Question about requesting a Priesthood Line of Authority

[classylady]

I’ve been writing my father’s history for my family and I want to include his priesthood line of authority. He was a Seventy when he passed away. Would I request the line of authority from his Seventy ordination or would I request the line of authority from his Elder ordination? Or should I request both?

I was pleased to see that we can request the priesthood line of authority for our deceased family (also you can request your own) by an email sent into church headquarters. Just go to LDS.org for instructions on how to request it. 

My father died when I was six years old so I have very few memories of him. He didn’t keep a journal, and we only have a few letters that he wrote my mother. So, there is very little information on him. Unfortunately, we never had his siblings write any of their memories of him. They are now all deceased, so is my mother. I’m getting my older siblings to write down their memories.  This has been an emotional experience for me. I’ve gained a greater appreciation for him and I’m hoping my children and grandchildren will get to know him through this history.

[Vort]

We have been taught that the current Priesthood line of authority is that of the office to which one is currently ordained.

I have never quite understood this; certainly when you officiate as a high priest, that authority comes through your high priest line; but the Priesthood was conferred on you when you were ordained an elder, so any general duties you perform under the auspices of the Priesthood you hold that are not specific to the office of high priest (or patriarch, or seventy, or apostle) seem like they should be authorized through your reception of the Priesthood rather than your ordination to a specific office therein. If anyone has any insight into this, I'd be interested to understand it better.

[Just_A_Guy]

9 minutes ago, Vort said:

We have been taught that the current Priesthood line of authority is that of the office to which one is currently ordained.

I have never quite understood this; certainly when you officiate as a high priest, that authority comes through your high priest line; but the Priesthood was conferred on you when you were ordained an elder, so any general duties you perform under the auspices of the Priesthood you hold that are not specific to the office of high priest (or patriarch, or seventy, or apostle) seem like they should be authorized through your reception of the Priesthood rather than your ordination to a specific office therein. If anyone has any insight into this, I'd be interested to understand it better.

FWIW:  the modern practice, of course, is to 1) confer the priesthood and 2) ordain to a particular priesthood office, but as I understand it this procedure came largely due to the influence of JFS I/JFS II/BRM.  The prevailing ordination practice through most of the 19th century did not include 1).

I’m not sure what significance that has in this context, but it seemed noteworthy.  

[Midwest LDS]

1 hour ago, classylady said:

I’ve been writing my father’s history for my family and I want to include his priesthood line of authority. He was a Seventy when he passed away. Would I request the line of authority from his Seventy ordination or would I request the line of authority from his Elder ordination? Or should I request both?

I was pleased to see that we can request the priesthood line of authority for our deceased family (also you can request your own) by an email sent into church headquarters. Just go to LDS.org for instructions on how to request it. 

My father died when I was six years old so I have very few memories of him. He didn’t keep a journal, and we only have a few letters that he wrote my mother. So, there is very little information on him. Unfortunately, we never had his siblings write any of their memories of him. They are now all deceased, so is my mother. I’m getting my older siblings to write down their memories.  This has been an emotional experience for me. I’ve gained a greater appreciation for him and I’m hoping my children and grandchildren will get to know him through this history.

As has been mentioned I believe the line of authority is from the most recent ordination, but you can always request both. The worst they can say is no.

As a tangent I remember an area in my mission where one of the members on the roster was listed as a Seventy. Elders were told first he was not a General Authority (even then most of us youngin's had no idea there were individual Seventies Quorums way back in the day) and second that he had gone inactive before they discontinued the individual Seventies Quorums and so had never been switched to being a High Priest. He didn't like missionaries, wanted no contact, but refused to have his name removed. 

Anyways tangent done and good luck with your search @classylady!

Edited February 5, 2019 by Midwest LDS

[classylady]

3 hours ago, Just_A_Guy said:

FWIW:  the modern practice, of course, is to 1) confer the priesthood and 2) ordain to a particular priesthood office, but as I understand it this procedure came largely due to the influence of JFS I/JFS II/BRM.  The prevailing ordination practice through most of the 19th century did not include 1).

