PROVO, Utah — In this, the 200th anniversary year of his birth on March 1, 1807, President Wilford Woodruff was honored with an Oct. 12 symposium at BYU in which 11 scholars and two prominent descendants explored the life of this missionary, apostle and fourth president of the Church.
Co-sponsored by the Mormon Historic Sites Foundation and the BYU Religious Studies Center, the symposium attracted scores of Church history enthusiasts to the latest in what has become a series of events on prominent early Church leaders in connection with their 200th birthday anniversaries. Oliver Cowdery was the subject of last year's event, and a symposium is planned next year on John Taylor.
As a young boy, Wilford avoided religious revivals, said Church history professor Susan Easton Black, who co-chaired the symposium with her BYU colleague, Alexander L. Baugh. By 1832, a newspaper article, although intent on ridiculing Mormonism, impressed him, she said, adding that he was baptized Dec. 31, 1833, in a stream so frozen that ice had to be removed with an axe.
"From that time, a favorite saying was, 'A religion that costs nothing is worth just that, nothing,"' she said in introductory remarks.
She noted that Wilford joined Zion's Camp, where he met Joseph Smith for the first time and was convinced he was a prophet. "From that time forth, his service to the Church was unbounded," she said. He was sustained as Church president on April 7, 1880.
Here are highlights of four of the presentations at the symposium.
Thomas G. Alexander
In 1880, President Wilford Woodruff received a revelation "which virtually nailed the flag to the flagpole of plural marriage; by 1890, his views had changed so much that he could accept and understand a revelation calling on the saints to stop the practice," observed Thomas G. Alexander, retired BYU history professor and President Woodruff's biographer, in his keynote address at the symposium.
"I believe the Lord reveals important things to His prophets when they're prepared to receive them," said Brother Alexander, citing Doctrine and Covenants 9:8-9 relative to the process of receiving revelation.
"What led President Woodruff to issue the Manifesto?" asked Brother Alexander in reference to what is now Official Declaration 1 in the Doctrine and Covenants. "The revelation resulted, I believe, from the spiritual, physical and psychic odyssey that ended shortly after his return from California in September of 1890. In this process, his attitude changed from apocalyptic belligerence to reluctant cooperation as the Mormons moved through a psychic watershed from persecuted outsiders and sectarians to members of a prominent church now with a majority of their members living outside of the United States."
He quoted from the diary of President Woodruff, who wrote that he had "arrived at a point in the history of my life as president of the Church ... where I am under the necessity of acting for the temporal salvation of the Church... After praying to the Lord and feeling inspired by His spirit, I have issued a proclamation which is sustained by my counselors and the Twelve Apostles."
Alonzo Gaskill
President Wilford Woodruff was one man who definitely spent his life communing with the heavens, said Alonzo Gaskill, former director of the LDS institute adjacent to Stanford University and who is now on the BYU religion faculty.
"The Savior states in Mark 16 that there are signs which will follow them that believe," Brother Gaskill said in his symposium presentation. "Wilford Woodruff attests in his journal, his writings, but his life in general attests to the fact that he was a fulfillment of the Lord's words."
Brother Gaskill quoted a statement from Wilford Woodruff that he did not join any church in his youth for the reason that he could not find any with the manifestation of the Holy Ghost with the attendant gifts and graces. "I believed every gift of the Spirit to be just as necessary now to constitute the true church of Christ and the kingdom of God as at any age of the world."
President Woodruff had many spiritual manifestations, Brother Gaskill said, "but what's curious is these spiritual endowments over his life become somewhat commonplace. As he speaks of them, there's no sense that these are unusual or that these are occasional, but rather, that they're just common, day-to-day experiences for a man who was just amazingly spiritual and deeply saturated with the Spirit of God."
Richard Neitzel Holzapfel
The first Church leader in history to have his voice recorded, President Wilford Woodruff took the occasion to recount the momentous meeting in March 1844 when the Prophet Joseph Smith delivered to the Quorum of the Twelve the keys and powers of the priesthood that the Lord had bestowed upon him.
In his symposium presentation, Richard Neitzel Holzapfel, professor of Church history and doctrine at BYU, spoke of this historic recording made by President Woodruff on March 19, 1897, by speaking into a "talking machine" or phonograph invented by Thomas Edison.
The audio recording, made on wax cylinders that are preserved today in the Church Archives, has been available to Church members in various formats since January 1972, when it was first published on a flexible vinyl disc together with recordings of other Church presidents. The disc was included in that month's issue of the New Era magazine. But only an edited version has been available, said Brother Holzapfel, who played the entire Wood-ruff recording during his symposium presentation.
It is significant, Brother Holzapfel said, that the Church president would recount the meeting with the Prophet Joseph Smith. "It's the only recorded voice we have of that time of someone who was physically present at the meeting telling us what it was like," he noted.
It must have been important to President Woodruff, who was nearing the end of his life and who sensed the historic importance of this new technology, Brother Holzapfel said.
The transcript of the recording reads, in part: "I bear my testimony that in the early spring of 1844, in Nauvoo, the Prophet Joseph Smith called the Twelve Apostles together and he delivered to them the ordinances of the Church and kingdom of God; and all the keys and powers that God had bestowed upon him, he sealed upon our heads, and he told us that we must round up our shoulders and bear off this kingdom or we would be damned."
The audio recording may be heard in full at the BYU Studies Web site, www.byustudies.byu.edu.
Richard Lambert and
Wilford Bruce Woodruff
Wilford Woodruff was such a meticulous and prolific journal keeper that the bound and published typescript of his journal occupies nine volumes averaging 600 pages each, for a total of about 5,400 pages.
"Because of that detail, we have a better record of his personal experiences than most of the leaders of the Church," said Wilford Bruce Woodruff during his symposium presentation with Richard Lambert. Both are great-grandsons of President Woodruff and are officers in the Wilford Woodruff Family Association.
During the past year, on more than 50 occasions, the two have presented their view of President Woodruff's life as his descendants, this in connection with the Churchwide Melchizedek Priesthood and Relief Society course of study last year on President Woodruff's teachings, and with the bicentenary of President Woodruff's birth this year.
"We felt his presence as we made those presentations throughout Utah, Brother Woodruff said. "We were blessed and strengthened as we bore testimony that he was one of God's prophets"
Brother Lambert said President Woodruff, like Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, Parley P. Pratt and others, was a seeker "that had read the Bible enough and heard the Bible teaching enough to know what the original organization of Christ's church looked like and knew of the gifts and powers that were associated with God's people. He sought diligently in his own private prayers and meditations to someday be able to partake of the same blessings that the early Christians were able to partake of."
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