Religion for Mormons and other Idiots

In practice, rather a lot of LDS “doctrine” is and has been enforced on the level of “policy,” not “revelation.”

For the most part, the worst of historically inane or otherwise troubling Mormon pop “doctrines” we find now abandoned, had never been canonized or even officially cleared for teaching. But in several notable cases, some now embarrassingly obsolete doctrinal issues found in their day a great deal of official sanction. Typically, as overtly wrong as these may have seemed even to most Mormons, these had for generations never been noted as terribly troubling dogma apparently just because Mormons are trained not to ask questions of themselves, let alone their leadership. Mormons are systematically bred and recruited into the religion because of their unusually keen desire to sublimate their individual inspiration and join the excitement and fellowship of a formal lifestyle program. Mormonism is increasingly a body of the sincerely faithful who are most happy, even eager, to surrender their individuality in favor of the safety of an authoritative external structure that tells them how to run their lives and promises them Eternal Glory if they obey the cultural mandates of the group. They are instinctively averse to making waves that might disturb the intellectual or spiritual gene pool. So on many doctrinal puzzles, Mormons patiently wait for the “Lord” to reveal the answer through His “chosen” leadership.

I take that back. Mormons are trained to ask one question: How can I ignore this seemingly asinine claim the church is making, and support the current Brethren in spite of any paradoxical, ironic, or contradictory departures from rational thought, the canon, or teachings from previous Brethren? This burden of faith is put upon the individual, rank-and-file member, and if the reigning Brethren seem unwilling or unable to satisfy any logical and theological dilemmas the fault lies with the individual, never the church leadership.

But the truth is, LDS leadership has self-groomed and self-recruited and selected itself proudly from the ranks of the humble, uneducated, unremarkable, unaccomplished, and yes, let’s admit it together proudly, the unintelligent for generations. The argument mitigating this selection proposes that they are however, humble and chosen, even if not overtly inspired, and God can reveal to them anything they need to know anyway. The argument is not without merit, but LDS canon proclaims “The Glory of God is Intelligence,” and that man can indeed understand the nature of God and man’s relationship to Him. Mormon canon, as recorded by Joseph Smith himself promises that we can reason with God as one man reasoneth with another. And yet, Mormonism perpetuates itself via a leadership that revels in its own mediocrity, and celebrates its deliberately cultured ignorance via a systematic litany of excuses and apologies–a soothing, anti-intellectual, populist philosophy, that embraces and promotes the inherent “spiritual” superiority of a leadership perpetually lacking in sophisticated mental processes.

http://www.ldschurchnews.com/articles/27528/Glory-of-God-is-intelligence.html

http://scripturalphraseguide.blogspot.com/2011/06/as-man-reasonethspeakethtalketh-with.html

The possession of no apparent personal charisma or talent, the lack of any clear ambition, and a simple character devoid of any noteworthy intellect, has been hailed and embraced in LDS orthodoxy as the ultimate leadership profile since Joseph Smith was slaughtered in his prime with a belly full of wine, his pen firing off revelations and curses from God, while double-wielding two blazing guns in righteous defense. Today, being humble and unremarkable is Mormonism’s supreme virtue. Even the former milktoasty Quaker, Brigham Young, had a drive and personal charisma that has never seen its like in the church since his passing.

Joseph Smith, contrary to the contemporary remaking of his character, was not just a humble farm boy. He was a highly intelligent and charismatic savant who recruited and attracted the best and brightest from similar stock to build his church. He was loud and brash and revolutionary and outspoken. Brigham Young had an entirely different style but he had many of the same qualities. Today however, the Mormon church is less concerned with gathering the best and brightest than with conserving its energy and resources for the more productive recruitment of a core demographic most likely to buy the “program.”

It must be conceded that while the best and brightest may be most fit for God’s work, but they also occasionally become rivals and dissidents. Mormons with good cause retain a rooted disdain for, and fear of, turncoats and possible “ites,” the likes of whom did them serious damage in the early days. Mormonism however, needs to get over Sidney Rigdon and company and move on. This safe and self-protecting approach has created a church-wide downward personality spiral in which God is increasingly given a less and less charismatic, less young, and far less eager and revolutionary core of potential priesthood candidates for leadership positions. That has its negative side. Unremarkable old farts build a church appealing mainly to other unremarkable old farts who tend to be capable of ministering only to the wants and needs of unremarkable farts, old and young alike.

As personality and intellectual qualities became de-emphasized to the point of burlesque in Mormon culture, Mormon callings became almost entirely based upon who fits the precast mold, who stands out the least as a human being and who makes the most compliant “Mormon,” who will reproduce more compliant “Mormons” like himself. Even when Mormonism selects the educated and accomplished, it selects those accomplished and educated along the IBM business model, or the quiet academic administrator, banker, insurance actuary or accountant, rather than any outstandingly brilliant artist, writer, performer, speaker, philosopher, religious professor or anyone who brings with them to the calling a trace of personal, individual genius and inspiration. The artistic and creative classes in all honesty, are a frighteningly loud, witty, cynical, independent, often sarcastic, incomprehensibly opinionated and outspoken subculture of humanity that Mormons are taught to openly shun and frequently belittle.

The original apostles, after choosing two candidates to replace Judas from their mere one-hundred and fifty-strong body of general followers, cast lots between these two, giving the Lord at least some small opportunity through Divinely manipulating a random element of chance, to give His direct input into the selection. (Acts 1: 15-23: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%201&version=NIV) Not so today. Today, the Lord can send His teaching angels to all the charismatic, spiritual prodigy farm kids toddling the woods of upstate New York as He sees fit, but none of them are going to be president of His church today. Today, that claim would only get them either permanently banned from baptism or excommunicated. You don’t apply, “run” or campaign for prophet. There are no human politics involved.

Today, a ponderous system of seniority eventually decrees who will lead the LDS church, and the only input God has into it is a vague “Providential” order to the otherwise random dates of call. He also is touted as having the habit killing off screw-ups or otherwise, all the guys in the line ahead of the One he wants. The church is forced to assume that rather than directly call Joseph Smith wherever he happens to be, today God predestines Joseph Smith to be born in Heber City Utah, and has his bishop call him to be a high priest at just the right time to be called by his stake president to an office like bishop, that attracts the area presidency to call him to be the next stake president or mission president which puts his name on a list of potential area presidents and then the apostles pull his name up to become a seventy, which puts him in line to join the Council of the Twelve when somebody dies and everyone moves up a peg, and so forth into the First Presidency. Finally, perhaps, if you survive with the longest period of seniority remaining above all the other apostles, and the current president dies, God is then allowed to seat you in the president’s chair.

Mormon leadership, not surprisingly, claims the Lord would never go outside this current Mormon system of ascendancy. The Lord would only talk to the Mormon Prophet. Mormonism doesn’t need bottom-up input at all. It’s all coming directly from the top-down. It doesn’t need outside advice. God gives all the advice inside and directly. But wouldn’t calling a man outside the system be just the test of modern LDS leadership Christ would be likely to throw at them? Isn’t that exactly what Jesus did when he preached to the elders of the temple? Didn’t Saul of Tarsus show up in Jerusalem with a direct calling from Christ, only to find himself kicked out into the boonies of Gentile Ville because the “Brethren” didn’t trust him?

Paul was a colorful character. An outsider. Way way outside. Yet, he ended up writing most of what we now call “orthodox” Christianity. That’s because he had the unique talent and drive to do so, and take the message outside the “valley” and into the “world.” God went and found Saul of Tarsus directly, the professional Christ-killer, and “restored” the Gospel to him in a very personal fashion. But today, the ideal personal profile of a typical LDS “Prophet” would be a farm boy from a turkey ranch in Ephraim, who’s biggest thrill of his 87 years remains that big church league basketball game seventy years ago, in which he made the winning goal, just before he went on his mission to post-war Germany or someplace where he miraculously learned the language in three days and baptized whole villages–as he remembers it anyway. He would return to Utah, set out for the roaring metropolis of Salt Lake City, work as a baggage clerk on the railroad for a year or so, then receive his calling as a bishop, stake president, and after only a few years of adult, real-world experience (if you can call the Utah or Salt Lake Valleys the real world…) he would commence a lifetime of professional Mormonism as a general authority working his way up the higher quorums.

There was tremendous hoopla a few years back for example, when Howard W Hunter made president in June of 1994. Hunter was born in Idaho, made his life and family in California, and toured the world as a dance band leader in his youth. What a wild change that background that was seen to be. But he was 86, not in good health and his calling lasted but ten months. He passed away in March of 1995, and succession fell back to the comfortably inbred “chosen ones” along the Great Wasatch Front.

http://lds.org/churchhistory/presidents/controllers/potcController.jsp?leader=14&topic=facts

Today, the One-Fold mission of the church is not so much to bring people to Christ, as it is enculturating the world into the Utah social model. First you prove you can become a Utahn, then you get access to Jesus.

My point?

Absent a blazing natural leader hand-picked by God Personally, from all the earthly souls available, the best of the best, full of insight and zeal, present LDS leadership has remained almost entirely dependent upon rationalizing or harmonizing often convoluted and disparate teachings of previous LDS leadership without the input of direct revelation and with limited intellectual tools.

Sometimes even the desperately undiscerning and blindly obedient are confronted with what are obvious, incontrovertible doctrinal errors, policy mistakes or simple, cultural ignorance and stupidity that can’t be studied, pondered, prayed, faithed, and “testimonied” away. Once they have been smelled out however, fumigating these hereditary doctrinal brainfarts that have been stinking up historical Mormonism is a trying act of conscience and unpleasant for all concerned. The fear is always that “fixing” doctrinal errors in particular, damages more of the church than it repairs. First and foremost, confessing to the church membership that they’ve been taught bad doctrine for generations, can only diminish the contention that the “Brethren” are on top of their prophetic game. It poses the question: Ok, now how many other tangental, convoluted folk-doctrines and supporting arguments generated around, or connected to this bogus dogma are now also screwed up. And if this one thing is “wrong,” how much of the “core” doctrine of the church might also be “wrong.” It could become a doctrinal free-for-all, with contention and politicking from top to bottom and bottom to top of the church hierarchy. Joseph Smith won every doctrinal argument with, “That’s all well thought out brethren, but God told me it’s this way….” And that was that. But this level of certainty concerning Mormon policy and doctrine has been rather rare since Joseph’s mishap at Carthage Jail.

Partly due to their present scarcity of genuine “revelation,” the most heinous failure in the mind of LDS leadership would be if the Brethren left any opening for the charge that they made any decision however slight, based upon external pressure or succumbed to outside reasoning, or even that they buckled to the will and combined enlightenment of their own general membership. A perfect case in point is the “blacks and the priesthood policy.”

In 2002, the late LDS president Gordon B Hinckley, as part of his legacy campaign to poke Mormonism’s nose out of the valley and have a little sniff around the world for a change, did an interview on German television. The presenter asked him pointedly why it took so long for the LDS church to allow Negroes to hold the priesthood.

Hinckley’s reply was, “I don’t know.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_KERZlwOXM&feature=related

In my first examination of Hinckley’s efforts, I beat up “Uncle Gordy” a little bit for going into these situations in a shockingly ignorant and unprepared state. On the other hand however, “I don’t know” is one of the most honest answers ever given by an LDS president to any question of doctrinal controversy in generations.

The quasi-“revelation” that ended the Negro priesthood ban, known as “Official Declaration 2” in the Doctrine and Covenants, http://lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/od/2?lang=eng exposes a rather functional process in which the Brethren simply got together, did some praying, and eventually came to the same conclusion:

The Church never denied membership based on race (although slaves had to have their master’s permission to be baptized), and several black men were ordained to the priesthood during Joseph Smith’s lifetime. The first known black Latter-day Saint was “Black Pete”, who joined the Church in Kirtland, Ohio, and there is some evidence that he held the LDS priesthood.[2] Other African Americans, including Elijah Abel in 1832, Joseph T. Ball in 1835 or 1836 (who also presided over the Boston Branch from 1844-1845), and Walker Lewis in 1843 (and probably his son, Enoch Lovejoy Lewis), were ordained to the priesthood during Smith’s lifetime.[3] William McCary was ordained in Nauvoo in 1846 by Apostle Orson Hyde.[4] Two of the descendants of Elijah Abel were also ordained Elders, and two other black men, Samuel Chambers and Edward Leggroan, were ordained Deacons.[5]

Early black members in the Church were admitted to the temple in Kirtland, Ohio, where Elijah Abel received the ritual of washing and anointing (see Journal of Zebedee Coltrin). Abel also participated in at least two baptisms for the dead in Nauvoo, Illinois, as did Elder Joseph T. Ball.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_early_Mormonism

There had certainly been no modern revelation from God to bar Negroes from the LDS priesthood. Not even in Joseph Smith’s day, a time when the founding Mormon prophet had nearly daily conversations with God and said so openly. We can only assume that somewhere in the heat of being brutalized and persecuted as “nigger lovers” by packs of southern Christian rednecks like the “Knights of the Golden Circle,” precursor to the KKK, in Missouri and elsewhere, that a very stern influence was quietly put upon Joseph not by God, but by his advisors to knock off all the Negro fraternization because it was going to get them all killed.

http://www.angelfire.com/mo2/blackmormon/BMPB.html

http://www.allaboutmormons.com/ENG_racism_6.php

http://www.dearelder.com/index/inc_name/Mormon/title2/Black_Mormons

http://www.angelfire.com/mo2/blackmormon/homepage.html

http://mormonmatters.org/2008/06/08/30-years-of-authorized-black-priesthood/

http://lubbockonline.com/stories/032908/rel_262847386.shtml

Naturally, a lot of early Mormons, like Brigham Young in particular, were well reconciled to the longstanding Christian notion that Negroes were the cursed sons of Cain and marked forever as a servile and inferior race. The Southern Baptist Convention didn’t drop this article of faith until June of 1995 for example.

http://www.sbc.net/resolutions/amResolution.asp?ID=899

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Baptist_Convention

In the summer of 1833, W. W. Phelps published an article in the church’s newspaper, seeming to invite free black people into the state [Missouri] to become Mormons, and reflecting “in connection with the wonderful events of this age, much is doing towards abolishing slavery, and colonizing the blacks, in Africa.” (“Free People of Color”). Outrage followed Phelps’ comments, (Roberts [1930] 1965, p. 378.) and he was forced to reverse his position, which he claimed was “misunderstood”, but this reversal did not end the controversy, and the Mormons were violently expelled from Jackson County, Missouri five months later in December 1833 (Bush & Mauss 1984, p. 55).

Coincidentally, on (December 16, 1833), Joseph Smith, Jr. dictated a passage in the Doctrine and Covenants stating that “it is not right that any man should be in bondage to another.” (Covenant 101:79).

In 1835 , the Church issued an official statement indicating that because the United States government allowed slavery, the Church would not “interfere with bond-servants, neither preach the gospel to, nor baptize them contrary to the will and wish of their masters, nor meddle with or influence them in the least to cause them to be dissatisfied with their situations in this life, thereby jeopardizing the lives of men.” (LDS D&C Covenant 134:12).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_early_Mormonism

http://www.untoldstoryofblackmormons.com/

While many LDS detractors try to claim that anti-Negro racism is an essential doctrine of LDS theology, and that the basis for this prejudice is found in the uniquely Mormon, Book of Abraham, in the canonical “Pearl of Great Price,” the truth is that Christianity had been condemning Negroes to hell as the irredeemable, inherently damned seed of Cain for some 1820 years before Joseph Smith was ever in a position to give it a thought. Likewise, in Smith’s time, many of the most fundamentalist and adamant progenitors of today’s Christian critics of Mormonism’s “racism,” were eagerly buying and selling Cain’s children, forcing them into a lifetime of starvation and crippling hard labor, raping slave women for sport and breeding them for profit. Even more ironically, while the parents of the German commentator who accused Gordon B Hinckley of “racism” were learning how to spot non-Aryans in the Hitler Youth, and his grandparents were burning Jews in ovens and excusing the Third Reich’s humiliating defeat in 1932 to black Olympic champion Jesse Owens by claiming it was an unfair match between God-created man and a half-evolved ape, Mormonism had by way of comparison, merely interpreted its own available canonical evidence to mean that blacks were to barred from the priesthood, at least in this lifetime.

Yes, there were Christian racial attitudes that carried into Mormonism and sprouted in Utah, nurtured by the lifelong world view of the former WASPS who settled in that big white bunker. These bigoted Christian beliefs were easily reinforced by not being around many Negroes and thus never having to deal with the question for another five score years or so. But never attribute to racism what you can easily attribute to ignorance.

The Mormon canonical evaluation of the curse of Cain breaks down to something like this:

1    Caine was cursed. The curse was primarily having his progeny banned from the priesthood. This comes almost entirely from the books of Moses and Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price:

…Now, Pharaoh being of that lineage by which he could not have the right of the priesthood, notwithstanding the Pharaohs would fain claim it from Noah, through Ham, therefore my father was led away by their idolatry.

Abraham 1:26-27

Unlike Christians, who’d damned Negroes to eternal slavery and hell, Mormons limited Cain’s curse to losing priesthood entitlement in mortal life, followed by exaltation. Other Christian sects at the time were doubting if Negroes had souls and could be saved at all, or if they were like animals (in most Christian theology) and incapable of salvation.

2    Cain was marked as a sign of protection. Blackness is not a mark of condemnation, it is the opposite, it is a warning from God to any who would persecute the children of Caine. This is found in Genesis:

Genesis 4:10 — Genesis 4:15

10 And He said, What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying out to Me from the ground.

11 And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.

12 When you till the ground, it will no longer yield its strength to you. You will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.

13 And Cain said to Jehovah, My punishment is greater than I can bear.

14 Now You have driven me out this day from the face of the ground, and from Your face I will be hidden; and I will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.

15 And Jehovah said to him, Therefore whoever kills Cain, vengeance will be taken on him sevenfold. And Jehovah put a mark on Cain, so that anyone who found him would not strike him.

http://online.recoveryversion.org/bibleverses.asp?fvid=8048&lvid=8053&ol=on

3    Black skin has been assumed to be a prominent feature of Cain’s mark, but more than that, the Negroid genetic features is also the mark. The curse pertains specifically to the genetic offspring of Cain, therefore skin color has nothing to do with the mark or the curse alone, it is a combined package of genetic features that indicates a descendant of Cain. For instance, many American and Eastern Indians have skin as black as many Negroes, but Mormons have always held that native Americans are actually the blessed offspring of the Hebrew immigrant prophet Lehi, and actively recruited to the priesthood. Likewise, East Indians are actually Caucasians and their skin color has never been relevant to priesthood issues.

Mormon culture has in addition, clearly absorbed the Book of Mormon and longstanding Christian tradition that tries to define skin darkness in general as a punishment from God. But the Book of Mormon itself does not actually proscribe priesthood ordination or deny any other blessings on that basis.

Conversely, if the priesthood candidate’s skin were lily-white but had one fractional part of Cain’s DNA, the ban would still be in effect.

Specific, authoritative belief in the inherent inferiority of the Negro in Mormonism seems to originate primarily from Brigham Young, and was expanded upon by John Taylor, his successor, and others:

On another occasion, Young said, “You see some classes of the human family that are black, uncouth, uncomely, disagreeable and low in their habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind …. Cain slew his brother. Cain might have been killed, and that would have put a termination to that line of human beings. This was not to be, and the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin. Trace mankind down to after the flood, and then another curse is pronounced upon the same race—that they should be the ‘servant of servants’; and they will be, until that curse is removed; and the Abolitionists cannot help it, nor in the least alter that decree.”^[4]

Brigham Young said this despite the LDS scripture verses that state people may be cursed unto the 3rd and 4th generation, but if any were to repent and make restitution they would be forgiven and the curse lifted.^[5] This is reiterated in D&C 124:50&52 as well as Mosiah 13:13,14 and Deut 5:9,10.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_Mormon_doctrine

Young and others affirmed that Cain’s offspring were marked as easily spotted, permanent non-Levites, cut out of the line of the patriarchy–which is synonymous with the priesthood in both Old Testament and LDS theology–that would in time produce the Savior of Mankind, Jesus Christ. In short, Jesus would not be the descendant of, nor carry the blood in any small part, of the world’s first murderer—not because the sin would be transmitted downline, but according to many LDS theorists, to deny Cain and his children claim to or participation in the patriarchy or “priesthood” authority and lineage of Jesus Christ, Redeemer and Savior of Mankind, on any level.

But as usual, Brigham Young was making most of his observations about the Negro based upon a pressing period agenda ignored by modern critics:

Some researchers have suggested that the actions of William McCary in Winter Quarters, Nebraska led to Brigham Young’s decision to adopt the priesthood ban in the LDS Church. McCary was a half-African American convert who, after his baptism and ordination to the priesthood, began to claim to be a prophet and the possessor of other supernatural gifts.^[5] He was excommunicated for apostasy in March 1847 and expelled from Winter Quarters.^[6] After his excommunication, McCary began attracting Latter Day Saint followers and instituted plural marriage among his group, and he had himself sealed to several white wives.^[5][6]

McCary’s behavior angered many of the Latter Day Saints in Winter Quarters. Researchers have stated that his marriages to his white wives “played an important role in pushing the Mormon leadership into an anti-Black position”^[5] and may have prompted Young to institute the priesthood and temple ban on black people.^[5][6][7] A statement from Young to McCary in March 1847 suggested that race had nothing to do with priesthood eligibility^[8] and the earliest known statement about the priesthood restriction from any Mormon leader (including the implication that skin color might be relevant) was made by Apostle Parley P. Pratt a month after McCary was expelled from Winter Quarters.^[6] Speaking of McCary, Pratt stated that he “was a black man with the blood of Ham in him which lineage was cursed as regards the priesthood”.^[9]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints

After Brigham, the issue of the Negro and the priesthood did not clear up much:

Under John Taylor’s presidency, there was confusion regarding the origin of the racial policy. [Elijah] Abel was living, breathing proof that an African American was ordained to the Priesthood in the days of Joseph Smith. His son, Enoch Abel, had also been conferred the Priesthood.^[6] Joseph F. Smith said that Abel’s Priesthood had been declared null and void by Joseph Smith himself, though this seems to conflict with Joseph F. Smith’s teachings that the Priesthood could not be removed from any man without removing that man from the church.^[7] From this point on Joseph Smith was repeatedly referred to as the author of many statements, which had actually been made by Brigham Young, on the subject of Priesthood restriction.^[7]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_Mormon_doctri

And the plot thickens:

One of the justifications that some Latter-day Saints used for the discriminatory policy was that black individual’s pre-existence spirits were not as virtuous as white pre-existence spirits. For example, Apostle Joseph Fielding Smith wrote: “According to the doctrine of the church, the negro because of some condition of unfaithfulness in the spirit — or pre-existence, was not valiant and hence was not denied the mortal probation, but was denied the blessing of the priesthood.”^[33]

Smith also reasoned that during the war in Heaven, some spirits would logically have been less valiant in following the Savior than others, therefore the priesthood was restricted from the least valiant.^[34] However, Smith made clear that the book was his own personal opinion. Of the doctrine of the church, Smith said “The Mormon Church does not believe, nor does it teach, that the Negro is an inferior being. Mentally, and physically, the Negro is capable of great achievement, as great and in some cases greater than the potentiality of the white race. He can become a lawyer, a doctor, a scientist, and he can achieve great heights.”^[35]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_Mormon_doctrine

Brigham Young however, had already answered this question:

When asked “if the spirits of Negroes were neutral in Heaven,” Young responded, “No, they were not, there were no neutral [spirits] in Heaven at the time of the rebellion, all took sides …. All spirits are pure that came from the presence of God.”^[2] Prior to learning about [negro] Enoch Lewis’s marriage to a woman of European descent (December 1847) and subsequently enacting a ban on Negroes in the priesthood, he considered Walker Lewis “one of the best Elders.”^[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_Mormon_doctrine

McConkie however, when he went at the question in his allegedly “definitive” encyclopedia of Mormon “doctrine,” ignored Brigham Young, ignored his father-in-law’s disclaimer that his ramblings on the Negro were merely an unsupported personal opinion, and wrote this entry as if it were pulled straight out of the Mormon canon:

Of the two-thirds who followed Christ, however, some were more valiant than others… Those who were less valiant in pre-existence and who thereby had certain spiritual restrictions imposed upon them during mortality are known to us as the negroes. Such spirits are sent to earth through the lineage of Cain, the mark put upon him for his rebellion against God and his murder of Abel being a black skin (Moses 5:16-41; 12:22). Noah’s son Ham married Egyptus, a descendant of Cain, thus preserving the negro lineage through the flood (Abraham 1:20-27). Negroes in this life are denied the priesthood; under no circumstances can they hold this delegation of authority from the Almighty. (Abra. 1:20-27.) The gospel message of salvation is not carried affirmatively to them (Moses 7:8, 12, 22), although sometimes negroes search out the truth, join the Church, and become by righteous living heirs of the celestial kingdom of heaven. President Brigham Young and others have taught that in the future eternity worthy and qualified negroes will receive the priesthood and every gospel blessing available to any man. The present status of the negro rests purely and simply on the foundation of pre-existence. Along with all races and peoples he is receiving here what he merits as a result of the long pre-mortal probation in the presence of the Lord….The negroes are not equal with other races where the receipt of certain spiritual blessings are concerned, particularly the priesthood and the temple blessings that flow therefrom, but this inequality is not of man’s origin. It is the Lord’s doing.^[29]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_Mormon_doctrine

But Bruce R McConkie not only ignored Brigham Young in favor of his father-in-law’s unauthoritative theories about Negro pre-mortal cowardice, he also ignored a prophet he had a personal problem with, David O McKay, who’d called the first edition of his Mormon Doctrine an embarrassingly errant hack job and tried to ban it:

In 1954, Church President David O. McKay taught: “There is not now, and there never has been a doctrine in this church that the negroes are under a divine curse. There is no doctrine in the church of any kind pertaining to the negro. We believe that we have a scriptural precedent for withholding the priesthood from the negro. It is a practice, not a doctrine, and the practice someday will be changed. And that’s all there is to it.’^[46]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_Mormon_doctrine

But then again, McKay was in turn openly disavowing the assertions of preceding church president George Albert Smith, who had strongly expressed rather opposite ideas about the issue, only a few years before McKay got the bully pulpit of Mormonism. In 1949, George Albert Smith’s First Presidency made a declaration that included the statement that the priesthood restriction was divinely commanded and not a matter of church policy. It declared:

The attitude of the Church with reference to the Negroes remains as it has always stood. It is not a matter of the declaration of a policy but of direct commandment from the Lord, on which is founded the doctrine of the Church from the days of its organization, to the effect that Negroes may become members of the Church but that they are not entitled to the Priesthood at the present time. The prophets of the Lord have made several statements as to the operation of the principle. President Brigham Young said: “Why are so many of the inhabitants of the earth cursed with a skin of blackness? It comes in consequence of their fathers rejecting the power of the holy priesthood, and the law of God. They will go down to death. And when all the rest of the children have received their blessings in the holy priesthood, then that curse will be removed from the seed of Cain, and they will then come up and possess the priesthood, and receive all the blessings which we now are entitled to.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_Mormon_doctrine

George Albert Smith’s declaration on the status of the Negro in Mormonism goes on to state that the conditions in which people are born are affected by their conduct in a pre-mortal existence, although the details of the principle are said not to be known. It then says that the privilege of mortal existence is so great that spirits were willing to come to earth even though they would not be able to possess the priesthood. It concludes by stating, “Under this principle there is no injustice whatsoever involved in this deprivation as to the holding of the priesthood by the Negroes.”

The one common load of totally human-originated BS in all these justifications for the denial of the Negro the priesthood, is the claim that the “less valiant” spirits in the war in heaven got to be Negroes. This is simply a device to alleviate any implied “original sin” element connected to Cain’s curse. It’s hard LDS doctrine that all men are born pure and sinless and guilty of nothing. Mormons teach that all mankind can not only be “saved” but all of mankind are exaltable children of God. This is the central theme of Joseph Smith’s restored “Gospel.” Therefore, to also preach that any otherwise qualified candidate for priesthood ordination should be denied this authority simply because of patriarchal lineage—in other words, race—screamed errency from the day it was first openly declared. Church leadership from Brigham Young on down desperately scrambled through the years to invent better and better sophistry to make it sound “fair.”

The contention that some of God’s spiritual children screwed up just a little bit before being shipped into a womb was, as I keep saying, pulled right out of somebody’s would-be prophetic arse. And in this case, it was not Brigham Young’s prophetic arse, even inasmuch as his was certainly an ample one and a prolific generator of early Mormon prophetic vapors. It’s probably down to John Taylor, as well as the corresponding notion that blacks could only be servants in the Celestial Kingdom that began to develop along with this system of excuses.

What would have been consistent with LDS doctrine–just for laughs–would be to say that egroes are spirits who are guaranteed a place in the Celestial Kingdom, like those spirits who, “volunteer” as it is popularly supposed, to be sent to infirm human bodies that die in birth or before the age of accountability, or those born with physical and mental handicaps. These doomed and imperfect human bodies it has long been maintained, were always occupied by the most pure and valiant spirits who have already earned their entry into the Celestial Kingdom. They serve their sentence in mortality as a technical requirement for Eternal Glory, just marking time without being expected to fight or labor or prove themselves. It’s the pre-mortal slackers, screwups and layabouts, who actually need the learning opportunity that mortal priesthood service and responsibility offers them. That theory you could rationalize with Mormon canon and other doctrine.

But it never would have occurred to LDS leadership that not having to go home teaching and still eventually get received into Paradise might actually be a blessing.

The difference between me and a Brigham Young or a John Taylor I suppose, is that I am well aware that as logical as that just sounded, and as convenient as it is to be able to rationally explain away the Negro-priesthood problem, unlike many of these early LDS leaders, I am always well aware of when I am blowing smoke out of my arse. And I don’t have a title that would presume to authorize me to transubstantiate methane into scripture.

And then again, at the root of it all you have those darned Bible verses hanging you up even without all the Mormonism. Mormonism in truth only mitigated Cain’s curse and explained how his posterity made it through the Great Flood. The curse itself in basic Christianity went all the way back to the Beginning, to Genesis.

Apostle Harold B. Lee blocks policy change

In 1969 church apostle Harold B. Lee blocked the LDS Church from rescinding the racial restriction policy.^[47] Church leaders voted to rescind the policy at a meeting in 1969. Lee was absent from the meeting due to travels. When Lee returned he called for a re-vote, arguing that the policy could not be changed without a revelation.^[47]

Church president statement in 1972

Harold B. Lee, president of the church, stated in 1972: “For those who don’t believe in modern revelation there is no adequate explanation. Those who do understand revelation stand by and wait until the Lord speaks…It’s only a matter of time before the black achieves full status in the Church. We must believe in the justice of God. The black will achieve full status, we’re just waiting for that time.”^[48]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints

I personally tend to look at Harold B Lee as just being something of a prick about the whole issue here. But he has a point. Sometimes God’s lack of open communication puts the entire collected body of LDS general authorities, as clearly shown here, sitting around the conference table, trying not to complain or contend, waiting for God to solve their problem for them. You can’t blame Harold B Lee for demanding that somebody pony up a genuine revelation or shut the hell up about it. I empathize with Lee’s demand for a tangible vision, a visitation, a good old Joseph Smith-type revelation from God. Those had long been in short supply. And Harold B Lee was quite correct in believing that without God directly clarifying the issue, even if none of them really knew why the ban was still being enforced, it was a tradition clearly in the canon and they were bound by it:

Ban as an unknowable mystery

David O. McKay said: “From the beginning of this dispensation, Joseph Smith [actually, there is no reliable evidence that Joseph Smith ever taught this doctrine, and in fact Smith ordained several negroes to the priesthood personally] and all succeeding presidents of the church have taught that negroes, while spirit children of a common Father, and the progeny of our earthly parents Adam and Eve, were not yet to receive the priesthood, for reasons which we believe are known to God, but which He has not made fully known to man.”^[44]

[edit]Attribution to human error

Although not refuting his belief that the policy came from the Lord, apostle Spencer W. Kimball acknowledged in 1963 that it could have been brought about through an error on man’s part. In 1963, he said, “The doctrine or policy has not varied in my memory. I know it could. I know the Lord could change his policy and release the ban and forgive the possible error which brought about the deprivation.”^[45]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_Mormon_doctrine

1978 Revelation on Priesthood:

Spencer W. Kimball became LDS church president in 1973, when Harold B Lee was taken out of his place suddenly by a God whom we might imagine was responding to Lee’s demand for a “revelation” by sending him a very direct message about standing in the way of repealing the priesthood Negro ban. Kimball took general conference on the road, holding area and regional conferences all over the world. He announced many new temples to be built, many of them “McTemples,” downsized facilities that could do all the work at half the price and double the availability around the world of temple ordinances. This included a temple in São Paulo, Brazil. There, church leaders realized the impossibility of determining bloodlines in an incredibly mixed-race environment for the first time.^[63]

On June 8, 1978, the First Presidency issued an official declaration, now a part of the standard works of the church, which contained the following statement:

He has heard our prayers, and by revelation has confirmed that the long-promised day has come when every faithful, worthy man in the church may receive the Holy Priesthood, with power to exercise its divine authority, and enjoy with his loved ones every blessing that follows there from, including the blessings of the temple. Accordingly, all worthy male members of the church may be ordained to the priesthood without regard for race or color. Priesthood leaders are instructed to follow the policy of carefully interviewing all candidates for ordination to either the Aaronic or the Melchizedek Priesthood to insure that they meet the established standards for worthiness.^[64]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints

In 1978 Bruce R. McConkie had some backpedalling to do:

There are statements in our literature by the early brethren which we have interpreted to mean that the Negroes would not receive the priesthood in mortality. I have said the same things, and people write me letters and say, “You said such and such, and how is it now that we do such and such?” And all I can say to that is that it is time disbelieving people repented and got in line and believed in a living, modern prophet. Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon or whomsoever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation. We spoke with a limited understanding and without the light and knowledge that now has come into the world…. We get our truth and our light line upon line and precept upon precept. We have now had added a new flood of intelligence and light on this particular subject, and it erases all the darkness and all the views and all the thoughts of the past. They don’t matter any more…. It doesn’t make a particle of difference what anybody ever said about the Negro matter before the first day of June of this year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_Mormon_doctrine

You might have thought that old Bruce R would have argued against changing this priesthood eligibility policy, given his support for his father-in-law’s various doctrinal theories, and McConkie’s strong affection for established canon. On the contrary, in the final debates he argued strongly in favor of dropping the restrictions on worthy Negro males:

When the priesthood ban was discussed in 1978, apostle Bruce McConkie argued for its change using the Mormon scripture and the Articles of Faith. The Third Article states that “all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel.”(Articles of Faith 1:3) From the Book of Mormon he quoted “And even unto the great and last day, when all people, and all kindreds, and all nations and tongues shall stand before God, to be judged of their works, whether they be good or whether they be evil— If they be good, to the resurrection of everlasting life; and if they be evil, to the resurrection of damnation. (3 Nephi 26:4-5) The Book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price states that Abraham‘s seed “shall all the families of the earth be blessed, even with the blessings of the Gospel, which are the blessings of salvation, even of life eternal.” (Abraham 2:11) According to his son, Joseph F. McConkie, these scriptures played a great part in changing the policy.^[19]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_Mormon_doctrine

There were church leaders however, who embraced Brigham Young’s take on the Negro’s mortal disposition far more enthusiastically than McConkie:

In 1881, church president John Taylor said “And after the flood we are told that the curse that had been pronounced upon Cain was continued through Ham’s wife, as he had married a wife of that seed. And why did it pass through the flood? Because it was necessary that the devil should have a representation upon the earth as well as God; and that man should be a free agent to act for himself, and that all men might have the opportunity of receiving or rejecting the truth, and be governed by it or not according to their wishes and abide the result; and that those who would be able to maintain correct principles under all circumstances, might be able to associate with the Gods in the eternal worlds.” (Journal of Discourses, Vol. 22 page 304).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_Mormon_doctrine

While nobody picked up and ran with Taylor’s “Negro-as-Satan’s-agents” allusion as a serious doctrinal contention, Taylor’s administration was the first to propose (against the late Brother Brigham’s objections) that Negroes spiritually had it coming for being “less valiant” as pre-mortal crusaders. That stuck. And far loonier things have been said or at lest recorded and attributed to noted authorities. Some of these linger on in Mormonism at least conceptually. All of them sting of residual Calvinism.

Apostle Mark E. Petersen gave a speech on this subject: “God has commanded Israel not to intermarry. To go against this commandment of God would be in sin. Those who willfully sin with their eyes open to this wrong will not be surprised to find that they will be separated from the presence of God in the world to come. This is spiritual death…. The reason that one would lose his blessings by marrying a Negro is due to the restriction placed upon them. ‘No person having the least particle of Negro blood can hold the Priesthood.’ (He’s quoting Brigham Young here.) It does not matter if they are one-sixth Negro or one-hundred and sixth, the curse of no Priesthood is the same. If an individual who is entitled to the Priesthood marries a Negro, the Lord has decreed that only spirits who are not eligible for the Priesthood will come to that marriage as children. To intermarry with a Negro is to forfeit a ‘Nation of Priesthood holders.’” Source: Race Problems — As They Affect The Church, Address by Mark E. Petersen at the Convention of Teachers of Religion on the College Level, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, August 27, 1954.

Again we hear from Apostle Mark E. Petersen: “The discussion on civil rights, especially over the last 20 years, has drawn some very sharp lines. It has blinded the thinking of some of our own people, I believe. They have allowed their political affiliations to color their thinking to some extent, and then, of course, they have been persuaded by some of the arguments that have been put forth…. We who teach in the Church certainly must have our feet on the ground and not to be led astray by the philosophies of men on this subject…. “I think I have read enough to give you an idea of what the negro is after. He is not just seeking the opportunity of sitting down in a cafe where white people eat. He isn’t just trying to ride on the same streetcar or the same Pullman car with white people. It isn’t that he just desires to go the same theater as the white people. From this, and other interviews I have read, it appears that the negro seeks absorption with the white race. He will not be satisfied until he achieves it by intermarriage. That is his objective and we must face it. We must not allow our feelings to carry us away, nor must we feel so sorry for negroes that we will open our arms and embrace them with everything we have. Remember the little statement that we used to say about sin, ‘First we pity, then endure, then embrace.’…. “Now let’s talk about segregation again for a few moments. Was segregation a wrong principle? when the Lord chose the nations to which the spirits were to come, determining that some would be Japanese and some would be Chinese and some Negroes and some Americans, He engaged in an act of segregation…. When he told Enoch not preach the gospel to the descendants of Cain who were black, the Lord engaged in segregation. When He cursed the descendants of Cain as to the Priesthood, He engaged in segregation…. “Who placed the Negroes originally in darkest Africa? Was it some man, or was it God? And when He placed them there, He segregated them…. “The Lord segregated the people both as to blood and place of residence. At least in the cases of the Lamanites and the Negro we have the definite word of the Lord Himself that he placed a dark skin upon them as a curse — as a punishment and as a sign to all others. He forbade intermarriage with them under threat of extension of the curse. And He certainly segregated the descendants of Cain when He cursed the Negro as to the Priesthood, and drew an absolute line. You may even say He dropped an Iron curtain there…. “Now we are generous with the negro. We are willing that the Negro have the highest education. I would be willing to let every Negro drive a Cadillac if they could afford it. I would be willing that they have all the advantages they can get out of life in the world. But let them enjoy these things among themselves. I think the Lord segregated the Negro and who is man to change that segregation? It reminds me of the scripture on marriage, ‘what God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.’ Only here we have the reverse of the thing — what God hath separated, let not man bring together again.” Source: Race Problems — As They Affect The Church, Address by Mark E. Petersen at the Convention of Teachers of Religion on the College Level, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah,August 27, 1954.

