Lectures on Faith

The Lectures on Faith

Seven lectures on the nature of God and of faith that were printed in the Doctrine and Covenants from 1835 to 1921 — and then were not. What they say, and why they were taken out.

What they are

The Lectures on Faith are seven doctrinal lectures prepared as a course of instruction for the School of the Elders at Kirtland, Ohio, in the winter of 1834–35. They are systematic theology in the older sense — definitions, propositions, catechism-style questions and answers — and they are concerned above all with two subjects: what faith is, and what God is.

They are exposition, not revelation, and they never claimed otherwise. That distinction is the whole of their strange history.

Why they were in the Doctrine and Covenants

When the Doctrine and Covenants was compiled in 1835, it was published in two parts. The Lectures were the first part — the “doctrine” — and the revelations were the second, the “covenants”. The title of the book is a description of its contents, and for eighty-six years the first half of it was these lectures.

They were removed in the 1921 edition. The stated reasoning at the time was essentially the one above: they were never presented to or accepted by the church as revelation, and they were lectures prepared for a school rather than scripture.

Why people still argue about them

The fifth lecture describes the Godhead in terms that do not sit easily with what Latter-day Saints were taught afterwards — most conspicuously in how it speaks of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and of what kind of being each is. Joseph Smith's teaching on the nature of God developed considerably between 1835 and 1844, and the Lectures sit on the early side of that development.

So the Lectures are read now for two different reasons, by two different sets of readers: as an early formulation that shows the doctrine in motion, and as an argument that something was lost when they were removed. Both readings depend on the text, which is short enough to read in an evening.

What we hold

The 1835 text, complete — all seven lectures, indexed separately, alongside the 1833 Book of Commandments and the current Doctrine and Covenants.