Section 2 -- The Overwhelming Historical And Scriptural Case Against A Paid Ministry And Related Tithing

Section introduction

Having briefly outlined the problems faced by the LDS church and its members, and having suggested a general solution, perhaps it is now time to dive deeper into the various issues behind these high-level topics and conclusions. The most critical of all issues is that of tithing and the closely related system of a professional priesthood. I think it is fair to say that every other divergence by the church from the original gospel can be tied in some way to that placing of church income ahead of every other principle of the gospel.

Insisting on treating a restored religion as a for-profit business, complete with retaining massive profits to make equally massive investments in land and other assets, for purposes of supplying pension funds, rainy day funds, and management perks, cannot possibly do anything else except warp essentially every aspect of the original gospel. This makes the LDS church look exactly like the religious empire of the Roman Catholic Church, which it supposedly replaces with supposedly better principles and better intentions.

Selling the gospel is a great deal different from giving it to the world free of charge, as did Christ himself. The current church had no research or development costs in developing this wonderful gospel, but still it wants to seek enormous rents on every aspect of the restored church, changing details and "simplifying it" to optimize income.

We are certainly not the first generation who have suffered because of similar decisions made by church leaders on the issue of tithing. Reading about some of their problems and objections should help put our own situation into better context

Excerpts from about five or six different works from about five or six different time periods should give us a pretty good sampling of past experience. The simple conclusion one might reach from reading all of this history is that the concepts of tithing and charity are mutually exclusive, and always have been. One might easily guess that the "Lamb slain from the foundation of the world" knew all of these things long before he came to earth, and he presented his gospel accordingly, not finding any need to equivocate or be unsure of himself. There was no reason to "test drive" this gospel, making changes on the fly.

After that we will analyze in some detail a portion of the voluminous scriptural information on this point, plus review our own church history to locate some pivotal events and decisions.

Section Contents

The argument of this book section on the topic of tithing and paid ministry will be established by drawing on

1. introductory topics related to tithing and temples,

2. histories of tithing written by other authors,

3. new historical material compiled using an LDS viewpoint,

4. the presentation of more closely reasoned examinations of all LDS Scriptures,

5. a presentation of statistical evidence showing the vast inefficiencies of churches controlled by paid ministries,

6. more general comments concerning the consequences of the paid ministry choice.

Tithing histories that appear below, in full or in part:

Internet access to these histories:

A very short history of tithing (full text appears below)

"A Brief History Of Tithing After Christ’s Crucifixion" by Dr. Fillmer Hevener, 2005, 2 pages

http://www.guthriememorial.org/articles/brief_history_of_tithing.htm

This item is included in the book.

A short history of tithing (full text appears below)

The Great Case of Tithes Truly Stated (1657) by Anthony Pearson, multiple later editions beginning in 1720, 36 pages.

Read the online 1850 edition:

https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=ECTQZZb4LuAC&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA1

The document opens in a reader application.

This book by Pearson appears below in compact form, but is much easier to read online.

https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=ECTQZZb4LuAC&pg=GBS.PA2

A medium length history of tithing (excerpts appear below)

A history of tithes (1894) by Henry William Clarke, 268 pages, 304 pdf images

Here is the full text of the Clarke book, or the reader can choose other formats:

https://archive.org/stream/historyoftithes00claruoft/historyoftithes00claruoft_djvu.txt

Images of original pages:

https://archive.org/details/historyoftithes00claruoft/page/6

This book is based to a large extent on the earlier Selden book.

A very long history of tithing (excerpts appear below)

John Selden, History of Tithes, 1618, 491 pages

Old English text is somewhat difficult to read

Here the full text appears in outline form

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A68720.0001.001?rgn=main;view=fulltext

Here the reader can see all the original images for the John Selden book

https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=ntZIAQAAMAAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PP11

Commentary on the tithing histories used in this book

The first history of tithing appearing below is a modern summary probably written in about 2005 and placed on the internet along with other religious writings by the same author. Since the history of tithing seems to not be widely known by the Christian church populace today, this will give us a simple historical framework to begin with.

Next comes materials from three longer documents: a Quaker tract originally published in 1657 by Anthony Pearson (the 1850 edition is used here for easier reading), a major 1618 work by John Selden which explored this subject in extreme detail (although it is hard to read in middle English), and a later (1894) and more readable compilation based to a large extent on the work of John Selden and others.

As a useful historical reference point, it was in 1517 that Martin Luther posted his 95 theses and inadvertently started the Protestant Reformation. The English Reformation happened a little later:

The break with Rome was effected by a series of acts of Parliament passed between 1532 and 1534, among them the 1534 Act of Supremacy, which declared that Henry was the "Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Reformation

Looking at the "history of histories" on the topic of tithing, John Selden was apparently the first to do an enormous amount of original research on the topic and published his work in 1618 in the book entitled The Historie of Tithes. Since his research was considered anti-church and anti-monarchy, the two improper beneficiaries of the collection of tithes, it is not surprising that his work was not well received by the social elite at the time.

Other writers later adopted and adapted his material and added their own viewpoints. In 1657 Anthony Pearson composed a lengthy pamphlet to express the Quakers point of view.  A Rev. Henry William Clarke prepared a 268-page book in 1894 on the same topic. These writers allude to a larger body of writings from earlier times, presumably mostly referring to John Selden.