Mormonism’s First Theologian | The Essential Parley P. Pratt with foreword by Peter L. Crawley

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At least one Latter-day Saint in the early days of the Church truly understood what it means to have the heavens open and God speak after centuries of silence. Par ley Parker Pratt, one of Mormonism’s original Twelve Apostles, ordained at age twenty-seven by Joseph Smith himself, knew in his soul that revealed truth—final, full, and absolute—could never compromise or co-exist with human dogmas or systems. It would prevail over them and within the lifetime of the believer sweep to universal dominion. Anything less would deny its superiority. 

“I will state as a prophecy, that there will not be an unbelieving Gentile upon this continent 50 years hence,” Parley wrote in 1838, “and if they are not greatly scourged, and in a great measure over thrown, within five or ten years from this date, then the Book of Mormon will have proved itself false” (p. 24). Driven by this belief, the largely self-educated New Yorker became the young faith’s first theologian and most ardent propagandist. 

While Pratt’s writings may strike some today as overly aggressive, they accurately reflect the militancy and zeal of a nineteenth-century millennial movement charged with establishing the kingdom of God on earth as a condition of Christ’s return. Poor timing could be one reason Parley is best known today as a missionary or composer of hymns, while his younger brother, Orson, also an apostle, gets the credit for being an intellectual. 

Now this new collection of Parley’s most significant works, The Essential Parley P. Pratt, published by Signature Books under the direction of Peter L. Crawley of Brigham Young University, restores Pratt to his rightful place in Mormon annals. It is highly appropriate that Pratt was chosen to be first in a new “Classics in Mormon Thought Series” that willinclude the writings and sermons of such notables as Brigham Young, John Taylor, Joseph Smith, Wilford Woodruff, B. H. Roberts, John Widtsoe, James Talmage, and others. 

Presented in this handsome volume are the original texts of twenty of the apostle’s most important writings, including “The Kingdom of God” from Mormonism’s most successful missionary piece, A Voice of Warning, published in twenty-four English editions before 1900, and “Keys of the Mysteries of the Godhead” from Key to the Science of Theology, his most com prehensive work. Well worth the investment by itself is the foreword by Crawley, an authority on early Mormon publications, who evaluates Pratt’s contribution to the theology of the Church and influence on other Mormon authors. 

A gifted writer, Pratt was also a born publicist and anything but shy. He once informed the Queen of England that her government was just one of the toes of the great image, spoken of by Daniel, that would be smashed by the “stone cut out of the mountain without hands” (p. 88), referring to the Mormon kingdom. He then printed his letter in pamphlet form for widest distribution. 

Pratt’s case for the gospel “as Restored in this Age” was closely reasoned, internally sound, and founded squarely on the Bible, which he knew almost by heart. In defending Joseph Smith, he was emotional and convincing. And on offense, his preferred stance, the Archer of Paradise, as he was named by W. W. Phelps, shot real arrows from his bow. In a piece entitled “Zion’s Watchman Unmasked, and Its Editor, Mr. L. R. Sunderland, Exposed; Truth Vindicated; The Devil Mad, and Priestcraft in Danger!” Pratt flatly told a Methodist critic that his church was “a system of idolatry” and “a daughter of the great mother of harlots” (p. 47).

Few Mormon writings better convey the chiliastic spirit of the early church than Pratt’s article, “One Hundred Years Hence. 1945,” written in 1845, in which he describes Zion and the world in 1945, “some forty or fifty years” after the cataclysmic events of the last days. Looking a century ahead, he relates how workmen, digging the foundation for a new temple “where it is supposed the City of New York once stood,” discover a lead box which contained “some coin of the old government of the United States” (p. 142). Students of Mormon theology will find much to think about in Pratt’s expositions on the eternal nature of matter and spirit, the immortality of the physical body, and the plurality of Gods. And historians who care to look closely will discover in his writings important clues to the causes of conflict in the Church’s turbulent early years. 

For example, Pratt’s description of the kingdom of God as an “organized government on the earth” probably reveals the real reason for repeated accusations of treason and insurrection in Missouri, Illinois, and Utah Territory. Supporting this view are his later remarks on this theme in Utah, not included in this volume.

And Pratt’s warning that “the remnants of Jacob will go through among the Gentiles and tear them in pieces, like a lion among the flocks of sheep” (p. 24) could hardly add to the comfort of settlers on an exposed frontier when Mormon missionaries visited neighboring Indian tribes. It almost amounts to an eerie foretelling of what happened to a train of Arkansas emigrants in 1857 at a place on the Spanish Trail, called Mountain Meadows, following by four months the apostle’s brutal murder in Arkansas.

Did such doctrines reflect the views of either Mormonism’s founding prophet or Brigham Young? Not necessarily, according to Crawley, who holds that much of Mormon theology “exists primarily in the minds of the members” (p. xxiii), supposedly including Pratt. He argues that doc trines are passed from one generation to the next by believers, who “ultimately speak only for themselves” (p. xxiii) and are reinterpreted roughly every thirty years by the faith’s intellectuals.

Whatever one may think of this doc trine, which is pretty revolutionary in itself, there is no better way to catch the spirit of early Mormonism than to read this book. 

The Essential Parley P. Pratt, foreword by Peter L. Crawley (Salt Lake City: Sig nature Books, 1990), xxvi, 242 pp., index, $17.95.