The Form of Godliness

The verdict in the grove

When the Lord of the vineyard finally answered a fourteen-year-old's question about the churches, he answered in a phrase — and the phrase turns out to be a measuring instrument. The professors of religion, Joseph was told, "draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me... having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof" (Joseph Smith—History 1:19, quoting 2 Timothy 3:5).

Now set that verdict beside the Restoration's great ordinance verse: "in the ordinances thereof, the power of godliness is manifest" (D&C 84:20). The same phrase, on both sides of the ledger — the grove naming what was lost, Section 84 naming what returned. And if the power of godliness is what its companion essay argued — the power of union, since godliness is God-likeness and God's own life is perfect at-one-ment — then the grove's indictment reads with sudden precision: you kept the choreography and lost the union it rehearses. The forms of the ordinances survived everywhere in Christendom. The unity-content those forms exist to teach had been inverted, fenced, clericalized, or captured — differently in each branch of the family.

This essay runs the audit — offered plainly as our reading, with the sickle kept off persons and denominations alike, because what follows is an examination of practices and structures, every one of them maintained by sincere believers whom God was watching with love. Three columns: the Protestant churches of Joseph's own landscape, the Roman communion, and the Orthodox East. Each kept fragments the others lost. None held the assembled whole. And the Restoration's shape only becomes visible when all three columns stand side by side.

The Protestant column: the gate at war, the table fenced

Begin where Joseph stood: the revival landscape of 1820s New York, where the audit's findings are the starkest.

The gate had become the battlefield. Baptism — the ordinance whose entire New Testament content is entry into one body by one Spirit — was the single most divisive doctrinal territory in America: immersion against sprinkling, believer's baptism against infant baptism, whole denominations constituted around their mode of the gate, each gate posted with arguments against the others. A seeker faced not one door into one fold but a row of contradictory doors — which is literally the question that sent a boy into the grove: "Who of all these parties are right?" The ordinance of union had become the engine of division; the gate itself was shattered into weapons.

And the table had been fenced — the audit's most damning exhibit. Communion, the ordinance whose stated content is "we being many are one bread," was administered in that world as a boundary technology. Presbyterian congregations used communion tokens — literal metal admission passes, issued by elders after examination, required for a seat at the table — and their ministers preached "fencing sermons," a technical term of the trade: the pastor fencing the table by enumerating the classes of persons barred from it. Baptist congregations practiced closed communion, the table shut to any soul not immersed into their own fellowship. Much of the Reformed world throttled the ordinance to quarterly "communion seasons" — union renewed four times a year. Pew rents stratified the sanctuary itself: seating sold by wealth, the prosperous in front, the poor in the galleries — the epistle of James's "sit thou here in a good place... stand thou there" (James 2:3) violated architecturally, every week, in the room where the one loaf was broken. And at the bottom of the fence, the segregated rail: in 1787, Black worshippers at St. George's Methodist church in Philadelphia — among them Richard Allen, a licensed preacher — were pulled from their knees mid-prayer for kneeling at a rail reserved for whites. They rose, walked out, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church was born of an expulsion at an ordinance site. Within a generation the ordinances proved unable to hold even the denominations themselves together across slavery: the Presbyterians split in 1837, the Methodists in 1844, the Baptists in 1845 — the tables of union presiding over the fracture of their own communions, because the table had been rebuilt as an instrument for marking who was out. Form retained. Power denied. The inversion complete.

