Welcome to Abide, a Maxwell Institute podcast.

In Mormonism, a very short introduction, Richard Bushman says that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a New Testament church that embraces an Old Testament model.

We see that over and over again, notions of priesthood, kinship networks, chosenness, and dietary restrictions.

But the introduction of temples is perhaps the clearest evidence.

The Kirtland Temple, whose dedicatory prayers canonized as Doctrine and Covenant Section 109,

is the first temple dedicated in this dispensation.

In Section 110, we learned that Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon saw the Lord and were told

that he had accepted the Saints' temple as an offering.

Later, more messengers bestowed keys to Smith and Rigdon, keys that ensured the

Latter-day Saints would be able to accomplish the necessary work to gather Israel, literally

and spiritually, throughout this dispensation.

One thing of note to remember is that even as Latter-day Saints

today rightly focused on the receipt of priesthood keys, some Latter-day Saints were more focused on the

millennium. As W.W. Phelps told his wife Sally, the big news from the visions and visitations of the day

was that the great and terrible day of the Lord, as mentioned by Malachi, was near,

even at the doors. The narratives that we focus on today are not the same that early saints

focused on. That does not make either perspective more valuable, but instead should change

how we read the stories and think about them more deeply. My name is Joseph Stewart.

I'm the public communication specialist at the Neely Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

at Brigham Young University.

Janice Johnson, who is a Willis Center Research Associate at the Institute, and I will

be discussing each week's block of reading from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,

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