…

The following is a quote from the then Mr. Kimball (Spencer W.), speaking at the General Conference meeting, October, 1960. “I saw a striking contrast in the progress of the Indian people today…. The day of the Lamanites is nigh. For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised. In this picture of the twenty Lamanite missionaries, fifteen of the twenty were as light as Anglos, five were darker but equally delightsome The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation. “At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter were present, the little member girl–sixteen–sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents–on the same reservation, in the same hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather….These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness. One white elder jokingly said that he and his companion were donating blood regularly to the hospital in the hope that the process might be accelerated.” Improvement Era, December 1960, pp. 922-923.

…

“Of the thousands of children born today, a certain proportion of them went to the Hottentots of the south seas, thousands went to Negro mothers, thousands to beautiful white Latter-day Saint Mothers.”-Melvin J. Ballard

B.H. Roberts-the Seventy’s Course in Theology:  “That the negro is markedly inferior to the Caucasian is proved both craniologically and by six thousand years of planet-wide experimentation.”

The Juvenile Instructor (a Church magazine): “Last in order stands the Negro race, the lowest in intelligence and the most barbarous of all the children of men.”

Also, the LDS children’s Juvenile Instructor suggests that the Polynesians also were cursed with dark skin: “We are asked if the natives of New Zealand and of the Samoan society and Sandwich Islands are descendants of the Nephites (white people) or of the Lamanites (American Indians)….It is plain from the history of the Book of Mormon that this dark skin has been brought upon them by transgression. Whether this transgression occurred before they left this (American) continent or afterwards is not clear.” (The Juvenile Instructor, vol. 30, p. 129.)

http://yhvh.name/?w=548 http://mormonthink.com/blackweb.htm

And ironically, while Mark E Peterson and apostolic friends are dropping racial bombshells:

In 1958, Joseph Fielding Smith published Answers to Gospel Questions which stated “No church or other organization is more insistent than The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, that the negroes should receive all the rights and privileges that can possibly be given to any other in the true sense of equality as declared in the Declaration of Independence.” He continues to say they should not be barred from any type of employment or education, and should be free “to make their lives as happy as it is possible without interference from white men, labor unions or from any other source.”^[49] In the 1963 General Conference, Hugh B. Brown stated: “it is a moral evil for any person or group of persons to deny any human being the rights to gainful employment, to full educational opportunity, and to every privilege of citizenship”. He continued: “We call upon all men everywhere, both within and outside the church, to commit themselves to the establishment of full civil equality for all of God’s children. Anything less than this defeats our high ideal of the brotherhood of man.”^[49]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints

It’s easy for the ignorant and self-interested to paint Mormonism with the Lefty’s favorite tar brush of common racism. In fact, since the Civil Rights Movement set upon the mission of bringing down the LDS church, it is even held that Mormons are close friends with the KKK, the favorite bugaboo of the “enlightened” Left. These slanders, when repeated widely, naturally become the assumptions of rational, fair-minded people as well. Frankly, Mormonism has given even the most forgiving investigator cause for suspicion. But Mormonism and its attitude toward the Negro, isn’t really a Right-Left, racist/colorblind debate in the usual Christian American sense:

Many of the members of the anti-Mormon mob that murder the first President of the Church, Joseph Smith, are members of a secret racist society called the “Knights of the Golden Circle.” After the Civil War the organization is outlawed. A few members of the Knights of the Golden Circle found a new organization called the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.—1844
(See BlackMormon)

Soon after its formation, an LDS apostle writes that the KKK will prove a “curse” upon America.—1868
(See BlackMormon)

The KKK holds anti-Mormon meetings and, in the south, kills and in some cases tortures Mormon missionaries.—1870s-1890s
(See Blazing Crosses, pp.11ff)

J. Golden Kimball receives a telegram indicating that the Ku Klux Klan again plans to torture Mormon missionaries in the South if they don’t leave immediately.—1891
(See BlackLDS)

When a nation-wide tour of the stage version of “The Clansman,” a story that insults blacks and glorifies the KKK as white heroes, arrives in Utah, the anti-Mormon “Salt Lake Tribune” praises the production. The Church-owned “Deseret News,” however, while recognizing that the play is well done in technical terms, states that the Klan is not to be praised, for it “rode about the country at night killing or torturing negroes and their sympathizers…[and] became a band of idle, dissolute and vicious individuals who entered upon a career of brutality and violence that appalled the country.”—1908
(See Deseret News, Nov. 2, 1908)

The Church owned “Deseret News” calls the KKK “an insult and a menace to orderly government” that would lead “to riot and bloodshed.”—1920s
(See Deseret News, 23 Dec., 1920)

The “Salt Lake Tribute” [the official organ of Christian anti-Mormon reformers] accepts KKK advertising and notices, but the “Deseret News” refuses and only writes of the KKK to condemn it in editorials.—1920s

“So far as its operations are known–its secrecy, its mummery, its terrorism, its lawlessness–it is condemned…These mountain communities of ours have no place whatever for it in their social scheme of things…[he who tries to establish it among us] should be made emphatically to understand that his local endeavors will be worse than wasted, and his objects [goals] are detested, and his [absence] is preferred to his company. The people of Utah have no taste or patience for such criminal nonsense…”—1921
(See Deseret News, July 23, 1921)

Because of the Church’s condemnation of the KKK, the KKK “Grand Wizard” of Wyoming considers the Church it’s “greatest enemy.” “In the Realm of Utah and scattered over the West in general, we have another enemy, which is more subtle and far more cunning [than other anti-KKK groups] in carrying its efforts against this organization…the Latter-day Saint Religion!”—1923
(See Papers Read at the Meetings of Grand Dragons, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, 1923, pp.112-3)

http://www.allaboutmormons.com/ENG_racism_6.php

http://www.dearelder.com/index/inc_name/Mormon/title2/Black_Mormons

The Salt Lake Tribune and the Deseret News are fascinatingly blatant records of Mormon-v-anti-Mormon, meaning Christian populations of the State of Utah:

1908: The stage version of Thomas Dixon’s bestselling novel The Clansman, which portrayed blacks as ignorant and ravenous brutes, and glorified the KKK as white heroes, had toured all over the United States. Finally, the tour came to Salt Lake City. The Gentile (non-mormon) newspaper in the city, The Salt Lake Tribune, praised both the play and its message. The Mormon paper, the Deseret News, said that while the play itself was “an excellent production” in technical terms, the Klan was not a heroic organization as the play portrayed, but “rode about the country at night killing or torturing negroes and their sympathizers” in a “reign of terror” and “became a band of idle, dissolute and vicious individuals who entered upon a career of brutality and violence that appalled the country.”(Deseret News, Nov. 2, 1908).

1916: The Salt Lake Tribune, Utah’s Gentile (non-mormon) and Anti-Mormon newspaper (which almost daily contained anti-Mormon articles) wrote a critique of the silent movie Birth of a Nation; which was a film version of the play The Clansmen. The Tribune wrote that “Mob violence and outlawry [by blacks] are depicted, followed by spectacular vies of the Ku Klux Klansmen who organized secretly to control the negroes through their superstitious fears. The Klansmen were fearless night-riders and they wore white shrouds. Acts of vengeance were perpetrated [upon blacks] under the cover of darkness, and the pictures show clearly why such extreme measures were necessary for the continuance of law and order.” (Salt Lake Tribune, April 2, 1916)

1920: The KKK was “an insult and a menace to orderly government” which would lead “to riot and bloodshed”. (Deseret News, 23 Dec., 1920)

http://www.angelfire.com/mo2/blackmormon/BMPB.html

And still, decades later, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, following the confused LDS pattern of mutually exclusive statements on the Negro issue, at the same time you had David O McKay, Joseph Fielding Smith, and Hugh B Brown embracing the Civil Rights Movement, on the other hand, you had Cleon Skousen and his apostolic pal ET Benson at some other pulpit calling the Civil Rights Movement an arm of Communist Aggression:

My grandfather [ET Benson] saw the U.S. civil rights movement, in larger conspiratorial context, as a leading element in a vast, ominous and active Communist plot designed to “overthrow established government” through “widespread anarchy,” the sparking of “a nation-wide civil war” and the assassination of “anti-Communist leaders of both races.”

He warned Americans: “It is happening here! . . . THE COMMUNIST PROGRAM FOR REVOLUTION IN AMERICAN HAS BEEN IN PROGRESS FOR MANY YEARS AND IS FAR ADVANCED.”

This Moscow-orchestrated plan, he declared from his General Conference pulpit, was being implemented on American soil “[u]sing unidentified Communist agents and non-Communist sympathizers in key positions in government, in communications media and in mass organizations such as labor unions and civil rights groups [which] demand more and more government power as the solution to all civil rights problems. Total government is the objective of Communism. Without calling it by name, [they] build Communism piece by piece through mass pressures for Presidential decrees, court orders and legislation which appear to be aimed at improving civil rights and other social reforms.”

Ezra Taft Benson saw the American South as the initial battleground in Communist efforts to establish a foothold before spreading northward. These attempts, he warned, were designed for “splitting away the ‘Black Belt,’ those Southern states in which the Negro held a majority, and calling them a Negro Soviet Republic.” He warned Americans to be on guard for African-Americans who had “migrated to the Northern states,” where they had likewise “applied this same strategy to the so-called ‘ghetto’ areas in the North.”

He reassured White patriots, however, that even “[i]f Communism comes to America . . . the Negro represents only 10 percent of the population. In any all-out race war which might be triggered, there isn’t a chance in the world that Communist-led Negro guerilla units could permanently hold on to the power centers of government, even if they could capture them in the first place.”

http://www.exmormon.org/mormon/mormon409.h

Well, that was then and this is now. Except the LDS church has never authoritatively justified, apologized for, or retracted the many boldly racist theories and observations its leadership at least in singular cases has made over the generations. Was it racism in the dictionary sense? Yes, in many cases it was, but not because of the priesthood restriction itself so much, as Mormon leadership’s clearly human and bigoted attempts to rationalize this vaguely canonical restriction by inventing supplemental folk-doctrine and applying faulty and biased “scientific” or “empirical” evidence to prove the Negro race deserving of the ban. They did this, because otherwise, the knew either they or God would look petty and unfair.

The curse of Cain is however, still stuck solid in the Christian canon. Christians interpreted the curse to be a black skin and being a perpetual slave. It’s clarified to mean only a restriction from the priesthood in Mormon canon. But you’re stuck with a scriptural curse on Cain and his descendants either way. If none of the Mormon canon existed you’d still have an accursed Cain. God’s curse was indeed Biblically argued as justification for institutionalizing American slavery–but not by Joseph Smith or the Mormons. That was Christian America who did that. Until they killed him for it, Ol’ Joe Smith was in fact running for US president on an Abolitionist platform.

As the LDS church leadership later evolved, rising out of the battleground of an American Constitutional struggle over slavery, they began inventing theological justifications for their own canonical interpretations of the Negro curse. Large factions of the congregation and leadership had always found the Negro priesthood ban embarrassing and difficult to rationalize with foundational Mormon theology. Reacting to these growing, enlightened objections, LDS leadership at times proposed justifications that were just plain ignorant, bigoted and arrogant, and then pounded their points home more and more fervently to silence the rising protests.

Institutional racism is defined as any time you have an organized system that believes in a fundamental genetic and intellectual inferiority of any given race. Mormonism, like most of Christianity, from its highest leaders down, either in whole or in part, for many generations fell into that category relative to their floppy positions on the Negro. You can’t argue otherwise.

My own pragmatic explanation of lifting the Mormon priesthood ban on the Negro would be that in modern times the genetic markers are so compromised that there are no pure lines on any side of the question today, anywhere, anyway. A more obvious proposal, and one I as an unschooled ignoramus find embarrassingly absent in official LDS apologies, is that Christ was born two-thousand years ago and therefore, since we’re well past that phase of the Atonement, been there, done that–the whole point of excluding Cain’s line from Christ’s priesthood order, and/or keeping Christ’s line pure of Cain’s dirty deeds for whatever reason, was resolved with the birth of the promised Messiah. Even the Gentiles became the chosen people at that point. But that’s just me sensibly preserving my “testimony” by trying to make sense of Mormonism. That burden is upon me, for some reason, and it shouldn’t be.

For those of us who know a little bit of history, a dismissive, “We’re beyond that now,” from Mormon leadership, as Uncle Gordy would often say when waving off these sort of confused doctrinal reversals, isn’t very satisfying. It’s mostly insulting. And so we try to do the work of patching up the “Gospel” the Brethren should be doing for us, by ourselves.

I confess. You’re correct out there brothers and sisters. I can hear you grumbling about me to yourselves. I shouldn’t be the one taking up the assignment of this sort of doctrinal analysis. It’s not my calling to tie up all the loose and frayed ends, define and harmonize all the seemingly random bits of the Mormon “Gospel” floating around the church.

It’s just that nature abhors a vacuum.

Mormonism as taught through the revelations of Joseph Smith answers most of the really hard questions dubious Christians have historically had about mankind’s basic relationship to God. Joseph Smith wasn’t the first “Christian” to be skeptical about Plato’s “Perfect Being” theories. Joseph Smith “revealed” if you will, that God and his Son are two separate Deities, their third companion is a Spirit, we’re all part of the same family, spiritual and physical sons and daughters of God. The Father and Son are “Perfected” humans, and we can be “Perfected” under their mentoring as well. We’re here to learn and grow and be more like our Father in Heaven, and so forth. These lost “plain and precious” truths are the sort of thing Joseph Smith was on about when we spoke of the “fullness” of the gospel. Not even Joseph Smith however, and his direct dictation from Deity actually restored all knowledge about everything God has in store for every facet and condition of mankind.

The embarrassing fact for those Mormons harping on the notion that the LDS “Prophets” of modern times make the church inherently superior, is that even by Mormon standards, Jesus has actually not maintained an ongoing stream of “new” revelation. He ultimately hasn’t revealed a whole lot more to modern Mormon prophets than he did to his contemporary ancient apostles, no matter how much today’s Mormon leadership imagines to the contrary. And, of what He has or could reveal to modern man, even Mormon leadership accepts that rather a lot of possible oncoming “revelation,” is still not meant to be openly broadcast anyway. Joseph Smith really only spoke of restoring those few but vital, key bits of Divine knowledge that had been lost, bent, or eroded through generations of the Church trying to fill in the blanks with Platonism and human “logic.” During Smith’s era of restoration, naturally, the volume of “new” or actually “restored” information came in a flood. Then it was all written down more or less, and the flood trickled off to just an occasional drip, after Joseph Smith. Because Joseph Smith had done his job. Which was restoring the church and those missing bits of data needed to run it properly.

Daily communication with God has never been the normal state of human condition. It has not so been since man was cast out of the Garden of Eden. It is not part of the deal, even for Mormons, even for Mormon “Prophets.”

For example, Moses came out of nowhere historically speaking, became a major prophet, wrote half the Old Testament, worked plagues and miracles, talked to God regularly, wandered around for 40 years in the desert, led his people to the Promised Land, and then, as my Norse ancestors would say, at this point Moses leaves the saga. He just disappears. From that day to this, thousands upon thousands of years, there have been only a handful of “prophets” who rose to anything like the stature of Moses. Each prophet before and after Moses likewise rose to the specific Biblically recorded task God had set for him, jotted down any specific task-related instructions which got added to the canon, and when the job was done they died, sealed their testimony with blood, or otherwise were never heard of again. We do not, just to make the point clear, ever read in the Biblical records of a string of functionary, custodial “Prophet” replacements who after the big prophet was gone and the main job was over, hung around and kept busy administering the program in an organized church structure. There are no biblical records where Aaron takes over for Moses, and then writes down a completely different spin on the “golden calf” episode from his own perspective. You don’t read the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and get to sort through each writer’s opinions of what the other three had to say about this subject or that. Yes, that all came later in the greater Christian Church, but it came from Church Fathers and Apologists and Clergy, none of whom claimed to be a “living prophet.” Granted, they acted as if they were and considered themselves infallible anyway.

If we take the existing Christian canon as the Word of God in any case, we can only assume that with a few exceptions, we’re still reading what Moses or Daniel or Ezekiel or Jeremiah wrote thousands of years ago because there wasn’t much God needed to add to it till the next job came up hundreds or thousands of years later and a new prophet needed calling. And in the Biblical record, it seems clear that each succeeding “Prophet” was only concerned with what he was doing for God and His people at the time, not harmonizing a whole prophetic tradition, or bringing everyone up to current status in the dogma department.

Now, it can be argued that preparing for the arrival of Jesus Christ was the whole point of the Old Testament prophets, and He did in fact harmonize the canon to that point by showing up personally and telling us all how the story ended. You could easily assume that His arguments and commentaries that became the New Testament do indeed take Christianity up to the current status. To accept that view however, you’d have to believe that Jesus was a very poor writer and had no sense of organization at all. He never wrote anything down for one thing. All his apostles got tortured and murdered to death in less than a lifetime, and his organization has been terrorizing itself ever since.

In Mormonism’s “most correct of any book on earth,” the Book of Mormon, you have exactly the history of prophet-to-prophet hand-offs combined with prophetic condensation, abridgement, clarification and preservation you’d expect in a real God-Guided system. Those prophets got wiped out as well, but they were more devout scribblers than their Old World equivalents obviously. But the Book of Mormon, all boasts aside, frankly doesn’t add much to the Biblical canon in terms of new and revelatory doctrinal points. Most of the Book of Mormon’s value lies in it’s existence. It’s a conceptual proof that God has other sheep, that God speaks to other prophets, that a modern prophet revealed and translated it, that the canon is still open. What’s recorded in the Book of Mormon could never be more revolutionary or revelatory than that it exists at all.

The problem we have with Mormonism in the area of ongoing prophecy, is that starting with Joseph Smith, you do now in fact have a highly structured bureaucracy leading a permanently constituted organizational “Church” structure. Its president takes upon himself the title of “Prophet, Seer, and Revelator,” and then uncomfortably waits for the next church-related job God feels a need to personally take an interest in. It’s like the Book of Mormon system only it happens in real-time. You end up with caretakers making perfunctory notes for posterity just to say they did something, as did Omni and Jarom and Enos, just handing down the book generation after generation, sometimes adding a note about how nothing much was happening so they’re just passing down the records like they were told to do. This, honestly speaking, is exactly what the “Restored” Church of Jesus Christ (of Latter-day Saints) has become since the martyrdom of Joseph Smith. This is not necessarily a reflection upon LDS leadership. Joseph Smith was shot all to hell by Christian mobs to shut him up and kill the movement, and perhaps that was part of God’s plan, but it is mostly a good indication that God generally calls any given “major” prophet to do a specific job and then whatever happens to him afterward just happens, because the job is done. In Smith’s case the claimed job was “Restoration,” and having “Restored” the structure and key doctrines necessary, we can assume that not only was Joseph Smith done with the assignment, but God was fairly happy with the wisdom and knowledge He’d revealed in the process, and therefore Smith’s successors could expect not a whole lot of additional conversation with Deity until conditions according to God’s timetable and desires warranted it.

Then again, the whole point of being a mortal—something God has amply revealed to both ancient and modern prophets—is for us to work out our own Salvation by making our own choices. The whole point of mortality is lost if God instructs mankind point-by-point and item-by-item what to do, what to think, and how to live all day every day. Mormon canon teaches of obedience, but the principle of obedience is a choice based upon faith, not an absolutely guaranteed, Divinely decreed and spelled-out formula to follow because it’s proven to “earn” you a certain reward based upon performance.

What Joseph Smith actually restored was the “Church,” a system of mortal government, through which God allows man to regulate man’s own participation in God’s Kingdom. God doesn’t need the Church. Man needs the Church. The Church is a mortal institution run by and for mortals. The difference between Mormonism and any other “Christian” church, is authority. Mormonism, if you care to buy it, claims to have direct authority from Jesus Christ to administer to His believers in His name. That’s authority mind you. Along with authority comes power and inspiration, and there’s where it gets a bit sticky. The Mormon hierarchy holds the “keys,” which means the token authority to talk directly to God, to commune with angels, the Holy Spirit, or see visions, heal the sick, raise the dead, any of all that miraculous stuff. I fully believe that the current LDS president for example, could talk to Jesus personally. I take that on faith. But I don’t have to believe that he doesn’t do that however, because he has said he doesn’t. I therefore know he doesn’t talk to God and Angels. That is not faith based. So what I know for a fact is, that Jesus doesn’t sit in the Salt Lake Temple and directly administer HIs church. And more to the point, Jesus isn’t up in the Church Office Building passing on daily lessons to the Brethren about bigger and bigger doctrinal concepts just for entertainment purposes.

http://www.ldschurchnews.com/media/attachments/53.pdf

The Church is about salvation. It’s about serving Christ and feeding His sheep. You just don’t need to know that much to accomplish this mission. Jesus doesn’t need to come down and micromanage the operation. And sure, by the time you read this some LDS “Prophet” may say he’s had a face-to-face with Jesus, and I’ll gladly accept this as the truth if and when it happens. It simply hasn’t happened since Joseph Smith to date.

Mormon priesthood authority is an exercise in on-the-job self-training. The various LDS authorities over time, have always been rather diverse in the way they trained themselves, and the way they defined their system of government. Originally, whatever Joseph Smith said about anything was “doctrine.” That was pretty much the whole early LDS organizational structure. What is or isn’t “LDS “doctrine” since then has always been inherently uncertain apart from somebody openly claiming a “revelation” and then having it unanimously sustained by the three ruling Mormon priesthood bodies, the Quorum of the Seventy, the Council of Twelve, and the First Presidency. Short of the completion of this canonization process, there have always existed “gospel hobbies” that general authorities, BYU religion professors, and even the general membership have been allowed to play with. These “mysteries” are pondered through generations and infiltrate many levels of official and semi-official LDS “theology,” but have no basis in revelation or authority and thus are not “doctrine.” This remains true, even though the likes of Bruce R McConkie might have sternly and apparently “authoritatively” argued his own unique brilliance here there and everywhere for however many years.

And down a hundred rungs of the LDS doctrinal evolutionary ladder from bona-fide, half-credentialed doctrinal pretenders like Bruce R McConkie, hangs the likes of one W Cleon Skousen–by his prehensile tail probably. Skousen made his fame first by becoming a “Commie Hunter,” and gaining a hysterical popularity in the dry little Salt Lake Valley back in the McCarthy era, and this he used as a platform for promoting his bogus doctrinal babblings as well, assisted again by virtue of his lame BYU half-title and his chumminess with a couple of key church presidents. But even his most staunch and authoritative supporters in the First Presidency ultimately turned their backs on Skousen. And yet, Skousen remains protected even today from those who would sully his legacy. Even when McConkie gave his lecture on modern heresy at BYU in 1980, Skousen and I were both in attendance. I always wondered why Brother Bruce didn’t just name Cleon as a “Modern Heretic” from the lectern and be done with it. Professor Eugene England unfortunately didn’t have Skousen’s connections, so it was England who got the infamous dressing-down letter from McConkie instead.

Let’s not pretend there aren’t any “politics” in the church.

http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=6770

http://www.mrm.org/bruce-mcconkies-rebuke-of-eugene-england

If you believe that the LDS “Prophet” talks directly to God, if you believe that’s the whole point of the church, and that the entire LDS governmental system was established by Joseph Smith merely so it could rubber-stamp its approval of anything the “Prophet” comes up with, I submit that you are a fool. And Bruce R McConkie agrees with me apparently. Actually, McConkie would call you a damned fool.

If you think any half-arsed theory belched out in a stake fireside by any given LDS “prophet,” in the last two centuries or so is living scripture, or that any jackass book written by some LDS prophet’s best buddy, or some little tome once given some offhand praise by The Brethren, singularly, or en-masse, rates as “Mormon doctrine,” you’re basically a heretic. This sort or confusion and anarchy is not the church Joseph Smith established, and definitely not the church God had in mind when He “revealed” a three-bodied regulatory structure set up as a check-and-balance system in the very image of the US Constitution–which again, Joseph Smith maintained was inspired by God to establish God’s purposes and Kingdom on Earth.

http://www.fairlds.org/Misc/Do_Mormons_Believe_in_Blind_Obedience.html

In the organization of a new stake recently, a general authority rolled into town to conduct the various meetings and sustain new stake authorities. This authority came to the business of installing the new stake president and put him before the body to be sustained. “Those who can sustain (so-and-so) in this calling, please manifest by the uplifted hand…. And then he said, “Those opposed…as if it would make any difference….” concluding with a drifting-off tone, a wink, and a responsive chuckle from the crowd.

Plainly, this general authority was under the impression that the rubber-stamping process should be enforced all the way down to you and me out there in the pews on Sunday. If I had raised my hand and objected to the sustaining of a man who’d been molesting my toddlers, would that make a difference do you suppose? What if he were looking to sustain a vote on something really really controversial, something that changed doctrine and the church itself? How about plural marriage for instance?

Official Declaration—1

To Whom It May Concern:

…Inasmuch as laws have been enacted by Congress forbidding plural marriages, which laws have been pronounced constitutional by the court of last resort, I hereby declare my intention to submit to those laws, and to use my influence with the members of the Church over which I preside to have them do likewise.

There is nothing in my teachings to the Church or in those of my associates, during the time specified, which can be reasonably construed to inculcate or encourage polygamy; and when any Elder of the Church has used language which appeared to convey any such teaching, he has been promptly reproved. And I now publicly declare that my advice to the Latter-day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land.

Wilford Woodruff

President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Salt Lake City, Utah, October 6, 1890.

Now, you might expect me to use plural marriage as an example of prophetic waffling or doctrinal unclarity. Nothing could be more untrue. The above declaration simply falls back to previous, superseding doctrines about honoring, sustaining and obeying the law, long found directly from Joseph Smith and published in the Wentworth Letter, now called the Articles of Faith.

12 We believe in being ^asubject to ^bkings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in ^cobeying, honoring, and sustaining the ^dlaw.

The truth is, laws were passed that were specifically designed to kill Mormonism. These authorized civil authority to confiscate the entire bank account of the LDS church and every stick of property it owned for teaching that plural marriage was a correct Biblical principle. The accusation president Woodruff was fending off was that Mormons may have stopped teaching plural marriage as a proper Biblical marital status, but everyone knew the church still believed it and so all of Mormonism was still guilty. In the end, Mormonism’s Christian persecutors made a lot of headway into making that “thought-crime” stick anyway, Constitutional or not. However, as long as plural marriage was neither taught nor authorized by the LDS church, the church was legally off the hook. So, the above “Manifesto” was published and the policy was sustained as canon doctrine and thereby Mormons were officially out of the multiple wife business. In reality, all it really does is re-assert the LDS respect and deference for the Constitution of the United States of America, which on this uniquely Mormon marital issue, had been manipulated by a lot of activist Christian judges and attorneys who’s real interest was destroying the church, not regulating marriage.

What I’m most fascinated by however, is this rather casual aside to the whole controversy:

The Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as President of this Church to lead you astray.It is not in the programme. It is not in the mind of God. If I were to attempt that, the Lord would remove me out of my place, and so He will any other man who attempts to lead the children of men astray from the oracles of God and from their duty. (Excerpts from Three Addresses by President Wilford Woodruff Regarding the Manifesto: Sixty-first Semiannual General Conference of the Church, Monday, October 6, 1890, Salt Lake City, Utah. Reported in Deseret Evening News, October 11, 1890, p. 2.)

The emphasis is mine above. This is the most self-serving, logically circular, and mindlessly, NAZI-propaganda-like verse in all of the LDS scriptures. This is papal infallibility added to the king’s divine right to rule added to the deity of pharaoh as implemented today. In reality, it’s merely a quick aside by way of introducing the gravity of Woodruff’s announcement about abandoning plural marriage. He’s merely reassuring that he’s not a fallen prophet for retreating from the practice. This little reassurance however, is now a bigger statement of “Mormon doctrine” than the plural marriage Manifesto it prefaces. It is used by any general authority in the church, and particularly the president, to halt any debate on any subject he’s decided to booster. The literal belief of those promoting it, is that since the guy they’re backing is still moving their lips and words are coming out, it must be God’s direct will, because if it wasn’t, God would have struck them dead on the spot before He’d allow any of them to babble out anything goofy or misleading.

Anyone who’s read half of what Brigham Young babbled about knows this surely cannot be true. Ask Bruce McConkie. For some reason Bruce and I have become rather sympatico in my old age on this score. But on the other hand, Brigham Young also said this:

“The greatest fear I have is that the people of this Church will accept what we say as the will of the Lord without first praying about it and getting the witness within their own hearts that what we say is the word of the Lord.” ²¹

http://www.staylds.com/docs/WhatIsOfficialMormonDoctrine.html

President Woodruff had no intention of making a claim of LDS infallibility where the president of the church is concerned when he assured his audience that the Lord would not let the LDS leadership lead its flock astray. That wasn’t even his point. All he was trying to do was brace them for a major reversal in what had become a major doctrine of salvation for the Saints in Utah.

But isn’t there indeed a system set up that would in fact check any church president before he went very far astray? Isn’t that called “church government?” Isn’t that called being governed “by common consent,” rather than being obligatorily extorted by the powerful to rubber-stamp their decrees? Or Is God’s whole plan to guard His people from human error, ignorance and prejudice, just to shoot a lightning bolt through the prophet if he misspeaks?

And isn’t it through church government, not a direct call from God, that the church president gets to be church president in the first place? It’s all done by seniority of call, not a voting process. Originally succession went to the oldest apostle, later changed to the senior apostle by time of service in the calling. Automatic succession by seniority eliminates a lot of politics, but has its disadvantages as well and tends to create a geriarchy led by the least current old codger who’s the least connected with what’s going on now in the world. And it leaves lingering, fluttering death-strings of those who have strong doctrinal views on one side of an argument, who die after a few years or even months of harping on it as a new president, only to be replaced by another octogenarian on his death bed who has an entirely opposite viewpoint. But you see, I’m wrong for even seeing what is patently obvious and saying a word about it to anyone according to Dallin Oaks or Bruce R McConkie. The proper duty of the rank-and-file Mormon is to quietly pray your heart out hoping God will eventually take care of it directly or the Brethren with eventually pull their heads out of their collective arses.

I could be even wronger by pointing out that Acts 1:15-26 clearly explains how the original apostles, let by Peter, selected a member of their body, and that it involved a pre-selection and the casting of lots—nothing like the procedure used in Mormonism today.  And Brigham Young governed without a presidency for many years before he dared call himself “president” of the church and take Joseph Smith’s place directly—for fear of congregational dissent. So Mormon claims of having the same organization as the “primitive” Church is a little grandiose. To make the point clearer, Jesus personally appeared and called his apostles. What happens now doesn’t even involve casting lots to introduce a Divinely random input to the selection. For generations Utahns were calling Utahns from around the Valley and the system just shuffled them down the seniority line and that’s how we got who we got in there now, period. In order to sell the notion that Jesus personally called today’s “Prophet,” you have to assume Jesus “prompted” his name to stand out on a list of local candidates on some ward roster forty or fifty years ago, and through Divine Providence, rising here and there to this and that call, the fact that he ended up at the top of the hierarchy was subtly guided all that time through all those processes, and most of all you have to believe that God predestined him to be born along the Wasatch Front to just the right Mormon family. All of this bolsters the contention that the closed and ignorant society of Utah is Zion and God’s repository of all wisdom and spirituality. Why else would all the “Prophets” come from Utah? Well, because the selection process has essentially excluded anyone out of earshot of the Salt Lake temple from even getting on a list. The concept of God appearing at the deathbed of the outgoing “Prophet” and speaking the name and GPS coordinates of His Chosen successor isn’t in the system.

Which leads me to a load of constantly changing doctrines and policies, or even canon verse, like the repeated changing of temple ceremonial texts which are the highest of the LDS canon, the rules for conducting the quorums of the LDS leadership, even the questions on the temple recommend list and how they got there, that just somehow, somewhere get “decided” and continue forever until one day they change it all, and basically you’re just supposed to deem it none of your business. Annoying, yes, goes directly to the topic of Mormon doctrine, but for me and most other Mormons, not terribly troubling because these are doctrinal components not meant for public consumption anyway.

What is however openly troubling for many Latter-day Saints is the Mormon “no contention” doctrine. This very popular dogma has been magnifying itself for generations and is now cited any time you disagree with anyone of any authority in the church. The first person to stop the argument and say in the sweetest primary voice, “I feel the spirit of contention,” wins their point, and disrespects the other party into silence. This phenomenon arises out one silly verse in 3d Nephi that Mormonism has taken to the hysterically extreme:

 29 For verily, verily I say unto you, he that hath the spirit of^acontention is not of me, but is of the ^bdevil, who is the father of contention, and he stirreth up the hearts of men to contend with anger, one with another.

http://lds.org/scriptures/bofm/3-ne/11?lang=eng

Dallin Oaks is famous for his role in very publicly taking this blind obedience principle to new heights in the first major network television documentary about the modern LDS church under president Gordon B Hinckley. In this video Oaks gives a little lecture against criticizing LDS church leadership, in which he says without a trace of sarcasm or so much as a wink to the irony of it:

It’s wrong to criticise leaders of the church, even if the criticism is true.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xcwghb_don-t-ever-criticize-us-even-if-th_new’

Oak’s suggestion arises from the very real LDS expectation that as its leadership is speaking away incorrectly, or heading the church down the wrong path, God will send an angel to “reveal” their error, or that God will actually strike the offending idiot dead before any damage can be done. Therefore, no rank-and-file Mormon need ever speak out. Just patiently wait for the “Brethren” to either correct themselves or be corrected by Deity. Have faith and wait–however long it takes for them to realize what is blatantly obvious to you and the world. And again, this inane contention arises from Wilford Woodruff’s urgent appeal to his flock to not fire him or leave the church in mass exodus because he was putting the kibosh on plural marriage.

The dilemma I have here is that the claims of Mormon leadership’s infallibility, combined with the congregation’s duty to ignore their error even when they are obviously being fallible, is clearly Mormon doctrine. There are verses in canon scripture. Everyone believes it literally. These notions are standard citations by leadership to prove that leadership is never wrong. And yes, numerous other scriptures refute the notion of LDS leadership infallibility, but are not nearly as faith-instilling and spiritually sexy. To a church leader, statements from scripture that suggest infallibility are like spiritual crack. It’s a shortcut to a spiritual high, or at least obedience. Scripture that concedes LDS leadership to be mere mortals and thus fallible, are only cited on rare occasions to explain away doctrinal paradoxes and changes over the years.

Papal infallibility is a cheap and easy doctrinal win. It sticks to any argument you want to win as a massive force-multiplier, even if you only have a shred of implied authority behind you. It is obviously not likely to be abandoned by anyone in authority. The only way to combat contemporary human authority, is to fire back a contradictory verse of canon. So just like any Biblical scripture, just like any other religious denomination, Mormons a lot of the time just end up bashing even the modern canon verses back and forth, proving to themselves whatever they want to believe anyway. And in perfect circular argument, Papal infallibility allows you to dismiss any canonical argument against you by contending that the Pope is not only infallible, but the only mortal authority capable of properly defining not just doctrine, but the Divine canon itself, and by extension how canon is to be applied and interpreted.

Joseph Smith almost daily, hammered straight and true at specific questions and nailed the answers to the canon wall. What virtually every Mormon “prophet” since Smith has done instead, is occasionally extrapolate from either Smith’s revelations and statements of faith, or tangential statements by Smith other prophets. For example, President Woodruff clearly didn’t mean his little preface to become what it has now become. He had intended a simple reassurance that in the specific case of his cessation of plural marriage, that he had seen a revelation outlining its necessity. He makes this abundantly clear. He makes it abundantly clear that all he is promising is that in the matter at hand, he is not a fallen prophet. Likewise, Nephi’s warning against contention never intended to stifle earnest and enthusiastic debate.

http://www.fairlds.org/The_God_Makers/tagm30.html

Apparently modern Mormon leaders find attempting to nail down Mormon doctrine point-by-point in specific terms so trepedatious that they don’t actually do it unless, and until literally slapped repeatedly about the head and chest with it. When it won’t go away, when it will result in death and destruction and the end of the church, when riots might ensue at any moment, when the entire progress of the Kingdom of God on Earth is at stake, only then will they actually sit down and deal with the given issue—and then only that issue. I could suppose that this seems to be because they are skittish of late about pulling a meeting on some critical doctrinal crises because it implies, nay almost demands that somebody in charge of the meeting pony-up a revelation, or they all look impotent, ineffectual, and a bit silly arguing amongst themselves just like commoners.

In the case of plural marriage, Joseph Smith received a revelation sustaining the practice of plural marriage as observed by ancient prophets. (Section 132 D&C.) The modern Saints began to practice it. That led to serious social and political problems that would have destroyed the church. Wilford Woodruff went to the Lord, then the body of the church, laid out all the doctrinal considerations, asserted that God had told him to issue a decree that the practice should be stopped, and made a completely consistent and rational account of both himself and God’s will in the matter.

http://lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/132.34-40,45?lang=eng#33

No complaints have I then, with Wilford Woodruff or the whole plural marriage issue. The system worked. That’s actually how serious LDS doctrinal points should be dealt with. But you must also see, that in the course of solving one doctrinal dilemma, Wilford Woodruff’s allusion to LDS presidential infallibility just created another huge doctrinal controversy. As a practical policy, all LDS general authorities are now treated by themselves and their membership as if they were infallible. If not infallible perhaps, then certainly unquestionable. In effect, infallible by other means.

As it happens, the local priesthood lesson this coming week is a little tome by Ezra Taft Benson, out of the June 1980 Liahona, titled, Fourteen Fundamentals in Following the Prophet. It’s a classic, self-serving primer in LDS hierarchal terrorism:

1. The prophet is the only man who speaks for the Lord in everything.

2. The living prophet is more vital to us than the standard works.

3. The living prophet is more important to us than a dead prophet.

4. The prophet will never lead the church astray.

5. The prophet is not required to have any particular earthly training or credentials to speak on any subject or act on any matter at any time.

6. The prophet does not have to say “Thus Saith the Lord,” to give us scripture.

7. The prophet tells us what we need to know, not always what we want to know.

8. The prophet is not limited by men’s reasoning.

9. The prophet can receive revelation on any matter, temporal or spiritual.

10. The prophet may advise on civic matters.

11. The two groups who have the greatest difficulty in following the prophet are the proud who are learned and the proud who are rich.

12. The prophet will not necessarily be popular with the world or the worldly.

13. The prophet and his counselors make up the First Presidency—the highest quorum in the Church.

14. The prophet and the presidency—the living prophet and the First Presidency—follow them and be blessed—reject them and suffer.

http://lds.org/liahona/1981/06/fourteen-fundamentals-in-following-the-prophet?lang=eng&query=June+Ezra+Taft+Benson+(publication%3a%22Liahona%22)

It would take gigabytes to tear into the fascinatingly backwards little sermons that Benson delivers to explain each of these points, but for present purposes I will simply remark that this lesson appeared thirty-one years ago as of this writing as a First Presidency message and it preceded Bruce McConkie’s famous rebuke of Eugene England, in which McConkie vehemently contradicts most of Benson’s points above. McConkie could not have been unaware of it and perhaps it’s a bit of a play from the top to slap down both sides of the then raging battle over just who decided what Mormon doctrine was. This war was fought on the one side by BYU religion professors and other civilian dabblers like Skousen, and on the other hand, was waged on the offensive by a somewhat two-fronted attack first from Bruce R McConkie, who used the opportunity to declare himself the prime arbiter of all things doctrinal, and finally, not entirely in lockstep with McConkie, a late-entering bombing run of official declarations from “The Brethren” trying to own the debate and keep McConkie in his place. By Benson’s criteria this list of “truths” is “modern scripture” and “more vital to us than the standard works,” and essentially superior to Mormon canon. Benson had the credentials and wrote as President of the Quorum of Twelve, on assignment of the First Presidency, delivered it in official LDS forum, and published it in official LDS magazines. Either Benson and his Quorum of Twelve and First Presidency are preaching false doctrine here, and leading the whole church astray, or Bruce R McConkie was a heretic.

