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╇
i

Feeding the Flock

╇
iii

i

Feeding the Flock

The Foundations of Mormon Thought:
Church and Praxis
Terryl L. Givens

1
 1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Oxford University Press 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Givens, Terryl, author.
Title: Feeding the flock : the foundations of Mormon thought : church and
praxis / Terryl L. Givens.
Description: Oxford, New York : Oxford University Press, [2017] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016042506 (print) | LCCN 2016043760 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780199794935 (cloth) | ISBN 9780199795000 (updf ) |
ISBN 9780190657864 (oso) | ISBN 9780190657857 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Sacraments—Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. |
Sacraments—Mormon Church. | Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints—Doctrines. | Mormon Church—Doctrines.
Classification: LCC BX8655 .G58 2017 (print) | LCC BX8655 (ebook) |
DDC 289.3/32—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016042506

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
v

To Philip and Deborah

How good and glorious it has seemed unto me, to find pure and holy friends, who are faithful, just,
and true.
–​ Joseph Smith
╇
vi

i

Contents

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi

1. What Is the Church, and Why Is One Necessary? 1

2. Latter-╉day Saint Covenant Theology 14

3. Sacramental Theology 45

4. Priesthood: Authority, Power, and the Mysteries of Godliness 72

5. Ecclesiastical Structure 122

6. Sacramental Ordinances—╉Salvific 144

7. Sacramental Ordinances—╉Non-╉Salvific 197

8. Spiritual Gifts 213

9. Scripture 257

10. Worship 279

11. Boundary Maintenance and Discipline 295

Source Abbreviations 315

Notes 319
Index 397

vii
ix

Preface

i
In volume 1 of my history of Mormon thought I chose “Wrestling the Angel” to
designate the metaphorical struggle to articulate in human terms the key ideas per-
taining to the nature of God, the human, and their relationship. (I use “Mormon”
as a simpler and interchangeable term for “the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day
Saints,” the formal designation for the faith tradition.) In this, the second volume,
I chose “Feeding the Flock,” as it is the metaphorical expression the resurrected
Savior used to refer to the work of the ministry, executed in and through his church
by his delegated servants.1 I intend those words to convey the general scheme of
organization, offices, authority, and practices that God designed to bring to fruition
his ultimate intentions for the human family discussed in that first volume. This is
a book, simply put, about the church, or what religious scholars call ecclesiology.
In referring to a history of Mormon practice, I do not mean to present a sociology
of Mormonism, or a history of Mormon culture. I mean only to contrast the study
of Mormon theology, or Mormon thought as a system of ideas and doctrines, with
Mormon ecclesiology, that is, the study of how those ideas and doctrines have been
formally implemented through an ecclesiastical structure and modes of worship. In
one volume, I cannot hope to cover the entire range of the institutional church, his-
torically or organizationally. So while important, many aspects of the institutional
church (like auxiliary organizations and educational systems) I have had to neglect

ix
xi Preface

or pass over lightly as being less central to the study of ecclesiology as historically
understood.
The same caveats apply to this volume as they did with the first. I make no claims to
either a comprehensive or authoritative presentation and have selected for treatment
those aspects of Mormon ecclesiology that strike me as most useful in answering
the fundamental question of ecclesiology: what did Joseph Smith and his successors
understand the purpose of the church to be, and how did the resultant structure and
forms of practice evolve over time?
Mormon ecclesiology in my experience has proven more complicated to arrange
topically than theology, because of the complex interconnectedness of all the parts:
sacraments are inseparable from questions of authority; authority has both insti-
tutional and soteriological roles; in addition, authority is both evidenced in and a
precondition for certain spiritual gifts; some spiritual gifts are hard to distinguish
from sacraments (healing, for example); some sacraments are central to temple the-
ology but some are part of the order of worship (the Lord’s Supper), and some are
performed independently. A patriarch holds a priesthood office, but his work is to
pronounce blessings, which are a form of sacrament. Seventies formed part of the
church hierarchy, became a ward-level priesthood office, then reverted to part of
the leadership structure, and so forth. Therefore, liberal use of the index may be the
best way to ensure that one has access to all the angles from which a given topic may
be discussed in this volume. For readability, most spelling from original sources has
been modernized.
xi

Acknowledgments

i
Many of the questions this volume tackles were raised in the Mormon Scholars
Foundation Summer Seminar of 2015, “Organizing the Kingdom: Priesthood,
Church Government, and the Forms of LDS Worship.” I thank the donors of the MSF
for their support and the participants for their contributions. Several scholars have
reviewed various drafts of this work and made helpful criticisms, especially Matthew
Bowman, Benjamin Huff, Michael MacKay, Gerald Smith, and Joseph Spencer. Jed
Woodworth’s critiques have been crucial, and Jonathan Stapley’s work on priest-
hood has been invaluable. A work of this nature would be much more difficult if
not for the world-​class editing of the Joseph Smith Papers editors, making available
to this generation an unprecedented bonanza of readily accessible source materials,
and I am grateful to the entire team of editors for their contributions to the field of
Mormon Studies. I also express appreciation to the University of Richmond Faculty
Research Committee and the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship
for generous support in bringing this project to fruition. Finally, a thank you to my
colleagues at Harris Manchester College, Oxford University, where I completed the
manuscript as a Visiting Fellow in 2016.