But honesty requires the other half of the Protestant ledger, because the era also held real unity-technology — in fragments, each movement grasping one piece of the pattern while missing the rest. The Methodists ran the era's best horizontal watch-care: the class meeting — a dozen souls under a class leader charged to inquire weekly into each member's state and to "watch over one another in love" — and the love feast, bread and water and testimony, admission by a class ticket renewed quarterly on evidence of faithful fellowship. That is Section 20:53's own ancestor — the teacher's watch, running in Wesley's machinery — and it is no accident that young Joseph found himself "somewhat partial to the Methodist sect." Yet the camp meetings exposed the ceiling: genuine collective outpourings — real shared fire — that ended in division, the converts "filing off, some to one party and some to another," the seeming good feelings "entirely lost in a strife of words and a contest about opinions" (JS-H 1:6). The revival could kindle corporate fire and could not fold it; without gathering keys, every Pentecost dissolved into a recruiting fair. The Campbellites made unity their entire platform — the Springfield Presbytery's "Last Will and Testament" of 1804 remains one of the most astonishing documents in American religion: a presbytery formally dissolving itself, willing "that this body die, be dissolved, and sink into union with the Body of Christ at large" — and they restored the weekly table and baptism by immersion for remission of sins. Unity as ideal, ordinances partially recovered — but no authority claim, no gathering, and a congregational atomism that left every restored form freestanding. Their Ohio congregations were straining past their own movement's limits: Sidney Rigdon's flock at the Morley farm was practicing common-stock proto-consecration when the missionaries arrived in 1830 — which is why Kirtland converted almost en masse, and why the law of consecration (Section 42) was revealed, months later, to that very community: the Restoration landed among people already reaching for a unity their forms could not deliver. The Quakers held the horizontal content at radical strength — no clergy, no pew rents, plain speech to every rank, women ministering, early abolition — and had discarded the enacted forms entirely: no water baptism, no communion, all inward. The test of content-without-binding-form arrived on schedule: the Hicksite–Orthodox schism tore American Quakerism apart in 1827–28, in the very seasons Joseph was receiving the plates. And the Shakers achieved the era's maximum economic unity — full consecration, all things common, villages of genuine accord — by amputating the family: celibacy universal, the weld forbidden, unity purchased by subtraction. And here the canon itself joins the audit, because the Lord reviewed the Shakers by name in March 1831, in a revelation carried to their community: "whoso forbiddeth to marry is not ordained of God, for marriage is ordained of God unto man" (D&C 49:15). The Doctrine and Covenants contains its own denominational audit; this essay merely extends the method.

The Roman column: the skeleton, clericalized

Rome barely figured in Joseph's Palmyra — American Catholicism before the famine migrations was a few hundred thousand souls, concentrated in Maryland and the ports — but the audit is about Christendom's whole inheritance, and Rome held most of its bones.

Score what the Roman communion preserved, and the list is astonishing: the authority instinct — an unbroken claimed line from Peter, keys language intact, the conviction that ordinances require commissioned hands, which the revival world had dissolved into every-man-his-own-authority. Sacramental realism — the doctrine that the ordinance actually does something, that grace is really conferred in the act itself: structurally, Section 84:20's own claim, held firm against a Protestantism that had reduced the ordinances to memorial gestures. One table worldwide — a single Mass, one liturgy from Warsaw to Baltimore; while Protestant tables multiplied and fenced against each other, Rome's table was in principle one, and a Catholic could commune anywhere on earth. The communion of saints — the living praying for the dead, the dead interceding for the living, purgatory as a doctrine of post-mortem progress: a garbled but genuine memory of the very thing Section 128 restored ("they without us cannot be made perfect, neither can we without our dead") — Protestantism had amputated the dead from the body entirely; Rome alone kept the family reaching across the veil. And monasticism — actual consecration communities, all things common, sustained for a thousand years: the Shaker fragment, held without forbidding marriage to the whole church.

But run the unity-content test, and the inversions are as specific as the preservations. The cup withheld: communion in one kind, the laity fenced from the blood for six centuries — the ordinance instituted with "drink ye all of it" administered with half its emblems reserved to the clergy. The unknown tongue: the Mass in Latin, the table's words incomprehensible to the fold — Paul's protest institutionalized as the norm: "if thou shalt bless with the spirit, how shall he that occupieth the room of the unlearned say Amen... seeing he understandeth not what thou sayest?" (1 Corinthians 14:16). The throttled frequency: lay communion reduced, for most, to the annual Easter duty — the table of weekly union visited once a year. And beneath all of it, the two-caste church: priesthood as the possession of a professional class, the body's role reduced to reception — the precise inversion of the Restoration's charter purpose, "that every man might speak in the name of God the Lord" (D&C 1:20). Even in 1830s America the machinery was visibly seizing: the trusteeism wars, lay trustees against bishops over who owned the churches, congregations schisming over the question of who holds what. The verdict on the column: forms of extraordinary fidelity, with the union-content clericalized — the skeleton intact, the circulation pooled in one organ.