Another way to phrase this convoluted argument is to say that Mormons in the little Utah Valley after many generations of isolation had finally got smart. They made a university. Then they found out that if you get smart and encourage study and analysis and free-thinking, you end up with a lot of Mormons with high degrees asking questions  that “The Brethren” can’t answer or can’t answer without calling their predecessors ignorant and uninspired at least by implication. You are now stuck, because the “Glory of God is Intelligence,” but intelligent Mormons spot problems and inconsistencies and outright incorrectness. They find these things in Mormon leadership, their writings, and their theories, past and present. McConkie’s solution was to claim it’s all about the canon. The ultimate standard of correct Mormon doctrine is tested with the canon, and no matter who said it at what level of authority in the LDS church, if it disagrees with the canon, the error is with the man and the doctrine, never the canon. The Brethren responded by boasting that God has thus far only called the divinely inspired ignorant and unpopular to serve as prophets, went on to categorize the intelligent and educated as inherently rebellious and ripe for hell, and threw in the rich just to cover all bases since the rich tend to be better educated anyway. And most importantly, The Brethren also pointed out to lesser authorities like Bruce McConkie that it is the First Presidency and only the First Presidency that has anything to say about anything doctrinal.

This of course, did little to shut Bruce McConkie up, or dissuade his by then massive fan base amongst the LDS general membership, or even give them cause for tempering their absolutely desperate loyalty to his officially condemned encyclopedia of Mormon Doctrine.

Officially, Bruce McConkie’s warning to Eugene England that canon scripture, including modern canon revelations, are the foundation of Mormon “Gospel,” is false. According to Benson’s sermon delivered at England’s very place of employment, BYU, only months previous to England’s berating by McConkie, canon scripture is not in point of fact the measuring stick by which we establish the truth of Mormon doctrine. Not according to the “Prophet.” Officially, the “Prophet” says that Mormon doctrine is whatever the present “Prophet” says it is. And it doesn’t have to be a “revelation” and it doesn’t have to be informed, educated, or inspired. It could be on any subject including civic or political matters. Officially, the “Prophet’s” every random opinion is “more vital” than canon scripture. That’s not me being sarcastic. That’s exactly the way it is repeatedly spelled out in official teaching materials. That is the way it is universally understood in the church.

Officially, when a new “Prophet” assumes the title of LDS President, Mormon doctrine becomes whatever he changes it to. A living “Prophet” trumps the entire history of dead prophets and everything they passed on, including thousands of years of canon scripture.

That’s what the “Prophet” teaches.

But then, what would you expect the “Prophet’s” take on the issue to be? Would you expect him to say, don’t listen to me all that closely—I’m just wingin’ it like you with the scriptures and doin’ my best to make sense of it all…? Of course the prophet’s going to tell you to follow himself. Of course he’s going to promise you the Lord would never let him fail you.

I’d love to be able to explain this in a more credible, sensible, even logical fashion, particularly for the sake of some wavering Saint or LDS investigator who finds this irrational line of dogma intellectually retarded and spiritually troubling. This is all the better I can do.

LDS prophets and leaders are by their own definition, infallibly fallible. The effective doctrine on LDS leadership fallibility is that they are indeed fallible, but you’re not allowed to call them on it.

The convoluted process for determining Mormon doctrine on this or that score today, is nowhere near as simple and direct as showing up at Newell Whitney’s store, buying a plug of chaw, a quart of whiskey, and going upstairs to the School of Prophets to ask Joseph Smith. Indeed, the “process” of determining Mormon doctrine currently isn’t even a “process.” It just sort of happens. “Mormon” doctrine mutates daily and continues to just slop out of the pulpits and quorums and other organizations in the church, extrapolated from raw journals and personal, pet writings of Mormon authorities over the years.

A good example of some of these sorts of apocryphal sources is the a decades-after-the-fact interview with Zebedee Coltrin about his attendance in the previously mentioned School of the Prophets that originally met above Whtiney’s store. And while helpful on one level, Zebedee could pretty much say anything he wanted to about what was taught or performed there and assign any doctrine or practice to anyone he felt like. But whether coming from Zebedee Coltrin or Brigham Young, this is the sort of informational source the LDS church has relied upon for its “doctrine” since Joseph Smith was assassinated. And it’s not a good thing.

http://www.boap.org/LDS/Early-Saints/ZebC.html

Don’t take my word for it. Bruce R “McConcrete,” the late apostle who wrote in stone, will make the case for me:

The following is a letter written by LDS Apostle Bruce R. McConkie and sent to a BYU Professor by the name of Eugene England. The purpose of McConkie’s letter was to let Dr. England know that he was very displeased with certain ideas he was espousing publicly. These included teachings taught in the past by leaders such as Brigham Young….

http://www.mrm.org/bruce-mcconkies-rebuke-of-eugene-england

http://eom.byu.edu/index.php/King_Follett_Discourse

The letter itself is quite lengthy so I have condensed it. It deals with a number of LDS “doctrines” and doctrinal camps that Brother England was attempting to reconcile through the examination of the historical teachings primarily of Brigham Young and Joseph Smith. The “King Follet Discourse,” is one of Joseph Smith’s most popular apocryphal writings, and is at the center of England’s postulations:

THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS

The Council of Twelve
47 East South Temple Street, Salt Lake City, Utah 84150
February 19, 1981

Mr. Eugene England
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxx, xx xxxxxxx

Dear Brother England:

This may well be the most important letter you have or will receive. It is written in reply to an undated letter from you which came in an envelope postmarked, September 4, 1980. Your letter enclosed a 19-page document which you had prepared under the title, “The Perfection and Progression of God: Two Spheres of Existence and Two Modes of Discourse.”

In your letter and the article enclosed with it, you set forth the thesis that although God knows all things as pertaining to our sphere of existence, there are nonetheless other spheres beyond ours in which Deity continues to advance and progress in knowledge and truth. In espousing and explaining this philosophy you suppose you are harmonizing quotations from various of the early Brethren. Some of these statements emphatically say that God knows all things and has all power and others of them say that he is advancing in knowledge and understanding and is gaining new truths.

…

On Sunday, June 1, 1980, I spoke at one of the multi-stake firesides in the Marriott Center on the subject, “The Seven Deadly Heresies.” In that talk I said:

“There are those who say that God is progressing in knowledge and is learning new truths.

“This is false — utterly, totally, and completely. There is not one sliver of truth in it. It grows out of a wholly twisted and incorrect view of the King Follet Sermon and of what is meant by eternal progression.

…

“Eternal progression consists of living the kind of life God lives and of increasing in kingdoms and dominions everlastingly. Why anyone should suppose that an infinite and eternal being, who has presided in our universe for almost 2,555,000,000 years, who made the sidereal heavens, whose creations are more numerous than the particles of the earth, and who is aware of the fall of every sparrow — why anyone would suppose that such a being has more to learn and new truths to discover in the laboratories of eternity is totally beyond my comprehension.

…

He [Brigham Young] was guided by the Holy Spirit in his teachings in general. He was a mighty prophet. He led Israel the way the Lord wanted his people led. He built on the foundation laid by the Prophet Joseph. He completed his work and has come on to eternal exaltation.

Nonetheless, as Joseph Smith so pointedly taught, a prophet is not always a prophet, only when he is acting as such. Prophets are men and they make mistakes. Sometimes they err in doctrine. This is one of the reasons the Lord has given us the Standard Works. They become the standards and rules that govern where doctrine and philosophy are concerned. If this were not so, we would believe one thing when one man was president of the Church and another thing in the days of his successors. Truth is eternal and does not vary. Sometimes even wise and good men fall short in the accurate presentation of what is truth. Sometimes a prophet gives personal views which are not endorsed and approved by the Lord.

Yes, President Young did teach that Adam was the father of our spirits, and all the related things that the cultists ascribe to him. This, however, is not true. He expressed views that are out of harmony with the gospel. But, be it known, Brigham Young also taught accurately and correctly, the status and position of Adam in the eternal scheme of things. What I am saying is that Brigham Young, contradicted Brigham Young, and the issue becomes one of which Brigham Young we will believe. The answer is we will believe the expressions that accord with the teachings in the Standard Works.

Yes, Brigham Young did say some things about God progressing in knowledge and understanding, but again, be it known, that Brigham Young taught, emphatically and plainly, that God knows all things and has all power meaning in the infinite, eternal and ultimate and absolute sense of the word. Again, the issue is, which Brigham Young shall we believe and the answer is: We will take the one whose statements accord with what God has revealed in the Standard Works.

I think you can give me credit for having a knowledge of the quotations from Brigham Young relative to Adam, and of knowing what he taught under the subject that has become known as the Adam God Theory. President Joseph Fielding Smith said that Brigham Young will have to make his own explanations on the points there involved. I think you can also give me credit for knowing what Brigham Young said about God progressing. And again, that is something he will have to account for. As for me and my house, we will have the good sense to choose between the divergent teachings of the same man and come up with those that accord with what God has set forth in his eternal plan of salvation.

This puts me in mind of Paul’s statement: “There must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you.” (1 Cor. 11:19.) I do not know all of the providences of the Lord, but I do know that he permits false doctrine to be taught in and out of the Church and that such teaching is part of the sifting process of mortality. We will be judged by what we believe among other things. If we believe false doctrine, we will be condemned. If that belief is on basic and fundamental things, it will lead us astray and we will lose our souls. This is why Nephi said: “And all those who preach false doctrines, . . . wo, wo, wo be unto them, saith the Lord God Almighty, for they shall be thrust down to hell!: (2 Ne. 28:15.) This clearly means that people who teach false doctrine in the fundamental and basic things will lose their souls. The nature and kind of being that God is, is one of these fundamentals. I repeat: Brigham Young erred in some of his statements on the nature and kind of being that God is and as to the position of Adam in the plan of salvation, but Brigham Young also taught the truth in these fields on other occasions. And I repeat, that in his instance, he was a great prophet and has gone on to eternal reward. What he did is not a pattern for any of us. If we choose to believe and teach the false portions of his doctrines, we are making an election that will damn us.

It should be perfectly evident that under our system of church discipline, it would be anticipated that some others besides Brigham Young would pick up some of his statements and echo them. Those who did this, also on other occasions, taught accurately and properly what the true doctrines of the gospel are. I do not get concerned when a good and sound person who. On the over-all, is teaching the truth happens to err on a particular point and say something in conflict with what he has said himself on a previous occasion. We are all mortal. We are all fallible. We all make mistakes. No single individual all the time is in tune with the Holy Spirit, but I do get concerned when some person or group picks out false statements and makes them the basis of their presentation and theology and thus ends up having a false concept of the doctrine, which in reality, was not in the mind of the person whose quotations they are using.

Wise gospel students do not build their philosophies of life on quotations of individuals, even though those quotations come from presidents of the Church. Wise people anchor their doctrine on the Standard Works. When Section 20 says that God is infinite and eternal, it means just that and so on through all of the revelations. There is no need to attempt to harmonize conflicting views when some of the views are out of harmony with the Standard Works. This is what life is all about. The Lord is finding out what we will believe in spite of the allurements of the world or the philosophies of men or the seemingly rational and logical explanations that astute people make.

We do not solve our problems by getting a statement from the president of the Church or from someone else on a subject. We have been introduced to the gospel; we have the gift of the Holy Ghost; we have the Standards Works and it is our responsibility to get in tune and understand properly what the Lord has revealed and has had us canonize. The end result of this course of personally and individually pursuing light and truth is to reach that millennial state of which the scriptures say it will no longer be necessary for every man to say to his neighbor “know the Lord,” for all shall know him from the greatest to the least. Joseph Smith says this will be by the spirit of revelation.

…It is not in your province to set in order the Church or to determine what is doctrines shall be. It is axiomatic among us to know that God has given apostles and prophets “for the edifying of the body of Christ,” and that their ministry is to see that “we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the slight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive.” (Eph. 4:11-16.) This means, among other things, that it is my province to teach to the Church what the doctrine is. It is your province to echo what I say or to remain silent. You do not have a divine commission to correct me or any of the Brethren. The Lord does not operate that way. If I lead the Church astray, that is my responsibility, but the fact still remains that I am the one appointed with all the rest involved so to do. The appointment is not given to the faculty at Brigham Young University or to any of the members of the Church. The Lord’s house is a house of order and those who hold the keys are appointed to proclaim the doctrines.

Now you know that this does not mean that individuals should not do research and make discoveries and write articles. What it does mean is that what they write should be faith promoting and where doctrines are concerned, should be in harmony with that which comes from the head of the Church. And those at the head of the Church have the obligation to teach that which is in harmony with the Standard Works. If they err then be silent on the point and leave the event in the hands of the Lord. Some day all of us will stand before the judgment bar and be accountable for our teachings. And where there have been disagreements the Lord will judge between us. In the meantime if we want to save our own souls we need to strive with all the power we have to be in harmony with the revelations and not to be teaching or promulgating doctrines that suit our fancy.

I advise you to take my counsel on the matters here involved. If I err, that is my problem; but in your case if you single out some of these things and make them the center of your philosophy, and end up being wrong, you will lose your soul. One of the side effects of preaching contrary to what the Brethren preach is to get a spirit of rebellion growing up in your heart. This sort of thing cankers the soul spiritually. It drives people out of the Church. It weakens their faith. All of us need all of the faith and strength and spiritual stability we can get to maintain our positions in the Church and to work out our salvation.

Now, I think I have said enough in this letter so that if you are receptive and pliable, you will get the message. If you are not, rebellion will well up in your heart. I pray for your well-being. I repeat: the door to my office is open. Perhaps I should tell you what one of the very astute and alert General Authorities said to me when I chanced to mention to him the subject of your letter to me. He said: “Oh dear, haven’t we rescued him enough times already.”

Now I hope you will ponder and pray and come to a basic understanding of fundamental things and that unless and until you can on all points, you will remain silent on those where differences exist between you and the Brethren. This is the course of safety. I advise you to pursue it. If you do not, perils lie ahead. It is not too often in this day that any of us are told plainly and bluntly what ought to be. I am taking the liberty of so speaking to you at this time, and become thus a witness against you if you do not take the counsel.

I repeat: I have every good wish for you, pray that the Lord will bless you and hope that things will work out properly and well in your life.

Sincerely,

Bruce R. McConkie

BRM:vh

P.S. I am taking the liberty of sending copies of this response to those to whom you sent your communication.

It turns out Bruce R McConkie is more cynical than I have ever been. And I grew up believing him to be the most obnoxiously pious of the pious. The most nose-rubbingly enlightened of the enlightened. I will also tell you that Brother McConkie was so enthusiastic about his unique calling in this matter that he mailed out so many copies that they instantly became common currency in anti-Mormon camps. What actually came of this screed is nothing but fodder for anti-Mormonism. In terms of its doctrinal merits, It vanished into a very quiet oblivion. It went to the same theological wastebasket that his Seven Deadly Heresies talk went to—except of course this too became great fodder for the anti-Mormon efforts around the globe, because in that little jewel of a discourse, he said things like, having a personal relationship with Christ is heretical. You’d think the “greatest theologian of our times” would have the discernment to see how raving, anti-Christian sound-bites could be used against us, wouldn’t you?

Then again, McConkie has also been on the other end of the theological power structure. Bruce R knows well how it feels on the other side of the lecture about following what the Brethren want taught:

“The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
47 E. South Temple Street
Salt Lake City, Utah

David O. McKay, President
February 3, 1959

Dr. A. Kent Christensen
Department of Anatomy
Cornell University Medical College
1300 York Avenue
New York 21, New York

Dear Brother Christensen:

I have your letter of January 23, 1959 in which you ask for a statement of the Church’s position on the subject of evolution.

The Church has issued not official statement on the subject of the theory of evolution.
Neither ‘Man, His Origin and Destiny’ by Elder Joseph Fielding Smith, nor ‘Mormon Doctrine’ by Elder Bruce R. McConkie, is an official publication of the Church. . . .

[Emphasis added]

Sincerely yours,
[signed]

http://www.exmormon.org/mormon/mormon193.htm

In the context of his own censure and the Brethren’s repeated disavowment of his most popular book, McConkie’s letter to England is truly an amazing document. Imagine the sheer ego it would take to just casually quote yourself from a talk you gave recently rather than type out a new paragraph like a mere mortal having a normal conversation. But that’s the psychological profile of an academic. If it’s published, it’s authoritative. Even if you’re publishing yourself it’s still authoritative.

Here also, is Bruce R McConkie as the pot calling the kettle black. He says to teach what the “Brethren” teach. That takes a lot of hutzpah from a guy who’s own seminal work, Mormon Doctrine, got him spanked and spanked hard by the “Brethren” for publishing unauthorized and offensive doctrinal errors from cover to cover. Then he has the gall to say Brigham Young taught false doctrine. Worse than that, to paraphrase David O McKay, McConkie’s whole tone and demeanor in Mormon Doctrine seemed deliberately designed to tell the entire orthodox Christian world to feck off. Frankly, that message still comes through loud and clear even after Brethren-enforced “corrections.”

Oddly enough, Brigham Young, who McConkie found guilty of teaching doctrine not approved by the “Brethren,” was the first “Brethren.” Brother Brigham is why we now just call them “The Brethren.” McConkie however, is the guy who made “The Brethren” sound like a mafia hit squad, who’d be talking to you later if you didn’t take his advice right now.

Apparently a live Bruce trumps a dead Brigham. And yes Bruce, if you’re reading along up there, the LDS church has in fact believed one thing under one president, and another thing under another president. Ironically, you yourself point out that Brigham Young taught that Adam was God as president of the church, and then say this is damnably false doctrine according to you and then current leadership.

David O McKay, another case in point, firmly stated that there was no doctrine at all demanding that negroes be denied the priesthood, that it was a policy matter that could be reversed. He even led a council of the combined quorums in 1969, and achieved an affirmative vote to do so, until Harold B Lee, out of town on business, came back and made such a stink that they had a losing re-vote, based upon his insistence that it was a canon doctrine matter that would require a revelation to change. Joseph Fielding Smith then succeeded McKay as president and further imposed this negro-anti-priesthood doctrine upon the church. Others, like McConkie, went on writing books and essays explaining in great detail the logic and reason of how negroes would never receive the priesthood in this lifetime. Smith died in 1972 and Harold B Lee sat in for a year succeeding Smith. He even more emphatically bolstered enforcement of the doctrine of the negro being denied priesthood authority, claiming it would not happen until some distant future eternity. Then he died in 1973, and under Spencer W Kimball a few years later, that promised, priesthood-bearing eternity arrived upon the Mormon negro rather suddenly. So suddenly, that McConkie had no defense for his vehement Mormon Doctrine commentaries paraphrasing Fielding Smith’s theology about it other than “I was wrong.”

The point is Bruce, you were merely parroting your father-in-law, a president of the church, and he was wrong. So was Harold B Lee, also a president of the church. So was Brigham Young on the matter. So was John Taylor, his successor, and I could name many more LDS presidents and “Prophets” who were wrong on the matter as it turns out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints

McConkie says Brigham Young contradicted Brigham Young. Then he says a prophet is not always a prophet. He then quotes Joseph Smith debunking himself and half of what he ever said or wrote by implication. Then McConkie says (and even I shudder at this) that God allows even Brigham Young to teach false doctrine. God allows false doctrine to be taught in the church—even if from its president and Prophet.

See, good ol’ Bruce couldn’t just correct Gene England and let it lie. And McConkie doesn’t even think to question the reliability of the records which supply us with these crazy Brigham Young “doctrines,” the most obvious weak link. And then he really crosses the line into full hypocrisy: He doesn’t claim the “Brethren” to be infallible, just omnipotent.

If Brigham Young leads me to hell, argues McConkie, well, I guess I’m in hell but Brigham gets off because he’s a great prophet and did all those other good things that insures his reward anyway. I also presume that if Bruce R McConkie leads me to hell, I’m again the one stuck in hell, not The Conk. McConkie say it’s on his head for teaching me the false doctrine that sent me there, but what I guess that really means is that old Bruce will feel really bad about my plight as I eternally splash in the Lake of Fire, while he’s up there writing pompous letters on his Celestial letterhead to underlings in the lower Kingdoms of Glory.

The solution Bruce McConkie demands of you, is that you should not explore Brigham Young’s teachings, a man who saved the religion and was hand-picked by Joseph Smith to take over, but rather you should embrace the superior teaching and enlightenment of Bruce Redd McConkie instead. McConkie doesn’t make any promises though. He admits he might not be right either, but compared to Brigham Young, the odds of correctness improve greatly, he clearly implies. Still not much comfort in that Bruce.

Now, I called Bruce R McConkie a hypocrite back there a bit. I mean that in a very classical sense. McConkie in this letter to England, did just what he faulted Brigham Young for doing back in the day. He pulled a great big handful of doctrinal turds out of his arse just to make a point and win an argument. He used this arsenal of stinky theology just to fling poo at England for effect, acting like the King Monkey of the primate house at the zoo. McConkie was intellectually crafting talking points, not, divining rounded statements of universal truth.

And you see, when you check this little McConkie rant against Mormon canon as he suggests, he only condemns himself. Wilford Woodruff I think would disagree with the notion that God allows false doctrine to be taught by the LDS president. Woodruff seemed to think it wasn’t in the Lord’s mind, not in the Lord’s program to let the “Brethren” lead the church astray with false doctrine. And that’s canon. Bruce.

http://lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/od/1?lang=eng

Yes, the Twelve or other general authorities serve as a representative body who are authorized to call out the “Brethren” on false doctrine—whoever that “Brother” might be. That’s not necessarily all that mystical. Church government is inspired by God to do this job. The problem is, until recently it hasn’t been doing the job at all, it’s been doing the same schizophrenic waffling McConkie is doing, running for dogmatic cover between urging the faithful to continue lapping up every silly babble from the mouth of the current “Prophet,” telling the rank and file to shut up about any confusion or doctrinal uncertainty, while at the same time claiming the liberty to fight amongst themselves over just who’s twist on what doctrine is going to be binding for this next generation or so—but behind closed doors and very quietly.

Keep in mind now, that McConkie was not assigned to write this letter. It is sent on Council of Twelve letterhead and he makes an anonymous allusion to some other “general authority” he suggests he had discussed the matter with, but there is no official assignment here to do or say anything from the “Brethren.” And as McConkie points out himself, no single apostle has any inherent authority to define doctrine at all. Witness for Christ, yes, preach doctrine as defined by the First Presidency, yes, but apart from some special assignment not even the apostles are authorized to preach or doctrinally define anything they want. That would be Protestantism.

That Mormon apostles and general authorities have felt they are freely entitled to explore, ad-lib, publish, and promulgate their own doctrinal, literary and presentational works over the ages without permission, editorial input, or approval from the First Presidency is the problem. Bruce McConkie makes this clear in his letter to England, yet McConkie had this problem pointedly spelled out for him by the Brethren with his own first doctrinal effort, Mormon Doctrine, and McConkie pressed ahead anyway in direct defiance of the wishes of then president David O McKay. So, as I say, McConkie is a hypocrite of the first order in this matter.

The key to understanding Bruce R McConkie, is to know that he is merely the sum of all he’s read. He’s a consumer and regurgitator theologically, not a producer and refiner. Bruce R McConkie’s sole source of theological insight and authority was his ability to recall and vehemently quote a lot of things written by a lot of actual authorities scattered around in a lot of places. Naturally, he centers onto the canon, the standard Works. No problem there, except that he neglects to see that a huge chunk of these were delivered by Joseph Smith in modern times. I guess we’ll “prove” Joseph Smith’s uncanonized teachings by checking them against his canonical teachings. That’s the same way Bruce R footnotes Bruce R to prove Bruce R is correct.

McConkie’s main thesis is entirely sound. Essentially, the difference between Joseph Smith or Brigham Young telling fireside stories and Joseph Smith or Brigham Young speaking modern Holy Scripture, is a formal vote of the “Brethren” in the various quorums sanctioning some of his writings as canon, and others as unreliable. Full canonization naturally, would also require the sustaining vote of the general body of the church. But McConkie’s fallacious logic myopically ignores the fact that we use Biblical texts as canon as well. Joseph Smith himself said that these were not entirely reliable. Joseph Smith in fact started rewriting the whole Bible, because Joseph Smith thought the Bible was pretty messed up in some very important places.

God did not give us the Standard Works as McConkie pretends. A collection of “prophets” gave us the canon–every scrap of it. The “canon” we use has been authored, processed, edited, proven and finally sanctioned by the very “Brethren” McConkie claims are “allowed” by God to be flawed and false. They are therefore also freely entitled to falsely canonize their falseness.

Bruce R McConkie really wants to be a foaming fundamentalist. Bruce wants to be able to send you to hell if you don’t sign up. Bruce wants to send you to hell if you don’t swear an oath to the official dogma he’s appointed himself to define out of an inerrant canon like a Latter-day Calvin. He just doesn’t quite know how to get there from here so his connective logic is a bit silly.

Mormons do not believe the Bible to be inerrant. What hasn’t been dealt with clearly however, is whether or not any of the modern canon is inerrant. By implication you co go either way with the argument. It’s either been recorded by mortal, fallible man and subject to error, or it’s been controlled directly by the guiding hand of God, written, translated, and preserved by a string of Prophets, and therefore exactly the message God intended to deliver.

Likewise, McConkie in one breath declares the “Brethren” to be modern prophets, to be treated for all intents and purposes as inerrant, while in the next breath he censures Brigham Young, the second most sanctified Mormon Prophet in history, like he’s some hick preacher who showed up to the tabernacle drunk regularly, took the pulpit with no preparation whatsoever, and commenced to spout off any random old rubbish on his mind at the moment. (Probably too close to the truth there…)

McConkie would just love to play the Grand Inquisitor, but Mormonism isn’t dogmatically precise enough to give him the tools he needs to torture a confession out of you and set you on fire. And the fact is, he never got the job of Big Boss so he could actually authorize himself to do it.

Our poor Bruce in his day, was painfully twisted in his understanding of a number of basic LDS doctrinal concepts. He railed one day in a grand assembly at BYU, against Salvation by Grace Alone, and slapped around yet another BYU religion professor, and author of a book, who had the audacity to promote developing a “personal relationship with Christ.”

On occasion, his honesty caused him to use the bully pulpit to expose teachings—both within as well as outside the church—with which he did not agree. One issue that caught my attention was his public rebuke of George Pace, an associate professor at BYU. Pace had been advocating that members should strive to have a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ,” a popular theme in evangelical circles but anathema in Mormonism. In March 1982, McConkie gave a devotional address titled “Our Relationship with the Lord” that branded Pace’s book as “unwise” because it contained “plain sectarian nonsense.”

…

On another occasion he publicly condemned the concept of salvation by grace alone, dubbing it the “second greatest heresy” of Christendom. (The idea of God as a spirit won top heretical honors as McConkie called it the“father of all heresies.”) In this speech he recalled an experience he had while driving his car and listening to an“evangelist who was preaching salvation by grace alone.” When this radio evangelist offered his listeners an invitation to be saved simply by believing in Jesus, McConkie commented, “Unfortunately I did not accept his generous invitation to gain instant salvation; and so I suppose my opportunity is lost forever.” The crowd laughed. (“What Think Ye of Salvation by Grace?” BYU devotional address, 10 January 1984).

http://www.mrm.org/bruce-mcconkie

Mormonism teaches that Jesus is literally and spiritually our big brother. We grew up together. We have the same mother and father. He took human form as we did and lived His life with us. There isn’t a much more personal relationship than that. That isn’t sectarian nonsense and it isn’t evangelical Christianity. It’s a far more intimate and personal fundamental relationship than anything in “orthodox” Christianity. Bruce McConkie doesn’t know that, which makes him ignorant, not a great theologian.

Likewise, the truth is, fundamental Mormon doctrine states that anyone who accepts Jesus Christ as their Savior is “saved” and goes to a reward greater than our imagination can illustrate. Not only that, Joseph Smith taught that you will have a chance to accept Christ here or in the next life and it’s all good. Bruce and his Utah cult of personality, and I mean that this time, have no understanding of the difference between the word “salvation,” and “reward.” The simple fact is that Mormons have always believed in a universal salvation based upon “Grace” alone. The problem is, Utah-product McConkie and his fellow intellectual and theological refugees in the Valley-0, have redefined anything short of the highest degree of the Celestial Kingdom as damnation and hell, and anyone not clearly a candidate for the highest reward of the highest heaven, as the damned. If you want to talk about false doctrine and heresy Bruce, there you go. I’ll just say it. Bruce R McConkie was a heretic.

What’s wrong with Mormonism? I asked that question in this series long long ago. The answer is right here: You can’t blame Bruce R McConkie for believing what he did, because his brain struggles for logic and inspiration from the isolated confines of an entirely self-contained Utah Mormon culture. His beliefs arise out of the collective “common sense” of a people self-removed into an environment of cultural inbreeding within a complete shelter from criticism. The Utah Mormon culture has actively promoted for generations, an unnatural lack of intellectual or religious insight or intuition. The Utah church has for generations deliberately eliminated, by the usual estimations, some 2/3 of the human race as candidates for their private, closed, extreme, ultra-pious society, because they do not lower themselves to minister to or associate with those who have not demonstrated a high predisposition toward Celestial Glory—as they self-define these characteristics. Furthermore, the Utah culture has officially incorporated into its church dogma the notion that even Celestial Glory is damnation unless the highest degree of Celestial Glory is achieved, and therefore even the very elect may not be elect enough to be worth wasting any time on.

In short: Bruce McConkie believes that if all you’re doing is keeping souls from the fires of hell and teaching people to live good lives, it’s not worth the church’s time and effort. Bruce R McConkie demands performance. Bruce R McConkie demands statistics and measurable, demonstrable piety and an absolute surrender of every aspect of your life to the “program.” The Mormon “program” will get you to the Celestial Kingdom. Mormons think this attitude is the epitome of wisdom and enlightenment. And so, naturally, in his day, still locked in that dusty Zion gestalt, Bruce McConkie easily found a vast and deep following in Mormonism who’s instinct was to simply defer to his greater intellect and wisdom due to his “calling,” rank, and position in the church.

Indeed, Bruce McConkie, was regarded by most of his era’s Latter-day Saints as a spiritual genius with a direct phone line to God, and was hailed by church president, Joseph Fielding Smith, as, “The greatest theologian of his generation in the church.” This might be expected from Smith, inasmuch as he was McConkie’s father-in-law and McConkie was his theological lackey. Smith was not coincidentally the first major Mormon theological organizer in the Mormon leadership chain, to clean and compile LDS doctrine into a coherent guide to Mormon orthodoxy. In this regard, while McConkie was an excellent scholar and had something of a photographic memory for chapter and verse, all he really did in actual practice was serve as his father-in-law’s chief editor and theological promoter. Most of what Bruce R McConkie wrote comes down to a paraphrase of doctrines promoted by Joseph Fielding Smith.

McConkie’s entire body of work is almost exclusively based on the teachings of his father-in-law. Mormon Doctrine is simply an organized collection of doctrinal issues paraphrased from his father-in-law’s previous efforts such as Fielding Smith’s articles from the Ensign, ultimately published as a series of books called Answers to Gospel Questions. McConkie’s second most famous work, Doctrines of Salvation, is, as I say, merely a direct and credited collection of Fielding Smith’s lectures and essays with McConkie commentary bridging and supporting them. McConkie’s Doctrinal New Testament Commentary is again based primarily upon Fielding Smith’s take on Mormon theology. Where McConkie cites previous Mormon authorities, like Brigham Young or Joseph Smith, these references are again chosen as a reflection of Fielding Smith’s use of them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Fielding_Smith

Those who think me harsh should consider McConkie’s own confession in his last talk before his death:

“I am one of his witnesses, and in a coming day I shall feel the nail marks in his hands and in his feet and shall wet his feet with my tears. But I shall not know any better then than I know now that he is God’s Almighty Son, that he is our Savior and Redeemer, and that salvation comes in and through his atoning blood and in no other way.” (Ensign, May 1985, p. 11.)

What McConkie clearly admits here, contrary to the belief of most of his fans, is that at the moment of his death he still had not personally seen Jesus the Christ much less had lengthy interrogatives with Him. McConkie’s “inspiration” clearly came through the very conventional means of a “still, small voice” and the same sorts of highly subjective, highly emotional, extremely personal “impressions” anyone else gets. One could easily concede and admire the semantics of McConkie’s faith-based argument that he could not be more sure about Christ’s Divinity, but this leaves neither he nor his fan base with any particularly deep, detailed, or even “new” insight into Mormon “doctrine.”

Bruce R McConkie tells us nothing you could not have read thousands of years ago from better writers and bigger authorities in Proverbs or Psalms or any of the Gospels. Unlike Brother Bruce, all of these ancient authors actually saw, heard, and were taught directly by Jesus Christ. If you follow Elder McConkie’s strongly worded warning to Brother England, go read them instead of checking out what Mormon Doctrine has to say about it.

McConkie’s works in general are characterized by their authoritative tone. McConkie once wrote to a Mormon scholar in 1980, “It is my province to teach to the Church what the doctrine is. It is your province to echo what I say or to remain silent.”^[10] In his best selling Doctrinal New Testament Commentaries and Messiah series, the sources that are most frequently cited as authority for his interpretational positions are other works authored by himself.^[11] He explained, “I would never quote another man unless I could first square what he said with the scriptures and unless he said what was involved better than I could.”^[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_R._McConkie

What McConkie’s father-in-law did, as president of the church mind you, was something fundamentally different than what McConkie spent his life doing. Joseph Fielding Smith was academically sifting through the thousands upon thousands of LDS commentaries, journals, conference notations and whatnot, trying to validate what he considered to be “correct” doctrines as he understood them, and debunk “false” doctrines as he found them circulating amongst his flock. He did so from a position in the end, of ultimate church authority, as its “prophet” and president. Before that he worked on assignment by the First Presidency. Joseph Fielding Smith also naturally relied upon his own father’s prophetic disposition in these matters—church president Joseph F Smith. Joseph F Smith was the first church president to seriously scrutinize Mormon folklore and even the previously sacrosanct ramblings of Brigham Young, and take an open stance of “correction” regarding the promulgation of many popular Utah Mormon doctrinal myths like Joseph Smith’s alleged “White Horse Prophecy.”

During his administration as President of the Church, President Smith made significant official statements of Latter-day Saint doctrine:

• “The Origin of Man“: In November 1909, in the midst of public interest in theories of evolution, the First Presidency issued a statement concerning the Latter-Day Saint doctrine. It affirms that God created man in his own image. The document also succinctly reiterates the doctrine of twofold creation (spiritual followed by temporal), the premortal existence of man, and ends noting that man, as a child of God, is capable of evolving into a God.

• “The Father and the Son“: On June 20, 1916, the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles issued a statement examining the LDS use of the term “Father” in scripture, clarifying times when the word referred to God the Father and when the word referred to Jesus Christ. The statement identified four different uses of the word “Father.” God the Father is the literal parent of the spirits of mankind and the earthly father of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is referred to as “the Father” when discussing his role as creator of the earth, when he acts as “the Father” of those who abide in his gospel, and when he acts with the authority of his Heavenly Father while on earth.

• “Vision of the Redemption of the Dead“: On October 3, 1918, Smith received a revelation on the nature of the spirit world and on Jesus Christ’s role in ensuring that the gospel is taught to all men, living and dead. A written account of the revelation was submitted to the general authorities of the church on October 31, 1918 and was unanimously accepted. The revelation was initially published in December 1918, and was added to the Pearl of Great Price, an LDS scripture, in April 1976; it has since been removed from the Pearl of Great Price and added to the Doctrine and Covenants as Section 138. This revelation complemented an 1894 statement on the eternal nature of the family and appropriate work for the dead issued by Wilford Woodruff. Genealogy work by members of the LDS Church increased after both of these statements.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_F._Smith

Building on F Smith’s doctrinal bent toward unifying historical and contemporary doctrinal issues, his son, Joseph Fielding Smith, took up the cause of a church-wide debunking, clarification, and correction of LDS “doctrine” and put it to the pen. For years, as apostle and president, he published question and answer sessions in church publications and carried this information over into talks, lectures, books, instructional manuals and other published media. He was probably the most prolific and most authoritative LDS theological author of all time. He was certainly one of the most coherent. Like his father before him, he wrote in official LDS volumes published by official LDS institutions, and he spoke from apostolic, prophetic, and presidential authority. His son-in-law, Bruce R McConkie, simply out of self-assertion became the last in this particular generation of LDS doctrinal weeding.

Note again however, that McConkie only ever did body-and-fender work. He never built a car. He never designed so much as a hubcap. He had apostolic title, and occasionally published his opinions in LDS official media. Personally however, he added almost nothing to LDS doctrinal knowledge. His work rather, concerns almost purely the rote parroting of other “prophets” and authorities, to which, he adds primarily his own verification of “correctness.” Bruce R McConkie McConkie had obviously intended to die leaving us his gift of what he considered to be the definitive work on “Mormon doctrine.” But as we see, in a church based on ongoing revelation, “official”doctrine at best can be rather flexible and dynamically gravitate toward greater and greater enlightenment, and at worst, become so diverse and prolific, that it becomes confused and nebulous.

David O McKay, Harold B Lee and others also attempted to thin out the rural Mormon folklore that had long become intertwined with hard-core LDS doctrine, through the Correlation Movement that began in earnest during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Most of this effort was good obviously. But the central, almost egomaniacal assertion hanging like a pall of stupidity over the entire effort to establish a rational, authoritative Mormon “orthodoxy,” is the contention so often boasted from Joseph Smith’s day to the present, that Mormonism has “restored the fullness of the gospel.” While this braggadocio promises a lot in one sentence, it remains a pretty hollow boast. Mormons can’t in fact even agree upon what “gospel” means nor content themselves that they’ve gotten just as full of it as they can get.

Mormon generation after generation keeps prying and poking around vague, disconnected little mental ramblings of the early church authorities, preserved with varied historical legitimacy as if every member of the church was constantly and desperately trying to reassure themselves that they really are in on the secrets of the universe. And the problem is, the nature of that boast and the culture of Mormonism itself, actually encourages the faithful to read, pray, ponder, and have their own “revelation.” Bruce McConkie’s assertions to Eugene England aside, even sticking to the Standard Works, when millions of people take up their right to personal revelation, sometimes they come up with all sorts of queer ideas. This is just as true of LDS leadership over the ages as it is with the general membership. As McConkie said however, when Brigham Young gets a queer idea here and there, I guess it’s just God’s test to see if we’re spiritually stupid enough to fall for it.

So don’t fall for it.

It’s more revealing than ironic, that the most famous book by the most “authoritative” LDS “authority” for many generations was given the title: Mormon Doctrine, by Bruce R McConkie. The revealing part of course, is that Mormon Doctrine isn’t necessarily Mormon doctrine. It’s merely Bruce R McConkie’s personal take on LDS theological concerns. Some of it is correct and undisputable doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And some of it is not only wrong, it’s been admitted by the author to be embarrassingly wrong. And though Bruce R McConkie has successfully homogenized his Mormon Doctrine theology into LDS dogma because he was responsible for most of the now “canonized” indexing, cross-referencing, commentary and dictionary sections of the LDS “Four Standard Works,” Bruce R McConkie’s original encyclopedia of Mormon “doctrine” remains what it has always been, an almost entirely unauthoritative collection of personal Mormon opinions. Any implied authority it may have had while he was alive died with him in 1985.

http://www.gapages.com/mcconbr1.htm

Mormon Doctrine wasn’t even originally published by the LDS church through its Deseret Book, “official” publishing arm. Mormon Doctrine was published by the period go-to literary marketing wing of rebuffed and rejected LDS apostles, general authorities and literary wannabees, Bookcraft. Bookcraft, or “Priestcraft Book” as I called it before it was bought out by Deseret Book in 1999, eagerly scrounged together odd talks and lectures from whatever LDS “authoritative” source it could scrump out of the religious or intellectual Mormon brain orchards, threw a ghostwriter and an editor at the project, and in a few weeks had yet another inspiring, and more importantly, marketable, piece of LDS er, literature.

The story of how McConkie, not yet an apostle, published this work on his own without any authority or even informing his superiors is an enlightening one. This will come as a shock to most Mormons, particularly of the McConkie era, but Marion G Romney’s evaluation of it at the time, writing on official assignment for the Council of Twelve, under the direction of President David O McKay’s First Presidency, listed over a thousand serious errors and noted the offensive use of negative labels against other religions and an overall pompous and authoritative tone for a book with no approval of the “Brethren” behind it whatsoever:

As to the book itself, notwithstanding its many commendable and valuable features and the author’s assumption of ‘sole and full responsibility’ for it, its nature and scope and the authoritative tone of the style in which it is written pose the question as to the propriety of the author’s attempting such a project without assignment and supervision from him whose right and responsibility it is to speak for the Church on ‘Mormon Doctrine.’ Had the work been authoritatively supervised, some of the following matters might have been omitted and the treatment of others modified.

