Edification/Education
To edify is to build up a person or a community in faith, understanding, and love, and to educate is to nurture, instruct, or rear a child in the way they should go. It is interesting to note that both words began in the household. The Latin aedificare, “to build,” is formed on aedes, a dwelling in the singular, most often the dwelling of a god, a temple, while educare, “to bring up” a child, stands close to educere, “to lead out.” The New Testament’s Greek oikodomē, the building of a house, became the King James “edifying.” In contemporary parlance, edification has thinned into a pleasant uplift, and education into the conveyance of information from one mind to another. The Apostle Paul held both words to a sterner standard: “Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth” (1 Corinthians 8:1).
The Hebrew Bible joins the rearing of children to the erecting of buildings in a single verb. Chanak means to “train up,” as in the proverb “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6), and the same verb names the dedication of a newly built house in the law of Deuteronomy, and the dedication of Solomon’s temple. Lexicographers debate how the two senses relate, and the most probable common thread is a formal beginning. The correspondence can hardly have been lost on Hebrew hearers, for whom training a child and dedicating a house were one act performed at the threshold of a life or a structure.
Every Joint Supplieth
Writing to the Ephesians, Paul described the church as a body “fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth,” which “maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love” (Ephesians 4:16). The architectural and organic images deliberately overlap, and each member contributes to a structure that in turn builds up every member. The same measure governs his counsel to the Corinthians, where the learned believer who ate in an idol’s temple risked a perverse edification, since the conscience of a weaker brother would be “emboldened,” in Greek literally “built up,” to act against itself. In Paul’s usage, knowledge that disregards a brother’s conscience can build that brother toward his own harm, and charity therefore supplies the measure of every true edification.
Paul’s instructions for worship apply the identical standard to spiritual gifts. He who speaks in an unknown tongue “edifieth himself; but he that prophesieth edifieth the church,” and when the Saints assemble, “every one of you hath a psalm, hath a doctrine, hath a tongue, hath a revelation, hath an interpretation. Let all things be done unto edifying” (1 Corinthians 14:4, 26). The assembly Paul envisions has no single source of instruction. Each participant contributes, and each contribution is measured by what it builds in the others. A gift that ends in the speaker’s private enrichment, however impressive, falls short of its purpose. Paul thus defines edification as a communal labor, a description that the revelations of the Restoration would later write into the constitution of the School of the Prophets.
A House of Learning
“Let all things be done unto edifying” (1 Corinthians 14:26) is the standard Paul applies to worship and also to the School of the Prophets’ order of instruction.
In the winter of 1832–33, a revelation commanded the Saints to “seek learning, even by study and also by faith,” and to “establish a house, even a house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of faith, a house of learning, a house of glory, a house of order, a house of God” (D&C 88:118-119). The School of the Prophets, convened at Kirtland in January 1833, was the first fulfillment of that command, and the temple then still under planning was to be its home. The injunction to seek learning is among the most quoted lines of Restoration scripture. Less often remarked are the rules that follow it for the conduct of the class, which order the exchange of instruction so that it runs in every direction.
A teacher was to be appointed, yet the revelation directed the members to “let not all be spokesmen at once; but let one speak at a time and let all listen unto his sayings, that when all have spoken that all may be edified of all, and that every man may have an equal privilege” (D&C 88:122). An earlier revelation had extended the same reciprocity to preaching by the Spirit, in which “he that preacheth and he that receiveth, understand one another, and both are edified and rejoice together” (D&C 50:22). Within the framework of the Restoration, the teacher is built up and the learner builds. The house of learning and the house of the Lord were also meant to be one building, recovering the double sense of the Latin aedes, at once dwelling and temple.
Learning That Builds
Lincoln Cannon grounds the Mormon transhumanist hope for artificial intelligence in this doctrine, observing that the Restoration holds “growth and learning are essential aspects of human nature, now and forever,” even should humanity attain superhuman or divine capacity, so that any tool able to help people grow and learn belongs to eternal progression. Conversational models now place a patient instructor within reach of anyone with a telephone, yet the first careful measurements disclose a hazard. In 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and her colleagues at the MIT Media Lab recorded the brain activity of students writing essays with and without ChatGPT. Those who relied on the model showed the weakest neural connectivity of any group, felt the least ownership of their essays, and struggled to quote accurately from work they had submitted as their own.
The study was small, and its results remain preliminary, yet it lends Paul’s distinction between puffing up and building up an almost clinical form. A model that composes on the student’s behalf yields a polished product while the learner supplies nothing. A second danger has drawn less attention and touches the communal heart of the Kirtland revelation. A private oracle answers each learner alone, so that the class in which “all may be edified of all” dissolves into countless separate conversations with a machine. Educational technology shaped by the pattern of the School of the Prophets would keep each learner speaking in turn, return students to one another, and treat the teacher, human or artificial, as a participant who is also edified.
On 27 March 1836, the Saints dedicated the Kirtland Temple, and the dedicatory prayer repeated the revelation’s charge to seek learning by study and by faith in a house of learning that was also a house of God. In Hebrew idiom, the act performed that day and the rearing of a child share one verb. To edify and to educate is to build persons into a dwelling fit for God, through a labor in which every joint supplies its part and the teacher rejoices together with the learners. Artificial intelligence may extend that labor to learners whom no school has ever reached, as Cannon hopes, provided the learner continues to build, and the house it helps to raise remains one in which all are edified.