one question God asks, “What did you believe about my son, Jesus Christ?” Those who can answer that question by saying they believe Jesus is Lord receive a reward of eternal happiness in Heaven, and those who either can’t say that Jesus is Lord, or who have never heard of Jesus are condemned to eternal suffering in Hell. While historically Catholics have believed that there is some wiggle room with their conceptualization of Purgatory, Evangelicals believe it is a one-time judgment that can never be changed, even if the reason for the person’s lack of belief is that they lived in a time and place where no one had heard of Jesus. 

And if you remember from an earlier video you know that Evangelicals as we know them today are really a post-WW2 invention.  One of the original goals of the Evangelical movement was to take down all barriers that churches had put up for people coming to Christ. And as their name – Evangelical – implies they are very interested in sharing the message of salvation with everyone. But they had a problem which was churches who put up, in their opinion, too many barriers to faith. And by this they meant requiring people to be baptized. Now, many Evangelical churches still practice baptism, it has not gone away. Instead what has happened is that they’ve changed the process from, as the New Testament puts it, “Believe and be baptized” to “Believe, say the sinner’s prayer, and later show evidence that you have done these things already through your act of baptism.”  Baptism itself is not efficacious, it’s the sinner’s prayer that actually does the heavy lifting, and the baptism is for show. So for them, to be saved means that you pray a prayer of repentance, inviting Jesus “into  your heart,” and then you are saved. When judgment day arrives for you the issue will be already settled since you have made some declaration that Jesus is Lord and will be placed in Heaven. That’s what salvation is for them in a general sense. 

Two subsets

I don’t want to get too far off track here but there are two important distinctions to talk about here. “Evangelical” is a broad term.  It’s not a denomination. It’s a descriptor that applies to many different types of churches. You can be a Baptist, and be an Evangelical. You can be a non-denominational church and be an Evangelical. And there is another descriptor that it’s important to talk about here: Calvinist. Evangelicals come in 3 varieties: Calvinists, Non-Calvinists, and Blind-To-Theology. The Bling-to-Theology category simply means this: members at a specific church are not taught using theological terms or categories. This is your, “We just love talking about Jesus” kind of church. Now, the leadership of that church, and the denomination they belong to (if they belong to one) absolutely has a stance as Calvinist or Non-Calvinist, but the pew-sitting people in those churches couldn’t tell you who Calvin was or how he is influencing their lives if you paid them. Their leaders simply side-step the issue by using other language to talk about the same things. So, really, we only have 2 categories.

100 years ago it would be easy to spot a Cavlinist church because they were mostly called either “Presbyterian” or “Reformed.” That hasn’t been the case for a long time. The hipster church on the corner that is called something like, “Engage! Church” could be Calvinist, or they could be Non-Calvinist, you’d have to dig to find out. So what is a Calvinist anyway and why is it important?

John Calvin was born during the Renaissance in France. He’s educated at the University of Paris but right after his University studies he breaks away from the Catholic Church and becomes a Protestant (French Protestants are called Huguenots) but eventually he has to flee to Switzerland because there is a great deal of violence against Protestants in France during that era. Calvin was trained as a lawyer, but he becomes a theologian and you can see the lawyer in him when you read his theology. And Calvin’s biggest theological contribution is the idea that because God is so Supreme, so sufficient, so all-knowing, he already knows who will and won’t be saved (at this time in history that’s the “believe and be baptized” version of being saved, not the “pray the sinner’s prayer version.) And in fact, this knowledge in God is so certain it must only be because he chose who would be saved and who wouldn’t. And, even further, it is entirely possible for a person to want to be saved, but if God has decided they will not be saved, there is no hope for them. The opposite is true too – if God has decided you are to be saved, that will be “irresistible” to you in a way that requires no agency from you. Today, there are various versions of Calvinism, some softer than others, but the basic idea is the same: God chooses who will be saved and who won’t. A person can’t really know for sure that they’re saved until the judgment. 

Calvinism still has a huge influence on Christianity today, especially in America. Roughly 60% of Evangelical churches believe some form of Calvinism, and this is part of what fuels the grace-vs-works debate. But it’s not a clear-cut distinction for which Evangelical church follows it and which ones don’t. The opposite position, Armeniniasm believes every person has the possibility of being saved and that the church should work hard to reach as many people as possible. But most churches have some mix in them.  I grew up in an Evangelical church where we were jokingly told, “You should spend your waking hours as an Armeniest (meaning you should work hard to spread the gospel) but you sleep like a Calvinist (meaning you should leave it all in God’s hands and be content with whatever he decides.)” 

You can see, in these two subsets there are two very different views on what it means to be saved. In one version God pre-decides it for a person, and no agency of theirs is required. In the other version the person has to use their will to decide to follow God, and that creates salvation for them. (I know this doesn’t make any sense, I didn’t make the rules, I’m just telling you.)

So, you can see, even within Evangelicalism there is disagreement about what it means regarding how to get saved. But they all agree on the fact that not being saved means eternity in Hell.  How will that time be spent? Opinions vary from, “eternal conscious torment” to “obliteration,” and obliteration is about the best you can hope for. About 15 years ago there was a movement in the Evangelical world to reconsider what Hell is, who goes there, and how that time will be spent, and the “obliteration” option largely became more popular because of that movement. Which means that in their view, if we’re considering a person who has never heard of Jesus Christ, the very best thing we can hope happens after they die is that they simply no longer exist. The alternative is that they are consciously tormented forever. 

Talking About Salvation

Normally in these videos I’ve tried to explain the Evangelical position in a way that hopefully makes you say, “yeah, I can see where they’re coming from even if I disagree.” But I gotta be honest, it’s really hard to do that here. The best I can do is to point out to you that their belief system (whether they’re Calvinists or not) is highly self-reinforcing. When I was an Evangelical I completely bought into this system because of the ways it’s self-reinforcing. There is the threat of eternal damnation hanging in the balance after all. But I’ll tell you how it started to crack for me. 

I grew up in a family where my mom took us to church and my dad only attended if us kids were having some kind of special event (a special choir performance, etc.) I was taught as a girl that someone like my dad would go immediately to Hell if he died in his unbelief. They softened that for people like me by saying, “life is long and you have no idea when someone’s heart might turn to God.” But it turned out that my dad’s life was not long. He died in a car crash at 44 years old. I was 12, which doesn’t sound very old, but I was a weird kid and interested in theology straight out of the womb. So I had to figure out how to understand that my church said my father was going to be consciously tormented forever without letting it break my faith. And in my little 12-year-old mind I kept a secret thought, “I think my church is wrong about that.” It would take me decades to gain enough theological sophistication to think all the way through that, of course, but that’s where it started. And I can tell you exactly where I was standing when I had it (12th and M street, Modesto CA), because it shook my world. The fruition of that thought wouldn’t come for decades, but I don’t know that I would be here today without it. 

I tell you all of that to say this: There are Evangelicals out there who question this system they’re in, even if it is very quietly. And frankly, our church’s conceptualization of the afterlife is far kinder, far more in line with the character of God. In this series we’re talking about the gifts our church has to offer to the larger Christian world, and this is certainly one of those areas. When you talk with Evangelicals about, “what it means to be saved” you will have to fight past a lot of anxiety about the threat of Hell, and worries about getting things wrong, and an entire self-reinforcing system. But you have something to offer here that your friends or family members might end up wanting.

More Come, Follow Me resources here.

Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities.

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