(By Daniel Peterson latterdaysaintmag.com 1-20-25)
Its faithful members typically think of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as restoring the New Testament church that was founded by the mortal Jesus and then led by his chosen apostles. And that is how I commonly think of it. In my judgment, we’re right to claim it and to proclaim it.
The claim is muddied just a bit, of course, by the fact that the Church’s modern organization has changed over time. It’s a moving target. Did the early Church have “assistants to the Twelve” and a “First Council of the Seventy” and “home teachers” as we once did but no longer do? Did it have wards and stakes and a Relief Society, and Young Men’s and Young Women’s organizations? Probably not. But those are relatively peripheral matters. The Lord’s Church will always be adapting to best serve the societies in which it is established. Revelation, and the Restoration, are ongoing.
It’s clear that the idea of a restoration of original Christianity had been around for a long time. That’s why my late friend Davis Bitton, formerly professor of history at the University of Utah and official Assistant Church Historian, wrote an unpublished general history of Christianity under the intriguing title of “Nostalgia for the Primitive Church.” He used that concept as the organizing theme of his narrative. Sensitive observers of Christendom had long been aware, sometimes painfully so, of its manifold historical departures from the ideals and practices of the earliest Christians.
The life of St. Francis of Assisi and the Franciscan movement that he founded can be viewed as an attempt to retrieve important but neglected aspects of Christianity. An animating principle in the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, too, as seen in such figures as Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, was to return to original Christian teachings and practices, stripping away the changes of later generations. And Roger Williams (d. 1683), the great early New England minister, theologian, and writer, founder of Providence and Rhode Island, is often credited with this statement: “There is no regularly constituted church on earth, nor any person qualified to administer any church ordinances; nor can there be until new apostles are sent by the Great Head of the Church for whose coming I am seeking.” That precise verbal statement may not actually be his, but it does authentically seem to represent his actual views.
“Restorationism” became a powerful religious force in the early American Republic. Its most notable exponent was the Scotland-born preacher Alexander Campbell (d. 1866). “We have no system of our own,” he once wrote, “nor of others to substitute in lieu of the reigning systems. We only aim at substituting the New Testament in lieu of every creed in existence; whether Mohammedan, Pagan, Jewish or Presbyterian. . . . We neither advocate Calvinism, Arminianism, Arianism, Trinitarianism, Unitarianism, Deism or Sectarianism, but New Testamentism.”
In this regard, Alexander followed in the footsteps of his father, Thomas Campbell (d. 1854), who also became an eminent preacher and a major American “Restorationist”: “Where the Bible speaks,” Thomas Campbell famously said, “we speak; where the Bible is silent, we are silent.”
The new dispensation that opened with the young Joseph Smith’s vision in the Sacred Grove in 1820 emerged, thus, into a particular American religious environment. It was an environment in which the hope of a restoration of ancient, New Testament Christianity had been passionately advocated and widely embraced. Notably, before his encounter with the Book of Mormon and his rise to the First Presidency, Sidney Rigdon had been an influential Campbellite preacher. And he brought many of his “Restorationist” congregation with him, including such soon-to-be prominent figures as Isaac Morley, Edward Partridge, Newel K. Whitney and Elizabeth Ann Whitney, Frederick G. Williams, and the future apostles Luke and Lyman Johnson, Lyman Wight, Orson Hyde, and Parley Pratt.
Acceptance of Joseph Smith’s mission obviously entailed belief in the restoration of primitive Christianity. But it soon became evident that the newly-founded Church would transcend mere Christian Restorationism alone. Concepts such as prophets, patriarchs, Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthoods, temples, priests, and high priests were at least as much at home in the Old Testament as in the New. And the very idea of a living prophet, ongoing revelation, and new scripture went far beyond Thomas Campbell’s dictum that, “Where the Bible speaks, we speak; where the Bible is silent, we are silent.”
From its very beginning, too, this was a Nephite Restoration. But Martin Luther, Roger Williams, and the Campbells had never imagined Adam, Abraham, Noah, or Moses as pre-Christian Christians, let alone awaited the chronicle of a vibrant pre-Columbian Christianity in the Americas. The Nephites were wholly unexpected news. “For this intent have we written these things,” explains Jacob 4:4, “that they may know that we knew of Christ, and we had a hope of his glory many hundred years before his coming.” But the news wasn’t always welcomed. Indeed, in 1832 it was Alexander Campbell who published the very first pamphlet attacking the Book of Mormon. The title he chose for it was “Delusions.”
After the First Vision, the first angelic ministrant to the young Joseph Smith was a resurrected Nephite named Moroni. Later, Moroni presented Joseph not only with the golden Nephite plates, but with other Nephite artifacts such as the Urim and Thummim or Interpreters, a massive breastplate, and the Liahona (which was, strictly speaking, a Lehite artifact but which, in any case, originated well outside the biblical narrative). And, of course, the Book of Mormon is an entirely Nephite scripture. Although one of its constituent sections, the book of Ether, tells the story of the earlier Jaredites, it reaches us as it had been edited by a Nephite prophet.
