The Power of Godliness

The manifest, and the measure

The Doctrine and Covenants makes a claim about ordinances that we quote often and audit rarely: "in the ordinances thereof, the power of godliness is manifest" (D&C 84:20). Take the sentence at its word and ask what it actually asserts. Godliness is God-likeness — and what is God like? The scriptures' deepest answer is not a list of attributes but a relation: "I and my Father are one" (John 10:30); a Father, Son, and Holy Ghost whose divinity is displayed to us, first and always, as perfect union — distinct persons, one heart, one work, one glory. Godliness, at its core, is at-one-ment: the capacity for total union without loss of self. So "the power of godliness" is, read literally, the power of unity — and the verse becomes a measuring instrument: an ordinance manifests that power precisely to the degree that it enacts, teaches, and produces union — union with God, union with each other.

Now run the audit, and watch the ordinances arrange themselves on a gradient exactly as the instrument predicts. Baptism: union with Christ enacted bodily — "buried with him by baptism into death... planted together in the likeness of his death" (Romans 6:4–5) — and union with the body entered in the same water: "by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body" (1 Corinthians 12:13); the covenant's stated terms are horizontal before anything else — bear one another's burdens, mourn with those that mourn (Mosiah 18:8–9). One ordinance, both axes of union, taught at the gate. The sacrament: union renewed — one loaf broken for many members, one cup, a whole congregation eating the same emblems of the same body at the same table, weekly — "For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread" (1 Corinthians 10:17). The endowment: union rehearsed to its summit — a company of saints, dressed alike, ascending together through the grammar of approach toward presence-with-God, the beholding that is union's highest register. And the sealing: union made permanent — the welding link, the ordinance for which the entire Restoration was announced before Joseph even held the plates (D&C 2), family bound to family until the whole human chain is one. Gate, table, ascent, weld: the ordinances ascend in exactly the order of the unity they teach — and the capstone verse names the summit: without the ordinances and the authority thereof, "no man can see the face of God" (84:22) — the beholding, union consummated. The power in the ordinance was never in the choreography. It is the power of the union the choreography rehearses.

The forms flex; the covenant holds

If the power is the union and not the form, then the forms should behave like instruments — adapted, by revelation, to serve the covenant in each generation's circumstances. And that is exactly how the record behaves.

The Lord stated the principle at maximum strength in 1830, about the sacrament itself: "it mattereth not what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink when ye partake of the sacrament, if it so be that ye do it with an eye single to my glory — remembering unto the Father my body which was laid down for you, and my blood which was shed" (D&C 27:2). It mattereth not — the elements, declared immaterial; the remembrance and covenant, declared the ordinance. Water replaced wine that season, and no one supposes the table lost its power. Form serves essence; essence is union with the Remembered One and with each other at his table.

Section 22 — the early commandment that all who joined the new church be baptized again, even those baptized before — reads the same way once its work is understood. Its stated rationale is covenant-newness: "all old covenants have I caused to be done away in this thing; and this is a new and everlasting covenant" (22:1) — entry into a live covenant through a live channel, not dead works. But watch what the requirement produced: one fold, in which no member carried a different covenant pedigree than any other — every soul through the same gate, under the same authority, into the same body. For a brand-new church assembling itself out of seekers from a dozen traditions, universal rebaptism was unity, manufactured at the gate — precisely the instrument that moment required. And the subsequent history proves the instrument was always understood as flexible, because the early saints kept using it: rebaptisms for renewal in Kirtland and Nauvoo; and in Utah, rebaptism deployed for decades as an explicit recommitment ritual — whole companies rebaptized on arriving in the valley, members rebaptized on entering the United Order, communities rebaptized during the reformation of the 1850s — baptism, wielded generation after generation as an accord-instrument — until the practice was retired by the 1890s, its renewing work assigned to the sacrament where it rests today. Seventy years of flexing, then a flexing back. The gate never moved; the covenant never changed; the uses of the form adapted to what union required. That is what "it mattereth not" looks like across a century.

What the keys actually open

And this brings us to the word that governs the whole system — keys — because our understanding of keys has flexed too, and auditing that development against the canon is one of the most clarifying exercises in the whole Restoration.

Ask the modern church what priesthood keys are and the standing answer is administrative: keys are the right to preside and to authorize — the authority that directs the performance of ordinances, so that baptisms, sacraments, and sealings are done in order, by assignment, under the proper channel. That definition is real, useful, and has genuine canonical footing (the presidencies of Section 107; the one-channel doctrine of Sections 28 and 43; a church of order, not confusion). But now open the canon's own keys-catalog and read what the keys delivered to this dispensation are actually called — because almost none of them are described as ordinance-authorizations:

To the Aaronic priesthood: "the keys of the ministering of angels, and of the gospel of repentance, and of baptism" (D&C 13) — angel-access, named first. To the Melchizedek: "the key of the mysteries of the kingdom, even the key of the knowledge of God" (84:19); the privilege "to have the heavens opened unto them, to commune with the general assembly and church of the Firstborn, and to enjoy the communion and presence of God the Father, and of Jesus" (107:18–19) — knowledge-keys, heaven-keys, presence-keys. In the great angelic roll call: Moroni holding "the keys of the record of the stick of Ephraim"; Elias, "the keys of bringing to pass the restoration of all things"; Elijah, "the keys of the power of turning the hearts of the fathers to the children"; Peter, James, and John, "the keys of the kingdom, and a dispensation of the gospel for the fulness of times" (27:5–13). And at Kirtland, the dispensation's own charter delivery: Moses committing "the keys of the gathering of Israel from the four parts of the earth, and the leading of the ten tribes"; Elias, the "dispensation of the gospel of Abraham" — the covenant that all families be blessed; and Elijah, the turning and the sealing (D&C 110:11–16). Add the strangest entries and the picture completes: "three grand keys" for discerning true messengers from false (Section 129) — keys as diagnostic knowledge; and "the keys of the kingdom, which consist in the key of knowledge" (128:14) — the kingdom's keys defined, in so many words, as knowing.