xi
╇
xi

Feeding the Flock

1

1
What Is the Church, and Why Is One Necessary?

i
In Mormon theology, human anthropology is traceable to a premortal
sphere in which God the Eternal Father invited into eternal relationship with
himself and a Heavenly Mother an innumerable host of those immortal human
spirits by which they found themselves surrounded.1 Rather than forming humans
for their own glory, the Divine Parents choose to nurture these souls toward god-
liness so that these their children, women and men, “might have joy.”2 It is at this
moment, before the earth is created or the first person formed, that grace—​God’s
freely given offering of love—​irrupts into the universe. In a seventeenth-​century
sermon, the English Puritan Thomas Watson asks, “What is the chief end of man,”
and replies, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God.”3 A historian of theology writes
that according to the great American divine Jonathan Edwards, God “always acts
for his own glory and honor. Why did God create anything outside himself ? …
God’s only motive was self-​g lory.”4 The first lesson of the Catholic Baltimore
Catechism asked, “Why did God make you?” The answer: “God made me to know
him, to love him, and to serve him.”5 One of the most popular preachers of the
twenty-​first century writes, “You were made for God’s glory.”6 Mormon scripture
challenges such orthodoxy, asserting, on the contrary, that humans were not cre-
ated to serve as instruments of God’s glory but that he has made it his project
and purpose to create the conditions for our happiness, by bringing “to pass the
immortality and eternal life of man.”7

1
2i Feeding the Flock

God, being perfectly and supremely joyful, wished the same condition to be
shared by the human race and made provision—​at his unfathomable personal
cost—​for this to be so. Embodiment for billions of spirits, the travails of mortal-
ity, and the educative experiences of pain and pleasure, dissolution, and death—​all
are orchestrated to effect the eventual incorporation of these numberless multitudes
into a celestial family. Full communion with God, partaking of the divine nature
by immersion in an eternal web of loving relationships, is the purpose and project
of human existence. A mortal sphere exposing humans to the formative crucible of
experiences and choices defines as much as refines our nature and propels the pro-
cess onward. The crowning culmination is achieved when sanctified individuals are
assimilated into eternal union with each other and with heavenly parents, in a divine
family. Such ends are achieved through belief in God and his providence, and faith
in an atoning sacrifice of God the Son that makes repentance, sanctification, and
resurrection possible. This is the fundamental framework of Mormon thought.
The contrast with orthodox conceptions of human existence and redemption is
profound. “God’s purpose and goal in redemption,” writes one religious historian,
“is to reverse the sin, corruption and death introduced into humanity by Adam.”8
Mormons, on the other hand, do not see God’s primary work as recuperative or
restorative but as progressive and additive. They see the Fall as part of God’s plan
from the beginning, a prelude to a mortal experience that is educative, formative,
and ennobling, linking an eternal, premortal past with post-​resurrection future.
As Smith would say in one of his last sermons, at some moment in a distant, pri-
meval past, “God Himself found Himself in the midst of spirits and glory. Because
He was greater He saw proper to institute laws whereby the rest, who were less
in intelligence, could have a privilege to advance like Himself and be exalted with
Him.”9 This conception of a covenant that precedes the world’s existence, wherein
a divine being (and a feminine divine companion) invites humans to participate in
the divine nature and enter into eternal relation with them, with that human fam-
ily reciprocally committing to the terms and conditions of such an outcome, is the
governing paradigm of Mormon soteriology. This is the covenantal relationship
that underlies and encompasses all other covenants. Smith is a long time unfolding
the full cosmic narrative, but he finds the principal impetus with his translation of
the Book of Mormon and its radical reworking of covenant theology, aided by rev-
elations in the months following that detail premortal councils and human partici-
pation in the grand design. Mormon ecclesiology is best understood—​indeed, it
can only be understood—​insofar as it is situated within this underlying covenantal
framework.
Why, we might ask to begin with, is a church even necessary in such a bold
scheme? A world of independent agents, exercising faith and living virtuous lives as
3

