Sunday, October 2, 2022

Terryl L. Givens on Joseph Smith's Dating of his Prophetic Call

  

Joseph Smith was steeped in the experience of scriptural insufficiency. As a youthful seeker, he quickly lost any illusions about sola scriptura, “for the teachers of religion of the different sects understood the same passage of scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible.” Significantly, Smith never dated his prophetic call from 1820, but from 1827, when he began his Book of Mormon translation. This experience radically reconfigured his understanding of restoration, a term that for centuries had emphasized removing, stripping away, and distilling down, Christian forms and practices to an unadulterated original model. (Terryl Givens, The Prophecy of Enoch as Restoration Blueprint [Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture Series No. 18; Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 2012], 1, emphasis added)

 

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