A telling aspect of the Restoration is what the golden plates couldn’t do.
When people are left without access to the sacrament or other priesthood ordinances, one might ask: Why not let the miracle of modern technology solve the problem by allowing a priest to bless the bread and water from a distance? The words of the sacrament prayer would still be audible in the room where the recipient was along with the bread and water, after all, and the priest would act with the same authority.
The answer is based on a series of media-historical propositions.
(1) An action that can be transmitted over distance can also necessarily be transmitted forward in time. The transmittable action is therefore preservable as well.
(2) Actions that can be preserved can also be reproduced in multiple copies. These copies do not depend on the original action, but can instead derive from other copies of the original.
(3) Transmittable, preservable and reproducible actions can be stored and accumulated. A collection introduces an element of competition for validity between copies with the same point of origin, and versions with different points of origin. One unavoidable end point of transmitting action across space is the problem of the library: Which action is most valid? Which copy is correct?
(4) Reproducible, preservable, transmittable and collectible actions become commodities that are commercially exploitable. The other end point of transmitting action is the problem of the marketplace.
This process is most clearly illustrated in the history of literacy. The action of the spoken word depends on the physical proximity of the speaker and listener. This can be overcome through recourse to writing, and it has ever been the claim of the written word to transport one person’s speech to another’s ear, whether on paper, papyrus, or imprinted on a clay tablet. But those same media also bring the speaker’s words forward in time and make them reproducible. Even without the speaker’s presence, copies can be made from copies. Records of the spoken word are accumulated in libraries and archives, where their differences raise questions of validity and priority. And they also compete as commercial wares in the marketplace.
Based on the historical precedent of literacy, I would draw two religious corollaries:
(a) If the action of the sacrament is reduced to the speaking of particular words, all of (1) to (4) would obviously apply to the words of a priest, so that playing a recording of a priest speaking the sacramental prayers would be as valid as a priest officiating in person. The Church would need only one priest – not at any given moment, but one priest ever – who could be recorded speaking the sacrament prayers. This is the media logic of the televangelist broadcasting to believers who hope to access his divine charisma through their televisions. This is also what made the abuse of indulgences possible with the advent of the printing press.
(b) If the action of the sacrament is considered to go beyond the spoken word to include some priesthood power however defined, but this power can still be transmitted over distance, then all of (1) to (4) will again apply with the same logical consequence. The medium need not be electronic. The force of the sacrament could for example be considered to inhere in the blessed bread and water. This material transmission would nevertheless have the same results, with the bread and water becoming the medium for a transmittable, preservable, reproducible, and commoditized priesthood power. This media logic is visible in history in the various superstitions surrounding the consecrated Eucharistic host, or in the medieval trade in relics.
The problems generated by allowing priesthood ordinances through telepresence become especially acute for the Church when it comes to the ordinance of ordaining priests. If a priest could be ordained at a distance without physical laying-on of hands, then the Great Apostasy – the cessation of divine authority to conduct sacraments – is reduced to a much more solvable problem. Peter and the apostles clearly had this authority, so if the authority is not present at some later date, then the solution according to (a) is to find a copy of the relevant words; or according to (b), to find an artifact that would materially transmit the relevant power.
So it is notable that the golden plates represent a rejection of these solutions based on what the plates couldn’t accomplish. In the words of Joseph Smith, the plates contained the “the most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion, and a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book.” Moreover, the golden plates are in religious terms the most extraordinary artifact ever discovered: an autograph record made by a prophet and priesthood holder who enjoyed the ministry of transfigured apostles ordained by Christ himself. They contain the sacramental prayers we use today. If neither the words of the Book of Mormon nor the golden plates as artifact were able to transmit priesthood authorization to Joseph Smith, then nothing else could. To solve the problem of the Great Apostasy, a personal angelic visitation was required.
I hasten to point out I am not stating (a) and (b) as claims about the nature of ultimate reality or the divine will. Instead, they represent opportunities where particular choices were made in history. The existence of other practices in other churches means that other choices would have certainly been possible. In many Christian churches, for example, the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper has a strictly memorial function. From this perspective, there would be little difference between congregants taking the sacrament in the chapel, and an individual contemplating the sacrament prayers before consuming bread and water in isolation, with no divine authority or ecclesiastic mandate claimed or required.
But what the alternate choices have in common is that they would make the Restoration a superfluous complication of the religious landscape. Contemplating Christ in the sacramental emblems is a wonderful thing, but there would be no need for John the Baptist to personally confer the priesthood on Joseph Smith if the sacrament is a strictly memorial act. If priesthood authority could be conferred through either verbal or material telepresence, then the solution to the Great Apostasy could have been found through philology or archeology. To admit the efficacy of Zoom sacraments would mean undoing basic choices in Church history, rewinding the Restoration back to before its origin.
The inability of women and others without access to a priesthood holder to partake of the sacrament in certain situations is a distressing problem in precisely the same way that the loss of priesthood authority for centuries before the Restoration was a distressing problem. However, the optimal solution for Latter-day Saints to a transitory problem will not involve strategies that, taken to their logical conclusion, would render the Restoration pointless.
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