He then goes into a point-by-point illustration of serious doctrinal errors espoused in the work. President McKay responded with a series of meetings, noted in his diary:

“THURSDAY, January 7, 1960
10:15 to 12:45 p.m. Re: The book—‘Mormon Doctrine’

The First Presidency met with Elders Mark E. Petersen and Marion G. Romney. They submitted their report upon their examination of the book ‘Mormon Doctrine’ by Elder Bruce McConkie.

These brethren reported that the manuscript of the book ‘Mormon Doctrine’ has not been read by the reading committee; that President Joseph Fielding Smith [President of the Twelve at the time] did not know anything about it until it was published. Elder Petersen stated that the extent of the corrections which he had marked in his copy of the book (1067) affected most of the 776 pages of the book. He also said that he thought the brethren should be under the rule that no book should be published without a specific approval of the First Presidency.

I stated that the decision of the First Presidency and the Committee should be announced to the Twelve.

It was agreed that the necessary corrections are so numerous that to republish a corrected edition of the book would be such an extensive repudiation of the original as to destroy the credit of the author; that the republication of the book should be forbidden and that the book should be repudiated in such a way as to save the career of the author as one of the General Authorities of the Church. It was also agreed that this decision should be announced to the Council of the Twelve before I talk to the author.

Elder Petersen will prepare an editorial for publication in the Improvement Era, stating the principle of approval of books on Church doctrine.”

“FRIDAY, January 8, 1960
11:55 to 12:15 p.m.

The First Presidency held a meeting. We decided that Bruce R. McConkie’s book, ‘Mormon Doctrine’ recently published by Bookcraft Company, must not be re-published, as it is full of errors and misstatements, and it is most unfortunate that it has receive such wide circulation. It is reported to us that Brother McConkie has made corrections to his book, and is now preparing another edition. We decided this morning that we do not want him to publish another edition.

We decided, also, to have no more books published by General Authorities without their first having the consent of the First Presidency. (see January 7, 1960)”

http://www.exmormon.org/mormon/mormon193.htm

As harsh as this sounds, ignoring what the last big, popular LDS “authority” had to say and just swallowing with an embarrassed shrug whatever the new guy is telling you, is essentially the LDS party line. This has become far more difficult to do since the advent of modern, affordable, publishing capabilities, combined with the ability to record these “authorities” in sound and video.

Six years later, after submitting to all the corrections noted by the Brethren, McConkie pressed President McKay to allow a reprint. McKay relented. Rather than reveal McConkie’s lack of insight in his original work, Mormonism, well used to brainwiping itself and starting over with the next big authority, ignored the first edition, and embraced the revised book as next to Divine:

After more than 50 years, Bruce R. McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine , one of the most influential LDS books of the 20th century, has quietly gone out of print.

The encyclopedic explanation of LDS teachings, first published in 1958, went through 40 printings, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Deseret Book has decided not to reprint the classic volume, said spokeswoman Gail Halladay, because of “low sales.”

“The demand is no longer there,” said Halladay, managing director for marketing and communications.

From the day it came off the presses, though, Mormon Doctrine , was at once wildly popular to many and deeply troubling to more than a few, even at the highest levels of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Several passages about the Roman Catholic Church and McConkie’s views of blacks were seen as especially offensive.

Although McConkie, an LDS apostle who died in 1985, took sole responsibility from the start for Mormon Doctrine ‘s content, it often was quoted over the pulpit and treated by members as quasi-official. The book, with its presumptive title, seemed to provide an answer to every question and left little room for ambiguity.

“ Mormon Doctrine served two generations of the Mormon rank and file as the main authoritative source of LDS teachings,” said LDS sociologist Armand Mauss. “With its authoritative tone and constant promotion from high places, it came to be regularly cited in the church curriculum, especially in [Church Educational System] materials, and soon took on almost a scriptural stature.”

To assemble the volume, McConkie, son-in-law of LDS Church President Joseph Fielding Smith, drew on Mormon scriptures, prophetic sermons and commonly held beliefs. He put them together in alphabetical order and with a tone of certainty.

Still, many complained that it did not fairly reflect the diversity of opinion among Latter-day Saints and their leaders.

“The book would more accurately have been entitled, Mostly Mormon Doctrine ,” Mauss wrote in an e-mail from his home in Irvine, Calif.

The book was even challenged by LDS President David O. McKay, who led the church from 1951 to 1970.

…

“Nonetheless, McConkie audaciously approached McKay six years later and pushed for publication of the book in a revised form,” according to Prince and Wright. McKay responded that “if republished,” the book should be clearly marked as McConkie’s work and not an official church publication.

McConkie took that as a go-ahead, Prince and Wright wrote.

“The book became one of the all-time best-sellers in Mormondom,” they wrote, “achieving the near-canonical status that McKay had fought unsuccessfully to avoid, and setting a tone of doctrinal fundamentalism, antithetical to McKay’s personal philosophy, that remains a legacy of the church to this day.”

…

Prince said he “never saw anything in Bruce McConkie that was mean or un-Christian,” but the LDS scientist nonetheless was “delighted” by news that Mormon Doctrine no longer would be published.

“His book,” Prince said, “has done some serious damage.”

In the first edition, Prince said, it was his “diatribe against the Roman Catholic Church that did the most harm, but subsequently, the real damage has been his statements about blacks.”

After the LDS Church opened its all-male priesthood to blacks in 1978, McConkie deleted his previous statement predicting that never would happen. Even in the most recent edition, though, McConkie wrote that God cursed Cain with “a mark of a dark skin, and he became the ancestor of the black race.”

Mauss, the sociologist, thinks the book is going out of print “none too soon, especially given the current public-relations preoccupation of the LDS Church.”

The volume’s continued availability after its wide distribution, he said, will “continue to provide critics of the church with an enduring basis for claiming, however unfairly, that ‘Mormon doctrines’ are non-Christian or anti-Christian, and that the church is a racist institution.”

“Elder McConkie was an apostle and a good man but a man of his times,” said Darius Gray, former president of the

Genesis Branch for black Mormons. “Sadly his times included a period in this nation when not all men were judged by the content of their character but rather the color of their skin.”

The gospel of Jesus Christ never has been a respecter of persons, said Gray, co-producer with Margaret Blair Young of a documentary film, “Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons.”

“The LDS Church is a young church,” he said, “and, as it has grown, it has become more inclusive, embracing of all God’s creations.”

The continual publication of Mormon Doctrine seemed to suggest an approval of the concepts and attitudes of a former time, Gray said. By not reprinting it, “a weight will have been lifted off the body of the church. We have thankfully moved on.”

.com/2010/05/23/bruce-mcconkies-mormon-doctrine-out-of-print-due-to-low-sales/

http://www.sltrib.com/faith/ci_15137409

Not apparent in the above article, is the happy eventuality that David O McKay, who vehemently resented McConkie’s attitude, rude style, and a lot of his theology, passed away four years after the publication of his Mormon Doctrine second edition. His father-in-law, Joseph Fielding Smith, who’s own theology McConkie had almost exclusively been paraphrasing, left as president of the Quorum of the Twelve and became the next president of the church. Oddly enough, McConkie soon moved into the Quorum of Twelve. Suddenly, McConkie’s unauthorized book wasn’t quite so bad after all, and he could preach it with apostolic authority, particularly on issues like the Curse of Cain or Negroes getting the priesthood—issues upon which McKay and Joseph Fielding Smith via Bruce R McConkie strongly disagreed.

I’m not concerned here much with what Mormon doctrine is. I’m simply exploring how Mormon doctrine gets to be Mormon doctrine. And more importantly, how you as an investigator or member of the LDS church can determine what really is your obligation to believe, to accept as “the gospel,” as Mormons would put it. The Mormon “gospel” isn’t mind you, “Jesus saved me amen.” It’s a very complicated litany of beliefs that adds up to “The Church.”

There is a huge base of what I call “hard” LDS doctrines that really haven’t budged from the days of Joseph Smith. Almost all of these originated with Joseph Smith. Most of the rest are little bursts of insight professed by Smith’s contemporaries or later leadership that sprang directly from something Joseph Smith once said. One of these would be the notion that mankind is literally the kin of God. Jesus is our literal brother, and God the Father is literally our Father. This crosses physical and spiritual lines to mean that God and man are of the same species, and that mankind can grow to become like our Father the same way a human child can grow to be like its father. But through the years, the urge to expand upon this concept or define it further, has tended to get a bit dodgy–from the top to the bottom of the LDS church.

Joseph Smith’s first step into “heretical” anti-Trinitarian unorthodoxy  was the “First Vision.” Mormonism has never doubted from that point onward that there are three distinct and individual members of the “Godhead.” Smith’s terminology was ironically stolen from Jean Cauvan, who also used “Godhead” rather than “Trinity,” because frankly, Cauvan, or “John Calvin,” couldn’t find any Trinitarian language in the Bible itself either. He was persuaded however to find some, when his early detractors formed a lynch mob, dragged him before the local church authorities, and they nearly excommunicated him for it. At that point Calvin begrudgingly conceded to pick up the required Trinitarian jargon and at least pay lip service to the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds—neither of which he actually considered authoritative. That adjustment having thus been made, Calvin’s theology became immensely popular in “orthodox” Protestantism. Calvin indeed, nearly invented what we in America call “Protestantism.”

But Calvin probably saw in Acts 7, exactly what Joseph Smith said he saw personally in the thickets of Upstate New York: God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ, appearing as two distinct and identical beings in human form. In Acts 7:55, Stephen identifies these two as the Father and Jesus Christ. Stephen says these two Biblical characters appeared to him as separate beings. Luke, the presumed author of Acts, obviously agrees with Stephen’s assessment. Furthermore, Luke claims Stephen was first visited by the presence of a third entity, a spirit entity, the Holy Ghost—again, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the same place, in three separate forms, the Holy Ghost filling Stephen’s his heart, and the other two Deities appearing before him physically. Even this perfectly traditional, Christian and orthodox source gives Mormonism three distinctly separate beings with or without Smith’s vision. This testament appears in canon, from a Sainted witness, Stephen, and a Sainted, Apostolic scribe, Luke. But of course, you have Joseph Smith’s replication of this experience concurring with Acts 7 on top of that. So this bit is easy: The Father and Son are again, in Mormonism, unquestionably two “perfected” or “glorified” physical beings and the Holy Ghost is just that: a Spirit.

I’ve looked by the way, for Christian depictions of Saint Stephen’s First Vision. They’re markedly absent from the icon repositories. This is because they would look exactly like Joseph Smith’s First Vision, and blow the hell out of all of Christianity since 326 AD and the Council of Nicea.

http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/acts/7?lang=eng

You may well ask, what is a “perfected” or “glorified” body? That’s where it starts to get sticky. That’s were knowledge starts to get replaced with intuition, sophistry, intellectualism, or just a hunch. Or worse yet, in Mormonism, you get your own “personal revelation,” and run around shooting your mouth off about it for generations until it sticks.

When you open the door to re-conceptualizing the nature of God and Man, what follows is that prophets, apostles, janitors and ward clerks all feel equally empowered to walk through that magic portal and explore the vast open spaces of the “Restoration.” God’s intentions, express and implied on the matter, are generally far more limited than those who claim to seek His wisdom in all things.

We find the whole culture of Mormonism pondering just what the relationship of God’s physical body is to ours, how man’s spiritual beginnings are integrated into a mortal frame, why the Holy Ghost doesn’t have a body of any sort, and so forth. For authoritative answers to all this pondering and questioning, at one time, with a handful of members and the prophet Joseph Smith alive and kicking, you would just go up and ask him. He’d talk to God about it, and give you an answer sometimes instantly, not just in the name of God, but he would deliver the very word of the Lord in First Person. Most of these tidbits of God’s Word were written down, went before the leadership, sustained by the membership, and became canon scripture.

Now, even though in Joseph Smith’s day you might well have God’s wishes for you personally delivered by a prophetic mouthpiece of the Lord in First Person, if it was just you writing it down, especially scribbling it out later from memory, well, that only means something to you. Assuming you got it down right, which is a big assumption, it may be a great personal bit of insight, but has no more binding doctrinal authority on you or anyone else than an autographed baseball card from Babe Ruth would have the authority to get you a contract with the major leagues. If you didn’t get it right, then you have a problem not just for you, but for a whole people of faith. Mormons love to dig this stuff out of scrapbooks, family Bibles, pioneer journals and old conference talks. Since 1847 they’ve been reading, sanctifying, and passing this crap around out there in “Zion.” And then every generation’s “authorities” tag onto the heritage, a little bit of their own alleged insight.

For instance, I used the language, “mankind can grow to become like our Father the same way a human child can grow to be like its father,” in my quick sketch of the doctrine in examination at the moment. Let’s pretend I’m Joseph Smith. Let’s pretend that Parley P Brigham LaVerle Widstoe wrote it down in his journal a day or two after I said that from memory, but now you’re reading me nearly two hundred years later. Did I really mean the “same” way, or did I only mean to imply a similar relationship?

The “same” way could mean that humans just physically evolve into Gods. I could have meant that God started as pond scum and evolved His way up from tadpoles to fish to reptiles to mammals to monkeys and so on. You could postulate that mankind is phase-one of becoming Divine in a very Darwinian sense. “Similar” however, might only mean that even though the organic physics of the process may be entirely different, the familial relationship is the same from the standpoint of intelligence and spirit.

The point is, even if quoted verbatim in the surviving record, you can’t be certain what I, as Joseph Smith meant, almost two hundred years ago. And you can’t ask me.

Joseph Smith has also written that we existed in a spiritual body before this earthly body, and that spiritual matter is simply a finer type of matter than temporal matter. This isn’t debated doctrine at all either. OK then, how is the crossover between the two types of matter and existence accomplished? Why is this crossover even necessary? Did God also begin as an intelligence, organize Himself into a spirit, and then evolve or manufacture Himself a mortal body? Did He then move on to perfect his mortal body over time into His present form? And how do I advance this line of understanding? What resources do I have? What role does logic or science or other wisdom play in figuring out this puzzle? Do I conclude that Jesus was an alien-human hybrid, and the Virgin Mary was enveloped by a cloaked shuttle sent from God’s mothership and received her implanted Divine DNA bundle through a non-physical trans-matter probe?

Don’t laugh. It’s not so funny. There’s a whole class of LDS gospel hobbyists who think they’re entitled to explore both that sort of vernacular and the exact mechanisms of Celestial reproduction.

With any allegedly “authoritative” Mormon source, I always go back to the same question I have about any “canon” or any other authoritative record: is that what the guy actually said? Now, in the case of the Gospels and Biblical texts, no, there were no shorthand geniuses taking dictation. Everything is from memory, everything was recorded years, decades, hundreds of years after-the-fact and filtered through generations of copiers and editors. As McConkie claims, yes, the only way we have of “proofing” canon is against other canon. From several canon authors we can eliminate some of the goofier theories at least. IE:

On the question of the Mormon conception of a Godhead, apart from divining Truth from a hundred slightly conflicting Biblical verses, Mormons have a very spelled-out version of the doctrine in the D&C, from the Articles of Faith, the very first of which is:

1 We ^abelieve in ^bGod, the Eternal Father, and in His ^cSon, Jesus Christ, and in the ^dHoly Ghost.

http://lds.org/scriptures/pgp/a-of-f/1?lang=eng

To flog this dead horse one more time: Mormons believe there are definitely three distinct personages in the Godhead. The Father and the Son are determined to have “perfected” physical bodies. The Holy Ghost has a spiritual body—but in LDS theology this would simply mirror His physical body-to-be. It is also taught that the Holy Ghost will some day have a physical body as well, but you know, at the moment I’d really have to do some research to tell you where to confirm that in the canon, because at that point we come to the end of the certainty.

It was been universally surmised initially however, that the whole point of what Joseph Smith meant to say was that we’re literal children of God. All of us. We are not born the inherently evil offspring of Satan. We don’t have to be “saved” from our hellish fate with our hellish natural born father the devil, by being adopted into God’s family. We were born children of a noble birthright and always have been His children, even before birth. Calvin was full of crap. That was radical enough for Mormonism when Joseph Smith was first explaining it to the world. It certainly pissed off the Calvinists.

Joseph Smith said that not only did God the Father and Jesus Christ His Son have physical bodies, but we are physically and spiritually related to them. This further applied to every one of us in or out of this or that church or not. Black, white, pagan, heathen, elect or not elect. All of human kind were God’s children. That’s all the farther Joseph Smith ever really took the doctrine however.

Mormon culture was founded originally by free-thinking, “enlightened” souls keen to explore intellectual and theological liberty. For many a generation, every single Mormon of any slight position or rank felt compelled to lecture and write and promulgate and plumb the depths of every minor theological or doctrinal suggestion ever half-spoken or jotted down by Joseph Smith–even if Smith had been pondering in jest. Today’s Mormonism however has been re-crafted with a quick sketch, a flip chart, a challenge to baptism, a lot of praying, and waiting for a burning bosom to confirm you should sign up. If you don’t weep in the first discussion you’re probably not good Mormon material. So conversely, today’s Mormonism has for generations, systematically repelled the same sort of intellectually and theologically curious, enlightened, free-thinkers who founded the church. Thus we find it now produces shepherds who talk softly and carry a big stick like Bruce R McConkie instead of insightful, inspired, pastoral theologians.

Even the best of sheep are not theologians. They just chew the theological grass–any theological grass, you lead them to. Only in the McConkie model, you drive sheep where you want them to go. That’s American style shepherding. Train some dogs and let them loose on the flock. They’ll all end up in the pen where you want them to be.

It is not surprising then that the LDS church finds itself now still idling and chugging the worn-out engine of its gospel bandwagon around the safe retreat of the Wasatch Front, never daring to theologically venture far from the nearest gas station and repair garage. Organizationally the church is expanding its horizons and doing great business, but theologically and prophetically speaking, it is in a very retrograde condition. It’s no longer “revealing” or “restoring” insight into God, the universe and everything, every day in wilder and woolier ways. More importantly, it doesn’t seem to know how to back the old jalopy-towed bandwagon out of the several box canyons and blind alleys previous leadership has unwittingly, and repeatedly piled and rammed it into over the generations.

Today’s LDS leadership must look back to Joseph Smith and the early days of the Restoration, in much the same way the Early Christian Church looked back at Christ’s ministry towards the end of its second century on earth, after losing its First President, our Lord, Jesus Christ, and then all His original apostles. And just like the Apostolic Fathers who scrambled to preserve what little written records they had back in those days, the LDS church went through an era where there was an abundance of writing and theological wrangling, based upon what early Latter-day Saints like Parley P Pratt for instance had extrapolated from teachings by Joseph Smith.

Parley Pratt invented Mormon pamphleteering, or “tracting” as it is called today. One of the big problems with Pratt in particular, and the entire “Restoration” movement, is that it borrowed a lot from the “Primitive Gospel Movement,” which among other revolutionary ideas, felt that written creeds were an abomination compared to Holy Scripture. Anything that cannot be extracted from Holy Scripture is not Church dogma they held. Period.

Parley Pratt, David Whitmer, Oliver Cowdery, and the very core of the LDS church as organized officially on 6 April 1830 with six total members, thought for the most part that the church was as “Restored” and as “Organized” as it ever needed to be. Those 13 Articles of Faith Joseph came up with were quite enough. For some early Mormons then, there remained a lot of organizational tension in the group as Joseph Smith continued to have more and more visions, write more and more scripture, reveal more and more dogma, and the LDS church started to be more and more centrally “instructed.”

https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V15N03_15.pdf

Parley Pratt and most early Mormons, leaders or not, felt liberated to take the new canon, from the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, the Doctrine and Covenants, or the mouth and pen of Joseph Smith, and with this measuring stick as a central jumping-off point, just go nuts with their pondering and praying and studying, like drunken prophetic sailors.

The bottom line is, to this day, the LDS church as an organization, has not dealt with the issue of what is or isn’t Mormon doctrine in a unified, coherent, harmonized fashion. I do not mean that they have not obfuscated, banned, redacted, sanitized, reprinted, republished, and sent out hit men like Bruce McConkie and the Correlation Police to insure that what they want taught gets taught, and what they want read gets read. What they have not done is define a clear criteria or organized system for canonization, or for harmonizing sometimes hugely disparate statements of doctrine by various Mormon “Prophets” or church presidents and other high leadership over the ages.

But most importantly they haven’t bothered to do “it.” As Spencer W Kimball used to say, “Just do it.”

It seems that prophecy is more an art than a science. Prophecy is more a question of waiting for God to speak through you than the ability to know the immediate will of God just by asking any time you like. The truth is, it’s pretty hard to tell sometimes when a prophet is speaking as a prophet—even to the prophet doing the speaking. And so, from the prophet’s perspective, it’s just better that Mormons assume a prophet is always speaking as a prophet. Furthermore, the longterm problem with openly establishing a consistent criteria for Mormon doctrinal authority, is that it will eventually lead to some current “Prophet” having to authoritatively condemn a previous “Prophet” for teaching false doctrine.

In example, let’s go back to Joseph Smith’s simple revelation that God is a perfected human and that we can be like Him:

In June of 1840, apostle, and eventual LDS church president Lorenzo Snow came up with the couplet, “As man is, God once was, as God is, man may become.” Superficially, this seems to be in harmony with the Divine human origins Joseph Smith implied we had. But on the contrary, it bounds spritely beyond Smith’s teaching, almost like a nonsequiteur, leaping over what Snow obviously thought was a logical ditch to jump. Snow says God started out just like man. Smith never said that. Smith said man can become like God. Smith said that we are children of God and can become like our Father. We are the created children of our Father and we were designed by Him to become like our Creator. That’s what Joseph Smith said for sure anyway. That’s what made it into canon. This is not at all what Snow is onto here. Snow implies that if we can become like God, then he must have at some point been just like us and done the same thing. This demands that God must have had a God back then, just like we do. Take your SciFi pick folks–you guys know what a temporal paradox is, and that’s one right there. So much for an eternal God without beginning or end. That’s your basic ouroboros, the eternal snake of the universe swallowing it’s own tail forever.

Snow never really issued a binding, definitive “revelation” on the matter. Brigham Young naturally blabbed all about it off the record as usual, but the issue wasn’t specifically parsed out anywhere in LDS canon. So, the question remains, is there one eternal and unchanging God in Mormonism? Mormons would answer yes. Can we as co-eternal lesser children grow to be like Him? Mormons would also answer yes. That much would be hard, steadfast Mormon doctrine. To do any more thinking about it however, puts you on very thin theological ice. If God started out as a mere mortal who grew to be God, and by thus by implication, God had a God, and God’s God had a God, and God’s God’s God had a God……well then, God wasn’t always God, so He’s changed, and couldn’t possibly be eternal and unchanging and perfect. Amongst other things, this fuels the intellectual fires of pundits like Cleon Skousen who, from this sort of pondering, deduce things like God is only God because we voted Him into office in the Spirit World.

Apparently, at least one recent LDS president had time to do some thoughtful reconsidering of the LDS official commitment to this whole apocryphal line of reasoning–before he kicked the bucket and left it for somebody else to reverse:

Question: “Is this the teaching of the church today, that God the Father was once a man like we are?”

Hinckley: “I don’t know that we teach it. I don’t know that we emphasize it. I haven’t heard it discussed for a long time in public discourse. I don’t know. I don’t know all the circumstances under which that statement was made. I understand the philosophical background behind it. But I don’t know a lot about it and I don’t know that others know a lot about it.“
- Interviewing Gordon B. Hinckley, Time Magazine, Aug 4, 1997
http://home.teleport.com/~packham/gbh-god.htm

Question: “Don’t Mormons believe that God was once a man?”
Hinckley: “I wouldn’t say that. There was a little couplet coined, “As man is, God once was. As God is, man may become.” Now that’s more of a couplet than anything else.“
- Interviewing Gordon B. Hinckley, San Francisco Chronicle, April 13, 1997, p 3/Z1

Church apologists explain Hinckley’s public statements:

“The real question should be, is President Snow’s couplet an accurate reflection of LDS doctrine? Everything Latter-day Saints teach about God is in agreement with the rest of the Christian world, with the exception of His nature. Joseph Smith said God is in the same form as we are, because we were created in His image as the Bible plainly and clearly tells us… But again, we do not emphasize Heavenly Father’s past, but the possibility of our future.
- The Foundation for Apologetic Information & Research (FAIR)

http://www.i4m.com/think/leaders/god_was_man.htm

For what it’s worth, Joseph Smith’s assertions about man’s kinship with Deity do in fact have an ancient basis in both Christian and Jewish theology. The concept was called “theosis.”

With this doctrine of exaltation or human deification, though, Joseph Smith wasn’t actually moving away from Judeo-Christian tradition. He was returning to a forgotten strand of it.

For ancient Christians and Jews also had a doctrine of human deification, which scholars call “theosis.”

As an early Jewish midrash or scriptural commentary expressed the belief, “The Holy One … will in the future call all of the pious by their names, and give them a cup of elixir of life in their hands so that they should live and endure forever. … (And He will also) reveal to all the pious in the world to come the Ineffable Name with which new heavens and a new earth can be created, so that all of them should be able to create new worlds.”

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700168175/Joseph-Smiths-restoration-of-theosis-was-miracle-not-scandal.html?s_cid=Email-4

President Hinckley was quite correct about Lorenzo Snow’s couplet having been de-emphasized for many decades now, at least in the official LDS teaching and support materials. The way of it is this: Lorenzo Snow had one big idea during his presidency. He came up with that cute couplet. Though he couldn’t quite canonize it or bill it as “prophecy” he flogged the hell out of it and it became the gospel fad of his era. That era passed it on for another couple of eras until, probably around the time David O McKay was yelling at Bruce McConkie for his presumptuously encyclopedic tome, and afterward into Joseph Fielding Smith and Harold B Lee’s Correlation Movement in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the Brethren, the First Presidency that is, started to try to take control of doctrinal development and clarification personally. By the time Gordon B Hinckley was having a closer look at some of these long-held folk doctrines, Snow’s couplet for one, which raised more questions than it provided answers, just didn’t seem to measure up. So it went bye-bye quietly.

http://www.bookofmormonbattles.com/Map.htm

http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/review/?vol=15&num=1&id=464

At one time every LDS meetinghouse library would have a complete set of the Journal of Discourses, the Comprehensive History of the Church, and other collections of first-hand or near-period journal-based “histories” and “doctrinal” commentaries particularly from presidents and apostles of the church.  Many of these sorts of “authoritative” historical volumes and their later-era commentators are now commonly understood to lie in the realm of extra-canonical or apocryphal records.

At the same time the prophet-of-the-day is cleaning the bookshelves of his predecessors’ doctrinal ramblings, each new generation of LDS leadership also fears the imagined consequences of letting the non-inerrancy bunny loose in the garden, or the non-infallibility cat officially out of the bag. The feeling amongst the “Brethren” it seems, has long been that to admit that even a single past leader was apparently pulling his “doctrinal” thoughts out of the wrong orifice, rather than giving verbatim dictation from Deity, would collapse the entire Kingdom of God like a house of cards. The Truth however, exists in a sphere unto itself. That’s another Joseph Smith-based, hard Mormon doctrine. It’s an “Eternal Principle.” Not even God can change that.

Covering arse is not an Eternal Principle. Personally, I think cleaning doctrinal house and formally admitting to failed records or failed traditions would serve God’s purposes better than covering arse. It would only free the church structure of its weak members and bring in a more solid foundation and an overall stronger leadership as well as general body of believers who are less fragile and more capable of taking the work to a very harsh world.

But then, I don’t run the place.

The bulk of LDS membership today hears exactly what they want to hear and will believe what they want to believe, in regards to current prophetic leadership. They will believe that the current “prophet” is the only authority in the church, and Jesus gives him direct and daily instructions about everything and anything. Most Mormons really really need to believe this. It’s their whole “testimony.” The whole garment of their membership in the church hangs utterly upon this one flimsy coat hook. It would spiritually and emotionally devastate most Mormons to know that the truth about the “restored” church is that usually, LDS “prophets” and “general authorities” say their prayers, read up on the subject, and then have to discern, decode, and try to understand the Will of God from the same subtle workings of the Spirit that you and I do.

There isn’t a better example of this Mormon emotional dependency on a single Divine Oracle than the first time a change of “The Prophets” or church presidents took place after Joseph Smith’s murder. A meeting was called in Nauvoo, In the midst of much contention over the line of LDS leadership succession, lead in part by Smith’s wife Emma and her son’s claim to the ministry through a claimed blessing given to Joseph Smith III by his father. Sidney Rigdon made a claim for the job based on proximity of his calling as First Counselor in the First Presidency. Brigham Young’s claim came as the standing president of the intact Quorum of Twelve. He argued that the Twelve held in trust all the keys of Melchizedek Priesthood, and that the First Presidency had been dissolved upon the death of the First President. Until officers of the First Presidency were again called and that quorum reformed, Young claimed title as the chief presiding officer of the Church, and holder of all related priesthood keys.

http://fairmormon.org/Mormonism_and_church_leadership/Succession_in_the_Presidency_of_the_Church

Now, legalistic arguments like this just aren’t sexy enough for some Mormons. The story goes that Brigham Young stood up before the crowd and at least some portion of that gathering suddenly saw him change into the voice and person of Joseph Smith—the sign from God that confirmed his mantle of authority. This was really really popular when I was a kid. It came right out of the primary manuals and everything.

The only problem is that no one talked about this amazing transformation when it happened. There are no journals, letters, or newspaper accounts written at the time of the meeting that would back up this amazing story. It is true that such a meeting took place. And it is true that both Sidney Rigdon and Brigham Young spoke at the meeting. But no account of the transformation was recorded at that time.

Historian Richard Van Wagoner has searched all diaries, journals, newspapers, and church records written shortly after the meeting and has found no evidence to verify the “miracle transformation” story. You can read more about his findings by reading his published report.

Brigham’s speech was reported on in detail in both Nauvoo newspapers and recorded by scribes for the official church records. Hundreds of members present wrote about Brigham’s persuasive argument in great detail in their private journals. Nowhere was there mention of the miraculous or divine.

So where does the story come from? There is no recorded account of the transformation until many years later, after the Saints were settled in Utah. In 1857, 13 years after the speech, Albert Carrington is the first to mention the transformation. In a speech before a huge gathering of Saints, he said that he couldn’t tell Brigham from Joseph that day when Brigham was speaking. Soon others were making the same claim.

Records even show that it was impossible for several members who made the claim to have witnessed the miracle to have even been in Nauvoo at the time of the meeting.

But not all members got caught up in the new story. Bishop George Miller, present at the gathering, later recalled that nothing supernatural had occurred on that day. Young made a “long and loud harangue,” Miller later wrote, for which I “could not see any point in the course of his remarks than to overturn Sidney Rigdon’s pretensions.”

http://www.mormonthink.com/glossary/transfiguration.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigham_Young

I guess this was supposed to be Brigham Young’s big miracle or something, or at least a lot of the faithful felt he needed one. At the time of the alleged miracle naturally, the first Mormon prophet had been murdered and Young was contending for his now open position. Likewise, at the time the story first appeared over a decade later, not coincidentally, there was an Army marching out to destroy them from the States. Brigham Young needed all the leadership credibility he could muster to hold his people together in the crisis. No doubt, some of his followers tried to help him out by producing some really convincing testimony in his favor, since Brigham was in the heat of many debates and contentions regarding how to respond to the invasion force.

In pioneer times, obviously an orderly transition of leadership in the corporation wasn’t thrilling or convincing enough to inspire men, women, and children to struggle, fight, and die all across the Great Plains for reasons of parliamentary procedure. The fact remains however, that, not since Joseph Smith “restored” the church, has LDS leadership openly claimed to have been led via bona-fide and openly glorious “revelation” in the same sense that Smith actually claimed to talk personally, face-to-face with Deity and Angels in a Q&A setting. Neither has any subsequent LDS leadership actually laid claim to speaking directly as the Voice of God, meaning relaying directly or channeling the express words and will of Deity, speaking in the First-Person of Jesus, as did Joseph Smith in hundreds of distinct, sometimes very personal and specific revelations now canonized in the Doctrine and Covenants, and many others not so canonized:

Thus sayeth the Lord… And Joseph Smith quoted the Lord almost daily. He and the Brethren hung out in the room above Newell Whitney’s store and held lengthy question-and-answer sessions about nearly everything, and Smith would right then and there give them the direct Word of God. Or he’d come back the next day having written down a vision or revelation, and he’d call it that, and present it as the verbatim word of the Lord.

http://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Schools_of_the_Prophets

http://jesuschrist.lds.org/josephsmith/v/index.jsp?vgnextfmt=tab3&vgnextoid=20ceda73c0b52010VgnVCM1000001f5e340aRCRD

Starting with the Utah experience, starting with Brigham Young to put a fine point on it, Mormonism found itself short on prophecy, long on hardship, and it began to invent encouraging, seemingly harmless little stories to make themselves feel better about themselves and their leaders. Their leaders in turn tried to promote everything they uttered as if it had the same prophetic insight as the ruminations of Joseph Smith. They weren’t always on the mark like Smith seemed to be. In a closed society, all of these wishful, sometimes whimsical if faithful efforts, evolved into a warm tapestry of homespun mythology, as Mormonism kept trying to fill the pit of mystical emptiness that Joseph Smith had once filled daily via connecting them directly to God.

Eventually, “harmless” Mormon mythology got sucked into the culture as fact and thus became an integral part of the religion as well. Since it was just them, out there in that hole, and they were all Saints, and they all believed anyway, nobody cared if it their little stories were all entirely true. It felt true. And they didn’t care if it sounded stupid. Mormons don’t like smart people anyway. Smart people don’t make good Mormons, they had decided long ago. Simple mindedness became a virtue in Brigham Young’s church. Their little anecdotes and couplets and experimental theological ramblings raised their spirits and promoted the “Gospel.” That’s all that mattered to them.

The same sort of thing happened in the mountain isolation of the Appalachian range in Tennessee and the south. The only difference is Brigham Young decided Adam was God, and the Christian hillbillies decided you should dance around, drink poison and handle vipers at church if you really love Jesus.

Wackiness is wackiness.

Most serious Christian historians today, even many Calvinist apologists, concede that Calvin’s theocracy in Geneva was an example of totalitarian repression, not a model of God’s Divine Government. In Joseph Smith’s time however, many Christians still felt that Calvin’s Church/Police-State in Geneva was a great example for America’s future organization. Even today Calvin’s sympathizers talk about America being a “Christian Nation,” and claim the Bible supersedes the Constitution.

When America’s Calvinist legacy first came upon Joseph Smith, his religious assertions were indeed deviant and unorthodox according to their understanding of Christianity. Likewise, under a Calvinist mandate, so were the Deists and Congregationalists, the Universalists, the Methodists and Baptists that America’s original Puritan stock had sought so earnestly to subdue in their colonies, but could not stifle nationwide in the long run. But Calvin’s disciples weren’t the only sort or “Christians” throwing their formative political weight around in the American Revolution. Under the Calvinist social/governmental model, the very man most credited with insuring religious freedom in America, Thomas Jefferson, was a heretic to be burned even more vehemently than Calvin’s Servetus, and many would have eagerly done so had they been able to get away with it. It is no wonder then, that the Founding Fathers went far out of their way to insure that they had cut Calvin and his thuggish, intolerant legacy off from their openly espoused goal of an American theocracy.

James Madison for one, grew up watching Baptists being imprisoned and persecuted in Maryland as a British Colony under a State religion. Madison was as mainstream a Christian as they came, yet when prompted by a fellow Christian named George Mason, he joined with the radical free-thinking Jefferson and others, and specifically enacted Constitutional provisions to insure that the Calvinist vision of an American theocracy built along the Geneva model would never be possible in their new United States of America.

“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
— Thomas Jefferson

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1673.Thomas_Jefferson

Jefferson was accused of being a “Deist,” which in reality is only one of a dozen or so offensive designations you could fling at his personal Christian faith. “Heretic” is the designation his opponents used against him as a candidate for the US Presidency. There were quite a few Deists, Universalists, Congregationalists, and other non-standard “Christians” in the core of American revolutionaries we now call our Founding Fathers. But they didn’t usually advertise it for political reasons—politics driven mostly by Calvinists and other “orthodox” Christians who never doubted that their new United States would be built into another Puritan Paradise like Geneva had been under Himself. (Calvin that is.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism

Oddly enough, today, the same Methodists and Presbyterians, Baptists, Episcopalians, even good old Roman Catholics and Lutherans, who called Jefferson and his Deist, Universalist, Unitarian or Congregationalist friends heretics, who likewise immediately categorized Mormonism as deviant from their own negotiated American orthodoxy and therefore outside the protection of America’s Christian law, now find themselves compelled to cling desperately to whatever sort of connection these Founding Fathers might have to Jesus Christ. When it’s in their best political interest we see that many of the most fanatically “orthodox” Christians are quite willing to lower their Christian bar of admittance in a most forgiving and inclusive manner, if it means they can thereby secure a firmer historical binding of their “Christian America” argument to those Founding Fathers who were most involved in the actual authoring of the American Constitution.

http://www.creationists.org/myth-of-the-seperation-of-church-and-state.html

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/farrell_till/myth.html

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/sarah-palin-sparks-church-state-separation-debate/story?id=10419289

http://bmccreations.com/one_nation/nation.html

http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/summer97/secular.html

It wasn’t just a handful of aberrant, quasi-Christian patriots coming along some hundred and more years into the experiment who thwarted Christianity’s desire to build a New Geneva on the American continent. God was the first anti-Calvinist, anti-Puritan force in the new American wilderness. The first limiting condition placed on Calvinism’s desire to unilaterally rule America came simply as an intrinsic function of America being a huge, wide-open country. God made this wide and wealthy landscape an attraction not only to Puritans and other Christian purists, but soon these zeal-driven pilgrims were being rapidly diluted by multitudes of more mainstream English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and other settlers just looking for a chance to own property and make a good living. Populations spread out into separate, independent towns, homes and farms. American families became independent homesteads, instead of being communally confined to tightly run, desperately dependent walled villages and outposts.

Mormons and Christians alike claim America as God’s choice land—but for opposite reasons. The Christians still think it’s theirs and the Constitution only forces them to be nice to non-Christians and let them come along for the ride as long as they don’t stick their noses into actually governing the nation. The Christians of Joseph Smith’s day in fact, felt they had the right not only to define what a Christian was or wasn’t, but that they had the right to punish those who weren’t, and deny basic rights of US citizenship to those they excluded from the Christian fold. We still see this today particularly on the Islamic front.

Mormons, from Joseph Smith’s day to today, like the Founding Fathers, believe that the US Constitution was inspired to insure that no church could enforce its faith everywhere at all times in the New World. The Mormons of frontier American believed they had as much right as anyone to worship God how they pleased, appoint ministers and church authorities as they felt moved, and most importantly, had every right to form fellowships, communities, and prosper in the new land like anyone else. And even more specifically: vote their conscience unhindered in American politics.

Christian America had other ideas for Mormons, Quakers, Baptists, Catholics, and God help them, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or whatever other religious and social deviants might try to come along and invade their Christian Nation. Unfortunately for the Pilgrim’s aspiring Puritan theocracy, while the vast majority of initial American settlers came from Puritan or Church of England roots, the Anglican influence in particular faded rapidly and decisively away over their first century in the colonies. The later English settlers carried with them the new King James “Authorized” Bible and a lot of initial loyalty to Church and King, but the good Americans of the Church of England soon found that submitting to a religious franchise held by a King or Queen some several thousand miles away across the sea seemed rather pointless after a while, and there was nothing to compel them to remain faithful to this commitment in the new country. As the nation grew, what really happened is that more and more American settlers came across the Atlantic specifically to get away from the constant supervision of God and King.