The Eastern column: the aim, and the floor plan

The Orthodox East was nearly invisible from Palmyra — on this continent it existed almost solely as the Russian mission in Alaska — and it scores differently from both other columns, holding treasures neither possessed.

The unfenced table. The East never withheld the cup: communion in both kinds, always, the people receiving bread and wine together. And — this detail deserves a full stop — the Orthodox commune infants: the whole fold at the table from baptism onward, no age-of-reason gate, no first-communion threshold, not one member of the body excluded from the meal. In the entire landscape of 1830 Christendom, the least-fenced table on earth stood in the East. The vernacular instinct, from the missionary beginning: Cyril and Methodius inventing an alphabet so the Slavs could have the liturgy in their own tongue — the structural opposite of Latin. Conciliarity: councils over monarchs, the church as communion rather than pyramid, truth received by the body's assent — a churchly instinct (the Russians would later name its ideal sobornost, catholicity-as-gatheredness) standing structurally nearer to common consent than anything in the West. And the aim itself — the East's crown: theosis, salvation as deification, "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4) read literally, the whole Christian life aimed at real union with God — the East never stopped teaching that godliness means becoming what God is: the doctrine the Restoration would scandalize the West by recovering. Even the one Orthodox outpost in 1830 America passes the audit movingly: Herman of Alaska defending the Aleuts against the traders of his own empire; Innocent Veniaminov building an Aleut alphabet to give a scattered people the word in their own tongue — gathering-behavior, at the edge of the world, toward the least.

The failures are equally specific. The captured center: caesaropapism — the church's head confiscated by thrones. Peter the Great had simply abolished the Moscow patriarchate and run the Russian church for two centuries as a state department under a lay procurator (the standing arrangement in 1830), while the Greek church lived as an administrative unit of the Ottoman state — the tower staffed by the palace. And the ethnic fracture: autocephaly hardening into churches-of-nations, communion bounded in practice by blood and language — a tendency the East itself would condemn as heresy (the 1872 council's anathema against phyletism, tribalism in the church) and yet never escape, as the New World would prove: Orthodoxy in America became overlapping ethnic jurisdictions, Greek and Russian and Serbian and Antiochian bishops in the same cities, parallel hierarchies for parallel bloodlines — a tangle the East names openly and has not solved.

And yet — examine that national-church structure with a builder's eye, because it deserves the audit's most careful paragraph. An autocephalous church is self-heading: it consecrates its own bishops, governs its own affairs, and carries the complete episcopal and sacramental pattern within itself — the whole church's anatomy, replicated at national scale — while no universal monarch sits above the autocephalies: the patriarchs are firsts-among-equals, honor without supremacy. Structurally, that is a memory of something the Restoration's charter describes exactly: distributed bodies each carrying the full pattern in seed, equal in authority within their jurisdictions, coordinated without a human emperor — the stake pattern; the tent of many pegs, each holding full tension at its own point of ground. Measured purely as architecture, the East preserved the distributed floor plan better than anyone in Christendom. But it preserved the plan functionally reversed, at four joints. Stakes partition by ground and covenant — move into the boundary and you belong, whatever your grandparents' blood; autocephaly partitioned by nation, and planted rival pegs in the same soil wherever peoples migrated. The tent has a living center pole — one who presides like unto Moses, common consent binding the whole, a solemn assembly able to gather every peg into one act; the East's pole was captured by empires or left vacant — no universally received council since 787, no operative mechanism by which the whole communion can decide anything together, so that the tent, magnificently pegged, cannot be re-pitched. The stake's equality is governed by conditions — unanimity, righteousness, revisability under the same keys that planted it (D&C 107:27–31); autocephaly is treaty-like — granted or seized once, defended forever, with no agreed grantor: equality by armistice. And the vectors run opposite: stakes are driven ahead of a gathering — "enlarge the place of thy tent... lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes" (Isaiah 54:2), pegs planted where the canvas is about to reach; the autocephalies mostly formed church-following-flag, tracking the fractures of empires — pegs marking where kingdoms had broken rather than where a tent was spreading. The verdict on the column, then, is double: the East kept the aim and the floor plan — theosis and the distributed pattern — the way a ruin keeps a blueprint: accurate enough to prove the original existed; incomplete enough to prove something was lost.