Furthermore, the sheer length of the Book of Mormon represents, in a way, its weight and significance in the Restoration. Counts vary, but the King James Version of the New Testament—the book at the core of Christianity as a whole—weighs in at between 180,000 and 185,000 words. In its original Arabic, the Qur’an, the foundation of the Islamic faith, weighs in at just under 80,000 words. The text of the Book of Mormon is roughly 270,000 words long. Clearly, the proportion of the Restored Church’s scriptural canon that comes from the Nephites is substantial.
For the rest of this column, though, I want to focus on an element of our regular weekly worship service whose Nephite origin is, I suspect, often forgotten.
When we seek the text of the two sacrament prayers, we commonly turn to Doctrine and Covenants 20:75-79. There, the Lord commands the elders or priests of the Church to kneel while praying as follows:
“O God, the Eternal Father, we ask thee in the name of thy Son, Jesus Christ, to bless and sanctify this bread to the souls of all those who partake of it, that they may eat in remembrance of the body of thy Son, and witness unto thee, O God, the Eternal Father, that they are willing to take upon them the name of thy Son, and always remember him and keep his commandments which he has given them; that they may always have his Spirit to be with them. Amen.”
“O God, the Eternal Father, we ask thee in the name of thy Son, Jesus Christ, to bless and sanctify this wine to the souls of all those who drink of it, that they may do it in remembrance of the blood of thy Son, which was shed for them; that they may witness unto thee, O God, the Eternal Father, that they do always remember him, that they may have his Spirit to be with them. Amen.”
We don’t know the precise words of the eucharistic or sacramental prayers among the Old World’s early Christians, but there is no evidence that they were the same as those that we use today. Our words are Nephite words. Before they ever appeared in the Doctrine and Covenants, they were published in the Book of Mormon.
At the conclusion of his record, as his earthly custodianship of the plates came to a close, Moroni seems to have been tying up loose ends. Surprised to be still alive, he wanted to include as much as he could that would be useful to future readers (see 1:1, 4) in a series of very short chapters that described common Nephite religious practices. Thus, Moroni 2-3 explains conferral of the gift of the Holy Ghost and ordination, both by the laying on of hands. Moroni 4-5 provides the sacrament prayers. And Moroni 6 describes the order of the Nephite church, including requirements for baptism and for maintaining (and losing) full fellowship, and how meetings were conducted.
The prayer over the bread forms the longest part of Moroni 4, and the fifth chapter of Moroni contains the prayer over the wine or water. They are, obviously, identical to the prayers given in Doctrine and Covenants 20:
“O God, the Eternal Father, we ask thee in the name of thy Son, Jesus Christ, to bless and sanctify this bread to the souls of all those who partake of it; that they may eat in remembrance of the body of thy Son, and witness unto thee, O God, the Eternal Father, that they are willing to take upon them the name of thy Son, and always remember him, and keep his commandments which he hath given them, that they may always have his Spirit to be with them. Amen.” (Moroni 4:3)
“O God, the Eternal Father, we ask thee, in the name of thy Son, Jesus Christ, to bless and sanctify this wine to the souls of all those who drink of it, that they may do it in remembrance of the blood of thy Son, which was shed for them; that they may witness unto thee, O God, the Eternal Father, that they do always remember him, that they may have his Spirit to be with them. Amen.” (Moroni 5:2)
It’s likely that the sacrament prayers had been in place for centuries: In fact, their language goes back to the time when the resurrected Savior himself instituted the ordinance of the sacrament among the Nephites. Please note the close verbal resemblance between his words at that time and the sacrament prayers, as well as the specific sequence of the phrases:
“And this shall ye do in remembrance of my body, which I have shown unto you. And it shall be a testimony unto the Father that ye do always remember me. And if ye do always remember me ye shall have my Spirit to be with you.” (3 Nephi 18:7)
“And this shall ye always do to those who repent and are baptized in my name; and ye shall do it in remembrance of my blood, which I have shed for you, that ye may witness unto the Father that ye do always remember me. And if ye do always remember me ye shall have my Spirit to be with you.” (3 Nephi 18:11)
I pause here to observe that many critics allege that Joseph Smith composed the Book of Mormon as he went along. If so, it was a very impressive feat for him to have constructed his sacrament prayers from phrases that—in my modern printed English edition—he had attributed to the risen Savior fully seventy-seven pages earlier. And yet eyewitnesses to Joseph’s amazingly rapid dictation of the Book of Mormon expressly deny that he went back in the manuscript to refresh his memory. And no evidence has been found to show that computer-aided searches and copy-and-paste functions had arrived on the frontier of either New York or Pennsylvania by the late-1820s.
But the Nephite roots of our sacrament prayers may go back even further in Book of Mormon history, to at least a century and a half before the visit of Christ: At the close of King Benjamin’s speech, his audience enters into a covenant, declaring “we are willing . . . to be obedient to [God’s] commandments in all things that he shall command us,” after which they agree to “take upon [themselves] the name of Christ” and obligate themselves to “remember to retain the name written always in [their] hearts” (Mosiah 5:5-12). These three promises are still the essential elements of the sacrament prayers in today’s Latter-day Saint worship services.
(My thinking on the sacrament prayers was prompted by John W. Welch, “Our Nephite Sacrament Prayers,” which is online at BYU ScholarsArchive.)
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