The Church of England ultimately could not prevent all manner of American-Anglican offshoots from having their own meetings, conducting their own Bible study, forming their own congregations, choosing their own ministers, and forming their own religious conclusions. These Anglo-American offshoots began calling themselves, like the Scots had done, things like the “Episcopalian” Church. “Episcopal” simply refers to being governed by a council of bishops. A lot of the Scots Presbyterians had already spilt out into Episcopal congregations because they refused to conform to the Church of England’s contention that the King of England was the God-chosen supreme head of the Church, among other issues. Many of these fled Scotland during the Highland purges under George III or otherwise emigrated to America to run their own church and civil affairs as they saw fit.

http://justus.anglican.org/resources/timeline/11ecusa.html

Anglican of course means “English,” so in places like Scotland, even in the Lowlands where Scottish nobles had sworn oaths of loyalty to the English Crown, Protestant Scots wanted the English connection diluted as much as it could be from their political and religious institutions. The Presbyterian Church was first founded in Scotland in the mid-1500’s through the leadership of John Knox, who spearheaded the Reformation in Scotland. He was vehemently anti-Roman Catholic and highly influenced by the teachings of, yes, there he is again, John Calvin. The “Presbytery” refers to being governed by a high council of priests, even taking a step back from the notion perhaps of being ruled by central bishops and dropping any direct connection to England or the English Church, and very certainly dismissing any authority of the Roman Church. Even so, the Anglicans originally counted most Scottish Presbyterian flocks as “conforming” essentially to the Anglican Communion. This was something James I earnestly tried to enforce. As the generations passed however, Anglo-Scottish relations became less and less cozy. After the Battle of Culloden in 1746 many Protestant Scots could no longer tolerate any English franchise on God on either side of the pond. The largely Scottish Presbyterians who moved progressively into the American south, either went to calling themselves Episcopalian or otherwise explored their own theological ideas and began to be counted by the Church of England as “non-conforming.”

http://christianity.about.com/od/presbyteriandenomination/a/presbyhistory.htm http://www.pcahistory.org/ebooks/pcus/ch1.pdf

This work I must remind the reader, is an entirely myopic exploration of religion in the United States of America with an utterly narrow field of view limited to those Christian forces that directly affected Joseph Smith and the development of Mormonism. It also examines how the rise of Mormonism exposed, and continues to expose, the inherent incompatibility of so-called “Christian” culture with Constitutional Democracy in an American Republic that guarantees freedom of religion. It is not intentionally a one-sided presentation, it is intentionally selective. For you Christians, I assure you I have pissed off far more Mormons than Christians by taking a neutral line through this history. Or should I say, having taken a moral line, a Christ-like line that seeks to examine right and wrong from the standpoint of pointing out guilt where it lies and merit where it is deserved. Having said this plainly, and admitting that it may seem pointless and tangential, my exploration would not be complete without examining Joseph Smith’s exposure to American Lutheranism.

This is a remarkably short encounter.

Martin Luther may have started the whole Reformation movement, and modern Mormons may pay him homage now and again for doing so, but Luther and his followers were one of the last and the least of the influences on Mormonism. All of Protestantism knows and honors Martin Luther as the father of the Reformation. All of Protestantism, all of the Reformationists just plain copied, ripped-off, riffed-on, duplicated, emulated, outdid or otherwise rode Martin Luther’s back into this new Christian age. But Mormons are not Protestants. Mormons are not Reformers. Mormons don’t even know for the most part what a “Reformation” is. Most Mormons think Martin Luther was a black civil rights crusader who got shot in the sixties, and now get yet another day off work in honor of his assassination. Or birth. One of those two. Joseph Smith’s early Christian education included plenty of exposure to Calvinism, Arminianism, some brief skirtings perhaps with Roman Catholicism, but not much actual Lutheran contact at all.

Some say Calvin’s ideas are very similar to those of Martin Luther. The LCMS, Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, probably agrees wholeheartedly because out of all the American Synods, it’s the only one left with its heart still firmly residing in the Dark Ages.

http://books.google.com/books?id=ApWxByVqe-MC&pg=PA199&lpg=PA199&dq=missouri+synod+history+slavery&source=bl&ots=F_t7GmmPUK&sig=l1-5C2Fbzxyb7DqjVaw8ALxW1Yc&hl=en&ei=FnpYTfveOoiq8AbFl8mhBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEcQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q&f=false

Lutheranism of any sort was as theologically irrelevant as Roman Catholicism to the Joseph Smith experience until late in his Mormon journey when he moved his church from the eastern states to Missouri, which was newly opened territory. At that time, Smith was trying to escape the mobs led mainly by Presbyterians and Methodists in his homeland of New York, and his first place of flight from same in Ohio. He thought farther West would be a place of freedom. As it turned out, the farther West he went, the farther away he got from any sort of Constitutional protection for his right to worship God as he pleased.

The first Lutheran incursions into what was then the “West,” came when a handful of Saxons got fed up with all the rationalism going on in the 19th century German synods, where the Church was spending too much time trying to make sense out of their religion. In 1838 these Lutheran Puritans left Germany and landed in New Orleans, recently French territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, and steamed up the Mississippi to Saint Louis Missouri. They formed the Concordia Seminary in 1839 out of a log cabin. The Mormons were in the process of getting invited out of the state the whole time the Saxon Lutherans were moving in, and by the time they founded Concordia, Mormonism had been booted out of the state at point-of-sword, and driven off through musket and ball by then.

Missouri’s Lutheran contingent was fresh off the boat, had problems with English, but were very keen on American religious liberty, and unlike the Mormons they found themselves permanently welcome in Missouri by sidestepping a few local social and political issues, like slavery. The Lutherans were also not very ambitious and kept a low profile so they didn’t frighten the locals into thinking they were all going to be speaking German in a few years if they didn’t put these newcomers down right away. But any Lutheran involvement in persecuting Mormonism in Missouri could have only ever amounted to very little. The Missouri Synod did however vote in the Roman Pope as their official nomination for the actual anti-Christ.

(Perhaps that’s where Mormons picked it up.)

The Missouri Synod might have been a problem for Joseph Smith perhaps, but it wasn’t actually formed until 1847, which is years after Mormonism had been burned and massacred out of the state by the general Christian population. By the time the Saxons had built themselves up and formed an actual synod, Joseph Smith had been murdered by the henchmen of Presbyterian,  Methodist, Baptist and other Protestant Christian clergies and politicians across the Mississippi River in Illinois.

As a quick historical orientation then: a year after the Lutherans arrived in Missouri, in 1839, the Latter-day Saints fled the state  under a gubernatorially issued extermination order. They crossed the river to Illinois. As usual, they were ultimately again burned and shot and raped and pillaged out of the city they founded there, Nauvoo. They were then forced to flee farther West. So of all the Christian sects hammering Joseph Smith and his friends either with actual hammers or in doctrinal debate, it would be hardest to determine just how involved any Lutherans may have been. Other Christian sects mind you, proudly rallied mobs and printed their calls for Mormon extermination in the newspapers and openly preached sermons calling for the imprisonment and hanging of Joe Smith, the Great Imposter. Famous Methodist, Presbyterian, and other Christian ministers, priests and pastors published broadsheets and handbills urging violent action against the Mormons. Not so, apparently with the Lutherans. Not even the really really pious ones.

http://books.google.com/books?id=0a4tbtxBOssC&pg=PA59&lpg=PA59&dq=reverend+pixley+anti-mormon&source=bl&ots=_rpatlclxK&sig=yiT6vpuBiiChf46WcwDGP8gQAME&hl=en&ei=cjazTf_8C4S5twea_4zqDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CC8Q6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=reverend%20pixley%20anti-mormon&f=false

In summation, you might think that Lutheranism was almost a non-factor in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. American Lutherans and American Mormons never even had the chance to swing a Bible and each other in the early formative days. However, Brigham Young had no sooner stumbled out of his wagon (since he was sick as a dog when they pulled into the valley) into the dust and sweltering freedom of Mexican Territory–what is now Utah–than he sent out missionaries into Scandinavia, Germany, and Lutheran Europe, where Mormonism converted thousands upon thousands of them–thousands of the most pious and Puritanical of the Lutheran hoards over there. These they shipped, carted and hiked into the Great Salt Lake Valley as fast as they could manage it for about a hundred years. But again, no sooner had these immigrants been gathered into “Zion” as Young called it, than they ceased to be Lutherans or Protestants or Scandinavians or Germans or English or Dutch. They almost instantly became “Mormons.” One of them is the current LDS Church president. I doubt if he even knows what lefse or lutefisk is.

If Brigham Young had one talent, it was Nation Building. You can’t fault him for that.

http://www.valpo.edu/cresset/2008/2008_Trinity_Chapman.pdf

http://www.guidedbiblestudies.com/library/lutheran_missouri_synod.htm

In Missouri, Mormonism also ran smack into the black heartland of the Southern Baptists. The Missouri Lutherans were as Puritanical as Calvin Himself, but the Southern Baptists made it a contest to see just how retrograde Protestantism could be. Luther, most theologians say, was not very different from Calvin in most of  his views. But unlike Luther, we’ve seen the despotism that resulted when Calvin controlled a city. The Southern Baptists, even though they ostensibly sprung from Arminian roots, had evolved over the years of their American isolation into a very Calvinistic sect. They clung to the King James Bible as the sole and inerrant source of God’s religious instruction. Since Baptist congregations are inherently independent, any given ministry could go entirely medieval if they so chose.

http://drjamesgalyon.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/what-should-southern-baptists-do-with-calvinists/

Both the southern Lutherans and the Baptists split company with their northern congregations over the issue of whether or not negroes had a soul and any capability of being saved. (Though both agreed that Jews were Satan’s spawn.) The Missouri Lutherans supported slavery as a tool to convert the heathen and claimed God tolerated it on that basis—God even considered it a benefit to the heathen to be enslaved if it resulted in being saved as a Christian. Northeastern Lutherans and American Lutherans in general had also admitted Negros into their congregations, but only under the assurance that said negroes would not use their Christianity as an excuse to disobey the law of the land and try to escape their obligations as a slave.

Except for the Scandinavian Lutherans who immediately gravitated to the Upper Midwest, American Lutherans were slow to deal with the slavery issue at all. When it became a roaring national and international disgrace around the time of the American Civil War, the Northern Synods took up the Abolitionist’s call. (This was well after the Mormon era in Missouri though.) The Missouri Synod, like the Southern Baptists, being an independent congregational structure, just said, “No Thanks” to Abolition.

The Southern Baptists went so far as to claim that Negros didn’t even have souls anyway so would be pointless converting them. They let their slaves dress up and pretend they had their own Black Baptists churches just to dangle the juicy Salvation Carrot they knew they weren’t eligible for but would work mighty hard to get anyway. Negros in Southern Baptist theology were just going to cease to exist or burn in hell or something when they died. That’s why God created them. God created Negros to be slaves. It was obvious. The Southern Presbyterians would eventually follow the Southern Baptists in this declaration as well.

http://www.americanpresbyterianchurch.org/the_north-south_schism_of_1861.htm

http://www.baptisthistory.org/sbaptistbeginnings.htm

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0NXG/is_1_37/ai_94160891/

The Southern Baptist Convention didn’t renounce their racist views on Negros until 1995. The State of Missouri for that matter, didn’t apologize for issuing an extermination order authorizing its good Christian Defenders of the Faith to shoot any Mormons they found in the state on sight, until 1976.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Baptist_Convention

http://sbcvoices.com/southern-baptist-convention-resolutions-racism/

http://www.suite101.com/content/lilbrun-boggs-extermination-order-a62267

The local Missouri “Christian” views on slavery did have tremendous impact upon Joseph Smith’s new church as well as a campaign for the US presidency he was beginning to mount in his last days. Smith’s position on slavery was that he wanted to abolish it but have the US government buy slaves up and free them, thus compensating “property” owners while solving the problem of slavery at the same time. He did allow free Negros to move to Missouri while he was there, and settle, work and worship with his “white” Mormon congregations. This practice of giving any Negros, free or not, houses and paid work and a place in church with white folks was extremely offensive to Joseph’s Christian neighbors. Amongst their many paranoid fears of Mormons was their habit of voting as a block and  buying up all the land in the area so Christian “Old Settlers” wouldn’t have a chance to build rich slave-driven plantations and prosper like their forefathers had done in Virginia and the East. The Old Settlers were in the constant fear that Mormons were educating Negros and treating them like human beings, and this could only result in a slave rebellion led by uppity Mormon Negro agitators.

All of these fears were founded upon the proposition that if the Mormons voted the way they wanted to vote, and kept bringing in the people they wanted to bring into the state, the Mormons would effectively out-populate the older inhabitants, and vote their way into running the place. Unfortunately for the Old Settlers, that’s how America works. That’s how state and federal constitutions are set up. There was nothing legally the Old Christians and their complaining clergies could do about it if Mormons wanted to call Joseph Smith a “prophet” and claim they were going to build “Zion” in the middle of their dreams of plantation paradise.

Baptists were a particular problem for the Mormons in Missouri and Southern Illinois. The Baptists had themselves been driven out of the Northeast early on and made their way south to try to take over what is now called the “Bible Belt.” One Baptist Reverend named Benton Pixley is famous for two things, one he was sent by the Missionary Society to hound Indians from Florida to Missouri into the waters of baptism which most of the Indians resented, and two, he made it his personal mission to dog Mormons to death if he could manage it, partly because they got along so well with the Indians. While Pixley was busy trying to convince Native Americans they were Godless savages and heathens doomed to burn in hell, Joseph Smith was running around showing them a Gold Bible he said was a record made by their ancestors that proves they were the noble descendants of God’s Chosen people. Most of the Indians knew this already in one legendary story or another, and didn’t mind hearing it again, even if it was from some peculiar white guy who was inordinately zealous about showing his admiration for them.

Pixley’s Baptist spiel about hellfire, damnation and a vengeful, white Jesus-God that was going to punish them for all eternity if they didn’t sign up, didn’t play well with the Native population for the most part. Pixley of course, was compelled to try to sell this line of BS anyway, and the Mormons weren’t helping him any with their “Great American Indian Civilization” pitch out of their Book of Mormon. In retaliation, Pixley appointed himself the permanent anti-Mormon correspondent for any newspaper or journal that would publish his diatribes against Joseph Smith. Another local minister, a Presbyterian, Finis Ewing, also published another famous article in the local papers in 1833 in which he pronounced, “The Mormons are the common enemy of mankind, and ought to be destroyed.” But it was Benton Pixley who actually called the meeting that led to the open slaughter of Mormon men, women and children at Haun’s Mill, and the Missouri extermination order of 1838.

http://books.google.com/books?id=0a4tbtxBOssC&pg=PA59&lpg=PA59&dq=reverend+pixley+anti-mormon&source=bl&ots=_rpauekjyO&sig=to8MJT4VZlY0xM2uivBk1LsePqo&hl=en&ei=KMqzTeuGLI23twfBp9HpDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEIQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=reverend%20pixley%20anti-mormon&f=false

With the go-ahead of these “respected” clergymen and many others like them, persecution of Mormons in Missouri commenced immediately upon their arrival in 1833. It came to a head in 1838 after a mob of Christian “Old Settlers” decided Mormons had no right to vote and established a human blockade around the polling place in newly formed Davis County to drive Mormons away. The Mormons slugged their way in to vote anyway, and the Old Settlers ran home crying that they were coming back with guns. This led to the Mormons returning with more Mormon voters carrying their own arms to defend their Constitutional right to franchise. The Christians shot at the Mormons, and unlike the Quakers the Old Settlers apparently imagined them to be, the Mormons shot back. The Christian instigators cried rebellion like stuck pigs to the Governor, and he eagerly issued an extermination order just in time to insure his re-election.

In fact, Smith wasn’t exterminated in Missouri, but one Mormon settlement at Haun’s Mill was brutally wiped out by anti-Mormon militias in response to the governor’s authorization, and the Mormons organized themselves in response. They fought off these roving mobs and rogue militias to a temporary truce, based upon a surrender of Mormon leadership. The rest of the Mormons were promised free passage out of the state. What actually happened is they had to abandon their lands and property for pennies-on-the-dollar, or more commonly, most lost all they had to looters and mobs as they went. Smith was imprisoned in Liberty Missouri for five months on no clear charge other than a general claim of insurrection.

Liberty Jail was a dank hellhole. It was a dungeon-like potato-cellar of a “jail,” mostly underground and with no light to speak of. Smith was routinely poisoned or fed tainted food by his Christian jailors and they also teased their prisoners that they had killed either a Negro or a fellow Mormon and fed this “Mormon Beef,” to Smith and his companions.

It is generally believed Smith was allowed to escape Liberty Jail because the entire chain of civil authorities from the governor on down believed Missouri’s charges were going to look foolish if Smith were allowed to carry his defense through the court system, up to and including the US Supreme Court. Smith had in the past humiliated scores of complainants against him, both private and governmental by repeatedly being found innocent of any actual crimes or misdemeanors once charges against him were finally examined under the law. The problem again, is Joe Smith may have been a quack, but he was a religious quack, and if his only “crime” was conning people into believing he was God’s Messenger, then it was no crime at all.

It is also believed that Smith’s Missouri persecutors considered it far easier just to track him down as he fled their captivity and shoot him, than to quibble about why they just weren’t going to put up with Joe and his Mormons, law or no law, in front of a judge in court.

http://www.mormonwiki.com/Liberty_Jail

http://mrm.org/mormon-beef

The truth about Christianity’s persecution of Mormonism, is that it starts with a “Gold Bible” in New York, with folks apparently quite convinced that he had one—they just wanted to steal it from him. And then he started printing these boring “Mormon” books. To finance all of this he started organizing into a regular “church” and raising funds from members of same. At this point, his professional Christian clergy rivals kicked into full drive and began to lecture and encourage public scorn and condemnation, which moved into virulent hellfire death and condemnation sermons, the more Smith’s enterprise prospered in spite of their official warnings against him.

By the time Joseph Smith and his merry band of heretics had been driven into Missouri, they’d been getting mobbed and robbed and arrested and tarred and feathered and beaten up and whipped for decades simply for being unorthodox. The worst “crime” charged against Smith for all of this was that he was a fake. Which again, isn’t illegal in a religious context. It’s not only not illegal, it’s specifically protected under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Joseph Smith had a perfect right to be a false prophet, a heretic, or a plain-old crank if he felt good about being one and wasn’t physically compelling anyone to join or give him money.

Most Christian apologists go right to polygamy or secret societies of Mormon vigilantes when they try to justify Missouri’s extermination order and related persecution. What actual Mormon historians have to concede is that there really isn’t a single instance of an actual Mormon Death Squad you can nail down for sure, and those with any factual provenance are directly connected with efforts by sometimes very well-meaning Mormons to protect themselves from this ongoing and longstanding onslaught of violence from their Christian clergy-assigned mobbers, rapists, murderers and sadists. And in reality, the polygamy issue was scarcely even known within the upper ranks of the LDS leadership at the time of Smith’s murder in 1844, some six years after the Christian-ordered slaughter of defenseless women and children at Haun’s Mill Missouri, and 24 years after the first round of Christian-clergy authorized threats to brutalize, repress, or kill Joseph Smith. Even assuming Joseph Smith was taking extra wives in his last days in Nauvoo, his attentions to these women was being characterized by his Nauvoo opponents as “infidelity” because the doctrinal connection to plural marriage wasn’t yet being made.

Now, huge mobs led by Christian ministers aren’t the typical response to “infidelity.” The bride’s old man or big brothers might come gunning for you maybe, but never half the state militia on orders from the governor to wipe out your whole village, men, women and children. Or as Christian crusader William Reynolds said at Haun’s Mill just before he put his musket to the head of ten-year-old Sardius Smith, and blew his brains out all over the blacksmith’s shop in which he was found cowering, “Nits will make lice, and if he had lived he would have become a Mormon.” Another great example of Christianity, Jacob Rogers, riding down fleeing Mormons in the same raid accepted the surrender of an aged man named Thomas McBride. On horseback, Rogers took the surrendered musket, saw it was loaded, then smiled and shot McBride in the chest with the man’s own weapon. McBride fell to his knees with a hand raised in pleading. Rogers took a large bladed corn knife and whacked off his hand in response, then got off his horse and hacked McBride apart bit by bit as he lay there dying. Numerous other fallen Mormons were hacked to pieces as an example to those who would eventually come reclaim their bodies.

http://www.heartslinked.com/peterson_families/ancestors/thomas_mcbride_and_catherine_john.htm

The Christian apologists will try to tell you that men like Reynolds and Rogers were just thugs and scoundrels and freelance ruffians. They were out of control. These sorts of villains were acting on their own the professional Christian excuse-makers say. But no, they weren’t. They were the Missouri State Militia. They were acting upon orders of their governor, at the express demand of Christian clergymen like Pixley and Ewing, with the full support of much of the local press and civic authorities. The same pattern had been repeated all across the US, the mobbery getting worse with every more and more successful anti-Mormon attempt at genocide. The same arrangement was subsequently repeated in Illinois, where the state militia joined forces with an inter-state mob to kill Joseph Smith once-and-for-all. And when Mormonism fled the United States for what is now Utah, Christianity’s mobocracy had gained so much anti-Mormon boldness that it sent an entire uniformed mob army out into disputed Mexican Territory to exterminate them–and of course lay claim to the Intermountain West that the Mormons had just tamed at great cost of life and labor–in the same way that Christian America’s forces of “civilization” stole every scrap of land and property from Mormonism systematically, from New York to Utah, waiting only long enough for the Mormons to produce lands, goods, and property of value, and settlements in productive order enough to be worth stealing.

Joseph Smith’s Christian enemies from the government to the clergy did not scream for his blood because he wasn’t being faithful to his wife. If that were true, he’d only be doing what most of them were doing on the side anyway. In fact, when Smith’s good Christian enemies eventually wrote legislation to outlaw plural marriage (which incidentally wasn’t illegal) they made sure you could sleep with as many women as you wanted as long as you didn’t “cohabitate,” meaning, if you married them and made a respectable arrangement out of it, you went to prison and got heavily fined, but if you took your hat and coat back home with you when you staggered drunk and debauched out of her bed later that night, back home to your wife,  you were fine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haun’s_Mill_massacre

The Reverend Pixley for one,  makes his complaints against Mormonism very plain, and they have to do mostly with Mormons not participating in his ecumenical councils in the region, and this due to their “un-Christian theology.” He spends a lot of time claiming that Mormons were clannish, pro-Negro, pro-Indian, and in general, a bunch of high-toned Northerners who put on airs and wore shoes even on hot days. Most central to these arguments was his conviction that Joseph Smith’s claiming to talk to God was a heretical fake. And on a personal note, Baptists had been the idiot, bastard cousins of American Christianity for generations. Now that Pixley and his fellows had finally become respectable and competitive at least in the south and western frontiers, even if it was mostly with savages and barbarians, you can be certain Pixley wasn’t going to let a bunch of Johnny-come-lately Mormon heretics thwart the long-awaited Baptist conquest of the United States.

Both the mobs in Missouri, the respected citizens and clergy who supported them, and those in Illinois actually swore oaths to slaughter all Mormons, including many of them signing formal documents and oaths spelling out exactly why they wanted to kill all the Mormons, confessing in writing that the law was on the Mormons’ side but swearing their lives, property, and sacred honor to exterminate them anyway in God’s name, because as they claimed, Mormonism wasn’t loyal to the white race enough, or to Jesus Christ enough, to have been what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they set about protecting religious observance. Personally, these sorts of claims really just come down to enjoying your own personal religion and politics, and seem hardly meriting an extermination order. But then, I’m not as “enlightened” as Reverend Pixley and his good Christian fellows.

In Missouri, the written oath the Christian “patriots” took was called the “Secret Constitution.” The Mormons called this document the “Mob Manifesto.” In this sacred covenant, the “Old Christian Settlers” essentially maintained that America was a Christian Nation, that Missouri was a Christian State, and by God no Mormons were going to move in, out-populate and out-vote Christianity as the legally binding religion of the land. The Bible clearly authorized slavery and they weren’t going to mess with that either.

Missouri eventually apologized for its actions in the so-called “Mormon War” of 1838. That’s because the war undeniably started when Missouri Christians formed a mob and tried to prevent Mormons from voting in Davis County. That much just isn’t in question on any side of the debate. They put it down in writing. It wasn’t much of a secret. Likewise, undeniably, anti-Mormon mobs took to the whole countryside raiding and raping and pillaging and burning Mormon property when the Mormons tried to defend their right to vote. That much is also very clear. The rest is history, a history not even the victorious Christians could successfully rewrite or stifle. Though, like Calvin’s defenders, the State of Missouri does a pretty good whitewashing their guilt on their website.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1838_Mormon_War

http://www.jefflindsay.com/LDSFAQ/FQ_Danites.shtml#danites

http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/resources/mormon.asp

http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~livcomo/letters/mormon.html

http://books.google.com/books?id=P5JBAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA166&lpg=PA166&dq=reverend+pixley+common+enemy+of+all&source=bl&ots=bnvjvGr0fR&sig=E3_MmMZdYE_2ELekjJ0Xr1j0pUs&hl=en&ei=tEqzTZrvM4aftwf7uYTqDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCAQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false

Originally welcomed as refugees into Illinois, the good Christian elements of that state would not rest until they’d outdone their Missouri Christian cohorts in the high level and low nature of their anti-Mormon persecution and violence. As far as the “Mormon War of 1844” in Illinois goes, this heightened episode of Christian-instigated anti-Mormon brutality culminated with Smith’s murder and the Mormon expulsion from the city they’d just built, Nauvoo, and the State of Illinois. The tenuous “treason” charge Joseph Smith finally got slaughtered for, after surrendering to the governor’s protective custody in Carthage Jail, comes down to the recipient of the bad-end of a city council decision running about the countryside, whining from magistrate to magistrate who repeatedly acquitted Smith, until he got the ear of governor. Seems the little whiner, Francis Higbee, had fired up an anti-Mormon press in the heart of Mormondom and got condemned as a “public nuisance.”

In attempting to get his revenge on Joseph, Smith’s Nauvoo publishing nemesis enlisted his friends in all the regional anti-Mormon newspapers to conduct a unified campaign of editorial haranguings, which prompted a coordinated campaign of over-the-pulpit church sermonizing urging the immediate use of force against the Mormon menace. In this atmosphere of fear and free-license to persecute, roving anti-Mormon mobs began to form, most of whom were indistinguishable from certain regiments of the Illinois State Militia. When Joseph called out the city’s own militia to defend Nauvoo from growing anti-Mormon Christian attacks, Smith’s critics claimed that he had taken over the county and called out the Nauvoo Legion to stifle their American rights. (Apparently meaning their right to mob Mormons at will.) It was “treason” they said. It was essentially the same ploy anti-Mormon activists had pulled off in Missouri. In Illinois however, rather than issue an order of extermination, the governor thought he’d have to calm this uproar down somehow, and decided he’d have Smith sit through a trial at least to sort out the whole treason issue.  Smith would probably get off as usual, or so the governor he seems to have figured, but a trial he thought would mellow out the mobs, justice would have been seen to have been fully served by everyone, and that would be it.

Smith’s old Missouri enemies also swarmed over the border however, and joined forces with the Illinois mobs. Joseph did indeed surrender to the governor as requested, and also disarmed the Nauvoo Legion to reassure the good Christians in the area there would be no Mormon anti-Christian holocaust executed against them, placing the protection of Nauvoo in the hands of the small portions of the Illinois State Militia they considered more-or-less reliable. The units assigned to “guard” Smith in Carthage however, had openly sworn to kill him.

Apparently learning their lesson from Smith’s escape from Liberty Jail, the mob-militia “guarding” Joseph Smith at Carthage Jail just waited till the governor and his main force was gone, stormed the jail and shot him all to hell. They took a moment in the woods to dress like Indians and paint their faces black, returned armed to the teeth, passed undisturbed through the ranks of his “guards” outside the jail, up the stairs to the second floor, and fought their way through the unlocked door of a waiting room where Smith and his fellows were voluntarily holding themselves under arrest. They drove Smith out the window in a hail of bullets. His “guards” outside, shot him on the way down to the paving stones outside the jail. They sat him up against the well he’d landed by, and shot him a few more times just for fun. This got the job of “Christianizing” Joe Smith done with no pretense of a trial or attendant encumbering Constitutional arguments. This avoided the likely chance that the law might let Smith off of this charge like he’d gotten off of every single one of the scores of other legal charges Christian persecutors had tried to pin on him to that date.

http://mrm.org/death-of-joseph-smith

http://historyofmormonism.com/joseph_smith/joseph_smith_life/martyrdom_joseph_smith/

http://books.google.com/books?id=_mBRDOww5h0C&pg=PT107&dq=mormon+war+illinois&hl=en&ei=gkyzTZyHCYK2tgfe8tjpDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDkQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=mormon%20war%20illinois&f=false

It just makes you wonder then, why would God choose Joe Smith from some hick town in the American frontier? What chance did Mormonism have to grow and prosper in frontier America’s self-igniting Christian revivalist environment? What chance did a seat-of-the-pants startup utopian society have in a wilderness run by political wolves, capitalist barons, religious opportunists and mobocrats? What chance did an unschooled farm boy have against America’s professionally trained, stump-preaching stormfront of Calvinism and Arminianism? What was God thinking when He came to this young American idiot at this inopportune time and told him to buck the entire social, political, and religious system and “Restore” anything, much less the True Church of Christ? That’s just a crazy idea. The whole notion is preposterous. It could never work. A kid like that wouldn’t last five minutes in that environment, peddling that load of crap!

Right?

You can’t knock success. It’s a mystery. Must be Divine Providence.

American religion evolved primarily out of various Anglified variants of Calvinism. Calvin had almost nothing in common with Joseph Smith theologically, though Smith had been brought up on huge doses of Calvinism. Not much of it seemed to have rubbed off however. Calvin’s offshoot sects like the Presbyterians, came to be be Smith’s political and theological arch-enemies.

Calvin was no stranger to persecution of course, but unlike Joseph Smith he quickly learned how to politic himself into a position of power through stirring up the masses and local clergy to support him. He could also argue his way out of the noose when called upon and barely escaped being branded a heretic himself early on. Like Joseph Smith, he was a self-made “Prophet,” only he didn’t believe in those, or a self-declared “Pope” except he didn’t believe in those either. He had no easy credentials, no “Old School Tie” connections to speak of, no inherent money, lands, titles, legal, political or social power base. Everything he built in his Geneva Empire he pulled out of his own arse and had to create on the spot. Calvin literally created his own theocracy and assumed the role of its Protector for Life. To do this he took an urban wilderness apart at the seams and rebuilt it in his own image. With little more than his own big mouth and clever pen, he ousted political, social, and religious authorities who had ruled the “civilized” world for centuries. You can’t knock success.

But John Calvin beat Joe Smith to the New World, and because Calvin’s theocratic descendants knew exactly what Calvin would be doing if he had been the one founding America, American Christians for the most part just presumed from the start that Old Joe Smith would be attempting to pull off the same sort of theocratic dictatorship. Quite apart from doctrinal differences, this political reality in an American system meant that Christians could not let Mormons participate on an even playing field or they could simply recruit and reproduce themselves into political orthodoxy anywhere they established a social power base. That’s far easier to do in America than it is with an official State religion where Christians could easily define Mormonism out of the entire political and social process. That’s what Constantine did. That’s what Calvin did. That’s what virtually every one of the Protestant Reformers did. How even a hugely Christian majority could do the same thing in a Constitutional Republic with specific Constitutional protections for freedom of worship, became a serious frustration for anti-Mormon Christian crusaders.

Christian America’s reaction to Revolutionary Joe Smith has been from the start, primarily a territorial dispute rather than strictly a doctrinal or authoritarian one. Smith was threatening Protestant America’s ownership of the hearts, minds, and bodies of the New World simply by being allowed to exist. The specifics of his doctrines were only relevant insofar as they could be firmly defined as heretical, and that could have come down to anything from denouncing infant baptism, the Triune God, the Inerrancy of the King James Bible, or any number of pet, historically hot Christian controversies, depending upon which Christian clergy was looking to put down Mormonism.

Joseph Smith’s most offensive heresy however, in the minds of the professional Christians offended by it, was the very notion that some rural hick in his pre-teen years could turn whole populations against thousands of years of conventional Christianity based entirely upon a claim to personal revelation. If the general population was somehow willing to accept that premise, then anyone could worship God however they wanted and could establish by public acclaim any new creed or clergy they felt most comfortable with. The professional American Christian clergy would no longer have a captive audience. America’s up-and-coming Christian ministries certainly couldn’t have that sort of competition going on in their expansive, newly planted American fields of self-imagined glory.

America in Joseph Smith’s day represented the largest wide-open potential Christian harvest in the history of the planet. Those who owned the Christian brand at the time saw that if they did not vigorously–even violently–guard its use, it meant that America would become a place where anyone could come up with a more popular twist on the Bible or religion in general, and freely steal their sheep away. They saw that if they were forced by their own Church traditions to insist upon preaching doctrines to, and haranguing their congregations with dogma that generations of thinking Christians have known to be irrational, illogical, and often just plain asinine, they would never be able to compete against somebody free to deliver a gospel that made sense for a change. (Or at least, made more sense.) If Joe Smith were allowed by “inspiration” to say, no, there’s no such thing as immaterial matter, or that God just exists as a finer form of matter, but neither matter nor intelligence can be created nor destroyed, the fact is, unlike the Platonic, Athanasian, non-God that Christians are compelled to defend, an intangible being who is made of nothing and yet fills an infinitely huge universe, which He incidentally created out of nothing, Smith’s version is going to leave the professional Christian with merely a few obtuse apologies centered around murky mysticism, to try to cover up the clear impression most intelligent listeners would get, that Joe Smith makes absolute sense and his notion of God and physics are apparently scientifically valid.

In frontier America, if anyone was going to be fleecing America’s thriving flocks, it was going to be Christians. Professional, properly trained Christians. Even though the professional Christians in America’s revivalist-driven frenzies at the start of the 19th century fought fervently amongst themselves to define what exactly a Christian actually was, or what the word even meant, they were all pretty certain it didn’t include Joe Smith and his Mormons. Ultimately however, Christianity could not find a Constitutional relief from Mormonism. So Christianity went outside the Constitution and invented a form of Holy Retribution that became known as “mobocracy.” Where Calvin would have simply had the lawmen he owned haul Joseph Smith into the courts he owned, and torture a confession out of him after the Church thugs he owned had beaten him senseless enough, and then Calvin could have executed Joe Smith in a public square that he also owned, Calvin’s American children could only effect the same arrangement by assembling masses of Christian clergy and congregational supporters, declaring Joe Smith a heretic in absentia, and then execute their verdict through an embrace of violence and encouragement to the reprobates, low-lifes and back-sliders within their own congregations, or even unfocussed n’er-do-wells loafing around within earshot, to go enjoy whatever wicked pleasure they might gain from tormenting, sacking, pillaging, raping and murdering the Mormons with the blessing of God, and with full assurance that as non-Christian blasphemers and heretics, Mormons are beyond the protection of American justice. (Like Negros and Indians.)

Where Calvin would have had his own lawmen and politicians openly enact and enforce anti-Mormon statutes by force of arms, America’s career Christian religionists generally had to settle for an agreement from their civil officials and officers of the law to look the other way, or just be out of town that day, as the mobs did the dirty work of insuring Christian control over all civic affairs.

Like Joseph Smith, Calvin made beginner’s mistakes that could have ruined him. For instance, because John Calvin was throughout his religious career essentially making it up as he went, claiming the Bible as his and God’s only authority on this earth, one of his first major religious scuffles before coming to undisputable power in Geneva was with a French refugee, Pierre Caroli, a pastor who was a stickler for “orthodoxy.” In his many lectures and tours, Calvin was always imprecise in his Trinitarian and other “orthodox” terminology. The peculiar Calvinist vernacular he invented became a target for detractors who saw that he didn’t have the Latin Church creeds and related jargon down well enough in their minds to be considered reliably schooled in Christianity. In fairness to Calvin, this is because none of it is actually in the Bible.

Caroli accused Calvin of Arianism and Sabellianism, a couple of old anti-Trinitarian “heresies” supposedly long settled in both Roman, Eastern, Lutheran and most other Protestant circles. Caroli’s charges centered around the notion that Calvin never used the word “Trinity,” he used “Godhead,” and his Geneva Church did not formally subscribe to the Athanasian Creed. The Confession of Faith he forced his entire city to swear to didn’t specifically contain any Trinitarian language either. In 1537 Calvin and his cloister of religious consultants were therefore called before the synod in Bern and back-pedaled their way out of the charge of heresy with some effort and then kicked Caroli out of town and permanently banished him.

I’ve always found this brush with heresy on Calvin’s part amusingly hypocritical in light of the fact that some few years later, after ascending to his throne in Geneva, he would be condemning Michael Servetus to the fire for being anti-Trinitarian, the same charge Caroli used to almost get Calvin burned to a crisp. And if I can compare Joseph Smith just once more with John Calvin, we see that Smith’s biggest sin from the professional Christian’s perspective seemed to be that he just didn’t ever seem to play the Christian game by the established rules. Some rules were just not to be questioned, and Trinitarianism was probably the most sacrosanct of them all in either the Roman or mainstream Protestant traditions. If you could prove your critics and opponents were anti-Trinitarian, it was sure-fire trip to the gallows or the stake—or if you were under Calvin’s rule, he seemed to prefer decapitation with a pretty, ceremonial sword he kept around for the purpose. So, just in example, when Calvin recognized his Trinitarian error, he did not say, no Bishop, it’s just not in the Bible so it isn’t true. He said, yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir, and moved on. (He did not however, go back and amend any of his confessions of faith to include Trinitarian language, nor did he append to any of his theological dogma either the Nicene or Athanasian Creeds.)

Unlike Luther and most other Reformers, Calvin skipped out on his Catholic education and was not at all well versed in the traditions of the Church Fathers and their various creeds. In fact when confronted with the writings of the Church Fathers or Apostolic Fathers by opponents or debaters, Calvin would just say he had the “original” Greek manuscripts, he had the Latin and the Hebrew and could read from the original Biblical authors themselves. Sola Scriptura or the Bible Only was his motto. He didn’t care what some minor African bishop like Augustine of Hippo or some Roman Catholic council had to say about the metaphysical character of Deity back in 326 AD. (I won’t go again into the fundamental stupidity of his assumption that he had the “original” Biblical texts at his disposal.) He did however have the oldest Greek and Latin texts then in existence, and it could be argued that he would therefore be more reliable in his resources than say, the King James “Authorized Version” is then or now. In fact there is an ongoing battle between modern sects who are essentially Calvinist most of them, who view the King James Version to be absolutely inerrant, and a modern class of scholars who in fact take Calvin’s argument and make it a point to catalogue every single error in this inerrant work, based strictly upon how it differs from the Latin and Greek texts it was allegedly taken from.

http://www.biblestudy.org/basicart/what-are-the-errors-in-king-james-version-bible.html

http://www.bible.ca/b-kjv-only.htm

http://bible.org/article/why-i-do-not-think-king-james-bible-best-translation-available-today

http://www.raptureready.com/rr-kjvo.html

http://www.theology.edu/journal/volume1/tr.htm

http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_bibl.htm

http://www.av1611.org/kjv/fight.html

The King James inerrancy battle should keep you occupied for a day or so browsing the net for links, if you really want to understand the base stupidity of  Calvin’s claim that God’s Church and the laws of God can be reliably extracted from what we have left of Canonical scripture whatever the manuscript. And when Joseph Smith came up all non-Trinitarian-ish after his First Vision, it wasn’t anything Calvin hadn’t been accused of long before. When Joseph Smith said the American standard, the King James Bible, wasn’t a perfect representation of the original texts, well, Calvin had already been there and done that. The same group of people bashing Joseph Smith on the head with the King James Version back in the frontier era, today now find that Joseph has rather a lot of support coming from scholars and doctors of divinity, and the intellectual giants of Christianity—just the sort of people his detractors claimed Joseph Smith was not and therefore everyone of letters surely knew with absolute certainty that Smith’ opinions about the King James Version were obviously idiotic.

