"No one shall be appointed to receive commandments and revelations in this church excepting my servant Joseph Smith, Jun., for he receiveth them even as Moses. And thou shalt be obedient unto the things which I shall give unto him, even as Aaron, to declare faithfully the commandments and the revelations, with power and authority unto the church. And if thou art led at any time by the Comforter to speak or teach, or at all times by the way of commandment unto the church, thou mayest do it. But thou shalt not write by way of commandment, but by wisdom; And thou shalt not command him who is at thy head, and at the head of the church; For I have given him the keys of the mysteries, and the revelations which are sealed, until I shall appoint unto them another in his stead."
One of the benefits of being called to a mission where the Church was nearly brand new is seeing the Doctrine and Covenants come to life before your very eyes as you serve and observe. I think we calculated at one point that, excluding couple missionaries, I must have been the 13th western missionary to step off the plane in Côte d'Ivoire as it was newly opened just a few years prior to my arrival. And it seems that Satan likes to run the same old playbook over and over. He likes to exploit conditions of confusion and credulity to sow seeds of pride where they can get a toe-hold, and then attempt to wedge the faithful away from the strait course by degrees until their faith fails them. I'm glad when he fails, but hearing experiences of how he tries can give me defenses against him because of how often he repeats himself and his methods.
As a case in point, the story goes that one of the newly called branch presidents in the mission felt inspired to grow the faith of his branch by increasing their reverence for the central ordinance of weekly worship: the sacrament. A worthy aim! He understood it, like we all do, as the renewal of the covenant of baptism, noticed that both ordinances are among the few in the Church's entire liturgical inventory to have fixed prayers, and that for one of them, special clothing was required. It must have been the Spirit, he thought, working through his key-holding, leadership calling prompting him to require that all of the Aaronic priesthood members blessing, passing, or preparing the sacrament each week be decked out in baptismal all-white jumpsuits. From his perspective, after ostensibly consulting the Handbook, there was nothing preventing such a "revelation", and he had a good, Christ-centered goal to increase the faith of the members in his own flock. What could be wrong about that?
The Mission President, at that time, was a warm, but imposing former military man, and former BYU Honor Code enforcement leader who was no stranger to occasional sternness. He had the practice of visiting all the branches on rotation. Upon seeing the deacons all lined up in all-whites, he immediately pulled the branch president aside and told him in no uncertain terms that he too had a revelation which said that the branch president's revelation was wrong. I'm sure there was some exchange with more nuance and understanding than that, but barely.
The principles at play here are multiple:
1. The Deceiver can work through good intentions, and often doesn't tempt the faithful in a 180 degree direction from their convictions. He is subtle and patient, and while he's not privy to God's omniscience, he's strategic enough with what he does know to be satisfied with small moves until he can capture you with firmer line-crossing. Even a degree off is a win for him.
2. Revelations come with scope. A branch president has no authority to alter the Handbook (which despite the read of the faithful high priest in question, was what his "prompting" was actually attempting to do) for the entire Church. Just because you're only attempting to enforce it in your own leadership role doesn't mean you can invent a whole new dress code. It's a subtle way to stretch beyond your scope, but it's in that subtlety that the slippery slope gets its power to inch you further toward more and more outright abuse of authority.
3. The Spirit does guide, but just because you have a good feeling about something doesn't make it a revelation. And counterfeits abound.
Please don't get me wrong. This was a fairly isolated incident. There were other anomalies and individual apostasies--some with wider effects, some involving serious sin--in the early years of the Church's presence in Côte d'Ivoire. But by and large my own sense was that newer members approached all new callings with high level of humility. They knew they couldn't rely on baked-in cultural tradition like some of the Utah Elders could, and therefore clung tightly to the Handbook and to the scriptures when they had questions about what practices to establish. They carefully sought out the line between doctrine and culture, and implemented the doctrine and its attendant practices with a high degree of exactness and intentionality. This allowed the cultural aspects to be more free in their own scope as well.
This particular branch president, to his credit, repented. And to the best of my information continued faithful service, leading his branch effectively in their Christian walk for years after this experience.
And that, too, seemed to have been the historic echo of Hiram Page's experience. In a similar environment of openness to instrumentalities in the seeking of God's will (divining rods, seer stones, and other objects being more common in the 1830s than now), and of the recent revelations to Joseph Smith cracking open definitively the concept of the closed canon and the horizon of possibility that the Lord could reveal His will to anyone, Page was among the firm faithful. He was selected, even before the Restoration of the Church, to participate in the handling of the Book of Mormon's gold plates along with 7 other witnesses, and joined the church nearly forthwith--within days--once it had been reestablished. Only 5 years apart from the prophet's own youthful 24 years old, Hiram served his community as a medical doctor and his new church in the office of teacher. Because of his education, he must have seemed authoritative as he taught, and reasonable enough to attract Oliver Cowdery's intellect into agreement as he speculated on the topic of Zion. But his good ideas and good intentions were not enough to guarantee freedom from deception. And his humility, like the branch president in my own story, was developed enough to allow him to back off, accept correction, and straighten up and fly right for the immediate future--confirming the faith of others in God, His Son, and their orderly method of revelation for the entire church to one key-holding prophet at a time.
Please note three more things about this historical episode and scripture section:
1. Cowdery, as second Elder in the church, was NOT denied the right to revelation for the general commandment to the church at this time. Just because Smith was the prophet, didn't mean he was the only one that could receive general revelation. Instead, the Lord's response, revealed through Smith, was that Cowdery should feel reinforced in his authority to SPEAK commandments to the church as moved upon by the Comforter. The limit of his scope was instead to real-time matters, and not the written, permanent kind of "commandments" that would only be given through Smith for the time being. Smith wasn't unwilling to share authority, but this event gave cause to seek out the Lord's will, which allowed the order of principles of scope and key-holding to grow in meaning and specificity as experiences made the specificity necessary.
2. The analogy of Moses to Smith and Aaron to Cowdery is the proximal reading of headship as it relates to not commanding "him who is at thy head." But there remains a sense in which Smith isn't actually the "head" of the Church, Christ is. In taking an unauthorized, but reasonable man's word that the Church as a whole should do X, and applying the force of commandment to it rather than seeking consensus with Smith first, what Cowdery was really doing was commanding Christ. And while that sounds egregious, the revealed response seems all the more gentle and encouraging in tone. Christ wants us all to be prophets, we just need to learn to speak in turn and check upward on our good ideas so we can be one with Him as we are one with our fellow partners in serving Him on His plan.
3. The Priesthood has order, revelation has scope, and even the manner of discipline--of affirming doctrinal, liturgical, and behavioral purity in disciples--has a charitable order to it. Cowdery wasn't to upbraid Page in public, but in private. He wasn't to punish Page or berate him, but to pull him aside as a "brother," tell him the plain truth, and see how he responds. If Page were to react badly or defiantly, I'm sure there would be further action necessary, but for now, the purpose of the leader privately correcting the offending party was one of building trust, offering space for repentance, and genuinely caring about the eternal soul of one's brother. This kind of gentle, love-motivated directness of confrontation is what creates conditions for common ground to be built upon, for repentance to enlarge both souls involved, and for solidarity in fresh steps forward to be taken in confidence and love unfeigned.
God is the great High Priest. He organizes, delegates, and inspires according to eternal principles to which we can all conform. Priesthood offices and power run under an ordered hierarchy, revelation is dispensed under an ordered scope, and teachings and discipline have a prescribed orderly manner. Order is important to our Father, and His love is evident in the exercise of His power through that order. We become more orderly as we allow Him to change our hearts to match His.
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