From Revelation to Scripture

Introduction

From Brigham Young University’s Maxwell Institute, this is the Maxwell Institute Podcast: Faith Illuminating Scholarship

My name is Rosalynde Welch, and today I have for you an interview with Dr. Steven Harper, another in my series of conversations with our new Maxwell Institute fellows. Dr. Harper is a professor of Church History and Doctrine at Brigham Young University, and the author of many books; most recently Wrestling With the Restoration, out last year from Deseret Book. Steve will be a fellow at the Maxwell Institute for the next two years, here to work on a book about the Doctrine and Covenants for Oxford University Press. This will be the first book of its kind at a major university press, a landmark in the field. In this conversation, we talk about what it means for a revelation to become scripture, a topic theologians call “canonization.” Steve shares a view of canonization that is less a single historical event and more a social process driven by countless individuals–men and women, adults and children–who return again and again to the text as a place to hear the voice of Christ. We talk about the Restoration’s unique view of revelation and scripture: for Latter-day Saints, it’s not the earliest divine word that is privileged, but the most current–and how this changes things for historians and believers. We talk about the future of the Doctrine and Covenants in our rapidly globalizing church, where the historical context of Joseph Smith’s revelations becomes ever more remote. And Professor Harper shares some thoughts on section 132, perhaps the most difficult of sections in the Doctrine and Covenants, and how frustration can be a gateway to revelation. Please enjoy this interview with Steven C. Harper.

Interview

The 1831 Revelation Council

 
Rosalynde Welch:

Steve Harper, welcome to the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

Steven Harper:

Rosalynde, thanks for having me. It's great to be with you.

Welch:

I want to take you back in time. I want to take you back to November of 1831. Joseph Smith has just convened a council of church leaders in the Johnson farmhouse in Hiram, Ohio, and you, Steve, are a fly on the wall in that room. You're watching the events of these days. During the course of almost a week, Joseph sets the manuscript revelations before the elders and he asks them for their help in publishing them, publishing the revelations that have been written by hand. He wants to publish them into a book. Eventually, after much discussion, the council votes to publish the book, not only to publish it, but to publish 10,000 copies of this new book of revelations. Some of the elders sign a signed statement attesting to the truth of these revelations, and in fact a preface for this new volume of revelations is revealed. And Joseph comes out of these meetings determined to make some revisions and corrections to the written manuscripts of the revelations, but then excited to move ahead with the publication of these revelations.

So you're a fly on the wall. You've watched this from the beginning to the end. And what I want to know is at the end of that week of meetings and the events that happened, the determination to publish these revelations, do you consider those revelations differently now than you did at the beginning of the week? Has something definitive happened in the status of those writings?

Harper:

This is a great question, a great scenario. Thank you. I have imagined myself in just this scenario many, many times. And I'm not positive what the answer is because there's a range of possibilities. And even in the same person, there might be a range of feeling, of emotion, of thoughts, as you know well.

So it kind of depends. Am I more like my ancestor Levi Jackman? He was not there, but in August of 1835, he bore witness before a council of church members who were accepting this new and improved book of revelations as canon. He bore witness that he was present when some of those revelations were given and he knew they were from God. He was excited to put his name on record and bear witness and give his consent to a new book of scripture, a modern book of scripture, right? Original revelations given in English in his lifetime, in his presence. So I might have felt like Levi Jackman, might have been thrilled.

I might have felt though like William McClellan. McClellan thought it was really, really great too, but he also thought, you know, that the grammar's pretty rough in some of those texts. And I'm smarter than Joseph. I think I could probably do these better than him. And not only McClellan, but some of the others must have felt that way too. We don't know for sure who thought or felt what, but we know that the Lord tells them that He knows they're feeling that way in section 67. And we know from McClellan's own records that he was both in absolute awe that Joseph Smith was the Lord's revelator, had no doubt about it, because one week before this meeting you're talking about, he had asked the Lord five secret and very intimate questions and then asked Joseph to seek a revelation from the Lord without knowing the questions.

And ever afterward McClellan testified that as Joseph Smith revealed, as Joseph dictated what's now section 66 of the Doctrine and Covenants, and McClellan scribed the original manuscript. If you didn't know that revelation was given through Joseph, there's nothing in the text that would betray it. It's Jesus speaking to McClellan. Jesus says, I'm your Redeemer. He says that at the beginning and the end. And then he answers William's intimate and secret questions, questions Joseph did not even know McClellan had. And he testified ever after that Joseph was the Lord's revelator.

Then a week later, he's in this meeting you and I are talking about, and he and the others are having a conversation about revelations in language. We don't know the details of it, but we can gather from the scattered records we have that there's a dilemma, right? On the one hand, these brethren know–they're all men at the meeting, as far as we can tell–they know that these are revelations from the Lord Jesus Christ through Joseph Smith. They don't have any doubt about it. And they also know that they're about to publish to a Protestant world a new set of documents that claim to be in the first person voice of Jesus and that challenge all of the assumptions of traditional Christianity--not all of them, but many of them in profound ways. In other words, this book, if they publish it, is going to cause them a lot of trouble. It's going to make them wildly unpopular. They're going to be answering pointed questions from their neighbors for the rest of their lives.

And they're worried that the texts might not stand up to that kind of scrutiny. So I'm really interested if I were fly on the wall, I'd be interested in this dilemma. How would I, how would I come down on this dilemma? What would I decide to do about it? Would I be bashful about signing my name onto that statement of the witnesses of the Book of the Lord's commandments? Would I do like Levi Hancock did? Would I sign it in pencil and then put never to be erased afterward?

