Just one day before Jonathan Stapley was awarded the best book award for The Power of Godliness by the Mormon History Association, I visited with him about the history and development of core ideas essential to current Mormon identities such as priesthood, authority, and ordinances.
We also discussed how priesthood power relates to temple practice and what Jonathan refers to as the ordering of heaven.
His volume is an academic history of Mormonism, and as such its intent is to understand and analyze the past and contextualize and historicize the present.
On this episode, Jonathan Stapley shares his perspective on Latter-day Saint liturgy in theory and practice.
About Our Guest:
Jonathan A. Stapley is an award-winning historian and scientist. An active participant in the field of Mormon Studies, he is also the Chief Technology Officer for a bio-renewables company.
Jonathan received his Ph.D. from Purdue University and has been active in the field of Mormon History for over a decade. You can read some of his publications here. He also writes for the academic history Juvenile Instructor blog, and at By Common Consent, a Mormon blog.
Extra Resources:
Episode 109 Transcript
The Power of Godliness
Latter-day Saint Perspectives Podcast
Episode 109: The Power of Godliness
Released July 10, 2019
This is not a verbatim transcript.
Some wording has been modified for clarity.
Laura Hales: Hello, this is Laura Harris Hales, and I’m here today with Jonathan Stately to talk about his book, The Power of Godliness, which was published by Oxford press in January of 2018. Jonathan, can you tell us just a little bit about your educational background?
Jonathan Stapley: I’m a trained chemist. I have a PhD in carbohydrate chemistry from Purdue University. I did my undergraduate studies at BYU in food science. I deal with what’s called electro-chemistry. That’s using electricity instead of chemicals to change sugars into other useful products.
Laura Hales: And you write in Mormon Studies. How did that happen?
Jonathan Stapley: Well, after I finished my dissertation in 2004, I created a company that industrialized my graduate work, and I was focusing more on managing individuals and ideas as opposed to actual research. Just at that time, institutions, including the church, began digitizing their collections, and blogs were just coming online. I was part of a group of people that were starting to access these materials and do research, kind of a new generation in the 2000s. Being a scientist and interested in systems, I applied my interest and love of our church to that same study.
Laura Hales: What is Mormon liturgy?
Jonathan Stapley: We are accustomed to talking about ordinances and priesthood in our church, but those words have a particular meaning within our faith that is peculiar. It’s different than the way those words are used outside of our tradition. There is a technical and scholarly approach to ideas of worship and ritual that exists. I’m using those frameworks and bringing them into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Liturgy is the system of ritual and ritualized acts that believers participate in to mark occasions and celebrate and worship. On Sundays, for example, we go to sacrament meeting and participate in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper and that is the liturgy of the Lord’s Supper. Now, if you are Roman Catholic or Orthodox or Jewish, you will be familiar with those terms because they’re part of the regular worship. They talk about the liturgy, but for us, it’s a little disorienting, I think, because we’re not exposed to that vocabulary.
Laura Hales: Sometimes we talk about “high church” and “low church.” Even though we’re technically “low church,” we have liturgy like the Catholics, who would do it maybe with more ceremony.
Jonathan Stapley: Yeah, for sure. And, of course, our tradition is complicated by the fact that we...
