Sorry I’ve been away. I was excited to blog about Joseph Smith’s first vision throughout the bicentennial celebration in 2020. I wrote several posts about it. Then I quit. When he began keeping a journal in 1832, Joseph wrote brief but faithful entries for about 10 days. Then he quit for 10 months.
For me it’s not just that COVID came. I confess that after the terrific General Conference in April, writing more first vision posts seemed anti-climactic. I wondered if anything that exciting would ever happen again. Sure I could look forward to celebrating two hundred years since Moroni’s visits in 2023, but it’s tough to compete with the first vision.
Joseph’s April 3, 1836 journal entry
After Joseph’s journal entry describing the Savior’s visit to him and Oliver Cowdery in the House of the Lord at Kirtland, followed by Moses, Elias, and Elijah, the rest of Joseph’s journal is blank. What else is worth writing about
after that? He didn’t start again for well over a year.
Then I remembered 2021 would be a Doctrine and Covenants year. The Come, Follow Me curriculum will focus on Joseph’s revelations. That’s exciting. So I’m back. I expect to keep up with the curriculum and make a short post about every section in the Doctrine and Covenants this year. I’ll post on Section 1 before Sunday and post again on Joseph Smith-History 1:1-26 to supplement the upcoming lessons.
Do you think I can stick to it all year? Maybe I can. Some of the most
Why is this even a question? Doesn’t everyone know that Joseph Smith was 14 when he saw God and Jesus Christ in a grove? The answer is no. Some people think they know. That’s not the same as knowing.
So was Joseph 14 or not?
He probably was. Why the qualifier? Because the evidence shows that the answer isn’t so simple. The evidence says that Joseph began worrying about his soul when he was about 12. He continued to do so through his early teens. His memory of his age at the time of his vision was vague. Joseph usually remembered his age at the time as an afterthought.
Joseph’s 1832 autobiography says
“At about the age of twelve years my mind become seriously imprest with regard to the all importent concerns for the well fare of my immortal soul.” That led Joseph to search the scriptures and observe churches and Christians. He concluded that the scriptures and the versions of Christianity didn’t match. Joseph felt grief as a result. In 1832, he remembered that this process lasted “from the age of twelve to fifteen.”
Joseph did not specify his age in the 1832 account
He said simply that “while in the attitude of calling upon the Lord a piller of light above the brightness of the sun at noon day come down from above and rested upon me and I saw the Lord and he spake unto me saying Joseph my son thy sins are forgiven thee.” Frederick Williams later inserted the words “in the 16th year of my age” into the clause quoted above. No one knows whether Joseph told Frederick to do so or why he wrote “16th year.” Some people may think they know. That’s not the same as knowing.
Joseph’s scribe recorded
an 1835 telling of the vision in Joseph’s journal. In that telling, the last thing Joseph says about the vision is, “I was about 14 years old when I received this first communication.” On that day at least, his age at the time of the vision was an afterthought, and he approximated it. That line contrasts with the intense and emotional lines before it. The foreground in this memory is of discovering the truth, overcoming the unseen power that startled him, praying, seeing divine beings, and being filled with joy. His age at the time is background. It was important enough to him to try to recall at the end but not more important than that.
In his manuscript history
Joseph remembered that unusual religious excitement started “in my fifteenth year.” He was, in other words, fourteen. Of all the accounts, this one does the best job of establishing a date and situating Joseph in time: early spring, 1820. Compared to the others, this memory is uncharacteristically sharp about Joseph’s age and the date of the vision. Joseph remembered later in this account, “I was an obscure boy only between fourteen and fifteen years of age,” after which his scribe added “or thereabouts.” A later revision of this document is more typical. In it Joseph says he was “about 15 years old” during the “unusual religious excitement.” Estimating like that is typical of the way Joseph dated things in his vision memories. Certainty about dates and his age is uncharacteristic in his vision accounts. In his letter to John Wentworth, Joseph said, “When about fourteen years of age I began to reflect upon the importance of being prepared for a future state.”
The secondary accounts follow this pattern
Orson Pratt says, “When somewhere about fourteen or fifteen years old, he began seriously to reflect upon the necessity of being prepared for a future state.” Orson Hyde’s version is less wordy but no more precise: “When he had reached his fifteenth year, he began to think seriously . . . ” The journal of Levi Richards just says “when he was a youth he began to think about these things.” David Nye White quoted Joseph saying God “revealed himself to me first when I was about fourteen years old, a mere boy.” Alexander Neibaur’s journal entry doesn’t say anything about Joseph’s age at the time.
Those are the facts of the historical record
That’s the evidence we have on which to base an answer to the question with which we began: How old was Joseph Smith at his first vision? He typically said he was about fourteen, and usually as an afterthought. Once he said clearly that he was fourteen. His scribe added, “or thereabouts.” Another scribe said he was fifteen. Some people interpret the vagueness and variety as evidence that Joseph didn’t see the Father and the Son. Some people think they know that he could not possibly mis-remember his age if he actually saw a vision. That’s not the same as knowing.
Joseph didn’t remember exactly how old he was
He didn’t claim to. He claimed to see the Father and the Son. He knew that God knew it. He couldn’t deny it. “Some said he was dishonest, others said he was mad, and he was ridiculed and reviled, but . . . he had seen a vision. He knew he had, and all the persecution under heaven could not make it otherwise.”
Did Joseph Smith see one divine being or two in his first vision? The question may seem absurd to Latter-day Saints who can quote the memorable line from the canonized account:
I saw two personages (whose brightness and glory defy all description) standing above me in the air. One of <them> spake unto me calling me by name and said (pointing to the other) “This is my beloved Son, Hear him”
But seven years
Before those words were written by his scribe, Joseph penned in his own hand, “the <Lord> opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord.” In this earliest known account of the vision, critics are quick to point out, Joseph describes the appearance of only 1 divine being.
Or does he?
Having studied all the available evidence carefully, I have concluded that what Joseph Smith struggled to communicate has not been understood by most critics or believers—and it won’t be until we learn to listen to him more carefully. On that point, see this earlier post.
When we listen to Joseph carefully
We hear him explain that he saw at least two divine beings in the woods but not necessarily simultaneously. In 1832 he wrote, “the <Lord> opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord.” His 1839 account says clearly, “I saw two personages” and the 1842 account adds, “two glorious personages.”
The distinction between
The 1832 account’s apparent reference to only one being—the Lord—and the 1839’s unequivocal assertion of two beings has led some to wonder and others to criticize Joseph for changing his story. But it may be that we just need to listen more carefully to Joseph tell the story. It may be that we have assumed that we understood his meaning before we did.
Joseph’s 1835 account provides the clearest chronology. He said,
a pillar of fire appeared above my head, it presently rested down upon me, and filled me with Joy unspeakable, a personage appeard in the midst of this pillar of flame which was spread all around, and yet nothing consumed, another personage soon appeard like unto the first, he said unto me thy sins are forgiven thee.
Two of the five secondary accounts also say that Joseph first saw one divine personage who then revealed the other. In an 1843 newspaper interview, Joseph reportedly said:
I saw a light, and then a glorious personage in the light, and then another personage, and the first personage said to the second, “Behold my beloved Son, hear him.”
saw a personage in the fire . . . after a w[h]ile a other person came to the side of the first
In the 1835 account Joseph also added as an afterthought, “and I saw many angels in this vision.”