I don't know for sure what I'd do in that environment. I sure have a strong conviction now that these are revelations from Jesus Christ through Joseph Smith. And as they knew then, I can see that they're pretty rough in many ways, pretty rough texts that are going to cause a culture war and challenges galore.

So I'm not sure if I'd have the courage of my conviction or not, but it'd be a fascinating exercise.

Canonization as an Institutional, Social, and Personal Process

 
Welch:

Yeah. Well, that's really interesting to compare, sort of, Jackman on the one hand and McClellan on the other. And here we have two sort of case studies of the way that canonization is an institutional process, it's a social process and it's also a very personal process, right? Whether or not a book holds the status of scripture for me depends on whether or not I am willing to regard it as scripture, whether or not I'm willing to figuratively kind of sign my name below it.

But I wonder for somebody like Jackman, let's say, he's all in, he has a testimony of Joseph as McClellan did, but he also doesn't have qualms about this new book becoming the face of his young church to the world, to his neighbors, right? Do you think though that the process of canonization, which, it should be said, maybe we can say it started here in November of 1831, but it really wouldn't fully culminate for four more years until 1835, when the Doctrine and Covenants is published. During that time, there have been at least two separate rounds of revision by Joseph Smith and by his other scribes and associates. Of course, there was the attempt to publish the Book of Commandments, which went very wrong, in a story that many of us know, down in Jackson County with the destruction of the printing press there.

So it was a long journey from the sort of initial moment to the final culmination as a book that one can hold. But before and after that process, did the revelations have more authority? Did they have a greater binding effect on its believers? Did something change in the status of the writings themselves for the Latter-day Saints before and after canonization? Or does that process just fundamentally work differently for Latter-day Saints where we have a notion of continuing revelation, right? And that revelation can come and flow.

Harper:

This is a great question too. I think it's both. I think there's some of each there. I'm influenced here by Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Stephen Stein, both scholars who've written about this idea that you're talking about and who have said variations on, look, a text is only scripture if there's a body of believers who regard it as scripture. There might be whatever else it might be. It becomes scripture when you've got a group who says, that is my scripture. And so without that group, Joseph Smith's revelation texts are, you know, to him they're whatever he says they are, but until he gets a group behind him willing to sign on to his affirmation that these are revelations from the Savior, then there's no church, there's no canon of these revelations.

So it's a very important process, but we wouldn't want to say that that only happens in these formal meetings of it, right? The November 1831 conference, the August 1835 gathering of the whole church where Levi Jackman and others sort of ritually almost go around the room and take turns bearing their witness and then everybody, men and women, everybody who's gathered there raised their hand in consent to accept this book.

Well, before and after that, there have been a thousand individual choices that have said, “I regard these revelations as scripture.” Think of Mary Elizabeth and Caroline Rawlins, right? The story we tell of them rescuing the pages from the mob. That's an affirmation that these are sacred. And a less known part of that story is that Mary Elizabeth, at least, if not Caroline, has been sitting up evenings in her aunt and uncle's home where the leaders of the church are reading these revelations to each other, right? And she's there, she even speaks in tongues in one of these meetings. She bears her witness that these revelations are true. It's not a kind of passive, I'll rescue some pages of print, I don't know what they are, but she knows that these are revelations and she's gonna do whatever it takes.

So there's all kinds of actions like that that Latter-day Saints make all along the way where they are ascribing to the view that these texts are more than just texts, more than just words. They're the words of Christ. And Joseph Smith knows that he needs this. When he starts that November 1831 council, he understands, look, unless I've got a body of believers, I'm on my own with this. It's me and Jesus and no one else. But when we get a group to sign on to the testimony of the book of the Lord's commandments, then we've got a canon, we've got a new revelation in the latter-days. This is something that the three and eight witnesses helped him very much to accomplish with the Book of Mormon. And now these same kinds of groups backing him up on his latter-day revelations are accomplishing the same kind of work.

And of course, it continues after those meetings as well. Whenever people do something or stop doing something because the revelations of the Lord that Joseph Smith told them to, that they tithe, that they build a temple, that they do a thousand things, go on missions. These are all affirmations that those revelations to Joseph Smith are from the Lord. So we're giving our consent in these powerful ways.

Continuing Revelation and the Global Church

 
Welch:

Yeah, I'm really compelled by this kind of new account of what canonization is, something that is a process that continues over time that's distributed among many people. And yes, of course, it centrally involves the prophet and his close associates and those who were immediately involved in the production and scribing and editing of the manuscripts and the publications. But it involves so much more. It's a social process and it happens over time and it's distributed among the entire body of Christ. That means that when we wanna talk about something like canonization, for convenience in history books, we might want to point to a certain date, but really you can't pin down an organic process like this, a spiritual process like this, to a certain date. It continues through a period of time. And I guess in a certain sense, it's continuing to this day, right? Not only in the sense that we might continue to add or take away from the Doctrine and Covenants, but in the sense that each time, this year as a church, we're reading the Doctrine and Covenants, and in a sense, this is another opportunity to sort of re-canonize, to re-assent to the authority of these revelations as scripture for us.

