From sacred history to sacred law to sacred history
Some thoughts on the nature of the Doctrine & Covenants
Greetings,
I have been asked to teach the Dialogue “Sunday school lesson” next Sunday on the Doctrine & Covenants, so I thought that this week I would share some thoughts on the nature of that book. For the non-Mormons in the audience, the Doctrine & Covenants is one of three books of scripture that Latter-day Saints add to the Bible in their canon. For believers, the book is of inherent interest. However, even for those who aren’t Latter-day Saints, the Doctrine & Covenants should be of interest because it’s a book of scripture for which we have unusually complete textual evidence as to its creation. Imagine studying the Pentateuch with a complete copy of the P, E, and J sources or a New Testament where you could consult a transcript of Q. In short, it’s a fascinating study of how canon is formed.
The Doctrine & Covenants consists mainly of written revelations that were dictated by the Prophet Joseph Smith between 1828 and his death in 1844. These revelations, which at the time were called “commandments” and today are referred to as “sections,” were then collected and published as a book of scripture, supplemented by additional revelations to Brigham Young (1847), Wilford Woodruff (1890), Joseph F. Smith (1918), and Spencer W. Kimball (1978). If one looks at the history of world scripture, the book that the Doctrine & Covenants most resembles is the Quran, which consists of revelations (suras) dictated by the Prophet Muhammed. Like the Quran, the Doctrine & Covenants has no overt narrative structure, although like the suras, each of its sections was given in response to concrete questions or problems facing Joseph and the early Latter-day Saint community. Unlike the suras of the Quran, however, we generally have pretty good contemporary historical information about the context of each revelation and thanks to the Joseph Smith Papers Project sponsored by the Church, the earliest extant text of each of these revelations is now easily available. One of the interesting things that these early sources show is that often the earliest text of the revelations differs from the canonized versions. More on this anon.
Joseph Smith’s revelations were not initially collected as a book of scripture. Rather, they circulated in handwritten copies or were published in Church newspapers. In addition, Joseph Smith’s scribes transcribed copies into an office record that is often the earliest textual source for some sections. In 1833, all of the then existing revelations were collected for publication in the Book of Commandments. Because this book was published in Missouri during the height of the first round of anti-Mormon violence in the state, very few copies were printed and it never circulated widely. In 1835, a second collection, the Doctrine & Covenants, was published in Kirtland, which included not only the text of Joseph’s revelations but the Lectures on Faith, a jointly authored theological treatise used in the Kirtland School of the Prophets.
The shift in organization from the Book of Commandments to the 1835 Doctrine & Covenants is interesting. In the Book of Commandments, Joseph’s revelations are organized more or less chronologically. It thus implicitly presents itself as a record of sacred history. The unstated narrative of the text is the story of Joseph Smith and the restoration of the Church. In contrast, the 1835 Doctrine & Covenants is not organized chronologically. Rather it organized more or less in terms of what we might think of as practical authority. The first section is what is today D&C 1, a revelation given specifically as an introduction to this 1835 collection. The next section is what is today D&C 20, which sets forth basic governing procedures for the Church, followed by a number of sections labeled “On Priesthood.”
Where the Book of Commandments was implicitly a work of sacred history, I think that the 1835 Doctrine & Covenants is best thought of as a legal text. What I mean by this is that it was not primarily an implicit record of sacred events. Rather, as was explained in the 1835 preface (not to be confused with modern D&C 1) , the revelations were presented as “items or principles for the regulation of the church, as taken from the revelations which have been given since its organization, as well as from former ones.” This also explains the inclusions of an “Appendix” that contained non-revealed texts “On Government” and “On Marriage,” which responded to practical needs of the Church. (The section on government is included in the modern Doctrine & Covenants as D&C 134, the only section not written by a president of the Church, and the document “On Marriage” was dropped in the 1870s.) I suspect that this explains the choice to label each revelation a “section” – a word drawn from statutes and legislation. It also explains in part why the published text of some revelations depart from their earliest recorded versions. The point of the 1835 Doctrine & Covenants was not to document the past. Rather, it was to provide the text of the currently controlling rules of the Church. When rules and structures were changed between the time that an original revelation was given and that revelation’s 1835 publication – this is especially evident in D&C 20 (basic rules for the Church) and D&C 42 (rules for the law of consecration) – the 1835 version of the text was updated. The 1835 Doctrine & Covenants was thus like the U.S. Code. The U.S. Code is not a record of all of the laws passed by Congress. That is contained in a collection entitled U.S. Statutes at Large. Rather, the U.S. Code is a topical compilation of the acts of Congress that are currently legally controlling.
