The greatest legacy of Joseph Smith is not the growth of the Church he organized, but the quality of the community within that Church, said Terryl Givens, professor of literature and religion at the University of Richmond in Virginia.

Copyright David Lindsley, used by permission

"Brother Joseph," as portrayed by artist David Lindsley, brought together the "first perfect seamless synthesis" of freedom and religion, says scholar.

Copyright Intellectual Reserve

Preaching the gospel in the Kirtland Temple, as depicted by John Falter, captures the authority of the Prophet Joseph's teachings and the deep personal relationship he had with his followers. Enduring relationships were important to him.

The author of several scholarly works on the Church and of religion in America, he spoke at a BYU devotional Nov. 29 on "Lightning Out of Heaven: Joseph Smith and the Forging of Community."

"Joseph succeeded in creating a community with no real parallels and few precedents in the history of the world," said Brother Givens. "That is the more vital fact and the more enduring mystery of the Church."He quoted essayist Thomas Carlyle who, speaking of heroes, said, "The great man was always as lightning out of heaven. The rest of the men waited for him like fuel, and then, they too would flame."

Brother Givens asked, "What did Joseph teach and what did he embody that did not simply attract a faithful corps of followers but galvanized and welded them into a powerfully cohesive group and that continues to endow a multi-million member group with those same bonds and cohesion today?"

Prior to Joseph Smith's time, religion for centuries had emphasized human depravity and inherited guilt. So as some thinkers found human potential to be beautiful, they were "thwarted at every turn by stultifying systems, rigid hierarchies, and inflexible orthodoxies."

"In Joseph Smith, religion and freedom found their first perfect seamless synthesis, for it was into this environment that Joseph introduced a re-invented story of human origin, nature, and potential. In the greatest intellectual fusion of his age, Joseph argued that the majesty of God does not exist at the expense of the dignity of man. He made religion the advocate rather than the enemy of all that is best in human yearning, but most importantly, Joseph promulgated a set of teachings that centered the restored gospel on a correct understanding of the divine nature of human nature and the relationships to each other. That is the knowledge that imbued his followers with an uncommon degree of self-knowledge and shared purpose."

Joseph taught that God not only has a body of flesh and bone, but his teachings that "God has a heart that beats in sympathy with ours is the truth that catalyzes millions, that He feels real sorrow, rejoices with real gladness and weeps real tears," said Brother Givens.

He said the Prophet's prayers anticipated a personal response, as compared with the vague responses discussed in Christian and mystic philosophies. "This model, I call dialogic revelation, situates Joseph and the religion he founded well outside Christian understandings of revelation" that "prophecy was only the privilege of prophets."

"Personal concerns are God's concerns," he said. "Solutions to those proximate concerns are the appropriate subject of divine communication from heavens. That knowledge binds a people to their God more powerfully than any exegesis of existence."

He suggested four truths taught by Joseph Smith. First, the soul of man has existed eternally. This understanding leads to the powerful principle "that man is inherently innocent."

Second, moral freedom can logically inhere in every human being if man is co-eternal with God, and that man is infinitely perfectible.

"In so literally embracing the divine potential of man, Joseph ennobles human nature to such a degree that even the most exuberant renaissance humanists would blanch," he said.

Third, he emphasized the primacy and durability of personal relationships. "Joseph's friends loved him because they knew the extent of his love for them. Nothing in Joseph's life was more important than friendship. When he revealed that the same sociality that exists here will exist in the eternal world, Joseph was affirming the fact that heaven is constructed out of a web of human relationships that extend in every direction. By the time his work was done he had laid the groundwork for men to be sealed to their wives across the eternities, for parents to be sealed to their children and their children's children, and to their parents and parents' parents across infinite generations, and friends to be bound to friends in the Church of the Firstborn."

Said Parley P. Pratt: "It was Joseph Smith who taught me how to prize the endearing relationships of father, mother, husband, wife, brother, sister, son and daughter. It was from him I learned of marriage for eternity, that the refined sympathies and affections which endeared us to each other emanated from the fountain of divine eternal love. I had loved before but I knew not why. But now I loved with the pureness and intensity of elevated, exalted feeling which would lift my soul from the transitory things of this groveling sphere and expand it as the ocean."

Brother Givens said the privileged status of personal relationships was a primary focus of the Restoration.

Joseph Smith said, "It was my endeavor to organize the Church in such a way that the brethren might eventually be independent of every encumbrance beneath the celestial kingdom by bonds and covenants of mutual friendship and mutual love."

Joseph Smith replicated the sense of extended family found in the early Christian Church, which "was no small feat, and not without the highest significance."

The fourth aspect is that of religious certainty. "He was as certain as he could be on any subject," and was "saturated in the tangible." He saw in his own experience of receiving revelations "a prototype that others could and should emulate."

This certainty "informs Mormon life, worship, personal aspirations and shared purpose" and is found in the rhetorical world of testimony

meetings filled with "language of calm assurance, and confident conviction, even professions of certain knowledge that overwhelm the more traditional expression of common belief."

The drawback of having such certainty is that it can lead to "a smugness, a sense that there is no need for searching and an alienation of those who cannot share such certainty," he said.

While faith has been a casualty among some scholars, "The call to faith is a summons to engage the heart, to attune it to resonate in sympathy with principles, values and ideals that we devoutly hope are true, and have reasonable but not certain grounds for believing to be true."

"What we choose to be responsive to (faith or doubt) is the purest reflection of who we are and what we love. That is why faith, the choice to believe, is, in the final analysis, an action that is positively laden with moral significance."

While there are appealing arguments for both sides, there is nothing to compel an individual preference of one over the other.

Yet, "there is nothing in the universe, or in any possible universe, more perfectly good, absolutely beautiful, worthy of adoration and worthy of emulation than this Christ, and a gesture of belief in that direction, a will manifesting itself as a desire to acknowledge His virtues as the paramount quality of a divided universe is a response to the best in us, the best and noblest of which the human soul is capable."

He concluded that "Joseph Smith ignited something in thousands of men and women that connects them to God and to each other in powerful ways."