The fullness of priesthood, what does that mean? In our next conversation with Dr. Margaret Toscano, we’ll talk about messianic, ecclesiastical, and charismatic priesthood. These aren’t terms we typically talk about in the LDS Church, but Toscano believes they are outside of our traditional Aaronic and Melchizedek Priesthood terms.
Margaret: Then, in the same article, I talk about the September 28, 1843 anointing of Joseph Smith and Emma Smith, to the fullness of the priesthood. They’re anointed jointly and I saw that as an important key for women. The idea is, if you look at all the statements of Joseph Smith, that when you have the fullness of the priesthood, you really have the right to everything else. So what I proposed then, and this goes back to your question, is that in a way, it was almost like Joseph was saying that the women could sidestep all the going through all those stages, that as soon as you had the fullness of the Melchizedek, and of course, the temple also gives you the fullness of the Aaronic, that really, you have this fullness. I would see it like an umbrella like your little light things here, that the fullness of Melchizedek priesthood encompasses everything else. Now, this created a problem.
GT: I can tell.
Margaret: Because really what he did was he set up two mechanisms by which you obtain priesthood, and he never worked that out. So you have the church priesthood, actually, I would say that Joseph Smith through the stages had three different kind of stages of priesthood. There’s the charismatic priesthood. There’s ecclesiastical priesthood, the fullness of the priesthood, which he also called the Messianic priesthood. It encompasses everything. I think that he felt like there should be a relationship between the fullness and the ecclesiastical, but that he never developed that. So he left these remnants of two systems that can seem like they don’t correspond or you’re not sure what they do. We can come back to some of this because I want to go back to your other question. After he died, you had Brigham Young and Hebrew, C Kimball, and George A. Smith and all of these others who began to try to sort of bring this under control, both in terms of the Relief Society and in terms of how people view the endowment. It was like, “Oh, well, this thing over here, that’s the fullness of the priesthood that’s through the temple, it has to be under the control of the church, and that the thing that the women got, it was not really the priesthood. They’re just an auxiliary.”
What do you think about these different mechanisms for priesthood? Check out our conversation….
Don’t miss our other conversations with Dr. Toscano!
