In my Full Circle Theory, Mormon Priesthood was a bloodline lineage and those of the "chosen seed" were to practice plural marriage in the 1800s as the dispensation of the gospel of polygamist Abraham in order to raise up seed, that is birth an Anglo-Saxon Nordic tribe of Ephraimites: who were to be in charge of leading the other Tribes of Israel with Joseph Smith as King of the House of Israel.
The whole point of the higher priesthood in Mormonism, therefore was that the priesthood was the literal seed (sperm) of the male body (see Abraham 2:11); and so when D&C 132 calls for Anglo-Nordic Mormons in the 1800s to use their Anglo-Norse male seed to birth a Peoplehood, you have a restitution of, a reliving of, the biblical Abraham's seed birthing the tribes of Israel. Just as Abraham's seed grew into the Jewish People, Joseph Smith and his Anglo-Nordic People grew into the Mormon People.
Those who, like me, descend from Anglo-Nordic Polygamist Pioneer ancestors are the "blood of Ephraim" (according to LDS Scripture) and we are thus within the covenant by birthright according to Mormon Scripture and Prophetic Teachings. So in my view, we are accepted by birthright and bloodline lineage, just as modern Jews are members of the Israelite covenant. Jews do not earn their covenant peoplehood status, but are members of the Jewish race by grace-gift, they are born into People of God. So too, as I see it, the Ephraimite Mormons are also of the covenant ethnos by birthright, they are this accepted by God through the grace-gift of lineage through the sacrifice of the Anglo-American Joseph Smith (whose sealed blood and words in Americanized LDS Scripture offers a form of salvation per D&C 135). This is combined with all the Anglo-American Mormons as polygamist Ephraimites offering "sacrifices on the altar" in the form of being sealed to plural wives on temple altars in the temple in the 1800s. These sacrifices or offerings birthed a Mormon Peoplehood (just as Abraham's polygamy seeded Israel) as the new "chosen seed." Gentiles (Goyim) are not the chosen seed but they are "saved" through the seed of the Israelite Jesus whose DNA transforms the Goyim into "spiritual Israelites"; but birthright Ephraimite Mormons are already Israelites by bloodline. Thus, as Joseph Smith explained, those of Ephraim don't need their blood purged out by Jesus' DNA like a pure Gentile (Goyim) does. Just as Israel stopped practicing polygamy at one point, so too the ending of polygamy and the gathering of the Ephraimites from the north by most Mormon sects by the year 1900, released Ephraimites like me from the "laws and ordinances" of any Mormon sect or denomination. For the need for the "temple high priest" and that priesthood had ended by 1900, as the priesthood of the body (the seeds) were no longer growing lives through polygamy (see Abraham 2: 11; D&C 132), and therefore, Mormon temples with sacrificial altars (which were designed to seal polygamists for eternity under a ruling temple high priest) became unnessary: as there was no longer a temple high priest approving of polygamist sealings any longer. So just as Jesus's human sacrifice ended the need for any more anmial sacrifices in the Jerusalem Temple (which temple was destroyed by Titus as God's doing), so too the end of polygamist sacrifices had completed the sealed blood of Joseph Smith whose LDS Scriptures were the new Word of God which spoke of the birthing of a New Ephraimite Peoplehood on American soil.
The priesthood is inherited by birthright bloodline and thus it is not something you earn or get from any Mormon authority in any Morrmon sect or LDS institution. As Max Mueller explains in his book Race and the Making of the Mormon People at Location 2423 - 2551 of the ebook (emphasis added):
The Patriarch and the Priesthood
The ritualized naming of patrilineage defined the hierarchal order in the restored church. And patrilineage defined the priesthood. In 1835, Joseph Smith Sr. began performing patriarchal blessings for Latter-day Saints outside his immediate family. That same year, Joseph Smith Jr. revealed that “the order of [the restored] priesthood was . . . handed down from father to son, and rightly belongs to the literal descendants of the chosen seed.” The prophet specified that this priesthood order was established at the beginning of human history with Adam. Adam passed the priesthood to Seth, his firstborn. Adam also ordained his great-grandson Methuselah. And “under [his] hand,” Methuselah ordained his grandson Noah. [See D&C 107: 40-52]
… Though it was an essential building block of the Mormon hierarchy, the priesthood was more than an administrative office. It was also the organizing principle of the Mormons’ reimagined conception of Israel’s covenantal family, an ancient family restored in this lifetime and bound together for the eternal life to come.[93] As early as September 1832, Smith first revealed that, through their ordination, priesthood holders of the latter-day Church of Christ became “sons of Moses and of Aaron and the seed of Abraham.”[94] For the first five years of the church’s history, because most Saints were believed to be Gentiles by birth, such patrilineal bond between latter-day priesthood holders’ and their Israelite forefathers was believed to be the fruit of spiritual adoption into the restored covenant. But in April 1835, when Joseph Smith expanded the hierarchical organization that he established in 1831, the distance between patrilineage and priesthood collapsed. To be sure, the laying on of hands of one Melchizedek priesthood holder conferred the same priesthood to another worthy (male) Saint, whatever the lineage. Yet the Saint who was “a litteral [sic] descendant of Aaron”—Moses’s brother and the first high priest of the Israelites—had the “legal right” to the priesthood.[95] And through their patriarchal blessings more and more Saints who had believed themselves to be Gentiles discovered that they were birthright heirs to the Israelite covenant.
