Time: Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants

A volume on time may seem a puzzling inclusion in a series exploring themes in the Doctrine and Covenants. However, some refrains remain invisible until we conceive and name them, which allows us to probe. The Doctrine and Covenants has enough to say about time, once we know how to look for it, that it might well change how we engage the gospel and our lives.

Philip Barlow goes so far as to propose that time can fruitfully be imagines as “the 0th principle of the gospel.” Time is, he says, an innate element, a precondition, and a malleable tool not only for principles whose names advertise the fact (such as Sabbath, millennium, preexistence, and prophecy), including faith, baptism, obedience, and love. Mastery of elements of time, for example, is what enables agency to become real reather than a mirage. Modern revelation asserts that life is a test, but also a school for knowledge, wisdom, joy, and skill. How we imagine time affects it all. Come, let us reason together.

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