There is nothing in the accounts
Requiring us to read these variations as exclusive of each other. In other words, there is no reason to suppose that when Joseph says, “I saw two personages,” he means that he saw them at exactly the same time for precisely the same length of time, or that he did not also see others besides the two. Moreover, because the 1835 account and two of the secondary statements assert that Joseph saw one being who then revealed the other, we can interpret the 1832 account to mean that Joseph saw one being who then revealed another, referring to both beings as “the Lord”: “the <Lord> opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord.”
We cannot be sure but it seems plausible that Joseph struggled in 1832 to know just what to call the divine personages. Notice that the first instance of the word Lord was inserted into the sentence after the original flow of words, as if Joseph did not know quite how to identify the Being. Or he may have written “I was filled with the spirit of god and he opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord,” and then tried to improve it by adding a t in front of he to make the, which would create the need to insert Lord after the fact (see below).
It’s also possible that Joseph purposefully evoked Psalm 110
In the King James Bible, Psalm 110 refers to two different divine beings both as Lord.
The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool (Psalm 110:1)
Smarter people than me had that insight. John Welch and James Allen noticed it first and concluded “if David could use the word ‘Lord’ in Psalm 110:1 . . . to refer first to the Father and then to the Son (see Mark 12:36), so could Joseph” (Opening the Heavens, 2d ed., page 67 fn. 38). So could Jesus, and so could the writer of Acts, as Robert Boylan has shown.
In 1842
Joseph said that he “saw two glorious personages who exactly resembled each other in features, and likeness.” Of the nine accounts of his vision, four of them say he saw two personages, three say he saw one who then revealed another, and, as we have seen, the 1832 account may imply that. Only one of the nine, the Levi Richards journal entry, doesn’t specify. It says:
when he was a youth he began to think about these these things but could not find out which of all the sects were right— he went into the grove & enquired of the Lord which of all the sects were right— re received for answer that none of them were right, that they were all wrong, & that the Everlasting covena[n]t was broken
Next time someone declares that Joseph Smith said he only saw one divine being in 1832
Ask how they know. Only a few people who make that claim have actually studied the evidence. Everyone else is simply parroting what they’ve heard. They only know what they’ve heard. What if what they’ve heard is partial, meaning both incomplete and biased? Why rely on someone who hasn’t spent time with the evidence?
I have spent time with the evidence
And I don’t know whether Joseph meant in 1832 to refer to one divine being or two. However, in light of all the evidence it seems presumptuous to conclude that there is no other choice but that he must have only meant one. That’s a partial choice. The reason to choose it is to more conveniently be able to convict him of changing his story on cross examination.
So did Joseph Smith see one divine being or two in his first vision?
Well, seven times out of nine he said he saw two. Once the recorder didn’t capture enough of his account for us to know, and once he said “the <Lord> opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord.” You decide what he meant by that.
Tune in next time for a discussion of how old Joseph was at the time of his vision, or subscribe if you want to have a link sent to your inbox.
In my last post I wrote about the dilemma between Joseph’s head and heart that led him to seek and receive the revelation we call his first vision. I promised to use this post to write about Joseph’s other dilemma, the one that kept him from telling his story, and that shaped the way he told it when he finally decided to do so. Here goes:
Joseph Smith was in his mid-twenties
He was hundreds of miles from home, anxious about his family and about his soul. He was in Greenville, Indiana, nursing Newel Whitney, whose leg had been badly broken in a stage coach accident. As Newel convalesced, Joseph went nearly every day to a grove just outside of town where he could be alone to vent his feelings in prayer. He remembered his past. He recalled his sins. He mourned and wept that he had let “the adversary of my soul . . . have so much power over me.” He remembered that “God is merciful,” and rejoiced that he had been forgiven and received the Comforter.
We know this because Joseph wrote it all to Emma
his wife, of more than five years who was having her own ordeal trying to find a home for herself and daughter, Julia, in Kirtland, Ohio. The letter is in Joseph’s hand. It is composed of just two sentences. Their average length is about 300 words. In them, Joseph jumped from topic to topic. He was a jumble of emotions. He spelled creatively. He asked Emma to excuse “my inability in convaying my ideas in writing.”
The inability to convey his ideas in writing was one of the horns of Joseph’s dilemma
The other was that he had been commanded to convey his ideas in writing. The Lord had told him to keep a record, and in it to tell the world of his calling as a seer, a translator, a prophet, and an apostle of Jesus Christ (D&C 21).
Joseph had translated the Book of Mormon
Oliver Cowdery had written it. Joseph had recorded dozens of revelation manuscripts, mainly in the voice of Jesus Christ, and mostly dictated by Joseph as someone else wrote. These documents testified indeed that he was a seer, a translator, a prophet, an apostle. But none of them told the story of his first revelation. There was no record of it in June 1832 when he wrote to Emma.
Joseph had no problem preaching the Book of Mormon
Moreover, he was planning to publish 10,000 copies of the Lord’s revelations to him. His first vision was different, however. It was one thing for Joseph to pray his conflicted thoughts and deep feelings in the woods, out of sight and earshot. That, he had learned, was safe. God was forgiving and upbraided not. However, the first time Joseph told his vision (and the last until 1832, so far as we know), a minister upbraided him plenty. “Telling the story,” Joseph eventually explained, “had excited a great deal of prejudice against me among professors of religion and was the cause of great persecution.”
We can make sense of Joseph’s reluctance
to tell the story of his first vision, and of the varied ways he eventually told it, if we are aware at the outset of the two horns of his dilemma:
He had to tell his experience
He felt he was incapable of it
Joseph returned to Kirtland shortly after writing to Emma, and shortly after that he and his counselor/scribe Frederick Williams recorded Joseph’s first vision, probably for the first time since it occurred twelve years earlier. Frederick wrote this impressive introduction:
A History of the life of Joseph Smith Jr. an account of his marvilous experience and of all the mighty acts which he doeth in the name of Jesus Ch[r]ist the son of the living God of whom he beareth record and also an account of the rise of the church of Christ in the eve of time according as the Lord brought forth and established by his hand.
History, circa Summer 1832 – The Joseph Smith Papers
Then Frederick listed Joseph’s apostolic credentials: four impressive events in Joseph’s life that readers could expect to learn about in the pages that followed. First, “the testamony from on high,” or what Saints would later learn to call the first vision. Second, “the ministering of angels,” meaning Moroni’s mentoring of Joseph beginning in 1823. Third, “the reception of the holy Priesthood by the ministering of Aangels to administer the letter of the Gospel,” meaning the restoration of what saints would later call the Aaronic priesthood. Finally, “a confirmation and reception of the high priesthood after the holy order of the son of the living God.”
Note that this transcription is based on the one at josephsmithpapers.org. Bold typeface indicates Joseph Smith’s handwriting while the regular typeface is the writing of Frederick Williams. Angle brackets <like this> enclose words one of them put in afterwards. Strikeouts indicate words they deleted. Square brackets [like this] enclose text The Joseph Smith Papers editors supplied to improve readability.
No one knows why Joseph decided to pick up the pen right there and finish the thought, referring to himself in the third person, as Frederick had been doing: “the Kees of the Kingdom of God conferred upon him and the continuation of the blessings of God to him.”
