WOMEN AND THE PRIESTHOOD, JS AND PLURAL MARRIAGE AND OTHER RAMBLINGS

Part of the problem with this whole thing with Joseph Smith and many plural wives is that people are intellectually lazy and do not read their early church history.  When they find stuff out that is pretty routine for even a casual scholar such as myself, then they are floored and their testimony is thrown into a tailspin as they begin to question everything.  Basically, I say "Get over it.  Either the Book of Mormon is true, or it is not."  All else does not matter.  You could tell me that Joseph Smith ate dog poop for breakfast with sugar sprinkled on top and dyed his hair purple and it would still change nothing about my testimony of the restoration.  Would I consider the poopy breakfast eccentric or weird?  Yes.  If I had received a witness of the Book of Mormon, would I trash that witness upon learning of said culinary eccentricities?  No.  No more than I would expect that my wife, upon learning a few months after we were married that I did indeed flatulate, would consider me a horrible person and throw dispersion on the rest of my character for having a sharp edge in one area.  Even if Joseph were to have somehow invented section 138 for his own gratification and were indeed committing adultery/fornication (in some kind of moment of weakness), I would still not throw out the previous works that were performed while in God's good graces.  People are human - so get over it.  Now, having said that - I do not believe for a minute that Joseph were some kind of sexual deviant.  Even marrying a 14 year old (and even if that marriage were to have been consummated), I would still not consider him a deviant.  Pushing the envelope there - even for the day - yes.  But a deviant - nope.  Let me again say here, I believe that sealing was for eternity only - not for time (ie;  there was no sexual consummation involved).  Bottom line here - Joseph was married to as many as were given him in the pre-existence as one of God's pre-eminent servants on par with any of the greats who have ever walked this earth.  Read Adam, Melchizedek, Abraham, etc.  No slouch in my mind.  And in that company, most of them were married to women in the multiple.  When you are of that kind of breeding, you are given more in order to improve the spiritual sustainability of the race.  Simple math folks.  Things are already plunging downhill fast - the world is turning into a cesspool.  Despite the best efforts of the orchardman to graft and dung and help the tree to bear fruit and even thrive.  When you find someone such as Joseph who is a direct descendant of his namesake, who is filled with the gifts of the Spirit, you take that person and spread their seed as far and wide in order to provide a leaven within a world that is fallen.  When I have met a descendant of BY or P P Pratt, you can simply feel the good breeding.  I can sense the electness of them......  Most of the GAs in the Church today are descended from this excellent stock (term used purposefully).  As a farmer/rancher, if you have a good breeding bull, you use him as much as you can to try and get those characteristics into your herd as quickly as you can before he loses his vitality and the job is given to another fine specimen.  Spiritual gifts and tendencies are passed from one generation to the next (through genetics) as much as they are inherited and are passed through spiritual lines (from our Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother(s).  I give the case of Joseph of Egypt.  The most dreaming/visionary people you will find on the face of the earth is through Manasseh (son of Joseph).  Coincidence?  I think not - it was a matter of breeding.  One of Joseph's characteristics present in both Ephraim (the redhead - picture Irish, Scottish, Picts, etc) and Manasseh (picture the warrior Indians, etc), is the fighting instinct.  Thus the prophecies that Joseph (who helped lead the rebellion of the 10 tribes in the north against more peaceful Judah) and Judah herself would finally blend back in during the last days and would at last be friendly towards each other.  This was beautifully fulfilled with the US and Israel being allies.  Joseph and Judah finally helping each other instead of fighting and bickering constantly.

Anyway - the next big one is women and the Priesthood.  The wave is coming.  Again, mostly hype based on lack of doctrinal/historical understanding.  When I was a ZL on the mission, I taught several modules where the Sister missionaries were asking what to do when they would encounter someone who was possessed (a common occurrence in Brazil) and there was no Priesthood readily available (again, a common occurrence in Brazil).  I told them to command it to depart in the name of Jesus Christ (as instructed in the endowment) and that they should use the verbage "using the Priesthood to which I am co-author" or some such language.  Several who I remained in contact with reported positive results using that method.  So, there you have it.

Previous to my mission, I was a voracious reader as the spirit of the Lord rested upon me to prepare for the pinnacle of life experience at that point.  I read much of this - and had no problem with it.  So many years in the Correlation Committee and we have washed the meaty stuff right out of the shepherd's pie and now it is just mushy mashed potatoes with no real protein in the doctrine.  I happen to agree with the snuffed Snuffer on that one.  The hard-charging doctrines have all but disappeared from our manuals.  Then we have the painful job of restoring "what had been lost" when the facts could not be conveniently brushed under the carpet.

