Category: First Vision

Joseph Smith’s First Vision

A First Vision for Anxious, Sinful Teens (or Adults)

There is a sacred grove about fifty feet from my office

It is in the atrium of the Joseph Smith Building on the campus of Brigham Young University. A bronze figure of teenage Joseph Smith is kneeling among the trees.

Avard T. Fairbanks’s sculpture “The Vision,” pictured here, is located in the courtyard of the Joseph Smith Building at Brigham Young University. When Elder Henry B. Eyring unveiled the sculpture in 1997, he paid tribute to the sculpture “for what he didn’t show,” referring to the implied presence of the Father and the Son. (Photo by Brent R. Nordgren.)

When Henry B. Eyring unveiled and dedicated this sculpture in 1997, he praised the artist for what Joseph’s heavenward gaze invites us to imagine. President Eyring said: “From studying the various accounts of the First Vision, we learn that young Joseph went into the grove not only to learn which church he should join but also to obtain forgiveness for his sins, something he seems not to have understood how to do.”

President Eyring hopes that every young person who sees the statue will relate to Joseph in the moment depicted, “that moment when Joseph Smith learned there was a way for the power of the Atonement of Jesus Christ to be unlocked fully.” According to President Eyring, “in more than one account the Lord addressed the young truth seeker and said, ‘Joseph, my son, thy sins are forgiven thee.’”[1]

Joseph’s parents “spared no pains” in teaching him “the Christian religion.”

They taught him that the scriptures “contained the word of God.” Joseph wrote that he was about twelve when he began to worry about the welfare of his immortal soul. His “all important concerns” led him to exercise faith in his parents’ teachings. He began searching the scriptures for himself, and doing what he called “applying myself to them.” That is how he discovered that various Christian churches professed things that the Bible did not.

Joseph grieved over that. He could see that contention characterized Christianity. He became deeply distressed because he believed the Christian teachings about his sinful and fallen state. He knew he needed to be redeemed by Jesus Christ, but “there was no society or denomination,” as far as he could tell, “that built upon the gospel of Jesus Christ as recorded in the New Testament,” he wrote, “and I felt to mourn for my own sins and for the sins of the world.”[2]

Joseph took the welfare of his soul seriously

For a few years he thought about his problem and what he should do. He considered the option of giving up his faith in God, but he couldn’t. To him, the sun, moon, and stars testified that God lived, and lived by divine laws, and should be worshipped. “Therefore,” Joseph wrote, “I cried unto the Lord for mercy, for there was none else to whom I could go.”[3]

Joseph chose a powerful verb in cried. He cried to the Lord for mercy because he was losing hope. There was no one else to extend him mercy. So he cried because he believed, or at least hoped, that the Lord would be merciful to him.

As President Eyring demonstrated, there is value in learning from Joseph’s various accounts of his vision

They tell us that Joseph believed his parents’ teachings about Jesus Christ. He searched the scriptures and believed that they contained the word of God. He applied himself to them. He worked hard to understand them and to discover what he should do because of them. He became intimately acquainted with people who believed different things about Christ. He paid attention to what they believed and how they behaved. For a few years he read, observed, and pondered. He thought about what he was becoming. He mourned when there was conflict between what he believed he should be and what he was. He became “exceedingly distressed” when he realized he was at an impasse. He was guilty of sin, and he could find no church built on the gospel of Jesus Christ, who redeemed people from their sins. So he cried out to the Lord for mercy.[4]

One of the best things Joseph did was balance urgency and caution

He recognized that he needed knowledge and power from God. Learning how to get it became his priority. “Information was what I most desired,” he said, and he formed a “fixed determination to obtain it.” He said it was “of the first importance that I should be right in matters that involve eternal consequences.”[5] Joseph put first things first. He relentlessly sought the most important truths.[6] Because his “immortal soul” was at stake, he acted both urgently and deliberately.[7]

He did not make rash decisions or jump to conclusions. “I made it an object of much study and reflection,” he related.[8] “I kept myself aloof from all these parties,” he said, “though I attended their several meetings as often as occasion would permit.” By exercising faith in God, studying much, observing closely, yet remaining aloof, Joseph positioned himself to make informed decisions. He could see that “contradictory opinions and principles laid the foundation for the rise of such different sects and denominations.” Being deliberate helped Joseph remain above the partisan prejudices “too often poisoned by hate, contention, resentment and anger.”[9]

Joseph tested Methodism

“In process of time my mind became somewhat partial to the Methodist sect,” he said, “and I felt some desire to be united with them.” If the Methodist teachings were right, Joseph would be able to seek and receive God’s prevenient grace. That is, despite his fallen nature, Joseph would receive a gift of God’s power that would enable him to come to Christ and be saved by him. He would know if it worked because it would be joyful, overwhelmingly joyful. Joseph watched as people experienced that joy. He tried it himself. He wanted his own Methodist conversion experience. “He wanted to get Religion too wanted to feel & shout like the Rest but could feel nothing.”[10] So despite his desire to follow Methodism, Joseph kept seeking.