Then Joseph dragged the pen across the page, making a line to separate the introduction from what came next. Below that line, Joseph wrote about himself in the first person, and all the confidence of the introduction vanished:
I was born in the town of Charon in the <State> of Vermont North America on the twenty third day of December AD 1805 of goodly Parents who spared no pains to instruct<ing> me in <the> christian religion at the age of about ten years my Father Joseph Smith Seignior moved to Palmyra Ontario County in the State of New York and being in indigent circumstances were obliged to labour hard for the support of a large Family having nine chilldren and as it required their exertions of all that were able to render any assistance for the support of the Family therefore we were deprived of the bennifit of an education suffice it to say I was mearly instructtid in reading and writing and the ground <rules> of Arithmatic which const[it]uted my whole literary acquirements.
Joseph confessed and exposed his mere literary abilities on the opening page. Here in his earliest autobiography, he highlights the horns of his dilemma: he has a marvelous experience to share, and he feels inadequate to share it. In a single sentence of 137 words, there are misspellings, awkward phrases, misplaced modifiers, and no punctuation. It’s natural to wonder why Joseph waited twelve years to write an account of his vision. Discovering how burdened he felt by that task leads us to appreciate the fact that he ever wrote it at all.
History, circa Summer 1832 page 2 – The Joseph Smith Papers
The document is not just the sum of Joseph’s literary limits
It also includes a raw, unfiltered, and beautiful account of one of the most marvelous and consequential events to ever occur. James Allen was a young history professor at BYU when he learned of Joseph’s 1832 autobiography in the early 1960s. He went to the Church Administration Building to study it and was overjoyed. This is Joseph Smith pure and simple, Allen thought, giving his feelings as best he could remember them and writing them out by himself.
Professor Allen joyfully told me about that day
“As I read that first account of the First Vision, there was that feeling that came over me that I don’t think I’d ever experienced before and not quite like anything I’ve experienced since. It said to me, ‘This young man is telling the truth.’ It was powerful story, a handwritten story that didn’t have very good grammar, nor punctuation.” Professor Allen said, “That confirmed the testimony that I already had, confirmed the reality and the honesty and integrity of the story of the First Vision.”
History, circa Summer 1832 page 3 – The Joseph Smith Papers
Read Joseph’s earliest account of his vision for yourself
What do you think? What do you feel? Do you hear the literary limitations that worried Joseph? Do you hear his marvelous experience? Can you sense the tension between those two forces?
At about the age of twelve years my mind become seriously imprest with regard to the all importent concerns of for the wellfare of my immortal Soul which led me to searching the scriptures believeing as I was taught, that they contained the word of God thus applying myself to them and my intimate acquaintance with those of differant denominations led me to marvel excedingly for I discovered that <they did not adorn>instead of adorning their profession by a holy walk and Godly conversation agreeable to what I found contained in that sacred depository this was a grief to my Soul thus from the age of twelve years to fifteen I pondered many things in my heart concerning the sittuation of the world of mankind the contentions and divi[si]ons the wicke[d]ness and abominations and the darkness which pervaded the of the minds of mankind my mind become excedingly distressed for I become convicted of my sins and by searching the scriptures I found that mand<mankind> did not come unto the Lord but that they had apostatised from the true and liveing faith and there was no society or denomination that built upon the gospel of Jesus Christ as recorded in the new testament and I felt to mourn for my own sins and for the sins of the world for I learned in the scriptures that God was the same yesterday to day and forever that he was no respecter to persons for he was God for I looked upon the sun the glorious luminary of the earth and also the moon rolling in their magesty through the heavens and also the stars shining in their courses and the earth also upon which I stood and the beast of the field and the fowls of heaven and the fish of the waters and also man walking forth upon the face of the earth in magesty and in the strength of beauty whose power and intiligence in governing the things which are so exceding great and marvilous even in the likeness of him who created him<them> and when I considered upon these things my heart exclaimed well hath the wise man said the<it is a> fool <that> saith in his heart there is no God my heart exclaimed all all these bear testimony and bespeak an omnipotant and omnipreasant power a being who makith Laws and decreeeth and bindeth all things in their bounds who filleth Eternity who was and is and will be from all Eternity to Eternity and when <I> considered all these things and that <that> being seeketh such to worshep him as worship him in spirit and in truth therefore I cried unto the Lord for mercy for there was none else to whom I could go and to obtain mercy and the Lord heard my cry in the wilderness and while in <the> attitude of calling upon the Lord <in the 16th year of my age> a piller of fire light above the brightness of the sun at noon day come down from above and rested upon me and I was filled with the spirit of god and the <Lord> opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord and he spake unto me saying Joseph <my son> thy sins are forgiven thee. go thy <way> walk in my statutes and keep my commandments behold I am the Lord of glory I was crucifyed for the world that all those who believe on my name may have Eternal life <behold> the world lieth in sin and at this time and none doeth good no not one they have turned asside from the gospel and keep not <my> commandments they draw near to me with their lips while their hearts are far from me and mine anger is kindling against the inhabitants of the earth to visit them acording to thir ungodliness and to bring to pass that which <hath> been spoken by the mouth of the prophets and Ap[o]stles behold and lo I come quickly as it [is?] written of me in the cloud <clothed> in the glory of my Father and my soul was filled with love and for many days I could rejoice with great Joy and the Lord was with me but could find none that would believe the hevnly vision nevertheless I pondered these things in my heart
Now think back to the previous post. Are you hearing Joseph? Some readers are too quick to conclude what he means above when he says “the <Lord> opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord and he spake unto me.” There’s a lot at stake in the way that line is interpreted. Did Joseph see one being or two? Did he change his story over time? Can he be trusted? I’ll write about those issues in my next post.
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There is a dilemma at the heart of Joseph Smith’s first vision accounts. It is hidden in plain sight. Once you see it you wonder how you missed it before.
There is a new book out from an esteemed university press.*
One of its chapters illustrates how easy it is to miss the dilemma Joseph emphasized. The author compares Joseph’s experience to some early American conversion narratives and concludes that Joseph’s accounts lack the angst and the typical “transformations of the heart.”
“Nowhere in Smith’s first vision is there a description of the agonies and ecstasies of conversion,” this author claims. Joseph “presents himself not as one whose heart needs changing but one whose mind needs persuading.”
Notice the either/or: “not as one whose heart needs changing but one whose mind needs persuading.” This author thinks Joseph’s accounts are about resolving “cognitive dissonance” or intellectual incongruity “rather than ravishing a sinful heart with infinite love.” These phrases sound fancy but they are uninformed. This is a false dilemma posing as analysis.
This author has not heard what Joseph is saying
“Nowhere in Smith’s first vision is there a description of the agonies and ecstasies of conversion.” Really? Joseph’s accounts describe both his agony and his ecstasy. (More on that in later posts.)
I remember the day I finally saw the dilemma Joseph describes
It was lunch time. I was sitting outside. I had copies of all the first vision accounts and was reviewing them again, trying to look at them in new ways, asking different questions. I had read each of them many times before. But that day I started paying attention to the number of times Joseph described what was going on in his mind. Then I noticed that he distinguished between his mind and his heart. Then I saw it: Joseph’s was trying to tell me that his mind and his heart were at odds.
Every story has a problem
When Joseph told his story, the crux of the problem was that his soul depended on knowing how to act relative to Christ’s atonement–and how to act he did not know.
