Revelation, 7 May 1831 [D&C 49]

Generally, a divine mandate that church members were expected to obey; more specifically, a text dictated by JS in the first-person voice of deity that served to communicate knowledge and instruction to JS and his followers. Occasionally, other inspired texts...

A title indicating one sent forth to preach; later designated as a specific ecclesiastical office. By 1830, JS and Oliver Cowdery were designated as apostles. The articles and covenants of the church explained that an “apostle is an elder” and, as such, had...

An ordinance in which an individual is immersed in water for the remission of sins. The Book of Mormon explained that those with necessary authority were to baptize individuals who had repented of their sins. Baptized individuals also received the gift of...

See Acts 2:38.
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After baptism, new converts were confirmed members of the church “by the laying on of the hands, & the giving of the Holy Ghost.” According to JS’s history, the first confirmations were given at the organization of the church on 6 April 1830. By March 1831...

An administrative and ecclesiastical office not associated with age. The Book of Mormon explained that elders ordained priests and teachers and administered “the flesh and blood of Christ unto the church.” The articles and covenants of the church directed...

The Book of Mormon related that when Christ set up his church in the Americas, “they which were baptized in the name of Jesus, were called the church of Christ.” The first name used to denote the church JS organized on 6 April 1830 was “the Church of Christ...

Shaker doctrine opposed marriage in favor of a life of total celibacy. For Mother Ann Lee, celibacy was “the key to sinless perfection and salvation.” A late eighteenth-century convert to Shakerism named Reuben Rathbun wrote, “The natural seed of copulation was looked upon as the most unclean and hateful of any thing in the natural creation,” and celibacy was required as the necessary “cross against the flesh.” The Shaker doctrine of celibacy led to an explicit segregation of the sexes and, as one historian has explained, became the “basis of its theology and its communal structuring.” (Garrett, Origins of the Shakers, 152–153, 223, 233–234.)
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See Mark 10:7–9.
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JS’s revision of the Bible had earlier declared that God created all things, including human beings, “spiritually before they were naturally upon the face of the Earth.” (Old Testament Revision 1, p. 5 [Moses 3:5].)
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Unlike the proscription against marriage and sexual relations, the principle of vegetarianism was not in general practice among the Shakers. Still, as early as 1820 there was an attempt on the part of the Ministry, located in New Lebanon, New York, to persuade Shaker communities to adopt vegetarianism, and leaders spoke against the use of meat, particularly pork. The revelation’s statement that it was “not ordained of God” to teach that believers should “abstain from meats that man should not eat the same” is evidence of the principle of vegetarianism being a belief held among the North Union Shakers in 1831. Teachings against the consumption of pork, apparently connected to the biblical prohibition observed by the Israelites, were reportedly not uncommon among Mormons living in the Kirtland area. Levi Hancock recorded that around May 1831 “the Preaching in Kirtland once was against the use of Pork— Once Joseph asked me to help him feed his hogs. I did so I osserved [observed] that the Jews never ate Pork He answered If I eat pork I will know what my hogs eat! And I left to this conclusion there are sometimes extremes in Preaching.” Hancock went on to explain that JS described the Israelite law against pork as a proscription God established for a specific time and place but that “Israel was so bound up with law that they still kept up the old established practice of not eating hog meat Finaly they got so much law they could not keep it themselves.” (Stein, Shaker Experience, 156–158; Puskar-Pasewicz, “Debates over Meatless Diets in Nineteenth-Century Shaker Communities,” 109–120; Hancock, Autobiography, ca. 1896, 22.)
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Earlier, in his revision of the Bible, JS modified part of Genesis 9:5 to read “surely blood shall not be shed only for meat to save your lives and the blood of every beast will I require at your hands.” (Old Testament Revision 1, p. 24 [Joseph Smith Translation, Genesis 9:11].)
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In 1806, twenty years after Ann Lee’s death, Ohio Shakers wrote to the Lead Ministry in New Lebanon, New York, to “request the privilege of opening to the world the first Foundation & Pillar” of their faith—that “Christ’s Second Appearance” had been in the person of Ann Lee. Permission was granted, and the 1808 publication of The Testimony of Christ’s Second Appearing became “the first General Statement of the present faith & principles” of the Believers. No contemporary evidence exists that Lee herself ever unambiguously taught such a doctrine. As their Christology developed, Shakers proclaimed that the “Christ spirit,” the divine anointing, filled Ann Lee in this last dispensation just as it filled Jesus in an earlier dispensation. This was necessary because a dual creation—man and woman—demanded a dual redemption in the form of Jesus and Ann Lee. The second appearing of the Christ spirit in Mother Ann restored “that which was lost by the transgression of the first woman” and “finish[ed] the work of man’s final redemption.” This belief was also rooted in the Shaker view of an androgynous God, with “Christ & Mother as representatives of the Dual principle in Deity.” (Stein, Shaker Experience, 68–72, 260, 326.)
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The copy of this revelation that originated with Ashbel Kitchell has “to rise & be exalted.” (“Mormon Interview,” 11 [D&C 49:23].)
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Shakers rejected the premillennialist idea that great cataclysms would accompany a second advent of Christ and that “the world is to be destroyed by fire.” Instead, Shakers argued that a spiritual fire would purge the wicked, and that they felt “its operation upon our own souls, and have found it to be, in very deed, a consuming fire to lust and pride, and every other corruption of man’s fallen nature.” (Summary View of the Millennial Church, or United Society of Believers, 148–149.)
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A name used in the Book of Mormon to refer to the descendants or followers of Laman, one of the sons of Lehi. The Book of Mormon explained that Lehi and his Israelite family migrated from Jerusalem to America around 600 BC. After Lehi’s death, his family ...

In JS’s earliest revelations “the cause of Zion” was used to broadly describe the work JS was called to do. However, the term Zion was soon used more specifically to describe a community of believers who live in harmony and equality. The Book of Mormon explained...