He realized that he was not able to discern by himself whether Methodists were right, or Presbyterians, or Baptists. Each made compelling, bible-based arguments. That confused, distressed, and perplexed Joseph.[11] He sought more evidence before making a decision with eternal consequences.

What did he do when experts offered conflicting, consequential choices?

He kept his faith. He worked hard. He turned to the scriptures. He received a revelation. Then he acted on it. “While I was laboring under the extreme difficulties caused by the contests of these parties of religionists,” he said, “I was one day reading the Epistle of James, First Chapter and fifth verse.” The scripture taught him ask God directly and with faith. That was a revelation to Joseph, “like a light shining forth in a dark place.”[12] Before he read and reflected on it, he felt paralyzed. After, he knew what to do.

“I must do as James directs,” he said, “that is, Ask of God.” Joseph chose the word determination to describe his resolve to act on the scripture.[13] He used it twice in his history. Another time he called it “a fixed determination.”[14] Joseph was not passive. He resolved to act in faith and do something he had never tried before. He said, “I just determined I’d ask him.” He went to the woods to take the next step in his quest for God’s redeeming love.[15]  Joseph knelt and “began to offer up the desires of my heart to God.”

He had never prayed aloud before

Joseph barely got started, however, before he aborted. He called it “a fruitless attempt to pray.”[16]It felt like his tongue swelled. He could not speak. It sounded like someone was walking up behind him. He tried to pray again but failed. The noise seemed to come closer. He sprang up and turned toward it. There was nothing making the noise, nothing he could see anyway.

He knelt again and “called on the Lord in mighty prayer.”[17] Something seized him, “some power which entirely overcame me,” he said. It was “an actual being from the unseen world.” Joseph was shocked at its power.[18] Doubts filled his mind.[19] Thick darkness enveloped him. He felt doomed. He was ready to give up, “to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction,” he said. He chose not to do so, however. He chose instead, at that moment, to exert all his “powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the power of this enemy.”

Just then Joseph saw a brilliant light descending from above

He called it a “pillar of flame.” As soon as it appeared the darkness left. The spirit of God filled Joseph, replacing the feeling of despair. Unspeakable joy replaced doom. Joseph heard his name. He looked into the light and saw God, who introduced Joseph to His Beloved Son. Joseph saw Jesus Christ, standing in the air with his Father. “Joseph,” the Savior said, “thy sins are forgiven.” He continued, “I am the Lord of glory. I was crucified for the sins of the world that all those who believe on my name may have eternal life.”[20]

Once he could speak, Joseph asked if he should join the Methodists. “No,” came the answer.[21] None of the current Christian churches had God and Christ right because of confusing creeds. The creeds were philosophical statements about God that ruled out even the possibility that Heavenly Parents created children, including a Beloved Son, from preexisting intelligence and element as part of a plan to empower and exalt them until the children were fully like their parents.  Joseph listened and learned that “Jesus Christ is the son of God.” He was crucified for sinners. He forgives the repentant and gives them eternal life. He can stand next to His Father, and not just in heaven. They can visit in person. They answer the prayers of anxious teenagers who ask in faith.

Joseph applied what he learned

He put his faith in the crucified and resurrected Savior who had atoned for his sins, and repented. Joseph knew what to do later when he realized “that I had not kept the commandments.” Every time he “fell into transgressions and sinned in many things,” he went back to his knees, chose hope over despair, and acted on the knowledge he had successfully tried before. He trusted the Savior who was crucified for him and “repented hartily for all my sins.”[22] That worked every time.[23]

Primary General President Joy D. Jones taught, “we can draw principles of truth from the Prophet Joseph’s experiences that provide insights for receiving our own revelation.” She noted these examples of good practice: “We labor under difficulties. We turn to the scriptures to receive wisdom to act. We demonstrate our faith and trust in God. We exert our power to plead with God to help us thwart the adversary’s influence. We offer up the desires of our hearts to God. We focus on His light guiding our life choices and resting upon us when we turn to Him. We realize He knows each of us by name and has individual roles for us to fulfill.”[24] That works every time.

When he unveiled the sculpture of Joseph in the grove near my office, President Eyring testified: “Jesus is the Christ. He lives. I know He lives. I know Joseph Smith saw Him, and I know that because He lives and because Joseph Smith looked up and saw Him and because He sent other messengers, you and I may have the thing that the Prophet Joseph wanted as he went to the grove: to know, not just to hope, that our sins can be washed away.”[25]

[1] Henry B. Eyring, “Remarks Given at the Unveiling Ceremony of ‘The Vision,’” Religious Education History, Brigham Young University, 66–68.