Harper:

Yeah, we renegotiate our relationship to them all the time in ongoing conversation. Sometimes that's by avoiding having a conversation with them, right? We either don't care, we don't engage. That's a way of saying, I couldn't care any less than I do about these things. That's pretty common, actually. And then, of course, there's all kinds of degrees of engaging with those texts. So much of what we do, so much of our emphasis, our emphasis on temple building and receiving of temple ordinances and covenants, this all has its foundations in these revelations to Joseph Smith. So much of what we do, sending missionaries globally, I mean, it really, really shapes Latter-day Saint life. When I say it, I mean the Doctrine and Covenants. And, you know, we're constantly renegotiating, reevaluating our relationship to them. We're in the middle of a profound conversation about Doctrine and Covenants 132 as we speak and so forth.

Reading the Doctrine and Covenants in Changing Times

 
Welch:

Yeah. Well, I wonder if you could say more about that. You're working on this big project on the Doctrine and Covenants, a book for Oxford University Press that kind of wants to set the Doctrine and Covenants among the great sacred texts of the world. And as part of that project, I wonder if you've thought about the way that we read the Doctrine and Covenants differently now in the 21st century, than say saints did in 1925, for instance. How has the church's relationship to the Doctrine of Covenants changed over time, if you've been able to discern any sort of a pattern or a trend?

Harper:

Yeah, there definitely is change over time, which is historic. And that's the thing that sort of tracks my attention or attracts my attention. I'm not confident that I have a full grasp on that, but we can definitely see some patterns, things that are maybe supremely important to us today, not so much in the early days and vice versa.

For example, in the earliest days of the church, they were very preoccupied with preparing the world for the second coming of the Savior. And they thought it would be quite soon. And they were thinking about that in a way that I have not seen 20th or 21st century Latter-day Saints think about or talk about until President Nelson's ministry. He has really gone back to that theme of preparing the world for the second coming of the Savior. He's drawn our attention back to some of those texts. I'm not trying to make any kind of point here about rightness or wrongness. I think the right thing to do is to emphasize whatever the Lord is leading us to emphasize in the present moment.

Another example is we received the Word of Wisdom in 1833, and it answered some sort of pressing issues, but those were not the pressing issues of our time in relation to those things. And it really wasn't a real important revelation until President Heber J. Grant's administration that spanned the world wars when, for example, tobacco consumption skyrockets and we start to see by mid-20th century tobacco companies conspiring to manipulate nicotine levels. In other words, that's a revelation given in 1833 where the Lord says, yeah, I'm going to answer your present question, but I'm telling you the real, really important reason for this revelation is to forewarn you, to warn you about future stuff, evils and designs, which will exist eventually in the hearts of conspiring men.

So we go through times where we don't emphasize some revelations or themes that run through the revelations as much as we do at other times. I think that's as it ought to be. Generally, maybe we miss some things we ought to be. Maybe the Lord is saying, I sure wish you'd pay attention to this. I sure wish you would.

I think consecration is that way. Consecration runs through the revelations, but I think we have, generally speaking–I don't want to fault everyone, I'll use myself–I think I have spent most of my life blaming my ancestors for being too lame to live the law of consecration, expecting my descendants to pick it up, right? I've told the story that goes like this, boy, those early Latter-day Saints, the Lord gave them the higher law of consecration, but they couldn't do it. And so he took it away. I would do it if I could, but I can't because he took it away. So it'll be up to my grandkids to really get their act together. This is a story that absolves me.

I don't have to know the law as it's contained in the book. I just can blame others or give the responsibility to others. That's a way of saying that I think that the Lord has expected us all along to live the law as we find it revealed in the Doctrine and Covenants. And we have spent a good deal of our time justifying our bad behavior in relationship to that.

So I think it's a combination of us needing to do better at hearing him, listening and acting on his words. And also, I think that there are times and seasons when some things in the revelations are more applicable, more relevant, more timely than others. Hope that all makes sense.

Section 132

 
Welch:

Yeah. You mentioned section 132. I wonder if you'd want to talk a little bit more about that. Where does that revelation stand for us today, in 2025?

Harper:

It is the highest of the exaltation revelations. This is what Professor Bushman called them. These are the revelations that start with section 76 and include 84, 88, 93, 132 certainly. These are the ones that go way beyond traditional Christianity. Brooks Holifield, a historian of American theology, said Joseph Smith revealed realms of theology unimaginable in traditional Christianity. Well, he has in mind these kinds of revelations, the ones that say yeah, there's heaven and hell, but it's way more complicated than that. There's heavens beyond heaven There's degrees of heavenly glory and there's a salvation for almost everyone out there. And there certainly is a salvation, a heavenly glory, for everybody who wants one of any degree whatsoever.

That these revelations really complicate or, maybe that's a negatively charged word, they really elaborate on what we receive from, with all due respect, from unrestored Christianity. And the highest of those, the most, the latest, let's say, the most recent of those is Doctrine and Covenants 132. And it's got the most spectacular doctrine of the Restoration in it: that I could be with my family forever and ever in the new and everlasting covenant of marriage. And It's got the hardest of all the restored doctrines in it: plural marriage. And that was hard at the time and it's hard in the 21st century for all kinds of reasons.

And I don't know what to make of it, right? I've read this text hundreds of times, and I feel less and less confident that I know what to make of it than I used to. And I've become okay with that. I used to have an insatiable need to know what it means and what to make of it. And that can lead us to making up our own answers, right? If we get too desperate for an answer that's not forthcoming, we might make up our own. And I don't think that's the best way forward.