The Presbyterian option made sense in his head
He knew he was sinful. He also knew he hadn’t been able to do anything about it. That’s what the Presbyterian option taught him to expect. It made sense.
The Methodist option appealed to his heart
He attended Methodist meetings and witnessed sinful souls like his feel God’s redeeming love, and “he wanted to get Religion too wanted to feel & shout like the Rest but could feel nothing.” Methodism taught him to expect to feel God’s love if he gave himself to Christ. That didn’t happen, however. No matter how much his heart wanted Methodism, it seemed to his head like the Presbyterian explanation fit best.
One of the options appealed to his heart and the other to his head
No matter how much brain power he put into it, he did not know if his conclusions were right, and no matter how much he tried to follow his heart, he did not know if it was leading him right. That was the problem. His head was telling him one thing, his heart another. How could he know which was right? The welfare of his immortal soul was at stake. It was a terrible problem. These slices of Joseph’s Manuscript History Book A1, excerpted in the Pearl of Great Price as Joseph Smith-History, verses 10 and 18, highlight Joseph’s dilemma:
10 In the midst of this war of words and tumult of opinions, I often said to myself: What is to be done? Who of all these parties are right; or, are they all wrong together? If any one of them be right, which is it, and how shall I know it? . . . .
18 My object in going to inquire of the Lord was to know which of all the sects was right, that I might know which to join. No sooner, therefore, did I get possession of myself, so as to be able to speak, than I asked the Personages who stood above me in the light, which of all the sects was right (for at this time it had never entered into my heart that all were wrong)—and which I should join.
Verse 10 is about Joseph’s thought process, about what’s gone on in his head. He has often wondered whether all the options are wrong and how he will be able to decide. The parenthetical clause in verse 18 is about Joseph’s emotional vulnerability. He tells us he has kept the awful, recurring thought that all the options for forgiveness are wrong from entering “into my heart.”
In 1902, church leaders tasked BH Roberts
with turning Joseph Smith’s history, originally serialized in 1842 in the Times and Seasons, into published volumes. While in that role, he had gathered the serialized “History of Joseph Smith” from back issues of the Millennial Star, the Saints’ British periodical, and bound it into three volumes that he kept and annotated.
His notes show that he thought Joseph contradicted himself in the passages quoted above
Joseph said he “asked the personages who stood above me in the light, which of all the sects was right, (for at this time it had never entered into my heart that all were wrong,) and which I should join.” Earlier, however, Joseph said that prior to his vision he had “often said to myself, what is to be done? Who of all these parties are right? Or are they all wrong together?”
The two lines seemed contradictory to Roberts
He knew that Joseph’s 1842 letter to John Wentworth said that at about age 14 he began to notice “a great clash” between churches and considered “that all could not be right, and that God could not be the author of so much confusion.” So Roberts silently elided the line for at this time it had never entered into my heart that all were wrong. That’s why those words are not in the published version of Joseph’s manuscript history (see top of page 6).
If BH Roberts couldn’t see
the dilemma Joseph tried to highlight, it seems wise to be humble and cautious about assuming that we have understood Joseph well. Working hard to listen to Joseph, using both brain and spirit, leads to seeing and hearing things in Joseph’s first vision accounts to which we may have been blind and deaf.
In my next post I’ll write about Joseph’s other dilemma
the one that kept him from telling his story, and that shaped the way he told it when he finally decided to do so. Stay tuned.
*Grant Shreve, “Nephite Secularization; or, Picking and Choosing in the Book of Mormon,” chapter 8 in Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, editors, Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 207-229. Quoted passages are from page 208.
Today’s post discusses what the Lord’s Christmas day 1832 revelation to Joseph Smith says about prophets, prophecy, and the end of the world. The revelation came a bit before Charles Dickens created Christmas as we know it.
The United States was in a state of political turmoil
Congress had passed tax laws that favored northern factories over southern planters. So a South Carolina convention “unilaterally nullified the tariff and forbade its collection. President Andrew Jackson, refusing to acknowledge this assertion of state power, called out troops. By Christmas 1832, a military confrontation appeared imminent” (Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, 191).
Latter-day Saints and other Christians
Viewed these events (along with a plague in India and a nearly global outbreak of cholera) in eschatological terms. Ess-cat-a-loj-i-cal is an adjective. Es-ca-tahn is the related noun, and it means the end of the world. Es-ca-tall-o-gee is theology about the end of the world.
The eschaton must be coming soon
At least that’s how it looked to Joseph Smith and others that Christmas. The United States was on the brink of civil war. Wars and rumors of wars, desolating sicknesses and desolating scourges were in the news (“Signs of the Times,” The Evening and the Morning Star 1:8 [January 1833], 62.) Joseph asked for and received a revelation about what was to come. It said that wars–plural–would begin shortly with South Carolina’s rebellion, then continue until wars had gone global and resulted in “a full end of all nations” (D&C 87:6). The revelation foresaw slave rebellions and the uprising of “remnants” vexing the Gentiles, which Joseph and the early Saints would have interpreted in Book of Mormon terms to mean descendants of Lehi irritating the unrepentant (Mormon 7:1-10, 3 Nephi 10, D&C 19:27).
This revelation is mainly descriptive, not prescriptive
D&C 87:1-7 describes what God knows will happen because people reject His laws and His love. It’s not about what He wants to happen, or what would happen if people obeyed His laws and reflected His love. It describes unfathomable violence by which the inhabitants of the earth “feel the wrath, and indignation, and chastening hand of an Almighty God” whom they have rejected. Given the impending eschaton, the prescriptive point in the last verse is “stand ye in holy places, and be not moved” (D&C 87:8).
Joseph Smith’s Christmas 1832 revelation
Is that a command to be passive?
Does it mean we should be a bystander or immobilized by fear? I don’t think so. I think it means something like, take a stand for holiness and don’t get pushed around. I interpret it as a command to take an immovable stand for the laws and love of God in a world descending into self-destruction. The otherwise depressing revelation ends with good news for those who take such a stand: The day of the Lord–the eschaton–comes quickly (D&C 87:8).
Joseph Smith may have looked foolish to some when the crisis blew over
Civil war didn’t come. It didn’t start with the rebellion of South Carolina, nor result in death and misery, or global warfare, or the end of nations. Well, at least not right away, as Joseph and others probably expected.
The eschaton never seems to happen as expected
When I was a kid in the 70s and a teenager in climactic years of the Cold War, I didn’t know the words eschaton or eschatology. I didn’t read the scriptures much nor understand what I read. I just knew—I was certain—that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ was inseparably connected with MAD, the mutually assured destruction we all anticipated when the US and the Soviet Union inevitably started raining nuclear bombs on each other. What I saw was all there was. I had no sense of history, the long history of war and violence or of Christian eschatology. I had no idea that what I assumed was different from what I knew. I thought I knew all there was to know about the topic. It was black and white.
Then the world didn’t end when or how I expected it to
That’s the story of Christian eschatology in a nutshell. Since the days of Paul at least, Christians have been expecting the end of the world any day. Every generation of Christians has waited for the end times, and there are always some Christians somewhere who are sure that it’s coming very, very soon.