[2] “History, circa Summer 1832,” pages 1-2, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-circa-summer-1832.

[3] “History, circa Summer 1832,” pages 2-3, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-circa-summer-1832.

[4] “History, circa Summer 1832,” pages 2-3, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-circa-summer-1832.

[5] “Journal, 1835–1836,” p. 23, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/journal-1835-1836/24.

[6] “Journal, 1835–1836,” p. 23, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/journal-1835-1836/24.

[7] “History, circa Summer 1832,” p. 2, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-circa-summer-1832/2.

[8] “History, circa 1841, fair copy,” p. 2, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-circa-1841-fair-copy/2. “History, circa 1841, draft [Draft 3],” p. 2, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-circa-1841-draft-draft-3/2.

[9] “Orson Hyde, Ein Ruf aus der Wüste (A Cry out of the Wilderness), 1842, extract, English translation,” The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/orson-hyde-ein-ruf-aus-der-wste-a-cry-out-of-the-wilderness-1842-extract-english-translation/1.

[10] “Alexander Neibaur, Journal, 24 May 1844, extract,” p. [23], The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/alexander-neibaur-journal-24-may-1844-extract/1.

[11] “History, circa Summer 1832,” p. 2, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-circa-summer-1832/2. “History, circa June 1839–circa 1841 [Draft 2],” p. 3, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-circa-june-1839-circa-1841-draft-2/3. “Journal, 1835–1836,” p. 23, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/journal-1835-1836/24.

[12] “Appendix: Orson Pratt, A[n] Interesting Account of Several Remarkable Visions, 1840,” p. 4, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/appendix-orson-pratt-an-interesting-account-of-several-remarkable-visions-1840/4.

[13] “History, circa June 1839–circa 1841 [Draft 2],” p. 3, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-circa-june-1839-circa-1841-draft-2/3.

[14] “Journal, 1835–1836,” p. 23, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/journal-1835-1836/24.

[15] “History, circa June 1839–circa 1841 [Draft 2],” p. 3, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-circa-june-1839-circa-1841-draft-2/3.

[16] “Journal, 1835–1836,” p. 23, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/journal-1835-1836/24.

[17] “Journal, 1835–1836,” p. 24, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/journal-1835-1836/25.

[18] “History, circa June 1839–circa 1841 [Draft 2],” p. 3, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-circa-june-1839-circa-1841-draft-2/3. “History, circa 1841, draft [Draft 3],” p. 3, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-circa-1841-draft-draft-3/3.

[19] “Orson Hyde, Ein Ruf aus der Wüste (A Cry out of the Wilderness), 1842, extract, English translation,” The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/orson-hyde-ein-ruf-aus-der-wste-a-cry-out-of-the-wilderness-1842-extract-english-translation/1.

[20] “History, circa Summer 1832,” pages 2-3, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-circa-summer-1832/2.

[21] “Alexander Neibaur, Journal, 24 May 1844, extract,” p. [23], The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/alexander-neibaur-journal-24-may-1844-extract/1.

[22] “Journal, 1835–1836,” p. 24, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/journal-1835-1836/25.

[23] “Journal, 1835–1836,” p. 24, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/journal-1835-1836/25. “Revelation, July 1828 [D&C 3],” p. 1, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/revelation-july-1828-dc-3/1. “Letter to Emma Smith, 6 June 1832,” p. [1], The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-emma-smith-6-june-1832/1. “Visions, 3 April 1836 [D&C 110],” p. 192, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/visions-3-april-1836-dc-110/1.

[24] President Joy D. Jones, “An Especially Noble Calling,” April 2020 General Conference: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2020/04/14jones?lang=eng.

[25] Henry B. Eyring, “Remarks Given at the Unveiling Ceremony of ‘The Vision,’” Religious Education History, Brigham Young University, 66–68.

 

Do you know how old Joseph was when he saw his first vision?

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.” 

One Being or Two?

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.”

In 1844, Joseph told Alexander Neibaur that he

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).

The Lord opened

For original image, click here

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.

Joseph’s Other Dilemma

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:

  1. He had to tell his experience
  2. 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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What dilemma led to Joseph Smith’s first vision?

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.

Joseph Sought the God of Love . . . and Found Him

There is so much more to the story of Joseph Smith’s first vision than is commonly known

Besides the familiar account included in the Pearl of Great Price, there are three other known accounts by Joseph and five known reports of people who heard him tell his experience. As a historian and as a believer, I’m thrilled that Joseph Smith’s first vision is probably the best documented vision of God in history. But some Latter-day Saints are troubled when they learn that there are several accounts of the story.

