scholarly journals The Earth as “Mother of Men” in Latter-Day Saint Theology

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 1016
Author(s):  
Kevin L. Tolley
Keyword(s):  
First Year ◽  
Significant Information ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Environmental Care ◽  
Additional Information ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Church ◽  
Theological Implication ◽  
Insight Into

Following the completion of work on the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith began his work on expanding the Bible’s scope. Unlike many of his contemporary Bible thinkers who were also working on translations of the Bible, Smith expanded the text in unique ways, breathing life into archaic and mysterious figures and developing themes far beyond the Biblical scope. Within the first year of the Church of Jesus Christ, Smith introduced significant information concerning a vision of the pseudepigraphical character of Enoch and additional information concerning the creation narrative. These additions give insight into Smith’s understanding of his theology and his views on the environment. These additional writings connect environmental care and social injustice. The unique theological implication is that the treatment of the marginalized and downtrodden is closely related to the environment.

scholarly journals Rasesynet hos mormonerne i det forrige århundre

1991 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johnnie Glad
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Dark Skin ◽  
White Skin ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Mormon Church ◽  
The Church

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (also known as the Mormon Church) was established on April 6, 1830, by Joseph Smith, Jr. in Fayette, New York. The Mormon Church claims to be not only a Christian church, but also the only true church here on earth. In addition to the Bible, this church has several authoritative sacred scriptures, such as the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price.One of the issues that has haunted the Mormon Church down through the years and caused considerable embarrassment and unrest, has been the race issue. Why were Negroes prohibited from entering the priesthood? Why were the Indians and the Negroes stigmatized? Why should a white skin be considered better and more favourable than a dark skin?The intention of this article is to throw some light on this issue and see how it developed during the previous century. It is important in this context to examine the Mormon scriptures. What did they have to say about this issue? And what about the church leaders? How did they look upon and tackle these problems? The leaders of the church had great authority and power. What they said and did had far-reaching consequences in the church and created a pattern for other to follow. The following century is a case in point.

Priesthood Ordination

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan A. Stapley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
The Temple ◽  
The Church ◽  
Power And Authority

Early Mormons used the Book of Mormon as the basis for their ecclesiology and understanding of the open heaven. Church leaders edited, harmonized, and published Joseph Smith’s revelation texts, expanding understandings of ecclesiastical priesthood office. Joseph Smith then revealed the Nauvoo Temple liturgy, with its cosmology that equated heaven, kinship, and priesthood. This cosmological priesthood was materialized through sealings at the temple altar and was the context for expansive teachings incorporating women into priesthood. This cosmology was also the basis for polygamy, temple adoption, and restrictions on the participation of black men and women in the church. This framework gave way at the end of the nineteenth century to a new priesthood cosmology introduced by Joseph F. Smith based on male ecclesiastical office. As church leaders expanded the meaning of priesthood to comprise the entire power and authority of God, they struggled to integrate women into church cosmology.

Translation

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Taves
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Upstate New York ◽  
The Third ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
The Church

In 1823, Joseph Smith (1805–44), a farmer and treasure seeker in Upstate New York, had a vision in which a personage told him of ancient golden plates buried in a hillside, which Mormons claim he recovered, translated, and published as the Book of Mormon (1830) and which led to the founding of a restored church (1830). The revelation to Smith that Mormons now refer to as “D&C 3,” that is, the third revelation in the current edition of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' canonized Doctrine and Covenants, provides our first direct window into the emergence of early Mormonism. Although there is evidence to suggest that Smith received what he and others viewed as revelations prior to this one, this is the first revelation that was written down at about the time it was received. This chapter centers on that revelation, using it to reconstruct not only the event itself but the events that led up to and followed from it, as they likely appeared to those who were involved at the time.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max Perry Mueller
Keyword(s):  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Racial Boundaries ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

This chapter concludes the book with a survey of the history of Mormonism and race after Brigham Young’s death in 1877 to the present. For more than a century, the church worked to fortify the racial boundaries around the Mormon identity that Brigham Young erected during his tenure as president and prophet. And yet, pressures from inside as well as outside the church continually contested these boundaries. This chapter also meditates on how and why the church has recently renewed its universalism, and done so in relation to a rereading of the Book of Mormon. Yet this contemporary Mormon universalism is a new universalism. It is cast explicitly in a different shade than the white universalism that was proposed, and in some ways practiced, by the church that Joseph Smith founded in 1830.

Scriptures

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terryl Givens
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Patriarchal Narratives ◽  
The Church

The Book of Mormon What is the Book of Mormon? The Book of Mormon, which members of the Church of Jesus Christ accept as scripture alongside the Bible, begins as a clan history, like the patriarchal narratives of Genesis, set close to the year...