Early Latter-day Saints were like that
William Miller (1782-1849) longed for Jesus’ return to end wars and death
But not quite as much as the followers of William Miller. He was a generation older than Joseph Smith. He was a Baptist, then a Deist, but the combination of having his life miraculously saved in the War of 1812 and the deaths of loved ones led him to conversion to Jesus Christ, and he renewed his Baptist faith. He longed for Jesus’ return to end wars and death. Like me, William Miller didn’t have the knowledge or skills or the revelation necessary to read and understand apocalyptic parts of the Bible in context. So he made some assumptions that led him to interpret Daniel 8:14 to mean that the Savior would return sometime between March 21, 1843 and a year later.
Some of William Miller’s followers got even more specific
They narrowed the day of the Savior’s Second Coming to April 3, 1843. They were not the only ones interested as that day approached. Latter-day Saints were also looking forward to the Savior’s Second Coming, studying the prophecies, trying to discern the signs of the times, as Christians had been doing for nearly two millennia.
So It was no wonder that on Sunday April 2, 1843
the subject came up in Elder Orson Hyde’s sermon. Joseph’s journal entry for that day says “Elder Hyde Preached 1 epistle John 1 chap 1st 3 verses–when he shall appear we shall be like him &c he will appear on a white horse–as a warrior & may be we shall have some of the same spirit–our god is a warrior–John 14:23–it is our privilege to have the father & son dwelling in our hearts &c . . . . .” After the sermon Joseph had lunch with Elder Hyde, and said, “Elder Hyde I am going to offer some corrections to you. Elder H. replid–they shall be thankfully received.”
Joseph clarified that when the Savior appears
“we shall see him as he is. We shall see that he is a man like ourselves. And that same sociality which exists amongst us here will exist among us there only it will be coupled with eternal glory which glory we do not now enjoy.”Joseph taught further that John 14:23 is about “a personal appearance” of the Father and the Son. “To say that the father and the Son dwells in a man’s heart is an old Sectarian notion. and is not correct. . . . ”
Then Joseph prophesied
“I prophecy in the Name of the Lord God that the commenceme[n]t of bloodshed as preparat[o]ry to the coming of the son of man. will commenc[e] in South Carolina.— (it probably may arise through the slave trade.)— this the a voice declard to me. while I was praying earne[s]tly on the subje[c]t 25 December 1832. I earnestly desird to know concern[in]g the coming of the Son of Man & prayed. when— a voice said to me, Joseph, my, son, if thou livest until thou art 85 years old thou shalt see the facce of the son of man. therefore let this suffice & trouble me no more on this matter.”
The next day was April 3, 1843
Joseph Smiths journal entry for April 3, 1843 pokes at Millers followers who expected the Second Coming that day. Image courtesy of josephsmithpapers.org
It turned out not to be the eschaton. Joseph’s journal entry pokes at Miller and his followers: “tis too. pleas[a]nt. for false prophets.” A few days later on April 6, 1843, Joseph again told his experience a decade earlyer of praying to know when the Savior’s Second Coming would be, and this time he added how he had decided to interpret the Lord’s intentionally vague revelation:
“. . . were I going to prophecy. I would procpesy [prophesy] the end will not come in 1844. or 5— or 6. or 40 years more [p. [72]] there are those of the rising generation who shall not taste death till christ come. <I was once praying earnestly upon this subject. and a voice said unto me.> My son, if thou livest till thou art 85 years of age, thou shalt see the face of the son of man. . . . <I was left to draw my own conclusions concerni[n]g this &,> I took the liberty to conclude that if I did live till that time Jesus <he> would make his appearance.— <but I do not say whether he will make his appeara[n]ce, or I shall go where he is.—>I prophecy in the name of the Lord God.— & let it be written. <that the> Son of Man will not come in the heavns till I am 85. years old 48 years hence or about 1890.—” (cross ref. D&C 130:14-17).
I’m quite fascinated by the way
Joseph read his own revelations in the context of his culture’s eschatology. He accurately prophesied the American Civil War, but he didn’t understand his own prophecy. When he received the Christmas revelation in 1832, as South Carolina was threatening secession, he assumed, as almost all Christians have done, that the Savior’s Second Coming would be soon. Then in 1843 Joseph specifically noted the difference between what the Lord revealed and what he, Joseph, interpreted it to mean:
The Lord’s revelation:
“Joseph, my, son, if thou livest until thou art 85 years old thou shalt see the face of the son of man. therefore let this suffice & trouble me no more on this matter.”
Joseph’s interpretation:
“I was left to draw my own conclusions concerni[n]g this &,> I took the liberty to conclude that if I did live till that time Jesus <he> would make his appearance.— <but I do not say whether he will make his appeara[n]ce, or I shall go where he is.—>I prophecy in the name of the Lord God.— & let it be written. <that the> Son of Man will not come in the heavns till I am 85. years old 48 years hence or about 1890.—”
This is a terrific way to show that Joseph Smith was a true prophet of God and a frontier farmer in the antebellum (pre Civil War) United States. That means that he knew things from God that no one else could, and that he understood them as most everyone else in his time and place would.
One reason that Joseph was such a good revelator is that he worked at what he called “the spirit of revelation.” He taught:
“A person may profit by noticing the first intimation of the Spirit of Revelation for instance when you feel pure Inteligence flowing unto you it may give you sudden strokes of ideas that by noticeting it you may find it fulfilled the same day or soon. (I,E,) those things that were presented unto your minds by the Spirit of God will come to pass and thus by learning the Spirit of God. & understanding it you may grow into the principle of Revelation. until you become perfect in Christ Jesus.”
Sometimes Joseph didn’t understand
How to interpret the Lord’s revelations, at least not right away. He had to work at it and see how things unfolded first. He referred to his Christmas 1832 revelation occasionally but never published it during his lifetime. Latter-day Saints began to pay attention to it in the 1850s as the American Civil War loomed. Then, in 1861, when it began to be fulfilled to the letter, a Philadelphia newspaper reprinted the revelation and asked, “Have we not had a prophet among us?” (“A Mormon Prophecy,” Philadelphia Sunday Mercury, 5 May 1861, reprinted in Robert J. Woodford, The historical development of the Doctrine and Covenants, 3 volumes [PhD dissertation, Brigham Young University, 1974], 2:1110).
Joseph didn’t always get it right
There was a gap between what God revealed through him and his limited ability to understand, interpret, and explain. He wasn’t a perfect revelator. He was just the best one the world has ever seen. Happy birthday Brother Joseph. And Merry Christmas everyone. Be of good cheer! When the news is bleak and violence leads to death and misery across the globe, take a stand for holiness and don’t move.
My oldest brother was born on December 13, 1955. He would be 64 today. He was killed in 1993 in a terrible car accident. It was the worst day of my life.
Inscribed: your missionary brother, Marvin John
Joseph Smith was born on December 23, 1805. So in the days leading up to Christmas my mind dwells on death and the role big brothers play in solving soteriological problems. Let me explain.
Soteriology (so·te·ri·ol·o·gy) is theology about salvation. Christianity’s soteriological problem is based on three premises:
God loves all people and desires their salvation (1 Timothy 2:3-4)
Salvation comes to those who knowingly and willfully accept Jesus Christ as their Savior (John 3:16)
Most people live and die without accepting Christ, or even knowing that they could or should
The problem says that all three premises are true but they can’t be reconciled
Proposed solutions tend to discredit one of the premises. Maybe God doesn’t desire the salvation of all people. Or maybe Jesus saves people who don’t knowingly and willfully accept Him.