Like accounts of the Savior on the Mount of Transfiguration

or instituting the sacrament, or suffering in Gethsemane, or appearing after his resurrection, the accounts of Joseph’s vision are not identical, and that fact is unsettling to some. It wasn’t unsettling to me because I learned it from Professor Backman, who wrote the book on the accounts and was thrilled, as a historian and a believer, to have such a richly documented vision of God to study. His motive was to teach me the vision in a way that was true to the historical facts and sustaining of my faith. But there are other motives out there. Other people present the same facts as Professor Backman taught me, but their motive is to undermine faith.

On its face, the fact of multiple and varied accounts is not a problem

The fact of multiple and varied accounts only upsets faith if the person assumes that multiple or varied accounts of the vision is incompatible with the first vision. In other words, there is nothing inherent in the facts of the matter that ruins faith. Faith in the first vision, or loss of it, depends entirely on what a person decides to do with the facts. Faith in the first vision, or loss of it, is not a matter of knowledge or sincerity. Some people on all sides of this issue are both informed and sincere. Others on all sides are neither. And some on all sides are informed but insincere while others are sincere but not well versed in the facts of the matter. None of those things seem to be the determinant of whether a person has faith in Joseph Smith’s first vision.

The determinant is each individual’s agency

We are not acted upon by knowledge. We act upon knowledge. We exercise our God-given ability to decide for ourselves whether to exercise faith in Him, His Son, and in Joseph Smith as their choice to restore the gospel. I am well-informed about the facts. I have studied the accounts of Joseph’s vision for several years and I find them harmonious and complimentary on the core elements of the story, namely: Joseph craved more light and truth about God and couldn’t find it in the existing churches. He studied the Bible and that inspired him to pray in the woods, where God answered his prayer directly.

Critics counter this claim

by highlighting ways the accounts are inconsistent with each other or with other known facts, and some critics claim that Joseph embellished his experience over time. It comes down to deciding whether to trust Joseph or not, and if you want to make that decision based on a consensus view of Joseph’s reputation, you’ll find that Moroni accurately predicted that Joseph’s name would be known for good and evil in every place on the planet. You’ll have to choose whether you can trust him. No one else can make that choice for you.

By predisposition, prayer, and lots of study

I have decided to trust Joseph Smith. I have studied all the accounts of his vision carefully and in context. I have published books about the vision with both academic and devotional publishers. My testimony is that Joseph Smith told the truth, and that those who knew him best believed him most.

In celebration of the 2020 bicentennial of Joseph’s vision

President Russell M. Nelson invited Latter-day Saints to study it seriously. I expect there will be many lessons and discussions about it. Some of these will focus on why it matters. I invite you to reconsider the way you might answer that question—why does Joseph Smith’s first vision matter? Many talks and lessons over the years have answered that question by saying that the vision showed that God and Christ were separate beings. That is true, but it’s not what mattered most to Joseph. It’s not what he wrote in his accounts. What was it about his vision that was most important to him?

First, Joseph testified that the Lord forgave his sins.

“at about the age of twelve years my mind became seriously imprest [p. 1] with regard to the all importent concerns for the wellfare of my immortal Soul which led me to searching the scriptures . . .   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 . . . . I felt to mourn for my own sins and for the sins of the world . . . . 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 . . . . 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. . . .  I am the Lord of glory I was crucifyed for the world that all those who believe on my name may have Eternal life.”

Second, Joseph testified that the vision brought him joy and love

“I called on the Lord in mighty prayer,” he said, “a pillar of fire appeared above my head, it presently rested down up me head, and filled me with Joy unspeakable.” In another account he testified, “my soul was filled with love and for many days I could rejoice with great Joy.”

Third, God is more powerful than the adversary that opposes Him and us

Fourth, we can choose to call upon God in faith in order to be delivered from the enemy of our souls, who is an actual though unseen being. Fifth, when we are perplexed, distressed, and anxious in a confusing world, God invites us to seek and receive the love, wisdom, forgiveness, and healing we need from Him.

God loves us

That’s what Joseph learned in the grove.  “I had found the testimony of James to be true,” he said, “that a[nyone] who lacked wisdom might ask of God, and obtain, and not be upbraided.”

What difference does it make if God and Christ are separate

embodied beings if they no longer reveal themselves, if they don’t hear and answer the prayers of anxious teenagers who ask in faith, if they don’t forgive sins or fill us with love and joy? Presbyterians of Joseph’s day believed that God was without body, parts, or passions. Latter-day Saints respond by emphasizing how the vision proves that God and Christ have bodies. But what does it matter if they have bodies unless they also have passions, including redeeming love for us?

Joseph’s accounts testify of a loving, responsive God

and show how we can reach him. They show how an anxious soul can make the courageous choice to exercise faith. Sarah Edwards lived a century before Joseph. She was married to the great Presbyterian preacher Jonathan Edwards, whose most famous sermon explained God’s mercy by emphasizing how abhorrent we are to God, so the fact that he is temporarily sparing us from the pains of the well-deserved hell we will most likely inhabit real soon is evidence of his mercy.