Assemble the catalog: record-keys, restoration-keys, turning-keys, gathering-keys, covenant-keys, knowledge-keys, discernment-keys, angel-keys, presence-keys. The canon's keys are overwhelmingly keys of the work and keys of access — instruments for gathering scattered Israel, welding the generations, opening the heavens, and knowing God — and scarcely ever framed as gate-passes controlling who may receive saving ordinances. And that framing matters doctrinally, because the Book of Mormon has already ruled on the gate: "he commandeth none that they shall not partake of his salvation... all men are privileged the one like unto the other, and none are forbidden" (2 Nephi 26:27–28); "the keeper of the gate is the Holy One of Israel; and he employeth no servant there" (2 Nephi 9:41). Salvation is free, the gate is a Person, and the Keeper staffs it himself. So the keys cannot be, in their essence, custody of salvation — salvation was never in anyone's custody but his. The keys are stewardship of the gathering: the authorized machinery by which the free salvation is carried to the four parts of the earth, the scattered are assembled, the dead are reached, and the family of Adam is welded into one — which is why every key named at Kirtland is a gathering-and-welding key, and why the Lord's original grant to Peter pairs the keys with binding: "whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven" (Matthew 16:19) — the keys of the kingdom, defined at their first bestowal as sealing-power: the authority to make unions that outlast the world.

Honesty requires marking the textual history plainly, and it strengthens rather than weakens the point: the keys-catalog itself developed within the canon. The great angelic roll call of Section 27 was not in the revelation as first received in 1830; the short sacramental text of the Book of Commandments was expanded with the keys passages for the 1835 edition. Section 110 was recorded in Joseph's journal in 1836 but unpublished for years and not canonized until 1876 — the saints built temples for decades before the Kirtland keys-text entered their scriptures. Even Section 13's wording reached print long after the event it records. Our doctrine of keys, in other words, has been unfolding from the beginning — clarified, expanded, re-emphasized, era by era — which means the current administrative emphasis is itself one chapter in a developing understanding, not the final dictionary entry. And weigh that development for better and for worse, with the sickle kept off persons: for better — the administrative reading protects the body from freelance claims and counterfeit channels ("none else shall be appointed... except it be through him," 43:3–4), keeps ten thousand congregations in order, and guards the ordinances' integrity worldwide; these are real goods, and Section 28's Hiram Page crisis shows what they cost when absent. For worse — when "keys" contracts in the pews to mean chiefly who may authorize what, the canon's grander registers go quiet: members conceive priesthood as a permissions hierarchy rather than an access-grant to heaven; the key of knowledge — the one the Lord rebuked the lawyers for confiscating, "ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered" (Luke 11:52) — gathers dust; and the question "who holds the keys?" crowds out the question the catalog begs: what are the keys for, and is the gathering they exist to drive actually accelerating in my ward, my family, my hands? The healthiest reading holds both: keys of order, really held, at the tower — and keys of knowledge, gathering, and welding, whose whole purpose is a work every covenant member is deputized into, "that every man might speak in the name of God" (1:20).

The horizon

Put the three movements together and the doctrine of ordinances stands whole. The power in the ordinances is the power of godliness, and godliness is union — so the ordinances rank by the unity they teach, from the gate to the weld. The forms of the ordinances flex by revelation, era to era — elements changed, practices adopted and retired — because the forms are instruments and the covenant is the constant. And the keys that govern the system are, in the canon's own catalog, keys of gathering, knowledge, turning, and presence — the machinery of assembling one family, not the custody of a salvation that was always free.

Which opens, at the far edge of faithful hope, a horizon worth naming carefully — ours, held loosely, weighed against the allegory. If forms serve union, and keys serve gathering, then the endpoint the scriptures describe is not a perfected denomination but one body: Zenos's vineyard ends with the scattered branches grafted home and "the trees became like unto one body; and the fruits were equal" (Jacob 5:74); the Nephite Zion is defined by the abolition of the suffixes — "neither -ites; but they were in one" (4 Nephi 1:17); and the Lord's last prayer before the oil press was "that they all may be one" (John 17:21). The gathering keys were cut for that door. How and when the Lord of the vineyard walks the branches home — including the branches scattered from this very Restoration — is his to reveal through his own channel, at the pace of what the body can receive. But the direction is not in doubt, and neither is the preparation, because it is the same preparation everything else in the gospel asks: become a people so practiced in union — at the table, in the ward, across the fences — that when the Master starts grafting in earnest, he finds a tree whose sap is ready. The power of godliness is manifest in the ordinances. The godliness the power belongs to is union. And every ordinance you have ever received was teaching you the same thing, at ascending depth: become one — with him, with them, with all of it — for if ye are not one, ye are not mine.

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And this greater priesthood administereth the gospel and holdeth the key of the mysteries of the kingdom, even the key of the knowledge of God. Therefore, in the ordinances thereof, the power of godliness is manifest.