I’m not sure what significance that has in this context, but it seemed noteworthy.  

JAG, could you explain what you just wrote? Forgive my ignorance, but, I’m not sure what the abbreviations mean.  Thanks. 

[Midwest LDS]

20 minutes ago, classylady said:

JAG, could you explain what you just wrote? Forgive my ignorance, but, I’m not sure what the abbreviations mean.  Thanks. 

Correct me if I'm wrong @Just_A_Guy but I believe he means Joseph F. Smith, Joseph Fielding Smith, and Bruce R. McConkie.

[Just_A_Guy]

1 hour ago, Midwest LDS said:

Correct me if I'm wrong @Just_A_Guy but I believe he means Joseph F. Smith, Joseph Fielding Smith, and Bruce R. McConkie.

Precisely.  It used to be that to ordain an elder, you just laid your hands on his head and said “I ordain you an elder in the Church . . .”; and the Melchizedek Priesthood conferal was implied but not spoken.  Joseph F. Smith began advocating a two-step process in the late 1800s based on his reading of the D&C.  IIRC John Taylor actually weighed in and said the process was unnecessary; then JFS pushed it during his presidency.  Heber J. Grant retreated to an “either way is fine” position, but Joseph Fielding Smith and Bruce R. McConkie stuck with their father’s/grandfather-in-law’s way of doing things and eventually their preference found its way into the Church’s manuals.  This becomes an issue if you deal with fundamentalist Mormons enough—they’re fond of saying that we lost the priesthood because as a matter of procedure we’ve been conferring it wrong since Heber J. Grant’s day (Grant is a sort of boogeyman to them, and as usual the fundies only tell you half the story).

Anyways, sorry for the diversion into useless trivia.  The notion I was floating—and I’m not really sure what I think about this, but I’m sort of toying with it—is, maybe we sometimes are a little quick to lump priesthood offices into the same umbrella (Melchizedek/Aaronic) without giving full attention to their distinctions.  Maybe it somehow *does* matter whether—say—a confirmation is performed by an elder versus a seventy versus a high priest?  Or maybe the import is simply because one can not confer a “higher” priesthood office than one has oneself received?

My brother and I were ordained elders by our dad; and when my brother was called into a bishopric and ordained a high priest, he was disappointed that our dad (still an elder) would no longer be in his line of authority.*  But I suspect that in the eternities the priesthood authority we continue to wield will be primarily patriarchal in nature and will come through the lines of our sealings to our parents; and that the “lines of authority” preserved in the Church’s records are primarily maintained as a matter of ecclesiastical form in the here-and-now.

 

*I’m still an elder and thus don’t have to worry about this—one of the benefits of being a perennial slacker.

Edited February 6, 2019 by Just_A_Guy

[classylady]

1 hour ago, Just_A_Guy said:

Precisely.  It used to be that to ordain an elder, you just laid your hands on his head and said “I ordain you an elder in the Church . . .”; and the Melchizedek Priesthood conferal was implied but not spoken.  Joseph F. Smith began advocating a two-step process in the late 1800s based on his reading of the D&C.  IIRC John Taylor actually weighed in and said the process was unnecessary; then JFS pushed it during his presidency.  Heber J. Grant retreated to an “either way is fine” position, but Joseph Fielding Smith and Bruce R. McConkie stuck with their father’s/grandfather-in-law’s way of doing things and eventually their preference found its way into the Church’s manuals.  This becomes an issue if you deal with fundamentalist Mormons enough—they’re fond of saying that we lost the priesthood because as a matter of procedure we’ve been conferring it wrong since Heber J. Grant’s day (Grant is a sort of boogeyman to them, and as usual the fundies only tell you half the story).

Anyways, sorry for the diversion into useless trivia.  The notion I was floating—and I’m not really sure what I think about this, but I’m sort of toying with it—is, maybe we sometimes are a little quick to lump priesthood offices into the same umbrella (Melchizedek/Aaronic) without giving full attention to their distinctions.  Maybe it somehow *does* matter whether—say—a confirmation is performed by an elder versus a seventy versus a high priest?  Or maybe the import is simply because one can not confer a “higher” priesthood office than one has oneself received?

