Don Bradley on Sacred Instruments of Revelation

 

I have been thoroughly enjoying the new book Freemasonry and the Origins of Latter-day Saint Temple Ordinances by Jeffrey M. Bradshaw.[1] In it, he cites an email received from the scholar Don Bradley regarding modes of revelation. Although Bradley was initially talking about the Temple, these insightful remarks apply to other divine instruments of revelation (or translation) that are found within the scriptures or Latter-day Saint church history:

In parallel to the Lord transforming the brother of Jared’s sixteen stones into vessels of divine light on Mt. Shelem—alongside giving the brother of Jared the interpreters He had made Himself—consider what the Lord did for Moses on Mt. Sinai. Moses gets the commandments on two different sets of stone tablets. One set the Lord makes for him, by His own hand. The other Moses makes for God, and God sanctifies it by the touch of His hand. Both sets of tablets convey God’s commandments. What matters is not the vehicle, but the divine purpose to which it is put and its divine sanctification to that purpose.

Another thought: The great anthropologist of religion Mircea Eliade observed that a culture’s cosmogony establishes its ideals for human action. In the same way that God created the world, we humans are to create within the world. Similarly, it would stand to reason that God’s actions in the creation of the world would establish the template for how He continues to create within the world. So, as Philip Barlow has argued, just as in our Book of Abraham and temple cosmogonies, God creates the world using pre-existing materials, so in this same way God, collaborating with his prophets, creates revelations within the world using preexisting materials available to them. For instance, the Book of Mormon was given in the pre-existing language of the King James Version of the Bible. On the model of these creation accounts, we should expect revelation to make use of such materials, recreating ancient and primordial patterns using modern materials. If an inspired painter were to perfectly depict the symbols of the ancient Jewish temple, without having any adequate human way of knowing this symbolism, would it be sufficient to dismiss the inspiration of his work on the grounds that although his symbolism was perfect his paints were modern? I would argue that this is sharply analogous to what we see in Joseph Smith using modern materials to restore ancient patterns of faith and worship.[2]

One more example to include would be Joseph Smith’s seer stone. Just as the Lord had prepared interpreters for Joseph, so too could he sanctify a stone Joseph already had for that same purpose. Of course, various accounts do witness that Joseph found his seer stone “by revelation,” making it just as likely that the Lord had already consecrated the stone to that effect.[3] Orson Pratt has similarly taught that multiple instruments — some divinely constructed, others man-made — could be “endowed” with all the properties of a Urim and Thummim, thus becoming sacred tools to bring about God’s work.

---

[1] Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, Freemasonry and the Origins of Latter-day Saint Temple Ordinances (Orem, UT: Interpreter Foundation / Salt Lake City, UT: Eborn Books, 2022), 401n249.

[2] Don Bradley, “Email message to Jeffrey M. Bradshaw,” July 24, 2022; cited in Bradshaw, Freemasonry, 401n249.

[3] See Wilford Woodruff, “Wilford Woodruff Journals, 1833–1898,” 158.