Review: First Principles and Ordinances

First Principles and Ordinances: The Fourth Article of Faith in Light of the Temple
Samuel M. Brown
Provo, Utah: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2014.

Joseph Smith was born into the Second Great Awakening. Gravitating to Methodist preaching, he ranked it above his other experience. Visions and golden plates prompted a New Covenant, born in April 1830. At first the New Covenant looked for a place in the landscape of antebellum Protestant thought and doctrine but gradually that seeking turned to renewal and rethinking. Mormonism moved from the American individualism that played over the billions of pages of Protestant imprints and wrote a new way of seeing the ancient. It didn’t simply try to restore (unsuccessfully) the all things in common of Jerusalem’s Acts. It wrote a story of ritual and liturgy that made family of believers and eternal friends of family.

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Release of the Final Volume in the Journals Series, Joseph Smith Papers

[Cross-Posted as BCC]

Capturing Joseph Smith on paper has been a goal of Mormon church historians for almost two hundred years. First efforts involved scribal minutes of church meetings, recording revelations and commandments that fell from Smith’s lips, and keeping a history of the early church. Those early efforts went to writing a canonical faith promoting history, one that steered the internal dialogue of Mormonism for more than a century. The primary sources that supported that faithful dialogue were largely under wraps. Why would anyone be interested?