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Q&A: The King Follett Discourse

Aaron Shafovaloff
September 16, 2024

Did Joseph Smith intend for it to be a significant?

“It seems that Joseph Smith intended this to be a significant discourse. ” (source)

Is this sermon considered important in LDS history?

“The King Follett Sermon is one of the most important sermons on doctrine in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, yet most of its teachings are contained in other sources that are sometimes less ambiguous… The sermon retains its power among Latter-day Saints because it brings together a number of Joseph Smith’s previous teachings on humanity’s relationship to God: God has the form of a human being; he once lived in a world like our own in the same way that we do; the Father created this world and gave it its laws so that the spirits around him could become like him; and intelligence, the essential aspect of the spirits for whom he created the world, is eternal… Though the King Follett Sermon has remained central to Latter-day Saint belief, since 1844 the Church’s understanding of several key elements of the sermon’s teachings have changed or at least been clarified: the teaching about the history of God, that about human potential, that about the nature of intelligence, and that about the resurrection of infants.” (PDF)

Was the sermon given at General Conference?

Yes. The discourse was “a prominent general conference talk given by Joseph Smith shortly before his death.” (source)

Does the sermon teach of God’s past progress unto godhood?

This is the conclusion of many Latter-day Saints. Matthew Bowman writes that Joseph Smith in the discourse “offered a series of statements that seemed to indicate that God had once been a man like human men and had progressed to achieve Godhood and that this was to be also the fate of his listeners.” (source, PDF)

Are the accounts of the sermon basically reliable?

Speaking of the four accounts of the KFD, Stan Larson writes that,

“the reports have have no irreconcilable parts—no contradictory statements—and it is sometimes quiet amazing how easily the various accounts combine. A high degree of agreement and harmony exists among them… Every indication points to the Bullock, Clayton, and Richards versions’ being written as Joseph spoke; this fact deserves emphasis. There is no evidence that any account was made by copying and/or expanding any other account.” (source, PDF)

James E. Faulconer and Susannah Morrison summarize the differences between the Grimshaw and Larson’s amalgamations:

“Larson’s version deletes material added by Grimshaw and adds material from the notes that Grimshaw omitted, but nevertheless there are no substantial differences between it and any of the previous published versions. It is noteworthy that each of the editors who has worked with the notes of the sermon has created much the same final version. That should give considerable confidence in the text as we have it, even if it is only an amalgamation of notes made at the time.” (PDF)

How is the manuscript support for the sermon?

Stan Larson writes,

“Of all the speeches given by Joseph Smith, this one has the greatest contemporary manuscript support, which certainly strengthens claims of its reliability and authenticity.” (source, PDF)

What effect did the teaching have on future LDS leaders?

Matthew Bowman writes,

“Throughout the nineteenth century, many Church leaders embraced the notion that God had achieved godhood through a process of maturation, learning, and growth.”

Writing of Brigham Young:

“For some, like Brigham Young, who succeeded Joseph Smith as President of the Church, this process was most comprehensible in terms of family and lineage. Young took Smith’s meaning at its most frank, imagining a long chain of divine parents. He said of God the Father, “He is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, both body and spirit; and he is the Father of our spirits, and the Father of our flesh in the beginning. . . . Do you wish me to simplify it? Could you have a father without having a grandfather; or a grandfather without having a great grandfather?”” (source, PDF, emphasis added)

And of Orson Pratt:

“Orson Pratt took the notion that God was not always God seriously, but he offered a more abstract version of divine progress than the lineal parentage statements of Young or Hyde, instead teaching that in some way God’s divinity is eternal and self-existent. From the King Follett Discourse, Pratt posited that “the primary powers of all material substance must be intelligent” and that therefore the totality of that intelligence, which was interconnected, self-existent, and eternal, was in fact what Pratt called the “Great God.” The being humans called “God,” then, partook of the eternal divine attributes that the “Great God” had always possessed as a singular manifestation of the eternal principles of divinity. Pratt thus insisted that “God” in the form of the “Great God” had indeed always existed and always possessed all the attributes of divinity, but that any particular “God” who entered into communion with the “Great God” might indeed have had a history of growth and change. He thus saw both eternity and progress in Smith’s ideas.” (emphasis added)

How did critics understand the sermon?