Sarah secretly preferred a different God

She had a deep desire to “call God my Father” and wondered whether she really could. She sought him in private prayer and felt

“the presence of God was so near, and so real, that I seemed scarcely conscious of any thing else. God the Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ, seemed as distinct persons, both manifesting their inconceivable loveliness, and mildness, and gentleness, and their great . . .love to me.” 

Sarah struggled to communicate, as Joseph would a century later, “the peace and happiness, which I hereupon felt.”  It “was altogether inexpressible.”

Sarah Edwards was typical of many people then and now

Terryl Givens explained, “Long before Joseph Smith offered his first prayer, thousands and millions of people must have yearned, as Sarah did, for the assurance that God was not the severe, distant, impersonal deity of Jonathan Edwards, but the kind, loving, and very personal God that Joseph found in the Sacred Grove.”

That is why Joseph’s first vision is so vitally important

It is the answer to all our prayers, our hopes for God’s acceptance, love, and forgiveness. It is the archetype for seekers everywhere. It reveals the antidote to our fears and anxieties and dilemmas. When Joseph entered the grove, it seemed to his teenage soul as if he were one of very few who could not feel God’s love and forgiveness. Then God filled him with love. Experiencing that love is the reason to choose to exercise faith in the God who revealed himself to Joseph Smith. The Father and the Son who appeared to Joseph are so loving and lovable. They respond to anxious teenagers, forgive their sins, and fill them with love that helps them cope with their fears and frustrations and causes them to rejoice with great joy.

In answer to his simple, faithful prayer

Joseph Smith saw our Heavenly Father and His Son Jesus Christ in the woods. After anxiety, perplexity, distress, and guilt, he felt their love, received their forgiveness, and experienced unspeakable joy, and so can you.

The First Vision: A Narrative from Joseph Smith’s Accounts

 

“At about the age of twelve years,” Joseph Smith wrote, “my mind became seriously impressed with regard to the all important concerns for the welfare of my immortal soul.”

Living in upstate New York in the 1810s, Joseph was surrounded by religious discussion and controversy. Religious revivals put the urgent question “What must I do to be saved?” foremost in his mind. But the answer was elusive. “Being wrought up in my mind,” Joseph studied the “different systems” of religion, but “I knew not who was right or who was wrong and considered it of the first importance that I should be right in matters that involve eternal consequences.” His own sins and the “sins of the world” made him “exceedingly distressed.”

By “searching the scriptures,” Joseph learned that “mankind did not come unto the Lord but that they had apostatized from the true and living faith and there was no society or denomination that built upon the gospel of Jesus Christ as recorded in the New Testament.”

For a time, Joseph Smith sought relief among the Methodists. In July 1819, more than one hundred ministers gathered for a conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, convened in Vienna (now Phelps), New York, a half-day’s walk from the Smith family farm. The area pulsed with “unusual excitement on the subject of religion.”

Reverend George Lane, a Methodist minister, lived in Pennsylvania but passed through Joseph’s area from time to time. Both Oliver Cowdery and William Smith credited Lane for inspiring Joseph

The preaching of one of the ministers, George Lane, may have especially influenced Joseph. William Smith, Joseph’s younger brother, recalled that Lane “preached a sermon on ‘What church shall I join?’ And the burden of [Lane’s] discourse was to ask God, using as a text, ‘If any man lack wisdom let him ask of God who giveth to all men liberally.’”

Joseph felt “partial” toward the Methodists but resisted full association; he wanted to know which doctrine was right.

He refused to feign conversion or religious feeling. Joseph later told friends that during one Methodist meeting “he wanted to feel and shout like the rest but could feel nothing.” Yet he was “greatly excited; the cry and tumult were so great and incessant.”

“During this time of great excitement,” Joseph’s religious concerns became a crisis.

He wondered in his head whether the churches were “all wrong together” but resisted letting the awful thought enter his heart. At the same time, he experienced “confusion,” “extreme difficulties,” and “great uneasiness” caused by guilt for his sins in the midst of a bewildering “war of words and tumult of opinions” about which church could furnish him with forgiveness.

Joseph was also grieved because of the disparity he found between the churches and the Bible.

Indeed, the Bible was both the battleground of this war and its greatest casualty, “for the teachers of religion of the different sects understood the same passage of scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible.”

Yet it was the Bible’s God to whom Joseph appealed.

He had listened over and over as religious partisans wielded the Bible as a weapon, “endeavoring to establish their own tenets and disprove all others.” Now Joseph approached the Bible privately, quietly—as a living word rather than as a dead law—and it spoke to his seeking soul.“Laboring under the extreme difficulties caused by the contests of these parties of religionists,” Joseph read James 1:5:

“If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.”

The passage sank powerfully into his consciousness.

