Evolving Concept of Priesthood

I left off last time promising to outline some key moments in the evolution of JS’s concept of priesthood between 1829 and 1835. I should mention where I align in the range of interpretations of this history, just to be clear on the approach.

Since the 1950s, we’ve seen apologists—those who take the correctness of the church’s truth claims without question and seek to defend the church against criticism—often construe historical evidence to support contemporary narratives about priesthood authority. We’ve seen polemicists—those who insist on the incorrectness of the church’s truth claims and seek to criticize the church—often construe the evidence to undercut JS’s claims to call his integrity into question. Conventional Latter-day Saint historians often construe evidence to support a technically demanding narrative that nevertheless aligns with the main contours of the apologia; we often see in these interpretations a “line-upon-line” justification for apparent contradictions between sources and our narratives.

I approach the primary sources with as much neutrality as possible, bringing as much contextual details as possible, and avoiding fallacies of historical interpretation as much as possible. I don’t care to defend or offend; I just care about the truth of what happened and how it happened. As a personal theology, I want to trust in Jesus and not conflate him with the church or the priesthood. He said he sides with truth, and I trust that’s where he’ll be found anyhow. The method that leads to greater accuracy, consistency, and truth doesn’t need additional justification. If that causes dissonance for religious people who take some assertions about priesthood as non-negotiable, well, so be it, I guess.

Key Events

When we arrange the primary sources in their order of production, we’ll notice right away how priesthood and accounts of angelic visitations arrive later in the sequence than some other key events. Let’s review these bearing in mind fallacies of retrojection, teleology, and decontexutalization.

Preceding JS and his earliest followers was a theological debate principally among mainline Euro-American Protestants over a reference in 2 Thessalonians to a “Man of Sin” being revealed in the last days and a large body of Antichrist lore and premillennial speculation. This setting affects what JS and his associates said, what they meant when they said it, and what we can conclude about the sources. Let’s take these aspects one at a time.

What do I mean by “premillennial speculation”? — It’s well-established how a significant number of North American Christians in the 1800s were fixated on biblical timelines suggesting an end-of-the-world or Judgment Day event. There were variations of what that event constituted, whether Jesus would personally come to earth and reign over it, or a doomsday destruction would annihilate the earth, or a rapturous miracle would lift the faithful into heaven, or God would sit in judgment upon the world, or some combination of these. But any of them as an endtime singularity can be classified as the “Parousia.” One prominent interpretation of biblical prophecies held that a thousand-year season would attend the Parousia; some styles of this interpretation treated the Millennium as coming after the Parousia, others as coming before. Premillennialism was the style that located the Parousia event before the Millennium; for Latter-day Saints, this meant Jesus’s Second Coming appearance being the inaugurating event before a thousand years of peace. Postmillennialism was the style that located the Parousia after the Millennium; usually this means for believers that Jesus’s Second Coming would occur after a thousand years of peace, the Millennium representing a period in which humanity progressively prepare themselves for Christ and his direct presence.

Premillennialism tends to fixate on apocalyptic symbolism in Revelation, Daniel, and other endtimes hotbeds of biblical verse; postmillennialism tends to emphasize humanity’s progression toward a heavenly society, and sometimes even posits that the Millennium has already begun and people today are contributing to preparing the world for the Second Coming. JS and his followers were thoroughly premillennial in outlook, though a nuanced investigation into their millenarianism reveals some interesting postmillennial features and variations from the North American Protestant trend. Passages of the Bible that hinted at the endtimes attracted their interest. References to “Man of Sin,” “Son of Man,” “Jehovah,” “Michael the Archangel,” and so on intensified their readings and speculations.

What do I mean by Antichrist lore? — Premillennial eschatology made a big deal of references to an Antichrist who would make war against Christians/the church shortly before apocalyptic mega-events like Armageddon, Gog and Magog, and the Parousia.1 Interpretations, especially the esoteric kind beloved by JS, Parley P. Pratt, Sidney Rigdon, and other prominent Mormon speakers, treated Antichrist as a necessary, prophesied latter-day precursor to Christ’s coming.2 Speculations tended to identify the Pope as the predicted Antichrist; or world leaders; or, according to a somewhat popular folk conspiracy theory, the Rothschilds or Rockefellers.3 For JS and early Mormons, they expected the Antichrist to make war against the Saints, and as they succeeded in their ministries, they could expect increasing opposition. This would only intensify the closer they came to the Parousia event.

The Man of Sin and endowment of power — In the Luke account of Jesus’s ascension into heaven, Jesus’s parting words to the disciples said to proclaim the gospel to every creature, but first to tarry in Jerusalem until they should be “endued with power from on high.” JS and many other Protestant Christians of the time reasoned that some kind of endowment of power event was necessary before embarking on foreign missions because Satan/Antichrist held dominion over the “heathen” world, and to engage in proclaiming the gospel would draw out the Man of Sin as prophesied in 2 Thessalonians.4 Before the Parousia could commence, the Saints needed to establish the New Jerusalem, and before the New Jerusalem could be established, the gathering of Israel would have to begin, and before the gathering of Israel could begin, elders would have to proclaim the gospel, and before the elders could proclaim the gospel, they would have to be endowed with power from on high, and before they could be endowed with power from on high, they would have to be ordained to the high priesthood and officiate as high priests to be prepared against the Man of Sin. Or so JS reasoned as he convened a conference in June 1831 to instruct and ordain high priests for the first time. At the conference, he ordained Lyman Wight to the high priesthood and then requested that Wight ordain JS a high priest. Several others were ordained, and records suggest all of their ordination blessings included bestowals of spiritual gifts to aid the elders in their ministries. A sudden episode of Harvey Whitlock being overcome by a dark spirit (some, including Hyrum Smith, took the possession to be “not of the Lord” and possibly the devil overtaking Whitlock) convinced the men in attendance that real spiritual danger threatened them and would have overcome them in the field had they not been so ordained to the high priesthood. The vivid display of JS “command[ing] Satan to leave Harvey, laying his hands upon his head at the same time” persuaded those in the room that the prophecy of 2 Thessalonians had been fulfilled: the Man of Sin had been revealed, defeated, and now stayed by their endowment of power through the conferral of high priesthood.5