What Is the Church? j3

motivated or drawn by the clarion call of a heavenly love is a powerful point of depar-
ture. The comforting, fortifying, and instructing divine Spirit guides in the journey.
Is an actual church necessary in the process? Certain functions of the church are
neatly laid out in the letter to the Ephesians: ministering, edifying, and teaching
until the imitation of Christ is fully achieved.10 But is the church thus alluded to
essential and indispensable or merely helpful? “Without religion,” one literary char-
acter claims, “you cannot make the will equal to its tasks.”11 As fallen, self-​interested
creatures with “willing spirits but weak flesh,” outside aid is critical.12 A church, from
this perspective, serves as spiritual reinforcement, a catalyst or facilitator of moral
betterment. In a related way, the collectivist model of public worship and religious
affiliation can provide a kind of spiritual as well as material synergy, transforming
the good intentions of solitary efforts into both personal transformation and public
impact. Not only are “two or three … gathered in [his] name” the guarantee of
God’s presence,13 but large-​scale dilemmas require concerted action that charities
and orders and congregations moving in concert are better prepared to address than
individuals. But are such rationales sufficient explanation?
At the same time, institutional religion comes at a cost. Once a formal institution
enters the religious picture, a critical Rubicon in the call of faith has been crossed, and
a whole series of dichotomies complicate the life of discipleship. Belief and practice,
orthodoxy and orthopraxis, inward faith and outward performance, private con-
science and organizational affiliation—​such distinctions are useful labels, organiz-
ing categories we have come to employ in the study of religion. These dichotomies,
however, can also suggest a rupture that portends a crisis, if not a catastrophic fail-
ure, of the animating imperative at the core of Christianity: pure and uncalculating
love, leading to the holiness that fits one for full communion with God. The moral
philosopher and theologian Kenneth Kirk considers that the institutionalization of
the Christian church itself threatens to undermine its own avowed purpose, as faith,
yearning, love, and loyalty become overwhelmed by forms, rules, and procedures.
Such a dilemma manifested itself almost immediately in the Christian church, he
believes: “with the Apostolic Fathers … the actions and dispositions are [already]
wholly confused,—​actions right and wrong pushing their way more and more into
the foreground of the code, and obedience and conformity taking the place of
enthusiastic loyalty as the basis of Christian life.”14 The problem, in other words,
is that moving from spontaneous love of God as a natural response, to creeds and
practices as prescribed belief and performance, would seem to turn religion into
the self-​conscious pursuit of a goal. Selfless response becomes self-​interested quest.
“If my aim in life is to attain a specified standard,” notes Kirk, “or to live according
to a defined code, I am bound continually to be considering myself, and measuring
the distance between my actual attainment and the ideal. It is impossible by such
4i Feeding the Flock

a road to attain the self-​forgetfulness which we believe to be the essence of sanc-

tity.”15 One remedy suggests itself: “How is disinterestedness, unselfishness, to be
attained? Once grant that moralism, or formalism, cannot bring the soul nearer to
it, and there remains only one way—​the way of worship. Worship lifts the soul out
of its preoccupation with itself and its activities, and centers its aspirations entirely
on God.”16
Worship is, as James White notes, “an exasperatingly difficult word to pin down.”17
Luther saw worship in terms of communion through “prayer and the song of praise,”
Calvin saw its end as union with God, while Archbishop Thomas Cranmer said
worship was “directed to God’s glory and human rectitude.”18 In Kirk’s view, wor-
ship in its pure form is what saves us from preoccupation with self and turns our
hearts and minds upward—​enhancing a “stream of new life” that characterizes “this
primary bond set up between God and the soul.”19 Most conceptions of worship,
then, emphasize interaction, reciprocity, praise given, and God’s spirit felt, “the
glorification of God and the sanctification of humanity” in the Catholic view.20 In
what follows, I will treat the broad theme of Mormon worship in a similar way but
extending Kirk’s emphasis on how believers develop to fruition “this primary bond
set up between God and the soul.” Geoffrey Wainwright is correct that “the proper
relationship between creature and Creator is … the relationship of worship,”21
but Mormons construe this “proper relationship” rather differently from other
Christians. As I have suggested above and explicated at length elsewhere, Latter-​
day Saints interpret that bond “between God and the soul” as a literal kinship, a
version of theosis more robust and more literal than other Christian versions of the
doctrine. Given Mormonism’s reading of that bond as one that is unimpeded by an
“infinite qualitative divide,”22 worship entails adoration and praise but also the forg-
ing of an eternal, familial relationality.
In addition, worship is not a solitary act—​it is communal, an activity expressed in
solidarity with others. “To S. Paul and S. John,” notes Kirk, “it could have no other
context than that of the Church.”23 As White quotes the Russian Orthodox theolo-
gian George Florovsky, “Christian existence is essentially corporate; to be a Christian
means to be in the community.”24 Theologians like Wainwright have also empha-
sized worship’s community-​building and unifying function.25 Latter-​day Saints in
particular emphasize the communal nature of religion but as much more than an
assist to compensate for the human frailty of solitary devotion, or for purposes of
establishing communities of merely provisional duration. Mormons construe salva-
tion as eternal relationality with other human beings as well as with God, or what
Joseph Smith called a “sociality” with friends and family “coupled with glory.”26 (In
this volume, I am using salvation to refer to the Mormon conception of the highest
degree of glory, the celestial kingdom or “exaltation.” Mormons—​confusingly—​also
5

