The reading associated with this week in “Come, Follow Me” includes section 25 of the Doctrine and Covenants, the revelation addressed to Emma Hale Smith. Luckily, the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk published an interview with Robin Jensen on that very subject, including a great discussion about how the revelations were a collaborative process. What follows here is a copost to that interview.

Emma Smith’s Role in Shaping the ‘Elect Lady’ Revelation (D&C 25)

As a bit of framing to set the stage, Robin Jensen explained what section 25 is about:

Doctrine and Covenants section 25 is a revelation directed to Joseph Smith’s wife, Emma Hale Smith. This text explores and clarifies Emma’s relationship with God, her leadership role within the early Church organization, her expectations as a wife, and her on a hymnbook.

He added more about what he sees as the trajectory of the revelation:

Too often this revelation gets interpreted by Emma’s Kirtland publication of the hymnbook or her Nauvoo Relief Society activities. That is understandable and appropriate in certain contexts. But we shouldn’t forget that there was an immediate 1830 context and reception to this revelation—as well as an attempt to fulfill the words of the revelation.

The challenge is that contemporary sources do not tell us the minutiae of daily life in that first year of Church activity. Determining how Emma immediately fulfilled the words of the revelation proves challenging.

But that she served as Joseph’s scribe in late 1830, conferences opened with singing, and she “[went] with him” to Ohio means that Emma possibly also fulfilled other commands from the revelation, including “expound[ing] Scriptures & exhort[ing] the Church.”

There were efforts to fulfil the revelation in its immediate context, not just the later events that we often associate with it.

One of the major focuses of the original piece that Jensen wrote for the Latter-day Saint Theological Seminar and the book As It Shall Be Given Thee: Reading Doctrine and Covenants 25 was that we need to keep more than the revelator in mind while thinking about how the revelations developed, were used, and were eventually canonized:

It’s not that we shouldn’t focus on Joseph’s role in the revelatory process. After all, without Joseph, the revelations wouldn’t exist. But we have too long ignored the recipient’s role in forming the revelation.

The revelatory process was collaborative. Taking the Doctrine and Covenants seriously means that we try to understand all the questions asked and contexts surrounding the creation of those texts, including scribes, recipients, and the earliest audience. …

Joseph Smith was not a fax machine for God. He did not dictate words without his own personality and experiences influencing those texts. So, too, must we imagine how the very request of the recipient of a section in the Doctrine and Covenants influenced the nature of the resulting revelation.

Answers come only based on questions—and well-formed questions result in better answers. When Emma Smith, Oliver Cowdery, or Martin Harris requested a revelation, they spoke to Joseph about what concerned them.

Such conversations shaped the very nature of the revelation output.

The revelations were a collaborative process.

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For more on D&C 25, head on over the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk to read the full interview with Robin Jensen.