Texts

School of the Prophets as a Temple Precursor

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The School of the Prophets was held in an upper room of the Whitney Store in Kirtland, OhioI hadn’t made this connection before, but it seems to jump out at me now like red ink. I knew that the School of the Prophets was a select group of brethren who participated in an effort to prepare themselves for the missionary work, but it also had a much more spiritual side with hints and shadows of the pending promises and revelations of an endowment of power from on high.  The School of the Prophets was preparing the Church for the temple.

I’m reading Dr. Richard Bushman’s excellent biography, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, and this impressed me when I read the following about the revelation of D&C 88 and the organization of this school: [Read more…]

Priestly Initiations in the Testament of Levi

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Detail from A Levite Priest holds up Holy Hands - James Tissot (1836-1902)

The Testament of Levi is one of the books in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and is an apocryphal and pseudopigraphal work so we do not know its original author or source. The Testament of Levi, as we have it today, was composed in its final form in the second century B.C. It is also considered an apocalyptic work, relating visions similar to John’s book of Revelation. Fragments of this text have also been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, lending more credibility to them than some of the other “testaments.”

One particularly interesting passage is about Levi’s vision of his priestly ordination in heaven, including washings, anointings, and investiture: [Read more…]

Cyril of Jerusalem on Washings and Anointings

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Arian Baptistry in Ravenna, Italy, depicting Christ's baptism, washing, or anointing - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arian_Baptistry>. Also note the gammadia marks on the apostles' robes

St. Cyril of Jerusalem

I was first introduced to Cyril’s Catechetical Lectures by Hugh Nibley in his phenomenal work The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri. Cyril of Jerusalem is a prominent early Christian theologian, and is considered a saint by many. His most famous writings are set of twenty-three catechetical lectures which he delivered around 347 or 348 A.D. while still a presbyter or priest before he became the Bishop or See (Seer?) of Jerusalem. Most of these lectures were given as instruction to candidates before baptism and initiation. One of the appendices of Dr. Nibley’s book contains snippets from Cyril’s lectures on the “mysteries” (ordinances) or advanced instruction given to the newly baptized or initiated, having already performed these rites. These are contained in the last five of the twenty-three lectures, or lectures 19-23, often called the lectures on the mysteries. All the lectures can be read in full online at New Advent or at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, albeit the translation is different than Nibley’s which he takes directly from the Patrologia Graeca by J.P. Migne (Vol. 33, cols. 1065-1105). [Read more…]

Trailing Clouds of Glory

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The Lake District, England - William Wordsworth's home

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a mother’s mind,
And no unworthy aim,
The homely nurse doth all she can
To make her foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.

–William Wordsworth (From Ode: Intimations of Immortality)

The Premortal Heavenly Temple

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The temples on earth are reflections of the temple in heaven. They mirror each other both in form and content. Consider the following points that I pull from Matthew Brown’s exceptional and classic book on the temple, The Gate of Heaven: ((Matthew Brown, The Gate of Heaven: Insights on the Doctrines and Symbols of the Temple, 6-7))

  • John saw “the temple which is in heaven” (Rev. 14:15, 17; Rev. 15:5-8).
  • Other scriptures also mention God’s heavenly sanctuary (Ps. 11:4; Rev. 7:15; Rev. 16:17).
  • “There are a number of ancient Hebrew traditions that specifically state that God resides in a temple that is located in the center of the universe.”
  • The earthly temples of Israel in ancient times were built after the same manner as the heavenly temple.

There are many more examples, both ancient and modern, that could be given which illustrate the existence of the heavenly temple, and most of them focus on the ascent one takes on their journey from mortality back to and through that temple to return to the throne of God.

The the last few days I’ve been pondering the existence of this temple and its role in our premortal life and journey into mortality. I have found that what we do on earth in the temple has striking parallels and resemblances to what occurred in the heavenly temple before the creation and our passage to this earth: [Read more…]