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Joseph Smith: History, Methods, and MemoryProphetic Authority: Democratic Hierarchy and the Mormon Priesthood

2023; Volume: 10; Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/21568030.10.17

2156-8030

John G. Turner,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

“by what authority doest thou these things?” Jerusalem's religious leaders ask Jesus. “And who gave thee this authority to do these things?” What are this man's credentials? Who has authorized him to teach and preach, heal on the Sabbath, cast out money-changers from the temple, curse fig trees, and forgive sins? Jesus answers their question with a question of his own. “The baptism of John,” he asks, “was it from heaven, or of men?” They are afraid to answer, because the masses believe that John—another uncredentialed, rustic man—was a prophet. So they tell him they do not know. “Neither do I tell you by what authority I do these things,” Jesus responds (Mark 11:28–33).1 Hearers and readers of the gospels would have gotten the message. Jesus did not need any human credential or investiture; his authority came directly from God.Jesus's hand-picked disciples had received their authority from him, but what about other leaders in the early church? This was a particularly thorny question for Paul. On what basis did his authority rest? In Corinth, Paul had to contend with self-styled “super-apostles” (2 Cor 11:5, NIV), men who thought of themselves as far above him. Paul, after all, was “rude in speech” (2 Cor 11:6). Paul had multiple answers for his critics. He “boast[ed]” in his weakness, in the afflictions that scarred his body and left him hungry (2 Cor 11:16). And he also rested his authority on his ongoing visions and revelations, in particular a time when he was “caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words” (2 Cor 12:4).As it has been at many points in the long history of Christianity, authority was a central concern for Joseph Smith and his early followers. Here was another man “rude in speech” claiming authority. On what basis could he and his associates baptize? Work miracles? Form a church? Church members recognized Joseph Smith as prophet, seer, translator, and revelator, as “first elder,” and as “President of the High Priesthood.” But to what extent was divine authority concentrated in Smith, and to what extent was it shared with other church members? After all, other men and women also had visions and revelations. Joseph clarified that only his revelations governed the church, but some Saints accused him of “seeking after Monarchal power and authority.”2 On the one hand, Smith consistently found ways to disperse power and authority, creating a dizzying array of offices, quorums, and rituals. But there was always a simultaneous diffusion and concentration of authority. In Nauvoo, while Joseph talked of establishing a kingdom of priests and kings, a secretive church council recognized him as “our Prophet, Priest, and King,” anointed by God.3Two recently published books shed new light on the ways that Joseph Smith both claimed and distributed authority. Ronald O. Barney and Michael Hubbard MacKay each spent many years with the Joseph Smith Papers Project, and it shows. Their books are meticulously researched. They know their way around this terrain.That knowledge leads Ronald Barney to take a measured, humble approach to his subject matter. In his Joseph Smith: History, Methods, and Memory, Barney repeatedly warns his readers that a fair examination of the historical record reveals unrelenting uncertainty. “The reality exists,” Barney cautions, “that JS never desired to be completely known” (12). The documentary record is fragmentary, and many texts attributed to Joseph Smith—such as letters, journals, and tracts—were written by his associates. Many historians have erred through their reliance on the later, always incomplete, and often distorted memories of the prophet's contemporaries. Despite the increased availability and accessibility of these sources, “it requires a great deal of work to look into the Mormon past” (49). In fact, Barney notes rather dolefully, “We are fated to suffer inevitable disappointment from the outset in the quest” (53).The heart of Barney's wide-ranging Joseph Smith is a series of three chapters on the development of priesthood order. Barney observes that the question of godly authority was central, not only for Smith, but for Jesus—Barney cites the above-mentioned synoptic gospel passages—as well as for Book of Mormon prophets and priests. Confusingly, although later generations of Latter-day Saints used the terms “priesthood” and “authority” interchangeably, “the idea of godly authority predated the later representation of priesthood in concept and reference in the early church” (166). Moreover, although Smith and others were ordained to the “high priesthood” in June 1831, the term Melchizedek priesthood came later. Adding to the confusion are debates over the priesthood restoration claims made by Joseph and his associates. According to the church's canonical history, John the Baptist ordained Smith and Oliver Cowdery to the Aaronic priesthood on May 15, 1829, and he promised them that the apostles Peter, James, and John would confer the “Priesthood of Melchizedek” on them “in due time.”4 Just as Smith during the earliest years of the church rarely spoke of his youthful vision of deity, there are no strictly contemporary accounts of the conferral of priesthood by angelic visitors. As Barney notes, some of Smith's early 1830s associates suggested that he and Oliver Cowdery had “made up the story in the mid-1830s,” accusations repeated by more recent critics of the church (171).When examining these claims and counterclaims, Barney proceeds with caution. He points to a number of statements by Cowdery that he had been with Smith when John the Baptist bestowed the priesthood on them. Given that Cowdery made these statements after his estrangement from Smith and his separation from the