The last verse of that revelation, the Lord says, I have more to tell you about this, but this is going to suffice for now. He certainly is leaving us with an unresolved challenge in that revelation that really asks us to wrestle with the nature of God. Who is God and what is God like? The young woman used to say, we're daughters of our Heavenly Father who loves us and we love him. And I'm sure they still have that in their minds. The theme's a little different now if I remember right.

But depending on what we decide to do with section 132, we wonder about the God of Abraham, the God of Sarah, the God of Hagar. What is that God like? Can we trust that God? Can we love that God? And I think that that text begs those questions for us. We have to answer them for ourselves. That’s what I mean by, you know, we have to engage those revelations all the time and we decide what they mean to us.

And we've always been in that conversation one way or another, including by ignoring it. But I don't think it's ever been more present. I think the featuring of the Doctrine & Covenants every four years in Come Follow Me has driven us into it in a way that we probably hadn't engaged in earlier years. I’m dancing around it, as you can tell.

Welch:

Yeah. You know, so I really take your points. I think we have two drives when we come to scripture. One is that we really want to understand it, right? We really want to interpret it. And I think, I think the Lord does want us to understand it. In fact, I think that the interpretation of sacred texts is one of the primary forms that that inspiration and revelation can take.

But, we can push it too far. And as you say, in our drive to understand, we can start fabricating kind of explanations for things that just are not forthcoming. The text as it stands is not willing to yield up the meaning that we so want from it. And so, sometimes a little bit of interpretive restraint and interpretive modesty, I think is called for.

The other thing that we want when we go to scripture, I think, is for it to be a mirror--but a really flattering mirror, right? A really flattering mirror that shows me back all the beliefs that I already hold in their best possible light and dressed up in really beautiful scriptural language. And it's hard to go to scripture and think, “Who is the God that I'm going to find there? Who is the Savior that I'm going to find there? Am I willing to know and encounter that being as they are?”--rather than wanting to remake them in the image that feels comfortable to me. Right.

So, yeah, I think that when we read section 132 now, both of those desires that we go to scripture with are frustrated. They're frustrated for us now. But again, I think that that frustration in itself is often a part of the revelatory process and that it can in time lead to the breaking in of greater light and knowledge.

Harper:

Yeah, we get to decide what to do with that frustration, right? I could decide, I don't trust this God. I don't love him. Or I could decide I'm going to trust him and that takes an immense exercise of faith. We could some, I mean, there's any number of choices that we can make about it. I think that's a major function of the revelations. Choose you this day, they say, right? A person has to choose what they're going to, how they're going to position themselves relative to the Lord's revelations through Joseph Smith. And that choice can be apathy, or it can be all, you know, full steam ahead with believing that they are the literal words of Jesus Christ. Or it can be, he made them up, he concocted them for his own purposes or whatever, and a thousand variations on that.

And I think that they're designed to do that work. I don't think they're designed to resolve every question or fix every problem. I think they're designed to ask us what we think about God. What think ye of Christ? Do you think he could talk to this kid and reveal things through Joseph Smith that are beautiful, challenging, repugnant, glorious, right? Would solve so many of the world's problems. Would also wrench your heartstrings. Do we think that's even a possibility? And will we engage with these revelations as if that's exactly what they are? Revelations from the Savior through a mere mortal, but a real live revelator.

Welch:

Yeah. You know, some listeners might be surprised just to hear us talking about Scripture in this way. I think if you have an idea of revelation and of Joseph Smith as a revelator, that is something like the old telephone or the fax machine idea, right? That Joseph picked up the spiritual telephone and that the Lord spoke in his own voice from start to finish and that is it. And then that got kind of transparently transmitted to paper from Joseph's mouth. And then that sort of went unchangeably to the version that we have in front of us now.

And of course, we know that that's not the case. It has never been the case with any book of scripture. And if anything, the Doctrine and Covenants seems designed to put that on display, right? Because all these records are still available. So we can see the layers of editing and of revision, sometimes the copy errors that might have happened, the doctrinal revisions that were made. Joseph wasn't shy. He not only revised his own revelations for doctrine, he revised the Bible itself, right, to clarify certain doctrinal issues. So he's never shy about that. There was a whole section of the Doctrine and Covenants, the “doctrine” part of the Doctrine and Covenants, the Lectures on Faith, have been decanonized, right? They've been taken out of this sacred book.

So for some people this could seem, well, if a text is available for that much human activity, how can it be sacred? This book that you're writing on the Doctrine and Covenants for Oxford University Press, if I recall correctly, it's part of a series that's called sacred texts of the world or something like that?

Harper:

Yeah, Studies in Sacred Texts.

Welch:

Studies in Sacred Texts. Yeah, so help me understand what you understand sacred to mean, and how it is that a book of scripture that has so many human fingerprints on it can be sacred.

