Category: LDS Church History

Joseph Fielding Smith, 2 Nephi 2:22, and “Death Before the Fall” in Church History

February 4, 2024 /

As many of my readers may know, President Joseph Fielding Smith (1876-1972) considered evolution not just incorrect, but devilish; he believed scripture taught a young earth, with no death of any kind anywhere before the fall of Adam c. 4000 BC.  His key scriptural evidence was 2 Nephi 2:22-25, which he cited dozens of times in books, articles, and private letters.  I want to explore and document a few related questions here.

  1. Does Smith’s understanding of this passage represent a clear and historically consistent Church position?
  2. Does Smith, in essence, overclaim?

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President Smith in 1910

The New “Answering Gospel Questions,” Part 2: Historical Background

January 7, 2024 /

To understand why some of us see these new guidelines as so significant, we need to cover some intellectual and religious history which will allow you to “read between the lines” more. And please note, I’m under time constraints and very much in stark “historian mode” here; I have not taken the time to render this more devotional; suffice to say, one can— as I do— believe fully in biblical and LDS prophets while rejecting the fundamentalist constructs often attached to them. 

Part 1: Introduction

Almost from the beginning, Latter-day Saints have operated on two loose competing paradigms of knowledge and “the world.” (I wrote a well-received paper on this for a conference in 2017; see  here for more details, including the unrevised draft.)

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The Power of Good Historiography: Or, How Joseph Fielding Smith Unwittingly Undermined Joseph Fielding Smith

August 23, 2023 /

I’m deep in my third (and final, I hope) dissertation chapter, covering the period 1960-1980. My research has always included archival work, interviews, and just generally pulling on every thread I can until the sweater unravels.

History is not merely what happened, but the stories we tell about what happened and how we tell them. Better understanding of the past can change our perception of the present, change our choices and understandings. Better history seems to have been a factor leading up to the 1978 revelation re: the priesthood/temple ban, for example. (See the long version of the Kimball biography.)

It’s also definitely the case with the Church and biological evolution. Joseph Fielding Smith told the story of evolution in the Church in the first half century in a particular way. And funny enough, it is Joseph Fielding Smith who ultimately undermines the very story he tells, leaving us instead a history that allowing much more theological openness to evolution. Continue reading

By Brigham Young University - https://archive.org/stream/banyan1911brig#page/n0/mode/1up, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49435096

Tales from the Archive: Edwin S. Hinckley and the Cross

March 5, 2023 /

I’ve been devoting the vast majority of my time to the dissertation, and haven’t posted much. But here’s a fun little tidbit.

Oftentimes in the archive, something grabs your attention. And as you acquire more and more of these things that have grabbed, you start making connections between them.

Edwin S. Hinckley was a BYU science professor at the turn of the 19th century, back when BYU was very small. He was also the favorite uncle of a young boy named Gordon B. Hinckley.

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Rough Stone Rolling

Rough Stone Rolling: Daniel 2, The Church, and Joseph Smith

November 5, 2022 /

Today we focus on Daniel 2, a vision.  The story goes like this.

In King Nebuchadnezzar’s 2nd year, he has a dream. According to Daniel 1:1-2, Daniel and friends don’t get carried off until Neb’s third year, although they’re present here. Either Neb can’t remember what it was (like many of us with our dreams) or he’s being unreasonable. Either way, he demands all his wise men tell him both the dream itself, and the interpretation. When they can’t, he wants them all killed for incompetence. Daniel hears about this and offers to interpret (like Joseph in Egypt), which he does, thus saving everyone.

The content of the dream involves a statue representing various political/national entities, and a stone cut out of the mountain, which smashes them all.

Easy enough, right?
As it turns out, the books written just on Daniel 2 could fill an entire library, arguing over what exactly it’s referring to. Continue reading

Public domain

The new Church History evolution topic essay, with commentary

June 15, 2022 /

A new Church History Topic essay on Organic Evolution appeared recently. These are not full-blown essays, like the Gospel Topics. Rather, they are meant as concise historical/conceptual summaries provided as background for the Saints volumes, not as a stand-alone lengthy exploration of a subject. You can find them linked, in footnotes, in Saints online.  I’d like to provide some notes and comments on this short background essay.

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Mormonism as Rough Stone Rolling: Towards an LDS Theology of Encountering “the World”

May 11, 2022 /

In 2017, I participated in the Maxwell Institute’s Summer Seminar, with the theme Mormonism Encounters the World and run by Philip Barlow and Teryl Givens. The seminar involves an intense few weeks of researching, workshopping, and writing. The result is a public conference of papers. Unfortunately, the papers that year were never posted onto the MI website, but WVS provided a summary here.

My paper looked briefly at the vertical relationship between Latter-day Saints and God but primarily at the horizontal relationship between Latter-day Saints and “the world.” I proposed two historical and competing models, ways of thinking about our interactions with “the world:”

  1. The “infection” model, which presupposes that Latter-day Saints received a pure intellectual inheritance of doctrinal understanding through prophets and modern scripture, which must be zealously guarded against outside influence. This model also characterizes almost all truth as “old” and static.
  2. The “quest” model, which presupposes that more “truth is out there,” and Latter-day Saints must venture out to find it, carefully weighing and “testing all things” to find what is good (per 1Th 5:21)

My paper received some very kind and enthusiastic comments, and I post the unrevised working draft here. I hope, eventually, to revisit and revise for publication, but in the meantime, enjoy.

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