Just as happened with JS and polygamy, such will occur with women and the practice of the Priesthood.  Personally?  I cannot wait to lay my hands on a child's head with my wife and exercise our Priesthood jointly - much as was done in the beginning.  To me, the most delicious of thoughts along this line, is the joint raising by my wife and I of our son that departed this earth 12 years ago.  How I cannot wait for that moment.   Not some stranger or vague acquaintance, but my wife and I, side by side dressed in our temple robes.  It is foreign to me to have to call a stranger over to bless and anoint my child.  If it came to a stewardship outside our home (such as the child of a woman who had no priesthood in the home), it would seem more natural to call a HT companion for that job.  I look forward to the return of practices that kind of seemed to get out of hand back in the St George Temple days, of women baptizing women in the temple fonts during purification rituals (that do not happen any more).   There is much that happened historically - that was discontinued that I feel ought not have.  Much of it occurred after the 1890 Manifesto.  Much disappeared.  I am not sure if it was an effort to please Babylon - or what - but it disappeared.  Of all the modern prophets, I trust those from 1900-1960 the least.  Precisely because in their zeal to mainstream and stamp out a practice that was given from God, much else was trampled.  This is just my opinion.  This is just my opinion - but we started to see doctrinal exposes that welcomed Darwinism into the doctrinal set and so much else that was wrong then - and is wrong now.  All so we could fit in at the time.  I am glad that I did not have to vote in the Manifesto at the time - because that would have been a hard pill to swallow for me.

People I fell in step with were President Kimball and the restoration of the Priesthood to all worthy males (as it appears it was in the days of Joseph Smith) and President Benson with his clarion call against commies and socialists.

Anyway - enough rambling.  I just thought I would record that.  I have always thought it.  It is nice to get it down on paper.....

Here are those quotes I found today:

Taken from a website discussing Women and priesthood:

"All priesthood is Melchizedek; but there are different portions or degrees of it. The priesthood bestowed in the temple is the same priesthood given by the laying on of hands, but it is a fullness of that authority and embraces all other authorities, appendages, and offices."
- Prophet Joseph Smith, The Words of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center, 1980, page 59

Women receive the priesthood in the temple

From the temple endowment

Why do women in the temple wear the Robes of the Priesthood? I think the answer is clear. Endowed women have the priesthood! Not only do they wear the priesthood emblems in the temple, but they also wear the priesthood garments outside of the temple.

The temple sealing ceremony also makes reference to the priesthood when it seals upon both the man and the woman "the blessings of kingdoms, thrones, principalities, powers, dominions and exaltations, with all the blessings of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob..". This power is the priesthood, as reference to all the blessings of Abraham indicates.

"It is a precept of the Church that women of the Church share the authority of the priesthood with their husbands, actual or prospective; and therefore women, whether taking the endowment for themselves or for the dead, are not ordained to specific rank in the priesthood. Nevertheless, there is no grade, rank, or phase of the temple endowment to which women are not eligible on an equality with man."
- James E. Talmage, The House of the Lord (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1912), p. 94.

"If a woman is requested to lay hands on the sick with her husband or with any other officer holding the Melchizedek Priesthood, she may do so with perfect propriety. It is no uncommon thing for a man and wife unitedly to administer to their children, and the husband being mouth, he may properly say out of courtesy, 'By authority of the holy priesthood in us vested.'"
- Prophet Joseph F. Smith, Improvement Era 10 (February 1907), page 308.

Wilford Woodruff's namesake son, just ordained a priest, was about to begin his duties. The future Church president summoned his family on 3 February 1854. "His father and mother [Phoebe Carter Woodruff] laid hands upon him and blessed him and dedicated him unto the Lord" (Wilford Woodruff Jr. Journal , 4:244) On 8 September 1875, George Goddard recorded a similar incident about his sixteen-year-old son, Brigham H. On his birthday, "his Mother and Myself, put our hands upon his head and pronounced a parents blessing upon him."

John Taylor on "The Order and Duties of the Priesthood" reaffirmed that women "hold the Priesthood, only in connection with their husbands, they being one with their husbands"
- Apostle John Taylor, Journal of Discourses, 21:368

Women have joined men in giving priesthood blessings to men:

In 1873, Apostle George A. Smith, then a member of the first presidency, travelled with a party of Mormons, including Lorenzo Snow, his sister Eliza, Feramorz Little and others, to the Holy Land. At a stopover in Bologna, Italy, he felt ill. "I became fatigued and dizzy," he wrote in his diary. "I got into a carriage and returned to the hotel. On arriving at the hotel I found myself so unwell that I requested Bros. Snow and Little and Sister Eliza to lay hands on me."
- George A. Smith, Diary, 9 January 1873, holograph, CA.

Women also used to give priesthood blessings to women, using consecrated oil:

In 1849 Eliza Jane Merrick, an English convert, reported healing her sister: "I anointed her chest with the oil you consecrated, and also gave her some inwardly .... She continued very ill all the evening: her breath very short, and the fever very high. I again anointed her chest in the name of the Lord, and asked his blessing; he was graciously pleased to hear me, and in the course of twenty-four hours, she was as well as if nothing had been the matter."
- Jane Merrick Journal and Letters 1849, page 205

If women do not receive the priesthood in the temple, why then were black women banned from the temple until until 1978 when blacks were allowed to receive the priesthood? Until 1978 Black men were not allowed to receive their endowments because they could not receive the priesthood. Interesting to note that this ban also included black women. It wasn't until after blacks could receive the priesthood were female blacks allowed to enter the temple, receive their endowments and be sealed to white or black men. Again, this is because church leaders recognized that women receive the priesthood in the temple.

The important thing to understand here is that endowed women have the priesthood power, but have no office in the priesthood in which to exercize it.

In the past, endowed women could administer priesthood healing blessings to the sick. They also placed their hands on the heads of sick children along with their husbands during priesthood blessings. But these practices have been discontinued.

Women don't think they have it. But doctrinally speaking, endowed women have the priesthood.