Harper:

Yeah, wonderfully well said. The person you were representing there a minute ago, the view you were articulating as you well know, right? It's based on an assumption, right? If there's human-ness in this text, it can't also be divine. That's not an assumption Joseph Smith had, nor can we find any evidence that's an assumption Jesus has. Rather, in the Doctrine and Covenants, we find–and elsewhere in Scripture, the title page of the Book of Mormon is a pretty darn good example–we find lots of evidence that Jesus is interested in communicating with us. And as you know, in any communication, there's noisiness, any communication where humans are involved. And I don't mean like, you know, what my dad called bang, ching, a lang, like rock and roll music or airplane engines. That can be noise for sure, but by communication noise we mean anything that clouds the decoding of the message. So an encoder, in this case Jesus Christ, sends a message to Joseph Smith. Joseph's the decoder. Well there's no communication ever, ever, that humans have been a part of that doesn't have noise in between the encoder and the decoder. You cannot receive if you're a mere mortal, no matter who you are–and this includes the prophet Joseph Smith, the greatest revelator the world has ever known–did not receive revelations flawlessly. There was noise between Jesus and him and Jesus acknowledges that in the revelation texts themselves, including in section one as we've seen, right. “I know you guys are weak. I know you're not capable of talking on my terms, so I'm going to give the revelations on your terms.”

And this is so you can come to understanding over time. It will require revelation to understand the revelations. You have to work at it. And Joseph Smith had to work at understanding his own revelations. And the great thing about him is that he did not adopt those kind of fundamentalist assumptions or those “all or nothing” distortions that are common, too common, including among us who have his revelations and ought to know better. If we're studying his revelations on their own terms, we will see that they don't share the assumptions that, as William McClellan put it in the 1870s when he was really upset at Joseph, he said, Lord meant what he said and said what he meant. So any changes over time are out of balance.

This is an idea that the Lord gave a pristine version, an urtext, right? The perfect version at some point in the perfect past. And anything that goes downstream from that is an error. Joseph Smith had just the opposite view. He thought that the very latest thing the Lord had said is the thing you ought to give your highest priority to. The last revelation, the most recent inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the most recent reading of the revelation, right?

And this is where the church formally and officially is, right? It's the last teaching of President Nelson that is normative. It's the last explanation that the apostles have given that we take as our guide, not some perfect version. David Whitmer and others got hooked up on, you know, they got bogged down by this idea that there was a perfect version in the past and we ought to go back to that and never move off of it. That’s not the right way forward. That’s not the restoration’s way of articulating its own forward momentum in revelation.

Welch:

Yeah. Well, that suggests that we need to maybe rethink the idea of revelation in the same way that we've been talking about canonization, not just as an event, right? Not just as a kind of one-time revelatory event–although sometimes there is an initiating event–but the full revelation then, taking D&C 50 as our guide here, consists not only of the message being given, but the message being understood.

Right. And that process of understanding can take a long time. It can take years even. Right. It can take years for Joseph to process, think back on, puzzle over, feel deeply confused over or to rethink and to re-understand the meaning of his earlier revelatory event. But that process of interpretation and of coming to understanding is equally a part of the revelation on this view that you've just shared here. Does that seem right to you?

Harper:

Amen. That seems exactly right to me. I really believe that and we can see Joseph Smith modeling that for us. He is the revelator through whom the Savior gives these events. He received the revelation in section one, but it takes Joseph and others time and “solemn ponderous thoughts”, he says, and careful thinking and lots of work and experience, frankly, water under the bridge, interpretive memory, the ability to look backward and say, now I understand.

I've experienced this with my own patriarchal blessing. Maybe other people have as well. Right. That was a revelatory event. I sat in my grandfather's living room and I was 14 years old and I received this beautiful blessing. And I had a really good night that night, but I had no idea. Now many years later, almost half a century later, I now have understanding of that blessing that I could not possibly have had the day that revelation was given. Well, that's true of the Doctrine and Covenants. It's true of all scripture.

And I really loved your point about the work and the humility that we need to bring to that if we want to get the most out of it. It's not a good idea to approach the Doctrine and Covenants or any scripture thinking that we know hardly anything about it. Much better to say, Lord, teach me, help me understand what you meant, help me understand what I should know about this today. What did it mean to them there then? What should it mean to me here now? Humility is crucial to understanding, to hearing God.

I think when we tell him what he can and can't say and will and won't do, I think we're limiting how much he's going to be able to get through to us. I think texts like 132 ask us the question, are you willing to have a massive amount of humility? Because it takes a lot of faith and vulnerability and humility to even just engage that text, or at least the second two thirds of it. And others too, certainly. We gotta bring humility and a sense that we really don't know God as well as we could or want to. And we could get to know him by listening to him. And the more we can do that on His terms, the more we can open ourselves to having Him teach us His word and His will in His own way, in His own time, the better we'll understand Scripture generally and the Doctrine and Covenants specifically.

Welch:

Yeah, it makes me want to put myself in the shoes of a new member of the church. Let's say in the Democratic Republic of Congo, right? New member of the church; the church is growing very quickly there. I've just been baptized maybe six months ago and I'm wanting to read the Doctrine and Covenants. How does that reader encounter this scripture? On the one hand, there’s a lot of that noise that you were talking about, right? There's a lot that separates this reader from the message that's being communicated in that text, both barriers of language, it exists in translation. Barriers of context, this was given in a time and a place that's very, very far removed from where the reader is now, a very different kind of culture. There's all sorts of noise that might inhibit the transmission of the message from the text of the Doctrine and Covenants to that new saint, that new Congolese saint.

On the other hand, I think it's quite possible that that new Congolese saint has precisely the kind of humility that you've just been talking about, right? They don't come to it like I, Rosalynde Welch, would, right–with a sense like, I'm this scripture scholar. I understand scripture. I know what it's all about. Let me come read this and let me tell it what it's saying. That Congolese saint actually might have precisely the humility that's needed for scripture to really talk and really communicate in the register that it wants to.