As it happens, the translator of the first Bible in English, John Wycliffe, never fully documented his texts or processes. Because of this lack of scholarly surety, and the fact that Wycliffe was considered a heretic back when the Roman Church ruled England, and thus the Roman Church had put down his pre-Reformation Reformation, his manuscript and most of his copies were destroyed. After that they were too poisoned to be used by any English scholar as a basis for a new Bible anyway. Wycliffe’s English style was obsolete as well. So, the King James Version draws very heavily upon the work of William Tyndale, who’s Reformational zeal to have the scriptures in the common language drew only inspirationally from Wycliffe. Tyndale is claimed to have used only the Latin Vulgate for reverence, and is claimed to have not had access to older Greek text. The “inerrant” King James Version is therefore actually about three translations into it, Hebrew or Aramaic to Greek, Greek to Latin, and then Latin to English, before the King James scribes start their job.

It might be noted that although excommunicated by and politically severed from Rome at the time, Henry VIII wasn’t very keen on Tyndale for his efforts at making an English Bible for the masses. Henry also felt Tyndale was cheating the texts into a far more radically Protestant context than Henry felt comfortable with. Like most people who argued with Henry VIII, Tyndale was executed shortly after finishing his work. But then, Kings change and so does the Church. By James Ist’s go at the Bible, Tyndale had already done most of the hard work, thus his being inconveniently dead didn’t slow James I down at all. James I and Parliament were all all by then very happily Protestant as hell, so James didn’t mind any of Tyndale’s anti-Roman colorations. He had his team lose any Calvinistic calls to rebel from the king or Church that Tyndale may have put in the margins or allowed to be translated correctly rather than spun to favor the English Crown. Then James had his team more eloquently paraphrase Tyndale’s translation, while cross-referencing it with the ancient texts. They had a go at some Greek or Latin or even Hebrew in emergencies, compared texts back and forth, polished it all up for king and clergy, and James I quickly had himself an excellent version of the Bible in the modern, educated, “King’s English.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wycliffe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tyndale

When John Calvin went at the Bible, he of course had older–and so he maintained a bit erroneously–more reliable texts. He wasn’t even dependent upon a translation. He had access to the oldest texts known in his day. If we concede this is true, then, one must ask, why did he miss the alleged importance of Trinitarian dogma? Calvin’s Humanist education made him quite familiar with the classical Greek logic of Plato, Aristotle and Socrates upon which the Nicene and Athanasian creeds were based. And in fairness to Calvin, when ultimately schooled by Caroli’s little Inquisition he found no intellectual reservations about Trinitarian theology. It’s just that nothing in the Biblical texts ever screamed “Trinity” at Calvin.

To Calvin, Trinitarianism was an extra-Biblical concept upon which he apparently had little or no opinion. Calvin deemed God’s nature of existence or the exact substance of His various manifestations to be fundamentally incomprehensible to the human mind, and irrelevant to the will of God in any case.

Calvin wasn’t preoccupied with knowing the nature of God, just in organizing what His rules were and making people obey them. (Mormons will tell you this is Satan’s plan, but that’s another matter.) Calvin looked at the Bible and Church tradition as a lawyer would, and systematically drew conclusions based entirely upon what he considered to be the most reliable evidence available to him in the Holy Canon.

There is only one other historical document that Calvin claims to have drawn upon in his deliberations of God’s True Will. This is known traditionally as the “Apostle’s Creed.” According to legend, the original of this document was drafted sometime in the vicinity of Christ’s passing from this earth by the Original Apostles. The story goes that they gathered together and each one contributed a portion of their personal gospel knowledge to compile its several statements, or “confessions” of Christian faith.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01629a.htm

Reliable references to the Apostle’s Creed however, only date back to the time of the Apostolic Fathers, many many years after the death of the Original Apostles. The Apostolic Fathers knew the Original Apostles or close associates of them, and it is possible that it was the Apostolic Fathers who drafted this creed based upon what is now Holy Canon and even from personal memory. Even assuming that it was the Apostolic Fathers and not the Original Apostles who kicked this document off, the Apostle’s Creed, like the Bible, was still clearly never written and published in one complete and “inerrant” edition, because the many well-documented examples of it through the centuries show that it originated as a much simpler document and gradually generated into the form we find it today:

1. I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth:

2. And in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord:

3. Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary:

4. Suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead and buried: He descended into hell:

5. The third day he rose again from the dead:

6. He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty:

7. From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead:

8. I believe in the Holy Ghost:

9. I believe in the holy catholic church: the communion of saints:

10. The forgiveness of sins:

1l. The resurrection of the body:

12. And the life everlasting. Amen.

If we concede that this is the oldest and most reliable confession of Christian faith, then Mormons are obviously Christian. No Mormon would have any problem with making any one of these confessions except for a little leeway in what “conceived by the Holy Ghost,” means in actual practice. This Holy Ghost issue mind you, is something the Eastern and Western Church are still arguing about so the murky relationship between the “immaculate” conception of Mary and this Biblical allusion to the Holy Ghost and Mary “hooking up” in some fashion with one manifestation of God or another to effect her virgin impregnation is hardly a settled matter even in the historically “orthodox” Churches. Indeed, there are whole new schools of Protestant Christian scholars who are even comfortable dropping the entire “virgin birth” scenario based upon obvious errors or manipulations of Biblical texts over the ages designed to bolster this theory rather than just translate the actual record.

The truth of the matter is, the important “virgin shall conceive” Biblical prophecy of Isaiah 7:14 actually read, “a young woman shall conceive,” in literal translation from the much older Hebrew texts. The Greek Septuagint version Calvin claimed to be his “original” texts (not!) substituted “virgin” for “young woman.” It’s no great leap to assume then that the Greek scribes who “translated” what we now use as a New Testament likewise beefed up this “virgin birth” claim whenever they came across the New Testament authors’ allusions to Mary’s conception or Christ’s birth–whether it existed in the original Hebrew or Aramaic texts they copied from or not. If for no other reason they would have tended to try to keep this theme consistent by revising the thousands of years of records to plug it in where needed—whether they were just promoting this theory on a personal whim or whether it actually was true. (And I remind the reader that the original “original” texts, the so-called “Original Autographs” do not exist today. We have only the alleged copies of these allegedly original documents, made generations later by Christian scholars and historians in Greek etc.)

This is not my main point here, but I can’t resist the urge to point out that the Biblical “virgin birth” scenario also calls into question other Biblical assertions that Christ came through the line of David, which would have to mean his biological father was Joseph, not the “Holy Ghost,” or any possible “orthodox” variant of some cosmic, transcendent, Triune God-Being. The New Testament authors, as good Jews, obviously felt compelled to give us the paternal family tree of Jesus of Nazareth to fulfill the several ancient Messianic prophecies about the House of David. But in the process they blew a rather large hole in the whole “virgin birth” theory.

Some very clever Mormons out there are now chasing their tails around very self-importantly in a testimony-shaking panic, reassuring themselves from their position of higher knowledge, about “clones” and “supernatural genetic transfers” through the priesthood power of the Holy Ghost as God’s Eternal Agent, which they assume would easily explain the whole virgin birth process. A clone however, would be Mary-plus-Mary, clearly excluding Joseph’s patriarchal and priesthood lineage. Supernaturally transferred genetic material through whatever means, Whomever its Agent, would likewise bypass genetic input from Joseph’s patriarchal line. So you High Priest Groups out there in Orem, Springville and Provo just keep working on it. Personally, I’m not sure it matters much to God but if it makes you happy to speculate upon the practical application of Godly reproduction, knock yourselves out. This is the sort of rabidly marginal inbred Utah doctrinal fixations Mormon detractors embrace as a gift.

Clearly I have gone into a serious digression so I’ll just move on…

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/virginprophecy.html

http://www.city-data.com/forum/religion-philosophy/510316-line-david-contradicts-virgin-birth.html

http://www.gotquestions.org/virgin-or-young-woman.html

http://www.harrington-sites.com/terms.htm

Once again I’m only trying to point out the folly of claiming you can use the Bible and the Bible alone to “prove” what is or isn’t the “truth” with any sort of certainty. If it were that clear, we wouldn’t have hundreds of Christian sects killing themselves off back and forth over basic questions of Christian doctrine for two thousand years, beginning with the question of what is or isn’t “Canon,” what belongs, and what doesn’t belong in the “Bible,” and even the basic matter of exactly how literally this “Bible” is going to be used as a doctrinal guide.

Calvin wasn’t the first to pretend to base his entire theology upon so-called “Biblical Truth.” But Calvin was the first to successfully rid himself of a traditional clergy that would have otherwise bickered and politicked with him over its history and interpretation into some sort of moderation. Calvin was the first to actually sell an entire civilization upon the notion that one guy could deliver God-like Truth and Wisdom just by being clever with the way he gleaned through the Biblical texts.

If you look at the Apostle’s Creed however, and then read the volumes and volumes of Calvin’s own creeds, confessions of faith, and doctrinal theses, you have to conclude that John Calvin gleaned a lot more from the writings of the Biblical authors than those who actually wrote the Bible did. If we assume the Apostle’s Creed was written by the close associates of Jesus Christ within a heartbeat of His being with them personally, and this simple creed, this short statement of faith and brief historical sketch of Christ’s mission is all they thought to pass on to us as a summary of Christian belief, then the results of John Calvin’s deliberations over the Canonical texts show that Calvin had theological ideas that went well beyond the Apostle’s Creed or anything expressly in the Holy Bible itself, whatever its translation.

When Joseph Smith “straightened out” the Bible, he at least had the audacity to claim an angel had told him how to fix it, or that God or Christ or the Holy Spirit or all three at once showed him what the Biblical authors really meant to write instead of what we ended up with. Calvin, on the other hand, like most other Christian dogmatists, rather than revealing great “truths” via direct messages from Deity or other supernatural Powers-that-Be, very clearly drew his “Biblical Truth” from Classical Greek Theism and Western philosophy in general. The rest he admittedly pulled out of his backside with no apologies.

Calvin’s theology comes down to five main points-which incidentally were never written down by himself and presented coherently as five connected points. They were eventually gleaned from his writings and sermons by those wishing to debate him:

Total Depravity:
Sin has affected all parts of man. The heart, emotions, will, mind, and body are all affected by sin. We are completely sinful. We are not as sinful as we could be, but we are completely affected by sin.

The doctrine of Total Depravity is derived from scriptures that reveal human character: Man’s heart is evil (Mark 7:21-23) and sick (Jer. 17:9). Man is a slave of sin (Rom. 6:20). He does not seek for God (Rom. 3:10-12). He cannot understand spiritual things (1 Cor. 2:14). He is at enmity with God (Eph. 2:15). And, is by nature a child of wrath (Eph. 2:3). The Calvinist asks the question, “In light of the scriptures that declare man’s true nature as being utterly lost and incapable, how is it possible for anyone to choose or desire God?” The answer is, “He cannot. Therefore God must predestine.”

Calvinism also maintains that because of our fallen nature we are born again not by our own will but God’s will (John 1:12-13); God grants that we believe (Phil. 1:29); faith is the work of God (John 6:28-29); God appoints people to believe (Acts 13:48); and God predestines (Eph. 1:1-11; Rom. 8:29; 9:9-23).

Unconditional Election:
God does not base His election on anything He sees in the individual. He chooses the elect according to the kind intention of His will (Eph. 1:4-8; Rom. 9:11) without any consideration of merit within the individual. Nor does God look into the future to see who would pick Him. Also, as some are elected into salvation, others are not (Rom. 9:15, 21).

Limited Atonement:
Jesus died only for the elect. Though Jesus’ sacrifice was sufficient for all, it was not efficacious for all. Jesus only bore the sins of the elect. Support for this position is drawn from such scriptures as Matt. 26:28 where Jesus died for ‘many’; John 10:11, 15 which say that Jesus died for the sheep (not the goats, per Matt. 25:32-33); John 17:9 where Jesus in prayer interceded for the ones given Him, not those of the entire world; Acts 20:28 and Eph. 5:25-27 which state that the Church was purchased by Christ, not all people; and Isaiah 53:12 which is a prophecy of Jesus’ crucifixion where he would bore the sins of many (not all).

Irresistible Grace:
When God calls his elect into salvation, they cannot resist. God offers to all people the gospel message. This is called the external call. But to the elect, God extends an internal call and it cannot be resisted. This call is by the Holy Spirit who works in the hearts and minds of the elect to bring them to repentance and regeneration whereby they willingly and freely come to God. Some of the verses used in support of this teaching are Romans 9:16 where it says that “it is not of him who wills nor of him who runs, but of God who has mercy“; Philippians 2:12-13 where God is said to be the one working salvation in the individual; John 6:28-29 where faith is declared to be the work of God; Acts 13:48 where God appoints people to believe; and John 1:12-13 where being born again is not by man’s will, but by God’s.

Perseverance of the Saints:
You cannot lose your salvation. Because the Father has elected, the Son has redeemed, and the Holy Spirit has applied salvation, those thus saved are eternally secure. They are eternally secure in Christ. Some of the verses for this position are John 10:27-28 where Jesus said His sheep will never perish; John 6:47 where salvation is described as everlasting life; Romans 8:1 where it is said we have passed out of judgment; 1 Corinthians 10:13 where God promises to never let us be tempted beyond what we can handle; and Phil. 1:6 where God is the one being faithful to perfect us until the day of Jesus’ return.

http://calvinistcorner.com/tulip

Chronologically tag-teaming Calvin was the second major influence upon American frontier religion, the Dutch Reformer Jacobus Arminius. http://www.victorshepherd.on.ca/Heritage/Arminius.htm Arminius was born a few years before Calvin died and studied under Calvin’s brother-in-law in Geneva. He started his career as a staunch Calvinist Reformer but after a while noticed a few problems with Calvin’s Biblical and logical conclusions. It was mostly Arminius and his followers who started breaking Calvin’s teachings down into the five points he most emphasized because it was those five main points they disagreed with so much.

http://christianity.about.com/od/denominations/a/calvinarminian.htm

http://www.ondoctrine.com/10armini.htm

http://www.tlogical.net/bioarminius.htm

In a nutshell, Arminius came to argue:

• Humans are naturally unable to make any effort towards salvation (see also prevenient grace). They possess free will to accept or reject salvation.
• Salvation is possible only by God’s grace, which cannot be merited.
• No works of human effort can cause or contribute to salvation
• God’s election is conditional on faith in the sacrifice and Lordship of Jesus Christ.
• Christ’s atonement was made on behalf of all people.
• God allows his grace to be resisted by those who freely reject Christ.
• Believers are able to resist sin but are not beyond the possibility of falling from grace through persistent, unrepented-of sin.^[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arminianism

Generations later, Arminius’ theology came to be incorporated into the tenets of Baptists, Methodists, the Congregationalists in early New England colonies, the Universalists and Unitarians. Even a few “liberal” Southern Presbyterian congregations allowed some Arminian teachings—much to the chagrin of the Anglican Communion. The Smith family was associated with most of the above, particularly the Congregationalists, Universalists, and Methodists. Emma Smith, Joseph’s wife’s family were staunchly Methodist.

it was Arminian theology in particular that fueled the revivalist flames that created Joseph Smith’s so-called “Burned-Over District” in upstate New York. Christ’s “Great Commission” (Matthew 28:16) to take the gospel to the world was pretty pointless to the Calvinist, because God, in Calvinism, had already chosen those He was going to save and this election was assured and irresistible, and not based on merit at all anyway. Believe or not believe, confess or be baptized, it didn’t matter in the end. It was really all down to God, not you. The Methodists however, were driven to sell the sinner on the idea of repenting, since they believed it was the sinner’s choice to make. Salvation to the Methodist was dependent first upon you exercising your free will to accept Jesus.  And after that, Methodists were also fervently engaged in making sure they didn’t “backslide” and lose their election as they, unlike the Calvinists, believed to be possible.

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+28%3A16-20&version=NIV

“Methodist” was originally an epithet used by Oxford students to describe the methodical way founders John Wesley, a professor there, and his younger brother Charles, had formed a “Holy Club” on campus to organize their lives. George Whitefield soon teamed with Wesley and introduced an animated form of open-air “revival” preaching to their club. Their original intent was a reorganization of the Church of England, but the whole “revivalist” approach infected branches of it to the point that they began to be called “Methodist.”

Wesley was very Arminian but Whitefield gravitated to some seriously Calvinist ideas as their church spread around Scotland and the British Isles, which strained their relationship. It was Whitefield however, who convinced Wesley it was not immoral to preach outside a consecrated church structure and brought the gospel message to all classes high and low, including labor castes who were until then outside the central focus of the Church. That’s not a particularly Calvinist approach mind you, and I can’t really account for Whitefield’s motivation for the populist, egalitarian overview of his Christian mission.  Whitefield was instrumental in founding an independent sect called the Free Church of England which ultimately led to an entirely separate Methodist church.

Whitefield first brought the notion of revivalism to the American colonies and fired up the First Great Awakening. When Whitefield died, Wesley, who outlived him, was free to take Methodism in an entirely Arminian direction with no further in-fighting from Whitefield. It’s this Arminian message in the Second Great Awakening, Joseph Smith’s time, that set the Methodists apart from the Calvinist pack as something new and exciting. The Methodists opened up the American religious playing field and the rest had to scramble to keep up with them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methodism

http://atheism.about.com/library/glossary/western/bldef_methodism.htm

While the Puritans of early America were certainly exposed to the thoughts of all the central Reformationists, including Jacobus Arminius in the Netherlands, Zwingli in Switzerland or even the German primo-heretic Martin Luther, they were addictively attracted to the brutishly simplified teachings and extreme disciplines of Calvin. Calvinists believed prosperity was always an indication of God’s favor, and hardship was always the result of sin and faithlessness. They believed that personal sin could bring God’s punishment upon the whole community and people required constant supervision and chastisement. Conversely, they also believed that hard work and faith was always rewarded by God. These concepts are inherently schizophrenic when objectively reviewed.

Calvin himself professed to believe in the “Priesthood of all Believers,” yet the purest descendants of Calvin’s religious machine, the Presbyterians, count Joseph Smith as an archetypal heretic because he claimed his authority without religious degrees or titles. “Who is this Joe Smith upstart?” they asked when he appeared in the thick of the religious scene of his day, telling them they had it all wrong. My Lutheran ancestors of course asked the same question about Calvin, when he did the same thing to Martin Luther’s followers back in the Old Country. My Lutheran relatives have described Calvin as an impertinent, egocentric despot who never finished a seminary class, never took a vow, and was never ordained by anyone of any authority to teach anything other than Legal Humanism. And that only in French.

Who the hell is Joe Smith? Who the hell is John Calvin? I could fairly reply. Thomas Jefferson asked himself the same question and came to conclusion that Calvin was Satanically inspired fool.

I can never join Calvin in addressing his god. He was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was Daemonism. If ever man worshipped a false god, he did.

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823

http://www.nobeliefs.com/jefferson.htm

Jefferson, almost as Joseph Smith was kneeling down in the woods to confirm his own dubious assessment, of period Christianity, was also writing this:

To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart. At what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism, this masked atheism, crept in, I do not know. But heresy it certainly is.

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, Aug. 15, 1820

For a sample of the philosophical nonsense Jefferson was describing as the Platonistic, the “Classical” or rather, “Pagan” foundation of Calvin’s God, here’s a segment from the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online:

          

  

http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/K113

http://books.google.com/books?id=5m5z_ca-qDkC&pg=PA97&lpg=PA97&dq=Plato+if+it+is+conceivable+it+is+possible&source=bl&ots=a3wqQSbc7C&sig=gWZBzy9EVDqGC_DY3P19RAMc_kI&hl=en&ei=oZqYTaKzDcyL0QHNzInvCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=Plato%20if%20it%20is%20conceivable%20it%20is%20possible&f=false

Regardless of the Biblical translation then, the Reformers and the Protestants, just like their Roman predecessors, were all decoding Biblical texts from their slightly varied but still narrow perspectives as products of a Hellenized, Greco-Roman, Western civilization. From the early Church Fathers and before, Christian scholars, Roman, Eastern, Protestant and Reformers alike have been trying to make Biblical texts support conclusions about the nature of God that Classical philosophers had long taken for granted as logical and thus true. The “Jesus of the Bible” or the “God of the Bible” was invented by Plato and Aristotle and Socrates and their Pagan Greek philosophical fellows. The writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were simply jiggered and interpreted hundreds of years later to make them seem to support the established “science” of these Pagan philosophers.

The Church of England’s Westminster Confession of Faith, negotiated in 1646 for example, describes God as “without body parts or passions.” This is a concept of the Supreme Being the Pagan Greeks and other Western philosophers had formulated generations before Constantine and his Nicene Council first codified it into Christian dogma in 326. When you start from this Pagan assumption, and you then examine God’s Biblical dealings with man through the relatively narrow and scarce Biblical texts that have survived, it is very easy to produce the sort of absurd, even cruel and arbitrary God that Calvin invented for himself. And again, in fairness, though Calvin and his fellow Reformationists were all claiming to be using the “Bible Alone!” as their sole source of wisdom, they were in fact also simply plugging generations of written and unwritten base assumptions from the corrupted “Church” they were rebelling from, automatically into Biblical verse. They used base assumptions from their admittedly corrupt “Church Tradition” to fill in the holes and answer questions the Bible itself didn’t even come close to answering.

http://home.earthlink.net/~ronrhodes/Creeds.html

Contrary to the Pilgrim’s Puritan claim on America as their ultimate Calvinist free-fire zone, the actual Fathers of the Constitution were some of the first Western philosophers and religionists to actually look at the Bible without preconceptions and allow themselves to evaluate its provenance, historical and literary value dispassionately and realistically—apart from the thousands of years of Christian mythology and the fabled Church histories surrounding it.

Thomas Paine was one of the chief authors and instigators of the American Revolution. Like Jefferson and others in their circle of American visionaries, he had religious notions that drew serious rebuke from most of his Christian countrymen, authoring amongst other works, The Age of Reason, which was called by his detractors, “The Atheist’s Bible.” His main approach illustrated a modern, critical Biblical scholarship that was generations ahead of its time, though common today.

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel07.html

Both Paine and Jefferson expressed sentiments that could very easily be put into Joseph Smith’s terms: The Church had fallen apart and the Bible was never intended to be the last word on the subject. In other words, all three of these American patriots were saying that the Church had not been either Providentially preserved from, or inspirationally Reformed from heresy and fatal collapse. The the Bible was never a complete “How To” manual left directly from the pen of Jesus. Christ had never intended to leave a Biblical record in total perfection specifically to save the Church from error, so the boast that mankind didn’t need anything other than the Bible to run society in Christian harmony is ludicrous. Thomas Jefferson even edited his own version of the Bible, removing the parts he said were idiotic or anti-social, illogical, demonic and dangerous to the nation.

Yes, Jefferson was branded by many a heretic. It was a serious detriment to his political aspirations. However, Thomas Jefferson went on to found the nation and became its president in due time. Joseph Smith on the other hand, got shot down like a dog by an angry mob of Christians.

Timing is everything I guess.

And then again, Jefferson never claimed to talk to God and Angels. Jefferson never tried to found his own church and muscle in on Christianity’s piece of the American pie.

It is the undeniable truth that Calvinists took over England, and through English colonization, Calvinism was the main religious force in opening up the North American continent, specifically those colonies who later became the United States of America. What Calvin’s modern fans try to obfuscate however, is the fact that the small group of truly great thinkers who authored and crafted the US Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights where the relationship between religion and State authority was cleanly severed, were in truth a coven of dissidents reacting directly to Calvinistic oppression and abuse of power. They had seen it historically on two continents for many generations. For this reason, the Founding Fathers incorporated protection for all religion in the Constitution. They also limited government from taking a position on religion at all, other than acknowledging the Great Architect of the Universe, the Creator, Who grants all mankind its universal rights.

From the birth of the Church of England to the American Revolution, the State enforcement of Christianity had been seen by America’s Founding Fathers to be, a capricious and bloody disaster. After Henry VIII, the Church of England had first undergone a violent flip-flop back to brutally enforced Roman Catholicism with the short-lived “Bloody Mary,” Henry’s daughter. She died mercifully prematurely in her reign, and from then on the Parliament became over-run with Protestants eagerly driven to force Roman Catholics out government, the court, and ultimately all of England if they could manage it. They rapidly codified anti-Catholic laws including the proscription of Roman Catholics from ever taking the English Crown again. This power-hungry English Parliament looked over the channel in Europe, and jealously spied Calvin’s incredible control of every aspect of Genovese society. They soon adapted themselves to exploit Calvin’s whole approach.

In 1567, Mary Queen of Scots was forced to abdicate the Scottish Throne because she was a Roman Catholic.  Scotland had been forcefully aligned with England and politics had gone all Puritan on her. Her heir and son James, had been raised a Protestant. He met the new Protestant requirement to take his mother’s throne, but James was only 13 months old however. Several regents ruled on his behalf while he grew up. Before he ascended to his kingly duties, he took to travelling Denmark and Norway to learn the sport of witch hunting, which was immensely popular in Scandinavia at the time. He was a very active participant in these trials and punishments, and in one famous case testified that the witches involved had cast a spell of bad weather that was intended to sink his boat and prevent his participation as he travelled to the court. He authored a little book on the subject titled Daemonologie  in 1597, which became something of a handbook for witch hunting fanatics.

James I (Known as James VII of Scotland) practiced his witch hunting hobby as the Scottish King a while. He took a Danish wife while he was at it. Inevitably his mother was executed as a threat to English Protestantism by Elizabeth I. This cleared the way for him to take the English throne without dispute, since unlike his mother, James’ religion was all in order and he had a proper Protestant spouse to make proper Protestant heirs with. He united the two kingdoms of Scotland and England in 1603 as James I of England, when Elizabeth I died childless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_I_of_England

http://www.elizabethan-era.org.uk/elizabethan-witchcraft-and-witches.htm

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/james-I-witchcraft.htm

In 1605 a Catholic soldier named Guy Fawkes, supposedly guarding a pile of firewood underneath James’ first parliament as English king, was discovered to also have a pile of powder kegs nearby with which he intended to blow up the entire government. After that, James forced English Catholics to swear an oath of loyalty and deny the supremacy of the Roman Pope over English law. He was quite friendly to them afterward however.

http://talesofcuriosity.com/v/GunPowder/

James I also tried to conform the Scottish Protestants as closely as he could to the English Protestants. This annoyed the Scottish immensely. Part of James I’s problems with the Scottish had to do with the Scottish Reformationists claiming way too much independence from the English Church, of which he was now the head, and resting way too much authority on the scribblings of John Calvin. Of course, as already noted, in reality James I had begun his King’s career in Scotland as a back-woodsy Calvinistic Puritan like all the other Scottish Protestants. When he came into the English Throne however, all his witch hunting and whatnot alienated the English Court’s more cosmopolitan, educated Puritans who considered him to be unsophisticated and superstitious. But James I was well thought of throughout his kingdoms, and he made many important cultural and religious “advances” at least from the English, Protestant perspective.

In 1607 a group of settlers sailed from James I’s England and founded the American colony of Jamestown in his name. This entrepreneurial venture became the toe-hold of the Church of England on a big new continent.

http://www.historyisfun.org/jamestown-settlement.htm

James I gave us the era of William Shakespeare. He fostered art and architecture, music and social progress. He brokered something of a peace between Catholic and Protestant, England, Ireland and Scotland, and he sponsored the translation and publication of the Bible that would become the New World English Standard, his “Authorized Version,” which was first published in 1611.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Version

Oddly enough, neither the Pilgrims, other American colonists, or the common English used their king’s “Authorized Version” until around 1651, some thirty years after he made it available to them all. Until around that period, the Geneva Bible was used in the home. This had been compiled in Geneva in part by Calvin’s brother-in-law, as headed up by English refugees from Bloody Mary. It was finally published and Dedicated to the new Protestant Queen, Elizabeth I in 1560.

The Geneva bible was flamingly anti-Roman, something the Anglican church had no quarrel with, but it was also flamingly anti-authoritarian, something the English Crown had issue with. So the Bishop’s Bible was used in church.

This Bishop’s Bible wasn’t the first English “Authorized” Bible. In 1539 Henry VIII ordered Thomas Cromwell to supervise Myles Coverdale in producing the English Great Bible, so-called because it was huge. It is sometimes also called the “Cromwell Bible.” It was also very expensive. It was a clergy-only authorization not meant for the masses. Because Henry VIII grew impatient with the scholarship and tedious deliberation involved, Coverdale ended up basically ripping off the work of William Tyndale who Henry had branded a heretic and traitor, and executed three years previously. Coverdale took Tyndale’s work and removed the objectionable anti-Catholic and anti-authoritarian marginal notes, consulted the Latin Vulgate and various German translations and made editorial corrections for political and dogmatic reasons to keep his king happy. He did not spend any time at all looking at any ancient Biblical texts. The result was clumsy Olde English and would be scarcely understandable today.

Another irony of the Great Bible is the fact that Myles Coverdale in 1535 had already published the first complete English Bible. The Coverdale Bible, unlike other English translators, included the full New and Old Testaments. Like the Great Bible, it was based on Tyndale and German translations. So it is important to note that the Great Bible was very specifically published by the Church of England for some very specific editorial reasons not at all related to scholarship or accuracy. Henry VIII already had an excellent English complete Bible from Coverdale. He wanted one like it, but spun to his own purposes, as supervised by his Vicar General Thomas Cromwell, to insure the resulting volume met the express interest of supporting his king as the sole Defender of the Faith. Not the Pope. Not the Bible. Not John Calvin. But Henry VIII, King of England.

http://smu.edu/bridwell_tools/specialcollections/prothroexhibit/english27.htm

http://www.chaplain.us/Bible/bible.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bible

http://www.greatsite.com/timeline-english-bible-history/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Modern_English_Bible_translations

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverdale_Bible

It could be fairly claimed that all of these translations served one political or theological purpose or another rather than represented true and accurate preservation of Holy Writ. But when the Geneva Bible made the Holy Scriptures available in common English vernacular it became immediately popular with the common folk. It was very much a Calvinist document however, a movement that hadn’t yet been smoothed into existing Anglican doctrines maintaining the unilateral Church authority of the English King. Unlike Calvin’s Calvinism and the masses who actually might like a little Biblical anti-authoritarianism, the Church of England and its heads of state didn’t like using a Bible infested with Calvinesque marginal notes authorizing rebellion from Crown and Church. Calvin encouraged slaves and servants to choose God over their masters, and a host of other dangerous free-thinking intimations. So in 1586, under Elizabeth I, a council of bishops produced yet another Bible based on William Tyndale’s work. This again is ironic, since Tyndale had only decades before been arrested by Henry VIII and imprisoned for over 500 days in filthy conditions until he was nearly dead. Finally Henry invented some feeble evidence and Tyndale was convicted of heresy and treason in a contrived trial and then strangled and burnt at the stake in the prison yard on October 6, 1536. His last words were, “Lord, open the king of England’s eyes.“

http://www.greatsite.com/timeline-english-bible-history/william-tyndale.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tyndale

http://www.reformed.org/documents/index.html?mainframe=http://www.reformed.org/documents/geneva/Geneva.html

http://biblehistory.ca/article.php?fragid=22&year=1568

For James I’s Biblical mission, he didn’t have to worry about Henry VIII’s fondness for all things Roman Catholic, that had passed from the Anglican Church in no uncertain terms. But when he left the Scottish rabble and became an English king as well, it became a problem of uniting the equally rabid English and the Scottish Protestant factions not against a Roman Pope, but into agreement upon the sovereignty of the King of England as head of both Church and State. That just wasn’t an easy proposition. English Calvinists brushed over rather a lot of Calvin’s views on rather a lot of Church-State issues because they didn’t fit the Anglican foundation. James felt he had to insure this Anglican power base would be observed throughout his kingdoms. This meant he had to mount yet another Biblical rendition that either left all the politics out, openly supported his role as King and Church Head, or the very least, walked that fine line between a sort of neutral accuracy and asking for trouble. Again, he used Tyndale’s work as a centerpiece. His team would go back to the oldest known manuscripts and attempt not just a literal translation, but something that captured the majesty of the Word of God, something everyone could not only read and enjoy as literature, but a Bible that would exclude all marginal interpretations and leave it to the Church (Him as its head) to do all the interpreting.

And the rest is history…

Backtracking the English Bible even farther however, to be fair, the first first delivery of the Holy Scripture to the English masses of course, has to be credited to John Wycliffe. Wycliffe was such a prolific religious idea man and academic genius that he, not Martin Luther, is lauded by the scholarly as the precursor to the Reformation Movement. He was in fact, a Reformer before the Movement caught up with him. He professed that the Bible should be an open possession of the Body of Christ, not a secret collection of scribblings in a language the common population couldn’t even read. He was embarrassed that English nobility read the only common-language Bible they could easily get in French, the only other available being the Vulgate, which was in Latin, which by that time was no longer a common language and was used only by academics and the clergy. Wycliffe instigated an English translation from the Latin that resulted in English versions of the New Testament and an edited, more readable edition of the Old Testament that had been already finished, by Nicholas of Hereford, all of which was again edited and revised by Wycliffe’s associate John Purvey in 1388.

Wycliffe’s pre-Reformation Reforming led to his Roman Catholic opponents saying, “The jewel of the clergy has become the toy of the laity.” And in Wycliffe’s time, Rome was the only game in town. The Roman hierarchy attempted to completely exterminate Wycliffe’s work, but about 150 manuscripts still remain. Tyndale was indeed inspired by Wycliffe’s efforts, which is but one more thing that put him at odds with Henry VIII. Henry VIII did not look at Wycliffe as a Reformer. Henry VIII was the only Reformer Henry VIII needed in his Court. Henry VIII saw Wycliffe as a rebel and troublemaker who in the end was declared posthumously a heretic, excommunicated, dug out of the Church’s Holy Ground, and dumped ignominiously into the local river. Just to make sure he stayed dead, his writings and books were all burned and declared heretical and banned.

http://www.tlogical.net/biowycliffe.htm

At any rate, 1653 brings us to England’s first full-bore Calvinist witch hunter and overall pompous English bastard, Oliver Cromwell. By by 1653 Cromwell had promoted his exploits killing Catholic Celts on the battlefield into a high position in Parliament. He then overthrew King Charles I, had him executed for ostensibly for seeking help from a Catholic army during the battle which Cromwell sold as treason, dissolved Parliament, dissolved the monarchy, formed the “Commonwealth of England,” and installed his own “Barebones” Parliament consisting of hand-picked ministers.

Oliver Cromwell was a distant relative of Thomas Cromwell, the man who’d found Henry VIII the legal and doctrinal excuses for taking over the job of English Pope. Henry had taken Oliver’s kin to the heights of power in his Kingdom, but Thomas eventually found his English Reformation plans put on hold as Henry cut off his head. It seems Parliament thought he was getting too big for his britches and convinced Henry Thomas Cromwell had to go. His kinsman Oliver obviously figured out how to prevent that from happening again by killing the king first, and taking over Parliament himself.

Oliver Cromwell was a truly raving England-First Puritan who professed that God guided his every move. And being a true Calvinist to the core, he had no use for a monarchy pretending to be the head of the Church, and he had no need for a professional clergy to tell his Parliament how to govern English society.

When Oliver Cromwell quoted the Bible it was the full Calvinist Geneva Bible mind you, not the King James Version. Cromwell was all about doing God’s will as he saw fit and any one or anything that encumbered this mission was eliminated. Cromwell had won brutal battle after battle in his campaign against Scottish and Irish Catholics, and even formed a violent aversion to his period Scottish Presbyterians who refused to conform to his English Church and legal systems. He knew what was best for them and he was damned well going to force them to accept it. After conquering them all, he declared himself  “Lord Protector of England, Ireland, and Scotland.”

Cromwell’s army slaughtered more than forty-percent of the native Irish population for refusing to renounce Catholicism, and drove by force the remaining indigenous population to County Connaught, with the Act of Settlement in 1653. His treatment of the Irish has been categorized by historians as “genocidal.” Even the Scottish Presbyterians had been fighting for a Stuart restoration to the Scottish and/or English Throne, in the person of Charles II, but Cromwell easily and brutally put down both Catholic and Protestant supporters of the Stuarts.

The only thing Oliver Cromwell hated worse than Catholics was heretics and traitors. The only thing he hated worse than heretics and traitors were witches. And be slaughtered a lot of each.

http://www.forerunner.com/champion/X0004_3._Oliver_Cromwell.html

http://www.britannia.com/history/monarchs/mon48.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Cromwell

Cromwell’s Commonwealth died with him and the monarchy was restored in 1660 with Charles II, who dug up his bones and hung him by his shroud at Tyburn, except for his head which was cut off and displayed outside Westminster Hall. For the most part his ethnic cleansing of the Irish and gloating victories over the Scottish combined with his furious Calvinism still to this day overwhelm any contributions he may or may not have made to English society.

The English Crown in the 18th century diminished into something close to a “Super Minister,” and almost a figurehead that Parliament could listen to or not. But though a figurehead, the king remained an important figurehead and led by example if nothing else.

In 1745 “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” Charles Edward Stuart, Scotland’s last Stuart pretender to the English and Scottish thrones, returned to Scotland from his safe exile in France, and led a  Jacobite or “Highland” rebellion that recaptured his Scottish throne. This surprised everyone including his loyal followers. The English were taken aback and in a state of panic. He then stupidly insisted upon taking on his claim to the English throne. That didn’t go so well for him.

http://www.britishbattles.com/battle_of_culloden.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Culloden

Invading England and capturing its capitol city was not an entirely idiotic notion. The Scots were actually doing quite well at first. (And of course they had God on their side…) The English Parliament even fled town and the entire government was essentially in the process of abandoning London to the oncoming Scottish forces. In the last push however, Charlie got spooked, received some bad intelligence and became convinced a huge force was just waiting for them a few miles closer to their goal. He turned tail and retreated back up into Scotland to have a rethink.

George II of England couldn’t believe this stupid move, thanked God for such a stroke of luck, took advantage of the time Stuart had granted him to rest, rally, and reorganize his forces. Then he sent the Duke of Cumberland chasing backup to Inverness with his best and brightest to solve the Scottish Catholic problem once and for all, in the same way Oliver Cromwell had solved the Irish Catholic problem generations before.

On April 15, 1746, Cumberland’s army faced off with the last Stuart claimant to the English throne with cannon, musket, and sword at Culloden Moore in northern Scotland. When he was finished, there wasn’t much left other than carnage and bloody tartan. He followed up the Jacobite slaughter by systematically burning out the entire Highland population. Likewise, by legal proscription, rape, pillage, and mass murder he drove out or effected the near genocide of the Highland Clans. The Jacobites were mostly Catholic, mixed with a smattering of Scottish Episcopalians, who had splintered from the Scottish Presbyterians because they wouldn’t conform to the Church of England’s guidelines. I mention this again because it isn’t coincidental. This butchery didn’t take place because of simple politics. It was a religious war. It was Christians killing Christians because they disagreed who should be running the Church and State.

(So in one-thousand seven-hundred and forty-five years since the birth of Christ nothing much had changed.)

As usual, George II mainly ended up the King of England because he wasn’t Roman Catholic. George II’s father, George I had been imported from Hanover, which is now in Germany, even though there were English and Scottish heirs with perhaps better claims. The British Isles contestants were all Roman Catholics or had Catholic sympathies.

George I spoke very poor English. He was regarded as a bumpkin and a foreigner by Parliament, and turned out to be far more conciliatory to Roman Catholics than they’d imagined he would be. Undaunted by his efforts at moderation, Parliament continued to enact anti-Catholic measures that grew increasingly oppressive. The English public never warmed up to him either, and it was said that his heart was never in England, but Hanover.

As a young heir to the English throne, George II came to heated debates with his father over the dangers of allowing Roman Catholics to undermine the English Church and State by allowing them power and position when they were forsworn to a foreign Pope. This was an attitude that carried over to the American colonies and remained stalwart amongst the Protestants in the United States of America until about 1960, when John Fitzgerald Kennedy, an Irish Catholic, was elected president midst much the same objections from opponents over his allegiances to Rome. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy)

Over these Catholic conspiracy issues and other matters of governing England, George II became enraged at his father in public one too many times, and was banished from Court till his father passed away and he took the throne in 1727.