The first Christians didn’t have this problem
Because they didn’t make the unstated assumption that makes it a problem in the first place. In other words, the first Christians didn’t believe that death was a deadline that determined a person’s salvation. Peter taught that Jesus Christ preached His gospel to the dead so they could be judged as justly as the living (1 Peter 3:18-20, 4:6). Paul taught that Christians could be baptized for the dead (1 Corinthians 15:29).
Trumbower’s very cool book traces the doctrine of redemption for the dead through Christian history
It was Augustine, not Jesus or His apostles, who decided
That death should be a deadline that determined a person’s salvation. But Augustine’s view prevailed in Christ’s church, at least in the West. Many medieval Christians continued to believe that after his death and before his resurrection, Christ opened the spirit prison. They called this event the harrowing of Hell, and they created a lot of art depicting it.
My favorite images are the ones in which Hell is an awful monster, and Christ causes it to cough up its captive dead (as in 2 Nephi 9). This one is Grandes heures de Rohan. I got it from jessehurlbut.net. He got it from gallica.bnf.fr Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, Latin 9471, fol. 76r.
However, the Protestant reformers, for all the good they did, generally followed Augustine on this point.
Then along came Joseph Smith
He was immersed in Protestant culture and assumptions. His big brother died painfully in 1823. The loss was heartbreaking to Joseph. It stung even worse when Reverend Benjamin Stockton implied pretty strongly at Alvin’s funeral that he would spend eternity in Hell. Joseph couldn’t reconcile Alvin’s goodness, Rev. Stockton’s doctrine, and a just and merciful God.
Fast forward twelve years to 1836
Joseph now knows from the Book of Mormon that unaccountable infants who die are not damned, but as distasteful as Rev. Stockton’s doctrine still sounds, Joseph doesn’t know that adults who die before embracing the Savior’s gospel are not automatically damned. Sincere and devout but mistaken theologians have caused this problem. If you’re the Lord Jesus Christ, how will you solve it?
How will you inform a world that has already decided otherwise
That your saving grace reaches beyond death and saves all who choose to embrace your gospel? Joseph hasn’t even thought to ask, being so thoroughly acculturated by Protestantism and all. So how do you get him to become open to it? How do you help him become aware of things he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know?
You show him a vision of the future, and of heaven, and you make sure he sees Alvin there. That makes him marvel and wonder. How will Alvin get past the flaming gates of God’s kingdom? Having purposely provoked the question, you answer it:
All who have died without a knowledge of this gospel, who would have received it, if they had been permitted to tarry, shall be heirs of the celestial kingdom of God— also all that shall die henceforth, without a knowledge of it, who would have received it, with all their hearts, shall be heirs of that kingdom, for I the Lord will judge all men according to their works according to the desires of their hearts (D&C 137).
Joseph Smith’s journal entry for January 21, 1836, is the source text for D&C 137, the vision of Alvin in heaven, and the restored truth that desire, not death, determines salvation through Christ. Image is courtesy of josephsmithpapers.org.
Desire, not death, is the determinant of salvation through Jesus Christ
He saves all who desire to be saved by Him once they know that good news. Which side of death they are on makes no difference at all. By removing the assumption that death determines salvation, Jesus resolved the soteriological problem for Joseph and for everyone else. There is no conflict between the premises now.
That’s just the beginning. After restoring this truth, Joseph restored the early Christian practice of baptism for the dead. The prophets after him restored endowment and sealing ordinances for the dead. And in 1918 his nephew, Joseph F. Smith, received a series of visions that reveal how Jesus harrowed Hell. His report of that experience testifies: “The dead who repent will be redeemed, through obedience to the ordinances of the house of God” (D&C 138:58).
That is a good verse, no doubt. But my favorite is the one right before it, the one in which Joseph F. Smith says that he saw that “the faithful elders of this dispensation, when they depart from mortal life, continue their labors in the preaching of the gospel of repentance and redemption, through the sacrifice of the Only Begotten Son of God, among those who are in darkness and under the bondage of sin in the great world of the spirits of the dead” (D&C 138:57).
That verse is about all three of my big brothers–
Marvin J. Harper, Howard K. Harper, and the Only Begotten Son of God–and about how they’re solving the soteriological problem. “O the greatness of the mercy of our God, the Holy One of Israel! For he delivereth his saints from that awful monster the devil, and death, and hell, and that lake of fire and brimstone, which is endless torment” (2 Nephi 9:19)
Recently a living prophet, Russell M. Nelson, declared something that has always been true. Joseph Smith taught it.
“Nauvoo Relief Society Minute Book,” p. [38], The Joseph Smith Papers“Nauvoo Relief Society Minute Book,” p. [58], The Joseph Smith PapersOther prophets have taught it recently.
But it hasn’t always been believed by some members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“The heavens are just as open to women who are endowed with God’s power flowing from their priesthood covenants as they are to men who bear the priesthood,” President Nelson said.
He explained that “accessing the power of God in your life requires the same things that the Lord instructed Emma and each of you to do.”
I do not like it when lesson manuals or teachers try too hard to liken the scriptures to us or prescribe the gospel as if one size fits all. But I like it a lot when prophets declare the truth and invite us to seek and receive revelation to know how to apply the truth to our circumstances. I loved hearing President Nelson invite us to “study prayerfully section 25 of the Doctrine and Covenants and discover what the Holy Ghost will teach you.”
This post is my way of sustaining President Nelson’s invitation. It’s designed to provide backstory to D&C 25 and some orientation to principles of interpreting the scriptures.
Start with them there then
In the technical terms of scriptural hermeneutics or interpretation, start with exegesis (ex-a-gee-sis). In other words, start by working to understand what a revelation meant to its original recipient(s)–to them there then. Don’t assume what it meant. Discover what it meant.
Then, in hermeneutical terms, do eisegesis (ice-a-gee-sis)–determine what the revelation means to you here now. President Nelson taught this way when he invited us to “study prayerfully section 25 of the Doctrine and Covenants and discover what the Holy Ghost will teach you.”
I hope this post helps someone discern how to act here and now on what the Lord told Emma there and then. There was Harmony, Pennsylvania, a settlement on the Susequhanna River where Emma was born in the summer of 1804. Then was twenty-six years later, July 1830, when the Lord gave the revelation.
In order to come as close as possible to understanding the revelation as Emma did, try to pretend that then is now and you are her.
Three years ago you married Joseph against your parents’ wishes
Then you watched Joseph translate the Book of Mormon. In the midst of that you gave birth to a son who lived less than an hour, and you barely survived weeks of infection. Then, just three months ago, Joseph restored the Savior’s church.
Your parents raised you with middle class aspirations. They worried that by marrying Joseph you were opting for poverty and infamy. Their worries were well founded. Right after your marriage you moved in with Joseph’s parents, then about a year later you moved in with yours. They offered you and Joseph a small farm and a smaller home, allowing payment over time. Only the generous help of friends enabled you and Joseph to make the payments. You have had to depend on others financially. You worry about that.
One month ago, you were baptized near Colesville, New York as a group of angry neighbors objected. Before you could be confirmed, the raging crowd drove you and other saints into the Knight family’s home for refuge. Then a constable arrested Joseph for preaching the Book of Mormon. For the next few days you waited at your sister’s home, praying and “awaiting with much anxiety the issue of those ungodly proceedings.” You felt your “very heart strings would be broken with grief” as Joseph is tried and acquitted in two counties, spat on, insulted, and mocked.