Harper:

I think you are right. I think that those saints are akin to the first Latter-day Saints, and they were thrilled to hear from the Savior again. They thought it was the coolest thing in the world that they could ask the Lord their intimate questions and then say, Joseph, could you seek a revelation on my behalf? And he would say, sure, let's ask. I don't know what the Lord will say or if he'll even answer, but let's ask. And in this fantastic way, the Savior of the world will condescend to speak to William McClellan, I'm the Lord your Redeemer, or to Emma Smith, my daughter, right? And again, if you don't know Joseph the Revelator, there's nothing between the Savior and Emma. It's him speaking directly to her. The early saints thought that was the greatest thing in the world.

And the Congolese convert, I think, is of that same spirit and mind. And it's true that, you know, maybe there's some things you and I know that could help people with context. But for the most part, it's probably more like I could learn lessons from those saints who just hear the pure voice of the Savior speaking anew, bearing witness of His power, His love, His redeeming grace, and just hearing that beautiful message and not over-complicating it, and just rejoicing that the Savior has spoken anew in the last dispensation.

Welch:

Well, historians are not futurists, and I don't expect you to see the future here. But given that the church is growing so fast in these African nations, in Brazil, in Argentina, in South America, what do you expect the future of the Latter-day Saints' relationship to this book of their scripture, the Doctrine and Covenants, to be moving forward? Do you expect that it will remain the same? Will we still read it every four years? Will it mean as much to us? Will it mean more? Do you expect it to kind of fade in relevance as the church grows ever more global and the median Latter-day Saint grows ever further removed from the original context of the revelations?

Harper:

Boy, I do not foresee it being diminished in its importance in any way. President Nelson, if you just charted his recent messages, his conference talks–I'm not saying that the Book of Mormon is not important. He's certainly a more powerful witness of the book and taught us to read it every day if we want to make better decisions, et cetera. What would our life be like without it? We don't want to say the Book of Mormon's not important at all, but think about his last few conference talks, the texts have been drawn from the Doctrine of Covenants. He admonished us to read and understand Section 109 as we learn about what the temple has in store for us. He took his very latest talk from Section 121 and taught us that if we want power and if we want priesthood, think about the most ultimate sacred setting and what we ask for. If we really want that, President Nelson teaches us, well, what you've got to bring to it is virtue and charity. If you want God's power, if you want confidence in His presence, then He has given some terms and conditions and they include virtue and charity.

He has drawn on section 25, right, in the talk that I eavesdropped on several times now. He was speaking to the sisters, but I need this talk as much as anyone. He emphasized section 25, taught us to read it and mine it for ourselves and apply it to ourselves. Act as if the Lord's instructions to Emma are relevant to us here now. So I can't see the Doctrine and Covenants being diminished in importance. I see it hugely important, including the renewal of the covenant, gathering Israel to the covenant and specifically gathering from both sides of the veil to the temple to make and keep the sacred covenants that enable us to regain God's presence. Those are all things that are certainly in the other scriptures, but they come to their fullest, most developed points in the doctrine of covenant. So I think it's here to stay.

Interlude

Professor Harper is best known in the academic world for his 2019 book First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins, which looks deeply at the four accounts of the first vision that Joseph Smith produced over the course of his ministry, beginning in 1832. As a people, we’re most familiar with the 1838 account that appears as the Joseph Smith History in our Pearl of Great Price, and until the 1960s, that was the only account that was widely known. In his book, First Vision, Steve Harper explored the neuroscience of memory formation to ask why the rediscovered accounts might differ from each other, and he investigated the formation of collective memory, the history that binds a community together, to ask how the Latter-day Saints have remembered the First Vision in different ways at different times. In the second part of our interview, Steve talks about memory and history, and how he brought this expertise to the table in his role as General Editor of the Saints series, the much-loved volumes on Church history that are re-shaping the way Latter-day Saints around the world remember our past. Let’s return now to my interview with Dr. Steve Harper.

Interview

Welch:

I want to shift gears just a little bit now and take you back in time to a different point. We're not in 1831. Now we're in 1960. Okay?

Harper:

Boy, I sometimes tell my students if it happened after 1845, I have no idea. So I'll do my best.

Welch:

I think you might be able to take yourself back to this place. It's 1960 and there's a young BYU historian named James Allen who has just gone up to the Church History Library and he has read for the first time an early account of Joseph Smith's First Vision, an account he's never read before or never seen before and that nobody that he knows has ever read before or seen before.

Now, in that moment, you might think that a historian would be deeply dismayed, right? This means that everything he's ever thought has been overturned. seems to call into question what he has known about this event of the First Vision. It seems to throw everything into disarray. But you've written that that young historian, James Allen, was overjoyed in that moment when he read this new to him account of the First Vision.

Why? Why did he feel joy in that moment?

Harper:

Well, he was not only a really, really well-trained historian, meaning that he loved the raw records of the past. The more raw, the better. The nearer they got to the being present at the creation, right, say of the first vision, the more he could get into the heart and mind of Joseph Smith, close in time to his vision, the better. So he's a first-class historian, really well-trained and excited about the historical record, but for James Allen, it's more than that. It's that this is the most consequential event since the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, right? His reappearance in the 19th century in America. That is a massively important historical event. so here, Professor Allen has access to a new record of it. In fact, the earliest account that is known is till this day and he's overjoyed.

