Item Detail
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33078
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0
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35
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English
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“The Blessing That’s Anticipated Here Will Be Realized in the Next Life”: The Development of Modern Latter-day Saint Marital Sealing Rules
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Journal of Mormon History
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July 2023
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49
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3
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103-140
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"During the nineteenth century there was no sharp distinction between Utah marriage law and Latter-day Saint sealing practices. To be sure, theologically Latter-day Saints believed that sealings had eternal consequences that merely civil marriages did not have, and civil marriages without sealings were possible. However, under Utah law, sealings simply were marriages, and until the end of the century it was assumed that a church divorce was a legal act that dissolved a legal marriage. After 1888 this changed as marriage law formalized and sealing rules came uncoupled from secular marriage. At the same time, Latter-day Saint sealing theology underwent a revolutionary change in 1894 when Wilford Woodruff announced the end of the law of adoption, which marked the abandonment of nineteenth-century kingdom theology. This is the setting from which the modern rules governing marriage sealings in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints emerged. These rules constitute a de facto ecclesiastical law of marriage for Latter-day Saints both living and dead. Over the course of the twentieth century, those rules have evolved in the face of shifts in theological understanding and the practical requirements of modern Mormonism. The result is a set of bifurcated rules in which the living and the dead are subject to substantially different regimes, neither of which rest on a fully articulated theological foundation. Rather, the rules grew organically over time, with each set of changes retaining continuity with the past while introducing innovations that sometimes repudiated the theological assumptions behind earlier rules that were retained. This process has allowed the church to adapt to changing patterns of worship, but the resulting system is not without problems, and it is by no means clear that it will remain stable in the future." [Author]
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