I read an article recently about a Catholic priest who was found to have been saying a wrong word when he performed baptisms, and that he had been doing so since 1995. His dioceses has declared that this makes all the baptisms he performed invalid, and all subsequent rites (such as marriage) also invalid, because they are supposed to be preceded by baptism.
I’m interested in how a similar finding would play out in a Mormon context. Of course, we don’t have anyone whose job it is to baptize like a Catholic priest does. I’m guessing most child-of-record baptisms are performed by the child’s father when he’s available and a priesthood holder, and most convert baptisms are performed by male missionaries. Perhaps the closest we get would be a temple sealer, who could perform hundreds or thousands of sealings. So what would happen if it were discovered that a sealer had said a wrong word in thousands of sealings?
I think the answer hinges on whether we see ordinances as being more like magic spells, or more like parts of a relationship between us and God. If an ordinance is like a magic spell, it’s crucial that the words be said exactly right. The ordinance, spoken by someone with the proper authority, is operating on the world in the way that a chemistry experiment or a baking recipe does. The cake you’re making doesn’t care about your intent. It cares that you put the right ingredients together in the right way and bake the result at the right temperature for the right amount of time. If, on the other hand, the ordinance is part of a relationship, then the exact wording doesn’t matter so much. We’re doing it to show our commitment to God, in front of our community, and so long as both understand what our intent is, then getting the words exactly right might not be crucial.
Really, I think there are aspects of LDS ordinances that are both like magic spells and like parts of relationships.
Ways LDS ordinances are more like magic spells
- They’re required. Like with baking a cake, we have to do all of them to reach the desired outcome of exaltation. Nobody is off the hook on any step. We take this so seriously that we do ordinances on behalf of the dead who didn’t get a chance to do them.
- They require particular authority. Authority is a required ingredient. No amount of good intent can make up for lack of authority.
- They require that words be said correctly, with witnesses checking to be sure that they are.
- Our scriptures say that God’s house is a house of order and not of confusion. Requiring ordinances to be performed exactly according to a standard seems consistent with order.
Ways LDS ordinances are more like parts of relationships
- We have scriptural precedent for their form not being fixed. D&C 27:2 says, “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.” (This is in contrast with the Catholic example, where the dioceses gave the example of using milk in place of wine for communion invalidating the rite.)
- We have experiential precedent for their form not being fixed. For example, the temple endowment ceremony has been tinkered with over the years, and particularly in the last few years.
- The requirement of correct wording is looser than it would be for a magic spell. For example, if a giver of a sacrament prayer says a word wrong, he typically just backs up to the end of the last phrase he said correctly and picks up from there. If the prayer were like a magic spell, it seems like it would have to be said exactly right, from beginning to end.
- I’ve never heard of an LDS ordinance being invalidated long after the fact like in the Catholic example. Once it’s in the Church records, it’s presumed to have been done correctly. (I’m open to being corrected if I’m wrong on this.)
You can probably already guess which way I hope the Church sees ordinances. I really prefer the relationship view. (Tangentially, thinking about this topic has made clearer for me what my sister Lynnette has been saying when she said she prefers this view of God. For example, see this lovely post she wrote a few years ago about what she called the reckless love of God for us.) I understand why Church leaders might prefer a more magic-spell-type view because they are so concerned about proper authority. It makes sense that the more ordinances are viewed as part of a relationship with God, the less important the Church and its authority become. It seems like congregants have much more say in how church is going to be in Protestant churches, say, where ordinances are seen as less necessary and priesthood authority less important, than in places like Catholicism, where the church is an absolutely required intermediary between humanity and deity.
But I think there are very good arguments for the relationship view of ordinances. In addition to all the changes, like I mentioned above, I think the oft-quoted verse about God not looking on the outward appearance can be usefully applied here:
Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.
If ordinances are about a relationship with God, then it would make sense that he cares about what’s in our heart when we do them, not on whether we got all the trappings and words (and perhaps even authority) exactly right.
What do you think? I’m sure I’ve oversimplified and missed other ways of thinking about ordinances with my binary framing. Please suggest other possibilities in the comments.
It’s also important to note that translations of ordinances have changed subtly over the years. Even when the exact wording hasn’t changed in English, the translations to other languages have shifted slightly over time. These changes in wordings don’t seem to invalidate previous ordinances.
You can even see that in English in the Sacrament prayers. The version of the bread prayer in Moroni has a one word difference from the version in D&C 20 (hath vs has). While the rest of the Church’s publications use the wording from D&C 20, I have yet to hear anyone be corrected for using the Moroni version.
When we say something “counts”, we must mean that it “is counted” by someone. Presumably the important someone who must count an ordinance is God. Which ordinances will He count? I think the Mormon view would be that when God gives a man the keys of the priesthood, He delegates to him the responsibility of counting the relevant ordinances. So Russell Nelson currently has the final say on what counts and why.
Suppose for a moment that missionaries in some country were discovered to have been systematically padding their numbers with sketchy baptisms. I think once they’re on the record they tend to stay there.
