One of the most egregious aspects of Mormon doctrine, as it was and is presented to the world and its millions of ordinary members during the 20th and 21st centuries, is the misrepresentation of its very colorful second prophet, Brigham Young. . In the literature that the Mormon Church has produced for its members to study on the life of Brigham Young, there is actually no mention of Brigham Young of the 19th century. Instead, you have the meager sketch of a man depicted as a likely monogamous, husband of one wife, who did not, or could not, produce his own theological teachings and proclaim them ex cathedra as revelations and scriptures, as Joseph Smith did. . But the truth is that Brigham Young had 27 wives and, beginning in 1851, he proclaimed at the General Conferences of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints various doctrines that were considered by the Utah Mormon Church and the British Mormon Church. . Church as sacred revelations of God. The main doctrine of Mormon theology introduced in 1851 by Brigham Young and recorded in the highly acclaimed “Journal of Discourses” was the Adam-God Doctrine, which was believed and followed by Mormons in Utah and Great Britain until about 1905. Brigham Young, a friend and confidant of Joseph Smith, fully believed what Smith had said in his 1844 King Follett Address and in Smith’s Book of Abraham about Mormon polytheism.
However, Brigham believed that he had received more knowledge, from the source he called his god, that Joseph Smith had not received about the doctrine of the resurrected exalted man. Young truly believed that one of his purposes on earth was to fulfill the entire doctrine of the exalted god-man; and proclaimed, in 1851, that the exalted God-Father-man, who had created all spirit children who were to inhabit mortal bodies on earth through procreation with his heavenly spouse, was Adam, as in the Garden of Eden , and that his goddess wife was Eve. From 1851 until his death in 1877, he continually proposed the Adam-God Doctrine in LDS General Conferences (and even in the Mormon newspaper, “The Deseret News). He had the arrogance to declare in one such conference that, to paraphrase, “Jesus he had to have a resurrected body like that of his father, Adam, in order to properly judge his children.” Yes, he heard you correctly. This disturbing statement by Brigham Young was printed in the “Journal of Discourses, and later in the 1984 LDS Melchizedek Priesthood Study Guide, used by myself and all other elders in the Mormon Church during the year 1984 , in a chapter entitled “Man Can Become Like God”.
In his heretical interpretation of Christianity, Brigham Young had woefully failed to understand that Jesus Christ was the eternal Spirit Jehovah, who presided over the children of Israel when he brought them out of Egypt, settled them in the land of Canaan, and judged them. through the prophets for nearly a thousand years. Eleven of the Mormon Apostles, serving under Brigham Young, from 1851-1877, were ardent believers in the Adam-God Doctrine. However, only one Mormon apostle, Orson Pratt, refused to believe Brigham’s ex cathedra revelation which had become ex cathedra scripture. During the recorded minutes of meetings of the Mormon Council of Twelve Apostles, in 1858, 1862, and 1867, Orson Pratt was rebuked by the other apostles for not believing what the Prophet, Brigham Young, proclaimed to be the words of God. These recorded minutes are available on the Internet for public viewing.
In 1877, the Mormon prophet Brigham Young, ailing in ill health, decided to convert his Adam-God Doctrine into a Mormon temple liturgy, writing and recording it as the “Lecture Before the Veil,” in which he wrote the chronology of The Father Adam and Mother Eve, as they had been resurrected and glorified as a god and goddess before Adam had organized (he did not have the power to create something out of nothing) the heavens and the earth and placed himself and his unique special. heavenly wife, Eve, to the Garden of Eden. Young personally read the original Adam-God liturgy for the first time in the Mormon Temple in St. George, Utah, in early 1877.
Twenty years or so after Brigham Young’s death in August 1877, just after Utah had been added to the Union in 1896, the LDS Church hierarchy realized that the non-Christian strangeness of the Adam-God Doctrine was something very close to polygamy, which would detract from the apparent Christian representation that the Mormon Church was trying to paint for the US government, for the purpose of annexation. Then, around 1902, the Mormon Church began to officially denounce the Adam-God Doctrine, which had been practiced in Mormon Temples since 1877, and which had been considered canonical scripture ex cathedra since 1851. However, the main problems associated with decanonizing a long-established doctrine revealed and developed by a Mormon prophet, as the heresy was handled pragmatically by Mormon propagandist sophists who became known as Mormon apologists.
After 1902, the Adam-God Doctrine was officially relegated in Church publications to the status of heresy and instead called the Adam-God theory, which Mormon prophet Spencer W. Kimball later said in 1985, that was invented by a heretic. These pronouncements, however, created a stir among the generations of Mormons who had personally experienced polygamy and the Adam-God Doctrine liturgy in Mormon temples in Utah, and thus the Mormon Church, between 1905 and 1920. , lost about 75,000 of its once loyal members, who rebranded themselves as fundamentalist Mormons and kept polygamy and the other doctrines that had been propounded by Brigham Young. The Mormon Church dealt with these thousands of once loyal Mormons by excommunicating them for practicing false doctrines. This was basically the second schism, or split, in the Mormon Church. The first schism had been the split of the Latter-day Saints in Nauvoo, Illinois, when Brigham Young declared himself successor to Joseph Smith, after Smith’s lynching and death. and led a portion of the Latter-day Saints west to the Utah Valley.
Thus, the doctrinal history of the Mormon Church has been largely marked by pragmatic efforts to keep the Church alive and prosperous by declaring that doctrines once attributed by Mormon leaders as the voice, the word and command of God, were heresies for political gain. of the church. Long before, Mormon leaders who had multiple wives had lied to the world when they printed in their Doctrine and Covenants that “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does not endorse polygamy, but rather teaches and believes that a man should have one wife.” and only wife. Men with up to ten wives went on missions from Utah to other countries declaring and preaching that polygamy was a sin. Incredible, huh?
I tend to believe that the most honest scholars in the early 20th century Mormon Church hierarchy, such as BH Roberts, a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy, were still pragmatic enough to conclude that the Church had to move on, so than lying because the Mormon lord was ultimately necessary, albeit completely dishonest. Roberts was very concerned about the true origin of the Book of Mormon, whether Joseph Smith had plagiarized it from other works or whether he had actually translated it from gold plates; but, having been one of the generation that actually experienced the Adam-God Doctrine in the Salt Lake Mormon Temple, he was not qualified to dismiss the Adam-God Doctrine as a fad. In a previous essay, I attempted to compare the typical pure-pure Mormon mind with one systematically compartmentalized by lifelong conditioning, where truth and fantasy are contained in different well-insulated mental compartments, and are selectively used to support an unbearable religion. . Perhaps BH Roberts had this kind of selectively interchangeable mind.
Reflecting on Brigham Young and his heretical arrogance, saying what he did about the Savior of the world, the Word that became flesh and dwelt among men, the Jehovah of the Old Testament who led the Children of Israel through Moses to the promise earth, our Lord Jesus Christ, who had to have had a physical body, just like his exalted man god father, in order to properly judge his children, we can be sure that the creator and progenitor of the Adam-God Doctrine surely was a heretic