James E. Faulconer with Susannah Morrison write,

“In June 1844, two months after the King Follett Sermon was delivered, anonymous former Latter-day Saint writers in the Nauvoo Expositor condemned the teaching: ‘Among the many items of false doctrine that are taught the Church, is the doctrine of many Gods. . . . It is contended that there are innumerable Gods as much above the God that presides over this universe, as he is above us.'” (source)

How does the sermon relate to the Lorenzo Snow couplet?

Faulconer and Morrison again,

“For Latter-day Saints, to the notion that in some sense, perhaps even literally, we can become gods, Snow’s couplet adds the idea that God became God in the same way, moving from being human to being divine.

“On his return to Nauvoo, Lorenzo Snow told Joseph Smith of his experience, and the latter said, “That is a true gospel doctrine, and it is a revelation from God to you.”25 Four years later, both the teaching of the second part of the couplet (doctrine since 1832) and, more significantly, the teaching of its first part (that God has become God, having once been a human being) were part of Smith’s public King Follett Sermon. Though Smith never refers to the couplet in the King Follett Discourse, for Latter-day Saints, Snow’s couplet has become the précis of what Smith teaches in the sermon.

“One could understand much of the subsequent discussion of the King Follett Sermon as attempts to clarify Joseph Smith’s sermon with Lorenzo Snow’s couplet as a stand-in. With the exception of the teaching about the resurrection of those who die in infancy, discussions of the other King Follett doctrines have not usually been directly linked to the sermon, presumably because they have other, canonical, warrants. Snow’s couplet, thus, becomes the vehicle on which most discussion of the King Follett Sermon is loaded.

“For Brigham Young, the teachings of the two halves of the couplet— “As man now is, God once was” and “As God now is, man may be”— were equally important and to be taken equally literally. For example, with regard to the first he said, “How many Gods there are, I do not know. But there never was a time when there were not Gods and worlds, and when men were not passing through the same ordeals that we are now passing through.”26 And with regard to the second he said, “[Eternal matter] is brought together, organized, and capacitated to receive knowledge and intelligence, to be enthroned in glory, to be made angels, Gods.”27 Brigham Young is perhaps best known (or even notorious) for taking a quite literal view of the teaching. In one address he said, “Then will they become gods, even the sons of God; then will they become eternal fathers, eternal mothers, eternal sons and eternal daughters. . . . When they receive their crowns, their dominions, they then will be prepared to frame earth’s [sic] like unto ours and to people them in the same manner as we have been brought forth by our parents, by our Father and God.” (PDF)

Did the “history of God” idea perpetuate?

“With regard to the history of God, along with Joseph Smith, nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints often thought of God as having once been a human being and having become, by his experience, God. However, by the early twenty-first century (indeed by the 1950s at the latest), though the nineteenth-century teaching is not denied, the official position has tended in the direction of agnosticism toward it, with the significant exceptions mentioned earlier of the Melchizedek Priesthood and Relief Society manuals.” (PDF)

How strong is the parallel between Father and Son?

BYU professor Rodney Turner:

“[O]pinion is divided as to how closely the Son’s career paralleled that of his Father . . . These and the Prophet’s earlier remarks are believed by some to infer that our God and his father once sacrificed their lives in a manner similar to the atonement of Jesus Christ. It is argued that the Prophet’s words suggest that these gods did not simply live and die as all men do, they ‘laid down’ and ‘took up’ their lives in the context of sacrifice . . . This extrapolated doctrine rests upon a somewhat inadequate, if not shaky, foundation. Indeed, it is highly doubtful. The basic process of laying down and taking up one’s life is similar for all even though it is not identical for all (“The Doctrine of the Firstborn and Only Begotten,” in The Pearl of Great Price: Revelations from God [Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1989], 91-117).”

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