What Is the Church? j5

use the term to refer to the state that virtually the entirety of the human race will
inherit, excepting only the “sons of perdition.”)
The philosopher Charles Taylor sees secularism as following upon a great cosmic
reorientation in the Western world—╉an “anthropocentric shift,” or a substitution of
man for God at the center of ultimate concern. This anthropocentrism, he writes,
replaces theocentrism as a consequence of Enlightenment thought.27 Mormonism
refuses this either/╉or split and reconstitutes heaven as a matrix of eternal relation-
ships that are horizontal as well as vertical. Rather than transcending human rela-
tionships in a beatific vision, Mormonism sacralizes them and incorporates them
into a divine family of which God (as Eternal Father united with an Eternal Mother)
is the head. In both these ways, as celebration of God’s invitation to participate in
his heavenly family and as the work of forging a heavenly community here and now,
Mormon worship seeks to reverse the direction of religious concern from self to
other. More than this, however, the church exists as an indispensable means for
developing communities of sanctified individuals that can endure eternally. This
requires particularly robust means of shaping character and solidifying durable rela-
tionships, means that require covenants and sacraments.

The Protestant Rupture

Jesus launched true Christianity, the saying goes; humans invented churches. Such a
wry remark only has resonance among Christians in a modern age, where the value
of a formal institution through which to worship God has been called into ques-
tion. In earlier Christian eras, the indispensability of the church was too obvious to
doubt. Before the era of organized, institutional churches, religion was inseparable
from culture. The Old Testament uses the Hebrew term qahal (ἐκκλησία or ekkle-
sia in the Septuagint) to signify a convocation for civil or religious purposes. By
the New Testament era, writers employ the term ekklesia to refer most commonly
to organized congregations of Christian disciples in specific locales (“the church at
Antioch”; “the churches of Asia”), though it can also indicate a more universal body
of believers (“I will build my church”; “as Christ loved the church”).28
The basis of Israel’s religion was covenant; Jon Levenson wrote that Israel “was
called into existence at a moment in ordinary time and at a specifiable place,”29
but in other Jewish thought, God’s covenant with humankind dates to the very
creation of the heavens and the earth; “All the souls which existed from Adam
onward,” wrote Menasseh ben Israel, citing the Tanhuma, “and which will exist
until the end of the world, all these were created in the six days of creation, and
they were all in the garden of Eden.” And, he added, they were all present at Sinai
6i Feeding the Flock

and participated in the reaffirmation of the covenant. This last assertion he found
attested by the verse in Deuteronomy 29:14, “I make this covenant to those who
are standing here, and with those who are not here with us today.”30 Its earliest
biblical expression was in Abraham, where God defines his relationship with his
covenant or “chosen” people as one that is passed on hereditarily, an “uncondi-
tional” gift, “valid forever.”31
As Christianity grew out of Jewish roots, the principal mode of affiliation—​of
belonging—​continued to be covenantal. However, in the new trans-​ethnic commu-
nity and amid Christianity’s universal claims, the covenant was construed in terms of
adoption rather than inheritance, and new institutional forms with affiliation open
to all became fundamental to religious identity. This was because the church that
Jesus was seen to have inaugurated, as locus of the new covenant, became an inescap-
able conduit to the salvation believers sought, effecting the purposes enumerated in
the letter to the Ephesians: ministering, edifying, and teaching until the imitation
of Christ was fully achieved. For centuries, the most emphatic rationale the church
provided for its existence was simple and convincing; the principle “extra Ecclesiam
nulla salus” (“outside the Church there is no salvation”) was unquestioned at least
from the third century, when it was first expressed by Bishop Cyprian of Carthage.
Or, “whoever wishes to be saved, needs above all to hold the Catholic faith,” as the
Athanasian Creed put forth.32 This was thought to be the case because the Fall of
Adam immersed his posterity in a blanket condemnation from which none could
escape through their own merits.
The underlying logic of this indispensability of the church was based on notions
of divine authority, which Christ was believed to have bestowed on his apostles
and their successors, and which was employed in administering the church sacra-
ments, those “instrumental channels of God’s grace to humanity,” the indispensable
conduits through which saving power was transferred to fallen humans.33 Such sac-
raments were necessary to salvation, and only the Mother Church has the Christ-​
given authority to administer them. As the Council of Trent reaffirmed in response
to challenges to this position, those (Protestants) who claimed that sacraments
“have been instituted for the nourishing of faith alone” were profoundly wrong, and
they were anathematized accordingly. Sacraments were not merely “outward signs
of grace”; they were that, but they also “contain the grace which they signify” and
“confer that grace” on the faithful.34
With the sixteenth-​century Reformation, a major sticking point to separation
from Rome was this perceived impossibility of finding salvation outside the for-
mal church organization—​of which there was only one plausible candidate in most
eyes. Thus the objection of the Catholic cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto to Reformer John
Calvin was typical: Sadoleto “rejected the Protestant teaching of salvation by faith
7

