Ordinances

I. Why Physical Acts?

One of Christianity's most persistent errors is the claim that physical ordinances are unnecessary — that faith alone, inward and unembodied, suffices for salvation. The Restoration answers this directly: God, who is himself embodied and physical (D&C 130:22), works through physical acts because we are embodied beings. Heaven and earth are bound together not through abstraction but through covenant acts performed in a body. "And without the ordinances thereof, and the authority of the priesthood, the power of godliness is not manifest unto men in the flesh" (D&C 84:21). The body matters. The act matters. The authority matters.

“For by water ye keep the commandment; by the Spirit ye are justified, and by the blood ye are sanctified.”

Moses 6:59–60 records the earliest known instance of the gospel's ordinance framework, given directly to Adam. Baptism, the Spirit, and the blood of Christ are the three elements of the covenant from the very beginning. This is not a New Testament invention — it is the eternal order restored in every dispensation.

II. The Essential Ordinances

The saving ordinances form a sequence, each building on the last. The Lord set them out through Nephi in the doctrine of Christ (2 Nephi 31): faith, repentance, baptism by immersion for the remission of sins, receipt of the Holy Ghost by the laying on of hands, and endurance to the end. These constitute the foundational covenant. Atop them the temple ordinances seal the soul into eternity: the endowment and the sealing.

• Baptism by immersion for the remission of sins — the gate of the strait path (2 Nephi 31:17)
• Confirmation and gift of the Holy Ghost — the baptism of fire and of the Spirit (2 Nephi 31:13–14)
• Priesthood ordination — for those called to administer in the Holy Order
• The endowment — the investiture of holiness and the reception of sacred law
• The eternal sealing — binding husband and wife into the continuation of the seeds (D&C 132:19)

III. Proxy Ordinances — Redemption of the Dead

The Restoration's most distinctive ordinance doctrine is baptism for the dead. Paul mentions the practice to the Corinthians as if it were known: "Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? why are they then baptized for the dead?" (1 Corinthians 15:29). Joseph restored the full theology: the human family is one, the covenant is for all who have ever lived, and those who never received the ordinances in mortality must be offered them by proxy — performed by the living on their behalf.

“For we without them cannot be made perfect; neither can they without us be made perfect.”

The welding link — the chain connecting all dispensations, all the dead with all the living — is the ordinance work performed in temples. "It is sufficient to know, in this case, that the earth will be smitten with a curse unless there is a welding link of some kind or other between the fathers and the children" (D&C 128:18). Ordinances for the dead are not an afterthought; they are the mechanism by which the entire human family is rescued.

IV. Authority — Who Can Administer

An ordinance performed without divine authority is a religious ceremony — nothing more. It produces no covenant and binds nothing. The authority to administer the saving ordinances must come from God, not from institutional tradition. In the Restoration this authority was restored through angelic messengers: John the Baptist conferring the Aaronic Priesthood; Peter, James, and John conferring the Melchizedek Priesthood. The ordinances are only as valid as the authority behind them.