The reassembly

Now stand the three columns side by side, and read the finding whole.

Rome kept the skeleton: authority, sacramental power, the one table, the dead, consecration — with the union-content clericalized. The East kept the aim and the floor plan: deification, the unfenced cup, the communed infants, conciliarity, the distributed pattern — with the center captured and the body partitioned by blood. The Protestants kept the nerves: vernacular scripture, the lay voice, watch-care, the every-member ministry, the hunger for unity itself — while shattering the gate and fencing the tables against each other. Every fragment of the original pattern survived somewhere in the family. No communion held the assembled body. And each column's failure was load-bearing for the others' treasures: the skeleton without nerves went rigid; the nerves without skeleton went formless; the floor plan without a center could never be re-pitched.

Which is why the Restoration takes the shape it takes — because it agrees with each column against the other two. With Rome, against the Protestants: that authority is non-negotiable, that ordinances really confer what they signify, that the dead belong to the body. With the Protestants, against Rome: that the line had broken, that the word belongs to the people in their own tongue, that the priesthood belongs to the body — every man speaking in the name of God. With the East, against them both: that the destination is deification — "then shall they be gods" (D&C 132:20) — that the cup belongs to everyone, and that the church is a communion of full-pattern bodies, not a pyramid. No existing column could resolve that trilemma from inside itself; agreeing with everyone against everyone requires standing somewhere none of them stood — which is precisely what a new bestowal is: angels, keys, a fresh gate; not a fourth column added to the table, but the reassembly the three columns were each carrying a third of.

And now read the Restoration's ordinance-suite against the full audit, and every feature answers a specific fracture: one gate (Section 22) where the gate had been a battlefield — every covenant made new, every member's pedigree identical, rebaptism not as dismissal of anyone's sincerity but as the only possible reset in a landscape where the door itself had become a weapon. An open weekly table — common bread, "it mattereth not" elements (27:2), both emblems, the common tongue, every member, no tokens, no fencing sermons, no rented pews, no segregated rail — the fenced table of every column, unfenced at every fence-post at once. A lay priesthood under common consent where Rome had a caste and the revivals had anarchy — order and the every-member voice, keys of presidency and "every man might speak." Watch-care as the founding priesthood duty (20:53) — Wesley's class-meeting instinct, installed in the constitution rather than left to a society. Consecration revealed with the family, not against it — Sections 42 and 49 in the same season: the Shaker treasure, freed of the Shaker amputation, aimed at a Zion that welds households instead of dissolving them. Stakes — the East's distributed floor plan, repaired at all four joints: partitioned by covenant-ground instead of blood, pitched around a living center with gathering keys, governed by unanimity-and-righteousness, and driven ahead of a gathering rather than behind collapsing empires. And the weld — the piece no column held whole: gathering keys and sealing power, so that the fire the camp meetings kept kindling and losing could finally be folded, and the dead whom Rome half-remembered could be reached by ordinance rather than merely prayed for — the family, joined across the veil, "that they without us should not be made perfect."

The audit ends, then, not in triumph over the columns but in family gratitude toward them — for the deepest finding is this: the fragments were kept. Through fenced tables and captured patriarchates and gate-wars, through every inversion this essay has named, sincere believers in every branch of Christendom carried their piece of the pattern — the Roman priest elevating the host actually believing power was present; the Orthodox grandmother carrying an infant to the cup; the Methodist class leader inquiring after twelve souls in a cold parlor; the Shaker sister consecrating everything she had to a family that could not include children — partial, loving, damaged custody, for centuries, so that when the Lord of the vineyard began the last graft, there was still live wood on every branch. The Restoration is the reassembly, and the reassembly is not finished: the branches are still out; the allegory's ending — "and they became like unto one body; and the fruits were equal" — is still ahead; and the same audit that measures 1830 measures us, every Sunday, at every table, by the same instrument the grove established: not whether we have the form of godliness — we demonstrably do — but whether the power thereof, which is the power of union, is manifest in what our ordinances are actually producing between the people who share them.

The form was never the failure. The form was the ark that carried the fragments. The question the grove asks every generation is only ever whether the power has come home to the forms — and the power, from Eden to Kirtland to your own ward's sacrament table next Sunday, has always answered to one condition: be one.

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They draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me... having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.