Echos of Geneva in Kirtland
That One Time Joseph Smith Quoted John Calvin in a Prayer
On August 18, 1833, Joseph Smith wrote to leaders of the Church of Christ in Jackson County, Missouri.
Earlier that month, news had reached him of the mob violence there in late July. Anti-Mormons destroyed the Latter-day Saint printing office in Independence, and tarred and feathered one of their leaders. By the time Joseph learned of all this, the persecuted Saints had already agreed to leave by the following year. Sadly, things would only get worse from there.
Their pain and departure was hard to accept for Joseph. His people were, after all, turning away from the New Jerusalem he believed God, via the mouth of a living prophet in the End Times, commanded them to build.
No wonder Joseph opened his letter with a prayer:
O thou disposer of all Events, thou dispencer of all good! in the name of Jesus Christ I ask thee to inspire my heart.1
I came across this moment while doing some research for a project on Mormon history. I immediately noticed the phrase “dispence of all good” as unoriginal to Joseph Smith, the origin of which, I imagine, might surprise Latter-day Saints today.
Nearly three centuries earlier, John Calvin, the Protestant Reformer, began the first section of the chapter “Of Prayer” in his Institutes by naming God “the sovereign disposer of all good” (III.20.1).
It means that every good thing—every mercy, every provision, every laugh, every cool breeze on a hot summer’s day—all of it has its origin in God’s will, and comes to us by His hand at His good pleasure. “Disposer” sounds odd, but bear in mind the older sense of the word, i.e., not one who discards, but one who arranges or allots. God, then, is the arranger and distributor of all good things, the sovereign source from whom every gift flows.
For Calvin, this confession is the ground of prayer itself, because God alone gives, and we are the ones who ask. And it just so happens that Joseph Smith began his prayer with an extremely similiar phrase.
Where Calvin wrote “sovereign,” Joseph wrote “disposer of all Events.”
Where Calvin wrote “disposer of all good,” Joseph wrote “dispencer of all good.”
These are, essentially, synonymous confessions that God is ultimately in charge and the ultimate source of good. Both in the context of prayer.
Sure, that seems like a strange thing to say at the beginning of a letter about mob violence and forced exile. But the good Joseph yearned for—a comforting word from heaven to Missouri—is precisely the kind of gift the phrase confesses only God can give, which is, I suspect, why Joseph called God “thou dispencer of all good.”
Still, John Calvin in a Joseph Smith prayer?
Bit odd, isn’t it?
Granted, Joseph almost certainly didn’t own a copy if the Institutes, or, if he did, he was largely uninterested in what Calvin had to say about God. His Book of Mormon is famously anti-Calvinistic, as is his doctrine of human agency and premortality.
But that’s not my point.
My point is that a specific devotional phrase—the disposer of all good—had, by 1833, traveled from Calvin’s Latin into the piety of Anglo-American Protestantism—e.g., sermons and prayers and hymnals—and into the very grammar with which a person addressed God in a prayerful moment of grief. And when Joseph—under the weight of news he could barely stand beneath—when he began his prayer, this is the phrase that showed up first.
Wild, right?
At least, it was a bit jarring to me.
I think that’s because—and maybe I’m not alone—I tend to read Joseph as a figure cleanly severed from what came before him. I know he’s not; I know that for a fact.
But still, it seems to be my default mode Joseph Smith.
Perhaps the First Vision is the reason? The narrative frames it that way, anyway. Two personages—God the Father and Jesus Christ—telling a fourteen-year-old boy that the Christian creeds are an abomination, forbidding him from formally associating with any church. For many Latter-day Saints I’ve spoken with or read, they receive that story as a decisive break with corrupted Christendom. And my fellow evangelicals, well, we see it as Joseph’s decisive rupture with traditional Christianity.
Both readings present something common: Joseph on one side of the line, traditional Christianity on the other.
But prayer is a strange revealer, isn’t it?
Joseph’s prayer summoned Protestant language—Calvinist language, at that—the kind of language that formed his soul early in life. By his childhood, I’m assuming, that phrase—sovereign disposer of all good—was common enough among all Protestant denominations that I provided a strong unifying theme: God is gracious, God is good.
And Joseph hadn’t let go of that.
Not even in turmoil.
Obviously, none of this collapses the theological distance between Joseph and the tradition he left. That distance is quite large. But it does complicate the tidy picture of Josephs Smith I keep defaulting to.
Maybe it does for you as well.
📘 40 Questions About Mormonism
If you’ve appreciated this essay, you’ll love 40 Questions About Mormonism (Kregel Academic). It’s written for traditional Christians who want clear, charitable, and biblically faithful answers to the most common questions about the Latter-day Saint faith and tradition.
JSP D3:262.