What Is the Church? j7

alone and repeatedly emphasized the role of the institutional church.”35 A break
with the Roman Catholic Church could only be justified, in this light, by an entirely
new conceptualization of the church. Most specifically, as Horton Davies writes,
Protestants would have to redefine the “authority of the ministry and the nature
of the sacraments.”36 For the most part, Protestants redefined a church sacrament
as a sign rather than a channel of grace. “Signs and seals of the covenant of grace,”
according to the Westminster Confession; “signs” of “divine promises,” according
to Melanchthon.37 In Calvin’s most authoritative work, The Institutes, he calls sac-
raments “useful helps in fostering and confirming our faith.”38 They were not the
means of grace; Protestants came to use “sacraments” instead to refer to “those
duties we perform for the purpose of improving our minds, affecting our hearts,
and of obtaining spiritual blessings,” activities like “hearing the Gospel, reading the
Scriptures … [and] prayer.”39
For Protestants, then, faith was the determinant of salvation, a faith that relied
entirely upon the grace of Christ. But this proposition raised a critical problem. If,
as the Reformers argued, salvation was truly by grace alone, and the word of God
as a rule of faith trumped human councils or authorities, then neither the church
nor its sacraments were the exclusive mediators of salvation. (As early as the fourth
century an influential text had expressly called the bishop “the mediator between
God and you,” and another affirmed that priests are necessary “mediators between
God and humanity” in the twentieth.)40 Once this break with clerical authority
occurred, it was not unreasonable to question the need for any institutional church
at all. Initially, Reformers resisted that possibility.
Although Luther protested corruptions in the church that reached to the pope,
he nonetheless affirmed his belief that the visible church was the institution in
which that spiritual congregation could alone flourish, just as the human body is the
proper abode in which the human spirit resides.41 John Calvin at first justified his
break with Rome by claiming individuals found salvation through personal encoun-
ter with the Word, not through institutional authority. However, he, like Luther,
found it necessary to develop a rationale for the continued existence of a formally
structured church, which he had done by the 1543 revision of his Institutes.42 As a
consequence of “human ignorance, sloth, and vanity of mind,” he writes, we “stand
in need of eternal helps.” In generous “accommodation to our capacity,” therefore,
“God has provided a method by which, though widely separated, we might still draw
near to him.” However, what sounds here like merely useful assistance, a “method,”
he insists is an institution just as indispensable as ever the Catholic Church was to
its adherents. Referring to the “visible church” in particular, he declares: “beyond
the pale of the church no forgiveness of sins, no salvation, can be hoped for… . The
abandonment of the church is always fatal.”43
8i Feeding the Flock

Early Methodism shifted through various phases. Wesley came to emphasize

authority and correct doctrine less and less, though he valued his connection to
the established church; eventually he lamented that he had not preached from the
beginning that “every one who feareth God and worketh righteousness is accepted of
him.”44 The church, in this expansive vision, encompassed “all the Christians under
heaven,” or “all the persons in the universe whom God hath so called out of the
world.”45 And in his generosity, Wesley “dare[d]‌not exclude from the church catho-
lic all those congregations in which any unscriptural doctrines … are sometimes,
yea, frequently, preached.”46 However, participation in some visible church was in
his view indispensable. Not for any sacraments performed or authority represented,
but because Christians are called upon to constitute a community, a fellowship, and
summoned as they are “to live the life that is hid with Christ in God, then [we must]
take care how [we] rend the body of Christ by separating from [our] brethren.”47
Others justified more radical responses to the collapse of sacramentalism. (Five
years after launching his attack on medieval sacraments, notes Brooks Holifield,
Luther was “struggling to save the sacraments themselves.”)48 In England, for instance,
Benjamin Hoadly argued that individual “conscience” and “sincerity” trumped apos-
tolic authority and “external communion”; in so doing he ignited a debate involving
fifty churchmen and seventy-​four pamphlets in 1714 alone. Anxious fellow Protestants
correctly perceived that his argument would effectively “dissolve the Church as a
Society.”49 In America a century later, the young Abraham Lincoln drew the same
logical inference from Reformation thought as did numbers of Protestants: Lincoln
embraced the Bible but felt no need for any formal religious affiliation whatsoever. “I
am not a member of any Christian church, but I have never denied the truth of the
Scriptures.” In Nathan Hatch’s words, such reasoning in effect calls “for a Christianity
exclusively biblical that had no place for clergy, denominations, confessions or creed.
What [Lincoln and others] came to affirm was a faith drawn from the Scriptures
without human mediation.”50 The position was eminently reasonable: if essential sac-
raments administered by virtue of apostolic authority were not unequivocally requi-
site to salvation, of what necessity was any church at all?
Like other Christian thinkers, Joseph Smith did not believe the saved were
limited to one institutional church. “The church of the Lamb of God” consists
of “those who will have [the Lord] to be their God,” in the words of the Book of
Mormon, and an 1829 revelation had God declaring “whosoever repenteth and
cometh unto me, the same is my church.”51 Yet another scripture produced by Smith
held that some of “his [the Lord’s] people” include many of the righteous who co-​
exist alongside the Restored church.52 All this only makes the question even more
emphatic; why should Mormons believe the institutional church to have a vital—​
or even indispensable—​role in human salvation? Why the necessity of a formal
9

What Is the Church? j9

incorporation and organization? From Smith’s own reminiscences of his youth, it is
clear that the first function that he sought in religion was spiritual and emotional,
and it is to those motives that we may trace the origins of the system he would shape.
His personal faith journey gives important historical context to Mormonism’s
foundations in covenant theology, even as it establishes an enduring theme in LDS
ecclesiology—╉the quest for assurance of salvation.

