Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!usc!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: wcsa@cbnewsc.att.com Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: The Mormon Religion Message-ID: Date: 30 Aug 90 04:21:30 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories - Indian Hill West - Naperville, IL Lines: 77 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article , timh@linus.uucp (Tim Hoogasian) writes: > (sorry for the non-attribution. it was lost during the edit session.) >>The Journal of Discourses is not and has not ever been accepted as LDS >>doctrine, further, just because an apostle or prophet says something >>does not make it doctrine, for it up to the membership of the church >>to pray about the "revelation" for the truthfulness of it, before we >>can sustain it as doctrine. Whenever I begin to see non-mormons quote from things like the _Journal of Discourses_, without knowning exactly what the JD was, I want to burst out laughing. So before anyone else starts quoting away with the assumption that anything contained in the JD is authorized, consider the following: The JD was a periodical that ran for some twenty-five years (give or take a few years). It was not started up by the LDS Church, rather it was begun by a few Mormon entrepreneurs (mainly Issac Watts). At the time most Mormons actually resided in England not (gasp!) in the Utah Territory, so these entrepreneurs had the great idea, why not follow the mormon GAs (General Authorities) around, take down their remarks as they spoke to various groups of Mormons in the Utah Territory, and publish their remarks in England in a periodical format, hence the title _Journal of Discourses_. This was possible, for the first time for Mormons, because Issac Watts and a few of his fellow entrepreneurs had been trained in rapido writing, a forerunner to Pitman's shorthand. And so they began to follow GAs around, take down their remarks, and send them to England for publication. Up to this time, when sermons were recorded, they were usually reconstructed from several reporters who took them down in long hand. Hence the number of sermons we have from pre-JD days is rather low. What's so amusing is to see the type of talks they decided to publish. Frankly, you don't sell subscriptions quickly by publishing a series of devotional type sermons, so Watts and his fellow entrepreneurs purposely selected the most speculative remarks of all to reproduce. Just flip open the first volume and you'll see what I mean. The very first talk is by one of the Pratt brothers about what he thinks life in the spirit world (after death, but before the resurrection) is like, and so on, and so forth. Frankly, the first volumes read, sometimes, like one of those LDS priesthood secessions where the lesson breaks down and everyone begins speculating wildly. After about five or six years the project was in the red and there was some internal conflict among the staff of the JD, so the LDS Church took it over and continued the publication, however, they became a little more selective about what was contained. Of course, most anti-mormon writers love to quote the first few volumes, but seem quite unaware of the status of the first volumes among the LDS. >now, you're telling us that (for instance) Apostle Bruce McConkie's >*very* interesting condemnation of the seeking of a personal relation- >ship with Christ, as a *heresy*, might not be necessarily "correct"? Bruce R. McConkie was always such a controversal fellow. Everywhere he went things got HOT. For instance, he wrote an encyclopedia-like work on mormonism called _Mormon Doctrine_, but his first edition was recalled on order of the leading GAs because of certain "inaccuracies." For a while, because the the controversal nature of _Mormon Doctrine_ an official policy limiting publications by GAs was seriously contemplated. For the rest of his life, McConkie was forced to revise and re-edit _Mormon Doctrine_ (each succeeding edition is different) until even he wished that he had never started the project in the first place. While one may criticize his "personal relationship with Christ" talk, which, BTW, upset alot of mormons (including myself), it is a little incomplete to stop with that. McConkie seemingly reversed himself shortly after said "talk" and you will find that for the remainder of his life, he seemed to be involved in a project to rectify the incorrect impressions that his remarks had provoked, ie. his _Mortal Messiah_ series on the life of Christ. -- Willard C. Smith att!iwsgw!wcsa wcsa@iwsgw.att.com "It's life, Captain, but not as we know it."