“Never did any passage of scripture come with more power to the heart of man than this did at this time to mine. It seemed to enter with great force into every feeling of my heart. I reflected on it again and again,” Joseph said, “knowing that if any person needed wisdom from God, I did; for how to act I did not know, and unless I could get more wisdom than I then had, I would never know.”

The biblical invitation to seek revelation moved Joseph deeply.

Joseph’s culture was so prone to proof texting—proving various doctrines with passages from the Bible—that the invitation to seek wisdom directly from God was “cheering information,” as Joseph called it, “like a light shining forth in a dark place.” Joseph determined to pray aloud for the first time in his life.

On a clear spring morning in 1820, Joseph sought solitude in the woods near his home.

He went to a familiar place, near the “stump where I had stuck my axe when I had quit work,” he said. There he knelt and began searching for words to express his deepest desires, but he was overcome by an unseen power.

Tongue-tied and enveloped by thick darkness

Joseph felt doomed as he was “seized” by the astonishing “power of some actual being from the unseen world, who had such marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being.” This adversary “filled his mind with doubts and brought to mind all manner of distracting images.” At the moment when he had to choose whether or not he would succumb to the force that held him, Joseph exerted “all my powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the power of this enemy.”

Joseph became conscious of a heavenly light descending upon him, growing more brilliant as it enveloped him and the leaves and boughs of the trees, until they seemed to be consumed with fire and the light was brighter than the sun.

It rescued Joseph from his unseen enemy. Darkness vanished. Joseph’s prayer opened heaven and invoked power that vanquished the most potent opposing force he had ever experienced. In the midst of the “pillar of fire,” Joseph saw a glorious personage standing above him in the air. He called Joseph’s name and said,

“This is my beloved Son. Hear him.”

Joseph saw another personage appear who “exactly resembled” the first. The Son then called Joseph by name and said, “Thy sins are forgiven.”

Joseph asked the heavenly beings which church was right.

“Must I join the Methodist Church?” he asked. “I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong.” The problem was that “all religious denominations were believing in incorrect doctrines.” God did not acknowledge any of them “as his church and kingdom.” The everlasting covenant, the tie between the ancient Christian gospel and the present day, “had been broken.”

Jesus Christ confirmed Joseph’s observations

“The world lieth in sin,” He told Joseph. The existing churches had “turned aside from the gospel and keep not my commandments. They draw near to me with their lips while their hearts are far from me.”

The “creeds” that oriented the Christian churches were “an abomination” in God’s sight.

They claimed God was unknowable and incomprehensible, yet He was revealing Himself to Joseph Smith in answer to prayer. One creed said, in the language of the philosophers, that God was “without body, parts, or passions.” Yet Joseph Smith saw and heard personages and felt Their overwhelming love.

“My soul was filled with love,” Joseph wrote with his own pen, “and for many days I could rejoice with great joy and the Lord was with me, but [I] could find none that would believe the heavenly vision nevertheless I pondered these things in my heart.”

Joseph Smith had found what he “most desired.” He “had found the testimony of James to be true, that [anyone] who lacked wisdom might ask of God and obtain.” The answer to his prayerful quest was not the experience the revival preachers encouraged or perhaps that Joseph expected. There were no “shouts of rejoicing,” no bench to sit on while the faithful prayed for him to get religion, no “deep tones of the preacher.” There was just Joseph in the “wilderness,” acting on the Bible’s oft-repeated invitation to revelation: ask and receive.

Read the four primary accounts of Joseph’s First Vision on which this narrative is based:

1832 Account

1835 Account

1838 Account (Pearl of Great Price)

1842 Account

*This post was originally published on the Church’s site in 2016

How will you study Joseph Smith’s First Vision: Some thoughts on seeking, assuming, and knowing

In philosophical terms, Joseph’s first vision is epistemological (e-pis-tem-a-loj-i-cal).  Epistemology is the philosophy of knowing. It seeks answers to such questions as: What is knowledge?  What do I know? How do I know? Joseph’s vision is about knowing. “How to act I did not know,” he said about his pre-vision self.  But after the vision he knew. “I had seen a vision, I knew it, and I knew that God knew it.” 

“For how to act I did not know.” History, circa June 1839 – circa 1841. [Draft 2] P. 2 – The Joseph Smith Papers
This post is also epistemological

I’m asking, what can be known of Joseph’s experience and how? I recognize that there are severe limits on what I can know about the vision and how. But there are things I can know and some good methods of knowing. So I’m seeking answers based on the historical method and on spiritual experience. 

We can only know through Joseph

He was the only witness. He created the evidence we have to evaluate. It is best to seek learning by faithfully studying Joseph’s accounts. It is worst to assume what his experience must have been like and how he would respond to it.  But that’s exactly what many people do. 