Anxiety, Certitude, and Covenant Theology

The intense human craving for relief from the fears of death and damnation has
given rise to many cataclysms and innovations in the history of Christianity. In the
Catholic soteriology, assurance of salvation can only come when an imperfect faith
is supplemented, as Adolf von Harnack long ago characterized the principle, “by the
doctrinal authority of the Church on the one side and by the Sacramental Church
institution on the other, and yet in such a way that it is obtained only approxi-
mately.”53 In other words, salvation comes from belonging to the true church and
receiving its sacraments by authorized administrators. Those conditions provide
a degree of assurance that may fall short of absolute certitude but is as close to a
guarantee as is possible in this world. Providing such assurance was a conspicuous
function of the church. It may be true that Church Fathers professed a theological
rationale for the indispensability of the church to human salvation; but the church
had also provided a critical psychological role in assuaging a human fear of the
hell that perpetually threatened in the background. That role was radically under-
mined with the Reformation critique of sacramental efficacy. Without those visible
instruments of salvation, how does one know one is saved? Clearly, in light of the
Reformation critique of Catholicism, the doctrine of the church would itself have to
change if it were to maintain its relevance and value. The church would have to find
an alternate means of satisfying the human craving for an antidote to the anxiety of
damnation, and a firm theological basis as well.
Institutional abuses and purgatorial practices aside, Luther’s unease with Catholic
doctrine itself was precipitated in large measure because of the spiritual insecurity
he found in his life of monastic commitment. No matter how devoutly he observed
the rules and commandments of his faith and his order, he found himself incapable
of confidence in his spiritual standing and future. “My situation was that, although
an impeccable monk, I stood before God as a sinner troubled in conscience, and
I had no assurance that my merit would assuage him.”54 “Assurance” emerges here
as a critical preoccupation in Luther’s mind, and it will assume paramount impor-
tance in the theological systems of most Protestant forms that follow in his wake.
10 i Feeding the Flock

Luther found Catholic sacramentalism insufficient as a basis for spiritual peace. And
as Protestants came to deny that salvation comes through sacraments administered
by an elect class of mediators, they entirely demolished the principal hedge against
the personal dread of damnation that had for so many centuries been a constant in
the Christian mind. If innate guilt and depravity are our natural inheritance and
eternal torment our fitting destiny, then where is the balm of Gilead to be found,
if not in Mother Church and her saving sacraments and commandments, faithfully
upheld? Protestants had to necessarily supply a new answer to the age-​old question:
what constitutes the certitudo salutis (personal assurance of salvation), and how is it
to be secured? The fear of damnation, soon reinforced by Calvinist preaching that
emphasized human depravity and a fully merited eternal punishment, drove thou-
sands and eventually millions to seek spiritual relief. A popular eighteenth-​century
schoolbook, Collection of English Prose and Verse captured the religious terrors that
had become increasingly normalized. One writer in the anthology agonized over
“the vast uncertainty I am struggling with … the force and vivacity of my appre-
hensions; every doubt wears the face of horror, and would perfectly overwhelm me,
but for some faint gleams of hope, which dart across the tremendous gloom. What
tongue can utter the anguish of a soul suspended between the extremes of infinite
joy or eternal misery… . I tremble and shudder.”55
The solution to this hunger for assurance, Luther held, was to repose trust in God’s
faithfulness rather than in his own. When Paul said “the just shall live by his faith,”
Luther took this to mean not that we live in a constant state of hopeful uncertainty.
The power of faith did not for him refer to a human capacity for or exercise of sim-
ple trust. Rather, the righteous should live by confidence in Christ’s promises. And
given the fact that the object of that faith is certain and steadfast, being Jesus Christ
himself, his reliability was of such perfection as to ground incontestably the confi-
dence we repose in him. Our faith can relieve us of the purgatory of uncertainty,
not because our mind is firm but because our foundation is Christ’s faithfulness, not
ours. The object, not the practitioner, of faith endows faith with its saving power but
also confers its fruits: confidence and spiritual tranquility. “I grasped that the justice
of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies
us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn.”56 Luther’s self-​diagnosis for
spiritual anxiety—​and the prescribed cure—​resonated through much of the conti-
nent and across the channel.
As the idea would be canonized by Anglicans in the Westminster Confession,
“such as truly believe in the Lord Jesus, and love him in sincerity, endeavoring to
walk in all good conscience before him, may in this life be certainly assured that they
are in a state of grace” (emphasis mine). Furthermore, “this certainty is not a bare
conjectural and probable persuasion, … but an infallible assurance of faith.”57 And
11