“Not to Be Trammeled”

2019 ◽  
pp. 241-270
Author(s):  
Terryl Givens ◽  
Brian M. Hauglid
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Boundary Maintenance ◽  
Articles Of Faith ◽  
The Church

Christian creeds go back to the first Christian centuries. Catholics produced creeds largely to establish the lines demarcating orthodoxy and heresy. Protestants at first were hostile to creeds and often invoked the Bible as the lone and sufficient creed for Christians. Joseph Smith’s hostility to creeds was common, especially among other restorationists. Eventually virtually all Protestants realized that without a creed, boundary maintenance was impossible. Early missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints found it necessary to summarize and define the uniqueness of their message—effectively creating the first creeds. Joseph Smith, explicitly hostile to creeds as too circumscribing of belief, found himself forced by the same imperative to articulate his own summation of Mormon teachings. His Thirteen Articles of Faith are, however, wholly inadequate as a creed, since they omit many of the most core doctrines of the church. They are best understood, in Rodney Stark’s formula, as establishing an optimum tension with competing religious faiths—not too radical and not too familiar.

An American Book of Chronicles

2019 ◽  
pp. 136-158
Author(s):  
Eran Shalev
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Early American ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
The Bible ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
The Republic ◽  
American Book

By the time Joseph Smith published The Book of Mormon, Americans had been producing and consuming faux biblical texts for close to a century. Imitating a practice that originated as a satirical literary genre in eighteenth-century Britain, Americans began producing pseudo-biblical texts during the Revolution. This essay demonstrates how the prism of pseudo-biblicism allows us to view The Book of Mormon as emerging from a larger biblico-American world. The genre demonstrates how pervasive the Bible was in the cultural landscape of the Republic and the ease with which Americans lapsed into biblical language. As this essay points out, however, pseudo-biblical discourse also sheds new light on The Book of Mormon. The similarities between The Book of Mormon and other pseudo-biblical texts provide a significant context to understanding the creation and reception of Smith’s text, the culture of biblicism in the nineteenth century, and the intellectual history of the early American Republic.

Joseph Smith's Translation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Morris Brown
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
Metal Plates ◽  
King James Bible ◽  
The Church

Among many remarkable claims, Mormon founder Joseph Smith reported that he had translated ancient scriptures. He dictated the Book of Mormon, an American Bible from metal plates associated with Native antiquity; directly rewrote the King James Bible; and produced a scripture, derived from Egyptian funerary papyri, that he called the Book of Abraham. Smith and his followers used the term “translation” to describe the genesis of these English texts, which remain canonical for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Most commenters see these scriptures as merely linguistic objects; the central and controversial question has been whether Smith’s English texts are literal translations of extant source documents. On closer inspection, though, his translations are far more metaphysical than linguistic. These translations express a nonordinary power of language to connect people across barriers of space and time. Within these metaphysical scriptures, Smith expounded a theology of human deification that he also termed “translation.” This one word thus referred to a scripture capable of mediating between the living and the dead and to the transformation of humans into divine beings. Joseph Smith’s projects of metaphysical translation place Mormonism at a productive edge of tense transitions later associated with secular modernity, a modernity challenged by the very existence of the Latter-day Saints. Smith’s translations and the theology that supported them illuminate the power and vulnerability of his critique of American culture in transition as they set the stage for two more centuries of cultural change.

Biblical Philology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk van Miert
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
The State ◽  
Orthodox Church ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The Church ◽  
Insight Into

Chapter 2 gives an example of how historiography has hitherto been skewed in favour of aligning philology with latitudinarian readings of the Bible. Philology was not the prerogative of the more libertine faction in the Reformed Orthodox Church; on the contrary, it was the orthodox Franciscus Gomarus who excelled in biblical scholarship. Philology was only of marginal concern in the highly public theological discussion in the decade following the death of Scaliger in 1609: the ‘Troubles’ over predestination and the relation between the State and the Church, which brought the nascent Dutch state to the brink of civil war. Arminius professed to value philological methods in his letters and showed an insight into recent developments, but this was of no consequence for his dogmatic position. His adversary Franciscus Gomarus proved a far more accomplished philologist than Arminius, but his philological work postdates the Troubles and has therefore been largely ignored.

The Pearl of Greatest Price

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terryl Givens ◽  
Brian Hauglid
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
Fourth Volume ◽  
History Of ◽  
Articles Of Faith ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Principal Parts ◽  
The Church

This book narrates the history of Mormonism’s fourth volume of scripture, canonized in 1880. The book tracks this work’s predecessors, describes its several components, and assesses their theological significance in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Four principal parts are discussed, along with the controversies associated with each. The Book of Moses purports to be a Mosaic narrative missing from the biblical version of Moses’s purported writings. Little noticed in the scholarship on Mormonism, these chapters, produced only months after the Book of Mormon was published, actually contain almost all of Mormonism’s core doctrines as well as a virtual template for the project of Restoration Joseph Smith was to effect. Most controversial of all is the Book of Abraham, a production that arose out of a group of papyri Smith acquired, along with four mummies, in 1835. Most of the papyri disappeared in the great Chicago fire of 1871, but the surviving fragments come from Egyptian documents. That fact and the translations Smith attempted to make from the hieroglyphs on the surviving vignettes have convinced most Egyptologists that Smith’s work was fraudulent or inept. Mormon scholars, however, have developed several frameworks for vindicating its inspiration and his calling as a prophet. Chapter 3 attempts to make sense of Smith’s several, at times divergent, accounts of his First Vision, one of which is canonized as scripture. Chapter 4 assesses the creedal nature of Smith’s “Articles of Faith” in the context of his professed anticreedalism.

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