“I had seen a vision, I knew it, and I knew that God knew it.” History, circa June 1839 – circa 1841 [Draft 2] P. 4 – The Joseph Smith Papers
Many people do hypothetical history

That’s when a person imagines how the past should have been rather than working to discover how it actually was. One problem with hypothetical history is that it’s easy to disprove. For example, without ever looking at the evidence, some assume that if Joseph saw God and Christ he would obviously tell his family right away. He would remember his precise age at the time. He would write the experience immediately. And surely he would relate it the same every time he told it.  None of those assumptions is supported by Joseph’s accounts of his vision.   

Joseph’s way of knowing can be our way of knowing

In other words, if we seek as Joseph did, we can come to know what he knew as he knew.  A well-known statement of this is Moroni 10:3-5 in the Book of Mormon. Sometimes people sum up this passage as, “just pray about it,” but those few words hardly capture the formula, which includes more than one hundred carefully chosen words. It says you need two ingredients to begin: someone’s testimony or statement, and the ability to test its veracity. We must have the testimony in order to verify it. But simply knowing about a testimony is not the same as knowing that it is true. So Moroni says we have to do extensive brain work: reading, remembering, pondering, all with real intent or focused purpose. We also have to add spiritual work: faith in Jesus Christ, sincerity, prayer. When a seeker invests all of the required elements—intellectual and spiritual—the promise is that “by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things” (Moroni 10:5).

Verses 3-5 of Moroni 10 from an original Book of Mormon

An early Latter-day Saint newspaper article explained this way of knowing

“Search the revelations which we publish, and ask your heavenly Father, in the name of his Son Jesus Christ, to manifest the truth unto you, and if you do it with an eye single to his glory, nothing doubting, he will answer you by the power of his Holy Spirit: You will then know for yourselves and not for another: You will not then be dependent on man for the knowledge of God.”

The principle of independent verification by revelation

That’s how Dallin H. Oaks described this epistemology. Simply put, it’s seeking. There are other ways to think about knowledge. Rationalism and the scientific method emphasize observation and the intellect but discount spiritual possibilities or dimensions of knowing. These epistemologies are good at revealing proximate truths but fail when it comes to knowing ultimate ones. They can’t verify the existence of God, or whether he appeared to Joseph in a grove. 

These ways of knowing are appealing

They provide satisfying certainty about perplexing problems like the causes of sickness or natural disasters. They are good at explaining how, but incapable of ultimately explaining why some things happen. They are powerless to verify or disprove Joseph Smith’s testimony of his first vision. People who think in these ways alone can assume, as one scholar did that “the revelation to Moses as recorded in the Old Testament can hardly be taken literally as an event in which the Divine handed over or dictated to Moses Ten Commandments,” but he doesn’t know that. He stated it forcefully as a foregone conclusion but it’s still just a personal opinion based on his assumption about what is possible. 

Agnosticism, or not knowing, is another alternative

It is the conviction that ultimate things are unknowable. As with Joseph Smith’s epistemology, agnosticism is based on personal experience, or lack thereof, with God. Agnostics know that they don’t know, and some agnostics assume that no one else knows either. 

From all the alternative ways of knowing, Joseph Smith chose to be a seeker

The Oxford English Dictionary defines seek as to approach or draw near to God in prayer. It defines a seeker as “a searcher, and explorer, one who endeavors to find something hidden or lost, as in seeker after truth.” Joseph Smith recognized that he lacked the ultimate knowledge of salvation. He desired it badly. He thought, read, observed, analyzed, and finally prayed to find it. He worked hard for it. He struggled. Seeking is active, not passive. Seeking is not spiritual or intellectual. Seeking is spiritual and intellectual. Seeking requires the whole soul, all of one’s faculties. Seeking is the investment of one’s best brain work, spiritual sensitivities, moral judgments, and emotional vulnerabilities. Seeking is humble. Seeking is hard. And seeking is ultimately satisfying.

Assuming is the enemy of seeking

Assume has many definitions. The ones meant here are to pretend to possess, to put forth claims or pretensions, to take for granted as the basis of argument or action, to suppose. To assume is to avoid the hard work of seeking. Assumptions are not knowledge, but often those who hold them do not discern the difference. At best, assumptions are hypotheses—the beginning, not the end, of knowledge. At worst, assumptions masquerade as knowledge, pacifying those who hold them and keeping them from seeking. Assumptions thus prevent us from ultimate knowing. Assuming is intellectually and spiritually lazy. It is arrogant. It is easy. And, though temporarily attractive, it is ultimately unsatisfying and it can be spiritually devastating.

 D&C 88:118: “And as all have not afaith, seek ye diligently and bteach one another words of cwisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best dbooks words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith.”

