Names of the Church
The claim:
"After revealing 'Church of Jesus Christ' on April 6, 1830, Joseph Smith made the decision on May 3, 1834 to change the name of the Church to 'The Church of the Latter Day Saints.' Why did Joseph take the name of 'Jesus Christ' out of the very name of His restored Church? The one and only true Church on the face of the earth in which Christ is the Head?"[1]
"Four years later on April 26, 1838, the Church name was changed to 'The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' and has remained ever since.... Is it reasonable to assume that God would periodically change the name of his Church?... Why would Christ instruct Joseph to name it one thing in 1830 and then change it in 1834 and then change it again in 1838? Why would the name of Christ be dropped from His one and only true Church for 4 whole years?"[2]
The argument is about the name on the door. The young Church called itself three different things in eight years, the critics point out, and for one stretch it left Jesus Christ out of the title entirely. If the name came from God, why did it keep moving? And why would the Lord ever let His own name fall off His own Church?
It is a reasonable thing to wonder, and one piece of it is flatly true: for about four years, the official name really did not contain "Christ." This page will not tiptoe around that. But the rest of the charge leans on a mistake in its own first sentence, and once that mistake is fixed, the question shrinks to something a believer can hold without strain.
The first sentence is wrong, and it matters
The CES Letter says the 1830 name was "Church of Jesus Christ" and that Joseph later took "Jesus Christ" out of it. That is not what the records show. The original name was "Church of Christ," with no "Jesus" in it at all.
This is not a close call. The Church's founding document, the Articles and Covenants (now Section 20 of the Doctrine and Covenants, the Latter-day Saint book of modern revelations), opens with the words "The rise of the Church of Christ in these last days."[3] The Joseph Smith Papers, the scholarly edition of all of Joseph's documents, states it without any hedge: "The first name used to denote the church JS organized on 6 April 1830 was 'the Church of Christ.'"[4]
So there was never a "Jesus Christ" in the 1830 name to remove. What the 1834 change actually did was swap one word for another: it replaced "Christ" with "Latter Day Saints." That is a real change, and a smaller one than the CES Letter describes. The whole drama of the Lord "taking His name out" of an existing title rests on a name that never existed.
Why "Church of Christ" was a problem by 1834
The CES Letter leaves out the one fact that makes the 1834 change make sense.
By the early 1830s, "Church of Christ" was not a distinctive name. It was a crowded one. Several other restorationist groups on the American frontier called themselves the same thing, in the very same regions where the early Saints were preaching and building congregations. The biggest was the Stone-Campbell movement, which used "Church of Christ" and "Disciples of Christ" for its churches all across Ohio, Kentucky, and western New York. These groups could not even agree on a name among themselves. One historian of that movement put it plainly: "Both names were used, and the confusion over names has continued ever since."[5] A young church trying to gather converts under a name half a dozen other churches already claimed had a genuine practical problem on its hands.
Now look at who proposed the 1834 change. The motion came from Sidney Rigdon, an early convert who, before he joined the Latter-day Saints, had spent nine years inside Alexander Campbell's movement. He had personally pastored its congregations in three different cities.[6] Of everyone in the room, Rigdon was the man who knew the naming mess from the inside, because he had lived in the middle of it. When he stood up to suggest a more distinctive name, he was speaking from hard experience, not whim.
So the 1834 change has a perfectly ordinary human explanation. A recent convert who knew the naming landscape suggested a name that would not be confused with the competition, and a conference of members voted to adopt it. Nobody claims an angel dictated "Latter Day Saints." It was a practical decision by people solving a practical problem. A believer does not have to pretend otherwise, and the plain record actually helps the faithful case rather than hurting it. The records of that conference show a normal meeting: Joseph Smith presiding, a motion from Rigdon, a second from Newel K. Whitney, and a vote that "passed by unanimous voice."[7] No mystery, no cover-up, just a church working out its own name the way new institutions do.
David Whitmer's objection
The strongest objection does not come from the CES Letter. It comes from David Whitmer, and any honest answer has to take him seriously.
Whitmer was one of the Three Witnesses to the Book of Mormon. His testimony that he saw the angel and the gold plates was printed in every copy of the book, and he never took it back, reaffirming it on his deathbed even though he had left the Church years before.[8] That same man wrote, in 1887, that dropping "Christ" from the name in 1834 was a serious sin: "It is nothing short of trifling with a strict commandment of Almighty God."[9] You cannot brush that aside as the grumbling of an enemy. The same reasons a Latter-day Saint trusts Whitmer about the plates make him hard to dismiss about a meeting he attended.
So grant him his due. He was there. The conference happened. For roughly four years, from May 1834 to April 1838, the official name of the Church did not include "Christ," and a faithful person can fairly wish it never had. The concession is real, and worth stating without a cushion.