As such, the priesthood increasingly became a family business. It was passed down from ancient Israelite fathers to latter-day Mormon sons. At the same time that Joseph Smith Jr. was articulating the import of Israelite patrilineage for the priesthood within the church-wide hierarchy, his father’s patriarchal blessings revealed how individual Latter-day Saints’ genealogies related to their priesthood authority. For example, on April 30, 1835, Joseph Smith Sr. declared that Jonathan H. Hale, a future bishop of Nauvoo, was already “of the blood of Israel” and thus already had “the power of the Melchizedek Priesthood.” Likewise, because Wilford Woodruff was a descendent of Joseph and “of the blood of Ephraim,” the patriarch declared that Woodruff’s “great blessings” included the “power and authority of the Melchisedeck priesthood.” These inherited authorities would extend into future generations. “Thy sons shall receive the priesthood,” the patriarch told Woodruff.[96] Such blessings reveal that the early Saints understood that rights to the priesthood were a result of birth and not simply a condition of belief.
… [the now canonized Book of Abraham, as a] new translation reinforced Smith’s belief that a Saint’s priesthood authority was inherited from his ancient forefathers.[97] … Like the Book of Mormon and the book of Moses, the book of Abraham expands on familiar biblical themes. In Joseph Smith’s translation, Abraham is more than the father of many nations. He is also the first patriarch to articulate the origins of the patrilineal priesthood. Abraham explains that the priesthood “was conferred upon me from the fathers; it came down from the beginning of time . . . [from] the first man who is Adam, our first father.” …
God explained to Abraham that his own “seed” was synonymous with the priesthood. “In thy seed (that is, thy priesthood) for I give unto thee a promise that this right [of the priesthood] shall continue in thee, and in thy seed after thee (that is to say, the literal seed, or the seed of the body) [Abraham 2:11]" Yet the book of Abraham also presents the potential for an ever-expanding priesthood. The Lord promises to make of Abraham “a great nation,” a nation that would not only include his own descendants. His progeny “shall bear this ministry and Priesthood unto all nations . . . for as many as receive this Gospel shall be called after thy name, and shall be accounted thy seed.” ...