Joseph Smith and the Church, however, did not stand still in 1835. Indeed, many of Joseph’s biggest innovations – like teachings on sealings and eternal marriage, temple ordinances, work for the dead, and eternal progress – weren’t revealed or fully articulated until after 1835. The Saints were thus left with a law book that soon became out of date. In 1874, Brigham Young asked Orson Pratt to revise the Doctrine & Covenants, a project that took him two years and resulted in a new version of the book in 1876. The modern Doctrine & Covenants is essentially the version that Orson Pratt produced in 1876, less the Lectures on Faith, which were dropped in 1921, and with the additional materials added in 1890, 1918, and the 1970s.
Unlike the 1835 version, Orson Pratt’s Doctrine & Covenants is not a legal text. He abandoned the 1835 organization, opting instead to present the revelations in more or less chronological order. (He made a few mistakes.) However, he wasn’t simply producing a historical record. Rather, he was producing a kind of sacred history. This had at least two consequences. The first is that he needed to fill in the story from 1835 to 1876 in a way that captured what he found most spiritually important. This meant including revelations given to Joseph after 1835, but it also meant including other texts by Joseph that had not been formally given as revelations but which Orson regarded as spiritually significant. Examples include D&C 121, D&C 122, and D&C 128 (text taken from letters) and D&C 130 and D&C 131 (text taken from sermons). What these materials do is either canonize the spiritual reaction to central events like the Missouri persecutions or provide a canonized source for key doctrines, like redemption of the dead. Orson also dropped the 1835 statement “On Marriage,” which had fiercely defended monogamy, in favor of D&C 132, Joseph’s revelation on plural marriage. The replacement of “On Marriage” with D&C 132 not only canonized plural marriage, which was then being fiercely defended and practiced by the Church, but also elevated what had been a secret, personal revelation to Emma Smith into a public document controlling on the Church. The place of the text in sacred history gave it a public authority that the text itself did not claim. (To be clear, I am not denying that Joseph presented polygamy as an authoritative practice only pointing out that D&C 132 was not originally given as a public document.) In other words, part of what made Orson Pratt’s sacred history sacred was the implicit claim that that history was authoritative in some sense for Latter-day Saints.
If we understand the Doctrine & Covenants as scripture that went from sacred history (1833) to sacred law (1835) and then back to sacred history (1876) there are some interesting implications. First, it explains the textual differences between the earliest copies of some revelations and the current canonized form. When Orson Pratt created his sacred history in 1876 he was using the 1835 texts, but these texts were not prepared as sacred history but as controlling law. The “inaccuracies” in the canon-as-sacred-history are a result of the whiplash from history to law and back to history.
Second, and more importantly, the current organization of the Doctrine & Covenants invites Latter-day Saints to read it as sacred history rather than as law. The Doctrine & Covenants claims authority over believers but it does so as sacred history rather than as law. Hence, any well-informed Latter-day Saint understands that the current procedures for Church government are contained in the General Handbook not D&C 20. Rather, D&C 20 is read as providing a kind of ur-text on Church government as a founding document. As sacred history, the Doctrine & Covenants has also created problems in the past for members who have discovered that it is not an entirely accurate history because it is based on texts (the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants) that weren’t accurate records of original events. Finally, if we understand that the Doctrine & Covenants was prepared as sacred history in 1876, we should also be able to recognize that our view of sacred history as modern Latter-day Saints will not be precisely the same as Orson Pratt’s view.
This can be seen most starkly in the contrast between D&C 132 (announcing plural marriage) and D&C OD-1 (ending plural marriage). The addition of the Manifesto ending plural marriage to the Doctrine & Covenants fundamentally changes the meaning of the history that Orson canonized in 1876. Modern Latter-day Saints are committed monogamists rather than committed polygamists. Thus D&C 132 becomes “a problem” that must be finessed in some way rather than a triumphant prelude to a polygamist present. Part of what a faithful modern reading of the Doctrine & Covenants involves is thus both a recovery of the history that underlies Orson’s organization but also an interpretation of that history in light of what it means to be Latter-day Saint in 2021 rather than 1876.
See you next week,
Nate
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