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Plain and Precious

The Book of Mormon's own claim — the restoration of “the plain and most precious parts of the gospel of the Lamb” that were kept back and taken away (1 Nephi 13) — taken at full seriousness and demonstrated truth by truth. Each essay walks one doctrine from the Bible's standing field to the Book of Mormon's plain harvest in four movements: the truth stated, the standing grain of the Old and New Testaments, the plain harvest of the Book of Mormon, and the truth at the table. Companion to the Plain and Precious podcast; the field was white already.

15 essays

  1. 1The Field Was Already WhiteA workshop catalog — the truths standing ripe in the Bible's field before 1830: harvestable from the Old and New Testaments, harvested by almost no one, until the Restoration supplied the plain and precious sentences that let the Bible's own fragments cohere. For each truth: what was standing in the field, and the keystone that made the harvest plain.
  2. 2Salvation Is FreeFirst in the Plain and Precious series — the truth stated in three words by Lehi, standing ripe in Isaiah's waters and Paul's grace and the Bible's own last invitation, fenced and fought over for two thousand years, and harvested plain by the book that sets the table with no rail, no price, and no one forbidden
  3. 3The Doctrine, in His Own VoiceSecond in the Plain and Precious series — the gospel of Jesus Christ, defined completely by Jesus Christ: five moves, stated by the risen Lord in his own words, with a fence around the definition forbidding anyone to add to it or take from it. The simplicity is not a starting point to outgrow. It is the design.
  4. 4O How Great the PlanThird in the Plain and Precious series — how God can be perfectly just and perfectly merciful at the same time: the question the Bible states and sings but never mechanically answers, the question a child asks in one sentence, answered plainly in a letter from a worried father to a guilty son
  5. 5Not One Hair LostFourth in the Plain and Precious series — the resurrection: promised in Job's flesh and Daniel's dust, demonstrated at an empty tomb, and then blurred by centuries that traded bodies for clouds; made precise again by a missionary under cross-examination, a prophet naming the monster it rescues us from, and a father honest enough to label his opinions — every person, every body, restored whole, down to the hair
  6. 6Alive in ChristFifth in the Plain and Precious series — the salvation of little children, and of all who live and die without the law: the mercy Jesus embodied with children in his arms, the doctrine the centuries darkened into anguished fonts and unconsecrated ground, and the letter — written by a general watching his world end — that states God's tenderness toward the incapable more plainly than any page in scripture
  7. 7All Are Alike unto GodSixth in the Plain and Precious series — the equality of every soul before God: promised to Abraham, sung by Isaiah, declared by Peter and Paul, and betrayed for centuries by nearly everyone holding the page it was printed on; stated by the Book of Mormon in one itemized sentence that has been testifying against every hierarchy — including its own publishers' — since 1830
  8. 8He Speaketh unto All NationsSeventh in the Plain and Precious series — God's word was never one nation's monopoly: the Bible's own Gentile prophets and remembered nations, the closed-canon instinct that shrank a speaking God into a finished book, and the chapter where the Lord answers the objection in the first person — with a library still being written
  9. 9The Light in Every OneEighth in the Plain and Precious series — conscience, given its true name: the light of Christ, placed in every human being who enters the world, with a way to judge good from evil that scripture calls as plain as daylight — the doctrine that explains the goodness of unbelievers, arms anyone against deception, and means every person you will ever meet is lit
  10. 10Have Miracles Ceased?Ninth in the Plain and Precious series — the question Christendom's seminaries answered "yes, by design" while its pews kept praying anyway: answered "Nay" by a man writing alone at the end of his civilization, with the mechanism named, the logic anchored in God's own unchangeability, and one indispensable guard for every bedside where the healing hasn't come
  11. 11His Sons and His DaughtersTenth in the Plain and Precious series — identity, conferred: the new birth the Bible promises and the centuries tangled between worm and self-esteem, resolved from a tower by a king who called his people dust and royalty in the same sermon — because nothingness was always about merit, and the family name was always a gift
  12. 12That They Might Have JoyEleventh in the Plain and Precious series — the purpose of human existence, stated in one sentence by a dying father: joy is not the reward appended to life but the design specification of it — against every theology of gloom, every folk suspicion that God dislikes happiness, and every counterfeit route that never arrives
  13. 13One by OneTwelfth in the Plain and Precious series — the God who knows his children individually, demonstrated: an afternoon in which the risen Lord let two thousand five hundred people touch his wounds one at a time, healed every sick one brought to him, blessed the children one by one, and asked each disciple what he personally desired — the ministry style that is itself the doctrine
  14. 14No Manner of -itesThirteenth and final in the Plain and Precious series — the kingdom of heaven on earth: prayed for in the Lord's own prayer, attempted at Jerusalem, deferred by the centuries as impossible — and documented, for two hundred years, in the one scripture that recorded a working Zion: its mechanism named, its economics stated, its happiness measured, and its failure autopsied so the next builders would know which bolt loosens first
  15. 15The Condemnation and the RemedyD&C 84:54–58 read whole: a summons with the cure written into its own sentence