The sixth out of the seven books in the Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants series that I read is the one by Justin Collings on Divine Law. I admit that this one left me pleasantly surprised. I was expecting some sort of lawyerly analysis of how the commandments in the Doctrine and Covenants create a system of laws and how those hold up under the scrutiny of legal experts, akin to some of the chapters in Embracing the Law: Reading Doctrine and Covenants 42. Instead, I found an insightful and well-written exposition of the idea that divine law is a principle means by which God blesses us and guides us towards becoming more like Him. 

Admittedly, part of why I resonated with this book is that it outlined thoughts that I’ve had on my mind for years, using some of my favorite Joseph Smith quotes to support them. The book starts with a vignette that drops you right into the King Follett Sermon, building up to the statement that “God himself, finding he was in the midst of spirits and glory, because he was more intelligent, saw proper to institute laws whereby the rest could have a privilege to advance like himself … He has power to institute laws to instruct the weaker intelligences, that they may be exalted with Himself, so that they might have one glory upon another, and all that knowledge, power, glory, and intelligence, which is requisite in order to save them in the world of spirits.” This described, Collings writes, “a singular moment in cosmic history—a primeval burst of celestial grace.” This quote frames much of what follows, since it indicates that “those laws would furnish means for our divine ascent. In a thrilling blaze of gracious condescension, God beckons His children to rise toward His own throne. All who answer that sweet summons may climb by the ladder of law” (pp. 3–4). 

The one area in which I felt like there could have been more attention paid was in the efforts offered towards reconciling the divine love of God with God’s judgement and justice. Collings’s explanations felt a bit like hand waving, since they basically just said that it is what it is and judgement and justice are motivated by love without a lot of deep discussion into how that plays out before moving on to the next topic. He best wrestlings with the topic state that “Divine law does not gain its weight merely from an affixed punishment. It is motivated instead by a correlated possibility” (p. 14) and “there can be no law without consequences, shrink as we might from that cosmic reality. … The earliest revelations make clear that those who abuse God’s gifts of grace risk losing them” (p. 47). 

An area that I was particularly pleasantly surprised was in the author’s efforts to address commentary about the U.S. constitution in the Doctrine and Covenants. I’ll admit that when I came to the moment he brought it up, I rolled my eyes, thinking that it was going to be yet another exposition of American exceptionalism costumed in religious language by a Republican. Yet, a paragraph later (almost as if he saw my reaction coming), he wrote, “some might wonder why, in a global church, special attention should be paid to the political arrangements of any particular country. Others might wonder how an imperfect document that accommodates slavery could possibly merit divine approval.” His responses to these questions were actually very insightful and didn’t raise my hackles, like my initial reaction anticipated he would. In particular, his thoughts about the second question he raised were new to me—that the biggest flaws to the U.S. constitution were addressed by the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments: “In some respects, it is this Constitution—the post-Civil War Constitution, purged of its original compromises with slavery—that seems to be envisaged and described in the revelations. When I read that the Lord ‘redeemed the land by the shedding of blood,’ I think of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass as well as of George Washington and James Madison; of Antietam and Gettysburg as well as Yorktown and Trenton” (p.80). The revelations prophetically anticipated that version of the U.S. Constitution as much as they embraced the Constitution as it existed in the 1830s.

In the end, Divine Law: Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants stands out along with Terryl L. Givens’s entry on Agency as one of my favorite entries in the series.