And when he told that story to me, he emphasized that the Holy Spirit bore witness to him as he read it. This is true. He's telling me the truth. So for him, it was an exciting piece of detective work as a historian. Those days are so exciting when you find something that's the key to a puzzle that you couldn't unlock until then. But it was also the witness of God to him that this is an event that really happened and the most significant event.

I remember I had a professor in grad school who studied the history of air conditioning. And I thought I could not devote my life to the history of air conditioning. I like air conditioning. I'm grateful, but I don't care about the history of air conditioning.

Professor Allen devoted his life to the history of things that really, really matter. And so on that spectacular day, he had discovered a major piece of the puzzle and had a kind of an epistemological experience that went beyond just the ability to read, you to do the paleography, to read the old handwriting. He had a spiritual kind of experience with that text that told him there was more to it than just one more 19th century America and having a vision of Christ in the woods.

Welch:

So you mentioned something, which is that for historians, typically, the earlier the source, the closer it is to the event, the better in some ways, or the more exciting that it might feel, the more immediate that it might feel. But you, as an historian, I think are known, in your work on the First Vision in particular, but just in general, for paying attention to how it is that we know what we know, how it is that we remember things that we think we remember, these issues of metacognition.

And if I understand your work correctly, one of the things that you argue is that memory doesn't work the way that other sorts of filing or storage systems do. Where, you know, the closer it is to the event, you would think, well then, if it were just a simple matter of kind of storing the information in your brain in a kind of filing cabinet, then the closer to the event, then the more reliable that account is going to be.

But you say that memory works a little bit differently, such that sometimes in remembered events, it isn't always the earliest account that is the best. Talk to us a little bit about this conflict, maybe, between the metacognitive mechanics of memory and the sort of canons of historiography, the normal practices of historians.

Harper:

Well, thanks for giving me this chance, Rosalynde. It might be you and me alone who engage this conversation because I usually lose people at this point. They're like, wow, dad, please.

Welch:

This is the Maxwell Institute podcast. Our listeners are right with us.

Harper:

That's right. We love you. Thank you for tuning in. So the folks who are listening to us might know the work of the Israeli psychologist, Daniel Kahneman. He and his associates spent their careers studying heuristics, studying the mental shortcuts that people use to avoid the hard work of answering really hard questions. So historians, for example, have to try to answer, which of the accounts of Joseph Smith's vision is nearest to what he actually experienced? One biographer of Joseph Smith, Dan Vogel, asks early in his biography, “Since Joseph Smith gives us several accounts and they're all much later, years later than he said the vision happened, how certain can we be that he accurately represents his experience, the experience that he had at the time?” And then he and others, Anne Taves, Richard Bushman generally follows this, they say, well, the earliest account is going to be the best, the most reliable.

And with all due respect, and I have respect for all these scholars, my question back to them is, how do you know that? Well, because the earliest account is best. How do you know that? Well, we all know that, right? We agree as historians. How do you know that? And the fact of the matter is we don't know that. And the more we study memory formation, and I'm not a scholar of this myself, but there are fantastic scholars who are Daniel Schacter at Harvard and others everywhere from neuroscience to psychology, all of the memory science leads us to think it's not by default. You can't just assume that an earlier recorded memory is a better memory.

Here we're talking specifically about the kind of memory we'll call autobiographical. So me remembering an event from my past, like, for example, Joseph Smith remembering his first vision. An autobiographical memory is a present creation. We make it at the time that we have it. We don't store it somewhere. We store in some way what Professor Schachter calls traces. We have some kind of components, ingredients, you might say, that we can make memories out of, but those are always mixed with present circumstances whenever we have an autobiographical memory. So Joseph Smith's several accounts of his vision that are on record are, we have no way of knowing how precisely they tell us the event as he experienced it at the time. But we can have pretty good sense for how he experienced it over time. We can tell what it meant to him in 1832 and 1835 and 38 and 42. And that is what a historian can do. A historian cannot recover what absolutely happened in the Grove and with any degree of honest or accurate confidence say, “I know what happened.”

There's not something like a predictable rate of radioactive decay when it comes to memory. You cannot say if it's 10 years out, it's 90 % accurate. If it's 20 years out, it drops down to 75. It just simply doesn't work that way. So historians have got to stop using that heuristic. It's just a mental shortcut to answer a really complicated question.

Welch:

Well, and the good news from what we discussed earlier is that not only is that sort of an impossible problem for the historian to set herself, but it also isn't the right question given the expanded idea of revelation that we were talking about earlier, right? The revelatory event itself is just one part of the revelation. It may be the inaugurating part, but the meaning of the revelation evolves over time, right? And so it truly is not what happened that morning in the Grove that determines the meaning of the revelation. The meaning of the revelation inheres in how Joseph interprets it and understands it. And it makes complete sense that over time and in different places and for different reasons, the meaning of that revelation changes.

Harper:

Yeah, like my patriarchal blessing, right, means something more and different to me at this point than I possibly could have harvested from it at the time. And that whole history, that whole intervening history has been revelatory. It's been a process of coming to understand. And that's as sacred as the event itself.

Welch:

Yeah. There's a somewhat similar process that happens collectively when we as a people now think back together to commemorate the First Vision. And you should point out in your book, you trace the ways in which we have found ourselves, collectively, different meanings and different emphases and different inflections in the First Vision and have used those in various ways.