What Is the Church? j 11

this assurance, or “calling and election made sure,” is one that all may obtain “with-
out extraordinary revelation.”58 To the Protestants, writes one historian of theology,
“the test of the Christian was not that he was so living as to secure the promise, but
that he had experienced in himself the certain conviction that the promise was inde-
fectibly his. This conviction—​the ‘assurance’ of a status that cannot be lost—​… is
the palladium of orthodox Protestantism.”59
This assurance the church offered, made available through the grace of Christ,
took the form of a highly developed theology—​Protestant covenant theology. As
dissenters migrated to America especially, in the words of John von Rohr, “the often
anguished Puritan search for personal assurance of salvation found substantial
assuagement in covenantal certainty.”60 The general view was that God had estab-
lished a covenant of works with Adam (the covenant made with Moses at Sinai,
wrote Charles Buck’s editor, was “merely a republication” of the original).61 In the
aftermath of Adam’s (and Israel’s) failure to fulfill his obligation of perfect obedi-
ence, God made provision for a new covenant—​the covenant of grace, inaugu-
rated by Christ’s atoning sacrifice. Covenant theology was derived from the New
Testament’s express differentiation of Christ’s sacrifice and the gospel it inaugurated
from the Mosaic code and sacrifices which preceded it. Jesus himself referred to the
Eucharistic wine as emblem of a new covenant,62 and the author of Hebrews called
Christ the “mediator of the new covenant,” the “law [being] only a shadow of the
good things to come.”63
Covenant theology continued to evolve in the eighteenth century. The most
substantive reworking of the idea would be in response to the emphasis of Jacob
Arminius on the role of human agency in salvation. For Arminius, “inclusion in the
covenant of grace is not determined solely by God but by the free response of the
human person to God’s imitative in Christ.”64 Herein, the door is again opened to
that very anxiety that covenant theology was meant to alleviate. With John Wesley,
the whole program of salvational assurance is once again thrown into radical doubt.
In his “Call to Backsliders,” Wesley obliterated any hope of an abiding spiritual secu-
rity: even those “sanctified” in “the blood of the covenant” may indeed “fall away
from sanctifying grace.”65 Is, then, no greater assurance possible? A limited one at
best, opines Wesley. Like God’s pledge to Abraham, the archetypal covenant, “though
everlasting, was conditional.”66 Wesley’s critique reveals how unstable the solution of
the certitudo salutis, or assurance of salvation, had become in the years leading up to
Joseph Smith. It is no overstatement to say the religious world of antebellum America
continued to be the story of personal quests for salvational assurance writ large. And
covenant theology was the framework in which seekers found and secured that certi-
tudo salutis. Covenant theology is the framework on which Mormonism, too, erects
its ecclesiology—​but it is a covenant theology radically transformed.
12 i Feeding the Flock

Luther, Wesley, Smith

Mormonism’s beginnings connect the movement’s founder—╉and founding vision—╉

to Protestant predecessors in crucial ways. For many decades, Latter-╉day Saints
(LDS) believers have dated the origins of Mormonism to the fourteen-╉year old
Smith’s remarkable theophany in an upstate New York grove of trees. Recent histori-
ans have pointed out that the event was of an almost exclusively personal nature.67 In
actual fact, both the historical revisionists and the Mormon laity are correct; Smith’s
experience in the upstate New York woods in 1820 was an intensely personal experi-
ence that neither involved nor intimated any commission to inaugurate a new reli-
gious tradition. At the same time, the particular motives and outcomes behind that
spring theophany situate Smith firmly within a long-╉standing Protestant narrative,
and connect the Mormon church’s founding to an ongoing history of anxiety about
salvation and covenant theology—╉just as Lutheranism and Wesleyanism were.
The typical Protestant conversion story occurring at the intersection of salvational
anxiety and covenant theology was of the form we saw above with Martin Luther—╉
and it appears again in the conversion of John Wesley. He found his spiritual quest
one of perpetual anxiety until a decisive moment when, he recorded, “I felt that I did
trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me, that he had
taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”68 Out of
Wesley’s personal experience and entrepreneurial religiosity, Methodism was born.
Joseph Smith’s personal journey and religion-╉making career began in very similar
circumstances (and indeed, Smith was long inclined toward Methodism and greatly
influenced by it). The cause of his prayerful quest was—╉as the case with countless
others before and since—╉spiritual unease. “I [had] become convicted of my sins,”
he recorded of his early adolescence, “therefore I cried unto the Lord for mercy for
there was none else to whom I could go.” (His later words, spoken out of personal
experience, tie him even more closely to the pattern of Protestant terror about one’s
prospects of salvation: “There is no pain so awful as the pain of suspense.”)69 With
telling language, Oliver Cowdery, in his account of Smith’s First Vision (compiled,
he said with Smith’s assistance), referred specifically to the boy’s yearning for “that
assurance which the Lord Jesus has so freely offered” (emphasis in original).70 In the
ensuing 1820 theophany, Smith heard the sought-╉after words that firmly place him
within the tradition of the Protestant conversion narrative: “Joseph my son thy sins
are forgiven thee.”71
The divine words of comfort, however, proved to be no enduring balm; forgiveness
of sins gave no lasting assurance of salvation. Three years later Smith was haunted
anew by the specter of damnation, and eternal torment again plagued his mind. So
once more “I betook myself to prayer and supplication,” seeking “a manifestation of
13