Notice how themes of “Man of Sin,” “high priesthood,” and “endowment of power” don’t really feature in our contemporary narrative of priesthood restoration. Quite universally, our modern discussions of priesthood cite John the Baptist and Peter, James, and John. But in the historical record, the first mention of priesthood restoration shows up in D&C 26, a mention to JS and Cowdery that they had been given power over Satan; and then in 1831 with this conference of elders/high priests. We still haven’t reached JS’s historical account of his first vision and his description of receiving authority to perform the “baptism of fire and gift of the Holy Ghost” in the “chamber of Father Whitmer” in 1829. In 1831, they aren’t appealing to a story of John the Baptist or of Peter, James, and John, or priesthood keys, or the like; they’re deep into biblical prophecy about the endtimes, the establishment of New Jerusalem, and looking forward to the Second Coming.

JS that year kept expanding on his theology of spirits and the relationship of priesthood to spiritual phenomena. On several occasions, he instructed the elders in the threat of spiritual deceptions, on the need for discernment, and the role of the high priesthood in delivering power to discern all spirits. He received revelations (D&C 46 and 50, especially) indicating the constant trouble of elders confronting ecstatic displays of spirituality, both in themselves and in their proselytes. JS later wrote a long essay titled “Try the Spirits,” which gives his most articulate rationale for how everything imbues spirit and that all spirit must be put on trial and subjected to testing before being accepted as true or from the Holy Spirit. The “keys” were the means of knowing God’s mystery from Satan’s deceptions; anyone could possess keys, and JS himself often gave keys by mentioning “a key” or secret in discerning spirits. Satan constantly attempted to prevail against the church, and to prevent this, Jesus had given Peter the “keys of the kingdom,” the revelations of discernment that enabled him to detect Satan, to anticipate the gates of hell and block their onslaughts on the faithful. JS consistently referred to the visitation of Peter, James, and John as an event in which the “keys of the kingdom” had been bestowed; it was later interpreters who insisted the visitation meant the restoration of the Melchizedek priesthood, but in context of the gates of hell prevailing against the church and the need for JS and Cowdery to block this, it makes sense how this visitation aligned with revelation of discernment traceable to Jesus’s original statement to Peter.6

Ecclesiastical and conciliar concerns predominated throughout 1831 and into 1832 and 1833. Priesthood maintained the spiritual power dimension all along, but JS mapped offices, councils, and structure to priesthood as well. Integrating high priesthood with church organization surfaced in 1834 with several meetings to organize a presidency of high priesthood and ordain the patriarch. Oliver Cowdery began publishing in 1834 his own account of the history of the church as letters written to William Phelps. He said he first met JS on Sabbath evening, Sunday, April 5, 1829; arranged some business with JS “of a temporal nature” on the 6th; and on Tuesday the 7th, began scribing for the Book of Mormon translation. “These were days never to be forgotten,” he famously said. And then Cowdery described “the angel of God” visiting them to deliver the “anxiously-looked-for message” of whom could administer the ordinances of the gospel, baptism in particular. Although Cowdery did not mention John the Baptist by name in this account, he did quote the angel of God conferring “this priesthood” upon both of them “in the name of Messiah.” “We received under his hand the holy priesthood,” he also said.7 JS later expanded what Cowdery had described, providing the details of the angel being John the Baptist and further context for the visitation. But in 1834, there isn’t yet evidence of a Melchizedek/Aaronic distinction in JS and Cowdery’s priesthood rhetoric, though there is now the report of an angelic visitation being the occasion for JS and Cowdery receiving “the holy priesthood” in 1829.

So, when JS delivers his instructions on priesthood in 1835 to the Twelve Apostles, it makes sense how, by that point, the visitation of the angel of God in 1829, the organization of the church in April 1830, the June 1831 conference on the Man of Sin and the endowment of power in the high priesthood, the 1834 organization of the high council, and the 1835 commission of the Twelve and instructions on priesthood constituted the signature restorative events in the church. Those instructions introduced totally new concepts about priesthood we take for granted—that there are two orders, namely the Melchizedek and Aaronic, and that all other offices and councils are appendages. The councils of the priesthood, now codified in a document to be used by the elders when establishing new branches and conferences, were laid out in a scheme, all based on a logic of priesthood orders encompassing each other within various jurisdictions. In later revelations, JS would learn that the endowment of power and solemn assembly were intended for all the Saints in the House of the Lord, and that their foreign missions would inaugurate an even larger emigration vehicle for the gathering of Israel. But for this moment in 1835, the Twelve possessed a new commission and schematic for embarking on their ministry and setting in order the branches, with power in the high priesthood against the gates of hell prevailing against these fledgling congregations.