Granting all that still leaves two things in their place. The first is the nature of Whitmer's charge. His claim that the change broke a "strict commandment" rests on a command no record actually contains. He wrote that charge in 1887, more than fifty years after the fact. No revelation from the 1830s commands the exclusive name "Church of Christ," and Joseph Smith, who would have received any such command, never mentioned one. Even careful Latter-day Saint scholarship grants the gap: "there is no extant record of a direct command from the Lord in this dispensation to adopt the name 'Church of Christ.'"[10] Whitmer's memory of the events is solid; his later reading of them adds a rule the contemporary record does not show.
The second is what the name change did not touch. The wording on the official letterhead is not the same as the faith of the people using it. Through those same four years, the Saints kept calling themselves a church of Christ in their own publications and letters, and they partook of the sacrament in Christ's name every week. The title shifted for a season. Their devotion to Christ did not.
What 1838 actually did
The four-year window closed on April 26, 1838, with the revelation now in Doctrine and Covenants 115. Its key line is the name the Church still carries: "thus shall my church be called in the last days, even The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."[11]
Notice what that name does. It does not throw out either of the earlier names. It combines them. "Latter-day Saints" was the 1834 contribution, kept. "Church of Christ" was the 1830 name, expanded to the fuller "Church of Jesus Christ." The final title gathers up both steps into one, and it is more centered on Christ than the original 1830 name ever was, because it adds His full name.
You can read 1838 in two ways, and both are friendly to faith. The plainest reading is a course correction: Christ's name should not have come off in 1834, and the Lord put it back. There is nothing embarrassing in that for a Church that believes its leaders are fallible men who get corrected by revelation. Scripture is full of exactly that pattern, from Peter being corrected about the Gentiles in the book of Acts to the 1978 revelation that ended the priesthood and temple ban. The other reading, argued by the historian K. Shane Goodwin, is that 1838 confirmed a name the Saints had already begun using on their own, since the verse just before the official declaration addresses them as the "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" before formally naming it.[10:1] Both readings end up in the same place: the Church ended up with the right name, and revelation is what settled it.
There is more to all of this than four points can hold: the full timeline back to an 1829 draft document, the 1851 legal incorporation that fixed the modern spelling, parallel name changes in other churches and even in the founding of the United States, and President Russell M. Nelson's 2018 call to use the full name again. He framed that as "a correction. It is the command of the Lord," and tied it directly to the same scriptures the 1830s sequence answers to.[12] The in-depth version walks through all of it, including David Whitmer's case at full strength.
Both names were in the book
Once you see where the sequence was headed, it loses its menace. The standard the whole story answers to was set before any of the changes happened. The Book of Mormon, in print a week before the Church was organized, had already named "the church of God, or the church of Christ" at the Waters of Mormon,[13] and it had already recorded the risen Christ settling this exact kind of dispute among the Nephites: "how be it my church save it be called in my name? ... if it be called in my name then it is my church, if it so be that they are built upon my gospel."[14] The 1830 name drew on the first passage. The 1838 name fulfilled the second. Both were sitting in the same book the whole time.
The three-date list hides that quiet point. Far from guessing at its identity and stumbling between random labels, the Church was working out, in real time, what the scripture already in its hands required, and arriving where that scripture pointed. And the book that handed it both names had been sitting on the shelf since before the Church even had members, dictated by a young man with almost no schooling, the firmest evidence the Restoration has. That is the foundation the whole question rests on. A four-year detour in the title does not shake a foundation like that. It barely scratches it.