What Is the Church? j 13

my state and standing before him.”72 Smith’s spiritual odyssey was to this point but
one example of the familiar pattern: an anxious individual, conscience-​plagued by
introspection and chastened by hellfire sermons, seeking solace and tokens of grace.73
However, Smith’s case was complicated to some extent by the fact that remedies
available to the spiritual heirs of Puritanism were not available to him. By personal
inclination on the one hand and Methodist influence on the other, he was averse to
the two preconditions of Puritan covenantal theology: “piety and predestination.”
Smith was famously disinclined to both evidence and claims of personal piety. Three
years after his First Vision he lapsed into “sins and follies,” and later frankly admitted,
“I am not so much of a christian as many suppose I am.”74 Months later, he repeated
the point: “I do not want you to think that I am very righteous, for I am not.”75 At
the same time, his early partiality to Methodism equally rendered any Calvinist ver-
sion of covenant assurance impossible. “I abhor the doctrine of predestination,”76
thundered Wesley, and Smith followed suit: “God did not elect or predestinate.”77
However, on the occasion of Smith’s second spiritual quest, something more
durable resulted from this heavenly encounter than a transient absolution from sin.
This second vision, which Smith described as a visitation from the angel Moroni,
laid the foundation for the production of the Book of Mormon, and it was to the
receipt of this record that Smith dated his ministry.78 This record—​and the church
that arose out of its pages—​were both consequences of Smith’s personal quest for
salvational assurance, and both satisfy that quest in a manner analogous to the cer-
titudo salutis fashioned by the Protestant theologians. In his project of Restoration,
Smith effectively reworks the Protestant model of the covenant of grace—​appro-
priating the language, modifying the form, and accomplishing the same ends. The
theology Smith developed supplied an emotional and spiritual surrogate for the
consoling balm of that covenant framework—​one with a language familiar to a
nineteenth-​century Protestant audience—​and it would effect the same assurance,
without relying upon either piety or predestination. The Book of Mormon, subse-
quent revelations, and Smith’s rhetoric of restoration were all replete with allusions
to and explications of God’s covenant with Israel. The Book of Mormon in particu-
lar served to radically reconstitute covenant theology: it replaced its dichotomies of
old and new, law and grace, historic and spiritual, with an unparalleled synthesis of
them all, even as it exploited and literalized the earliest conceptions of covenantal
history to create a people with a rare spiritual cohesion; and it provided a concrete
nexus for experiential religion that was a remarkably successful surrogate for the
covenant of grace, channeling as it does a comparable effect of salvational assur-
ance. Most important, in the newly reconstituted covenant theology that emerges
from the Book of Mormon we find the outlines of a comprehensive rationale for the
church that Smith organized immediately thereafter.
 2
Latter-╉day Saint Covenant Theology

i
The Book of Mormon—╉“The New Covenant”

One contemporary remembered Joseph Smith relating a crucial detail about his
First Vision: according to Levi Richards, Smith said that on that occasion, the Lord
had confirmed to him that “all the sects” were “wrong, & that the Everlasting cov-
enant was broken.”1 That phrase—╉the everlasting covenant—╉became central to
Smith’s understanding of his prophetic calling and the massive project of “restora-
tion” to which he devoted his life. Translating the Book of Mormon, Smith found
its prophets confirming that “many covenants of the Lord” had been corrupted or
removed from the biblical text.2 When Smith published the Book of Mormon seven
years after Moroni’s first visitation, the scripture’s title page heralded a new version
of covenant theology, with an emphatic declaration of salvational assurance: the
Book of Mormon’s very purpose, its final editor tells readers on the title page itself,
is “to show unto the remnant of the House of Israel that they are not cast off forever.”
In fact, in an 1832 pronouncement Smith records the Lord’s reference to the Book of
Mormon as itself “the new covenant.”3 So how does the Book of Mormon reconsti-
tute Christian understanding of covenant theology?
Protestant covenant theology is predicated on the radical opposition between
the old and the new. As outlined above, the premise of covenant theology is that
the original covenant given the human race in the Garden of Eden was a covenant
of works, of obedience. But disobedience on Adam and Eve’s part ruptured their
14
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