Seeking is a commandment

Over and over the scriptures enjoin us to seek. A single verse, Doctrine and Covenants section 88:118, commands three times that we should seek. It tells us why to seek: because we lack faith.  It tells us what to seek: learning. It tells where to seek: out of the best books. It tells us how to seek: diligently, as well as by study and also by faith. Similar instructions are everywhere in the scriptures. Sometimes the command to seek is modified by an adverb, as in seek diligently, or seek earnestly (D&C D&C 46:6, 88:118).  Sometimes we are told what to seek (Amos 5:4-6, 14; D&C 6:16; 11:7, 21; 25:10; 46:8, 88:118; Jacob 2:18).  Sometimes the scriptures say what not to seek (D&C 6:7; 11:7; 22:4; 66:10; Jacob 4:10; Alma 39:14).  Some of the most beautiful passages are the ones that attach specific promises to seeking. “Seek the Lord, and ye shall live,” says one (Amos 5:6), an if/then formulation reiterated in the Doctrine and Covenants: “Seek the face of the Lord always, that in patience ye may possess your souls, and ye shall have eternal life” (101:38; see also 11:23, 88:83). Seeking is the means to knowing God. We could spend a long time profitably studying the scriptures that teach us how and what and where to seek. 

There are no scriptural instructions to assume    

This philosophical and dictionary work has a lot to do with the way we decide to study Joseph Smith’s first vision. Anyone concerned about knowing whether Joseph told the truth approaches the issue either as a seeker or as an assumer. A seeker comes to the quest open-minded, open-hearted, desiring to know whether and in what ways Joseph’s testimony is true and willing to use any means—spiritual and intellectual—to gain that knowledge. An assumer, whether believing or unbelieving, pre-supposes that they have knowledge. What more is there for them to learn? They are narrow-minded, closed to at least some of the possible means of knowing.  Rather than hold assumptions tentatively and subject them to testing and verification, assumers have already arrived at the conclusion. They do not want to know any more. They do not seek to know every bit of evidence Joseph left us, asking what it might reveal. Rather, they pick and choose bits that match their assumptions.

The historical method 

Is the means that seekers can use to gain knowledge of the accounts of Joseph’s vision. It is a disciplined way of thinking that identifies and sorts different kinds of information. It seeks knowledge of the past from those who created the knowledge. It discerns the difference between historical facts and interpretations of the facts or opinions about them. Historical facts are pieces of knowledge about the past than can be verified, and that are the same regardless of how one chooses to interpret them. 

Here are some historical facts
  •         Joseph Smith, Jr., son of Lucy Mack and Joseph Smith, was born in Vermont in 1805
  •         Several documents created by Joseph Smith and his associates declare that he experienced a vision
  •         These documents were written in the 1830s and 1840s

Those are historical truths that can be verified using the historical method. Notice, however, how little these facts actually reveal. The historical method is limited. It can tell us whether Joseph Smith was born in Vermont in 1805. It cannot tell us whether he was visited by God in New York in 1820. It can show us several documents that testify that Joseph envisioned heavenly beings. It cannot tell us whether his testimony is true or false. It can prove that the documents were written in the 1830s and 40s. It cannot prove whether they accurately represent Joseph’s experience in the grove. The historical facts do not prove or disprove whether Joseph experienced a vision.

Seekers need more than the historical method

The combination of seeking by study and by faith enables seekers to discern whether Joseph’s accounts tell the truth. The foremost historians of the first vision are seekers of the study and faith variety. They are disciplined, highly skilled students of the historical method who were trained in esteemed universities. And they choose to exercise faith in Jesus Christ and seek to know by spiritual and intellectual means. 

What about people who lose their faith after learning of the multiple first vision accounts

I have visited with and studied many of these sincere souls. Compared to the first vision scholars, they are ignorant of the evidence and of the historical method of studying it. They are generally poorly-informed people who assumed they were well-informed. Their crisis of faith began when they encountered evidence that overturned their assumptions. They did not practice a disciplined method of seeking. They did not seek by diligent, systematic study as well as by faith. Googling is not a synonym for seeking, nor is depending on secondary evidence or antagonistic witnesses. The hard work of seeking by study and by faith often prevents the painful process these people experience. 

Joseph was a seeker

He not only created historical documents that testify that he experienced a heavenly vision. He also left us evidence of his effective epistemology, his way of knowing. By richly documenting his first vision, Joseph gave us a testimony to verify and illustrated how it could be done.   

In 2020, I’ll post all year about Joseph Smith’s First Vision and the Book of Mormon. Subscribe if you’re a seeker, or want to be. Leave me a comment if you have questions about the First Vision or the Book of Mormon you want to discuss. Finally, share these posts with anyone you think they might edify or help.

 

(Bi)centennial of Joseph Smith’s First Vision, Part 2

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 Smith
James E. Talmage testified of Joseph Smith's First Vision
James 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.

 

(Bi)centennial of Joseph Smith’s First Vision

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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