Want the full case, including the strongest arguments the critics make and every source? Read the in-depth version.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Other Concerns," p. 119. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Other Concerns," p. 120. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 20:1. The Articles and Covenants of the Church, the Church's founding governance document, opens: "The rise of the Church of Christ in these last days, being one thousand eight hundred and thirty years since the coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in the flesh, it being regularly organized and established agreeable to the laws of our country, by the will and commandments of God, in the fourth month, and on the sixth day of the month which is called April—" https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/20 ↩︎
"Articles and Covenants, circa April 1830 [D&C 20]," Joseph Smith Papers. Editorial summary: "The first name used to denote the church JS organized on 6 April 1830 was 'the Church of Christ.'" https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/articles-and-covenants-circa-april-1830-dc-20/1 ↩︎
"Restoration Movement," Wikipedia. Provides comprehensive background on the Stone-Campbell movement, including the formation of "Disciples of Christ" (Alexander Campbell, western Pennsylvania) and "Christians" (Barton W. Stone, Kentucky), their 1832 merger, the geographic distribution of congregations across Ohio, western New York, Kentucky, and the unresolved naming dispute that left both "Disciples of Christ" and "Church of Christ" in active use across the same regions where the early Latter-day Saints operated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restoration_Movement ↩︎
"Sidney Rigdon," Wikipedia. Documents Rigdon's pre-conversion religious history: May 31, 1817 baptism at Peter's Creek Baptist Church, Library, Pennsylvania; Summer 1821 meeting with Alexander Campbell and joining the Disciples of Christ movement associated with Campbell; January 28, 1822 arrival in Pittsburgh as minister at First Baptist Church on Campbell's recommendation; 1823 Pittsburgh schism; 1826 pastor of a Disciples congregation in Mentor, Ohio; 1830 separation from Campbell's movement; November 14, 1830 baptism into the Latter-day Saint Church in Mentor, Ohio. The Wikipedia article uses "Disciples of Christ (Campbell movement)" terminology rather than "Reformed Baptist"; the standard academic biography (Van Wagoner, Sidney Rigdon: A Portrait of Religious Excess, Signature Books, 1994) uses "Reformed Baptist" as a self-designation Campbell himself employed during the 1820s, which is the label this article retains for that pre-1832-merger phase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Rigdon ↩︎
"Minutes, 3 May 1834," Joseph Smith Papers. The primary record of the Kirtland conference vote. Joseph Smith Jr. served as moderator; Frederick G. Williams and Oliver Cowdery served as clerks; Sidney Rigdon motioned the resolution; Newel K. Whitney seconded; the resolution "passed by unanimous voice." The minutes record the resolution that "this church be known hereafter by the name of THE CHURCH OF THE LATTER DAY SAINTS" and direct that branch churches adopt the new title and that the minutes be published in The Evening and the Morning Star. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/minutes-3-may-1834/1 ↩︎
David Whitmer, An Address to All Believers in Christ (Richmond, MO: David Whitmer, 1887). The single most-cited critical primary source on the 1834 name change. Whitmer was one of the Three Witnesses to the Book of Mormon and never recanted his Book of Mormon testimony, reaffirming it on his deathbed in January 1888. Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/anaddresstoallb00whitgoog. FAIR Primary transcription: https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Primary_sources/David_Whitmer/An_Address_to_All_Believers_in_Christ ↩︎
David Whitmer, An Address to All Believers in Christ (Richmond, MO: David Whitmer, 1887), p. 73. "Now it is strange, it is marvelous, that the Latter Day Saints to-day consider this matter of changing the name of the church, and the leaders in 1834 dropping out the name of Christ, as a small thing and a light matter!… It is nothing short of trifling with a strict commandment of Almighty God." Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/anaddresstoallb00whitgoog ↩︎
K. Shane Goodwin, "The History of the Name of the Savior's Church: A Collaborative and Revelatory Process," BYU Studies Quarterly 58, no. 3 (2019): 4–58. The modern scholarly reference work on the topic. Goodwin frames the 1830→1834→1838→1851 sequence as iterative revelation arriving alongside human deliberation, reads D&C 115:3 as the Lord confirming a name already emerging organically among the Saints, and engages David Whitmer's 1887 dissent on the historical merits. https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/the-history-of-the-name-of-the-saviors-church-a-collaborative-and-revelatory-process ↩︎ ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 115:1–4. The April 26, 1838 revelation received at Far West, Missouri. Verse 4 reads: "For thus shall my church be called in the last days, even The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/115 ↩︎
Russell M. Nelson, "The Correct Name of the Church," General Conference, October 2018, Sunday Morning Session. Nelson cites D&C 115:4 and 3 Nephi 27:7–8 as canonical anchors. Key quotes include: "It is a correction. It is the command of the Lord"; "Joseph Smith did not name the Church restored through him; neither did Mormon. It was the Savior Himself who said, 'For thus shall my church be called in the last days, even The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints'"; "To remove the Lord's name from the Lord's Church is a major victory for Satan"; "I promise you that if we will do our best to restore the correct name of the Lord's Church, He whose Church this is will pour down His power and blessings upon the heads of the Latter-day Saints, the likes of which we have never seen." https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2018/10/the-correct-name-of-the-church ↩︎
Mosiah 18:17. The Book of Mormon's first naming pattern, set during Alma the Elder's organization of believers at the Waters of Mormon: "And they were called the church of God, or the church of Christ, from that time forward." https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/mosiah/18 ↩︎
3 Nephi 27:5–8. Christ's instruction to the Nephite disciples about the proper name of his church: "Have they not read the scriptures, which say ye must take upon you the name of Christ, which is my name?... how be it my church save it be called in my name? For if a church be called in Moses' name then it be Moses' church; or if it be called in the name of a man then it be the church of a man; but if it be called in my name then it is my church, if it so be that they are built upon my gospel." https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/3-ne/27 ↩︎