Unlike his father, George II spoke fluent English and was a gung-ho Calvinist. He refused to go back to Hanover for his father’s funeral and this little gesture of contempt won him the approval of all English society. His slap-down of the Jacobites at Culloden was the last pitched battle ever fought on English soil. Protestantism had unquestionably been secured in the British Isles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_II_of_Great_Britain

http://www.englishmonarchs.co.uk/hanover_2.htm

But a pitched battle was brewing on American soil at the same time. In 1776, George II’s heir, King George the III, ultimately lost the American colonies. I leave you to sort out the reasons for this heated move to independence by the English colonists. There are a lot of theories, but a look at actual history will tell you it had as much to do as a whiskey tax and a beer tax and the price of tea, as it did with securing religious freedom. And perhaps the Calvinists were right in the end: the exercise of bashing Bibles back and forth for so many centuries eventually beat some sense into America’s head.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_III_of_the_United_Kingdom

America had begun to realize that religious liberty wasn’t liberty at all unless all individuals were allowed to debate and investigate their own understanding of religious truth, and were then free to observe these beliefs. America had also learned from Calvin’s oppression, that religion wasn’t worth anything if you could not enjoy the fruits of your own labors. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness may not be in the Bible, and happiness may not even be pious, but it wasn’t a bad as it was cracked up to be. And perhaps America had even learned that it was none of the local church biddies’ business if you wanted to dance, or sing, or fart on your own doorstep. In America, a man’s home truly became his castle, and that made him head of his own church in his own home.

John Calvin may have been given credit for founding the hardworking American ethos. But he taught God’s truth by bad example. America learned the value of true religious freedom by suffering the lack of it under Calvin’s colonial hell on earth.

http://bustill.blogspot.com/2008/04/religious-intent-providence-politics.html

http://www.worldviewweekend.com/worldview-times/article.php?articleid=5153

America’s Christian propagandists tell their children the story of Pilgrim Fathers who fled persecution in England for religious freedom in the New World. (And yes, it is propaganda, look the word up). And no, I’m not slapping down the Christians and taking the Mormon side of this argument. Mormons are big advocates of this happy American Pilgrim fable.

The proposition that there could be anything inherently wrong with the Pilgrims is going to be infuriatingly offensive to Christians of any stripe in America. And remember, again, in their mind, this includes Mormons, because they think they’re Christians like anyone else. Like every other American Christian, Mormons believe they are the end product of thousands of years of Godly guidance and constant refinement.

The American need to romanticize the Pilgrims stems from telling yourself for generations just how specially blessed by God you are for simply being an American citizen if for no other positive attributes. Of course you need proof of this every day just to stem off the creeping disbelief caused by looking at yourself in the mirror every morning and knowing how messed up you really are. So American children are raised on this wonderful little fairy tale about the quaint boys and girls of Plymouth Rock and how they helped mommy Pilgrim and daddy Pilgrim bring Jesus to the red American savages and preserve “True Religion” in the free country the founded. Naturally, it makes you, as a young Christian, and patriotic child of America, feel all warm and fuzzy, and your eyes get all rosy red and weepy when you are reassured like this, from sea to shining sea, every year in a national holiday, that you are absolutely wonderful and chosen by God.

The truth is, the Pilgrims were Puritan fascists who were only looking for their own religious freedom. They were too damned pious, independent and fanatical even for the more mainstream zealots of English and European Reformations. They called themselves “Puritans” because they were dedicated to purifying the Church of England of Roman influences. They hated Rome and they hated heretics, and they hated sinners and they really hated witches. Their reigning English King, James I was also a foaming Protestant Scottish witch hunter, and was every bit as fanatical as the Pilgrims were, since they were all theological soul mates. But James I actually had to sophisticate himself a bit, particularly stifling his witch-hating fanaticism when he took power in England. He had to accommodate the more moderate and educated Protestantism that then still held great sway in his English Court and Parliament. This social moderation at home however, didn’t slow him from encouraging the exportation of sharp, Puritan zeal to his growing colonies in the New World though, where raw Puritanism would be free to dominate the new society he intended to found there.

http://www.mayflowerfamilies.com/mayflower/mayflower_compact.htm

I say with very little exaggeration, that living under Puritan rule in the New England American Colonies would be nearly as religiously oppressive as living under the Taliban in Afghanistan, or Wahhabi ruled Saudi Arabia. The principle difference between Sharia Law and Pilgrim Law would be that the Pilgrims let women show their whole faces in public.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharia

http://www.iran-bulletin.org/political_islam/punishmnt.html

When American Protestants in particular talk about “Puritanism,” they allude to what they term a Protestant reaction to a Roman Church who’s clergy had become entirely corrupt. The Roman Church sold forgiveness to those who could afford it. The Roman Church was liberal and debauched within its hierarchy, but punishingly strict to the common folk. The Roman Church picked who would and who would not be saved based upon social and political intrigue and if it were at all possible to extract from the sinner, the Roman Church would invariably negotiate a generous contribution to the Church which could fix nearly any sin. We are also told by modern Protestants, when they praise their “Reforming” of this corrupted Roman Church, that it was also the goal of the Reformation to correct the excesses of the Inquisition, to liberate mankind to think and speak freely in Church or public venues. Modern Protestants contend that it was the torture and torment and brutal repression of art and science and music and free will that the Puritans wanted to purify out of the Roman Church. It was the selling of indulgences and political meddling that the Reformers wanted to reform out of the Church.

While it was true that the Reformation wanted to correct the corrupt doctrinal cottage industry the Roman Church had set up to support its clergy, the Puritans in particular on the other hand, weren’t all that put off by the Inquisition’s tactics or even goals in and of themselves. The Puritans and many other Reformers in truth just wanted the Inquisitional zeal applied unilaterally up and down the Church ranks from clergy to commoner. They just didn’t think you should be able to buy or politic your way out of being tortured into a confession of heresy. They figured that kings, Popes and bishops and priests were just as good candidates for heresy as anyone else—the more the merrier. Puritans in short, actually wanted more repression and more micromanaging of the Body of Christ. They wanted the power to institute the same sort of fanatical purification of Christendom that the Inquisition only pretended to enforce, and then only selectively, often for personal, social, or political reasons. The Puritans wanted their newly cleansed Protestant Inquistition to be universally applied to all Christians of whatever rank. The Puritans wanted everyone to be beaten into piety whatever his station in the Church or society– they just wanted to insure it was being done fairly and correctly by a dictatorial theocracy of their own design.

We read about the Salem Witch trials, some decades after the Pilgrims landed, and think that hanging nineteen men and women as witches on the say-so of a couple of snotty little girls looking for attention was a fluke carried out by an isolated, small group of inbred fanatics. We think the old man they crushed under stones for refusing to submit to their trials was the result of some abnormal paranoia due to the bunker mentality of a pioneer colony in a harsh new land. When we read about the dozens of fellow colonists they just let rot in jail for months as they queued them up for their American Inquisition, we assume that this sort of fiendish treatment had to be the product of some sort of atypical mass mental illness brought about through a bad diet and not enough sunlight. But no, that’s what Puritans did. That’s what Protestants did. That’s what the Roman Church did before them. That’s what Christians have always done.

The Reformation just made torture and inquisition a sport anyone could dabble in by voting themselves into power, rather than restricting the game to a permanent class of elite clergy and the high-born. The Pilgrims merely wanted to democratize religious persecution so the common man–and men only mind you–could get a piece of the action.

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/salem.htm

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/SAL_ACCT.HTM

http://www.libraryontheweb.org/student_pages/witch_trials/trials.html

The Pilgrims didn’t intend to found a nation based upon the freedom of religion at all. They hadn’t the slightest conception of a pluralistic society that could tolerate letting everyone worship God according to the dictates of their own conscience and understanding. Their America was founded as the Puritan’s chance at the unfettered purification of human society as they defined purity, through whatever means necessary, with nobody looking over their shoulder to moderate their efforts. The Pilgrims intended to establish a Bible Commonwealth. Citizenship, or “Freemanship” as they called it, was restricted to church members. Religious dissenters were banished. Originally even freemen didn’t even have the right to elect the colony’s officers. These were appointed by the clergy councils.

http://www.mayflowerfamilies.com/colonial_life/pilgrims.htm

The allegedly God-fearing, venerated, funny-hat-and buckle-wearing Pilgrims we celebrate at Thanksgiving every year by eating pumpkin pie and turkey till we can’t walk straight, brought with them a culture of religious bigotry. They whipped, imprisoned, hung, and publicly humiliated even their minor religious offenders in stocks, dungeons, gallows and on whipping posts usually in the town square or other places of public access where their fellow colonists could pass by and mock or taunt them. When we see these quaint depictions of Puritan discipline in woodcuts or read about them in history books, we are usually told or allowed to assume these punishments had something to do with civil misdemeanors or criminal activities. To the contrary, most of these routine sentences to ritual public humiliation were related to not living up to their legally mandated “Christian” obligations. Or rather, poor Christian observance was criminal activity to them.

The Pilgrims didn’t really put a big red letter “A” on your breast to shame you as an adulterer, or suspected adulterer–since the accusation alone was usually enough to destroy you. The Pilgrims by law could kill you for adultery, though in practice this never happened. And it was the letters “AD” with which you would be marked, and if found without this mark you would be branded on the forehead. This was later liberalized to merely whipping adulterers severely twice, giving recovery time between whippings, and marking them with “AD” letters–then if caught without this marking, rather than branding them, the sentence was moderated to severely whipping them again and again, every time they were found improperly labeled.

Fornicators who refused to get married were severely whipped, fined, and imprisoned. Getting married would let you off with only a fine, but the fine was far greater if you were already engaged, because you had already gotten the ultimate sex problem solved and you just didn’t have the piety to patiently wait for the ceremony. You would get three hours in the public stocks for cursing God or lying in public. If you denied the Holy Scriptures, a magistrate could sentence you to as severe a whipping as he felt appropriate to humble you, short of endangering life or limb.

In one rare Plymouth Colony case, bestiality got one confused farm boy hung, and the interesting thing there is that they also executed the sinful animals. I presume this was so these corrupted livestock would not go about the colony enticing other colonists into the same sin with their sexy barnyard ways.

Two gay Pilgrims in Plymouth got both whipped to shards, one of which was banished into the wilderness to die, and the more repentant one, the one apparently not deemed the instigator, was branded on the shoulder with a hot iron and banned from ever owning property in the colony, but allowed to remain.

There were two witchcraft trials in Plymouth colony, decades before the more famous Salem trials, though in Plymouth “not-guilty” verdicts were issued and the complainants were fined for bringing false charges.

The Pilgrims lived in a patriarchal theocracy and its patriarchs were misogynists bastards in general. For example, in 1662 Thomas Bird was sentenced to a double whipping for adultery with the unfortunately named Hannah Bumpass. Bumpass was essentially seduced or coerced by Bird, but she was given a stout single whipping anyway for quote: “…yielding to him, and not making such resistance against him as she ought.”

If the Pilgrims really didn’t like you over some generalized heretical activity they couldn’t pin down with a specific charge, or if they just didn’t like your attitude, or you were missing too many sermons on Sunday without a good excuse like being trapped in a well or withering away on your sickbed, they would just banish you to die alone out in the wilderness by “shunning” you.

The Pilgrims would fine you for harboring a Quaker. (The Quaker they would drive out to die in the wilderness.) The Pilgrims would even punish you for celebrating Christmas or Easter because they weren’t in the Bible. They probably would not approve of the nation of their legacy inventing yet another un-Biblical holiday in their honor and calling it “Thanksgiving.” Thanksgiving is not in the Bible and therefore is not holy. Celebrating it would be unholy. Unholiness is punished.

http://www.mayflowerhistory.com/History/CrimeAndPunishment.php

http://www.newnorth.net/~johhnson/geneology/beliefs.html

http://www.mayflowerfamilies.com/colonial_life/pilgrims.htm

http://almy.us/news/newsletters/website/art0402.htm

The architect of the American Theocratic Paradise the Puritan Pilgrims had come to create, was called by the English, John Calvin. His allegedly brilliant religious mind fired up Reformationists all over the European religious theatre into ecstatic heights of raving piety. If you believe his modern Christian fans, Calvin was a modest and quiet man who restored pure, Biblical Truth to all mankind. To other Christians, he’s a despotic know-it-all and a sanctimonious, unqualified upstart. To quite a few Christians, and many more non-Christians, John Calvin is one of the most evil men in the history of the planet.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/calvin/

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/John_Calvin.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Calvin

http://one-evil.org/people/people_16c_Calvin.htm

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03195b.htm

Jean Cauvin was born in 1509 in Noyon, in the Picardy region of France, son of Gerard Cauvin, primary attorney for Charles de Hangest, bishop of Noyon, who among other things oversaw the prosecution of heretics and witches. The Church routinely tortured and murdered heretics of course, but in the wake of the Papal Bull of Pope Innocent VIII, (1482-1492) the publication of Summis desiderantes affectibus in 1484, and the follow-up pamphlet Malleus Maleficarum in 1486 by Dominican monks Henrich Kramer and James Sprenger, the French Church became infected with the witch hunting hysteria that had already been sweeping across Europe.

http://www.malleusmaleficarum.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleus_Maleficarum

John Calvin retained a fervor for sniffing out and prosecuting witches throughout his life, which was about the only thing he and the Vatican ever agreed upon. In fact, he started out his education in Paris to study Latin, and prepare for the Roman priesthood. He was sent there by his father to build upon the Church and social base of power he had already laid the infrastructure for in Noyon.

A few years into it, Calvin’s father became involved in a Church-related financial debacle that inflated into a full-fledged scandal. Gerard was either guilty of a major screw-up or just got chosen by the Church to be the patsy and was excommunicated. His former boss added the trumped-up charge of heresy just to teach him a lesson.

Nicholas Cop, Rector of the University of Paris, a Protestant activist, had grown fond of young Calvin, and agreed to fund his education if he would change his studies to law since a career for him as a professional Roman Catholic was at that point pretty much out of the question. It was also a tribute to Calvin’s old man. John did change his study to Legal Humanism, but his father died some years later as the result of a long and dragging depression and physical illness. John’s mother had died earlier, and His father was denied burial on consecrated ground with her until John and his older brother were able to give security for the payment of their father’s debts and other obligations the Roman Church demanded.

Having lost all pride, family fortune and social position, John continued with his legal studies and attained a Doctorate in Law at Orleans in 1532. He returned to Paris rather cheesed off at the Catholic Church. He tied up with Nicholas Cop again and became an enthusiastic Protestant Reformer. That didn’t last long before the French Church chased them both out of town and Calvin settled in Basel, Switzerland, where he worked on and published his famous Institutes of the Christian Religion.

http://www.reformed.org/master/index.html?mainframe=/books/institutes/

John rubbed elbows throughout his law studies with fellow Humanist lawyers who based their philosophies on the Classic Greek and Roman thinkers. He moved amongst Protestant Reformers of all stripes who moved in the same legal and philosophical circles. Calvin postulated a new sort of theocratic system based around a council of elders (“consistory” he called it) and envisioned openly that his hereditary heirs would carry this absolute rule into posterity. He wrote a catechism and confession of faith for this proposed social order. About the time he had worked his religious master plans out he had moved his quest for a job and a congregation into largely French-speaking Geneva Switzerland. There he had gained powerful supporters like the city Chancellor Ami Perrin and noted evangelist, pastor and Reformer, William Farel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ami_Perrin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Farel

After gaining an audience and some favor with the Geneva City Council through his highly placed friends, in January of 1538 , Calvin presented his plans for the systematic Reformation of a wild and wooly Geneva. The city council was hotly divided but ultimately rejected his proposals, particularly the earnestly drafted religious creed he wanted the entire city to swear to. The council also refused to grant Calvin and Farel the power to excommunicate, an authority they had demanded because it was critical to insure that their plans could be enforced. Calvin retaliated by denying the Lord’s Supper to all Genevans at the Easter services that soon followed, saying the entire city was too debased to be worthy of communion. The City Council kicked Calvin and Farel both out of Geneva literally on their arses, calling Calvin a would-be “Pope.”

Calvin hid out in Strasbourg Switzerland and found some financial support there. He engaged in a travelling lecture series. He secured a modest position as a pastor and began to build a reputation there as a speaker. Eventually in 1540 somebody still boostering him in Geneva remembered his polemic skills and invited him to author the city’s written response to a new Papal Bull demanding Geneva’s return to Vatican rule. Calvin wrote such a great refusal that he was invited back almost immediately to come help run the Reformation in Geneva, but Calvin didn’t trust Geneva’s government and Church councils enough to risk his life right away. There had been a genuine turnover in these social and political powers however, and Calvin’s supporters had indeed taken full charge of the city. After a year of negotiations that reassured him his authority would never again be questioned, Calvin returned triumphantly in 1541 to a huge banquet in his honor and piles of booty as a reward.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/world/europe/05calvin.html

http://vlib.iue.it/carrie/texts/carrie_books/gilbert/14.html

Calvin had so re-arranged his new Geneva government that he had absolute power. He literally ran a theocracy. He controlled the police, the courts, the media, and every church in town. Those who cared to oppose or even debate him were swiftly dispatched one way or another, sometimes fatally, often brutally.

When he couldn’t find any conventional sinners to persecute, Calvin had an obsession with ferreting out witches. Most of his victims in this sport were women who wouldn’t submit to his will or the will of their husbands. But again, that doesn’t make him unique in the Protestant world, Martin Luther was likewise an avid witch hater. Rating these two on the scale of social enlightenment, the best you can say about Calvin is that he was slightly less anti-Semitic than Luther was, and the best you can say about Luther is he was too busy demonizing Jews to have very much time actively persecuting any other demons in his pantheon of the Godless.

One of Calvin’s French fans from Geneva published Les Sorciers in 1564. This little tome, published in Geneva, proposed that witches were a major danger for humanity and had to be systematically exterminated.

http://www.visualstatistics.net/east-west/witch%20trials/witch%20trials.htm

http://books.google.com/books?id=fswxYJDBLygC&pg=PA265&lpg=PA265&dq=calvin+witches&source=bl&ots=rOKZIkeVCW&sig=kWfUZ5Tua_CA2R47Zq7xDPYCwQ8&hl=en&ei=1B6UTfSEBKSU0QGpz_WHDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CD0Q6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=calvin%20witches&f=false

In 1553 Calvin had a dispute with a Spanish physician through the mail. Servetus was one of the most brilliant minds of the era and the first man to chart the human pulmonary system. Servetus opposed Trinitarianism and rejected infant baptism. Furthermore, Servetus had been mocking Calvin openly in various academic venues, calling him a despot and the “Pope of Geneva,” and bragging that he was coming to Geneva to argue the matter in person and hoped to join the honored ranks of those the great John Calvin had banished. Instead Calvin had him arrested, tried for heresy, and Calvin’s wholly-owned review panel obligingly condemned Servetus to be burned to death in a public square over a stack of his writings. The only objection Calvin raised was that he would have preferred to have beheaded  Servetus rather than burn him.

Well, the whole truth is, Servetus wasn’t burned in a conventional sense at all. He was slowly roasted from a distance and scourged by showers of faggots, or hot coals over a period of at least five excruciating hours.

Calvin’s period and even modern supporters have actually defended Calvin’s actions by claiming–and I’m serious about this—that it’s fine that Servetus was executed for blasphemy and heresy, because he was indeed a blasphemous heretic. They sometimes claim that he should have known better than to come to Geneva and debate Calvin directly man-to-man, and that Calvin had warned him, and some even say that had Servetus been merely decapitated by sword  as Calvin had preferred instead of being roasted alive with his books as the tinder, nobody would have been outraged and we wouldn’t still be remembering this one small blot on Calvin’s otherwise wonderful career. Some even say that Servetus repented to God as he slowly went up in greasy, fleshy smoke and begged Calvin to forgive him. This the Calvinists say, not only proves Calvin was right about his heresy, but demonstrates that Calvin actually did him a favor by lighting him up because he found Jesus in the end.

http://www.thestudiesinthescriptures.com/Pages/English/Eng%20PD/Eng%20PD%2080-89/EngPD%2085.htm

http://www.executedtoday.com/tag/michael-servetus/

http://www.calvin.edu/meeter/educational-resources/servetus-controversy.htm

http://thirdmill.org/newfiles/jac_arnold/CH.Arnold.RMT.8.html

http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/americas-debt-to-john-calvin

http://www.tnr.com/blog/damon-linker/calvin-and-american-exceptionalism

http://www.graceonlinelibrary.org/articles/full.asp?id=70%7C%7C868

http://books.google.com/books?id=_UJXV7HYlaQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=america+founded+on+calvinism&source=bl&ots=ttd5-CuJuJ&sig=YXxZmFP0iqj7xwcTsXQL4mX0FNA&hl=en&ei=37eXTaG4Gsq80QHfhIHtCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CFEQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q&f=false

Probably to avoid another unpopular and grisly public spectacle, what with all the screaming and the smell of burnt flesh permeating the town, In 1547 Calvin did actually specify  the beheading of another congregant prone to debate, Jacques Gruet, for blasphemy. At some point Calvin got tired of his objections, so after breaking him down under torture, he got him to confess numerous sins, the biggest of which was taking credit for an anonymous note left on Calvin’s pulpit arguing against infant baptism. Jacques Gruet

In his reign over his City/State of Geneva, Calvin is known to have overseen the execution or torture of thousands of witches and religious non-conformists. Not even his supporters contest this fact. He tortured or killed adulterers and blasphemers, and even hung children from their armpits from gallows to signify that they deserved death, or just threatened them with death if they didn’t obey him. Calvin even executed one child for striking his parents.

http://baptist-potluck.blogspot.com/2009/06/this-is-calvin.html

To many, even those who helped John Calvin initially to power, like Ami Perrin, Calvin became a despot, a bully and hypocrite, the founder of a personality cult, not a Christian hero. In the end, Calvin imprisoned Perrin’s wife for the crime of dancing. His father-in-law was prosecuted in connection with his wife’s dancing for accusing Calvin of being the “Bishop of Geneva.” Perrin had originally hailed Calvin as a component of Guillaume Farel’s Reformation battle against Rome, but Farel soon came to be known as an appendage of Calvin’s Reformation Empire, and Perrin eventually lost all belief in Calvin’s mission in Geneva.

I understand that you are considering imprisoning my father-in-law and my wife. My said father-in-law is old, my wife is ill; by imprisoning them you will shorten their days, to my great regret, which I have not deserved, and which would be to give me poor recompense for the services I have done you. Therefore I beg you not to imprison them. If they have done wrong, I will bring them here to make such amends that you will have reason to be content. I pray you to grant me this, since if you put them in prison, God will aid me to avenge myself for it.

—Ami Perrin, quoted by François Bonivard^[2]

I don’t know what made Perrin think this plea would have any effect on Calvin.  In 1548, Calvin imprisoned his own brother’s wife for suspected adultery but couldn’t prove the charge. Calvin dogged her down for nine years and in 1557 finally convicted her of adultery with one of his own servants. If Calvin’s own blood, family, and household wasn’t immune to his deadly piety, Perrin’s begging for mercy wasn’t going to have any influence at all on the “Pope of Geneva.” Not only was Perrin’s petition refused but Perrin was accused of treason.

http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/return-to-geneva-life-of-calvin-part-7

Perrin still maintained tremendous influence in Geneva however. There was a lengthy trial and acquittal, and Perrin began to openly move against his former comrade Calvin. Eventually Perrin led an attempted coup against Calvin’s government, based mainly on the promise to expel the hordes of French Protestant refugees like Calvin who were flocking to Geneva to escape the Inquisition or Roman Church in general. These “Huguenots” had all but taken over the Swiss city, and Perrin’s native Reformationists, who Calvin disparagingly and incorrectly called “Libertines,” could no longer stand the oppression of Calvin’s Calvinism. The Huguenots however, Calvin’s French friends, and many other refugee foreigners seemed to embrace Calvin’s pious, unilaterally oppressive and uniformly prosecuted religion. This has to be evaluated of course, in light of the alternative, which was for most going back to France or Spain or elsewhere in the Holy Roman Empire, and was being tortured and burned by the Inquisition.

Perrin’s rebellion failed and he was sentenced in absentia to have his right hand cut off.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huguenot

http://www.ideofact.com/archives/000160.html

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/452566/Ami-Perrin

Perrin’s revolt was the last time anyone dared quibble with John Calvin about anything on any level on any subject in Geneva. Calvin dismissed Perrin’s defeat as God’s justice and described Perrin as “our comic Caesar.”

And yet, for all it’s blatantly despotic nature, today’s Calvinist apologists go so far as to claim Calvin’s Geneva is the pattern upon which the US Constitution was modeled.

http://www.worldviewweekend.com/worldview-times/article.php?articleid=5153

http://www.christianpost.com/news/the-man-who-founded-america-28077/

http://www.reformed-theology.org/html/issue06/calvin.htm

The truth is, even Calvin’s Bible said: By their fruits ye shall know them. The United States of America wasn’t the fruit of Calvin’s despotic theocracy. The United States of America was God’s attempt to clear His vineyard of Calvin’s religious weeds.

http://bible.cc/matthew/7-16.htm

At this point in the Christian story Mormons may even know a little bit about the sort of Christianity that shaped and taught young Joseph Smith. With the advent of Protestantism in Christianity’s historical evolution, Mormons may think they know what prompted Joseph to go kneel down in the woods and ask God what his next move should be. They do know for sure, as part of core Mormon doctrine, he was trying to find his place amongst the wide array of third and fourth generation Protestants he grew up with in the weeds and woods of woolly Upstate New York, in the first decades of the 19th century. The truth of the matter however, is that the frontier American evangelists that Smith, his family and friends knew had little in common with the roots of either Protestantism or the Reformation Movement. 

The first definitionally “Protestant” or “Reformation” movement in the Church of course was the Great Schism of 1054. http://mb-soft.com/believe/txc/gschism.htm In this, the Eastern and Western Church excommunicated itself from itself. You may remember this had mostly to do with the Nicene Creed which had been in contention with the Eastern Church for hundreds of years by then. There were a number of other issues and the exact date that this schism became fixed and irrevocable is still debated. But in retrospect, it also had very much to do with the Western Church’s increased claims that the Roman Pope was the direct Apostolic heritage of Peter, and thus had primacy over all the other Popes, Priests, Holy Orders and of course, that meant the Eastern Bishops. The Eastern Bishops weren’t buying that argument in particular. When it came to a head they split Christianity formally into two clearly opposed and independent factions. 

The first generation of what we now call actual Protestants were in fact just Roman Catholics with a personal bitch against the Pope, the Priesthood, and the various Orders and/or the government of the Holy Roman Church in general. Not one of them probably started out with a mind to leave, damage, or compete against the Roman Catholic Church at all. They wanted to “fix” it. Hundreds of years later it’s very romanticized and spiritualized, but I use the colloquial word “bitching” here, because it is in fact exactly what was going on: routine, common, street-level bitching. There was no deep or serious intent to revolt from the Holy Roman Empire. At the right place, at the right time, and with the right person however, a well-worded bitch session can change the world. The very first official “Protestant,” the igniter of the Reformation’s Big Bang, was Martin Luther, a German monk with 95 reasons the Church was going to hell in a handbasket. 

Martin Luther was a German monk, ordained Roman Catholic priest and scholar born in 1483. He had a bright but sarcastic educational career in good schools and his wealthy and influential father shuffled him through a a great primary education in prestigious academies and encouraged him to get into law. His father, Hans Luder, (Anglicized later as Luther) made his fortune buying leases on copper mines and operated smelters. Coming from the lower classes, described in the day as “peasantry,” his father in particular was keen to place young Martin in the best and highest social and academic circles possible. He spared no expense in either Martin’s education or in wrangling the lad into social or religious positions to show off his genius. His father’s career plan had as its main objective gaining his son a high place in the civil service. His father served on four important regional civic councils and had a great deal of respect and influence locally. 

Following his father’s advice, Luther first pursued juris prudence but found law dry and uninspiring. He is quoted as claiming the law represented only uncertainty. He drifted almost immediately into into philosophy and made many explanations in the record that what he wanted was assurances about the nature of life. He had a special interest in the thinking of Aristotle, again following something of a traditional Augustine-like attraction to Platonist mentalities. Unlike Augustine however, even from an early age Luther was a very religious youth, actually overly-pious and highly critical of the profane habits of his fellows at school, and the laziness and ungodliness of society in general. He described his college as a “beerhouse and a whorehouse.” he concluded that pure reason could only bring answers about man but the only way you could learn about God is through divine revelation and the Holy Scriptures. 

Most Mormons naturally would find this to be a very familiar concept, but as I say, what Martin Luther was up to had very little to do with the religious environment or motivations Joseph Smith was most familiar with some three hundred years and more later. I’ll expand upon this when I deal with Luther’s translation of the Bible into German, but for the moment I’ll say that Luther’s concept of “divine revelation” is rather different than that of the Mormon’s “personal revelation” or “revelation” in general, as was his attitude to the “Holy Scriptures.” For one thing, he didn’t think a lot of them were Holy. And apparently, divine revelation to Luther was whatever he’d decided the scripture should mean, even if he had to write it out clearly himself. 

The story goes however, that Luther was riding a horse in the countryside one day in not very dubious weather, on his way back to his post at university, when a bolt of lighting came unexpectedly out of the sky and hit the ground almost right on top of him. (Perhaps this is the origin of the expression, “It came to me like a bolt from the blue.”) In any case, he was so upset, he rushed to his father telling the story, and saying, “ Praise Saint Ann, I will become a Monk.” Luther apparently felt that if God or Nature or like itself could just come blazing to an end in an instant without a hit of warning like that, then he should dedicate every last second of it making sure he was getting into heaven and serving God, rather than other vain and mortal pursuits. 

That of course is the Lutheran-to-neutralish Protestant version. If you want a study in revisionist history, or historical impressionism, first have a read from the official Catholic Encyclopedia: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09438b.htm  Then read the same summary of Luther’s life in the Wikipedia or any other source you care to Google: http://www.greatsite.com/timeline-english-bible-history/martin-luther.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther http://www.religionfacts.com/christianity/people/luther/bio.htm 

The Catholics obviously included the entire scope of Lutheran detractors in their history of the, well, it’s beyond a schism, it’s a revolt. If you listen to the Roman Church, Luther was the son of a brutal, money-grubbing blue-collar hick with delusions of grandeur who beat the hell out of his little Martin trying to buy into the aristocracy. The child Martin fled this brutal home life into the monastery, not out of a call from God, but in a desperate attempt to get out of the house so his father couldn’t abuse the hell out of him any more. His mother, by Roman Catholic accounts, was a whore and a washerwoman—not being sure which was the worse epithet. The fact that he was excommunicated and told the Pope to take a hike was not surprising, since he was the product of a false-conversion and a rebel in the first place. 

Frankly, I found so many contradictory sources on simple things like his days at school and other basic history I’m still not sure of the chain of events, but this is the best composite I could muster: 

At the age of seventeen in 1501 Martin Luther apparently entered the University of Erfurt depending upon who you want to listen to. He received his Bachelor’s degree in philosophy 1502. Three years later, in 1505, he received a Master’s degree and enrolled in the law school of that university. He then dropped out after the thunderbolt incident (allegedly) and joined the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt in 1505. 

Once in the monastic life however, nobody disputes the fact that our Martin threw himself into flagellations and fastings, pilgrimages and the whole gamut of extreme dedication to the Augustinian order he had joined. In the Lutheran version he just could not do enough to feel close to God. In the first generation of Roman Catholic detractors’ version, it appears that it was at the library there at the Erfurt monastery that he first ran into a copy of the Bible. Subsequent Roman Catholic versions say this is silly, and later generations of Roman Catholic detractors have admitted that he wrote extensively throughout his life about Biblical matters and obviously was familiar with the Bible from his youth. 

Johann von Staupitz, Luther’s Superior in the monastery, decided that Martin was spending too much time in his struggles over some grand universal revelation about life, the universe and everything. He encouraged Martin to continue his academic career and lay off the self-inflicted punishment a while. In 1507 Luther was ordained to the priesthood. In 1508 he began teaching theology at the University of Wittenberg. He  earned his Bachelor’s degree in Biblical Studies on 9 March 1508. He also completed a Bachelor’s degree in the Sentences by Peter Lombard which was the fundamental textbook of theology in the Middle Ages, in 1509. On 19 October 1512, the University of Wittenberg accredited Martin Luther the degree of Doctor of Theology. 

Luther soon became a world-renowned lecturer and scholars and theologians came to hear his explorations of Church doctrines and Biblical principles. Then he became more and more pointed in his criticisms of the way the Church was being administered and a thing called “indulgences” in particular, which were basically bribes to the Church keep God from sending you to hell for your sins. The Vatican needed a lot of money for expanding its empire, and it reaped most of its expenses for building monuments, basilicas, chapels and cathedrals like St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, from essentially granting the nobles of Germany, who had tons of cash in the day, a forgiveness of any sins they felt like committing for a suitable donation to the cause. 

On Halloween of 1517, Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door at Wittenberg. These were basically complaints against the Pope and Church in general that Luther claimed violated Biblical injuncture. Protestants often point to this event as the start of the Protestant revolution.  however,  John Wycliffe, John Hus, Thomas Linacre, John Colet, and others had already made similar complaints against the Roman Church without getting any attention from the Pope. Luther made specific charges of the selling of indulgences by Johann Tetzel, a Dominican priest, and he further made allegations damning the position of the clergy in regard to it’s role in determining individual salvation in general. 

In part due to the invention of the printing press, Luther’s 95 thesis were published almost overnight all over Europe. His bill of complaint came along at a time where not only was regional public acclaim ready for a reasoned argument against the Holy Roman Empire, but all of Europe and England were struggling with the subject of the Roman Pope and his puppet Emperors. Technology of the day suddenly allowed Luther’s well-crafted attack to be duplicated and transmitted worldwide. Though he never apparently intended it, his 95 theses, and eventually all of his writings became legendary in the Protestant movement. 

Luther’s observations were condemned as heretical by Pope Leo X in the bull Exsurge Domine in 1520. He was give 60 days to recant his 95 theses, and defend his writings. He was given another 60 days to confirm his public recantations to Rome. Luther was soon informed that the Pope had gathered all his writings and publicly burned them in Rome as heretical works. Luther responded by publicly burning his issued copy of Exsurge Domine. 

On January 3, 1521 the Vatican published the bull Decet Romanum Pontificem ([It] Befits [the] Roman Pontiff), excommunicating Martin Luther. It was customary after this step, to turn the heretic over to civil authorities to be burned or beheaded or hanged depending on how pissed off the Pope was with them. 

Consequently Luther was summoned to either renounce or reaffirm his views, at the Diet of Worms on 17 April 1521. When he appeared before the assembly, Johann Von Eck, by then assistant to the Archbishop of Trier, acted as spokesman for Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fifth. He presented Luther with a table filled with copies of his writings. Eck asked Luther if he still believed what these works taught. Luther requested time to think about his answer. Granted an extension, Luther prayed, consulted with friends and mediators and presented himself before the Diet the next day. 

When the counselor put the same question to Luther the next day, the reformer apologized for the harsh tone of many of his writings, but said that he could not reject the majority of them or the teachings in them. Luther respectfully but boldly stated, “Unless I am convinced by proofs from Scriptures or by plain and clear reasons and arguments, I can and will not retract, for it is neither safe nor wise to do anything against conscience. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.“ 

On May 25, 1521, the Emperor declared Martin Luther an outlaw. This in those days meant among other things, he was without protection of the law and anyone could kill him without legal retribution. As precarious a decree as this was, the usual course of the Holy Roman Empire would have been to torture a confession out of him and light him on fire. Or more often, produce a surprise set of new witnesses against the accused, like the say-so of a couple of paid whores or Church lackeys who only had to testify that they saw him having sexual intercourse with a goat or calling upon the name of Satan after stubbing his toe. 

Luther had powerful friends however, one of whom was Fredrick the Wise, Elector of Saxony, his own prince. Frederick kidnapped him as he left the Diet and kept him about a year in Wartburg Castle. Luther grew a huge beard and dressed like a knight and called himself “Jorg.” He wandered around town and listened to common German dialects, which he used to continue his work translating the Bible from Greek and Latin sources into common German. He also not-so-secretly kept in touch with other Church rebels and Reformers by visitation and correspondence. 

Martin Luther published the first Bible in his nation’s most common tongue in 1534. He used mostly a Greek Bible, a recent 1516 edition of Erasmus, later called Textus Receptus for the New Testament he published in 1522, followed by the Old Testament in 1534, which completed Biblical canon. In many prefaces to the Biblical books he openly debated and sometimes berated the validity for even including them, and placed several of the ones he disliked out of their usual order in an appendix in the back–Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation. Then he deliberately left them out of the index. He dropped entirely Tobit,  Judith, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, all of which were central and universally kept parts of the “Apocrypha.” He edited out parts of Esther and parts of Daniel which were longtime Old Testament canon in both Jewish and Christian tradition. 

In the process of publishing his Bible, he was amalgamating into a common, mutually familiar language all of the many mutually undecipherable dialects he found in the streets, cities, villages and farms in what is now most of modern Germany. Martin Luther essentially invented the modern German language and taught it to a linguistically confused nation through the media miracle of Gutenberg’s new printing press. 

The German humanist Johann Cochlaeus notes: 

Luther’s New Testament was so much multiplied and spread by printers that even tailors and shoemakers, yea, even women and ignorant persons who had accepted this new Lutheran gospel, and could read a little German, studied it with the greatest avidity as the fountain of all truth. Some committed it to memory, and carried it about in their bosom. In a few months such people deemed themselves so learned that they were not ashamed to dispute about faith and the gospel not only with Catholic laymen, but even with priests and monks and doctors of divinity.”^[19] 

Luther seems also to have given William Tyndale, an English Reformer and Biblical publisher/translator, safe haven and assistance in translating the same Greek-Latin sources for Tyndale’s English Bible. Tyndale’s New Testament of 1522 was a chief source for the King James Version of the New Testament roughly a hundred years later. 

Martin escaped martyrdom and lived peacefully to a ripe old age in the same small German town he was born in. In this time he wrote a little about everything. Some of these works now are claimed to be written by friends and students and a whole conspiratorial Protestant Movement full of mythical geniuses he associated with who borrowed his name or authority. But some of the things accurately attributed to Luther by his detractors I find refreshingly common, like urging his followers to, “Tell the Devil he may kiss my ass.” I find an earthy honesty of spirit in it. Luther was a sage of the middle-ages who loved his beer and spoke his mind. Queen Victoria’s bland, sterile, simpering virginity hadn’t yet infected the Church. 

There is such a thing as too much honesty when it comes to Luther’s attitude toward Jews however. Later in his career Martin Luther took rather a nasty anti-Semitic turn and started hammering away against the Jews, which he referred to as “That accursed race.” Originally he was quite tolerant of them, thinking they simply hadn’t heard the gospel and thus had no chance to accept its truth. After many years of his overtures to the Jews, and these efforts producing little interest in mass conversions to Christ, he began to preach that the Jews were eternally damned and set in their own evil, anti-Christian ways. He made moves to expel them from German politics entirely. He wrote a treatise entitled, On the Jews and Their Lies, and often quoted Christ in Matthew 12:34, where Jesus called them “a brood of vipers and children of the devil.” There was a little socio-political intrigue there in Luther’s motivations as well, since in Luther’s day Church Law superseded civil law, and the Jews were exempt in this arrangement from Church laws against usury, and could charge whatever interest they liked in making loans and other business arrangements. Luther in many ways conditioned the German public for the acceptance of Adolph Hitler’s similar theories against the Jews, and fed a longstanding resentment that found the nation very accommodating of Hitler’s “Final Solution” by suggesting they were all sneaky, unprincipled heathens out to steal the wealth of the nation and sabotage the happiness of good Christians all. 

Martin wrote and preached at one point that his followers should, “…burn down Jewish schools and synagogues, and to throw pitch and sulphur into the flames; to destroy their homes; to confiscate their ready money in gold and silver; to take from them their sacred books, even the whole Bible; and if that did not help matters, to hunt them of the country like mad dogs.” (Luther’s Works, vol. Xx, pp. 2230-2632 as quoted in Stoddard JL. Rebuilding a Lost Faith, 1922, p.99.) 

