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.

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.

The Spiritual Evolution of Margarito Bautista

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisa Eastwood Pulido
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
The Third ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
The World ◽  
Magnum Opus ◽  
Mormon Church ◽  
Spiritual Conquest ◽  
The Church ◽  
The U.S

A spiritual biography, this book chronicles the journey of Margarito Bautista (1878–1961) from Mormonism to the Third Convention, a Latter-day Saint (Mormon) splinter group he fomented in 1935–1936, to Colonia Industrial/Nueva Jerusalén, a polygamist utopia Bautista founded in 1947. It argues that Bautista embraced Mormon belief in indigenous exceptionalism in 1901 and rapidly rose through the ranks of Mormon priesthood until convinced that the Mormon hierarchy was not invested in the development of native American peoples, as promoted in the Church’s canon. This realization resulted in tensions over indigenous self-governance within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon Church) and Bautista’s 1937 excommunication. The book contextualizes Bautista’s thought with a chapter on the spiritual conquest of Mexico in 1513 and another on the arrival of Mormons in Mexico. In addition to accounts of Bautista’s congregation-building on both sides of the U.S. border, this volume includes an examination of Bautista’s magnum opus, a 564-page tome hybridizing Aztec history and Book of Mormon narratives, and his prophetic plan for the recovery of indigenous authority in the Americas. Bautista’s excommunication catapulted him into his final spiritual career, that of a utopian founder. In the establishment of his colony, Bautista found a religious home, free from Euro-American oversight, where he implemented his prophetic plan for Mexico’s redemption. His plan included obedience to early Mormonism’s most stringent practices, polygamy and communalism. Bautista nonetheless hoped his community would provide a model for Mexicans willing to prepare the world for Christ’s millennial reign.

“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.

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.

Cultural Crisis in the Mormon Kingdom: A Reconsideration of the Causes of Kirtland Dissent

1980 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 286-297
Author(s):  
Marvin S. Hill
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Land Values ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Cultural Crisis ◽  
The Will ◽  
Gathering Place ◽  
The Church

Until the time that the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints left western New York (where the church had been founded in 1830) and moved en masse to Kirtland, Ohio and then Far West, Missouri (where a second gathering place was established), the Mormons constituted a close-knit and fairly harmonious group. At Kirtland, however, serious internal discontent developed. In the wake of the collapse of the Anti-Banking Society in 1837 came widespread apostasy of many Mormons, several apostles included, who challenged Joseph Smith's role as prophetic leader whose word was the will of the Lord in secular as well as spiritual affairs. According to the prevailing interpretation, the causes were essentially economic. Fawn Brodie maintains in her chapter on the “Kirtland Disaster” that the “toppling of the Kirtland bank loosed a hornet's nest.” Quoting Apostle Heber C. Kimball, she says that afterward “there were not twenty persons on earth that would declare that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God.” Despite Smith's efforts to salvage his Ohio community, “with mercantile firms bankrupt, the steam mill silent, and the land values sinking to an appalling low, Kirtland was fast disintegrating.” In a recent work, Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton repeat the generalization: “in Kirtland … Smith's failed bank led to internal dissension.”

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.

Infallible Proofs, Both Human and Divine: The Persuasiveness of Mormonism for Early Converts

2000 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven C. Harper
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Church Of Christ ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
Finger Lakes ◽  
The Church

In March 1830, the Grandin Press in Palmyra, New York, published the first edition of the Book of Mormon. On April 6, Joseph Smith, Jr., organized the Church of Christ—Mormonism—in Fayette near the Finger Lakes. Shortly thereafter, Joseph's unschooled younger brother Samuel filled a knapsack with copies of the book and traveled to villages westward to make converts to what he believed to be the restoration of primitive Christianity. From these beginnings, a small army of itinerant missionaries gathered several thousand American converts throughout the 1830's.

Books and Angels

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Hicks
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Music Literacy ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
Gold Plates ◽  
The One ◽  
Musical Literacy ◽  
The Church

This chapter looks at the Mormons' earliest choirs, first by considering passages in the Book of Mormon that mentioned heavenly “choirs”—all of which would have made sense to a young religious American in the 1820s named Joseph Smith. For almost a decade Smith had visits from spirits awash in heavenly light. One of those spirits, an angel named Moroni, had led him repeatedly to a local hillside where a stone box of gold plates lay buried. The result was the Book of Mormon; one of its passages makes reference to the prophet Mormon's promise of heavenly choir membership as a reward to the faithful. This chapter discusses the founding and organization of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the first choirs it assembled, including the one at Kirtland Temple in Ohio and another at Nauvoo Temple in Illinois. It also examines the anti-choir, anti-music-literacy strand of American Protestantism during the nineteenth century and how conflicting visions of musical literacy lived on in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Mormonism

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Q. Mason
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
The United States ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Fully Integrated ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Four Books ◽  
The Church

Mormonism is the collective name for a group of related churches, movements, and theologies that trace their origins back to the prophetic revelations of Joseph Smith Jr. (b. 1805–d. 1844). The movement splintered following the death of Smith, with the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) becoming by far the largest institutional manifestation of Mormonism today. Mormonism claims to be a restoration of ancient Christianity, following a period of apostasy after the death of Christ’s original apostles. The movement began with a series of revelations to Smith in the 1820s in which God called him to be a prophet and then an angel directed him to a buried ancient record written on golden plates. Smith translated this record “by the gift and power of God” and published it as the Book of Mormon, which is one of four books considered by Mormons to be scripture (along with the Christian Bible, the Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price). Mormons believe that God leads their church through living prophets and continuing revelation, and that ordinances necessary for salvation and exaltation are performed only through the priesthood that was restored to Smith and passed on to the church today. Mormons prioritize family relationships, which they believe can be maintained after death through marriage ceremonies conducted in Mormon temples. Heavily persecuted in the 19th century for their practices of polygamy and theocracy, today Mormons are fully integrated into society even while maintaining a distinctive theology and group identity. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints operates an ambitious proselytizing campaign around the globe and continues to enjoy steady worldwide growth, with the majority of its members now residing outside the United States. Though strongly influenced by its origins in a modern American context, as it nears the beginning of its third century Mormonism is emerging as an increasingly mature global religion.

scholarly journals Verlossing: van Pelagius tot Joseph Smith

2010 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
H.F. Van Wyk
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Eternal Life ◽  
Methodist Church ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Mormon Church ◽  
The Church

Salvation: from Pelagius to Joseph Smith Every Christian church believes that she is a true church and proclaims that man can be saved and has eternal life. This dogma of salvation is usually based on the Bible as the Word of God. Mormons claim that Joseph Smith, founder and first president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, received a divine message to restore the church that Jesus had started.  In studying the plan of salvation the Mormons proclaim it is quite clear that that way of salvation was not restored in their church, but that it followed a pattern of false doctrine that was revealed time and again in history.  The core of their preaching of salvation is that man has the free will to choose his own salvation. Mormons are not the first to preach this message. This article will show that Pelagius oisty-kated the free will of man. In the Reformation the Anabaptists preached the same message, being a third movement next to the reformed and Roman Catholic believes. The Anabaptists became part of the churches of the Netherlands and at the Synod of Dordt the theology of the free will was rejected and answered.  The dogma of the free will of man did not end at this Synod: 150 years later John Wesley preached the same message of salvation during his and Whitefield’s campaigns at the dawn of the nineteenth century in the USA.  During this time Joseph Smith started to seek the true church and founded the Mormon Church. Although his theology differs quite strongly from the Methodist Church in which he grew up, the core of the way of salvation is the same: man has free will in choosing his salvation.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document