The book of Abraham thus presents the priesthood as both particular and potentially universal. The priesthood is an inherited authority. But it is also an authority that is intended to be shared: to restore, through the act of adoption—ritualized first in the patriarchal blessing and later in the temple—the less favored biblical lineages into the heavenly father’s good graces. …
… From Gentile to Israelite
It is important not to overstate how quickly the Latter-day Saints’ covenantal contract contracted from its universal beginnings. What would become in the Utah period a peculiar, even an ethnic Mormon identity, remained in the 1830s and early 1840s largely inchoate. As Jan Shipps has argued, in the first decades of Mormon history, the formula for “making Saints” appeared to differ little from the process of “making converts to Protestant churches.” Acceptance of the Mormon gospel, obedience to Joseph Smith’s revelations, acceptance of the authority of the priesthood, and baptism into the Church of Christ were enough to make anybody a Mormon. Yet unlike members of many other evangelical traditions, Mormons began to understand conversion into their church as the result of heretofore undiscovered descent from biblical patriarchs. Save for the few Gentiles whose conversions made them into “new creations”—even with new blood of Abraham coursing through their veins—the Holy Spirit did not have to “renovate” many converts’ whole beings, as Charles Grandison Finney might have said about evangelical rebirth and sanctification.[107]
Conversion [to Mormonism in the 1800s] was not the cause of new life. Instead it was the effect of descent from ancient biblical forefathers.[108] The missionaries in America and in the British Isles found receptive audiences because these converts had an inborn yearning to hear and accept Mormonism. As much as their minds and hearts, the Mormons began to believe that these converts’ blood was predisposed to the message of the gospel. Likewise, other Gentiles seemed to prove their true Gentile ontology by their indifference or antagonism to Mormonism. Writing in his journal in June 1840, Wilford Woodruff made the distinction between unbelieving Gentiles and Saints unequivocal. At that time, Woodruff witnessed increased levels of “Gentile” persecution in England and heard troubling reports from the United States. In the two previous years, anti-Mormon Missourians attacked a Mormon settlement at Haun’s Mill, in Caldwell County, killing eighteen. The Saints’ were finally expelled from Missouri. And Joseph Smith and other leading Mormons had been imprisoned in the Liberty, Missouri, jail for five months. In response, Woodruff wrote that “England & America” would not be “excepted” in the final judgment before Christ’s return. Instead these nations “are ownly fuel for the fire & tinder for the Breath of the Almighty.” The Mormons’ Gentile persecutors had “trodden” down the two branches of Israel, “Judah & Ephraim.” But, Woodruff warned, Israel “will rise again & fulfill the word of God on thee!”[109] For Woodruff, a “Gentile” shows his true colors in response to the gospel; a Gentile rejects it, an Israelite embraces it.
In June 1840, as Heber C. Kimball described the nature of the British converts in Preston, “the Saints, in general, as they have been baptized into one body are partakers of the same spirit, whether they be Jew or Gentile, bond or free.”[110] And yet, despite Kimball’s paraphrase here of Paul’s universalistic message to the Galatians (and its echoes of Nephi’s description of the universal covenant open to “black and white, bond and free”), lineage and its corollary, race, mattered when it came to the creation of the restored house of Israel. And lineage and its corollary, race, would matter even more in the coming years and decades.
British and, later, Scandinavian converts...from supposed Gentile nations were easily renamed the seed of Abraham.[111] And their new, or rediscovered, names allowed these (male) converts to be appointed to the priesthood. …
Today there are hundreds of Mormon sects and denominations claiming to be the true successors of Joseph Smith's prophetic ministry and scripture-making people forming theology. Yet not one of them has sufficiently proven any actual sheership in the form of translating new scripture, nor have they sufficiently proven any prophetic abilities to prophesy, etc. This to me is evidence that the higher priesthood and Temple rituals are finished, meaning they have served their purpose in forming the Mormon People themselves: who are part of the Covenant of Israel and thus all the restoration branches are the same tribe of Ephraim through birthright bloodline; regardless of their differing ecclesiastical systems and differing laws and ordinances and policies and manuals of instructions. That is all man-made invention at this point in my opinion. What is verifiable is their bloodline, their Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian bloodlines which were selected for by Mormon polygamists as the first Mormons in the 1800s.
The principles of Mormonism are sealed in LDS Scriptures already, and so ongoing claims to prophetic leadership and following man-made guidelines is no longer necessary, especially given the fact there is no longer a temple high priest in control of who can and cannot practice plural marriage, because most Mormon sects have abandoned plural marriage ever since about 1900. Therefore, while I support any Mormon who chooses to be part of a Mormon sect or denomination and chooses to be told what to do by their ecclestiastical leaders, I find no reason to do this, neither scripturally nor geneologically. My own "Independent Mormonism" is grounded more in the underlying Norse-like psychological energy of the teachings and mighty lives of the original Mormon founders Joseph Smith, Brigham Young and John Taylor.
I believe we are in the in the dispensation where the scriptures are sufficient to guide oneself, as Joseph Smith himself explained that we only seek guidance from above when we don't have sufficient guidance already in the Mormon Scriptures already published. So for me as a descendent of Pioneer Anglo-Nordic Mormon polygamists, I am of the birthright bloodline and don't need to be told what to do by any particular Mormon sect. So I embrace all Mormon sects and denominations equally as my blood kin as a quasi-ethnic tribe and peoplehood, regardless of differences in Creed or Sectarian Church Manuals; as we all share one common cause of maintaining the principles and values of our Mormon forefathers and rejecting Creedal-Christianity and growing as a healthy thriving kinship Peoplehood.
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