Doctrine and Covenants

The sections of the Doctrine and Covenants read unlike any ancient scripture because their occasions are documented to the month and often the day. A section may answer a named elder's question about his duties, direct the purchase of land in Missouri, or settle a dispute in the infant church's leadership, and the collection's theology emerges through this administrative texture.

Among the landmark sections in the Latter-day Saint edition are the revelation on the three degrees of glory in the resurrection, received in 1832 and known to early members simply as the Vision; the Word of Wisdom of 1833, counselling against wine, strong drink, tobacco and hot drinks, which later hardened into the church's dietary law; the 1836 dedicatory prayer for the Kirtland temple and the recorded visions that followed it; the instructions on baptism for the dead; and the 1843 revelation on the new and everlasting covenant of marriage, including plural marriage, publicly acknowledged after the migration to Utah.

Two later documents entered the canon as Official Declarations rather than sections: the 1890 Manifesto of Wilford Woodruff announcing the end of new plural marriages, and the 1978 declaration under Spencer W. Kimball extending priesthood and temple blessings to members of every race. The collection thus carries the movement's history inside its scripture, revision and continuation being part of the doctrine itself.

The revelations circulated first in manuscript and in church newspapers, and their printing was itself eventful. The 1833 Book of Commandments, the first attempt to publish them at Independence, Missouri, was interrupted when a mob destroyed the press, and surviving copies rank among the rarest of American books. Two years later at Kirtland, Ohio, the church published an enlarged collection under the new title Doctrine and Covenants, prefacing the revelations with the Lectures on Faith, a theology course from the Kirtland school; the 1835 edition was formally accepted by conference vote, establishing the pattern by which common consent canonises text in the movement.

Later Latter-day Saint editions added sections, dropped the Lectures on Faith in 1921, and modernised the apparatus, the current edition numbering 138 sections plus the two Official Declarations. The movement's 1844 succession crisis split the canon as well as the church. Community of Christ, the line organised around Joseph Smith III, kept the Doctrine and Covenants open in a stronger sense: its prophet-presidents have continued to bring sections for conference approval to the present day, addressing matters from the ordination of women to the sacredness of creation, while removing the plural marriage revelation the Utah church retained. The two books that share a name and a core are therefore living documents of two diverging traditions, and scholars read their differences as a map of the movement's history.