Matter and Revelation
How does the fundamental nature of matter constrain revelation?
You can listen to the audio version of this essay here.
Welcome back from Christmas break. I hope you had a nice holiday. If we were in elementary school, this is the time when we would share with each other what gifts we got (and those gifts would be video games, obviously). So let me share with you: I got a bunch of Joseph Smith-related books that I’m going to use to teach a class on his sermons and writings this next semester. These include:
Joseph Smith’s Doctrines and Insights (volume 2A, volume 2B)
Joseph Smith Papers: Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon
Law and the Restoration: Law and Latter-day Saint Thought and Scripture
On the whole the books are pretty good, though they’re very different from each other and so are useful for different purposes. Uncanonized Revelations is redundant with the Joseph Smith Papers volumes, since all it does is repeat material that has already appeared elsewhere, but it’s convenient to have the non-scriptural revelations all gathered into a single place. The Encyclopedia has a lot of material and is organized well, but it has the problem of having been made before the Joseph Smith Papers books, so you know there’s stuff out there that isn’t in the book. Most of the references are to the Documentary History of the Church and that’s a problem. The Doctrines and Insights books are fine but are organized a little strangely and no attempt is made to differentiate between documents created during Smith’s lifetime and reminiscences made, in some cases, decades later; they are not on the same footing when it comes to his teachings. The Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon is beautiful and I love looking through it, and the two Law and the Restoration books, by a law professor at William and Mary named Nate Oman, touch on lots of topics and are well done (though they don’t talk about the priesthood much, I think).
The one that’s probably most helpful overall for studying what Joseph Smith taught is The Revised and Expanded Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith. As you may know, in the middle of the twentieth century, Joseph Fielding Smith compiled a bunch of Joseph Smith’s writings and preachings into a single volume and called the collection Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith. This book was useful for a lot of reasons—the biggest was that it was the first collection of Smith’s views from throughout his life, so in a single book you could have access to lots of material. It was also published many times, so it was easy to get a copy (in English it was easy, at least, though I also saw a Spanish translation when I was a missionary). And for the most part the re-publications had the same pagination as the original edition, which meant that there was a fairly standard way of referring to passages in the book.
While Teachings was good for its time, it had two major downsides. It had decent coverage, but it wasn’t comprehensive, so it was missing a lot; some of this problem was fixed by the release of Words of Joseph Smith in the 1980’s, but that book focused only on the Nauvoo period. The second issue was that there were a lot of changes made to the text as it went from the original sources to the Teachings book. This downside was then exacerbated by Fielding Smith’s practice of treating certain sources, like the Documentary History of the Church, as though they were true primary sources, and so you ended up with layers of changes made by who knows who at who knows what time. The end result of all that is that, while the Teachings is a good guide to some things Smith thought, you can’t fully trust it, which for me is just the worst feeling when it comes to doing research. A research source that betrays you in an important way is like an unfaithful spouse: once it happens even a single time, you can never fully trust them again.
The Revised and Expanded Teachings does help with these issues. It does so by putting the original Teachings material into one column, and then in the very next column it adds the primary source, or at least the original source, whatever it might be. This setup allows you to compare the old Teachings with whatever those words ultimately come from, so you can see any changes, but you can also just look at the original source and use that if you want. It adds some notes and cites the volumes from the Joseph Smith Papers series whenever it can, so overall it’s pretty great.
Unfortunately, though, we still lack a one-volume edited collection of all of Joseph Smith’s doctrinally-relevant remarks. Such a book would be long, but I own some pretty long books, so there’s no reason it can’t exist in a single volume. I assume something like this is either already in preparation somewhere or will come out in the next handful of years. I’d like to put something like this together eventually as well but that’s still pretty far off since Rainbows has to cover so many more things before we reach the other side.
Anyway, that was my Christmas. And to be clear I did get video games too: Astro Bot and Metaphor: ReFantazio for Playstation 5. My daughter got Stardew Valley and my son got Sonic x Shadow Generations.
Picking up back up with context
For the past three weeks we’ve been taking a break from the principle of context by looking at the thought of Nels Nelson, a farmer, high school teacher, and BYU faculty member in the early twentieth century. We saw some of his ideas on the gospel in general, on revelation, and on covenants.
But we aren’t done with Nelson!