You yourself have played a really significant role in the collective memory of the Latter-day Saints in the present moment through your participation in the Saints volumes, the Saints' history of the church. Tell us a little bit, during your involvement with the Saints project, did you think about these issues of collective memory and how did your understanding of memory come to bear on the work that you did for Saints?

Harper:

Yeah, those of us who worked on Saints thought a lot about collective memory. We thought that even if not everybody in the church read the volumes or listened to them, that they would have a profound effect on shaping the collective memory of the Latter-day Saints over the course of a generation. And there's good evidence that that is underway as we speak. So we wanted to make sure they were historically responsible, that they were accurate, that they were factually accurate.

And we wanted also for our hermeneutic, right, for our method, for our explanatory method, we wanted to always choose faith, hope, and charity when there's a choice, right? The facts don't speak for themselves. The facts by which I mean things that are the same to Richard Bushman and Dan Vogel, right? Two biographers of Joseph Smith who don't interpret him the same way, but work from the same body of facts. Those facts are the same to both scholars, or Anne Tave's another one, right? So what leads, what choices do we make when we decide to interpret? Well, when we worked on Saints, we were led by prophets and followed their lead to interpret in terms of faith in Christ, hope in Christ, and the pure love of Christ. So we told the story that way on purpose. And that combination, we think, will be powerful.

So, how do we interpret the facts that there are various accounts of Joseph's vision and they're not all the same and so forth? We interpret them with faith. We believe he had a vision of God and Christ in the woods of Western New York. We hope that the things he learned are true and applicable to ourselves so that that angsty, sinful teenagers who hear “Joseph, my son, thy sins are forgiven” (1832 Account) – we hope that that applies to us and to our teenagers. And we have charity, that love, that Joseph said that as a result of the vision, “My soul was filled with love. For many days I could rejoice with great joy.” We want that love to, we want to receive that love from God and we want to reflect that love from God. So the books try hard to make those choices and to teach people that they could make those choices as well. There are all kinds of ways you can interpret the facts and a fruitful way, a beautiful way is with faith in Christ, hope in Christ, and as a recipient and a reflector of the pure love of Jesus Christ. And that will change our collective memory.

We'll go from being so angsty about these conflicting facts and so forth to really not being disrupted by them near as much. You've probably seen some evidence that that's the way things are trending. I think I have seen evidence that that's the way things are trending.

Welch:

Yeah. Well, Steve, thank you for your work on Saints. I am enjoying it myself. I'm learning a lot from it. I use it in my family. I think it really will stand as a landmark.

I'd like to conclude with a question that I always ask my guests. The name of this season of the podcast is The Questions We Should Be Asking. So I wanted to ask you, Steve, to conclude, what is the most powerful question that you have asked in your ongoing quest to understand the First Vision?

Harper:

My guiding question for everything, the most powerful question I've ever asked myself about anything ultimate, including the first vision is what do I know and how is it that I know it? So what do I know about the first vision? How do I know it? And as we've said, I'm a historian by training and by personality. My default setting is to find the earliest primary source and all the primary source materials that have any bearing on the event or the history that I'm studying and to internalize them deeply, to know what they say, why they say it, how they say it, when they were created, who created them, why did they create them, right? I want to know everything that can be known about the knowledge related to the past, the past that I'm interested in.

And then I can know all that stuff, and I do know all that stuff when it comes to the First Vision, and still not know whether the historical records tell a true story. So that requires a different kind of knowing. And that knowing can come by revelation. And I know the historical record of the first vision. I know it as well as anybody, I think. I also know that the revelation to Joseph Smith happened, but I don't know that because the records say it happened. I know because the Holy Spirit of God has let me know that the records tell a true story.

Now somebody might say, you know, which records tell the true story? I mean, I have unanswered questions. I'm not saying I know everything about it. There's a lot of things I wish I knew, but I know that the gist of the story is true. I know that Joseph Smith saw God and Christ, and that he received the revelation that he said he received. And I love it. I want to believe it. I will myself to believe it. But it's also the case that I'm not, I educate my biases. I know that we have inclination. One of the most common heuristics of all is confirmation bias. So I'm aware that there are other alternatives. There are other explanations for the facts. I want to know them all. I want to hear what everybody else has to say and I want to decide for myself.

And ultimately on ultimate questions, I don't know unless and until I receive revelation from God. So that's the most important question. What do you know and how do I know it? And for me, it's a combination of hard brain work and hard spiritual work.

And I don't feel like I know any ultimate things unless I've done both kinds of work together. I believe that our God-given abilities to combine head and heart are supposed to work together as the revelations we've been talking about say. I don't think that God expects brain work without spiritual work or vice versa. I will tell you in your mind and in your heart by the Holy Ghost, He says. I believe him.

So that's the most important question for me. What do you know? How do you know it? And it's really that simple. It guides my whole career. And I'm grateful.

Welch:

Well, Steve Harper, thank you so much for joining me today on the Maxwell Institute podcast.

Harper:

Thank you, Rosalynde. I really appreciate your work.

Conclusion

That concludes my interview with Dr. Steven C. Harper. We’re delighted to have him with us for the next couple of years, and I expect that you’ll be hearing and seeing more from him on Maxwell Institute channels.

If you enjoyed this podcast, I hope you’ll tell somebody about it and subscribe to our feed wherever you go for podcasts. And don’t forget to follow @BYU_Maxwell on social media and sign up for our newsletter at mi.byu.edu. I’ll be back soon with more interviews with our Maxwell Institute fellows. Thanks for listening.