Lectures on Faith

all-knowing.

And the lectures on faith taught that we need to believe God knows everything in order to have faith in Him, that He has to know at least the things that are important to our salvation.

And then Orson Pratt and Joseph Fielding Smith also taught that God has a complete, perfect knowledge of things.

But The lectures on faith is one thing produced by Joseph Smith during his time.

The King Follett sermon is another.

So Joseph Smith taught in the King Follett sermon that God was once as we are and that we must learn to become gods just as gods did before us.

Brigham Young and Orson Pratt even disagreed with each other over what God was like.

Early Mormonism was not as settled or unified as McConkie makes it sound.

Imagine a religion that is explicitly premised on the necessity of sacrificing all things.

Because, as the Lectures on Faith put it, "Any religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things never has power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation." Imagine a religion here that required you to willingly return to God everything you'd ever been given, to consecrate all of your time, all of your talents, all of your possessions, turning over the whole of your life to God's care and attention.

Can you imagine that kind of religion coupled with this kind of world? Can you imagine joining this kind of religion on purpose-

[laughs]

You're going to see that emphasized as if to say, pay attention, that God is a merciful being.

And in light of that, I want to take everyone to lectures on faith, which I attribute to Joseph Smith.

I think it's coming from the genius of Joseph Smith.

In lecture three, it says that three things are necessary for any rational and intelligent person to have faith that leads to salvation.

Gee, I wonder where they got that phrase.

Go back to Psalm 103.

Let me read verse 8, and then I'm going to read Lectures on Faith, Lecture 3, verse 15.

The Psalm says, "...the Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy." Lectures on Faith says, second among his character is that he is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abundant in goodness.

And instead of reproducing the Book of Commandments, they decided to enlarge and augment the book.

They added a whole bunch of material, revelations going up to what is basically section 107 today, and a huge series of theological lectures called the Lectures on Faith.

In fact, that's where the name Doctrine and Covenants comes from.

The lectures on faith were considered to be the doctrine, and then the revelations given to Joseph Smith were the covenants.

Put them together, doctrine and covenants.

This book is much larger, has much more material, and is complete, unlike the Book of Commandments, which was never really finished.

They regroup and they publish a book in 1835, and this one has the name that we're familiar with.

This is the Doctrine and Covenants right here.

I'll just name some of the more prominent ones where authorship was determined by using stylometry.

So you have Shakespeare's plays, you have the 12 unattributed Federalist Papers, um, you have Jane Austen's novel Sanditon, which was unfinished when she died and then somebody finished it, um, you have the Lectures on Faith and the Joseph Smith History and the Pearl of Great Price.

We have two word print studies of the Book of Mormon that also took on these two, and they both have, uh, completely, um, answered the question of who wrote the Lectures on Faith.

There was...

People originally thought it was Joseph, like, um, everything else was Joseph.

Right

...

the Lectures on Faith.