Witnesses and presiding authorities can require that an ordinance be repeated on the spot, but once it is recorded in church records, it “counts.” That also goes for ordinances performed by a priesthood holder later found to have been unworthy–even if the unworthiness was egregious.
On the flip side, when I was a stake missionary many years ago, a sister was baptized with no issues arising about the wording of the prayer or the worthiness of the missionary performing the ordinance. When she suddenly moved out of the ward a few weeks later, we discovered that no record had ever been created for her–the missionary said he had slipped the paperwork under the clerk’s door but the clerk said he never saw it. That one, I’m afraid, does not count. If she encountered the church wherever she moved, she would have needed to be rebaptized. (There is a lot more to this story, and some of the discredit falls on my shoulders.)
A more complicated case arose when I was a ward clerk. A brother from Sierra Leone returned from a visit to his home country and announced that the mission president had ordained him an elder while he was there. But he did not have a certificate and it was not recorded on his membership record. The bishop asked me to write to the Liberian mission president requesting a certificate, which I did. It was returned as undeliverable. If you have seen the movie “Freetown”, you will understand why–the mission had bugged out of Monrovia, Liberia and relocated to Freetown, Sierra Leone to avoid the Liberian civil war. They probably didn’t even take any certificates with them. So the next time the brother visited his homeland, we asked him to try to get a certificate. However, he died on that trip and we had no idea whether he ever obtained a certificate. Obviously, he never made it to the temple, but he never complained about that, so I can’t say that the lack of a certificate kept him out. When temple work is eventually done for him, he will be reordained during the initiatory phase of the endowment, whether his original ordination was valid or not.
I like your contrasting “magic spell” with “relationship,” and I think you’re very right that what matters is the commitment and intent.
In fact, that is how it HAS worked in the past. I have a few letters where people have written to Church leaders to ask whether an ordinance should be done again because of some anomaly — maybe a child has been baptized in a tub with the baptizer standing on dry ground outside; or maybe someone can’t quite remember but thinks someone was confirmed without explicitly being commanded to receive the Holy Ghost. Should the ordinance be redone? The response is consistent: No. God will accept the intent. As long as somebody’s intent was not deliberately to change the ordinance, it need not be redone.
Holding that understanding is very practical. Someone asked Joseph Fielding Smith what would happen if a man had performed numerous priesthood ordinances and then it were discovered that he had a black ancestor — would they need to track down everyone he had baptized, and every person those converts had ordained, ad infinitum, and redo the ordinances? No, JFS said (even though he was one of most racist leaders!). The error was inadvertent — nobody was trying to ordain someone who should not receive the priesthood; such a man had been delegated to perform those acts by someone who held keys, so the ordinances were valid. The only result in such a case would be that the man’s priesthood would be suspended.
Same thing after the Third Convention (the 1936-1946 schism in the Mexican Mission). The Saints had continued to do missionary work and perform baptisms — were they valid? That was ticklish. George Albert Smith decided that ordinances performed by rank and file members of the Church would be valid, even though an entire district might have been out of fellowship with the church, acting outside the direction of key-holders. The only exceptions were the relatively few converts who had been baptized by any of the seven Mexican leaders who had actually been excommunicated (changed in 1946 to disfellowshipments) — if those converts could be identified, they should be rebaptized so that there would be no misunderstandings (particularly no political misunderstandings about the seriousness of the schism, which is entirely different from believing that God would not accept the ordinance).
So there seems to be good historical precedent for your recognition of the relationship trumping innocent errors in the performance of ordinances.
Love your stories, Last Lemming!
When my niece sought a temple recommend at the time she was married, the ward couldn’t find any membership record. She remembered baptism, her large family remembered her baptism, she had been raised in the Church, there was no reason why that should have been the first time the lack of recording her baptism had been discovered. But there it was, and the family couldn’t find their copy of her certificate. Everybody decided that the easiest thing to do was to have her baptized again, 11 years after her first baptism, to record that baptism as her official date, and to issue the temple recommend for her marriage.
Clerks are important!
I was a temple worker for a while. They went through a whole training session on what to do if someone didn’t have an arm or hand and couldn’t make the signs. Bottom line: do the best you can. If someone was missing all four limbs they were just supposed the think about what they were supposed to be doing. That taught me that “strict” compliance wasn’t necessary. We do the best we can. Also, I got in trouble once to telling a patron that their temple clothes were on backwards. Offending them was considered worse than having things on backwards.
what would happen if a man had performed numerous priesthood ordinances and then it were discovered that he had a black ancestor
DNA testing shows that priesthood ordinances being performed by someone with an unknown black ancestor was a fairly common occurrence. Such technology would have rid us of the ban faster than anything else.
I would take this further and say that even if an ordinance is done “correctly,” it may be of no use beyond this world. JS said, “You might as well baptize a bag of sand as a man, if not done in view of the remission of sins and getting of the Holy Ghost. Baptism by water is but half a baptism, and is good for nothing without the other half-that is, baptism of the Holy Ghost.”