church, there is good reason for historians to give them credence. At the same time, Barney emphasizes that historians cannot impose later Latter-day Saint ideas on the early historical record. While Latter-day Saints today accept the “supremacy of the Melchizedek, or greater, priesthood,” early church members “viewed the restoration of the Aaronic or lesser priesthood as being at the time the essential event in giving the church access to God's legitimizing authority” (177). What mattered was that God had restored Christ's church and had granted authority to the prophet, who could then grant it to others.Michael MacKay utilizes a similarly humble and penetrating method in his Prophetic Authority: Democratic Hierarchy and the Mormon Priesthood. He does so to intervene in longstanding debates—popular and scholarly—both about the early Mormon movement and about Joseph Smith's leadership. Was religion in the early American republic characterized by populist, democratic impulses, as Nathan Hatch suggests? Or, as Amanda Porterfield counters, did religious movements offer hierarchical, authoritarian responses to the perceived threat of skepticism and doubt?5For many of Smith's detractors, this was not a scholarly question. Ongoing revelation was not a restoration of ancient Christianity but the reimposition of medieval religious tyranny. “They say that when they get the secular power into their hands,” warned Ohio newspaper editor Eber B. Howe, “everything will be performed by immediate revelation. We shall then have Pope Joseph the First, and his hierarchy.”6 In 1842, the reformer Jonathan Baldwin Turner alleged that for the Mormons, Smith's “voice is the voice of God in all things, great and small, whenever he chooses to call it so.”7 Even relatively sympathetic outsiders perceived danger. “You have too much power to be safely trusted to one man,” Josiah Quincy told the prophet during an early 1844 visit to Nauvoo.8MacKay leans more toward Porterfield than Hatch but eschews a simple answer. “Early Mormonism,” he explains, “was neither the unfettered populism suggested by Hatch nor the autocracy that Smith's critics accused it of being.” Instead, it was “hierarchical democracy, its new polity tailor-made to meet the needs of a post-Enlightenment United States that struggled to define what religion would be in the wake of disestablishment” (4). Smith was a type of “theological king,” but his church survived and grew “because his concept of kingdom included the ability to distribute the power of governance to other leaders” (2). MacKay's “hierarchical democracy”—or “democratic hierarchy,” as in his subtitle—reminds me of William Phelps's term “theodemocracy, where God and the people hold the power.”9 Is the formulation an oxymoron, or a paradox?In reality, who held the power? It is true that church councils and other Mormon leaders sometimes reprimanded Smith. His power was not unconstrained. At the same time, Mormon polity has always been and continues to be more hierarchical than democratic. Yes, Smith dispersed power and authority, but what Smith really wanted was for others to have revelations and visions that accorded with his own. “Joseph Smith was the Henry Ford of revelation,” comments Kathleen Flake. “He wanted every home to have one, and the revelation he had in mind was the revelation he'd had.”10 Smith quickly put the brakes on anything or anyone that threatened his own revelatory authority. My concern here is more with the confusing term “democratic hierarchy” than with the substance of MacKay's argument. As MacKay emphasizes throughout his book, Smith's governance depended on his prophetic voice and mantle.It is in the details of early Mormon history, though, that MacKay truly excels. Several elements of MacKay's discussion are particularly illuminating. For instance, he pays careful attention to a June 1829 revelation in which the “word of the Lord came” to Smith and Oliver Cowdery “in the chamber of old Father [Peter] Whitmer.”11 According to Smith's later history, the revelation commanded them to ordain each other as elders. “Without the experience in the chamber,” MacKay explains, “Smith's religious authority remains primarily charismatic and malleable, even vulnerable to the threat of new charismatic leaders” (57). Even though they were instructed to delay the joint ordinations, the experience in the chamber pointed to lines of authority foreign to the cultural milieu of American Protestantism within which the early Church of Christ emerged. MacKay also makes careful connections between the texts Smith translated or dictated—including his revision of the King James Bible—and the development of his ideas about baptism, authority, and priesthood.This brings us back to the paradoxical observation with which Ronald Barney started his book. Because of the Joseph Smith Papers, because of the increased availability of church records, and because of the diligence of countless scholars, faithful Latter-day Saints, anti-Mormons, and others, we know so much more about the founding prophet of Mormonism now than we did a half-century ago. At the same time, we know agonizingly little about many important events in Smith's life. How did Smith respond to the deaths of his first three children? What was the nature of Smith's relationships with his many plural wives? And, of course, there are questions which no sources or historical method can fully resolve, in particular those questions at the marrow of Smith's own religious experience.But if answers to some questions will always elude historians, “disappointment” is not as inevitable as Barney warns. There is incalculable value in delving into the nitty-gritty details of early Mormon history, in patiently assembling the development of priesthood authority over the span of many years, in examining the many revelatory texts Joseph Smith produced. In fact, there is delight in such details. Joseph Smith may not have wanted to be fully known, but he and his followers made enough known to entice us to keep searching.