My brother and I were ordained elders by our dad; and when my brother was called into a bishopric and ordained a high priest, he was disappointed that our dad (still an elder) would no longer be in his line of authority.*  But I suspect that in the eternities the priesthood authority we continue to wield will be primarily patriarchal in nature and will come through the lines of our sealings to our parents; and that the “lines of authority” preserved in the Church’s records are primarily maintained as a matter of ecclesiastical form in the here-and-now.

 

*I’m still an elder and thus don’t have to worry about this—one of the benefits of being a perennial slacker.

My father was ordained a seventy by Spencer W. Kimball around 1956. I’m not sure who ordained my father to an elder, but I assume his father. I would like to get both lines of priesthood authority from the church offices.  I’ll ask for both and we shall see what happens.

My husband was ordained an elder by his father, and two months after my father-in-law died, my husband was ordained to the office of high priest. So that changes his line of authority if I understand it correctly. I know my husband would have loved to have had his father ordain him to high priest, but it didn’t happen that way. (My father-in-law was a high priest at the time of his death, so he could have ordained my husband if he would have been living.) 

Edited February 6, 2019 by classylady

[CV75]

16 hours ago, classylady said:

I’ve been writing my father’s history for my family and I want to include his priesthood line of authority. He was a Seventy when he passed away. Would I request the line of authority from his Seventy ordination or would I request the line of authority from his Elder ordination? Or should I request both?

I was pleased to see that we can request the priesthood line of authority for our deceased family (also you can request your own) by an email sent into church headquarters. Just go to LDS.org for instructions on how to request it. 

My father died when I was six years old so I have very few memories of him. He didn’t keep a journal, and we only have a few letters that he wrote my mother. So, there is very little information on him. Unfortunately, we never had his siblings write any of their memories of him. They are now all deceased, so is my mother. I’m getting my older siblings to write down their memories.  This has been an emotional experience for me. I’ve gained a greater appreciation for him and I’m hoping my children and grandchildren will get to know him through this history.

I would request both and see what you get!

[MarginOfError]

On 2/5/2019 at 5:40 PM, Vort said:

We have been taught that the current Priesthood line of authority is that of the office to which one is currently ordained.

I have never quite understood this; certainly when you officiate as a high priest, that authority comes through your high priest line; but the Priesthood was conferred on you when you were ordained an elder, so any general duties you perform under the auspices of the Priesthood you hold that are not specific to the office of high priest (or patriarch, or seventy, or apostle) seem like they should be authorized through your reception of the Priesthood rather than your ordination to a specific office therein. If anyone has any insight into this, I'd be interested to understand it better.

It's a semantic argument (and perhaps a petty one), but I've always considered it as the difference between power and authority.  Sure, when I received the Melchizedek Priesthood, I was given priesthood power, but my ordination to the office of Elder sets limits on my ability to use that power (authority). It seems that the Line of Authority is aptly named in this way of looking at it, as it tracks that the limits of our authority are properly bestowed.

It isn't a perfect perspective, but it's the best I've got.

[GaleG]

On 2/5/2019 at 11:58 PM, classylady said:

My father was ordained a seventy by Spencer W. Kimball around 1956. I’m not sure who ordained my father to an elder, but I assume his father. I would like to get both lines of priesthood authority from the church offices.  I’ll ask for both and we shall see what happens.

My husband was ordained an elder by his father, and two months after my father-in-law died, my husband was ordained to the office of high priest. So that changes his line of authority if I understand it correctly.

What is the significance of a line of priesthood authority?

Thank you,

Gale

[Jane_Doe]

2 hours ago, GaleG said:

What is the significance of a line of priesthood authority?

Thank you,

Gale

 When a person is ordained to the priesthood, they know who ordained them, and who ordained that person, and who ordained that person... all the way back to Christ.   It's very cool, and demonstrates the organization of everything--- LDS believe that it is critical to be ordained to the priesthood by a person who has legitimate priesthood themselves.