Finally you and Joseph arrive safely at home. There the Lord gives a revelation that makes you more worried. Married life thus far had been tumultuous, and you’re understandably concerned about your family’s financial future and safety. Then the Lord tells your husband:
“Thou shalt devote all they service in Zion; and in this thou shalt have strength. Be patient in afflictions, for thou shalt have many; but endure them, for, lo, I am with thee, even unto the end of thy days. And in temporal labors thou shalt not have strength, for this is not they calling. Attend to thy calling and thou shalt have wherewith to magnify thine office” (D&C 24:7-9).
So there you go. The Lord essentially guaranteed you and Joseph a modest living that depended on the faithfulness of the saints. If the saints will support you, there will be enough to enable Joseph to devote his life to the saints. Other young wives in your time and place are aspiring to secure financial futures, but all the revelation foreshadows for you is a life of hardship with a husband who belongs to the church. You know him well enough to have no doubt that he will devote himself to Zion. Will you have faith enough to face that future? The Lord thinks so. He knows you well. He gives the next revelation directly to you. It comes through Joseph but the Lord speaks to you and shows that he knows your hopes and dreams, fears and frustrations.
It has a more affectionate tone than most, but it is straightforward
The earliest manuscript of the revelation begins more intimately than the formal, published version. “Revelation, July 1830–C [D&C 25],” p. 34, The Joseph Smith Papers“Emma my daughter in Zion,” the Lord says, “A Revelation I give unto you concerning my will Behold thy sins are for given thee & thou art an Elect Lady whom I have called.”
The first promise the Lord makes to Emma is that he will preserve her life. It’s a conditional promise based on whether she chooses to be faithful and virtuous. It was no hollow promise. She had barely survived childbirth. She knew women who hadn’t survived. And soon she would be expecting twins, increasingly the possibility of complications and death. Though it might not even register with readers now, the Lord’s promise of life would have been precious to Emma. So would His promise that she would “receive an inheritance in Zion.” It would have meant the world to her, since forsaking the world was the price she was willing to pay for that promise. Like all early saints, Emma was counter cultural in that respect.
“Murmur not,” the Lord commands Emma, “because of the things which thou hast not seen.” It’s commonly assumed that this clause refers to the Book of Mormon plates, but there is no reason to rule out other possibilities. Emma may have seen the plates. When she was asked if she saw them or not she didn’t answer directly. She testified that she handled them through a cloth. She didn’t say she never saw them. Besides, there were other things she may have longed to see but didn’t: visions, angels, marvelous translation.
Emma was among the first to receive a calling in the restored Church of Jesus Christ
Part of her calling, the Lord said, was to support Joseph in his: comfort him, go with him, and scribe for him. But Emma’s calling also included being ordained to preach–to expound scripture and to exhort the saints by the power of the Holy Ghost. There was a lot for Emma to be afraid of in that list of assignments.
First, it sounded like Joseph would be like the rope in a tug-o-war between the Lord and Emma: “The office of thy calling shall be for a comfort unto my servant, Joseph Smith, Jun., thy husband . . . ” The Lord was asking her to share Joseph with Him and the saints, and to make Joseph better at serving them by strengthening him. Emma could comfort and console Joseph so he could renewed for the burdens the Lord and the saints would place on him.
And “go with him at the time of his going,” the Lord told Emma. That’s another line that is easy to miss when we read. To her, however, it may have been the revelation’s most demanding clause. Expecting twins, she boarded a sleigh near her parents’ home that winter and headed west with Joseph. She went with Joseph in every sense–to comfort and console, to expound and exhort, to compile hymns, to inherit Zion–and that meant that she never saw her parents again.
The Lord follows Emma’s heavy list of callings by telling her how He’ll make her equal to them: He promises to give her the Holy Ghost, knowledge, and enough financial support. Barely. She’ll have to “lay aside the things of this world, and seek for the things of a better” to do what she’s been called to do and become what she’s been ordained to be, and to inherit Zion. Emma could see where it all led. She would have to starve her telestial aspirations and feed her celestial ones.
This revelation helps us see Emma’s conflicted complexity as the Lord did. Since she was human like us, there was a constant civil war inside her. The Lord saw that she was meek but could be proud. She wanted to complain about what she hadn’t seen at the same time she trusted incredibly in her husband’s revelations. She coveted the things of this world but longed for the things of a better world. She was afraid of the unknown and willing to go and do what the Lord commanded her.
My favorite thing about Emma’s revelation is how capable the Lord reveals she is
She’s full of potential. His high expectations are frightening to her. Can she possibly exercise that much faith? Chart a course that’s so counter to her culture? Expound? Exhort? Select sacred hymns? Comfort? Console? Shun pride? Maintain meekness? Delight in the glory her husband receives? Keep God’s commands continually? Cleave to her covenants?
She wanted to. She wondered and worried whether she could. She let the revelation orient her life. She selected sacred hymns for the saints. She expounded scripture by the Holy Ghost. The Nauvoo Relief Society Minute Book is full of her exhortations.
Nauvoo Relief Society Minute Book
She comforted. She consoled. In 1842, when Joseph was evading arrest for unjust charges, Emma may have remembered when the constable came for him twelve years earlier. She had been consoling him ever since. She wasn’t about to stop now. She went to Joseph in his hiding place. “Again she is here,” he said about that visit and all the earlier consoling times, “even in the seventh trouble—undaunted, firm, and unwavering—unchangeable, affectionate Emma!”
“Journal, December 1841–December 1842,” p. 164, The Joseph Smith Papers
In September 1843 Joseph sealed on Emma’s head the “crown of righteousness” the Lord promised in Section 25
Then, just days before his death in 1844, Joseph invited Emma to write her own blessing. She thought of Section 25 and penned her hopes that she would be able to obey its commands and receive its promised blessings. (Carol Madsen told that story best)
Emma clung to her covenants through Abrahamic tests. She could have, and perhaps sometimes did, consider herself in competition with the Lord and the saints for Joseph’s time and attention. The Lord assured her, however, that she was His highly favored daughter. He expected more of her than she may have thought she could give. I believe He will be true to His promise to give her all she ultimately wanted.
PS
That last sentence is not just wishful thinking. It’s based on the revealed terms and conditions of the new and everlasting covenant of marriage and knowing whether or not Emma made that covenant and abided by its terms. Subscribe if you want to be notified when I post the story of what I know about that and how.
Joseph Fielding Smith stood at the Tabernacle pulpit
In Salt Lake City on the second day of General Conference in April 1920. “One theme has stood out very prominently, and properly so,” he said. “That has been the subject of the great vision given to the Prophet Joseph Smith.”
Joseph Fielding SmithJames E. Talmage
Elder Smith had just listened to the scientist James Talmage, a fellow apostle who sometimes disagreed with Elder Smith’s views. “You know the story, I know,” Elder Talmage had said, “but it is well sometimes to be reminded of what we know.” He told the story of the first vision again and said that because of it The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints “stands aloof and alone.” Elders Smith and Talmage agreed heartily that day.
That evening Latter-day Saints packed the tabernacle again
Filling every seat and some of the aisles. Evan Stephens, Welsh-born director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir until 1916, returned to the rostrum after four years of feeling he had “been upon the shelf as a worn out vessel.” Now he was back in the conductor’s spot that had been his for a quarter century, leading the choir in his cantata, The Vision.
