I strongly, strongly disapprove of the teachings of the prophets and it is all John A. Widstoe\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fault. Now just for the record, I think that John A. Widstoe is a very cool guy. Indeed, when people ask me about my goatee, I always respond that I am simply trying to look like Widstoe. (Which as it happens, is true.) But he really set a bad precedent, in my opinion, for how we present the words of the prophets.<\/p>\n
What I am talking about are books like The Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson<\/i> or The Teachings of Spencer W. Kimball<\/i>. The great-granddaddy of this genre is Joseph Fielding Smith\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith<\/i>. As anyone who has read this book will tell you, its organization is bizarre. It is arranged chronologically (sort of) and consists of snippets of Joseph\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s thinking. There are a couple of complete sermons, but mainly it is just an odd mishmash of Joseph\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s writings. Now in fairness to Joseph Fielding Smith, there was no stenographer who followed Joseph around taking down his sermons, the way that Watts took down Brigham Young\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sermons. Still, TPJS<\/i> is perhaps a uniquely disorganized book.<\/p>\n
My theory is that the book appalled the orderly, chemist\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mind of Elder John A. Widstoe, one of Joseph Fielding Smith\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s then-colleagues in the Quorum of the Twelve. When you look at the second great book in this genre — The Discourses of Brigham Young<\/i> — Widstoe\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s reaction against Joseph Fielding Smith\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s haphazard editing is palpable. DBY<\/i> is extremely well organized. The chapters are arranged topically and have a clear structure. Indeed, the whole work is so well organized that one suspects that one is reading as much John A. Widstoe as Brigham Young between the covers. Certainly, if you have ever read any of Brigham\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sermons in the Journal of Discourses<\/i> you will know that he never achieved anything like the organizational clarity of Widstoe\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s rendition of him. Brigham was much messier, and Widstoe is clearly cleaning him up.<\/p>\n
The next set of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153teachings\u00e2\u20ac? books — Gospel Kingdom<\/i> (John Taylor), Gospel Standards<\/i> (Heber J. Grant), and Discourses of Wilford Woodruff<\/i> — were compiled by G. Homer Durham. Not unimportantly, G. Homer Durham was John A. Widstoe\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s son-in-law, and his work follows Widstoe\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pattern. Sermons are sliced, diced, and rearranged in topical format. By the time that G. Homer Durham had finished his flurry of editing (about 1950) the genre had more or less crystallized. Compilations of prophetic teachings were to consist of topically rearranged paragraphs from larger sermons.<\/p>\n
There are two basic reasons that this is a bad idea. The first is that it keeps the text from ever developing any idea that is longer than a paragraph. Now there are some people who can say a great deal in a single paragraph (John Taylor, for example), but there is clearly a loss when we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t allow them to develop any themes more complex than that allowed in half-a-dozen sentences. Secondly, slicing and dicing destroys the rhetorical context and flow of the sermons. Many of the prophets were powerful speakers who knew how to develop and organize a sermon. You lose something when \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The King Follett Discourse\u00e2\u20ac? is reduced to a set of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153quotes.\u00e2\u20ac?<\/p>\n
A far better approach would be to collect sermons together and publish them whole. See how ideas are developed and how they are related together. Get some sense of the cadence and pace of a prophet\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s speech. Alas, Widstoe was ultimately a scientist rather than a preacher, so order and rationality beat out rhetoric and oratory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I strongly, strongly disapprove of the teachings of the prophets and it is all John A. Widstoe\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fault. Now just for the record, I think that John A. Widstoe is a very cool guy. Indeed, when people ask me about my goatee, I always respond that I am simply trying to look like Widstoe. (Which as it happens, is true.) But he really set a bad precedent, in my opinion, for how we present the words of the prophets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1834"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1834\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}