Ordinances are nothing more than invitations to know God, through the Holy Ghost. They symbolically point to something grander. The Book of Mormon most often calls it “baptism in the NAME of Christ,” and rarely talks about the physical ordinance itself. If we are dipped or immersed in the name of Christ, what does that mean? We would first need to know and experience His doctrine to fully understand. The ultimate goal is to LIVE and BE what the ordinance represents.
I join Observer with the evidence from foreign languages. The sacrament prayers in Japanese changed substantially when new translations of the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants were published in the 1990s. I suspect that the changes must have been a bit jarring to members who had spent years listening to (or reciting) those prayers every Sunday–but nobody would suggest that the previous years’ prayers were ineffective.
I think we may have two different baptism ordinances in our scriptures, if I recall correctly. I think we have somewhere in the Book of Mormon a baptism ordinance that begins with “having authority given me by Jesus Christ”, and in the D&C we have “having been commissioned of Jesus Christ”. (Sorry, I’m too lazy to look these up right now.) It has been standard practice to use the D&C version, but on my mission I heard of a case where the previous mission president was doing the baptism, wasn’t familiar with the more commonly used text, so looked up the Book of Mormon version and used it. He became a GA later, so the baptism must be legit, right?
Thanks, everyone, for your comments.
Thanks for raising the issue of translation of ordinances into different languages, Observer and Mark B. I hadn’t thought of that, but it does seem like a perfect bit of evidence in favor of the “intent matters more” argument. I would think that the Catholics would have had to deal with this too, and for a far longer time. Maybe that’s why they kept Mass in Latin for so long. If you’re working with a dead language, you don’t have to worry about it changing!
And thanks for citing so many historical examples, Ransom, Last Lemming, and Ardis! Last Lemming, that’s really interesting about how the records are so crucial. It makes me think of currency, which is so much just bits and bytes now that a bank is really just its records. And Ardis, thanks for the fascinating examples of ordinances that didn’t need to be re-done (except in the case of trying to signal no connection with the excommunicated group).
Lily, that’s a great example of intent mattering over precision. I’ve wondered idly before about how such situations are handled in the temple. I’m glad to hear that it’s done with a focus on doing the best you can with what you have.
Ransom and DJ, those are good points I hadn’t considered about how or whether an ordinance counts in the first place.
And Quentin, that’s fascinating that you heard of a case where someone actually used the baptismal prayer from Mosiah. I’ve always kind of liked it better, probably just because it goes against the usual grain.
I’m currently a temple ordinance worker and I can sum up all the training as “Give everyone a break, we’re glad they’re all here and we’re all doing the best we can.” In general, a good faith effort to do everything correctly is sufficient. Lily is correct that once the robe is on, temple workers are not supposed to worry about making corrections. Contrary to what is often supposed, it’s not a big deal if you don’t get the wording exactly correct. Still, there are some workers who just have to jump in and make corrections. I’ve had temple workers lecture me about pronunciation of words that have multiple acceptable pronunciations. I recently had someone come over from the adjacent initiatory booth to point out that I had substituted “which” for “that.” Of course, he then proceeded to mangle his own wording much more egregiously. I let it slide as we are trained, though I confess that I did think about going over to point out the error. But they do their best to train that nonsense out of us. The temple presidency is pretty relaxed about all that, and really most of the ordinance workers as well.
One way of measuring “what counts”:
‘All covenants, contracts, bonds, obligations, oaths, vows, performances, connections, associations, or expectations,’ must be sealed by the Holy Spirit of Promise, if they are to have ‘efficacy, virtue, or force in and after the resurrection from the dead; for all contracts that are not made unto this end have an end when men are dead.’ (D. & C. 132:7.)
“To seal is to ratify, to justify, or to approve. Thus an act which is sealed by the Holy Spirit of Promise is one which is ratified by the Holy Ghost; it is one which is approved by the Lord; and the person who has taken the obligation upon himself is justified by the Spirit in the thing he has done.
My uncle was cheating on his wife when he baptized his child and was excommunicated shortly afterwards. The baptism “counted.”
I as a woman was not allowed to hold my baby when he was blessed because apparently that would have made the blessing null and void.
Go figure.
Thanks for sharing that, Left Field. That’s very encouraging to me to hear!
Seeker, right, but I feel like you may have missed the entire post beyond the title.
Anonymous, I’m sorry. That really is a massive issue, that we bar over half of adult members from performing ordinances.
Like Left Field, I too am an ordinance worker. The more cogent question here is what would invalidate an ordinance. We had a lively discussion with the temple president a while ago on this topic, the upshot being that the list of things that could invalidate an ordinance is very short.
Section 128 is specifically about proxy baptism, but I think the principle applies to all ordinances. This epistle is almost entirely about record-keeping. “Let us present in his holy temple…a book containing the records of our dead, which shall be worthy of all acceptation.” There is a form and a required authority for an ordinance, but once the witnesses, the recorder, or the presiding officer sign off on it, the record is made and the ordinance counts. For Mormons, it’s the record that counts, not the words.
Ziff: sorry.
Seeker, no worries! Sorry if I misunderstood you. I appreciate you commenting in any case.