Evan Stephens composed The Vision and conducted the performance of it during the April 1920 General Conference
Church President Heber J. Grant thought the performance was a “regular triumph.” So did Samuel Mitton. He had first attended Conference as a teenager in October 1880, when Joseph Smith’s First Vision was canonized in the Pearl of Great Price. Samuel had loved the tabernacle organ and choir and listening to Orson Pratt relate the vision. Now in his mid-fifties, an admirer and friend of Evan Stephens, and director of the saints’ choir in Cache Valley to the north, Samuel noted in his journal each part that was sung, the sermon on “the vision of the Father and Son,” and the singer who played Joseph Smith. He summed up the experience as “the greatest music I ever heard.”
The April 1920 General Conference
Together with that month’s issues of the Improvement Era and Young Woman’s Journal, were just the beginning. The Mutual Improvement Association commemorated Joseph Smith’s first vision church-wide on May 1. Young saints in California performed music and gave speeches.
In Provo, Utah, students and faculty from the sixth grade through college shared testimonials. “Joseph Smith’s first prayer proves to me that there must be a Mother in Heaven,” said seventh-grader Inez Taylor, perhaps taking her cue from Susa Young Gates’s recent article, “for if there is a Father and Son, there must be a Mother.”
Susa Young Gates published essays on what the first vision meant to women in both the Relief Society Magazine and the Improvement Era in 1920
These statements are precious. For the first time in the historical record, young saints—some very young—described how the first vision resonated with them. Printed beside their professors’ comparatively didactic statements, the students’ told “what the first vision has done for me,” and “what the first vision means to me,” and “how the prophet’s vision has affected my life.”
Several students linked their identity to the First vision
None more cogently than Mildred Boyer, a student at Brigham Young University. She said the vision began the movement that led her future mother to migrate from Europe to America, where she married a man “whose parents pulled a handcart across the plains of America because of that same wonderful revelation. . . . Through the vision of that unlearned boy, who knelt in humble prayer before his Maker, I bear testimony that I am what I am. The glory of God has been engraved in my heart, and belief in the truths of His Gospel has caused me to rejoice, and to go ever onward and upward to a higher and nobler plane. I have learned to have faith in a living God who loves all men and is never known to desert them when in need. I have learned that it is better to walk with Him in the dark, that to attempt to find my way alone in the light.”
The youth in Provo made Joseph Smith’s first vision their own. They performed The Return of Truth Triumphant: A Pageant of the Restored Gospel, in which one of them acting as “the boy prophet” took center stage, while many others formed the chorus and supporting cast.
After five weeks of rehearsal in Logan
Samuel Mitton’s choir of 160 singers performed The Vision. “Oh how grateful I feel,” he noted in his journal, to have the privilege of singing this great composition of so great an event—and on the 100th anniversary of the time when the Vision was given to Joseph the prophet.”
Barring some miraculous intervention, I won't be making any beautiful music for the bicentennial. I sure feel akin, however, to the saints a century ago who were thrilled to testify one way or another of what it meant to them. Subscribe if you feel the same way, or if just want to learn more about the vision. Soon I'll start a series of bi-weekly posts that explore Joseph Smith's first vision from every angle.
What are Latter-day Saints planning for the bicentennial of Joseph Smith’s First Vision in 2020?
A living prophet, Russel M. Nelson, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, recently made this announcement:
“In the springtime of the year 2020, it will be exactly 200 years since Joseph Smith experienced the theophany that we know as the First Vision. God the Father and His Beloved Son, Jesus Christ, appeared to Joseph, a 14-year-old youth. That event marked the onset of the Restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ. . . .”
President Nelson promised that
“General conference next April will be different from any previous conference.” Would you like to know what’s in store? Me too.
I study the past, not the future
So the rest of this post is not about the bicentennial of Joseph Smith’s first vision. It’s about the centennial nearly a century ago. It’s based on a chapter of my new book: First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins (with the M word acting as an adjective according to the Church style guide). In my next post I’ll tell the story of the commemoration at the April 1920 General Conference.
On a beautiful, clear day, Early in the spring of 1920
Heber J. Grant, Joseph F. Smith’s successor as church president and prophet, received a letter from John Widtsoe, expressing delight at the news he had just read of the plan to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary. “The First Vision was a marvelous event which thrills to the core every latter-day Saint,” Widtsoe wrote. He sent President Grant his own writings on the vision and suggested the publication of “a memorial volume.” President Grant shared Widtsoe’s views, “read every word with pleasure,” and heartily approved the book idea.
Heber J. Grant told Edward Anderson, longtime editor of the Improvement Era
He had “read a very splendid article by Dr. Widtsoe on the subject of the First Vision.” Grant solicited Widtsoe’s essay for a special spring issue devoted “exclusively to the vision and its world-wide significance and far-reaching results.” Anderson wanted Grant to write too, but the president balked. There were more talented writers, he said, Widtsoe among them. Anderson replied that he couldn’t go to press without a statement on the first vision from Joseph’s successor as the prophet. President Grant thought about it for a couple of weeks, but as the press deadline loomed he decided not to write on the first vision for the special issue of the Improvement Era.
Meanwhile he read the proofs
Including Anderson’s poem “The Divine Answer,” based on the canonized account of Smith’s vision, and Orson F. Whitney’s ode “The Messenger of Morn.” President Grant read essays by his counselors in the First Presidency, Anthon Lund and Charles Penrose, who made a case that the nineteenth century was the most impressive, and the first vision was its most important event.
Lund wrote of his 1905 trip to the grove
And declared three truths derived from the vision but “contrary to the belief of the Christian world.” First, God is embodied and passionate. Second, Christianity was apostate at the time of the first vision. To make his third point, Lund told a story of his Danish boyhood and Lutheran education. “We learned much that was very good,” he admitted, “but also some doctrines that I could not accept.” He paraphrased his catechism, “if any one should say he had received new, divine revelation, we must not put any faith in such a declaration; for God has nowhere promised to give any more revelation.” Not so, Lund argued.
Grant continued readinG, a dozen essays in ALL
Susa Gates’s was the least long-winded and the most original. She asked the novel question: “Can you conceive, then, what the Vision meant to women?” She interpreted God’s intervention in history (via the vision) as the catalyst of equal suffrage. She was completely conscious as she wrote that the Constitutional amendment long sought by Latter-day Saint women and others, the amendment to forbid voting discrimination based on gender, had gained Utah’s support the previous fall, and now needed just one more state to ratify it.
“The Vision held the bright promise of equality and freedom for women”
Gates asserted. She showed how Joseph’s first vision evoked the doctrines of Latter-day Saint feminism. “It meant woman’s free agency,” she wrote, “the liberation of her long-chained will and purpose.” And it meant a Mother as well as a Father in heaven, who revealed their will personally, individually, without respect to gender.
President Grant read every page of the proofs
“I thoroughly enjoyed every article from start to finish,” he wrote to Anderson. “I think it is the finest number that has ever been issued by the Era. It is a wonderful missionary. I want ten thousand extra copies printed.” Ultimately, he couldn’t resist including his own contribution, a three-page article celebrating “the most wonderful vision ever bestowed upon mortal man.”
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