Why a blog and why this blog? A book is a big investment of time, energy, and focus. Someday I hope to write one on a related topic. In addition to this blog, I hope to have a podcast in the near future. Not a long podcast for those who want marathon interviews. Something more succinct. For now, however, we have this blog.
What is the blog for? To explore an idea. That idea is that Restorationism is bigger than one church. Sure, the LDS Church is by far and away the largest organization that sprang from Joseph Smith's Restoration, but many other churches split off. In fact, we have no idea how many Restoration groups, large and small, have flowered, thrived, withered away, and endured. How many are there today?
There are people out there who study those questions, and while I am interested in that sort of thing--very interested--this blog is about something else. It is about re-framing Restoration identity, practice, and organization for a modern, pluralistic, and global world. The numerical dominance of two groups should not determine what the Restoration means for all of us, even those who belong to those two groups (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Community of Christ).
The goal here is not to be polemical. It is to be Restoration ecumenical and, at the same time, stake out some new territory for doing things in a different way. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that I interpret Restoration history to be organizationally centered on the temple instead of the church. If I can persuade others of that point, then suddenly the temple achieves greater significance in Restorationism. Let's see how that might work.
In the October 7, 1829 issue of Palmyra's Reflector, Abner Cole cited an earlier story in another newspaper about the intention of Joseph Smith's followers to build a Temple of Nephi in the first year of the new Millennium. Although Cole was known to lampoon and ridicule Smith, we have no reason to doubt the factual substance of Smith's intention to rebuild a Temple of Nephi on the site of a long-destroyed first temple of Nephi, which is found in the text of the Book of Mormon that Smith had translated between April and June of the same year (1829). Smith may have hoped that he would obtain the riches and control of the land needed to build the temple that the "angel of the Lord" had promised him and the Smiths had related to Jesse Smith in an 1828 letter.
Joseph Smith's first church organization took place on April 6, 1830, over half a year after the original report of Joseph Smith's intention to build a Temple of Nephi in a local Palmyra newspaper. This means that the first plan for a building in the Restoration was not a chapel, but a temple. What was supposed to take place in this temple? For this we turn to the lost story of King Mosiah in the first manuscript of the Book of Mormon. Mosiah took a divining instrument, the interpreters, into a tabernacle to ask God how to use them. From behind the veil, God asked, "What is in your hand?" Mosiah responded, "I do not know, but I have come to inquire."
One might argue that the temple of the Restoration is both antecedent to the church and thus has precedence over the church. It may even be independent from it. No wonder that a number of Restoration organizations carried on the building of temples and practicing sacred temple rites, even though the information I just shared was only recently put together in this way by LDS researcher, historian, and author, Don Bradley. Don's purpose, as a historian, was not to make an ecclesiological or theological argument. The ecclesiological and theological implications of his work, however, are profound, and their role in inspiring this blog is the primary reason why I refer to them at the outset. The Restoration is wide open. No one owns it. We can re-imagine it and practice it in other ways.