But Luther’s crazy anti-Semitic streak wasn’t his only gap in enlightened Christian thought. I’ve made references to Luther’s problems with the “approved” Biblical canon of his day a number of times. Here again are just a few of the disparaging comments he’s on record as having made about the Bible: 

Regarding the New Testament Book of Hebrews: It need not surprise one to find here bits of wood, hay, and straw (O’HarePF. The Facts About Luther, 1916–1987 reprint ed., p. 203.) 

The Epistle of James: “St. James’ epistle is really an epistle of straw…for it has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it. . . [It is] not the writing of any apostle” (Luther, M. Preface to the New Testament, 1546.) 

The Book of the St. John the Revelator: “About this book of the Revelation of John…I miss more than one thing in this book, and it makes me consider it to be neither apostolic nor prophetic…I can in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it. Moreover he seems to me to be going much too far when he commends his own book so highly-indeed, more than any of the other sacred books do, though they are much more important-and threatens that if anyone takes away anything from it, God will take away from him, etc. Again, they are supposed to be blessed who keep what is written in this book; and yet no one knows what that is, to say nothing of keeping it. This is just the same as if we did not have the book at all. And there are many far better books available for us to keep…My spirit cannot accommodate itself to this book. For me this is reason enough not to think highly of it: Christ is neither taught nor known in it” (Luther, M. Preface to the Revelation of St. John, 1522). 

Martin Luther on the Old Testament: 

“Job spoke not as it stands written in his book, but only had such thoughts. It is merely the argument of a fable. It is probable that Solomon wrote and made this book.” 

“Ecclesiastes ought to have been more complete. There is too much incoherent matter in it…Solomon did not, therefore, write this book.” 

“The book of Esther I toss into the Elbe. I am such an enemy to the book of Esther that I wish it did not exist, for it Judaizes too much…” 

“The history of Jonah is so monstrous that it is absolutely incredible.” (as quoted in O’Hare, p. 202.) 

Of the first five books of Moses:  “We have no wish either to see or hear Moses” (Ibid, p. 202.) 

In his most famous dispute translating his German Bible, he responds to critics who claim he’s inserting his own personal religious doctrine into his translation, particularly Romans 3:28 where he adds to the writer’s assertion that we are “saved by grace,” the word “alone,” making the reading, “saved by grace alone.” 

You tell me what a great fuss the Papists are making because the word alone is not in the text of Paul…say right out to him: ‘Dr. Martin Luther will have it so,’…I will have it so, and I order it to be so, and my will is reason enough. I know very well that the word ‘alone’ is not in the Latin or the Greek text (Stoddard J. Rebuilding a Lost Faith. 1922, pp. 101-102; see also Luther M. Amic. Discussion, 1, 127.) 

While this quote is used by his enemies to suggest he considered himself above the original writers, he also replied in other sources: 

The text itself and the meaning of St. Paul urgently require and demand it. For in that very passage he is dealing with the main point of Christian doctrine, namely, that we are justified by faith in Christ without any works of the Law . . . But when works are so completely cut away — and that must mean that faith alone justifies — whoever would speak plainly and clearly about this cutting away of works will have to say, ‘Faith alone justifies us, and not works’.” ^[121] 

In a sense, Joseph Smith’s “Inspired Version” wasn’t doing anything that Martin Luther hadn’t already done in his German translation of the Bible.  

Luther’s saga contains “Road to Damascus” incidents above and beyond the fabled lightning strike that sent him to the monastery and changed not only his Christian walk, but the entire Christian world. One such insight struck him while climbing a mountain and led him to give up his monastic life instantly when he finally realized self-induced misery was just a waste of his time and piety. Another came when he stopped dreading the “gospel” or “good news” as some sort of inevitable come-uppance with the Lord and realized it was really a promise of unconditional forgiveness and he could stop beating and fasting and stone-bedding himself into penance. There’s also a great story in there about smuggling nuns out of a convent in herring barrels and marrying one. All this makes good reading for the Lutheran or anyone else, but is irrelevant for Mormon study purposes. 

According to the Roman Catholic Encyclopedia, Luther’s main theological contentions were thus: 

The Bible is the only source of faith; it contains the plenary inspiration of God; its reading is invested with a quasi-sacramental character.

Human nature has been totally corrupted by original sin, and man, accordingly, is deprived of free will. Whatever he does, be it good or bad, is not his own work, but God’s.

Faith alone can work justification, and man is saved by confidently believing that God will pardon him. This faith not only includes a full pardon of sin, but also an unconditional release from its penalties.

The hierarchy and priesthood are not Divinely instituted or necessary, and ceremonial or exterior worship is not essential or useful. Ecclesiastical vestments, pilgrimages, mortifications, monastic vows, prayers for the dead, intercession of saints, avail the soul nothing.

All sacraments, with the exception of baptism, Holy Eucharist, and penance, are rejected, but their absence may be supplied by faith.

The priesthood is universal; every Christian may assume it. A body of specially trained and ordained men to dispense the mysteries of God is needless and a usurpation.

There is no visible Church or one specially established by God whereby men may work out their salvation.

  

If you’re the Roman Pope or any other authority in the Holy Roman Empire, some of these issues are a real threat to the established order—like directly discarding not just the entire structure of any Church at all, but throwing the priesthood call freely out to the unwashed masses. The bulk of his other contentions are just rehashes of theological battles Augustine fought over a thousand years earlier. The issue of indulgences, even the Pope knew were wrong. They were just profitable and necessary for the temporal advancement of a comfortable Papal clubhouse and the armies of labor, craftsmen, and soldiery to maintain it. Luther however, went through a number of phases theologically and organizationally before he died, and in fact never totally got a church or full litany of dogma organized. Originally, yes, he thought the common body of Christ could just elect its own priests, discern its own truths and run its own Church. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before a little disaster called the “Peasant War,” got him re-thinking this whole concept. 

Initially, Luther seemed to many to support the peasants, condemning the oppressive practices of the nobility that had incited many of the peasants. As the war continued, and especially as atrocities at the hands of the peasants increased, Luther came out forcefully against the revolt; since Luther relied on support and protection from the princes, he was afraid of alienating them. In Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants (1525), he encouraged the nobility to visit swift and bloody punishment upon the peasants. Many of the revolutionaries considered Luther’s words a betrayal. Others withdrew once they realized that there was neither support from the Church nor from its main opponent. The war in Germany ended in 1525, when rebel forces were put down by the armies of the Swabian League. 

Luther resented Germany’s domination by a group of clergymen based in Rome, and these nationalist feelings may have motivated the Reformation to some extent. During the Peasants’ War, Luther continued to stress obedience to secular authority; many may have interpreted this doctrine as endorsement of absolute rulers, leading to acceptance of monarchs and dictators in German history. http://www.religionfacts.com/christianity/people/luther/bio.htm 

The Peasant War also gave birth to the appearance of three “prophets,” and a number of other hyper-Reformationists that went well beyond anything Luther had in mind. Luther had opened a Pandora’s box of individual, charismatic Christian rebellion. Luther subsequently fell back on a more conventional Church structure with an elite, institutionally educated clergy who ran the show and lost most of his faith in the greater body of Christ to govern itself. 

Zwickau prophets and the Peasants’ War

Main articles: Thomas Müntzer, Zwickau prophets, and Peasants’ War 

On December 27, 1521, three “prophets”, influenced by and in turn influencing Thomas Müntzer, appeared in Wittenberg from Zwickau: Thomas Dreschel, Nicolas Storch and Mark Thomas Stübner. The crisis came in the Peasants’ War in southern Germany in 1525. In its origin a revolt against feudal oppression, it became, under the leadership of Müntzer, a war against all constituted authorities, and an attempt to establish by revolution an ideal Christian commonwealth, with absolute equality and the community of goods. There were some common points between the Zwickau prophets and the later-developed Anabaptists. 

Münster Rebellion

Main articles: Münster Rebellion and Münster 

A second and more determined attempt to establish a theocracy was made at Münster in Westphalia (1532–5), led by Bernhard Rothmann, Bernhard Knipperdolling, Jan Matthys and John of Leiden. 

All things considered, Lutheranism, of all the Reformationist ideas had the most reasonable and measured spread into its country of origin. Not too surprisingly however, each of the various Reforming countries who followed his example, found its own heroes and its own doctrinal basis for Reformation, and went eagerly about persecuting, even civilly arresting and institutionally trying and slaughtering anyone who preached a different gospel, whether it be a Roman Catholic gospel or any of the competing “Reformed” gospels. Luther carried on some wild debates with a Swiss Reformer named Zwingli for example, about whether or not the Host actually was the flesh and blood of Christ. Though neither Luther nor Zwingli http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwingli would have been inclined to set one-another on fire, hang, or chop off each other’s heads, the fact remains that had one or both of them tried to carry on the same debates a few years later in front of major Reformationist and prime Protestant, Jean Calvin’s Geneva religious empire, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Calvin they’d have been bound in chains, had their books piled upon them and they’d  have been lit up in the public square. Clearly, one of the main features of historical Christianity, the oppressing and killing off its rivals, dissenters, and free-thinkers, was not a feature of the Church being “Reformed” in the Reformation. It was just being passed on to a new set of Inquisitors. 

In the end, Luther ended up with a professional clergy running a highly organized, institutional church, and this apparatus was entirely supported by the general congregation. Luther’s new church is still claiming to be “One Church, Catholic and Apostolic.” The big difference in Luther’s Lutheranism compared to the Roman Catholicism he’d left was that the congregation got to vote on who they were going to pay to tell them what to believe. 

Modern Lutheranism is too broad a subject to be of interest to me in this context, nor could I or anyone else fully cover the insanely diverse directions it has gone in all of these centuries. In the American Lutheran variants alone we just achieved yet another split over whether actively Gay ministers can be ordained. Previous splits occurred over whether women pastors can be ordained. Splits have taken place over the issue of the inerrancy of the Holy Bible, and the Missouri Synod claims the modern King James Bible to be inerrant in spite of Martin Luther’s serious condemnation of major parts of it. Other synods use a wide number of other Bibles that have little in common with Martin Luther’s work as well and insist the Bible has to be read in social context and contains a high portion of symbolic and allegorical content.

You can send homosexuals to hell and shut the mouths of your women in God’s house, or you can ordain all of the above to be your ministers, and still call yourself a “Lutheran.” Or you can take the middle road, and ordain confessed Gay ministers who aren’t sexually active, or let women and Gay’s do everything else but minister, perhaps become lay ministers. The Bible can be inerrant and fixed four hundred years ago by King James of England, or five hundred years ago by Luther of Germany, or it can be a groovy paraphrase published when hippies and Jesus-Freaks roamed the campi of America in tie-dyed T Shirts and faded bellbottoms. Stern old Pastor Wilhelm will send teenage girls to hell for wearing lipstick and going to the school dance, and Pastor Shirley T. Ransexual will tell them that Jesus loves the sinner, and invite them back to the rectory to play Black Sabbath and drink really thin coffee, along with Pastor Bob, the young hip youth pastor just out of divinity school who always wears a big hood-ornament-looking crucifix medallion and turtleneck instead of his vestments. It all comes down to a vote and a list of by-laws when you’re a Lutheran. And yes, I’ve been there and done that.

Early in the fifth century AD, the North African Church in particular was very busy trying to suppress the ideas of the Donatists—a school of Christian belief that chiefly claimed that the validity of any Church sacrament was dependent upon the moral worthiness of the priest or clergy official performing it. Were this so, naturally it would require the Holy Roman Church to be accountable for purging its clergy of perverts, cheats, movers, shakers, and self-promoters of all sorts. It would put in doubt the worth of the entire operation in the minds of those dependent upon these sacraments. To the rescue of the Church, came our now venerated Augustine of Hippo, then, just a middleweight African Bishop and scholar, who countered, quoting Optatus of Mileum, his predecessor; “The Church is an institution, ‘whose sanctity is derived from the sacraments, and not estimated from the pride of persons. …The sacraments are holy in themselves and not through men.’”

Meanwhile, somewhere in the Celtic regions of the British Isles by best estimate, a very intellectual young priest and Celtic monk by the name of Pelagius was motivated to leave his friendly, wet, shamrock-covered isles and take his St. Patrick style ideas into the heart of Christianity and do battle with a Church he felt was going astray. Pelagius however, fell mostly on the side of the Donatists on the above point.

Pelagius’ first trip to central Christendom took him to Rome in 380. There he found a pompous, opulent, wasteful, prideful, and overtly corrupt Church that appalled him. Everything about the Church in Rome was in opposition to his ascetic Celtic upbringing. He was galled by the extravagance of the hierarchy—particularly the Pope. Pelagius was insulted to hear what he called a “moral laxity” in the doctrine of Divine Grace hehad heard a Roman bishop cite from Augustine’s Confessions. The idea of helplessly begging for whatever Grace God might give with no hope of influencing God’s Grace one way or another, imperiled the entire moral law, as Pelagius put it.

In his visit to Rome and the course of his many debates in various forums there, he found his closest collaborator, a lawyer named Celestius. Pelagius became primarily the speechwriter and Celestius became the battling orator, promoting what became known as “Pelagianism.”

Pelagius retired to Ireland at length, taking with him his disciple Celestius. Here they continued to flail away at the Bishop of Hippo and his then yet-to-be-canonized doctrinal inventions. At the very moment when Augustine was just starting to find regional Church acceptance of his doctrinal masterpiece, Original Sin, Pelagius declared this newly invented doctrine to be abominable and spoiled a lot of Augustine’s fun and fame. It was from then on, open warfare between these two saintly men—as both acknowledged the other to be.

According to Pelagius, Adam’s sin didn’t fatally corrupt humanity, but instead he taught that“Over the years our sin gradually corrupts us, building an addiction and then holding us bound with what seems like the force of nature itself.” (Letter to Demetrias, VIII) Humans by nature have a clean slate at birth, and it is only through voluntary sin that humans are made wicked. In theory, a human could live a sinless life and merit heaven. In practice however, man, being by nature imperfect an unequal to God, sin always stained mankind one way or another given enough time and temptation. Pelagius was not therefore, making a claim as his detractors maintained, that man would be just fine without God’s Grace anyway.  He was saying however that the argument made by Augustine that if killed, unbaptized infants burned in hell, was a load of crap. Pelagius was saying that dead babies never had a chance to sin willfully or otherwise and were given a “pass” by God.

About 412, Pelagius took a trip to Palestine where the Bishop John of Jerusalem, a good friend, welcomed him. Pelagianism had spread like wildfire around Carthage, and the appearance of its author in Augustine’s back yard so-to-speak prompted a flurry of opposition from the Augustinian camp. Augustine had already disseminated four official letters condemning Pelagianism. Augustine’s associate Jerome, AKA “Saint” Jerome, a Latin Church scholar, happened to live in Jerusalem. Jerome had also authored several strong letters attempting to censure and eradicate Pelagianism. Visiting with Jerome at the time was another virulently anti-Pelagianist, Orosius, a pupil of Augustine. Together Jerome and Orosius publicly charged Pelagius with heresy and demanded action from Bishop John of Jerusalem. John called a council in July 415.

Church records suggest that Orosius’ lack of Greek made him look unprepared and not very convincing as the main prosecutor of the case against Pelagius. Bishop John’s Eastern heritage also made him far more willing to entertain the idea that humanity was basically good rather than utterly evil at birth. The council delivered no verdict on the issue and the Synod of Jerusalem remanded the argument to the Latin or Western Church, since Jerome, Orosius, Pelagius and Celestius were all disciples of the Latin Church.

A few months later, December of 415, two deposed bishops came to Palestine ostensibly to give evidence against Pelagius before the Synod of Diospolis, headed by the Bishop of Caesarea. The council was met but neither instigating bishop showed up for various odd reasons. Orosius had also intended to carry on his prosecution at this venue but left Palestine with no explanation after a consultation with Bishop John of Jerusalem. Pelagius did appear, armed with letters of recommendation from many scholars and Church authorities including Augustine himself, who in spite of their disagreements upon doctrine, gave a hearty endorsement of Pelagius’ moral and scholarly credentials. The Synod of Diospolis declared: “Now since we have received satisfaction in respect of the charges brought against the monk Pelagius in his presence and since he gives his assent to sound doctrines but condemns and anathematizes those contrary to the faith of the Church, we adjudge him to belong to the communion of the Catholic Church.”

As if to settle up with Jerome and Augustine once and for all, in 416 Pelagius wrote his most famous tome, On Free Will. Or: De Libero Arbitrio . This work did a major hatchet-job on Augustine’s theories.

As if to shut Pelagius up once and for all, Orosius, faithful lackey of Augustine, came crying back to Africa where Augustine took matters into his own hands and convened two local synods on their own authority. This council wrote an official letter of condemnation of Pelagius and his teachings, and sent it to Pope Innocent I of Rome. Now, even though sanctioned by four other bishops, Augustine of Hippo had no serious title or right or following in the greater Christian body. Even with his four back-bush bishop buddies Augustine had no Apostolic See and no universally binding right to define what was or wasn’t “orthodox” without it. Augustine’s church hadn’t been founded by one of the original Apostles and that made him an inherently inferior bishop. Luckily, he and Jerome both were great pals with Pope Innocent I of Rome.

Pope Innocent needed little convincing from Augustine and his African council of bishops. He immediately ordered a response from Pelagius. Pelagius put together his arguments in a letter and sent it back to Pope Innocent I. By the time it arrived however, Pope Innocent I was dead as a doornail. The letter was read by Pope Zosimus of Rome instead. In 417 Zosimus declared that he had been duly impressed by the defense Pelagius had made of his ideas and their basis in scripture and tradition, and declared him innocent of heresy.

Augustine was shocked. In 418 he called the Council of Carthage. This council named nine beliefs it claimed in particular were universal and orthodox in all the Church and always had been:

1. Death came from sin, not man’s physical nature. [I could write pages on the stupidity of that notion.]
2. Infants must be baptized to be cleansed from original sin.
3. Justifying grace covers past sins and helps avoid future sins.
4. The grace of Christ imparts strength and will to act out God’s commandments.
5. No good works can come without God’s grace.
6. We confess we are sinners because it is true, not from humility.
7. The saints ask for forgiveness for their own sins.
8. The saints also confess to be sinners because they are.
9. Children dying without baptism are excluded from both the Kingdom of heaven and eternal life.

Augustine pointed out simply that Pelagius had denied each one of these basic, universal Christian beliefs, and therefore he was in effect a heretic regardless of what the Pope had just found. Pelagians were thereafter banished from Italy, and by extension, the Western Church entirely, but it wasn’t quite that simple or immediate however. The most reliable versions of the story claim that since Pope Zosimus had already declared Pelagius innocent of heresy, and of course, as a Pope he wasn’t inclined to admit he’d goofed the first time, that Zosimus. Augustine likewise, a loyal Western Church product, wasn’t going to push the issue too hard with Il Papa, so Augustine went to friendly civil authorities and had Pelagius, Celestius and all their followers declared public nuisances and disturbers of the peace, and the actual order banishing Pelagianism from Italy came from the Emperor and governors, not the Pope.

Now, I have just two points for you to consider with this little bit of history. And this is Christian history, recorded by the winners, not some secret conspiracy nonsense pulled from hidden archives. It is not even contended by Christians:

First, going on some five-hundred years into Christianity, two major players with major authority and thoroughbred Christian scholarly and clerical pedigrees came to two radically opposed conclusions from exactly the same sources. Both claimed they had come to these beliefs via preserved scripture and Church tradition. Both claimed the most canonized records supported their own interpretations and completely condemned their opponent’s opinions and interpretations.

Secondly, It took multiple councils and scores of bishops to get any sort of condemnation of the doctrines and writings of Pelagius, and likewise, having had the case before him twice the Pope in Rome Himself could not bring himself to issue an open condemnation of Pelagius. Conversely, there was no instant affirmation of anything Augustine was arguing throughout all the same councils, and again, even hearing the case twice the Pope in Rome Himself did not overtly endorse Augustine’s notions instantly as patently and universally perfect Christian tradition. It took some time and intrigue to make the endorsement finally. Therefore, five-hundred years and countless Popes and priests and bishops and scholars into Christian history, it was not quite certain to even the Pope, whether or not man was basically good or inherently, utterly evil. It was not quite sure whether or not the innocent unborn really were innocent, or whether they were doomed to eternal fire and pain unless rescued by the Church. And then, it was not even certain if you could rescue anyone at all, or if this person or that person was going to be “Elected” by God no matter what you or they did, and if this one or that one was just going to be ripped into the fires of hell because God had already decreed it when they were created. These brutally, extreme opposite concepts came evolving through hundreds of years and thousands of Christian thinkers and Christianity en-mass still couldn’t be sure which one was “orthodox” and which one was “heresy.”

How did Pelagius escape condemnation so many times in so many councils? Well, that was easy. Five-hundred years into Christianity all that had really been worked out is the Nicene creed and a couple of other vague statements of faith. All he had to do was confess his belief in these by then couple-of-hundred-years-old creeds and the whole rest of the controversy was anybody’s guess. The Nicene Creed is gibberish and could mean anything. It’s nothing to confess it and then go on to bigger problems.

And it’s an ongoing chain of viciously enforced guesswork by whatever Church or civil political and intellectual forces were at play. Two-hundred years before Pelagious saved his butt by clinging to the Nicene and Apostle’s Creed, there was the poor shmucks who were excommunicated trying to hammer out the Nicene Creed. You had one faction ready to kill and sentence to hell the other over inserting this one word or that other word that means almost the same thing. The winners of that argument became professors of “what the Church has always believed.” The losers became heretics. But that much had been settled by Pelagius’ time. So he just copped his faith in a nebulous Creed bickered out hundreds of years before his time and was then free to experiment with bigger ideas.

According to Roman Catholic records, which seem to go out of their way to prove the Pope was going to condemn him anyway–Pelagius and Celestius fled the hearings, leaving them unfinished. Augustine and his disciples had a connection to Valerian, who held an influential position in Ravenna, and this civil connection developed into the secular power taking part in the dispute directly through the Emperor Honorius, by rescript of 30 April, 418, from Ravenna, banishing all Pelagians from the cities of Italy. Somewhere in there when the emperor got involved, Pope Zosimus had a change of heart under the combined civil pressure and growing clerical support for Augustine. It became a popularity contest, and to support Pelagius was to insult the honor of Augustine. Augustine and his friends were favored by the emperor. Ergo, supporting Pelagius was also insulting the emperor. Zosimus finally issued a Papal condemnation of Pelagianism and in spite of this pressure, and several waves of pressure from both the Pope and civil authorities, by 428 18 bishops in Italy alone still refused to sign the Papal decree condemning Pelagianism. The penalty for this was being deposed from office and yet they refused.

Pelagianism in fact spread and grew until it was finally beaten and hounded to death through the Greek Church, Gaul, and into the British Isles, and had morphed into Semipelagianism, which attempted to take the best features of both Pelagius and Augustine’s ideas and reconcile them. It took until 529 to forcefully convince all of Christianity that man was born evil and God saved whoever he wanted and your human input of any sort was pointless.

Pelagius and his followers represent the last remnant of the other side of a doctrinal and philosophical war fought and won by Augustine of Hippo and his followers. The only evidence of Pelagius’ writings remains as quoted excerpts appearing in papers Augustine and his fellows used to defame them. That is the Christian pattern. The Greek Church doesn’t even name Pelagius or illustrate his “heresies.” He just vanishes in Eastern tradition out of the historical record along with all of his supporters. That is why a thousand years later John Calvin or Martin Luther during the Reformation and Protestand Movement, could probably honestly believe the Church had always believed Augustine’s entire body of guesswork.

But wrong or right, the fact is, it’s not even logically possible to claim that Augustine’s beliefs have always been orthodox and universal. It took a hundred years and more after the Bishop of Hippo first pulled Original Sin and Predestination out of his saintly backside just to decide Augustine’s ideas had always been believed by the Church. In the meantime, obviously not everyone in the Church was believing it for over a hundred years.

If Augustine’s ideas were all that universal and traditional, these debates could have never run for whole lifetimes and beyond, through trial after trial. Pelagius’ wholly opposing arguments could never have gone before higher and higher clerical authorities as Augustine personally tried to batter them down into infamy, while Popes and bishops and scholars scrutinized them without reaching any clear and unanimous insight into which of these two radically different positions were really the “orthodox” Christian faith.

Taking both arguments into account, and taking the sheer time, talent and effort put into proving the truth of either or both sides of the Pelagius v Augustine debate presented to and through many noted Christian judges and juries, all that the story of Pelagius actually proves is that both Augustine and Pelagius were pulling it all out of their backsides and making it up as they went along. What the Council of Carthage really proves, is that until 418 Christianity didn’t really have an official opinion on anything either Pelagius or Augustine had to offer.

Christian history shows indeed, that variations and combinations of both Augustine and Pelagius were melded and blended to become Semipelagianism, Arminianism, Calvinism, Methodism, Unitarianism, Wesleyanism, and a number of Eastern variants. And while the West claims to be the product of the pure and undefiled Christian tradition via Augustine, little concessions have been made over the generations to mitigate some of the most stupid and evil of Augustine’s assertions. For example, the last of Augustine’s quoted nine canons used against Pelagius at Carthage is no longer widely taught in Roman Catholicism. A Mormon, but not a polite one mind you, would say, because it’s the most evil and asinine. It’s self-apparently wrong and ungodly. Joseph Smith wasn’t the first to say as much and he wasn’t the last.

From a Mormon standpoint mind you, both Pelagius and Augustine were full of bologna. Mormons can’t even fathom that Christians could have, do, or ever did believe the sort of idiocy Augustine came up with. When Christians attack Mormonism, all a Mormon really need do is say, at least Mormons don’t have to believe that little dead babies are burning in flaming sulphur for all eternity through accident of birth.

The current Catechism of the Catholic Church states that children who die without baptism are “entrusted to the mercy of God.” The problem with that statement is that the very heart of this Augustinian nightmare we now call Christianity, of necessity sends even the aborted fetus to hell. No amount of “Provisional Grace” and postulating about “Mercy” or “Limboizing” and praying them out of hell with the help of a friendly saint or the Virgin Mary or begging for the intercession of Jesus Christ gets around the matter of all flesh being born utterly evil and thus deserving and doomed to hell unless you are Elected to be baptized into the Church and receive the necessary sacraments. If you die before that happens, however young, in or out of the womb, on this continent, on Mars or under a totalitarian state that refuses to let you know anything about Jesus, the Bible or the Church, all that means in Augustine’s theory is that you were not Elect and God chose not to Elect you. The manner of, or reasons for your non-election is irrelevant. God did it to you. How He did it to you or why He did it to you is above your pay grade. You are powerless to change it. You are powerless to change God’s mind on it.  Hell and Heaven are predestined.

Here it is straight from the Catholic Encyclopedia:

Some codices containing a ninth canon (Denzinger, loc. cit., note 3): Children dying without baptism do not go to a “middle place” (medius locus), since the non reception of baptism excludes both from the “kingdom of heaven” and from “eternal life”.

So, the Roman Catholic Church in this case, can choose to just omit printing it out and teaching it to little kids in confirmation class, but after the Trinity, the doctrine of Original Sin is the very core of the faith. It is the very core of virtually all modern, mainstream Christianity, and the more even an “enlightened” Protestant, American Christian variant claims to be “Traditional” the more that sect generally emphasizes it. If you have Original Sin, you have Augustine, and if you have Augustine, you have babies burning in hell.

It’s that simple.

Which gets me to my unnanounced third point in this historical episode. Let’s assume the Roman Catholic Church, representing “What Christians have always Believed” for the moment, condemned Pelagius for not believing that unbaptized children went to hell. We know this actually happened, and we know Augustine was behind it. This made Pelagius a heretic, because he did not confess loyalty to a major canon that the Church has “always” believed. Well, the “Church” doesn’t believe that any more. The “Church” therefore has stopped believing something it has “always” believed. A “universal” belief is now no longer “universal.” And the “Church” now believes another new thing it has always believed.

Many of us have been raised on the King James Bible. I hate to come back to bashing that venerable old record around, but there is no better evidence that the “Church” adjusts from era-to-era what it has “always” believed than the preface from the “Authorized Version.”

The Epistle Dedicatory

TRANSLATED OUT OF THE ORIGINAL TONGUES:
AND WITH THE FORMER TRANSLATIONS DILIGENTLY COMPARED AND REVISED,
BY HIS MAJESTY’S SPECIAL COMMAND

There are no manuscripts in the original tongues of the entire New Testament. The lie here is multiple: No original manuscripts exist nor do even copies of manuscripts pretending to be from the original New Testament authors in the “original tongues.” We have some Greek versions written long after the death of the original authors. The King James Bible also originally contained the Apocrypha and that got dropped entirely. Even today zealous Christian sects preach this particular version to be written directly from the mouth of Jesus into King’s English. But, Jesus personally had nothing to do with writing or preserving any of it. This is also not the “Authorized” version any more. The sanctioning clergy that commissioned and purified this “perfect” English Bible has adopted a new one.

But if the “Church” tells you this King James Bible is the real thing, the actual Bible Jesus wrote Himself and then handed down exactly like it is, and you’re still all too willing to believe this impossible fantasy in spite of all the absolute proof it never could have happened that way even from Christian records themselves, well, you’re just helplessly ignorant. You’re just going to let it slide on by without making waves when the “Church” tells you God is like a shamrock or that all the uncivilized, dirty little dark babies in the Heathen Nations have not been Elected and that’s why it’s fine that they burn in brimstone forever.

So, case closed. The “Church” changes what it believes. Sometimes the “Church” changes what it as “always” believed so much it has to change its name from Catholic, to Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, or to Protestant from Roman Catholic, or Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, from Protestant and so forth. Or for that matter, from ELCA to LCA to ALC to EIEIO. The “Church” promotes what it believes at the moment and validates it by claiming it has “always” believed it. If you claim you find this to be also true in Mormonism, you must first also openly confess it in “Christianity” because Mormonism has only been at it for a couple of hundred years and still hasn’t made the radical sorts of basic doctrinal changes that your so-called “orthodox” Christianity has made hundreds if not thousands of times or the two-millenia it’s been inventing itself.

As a refresher, I’m attaching a handy chronology of Christianity’s general development to re-orient you before I move into the Reformation and Protestant Movements.

vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvcApologetics Toolkit

DEVELOPMENT OF THE BIBLICAL CANON

adapted from materials of Professor Paul Hahn of the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas

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Development of the Old Testament Canon

1000-50 BC:

The Old Testament (hereafter “OT”) books are written.

C. 200 BC:

Rabbis translate the OT from Hebrew to Greek, a translation called the “Septuagint” (abbreviation: “LXX”). The LXX ultimately includes 46 books.

AD 30-100:

Christians use the LXX as their scriptures. This upsets the Jews.

C. AD 100:

So Jewish rabbis meet at the Council of Jamniah and decide to include in their canon only 39 books, since only these can be found in Hebrew.

C. AD 400:

Jerome translates the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin (called the “Vulgate”). He knows that the Jews have only 39 books, and he wants to limit the OT to these; the 7 he would leave out (Tobit, Judith, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach [or "Ecclesiasticus"], and Baruch–he calls “apocrypha,” that is, “hidden books.” But Pope Damasus wants all 46 traditionally-used books included in the OT, so the Vulgate has 46.

AD 1536:

Luther translates the Bible from Hebrew and Greek to German. He assumes that, since Jews wrote the Old Testament, theirs is the correct canon; he puts the extra 7 books in an appendix that he calls the “Apocrypha.”

AD 1546:

The Catholic Council of Trent reaffirms the canonicity of all 46 books.

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Development of the New Testament Canon

C. AD 51-125:The New Testament books are written, but during this same period other early Christian writings are produced–for example, the Didache (c. AD 70), 1 Clement (c. 96), the Epistle of Barnabas (c. 100), and the 7 letters of Ignatius of Antioch (c. 110).C. AD 140:Marcion, a businessman in Rome, teaches that there were two Gods: Yahweh, the cruel God of the OT, and Abba, the kind father of the NT. So Marcion eliminates the Old Testament as scriptures and, since he is anti-Semitic, keeps from the NT only 10 letters of Paul and 2/3 of Luke’s gospel (he deletes references to Jesus’ Jewishness). Marcion’s “New Testament”–the first to be compiled–forces the mainstream Church to decide on a core canon: the four gospels and letters of Paul.C. AD 200:But the periphery of the canon is not yet determined. According to one list, compiled at Rome c. AD 200 (the Muratorian Canon), the NT consists of the 4 gospels; Acts; 13 letters of Paul (Hebrews is not included); 3 of the 7 General Epistles (1-2 John and Jude); and also the Apocalypse of Peter.AD 367:The earliest extant list of the books of the NT, in exactly the number and order in which we presently have them, is written by Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, in his Easter letter of 367. [Note: this is well after the Constantine's Edict of Toleration in 313 A.D.]AD 904:Pope Damasus, in a letter to a French bishop, lists the New Testament books in their present number and order.AD 1442:At the Council of Florence, the entire Church recognizes the 27 books, though does not declare them unalterable.AD 1536:In his translation of the Bible from Greek into German, Luther removes 4 NT books (Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelations) from their normal order and places them at the end, stating that they are less than canonical.AD 1546:At the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church reaffirms once and for all the full list of 27 books as traditionally accepted.

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Digitized and formatted in HTML by the Augustine Club at Columbia University, 1995

http://www.religionfacts.com/christianity/timeline.htm

The following timeline of Christianity summarizes some of the most important events in Christianity since its founding about 2,000 years ago. (Events in light grey are non-religious events included for historical context.)

c. 4 BC
Birth of Jesus

c. 26 AD
John the Baptist begins ministry

c. 27 AD
Jesus begins ministry

c. 30 AD
Crucifixion of Jesus

c. 35
Conversion of Paul

c. 44
Martyrdom of James

c. 46-48
Paul’s first missionary journey

c. 49
Council of Jerusalem

c. 50-52
Paul’s second missionary journey

c. 51-52
First and Second Thessalonians written

c. 53-57
Paul’s third missionary journey

c. 57
Letter to the Romans written

c. 59-62
Paul imprisoned in Rome

c. 60
Andrew martyred by crucifixion in Achaia (Greece).

c. 66-67
Second Timothy written

c. 68
Martyrdom of Paul

70
Fall of Jerusalem

c. 90-95
John exiled on island of Patmos

c. 95
Book of Revelation written

c. 96
Clement of Rome’s Letter to the Corinthians written

c. 120
Didache written

202
Christians persecuted under Septimus Severus

211
Christians tolerated under Emperor Antoninus Caracalla

222
Christians favored Emperor Alexander Severus

230
Origen’s On First Principles

235
Christians persecuted under Emperor Maximin the Thracian

238
Christians tolerated under Emperor Gordian III

244
Christians favored under Emperor Philip the Arabian

251
Cyprian’s Unity of the Catholic Church

254
Death of Origen

303
Diocletian orders burning of Christian books and churches

312
Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity

313
Edict of Milan establishes official toleration of Christianity

325
Council of Nicea

336
Death of Constantine

354
Birth of Augustine

367
Athanasius lists all 27 books of NT

379
Basil the Great dies

380
Christianity made official religion of Roman Empire

381
Council of Constantinople

386
Augustine converts to Christianity

389
Gregory of Nazianzus dies

395
Gregory of Nyssa dies

c. 400
Jerome’s Vulgate (translation of the Greek Bible into Latin)

407
John Chrysostom dies

411
Council of Carthage condemns Donatists

417
Pope Innocent I condemns Pelagianism

420
Death of Jerome

430
Death of Augustine

431
Council of Ephesus

451
Council of Chalcedon

787
Second Council of Nicea

950
Olga of Russia converts to Christianity

1054
Great Schism between East and West

1093
Anselm becomes Archbishop of Canterbury

1095
Council of Clermont: Pope Urban II proclaims First Crusade

1098
Crusaders take Antioch from Turks

1099
Crusaders recapture Jerusalem from Turks

1122
Concordat of Worms

1141
Peter Abelard condemned

1144
Fall of Edessa (crusader state)

1187
Fall of Jerusalem to Turks

1215
Fourth Lateran Council

1309
“Babylonian Captivity” (until 1377)

1337
Hundred Years’ War (until 1453)

1378
Great Western Schism (until 1423)

1409
Council of Pisa

1413-14
Lollard rebellion

1415
Council of Constance. Martyrdom of Jan Hus.

1420
Crusade against Hussites

1431
Joan of Arc martyred

1431-49
Council of Basel

1438-45
Council of Ferrara-Florence

1453
Fall of Constantinople to Turks

1478
Spanish Inquisition founded by Ferdinand and Isabella

1483
Birth of Martin Luther

1492
Expulsion of Jews from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella

1505
Luther becomes a monk

1517
Luther posts 95 Theses

1521
Luther excommunicated

1530
Augsburg Confession

1534
Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy

1536
Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion

1541
Colloquy of Regensburg

1555
Peace of Augsburg

1559
Elizabeth I’s Act of Uniformity

1590
Michelangelo completes the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome

1609
Baptist Church founded by John Smyth

1611
King James (Authorized) Version of the Bible produced

1729
Beginnings of Methodism, led by John Wesley

1738
John Wesley feels his “heart strangely warmed” during a reading of Luther’s preface to Romans on Aldersgate Street in London

1775
American Wars of Independence begin

1783
America wins independence from Britain

1793
Louis XVI executed

1797
Second Awakening begins

1798
Pope Pius VI is prisoner of France

1799
Schleiermacher writes Speeches

1801
Cane Ridge Revival

1804
Napoleon becomes emperor

1807
Hegel writes Phenomenology of the Spirit

1808
French occupy Rome

1810
Mexico wins independence

1812-14
British-American War

1814
Reorganization of the Jesuits

1816
American Bible Society established

1822
Schleiermacher writes Christian Faith

1826
American Society for the Promotion of Temperance founded

1830
Joseph Smith produces Book of Mormon

1834
Spanish Inquisition officially abolished

1838
Abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean

1841
David Livingstone to Africa

1845
Methodists and Baptists split over the issue of slavery

1846
Pope Pius IX (until 1878)

1854
Dogma of Immaculate Conception of Mary

1859
Darwin publishes Origin of the Species

1861-65
American Civil War

1861
Presbyterians divide over the issue of slavery

1869
First Vatican Council

1870
Dogma of Papal Infallibility

1872
Moody begins preaching

1875
Mary Baker Eddy writes Science and Health

1882
Neitzsche declares “God is dead”

1895
Five Fundamentals

1900
Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams

1906
Azusa Street revival

1908
Henry Ford introduces the Model T

1910
World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh

1914
Assemblies of God founded

1914-18
World War I

1917
Russian Revolution

1919
Prohibition passed into law

1925
Scopes “Monkey” trial

1932
Barth’s Church Dogmatics

1939
Hitler invades Poland and sparks WWI

1945
Nag Hammadi Library discovered in Egypt;
US drops atomic bombs on Japan

1947
India wins independence from U.K.

1948
World Council of Churches founded

1950
Papal encyclical Humani generis

1956
First issue of Christianity Today

1960
Birth control pill approved by FDA

1961
First human in space
Papal encyclical Mater et Magistra

1962-65
Second Vatican Council

1963
MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech

1968
Papal encyclical Humanae vitae

1969
First man on the moon

1971
Intel introduces the microprocessor

1973
Roe vs. Wade

1987-88
Televangelist scandals

1989
First woman ordained in an apostolic-succession church (the Protestant Episcopal church). Fall of the Berlin Wall.

1997
Birth of the internet

Sources

1. Earle E. Cairns, Christianity Through the Centuries (Zondervan, 1996).
2. Justo Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity (Prince Press, 1999).
3. Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christianity, Vol. I: to A.D. 1500 (4th ed., Prince Press, 2000).
4. Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service, 2004.

http://ministries.tliquest.net/theology/apocryphas/nt/

http://www.maplenet.net/~trowbridge/NT_Hist.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Christianity

http://www.internationalbibles.com/catalog/services/versions.htm