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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.

 

Was Joseph Smith a true or a false prophet?

Joseph Smith, Christmas, and the End of the World

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
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.

The Prince of Peace will be back soon!

Death, big brothers, and solving soteriological problems

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. 

Marvin John Harper
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). 

Rescue for the Dead by Jeffrey Trumbower
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. 

illulstrate how Joseph Smith's revelations affirm the harrowing of hell
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 journal entry, January 21, 1836
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)

 

How Do You Get Priesthood Power?

The Example of Emma Hale Smith Can Help
Artwork by Julie Rogers

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 Papers
Other 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.  

 

 

 

(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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Did Joseph Smith Obey the Word of Wisdom?

Did Joseph Smith obey the Word of Wisdom?

Whiskey, whiskey, whiskey

Joseph Smith stood before the saints in Nauvoo, Illinois in April 1841 and, with good humor, said: “What are my temptations? Whiskey whiskey whiskey.”  He said he “could live on it and get fat and feel well if God did not say it was sinful. He would not wrestle with it,” Joseph continued, “for he could not throw it.” Some people consider Joseph’s occasional consumption of alcoholic beverages hypocritical. Was it? 

Joseph drank before the Word of Wisdom was revealed

Martin Harris testified that Joseph “drank too much liquor” sometimes before he translated the Book of Mormon. The source for that is Joseph’s published history, so he didn’t try to hide it. Most of the other evidence that Joseph drank before the Word of Wisdom comes from critics, including a statement by Barton Stafford that “Joseph Smith, Sen. was a noted drunkard and most of the family followed his example, and Joseph, Jr. especially, who was very much addicted to intemperance.” But Joseph wasn’t very addicted. He wasn’t even a little addicted.  

Barton was grinding an ax against Joseph. Orlando Saunders is a less hostile, more credible witness. He said “everybody drank in those days,” including the Smith family.  “But,” he added, “they never got drunk.” Actually, Joseph’s dad said in 1834 that he had been drunk in the past, but Saunders and scholar Richard Bushman agree that “Joseph Sr.’s drinking was not excessive for that time and place.” It would have been odd if Joseph didn’t drink. It was common, and not yet forbidden by the Lord. Maligning Joseph for drinking before the Word of Wisdom is silly and mean. 

Joseph also drank after the word of wisdom was revealed in 1833Sidney Gilbert's copy of the Word of Wisdom

His journals are sprinkled with the evidence of occasions on which he drank. There is a pattern. After performing the marriage of a couple in January 1836, Joseph joined the wedding party as they “partook of refreshments, and our hearts were made glad with the fruit of the vine.” Speaking of the New Testament account of Christ furnishing a wedding party with wine, Joseph added playfully, “this is according to pattern set by our Savior himself and we feel disposed to patronize all the institutions of heaven.” 

To Joseph, these were sacramental occasions. He drank wine at weddings in keeping with the Word of Wisdom’s counsel to drink it “only in assembling yourselves together to offer up your sacraments before him. And, behold, this should be wine, yea, pure wine of the grape of the vine, of your own make” (D&C 89:5-6). The wine Joseph drank on these occasions had alcohol in it. It wasn’t just grape juice. Pasteurization was still half a century in the future. Originally, the Word of Wisdom approved, not condemned, specific, moderate drinking of sacramental wine.

A week after the marriage mentioned above, Joseph officiated in another “matrimonial occasion,” as his journal described it. Afterward groomsmen supplied wine. Joseph said he “cheerfully” blessed it, and the wine “was then passed around in order, then the cake in the same order. Suffice it to say our hearts were made glad, while partaking of the bounty of the earth which was presented until we had taken our fill. Joy filled every bosom,” His journal entry says, “I doubt whether the pages of history can boast of a more splendid and innocent wedding and feast than this. For it was conducted after the order of heaven.”

Not all of Joseph's drinking was sacramental

Joseph also drank wine in sacramental settings in the Kirtland temple, but not all of the occasions on which he drank were sacramental. Joseph apparently had some whiskey while confined in jail at Liberty, Missouri in the winter of 1838-1839. His journal entry for May 3, 1843 notes that Jenetta Richards, a recent immigrant from England, visited his office with a bottle of wine her mother made in England. Joseph’s journal says he “drank a glass of wine with her.”   

A month before his death, according to his journal, Joseph visited Frederick Moesser’s grocery store and “drank a glass of beer.” Originally, the Word of Wisdom approved mild barley drinks like the one Joseph had that day. On the last day of his life, confined in jail at Carthage, Illinois, solemn and conscious that he was about to meet his Maker, Joseph and his associates drank wine. John Taylor, an apostle who was with Joseph, noted later that this was not a sacramental occasion. “Our spirits were generally dull and heavy,” Taylor said, “and it was sent for to revive us,” the way saints today might have a coke in the afternoon. Taylor said all four men in the jail “drank of the wine, and gave some to one or two of the prison guards.” 

Those are the facts. You get to decide what they mean. Some people who are antagonistic toward Joseph, or just not well informed, decide the facts mean that Joseph Smith did not live the Word of Wisdom. That conclusion is anachronistic, or out of historical order. It assumes that observing the Word of Wisdom meant the same thing then that it does now. But it didn’t. 

What it means to obey the word of wisdom has changed over time

The revelation was originally given “not by commandment.” Joseph knew it well and observed it consciously, just not always meticulously, the way we might. He called excessive drinking a “monster,” and “the bane of humanity.” He “never interpreted the revelation as demanding total abstinence, but stressed moderation and self-control.” Joseph urged intemperate saints to be temperate and teetotaling ones to be tolerant.

Joseph might find it odd but not unexpected that critics devour the evidence he left us that once in a while he had a beer or drank a glass of homemade wine or enjoyed sacramental wine, or that he was tempted by whiskey, or that he drank some while he was unjustly imprisoned in a depressing dungeon. He might be puzzled that some people have focused inordinate attention on prosecuting him while overlooking the prophetic Word of Wisdom he produced. “I never told you I was perfect,” Joseph said, “but there is no error in the revelations which I have taught.” It is not hard to find faults Joseph did not try to hide, but where are the flaws in his revelation known as the Word of Wisdom?

Is the Book of Mormon True or False?

Greg Trimble convinced me to do this

Well, Greg and the teachings of some apostles. And the Holy Ghost. And this question posted online:

Is it true that Steven C. Harper and others in the history department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are transitioning the narrative about the Book of Mormon, so that it came through ‘revelation’ and not through ‘translation.’

The person who posed—pun intended—the question presumed to answer for me. So I hereby speak for myself.

It took me awhile to show up

I’ll grant that. Here are my excuses: I’m a historian by training and by personality, so I like to observe and analyze and describe the debates, but prefer not to get involved, especially when the quality of the dialogue decomposes in the comments. Plus, I’m an introvert. I don’t like to draw attention to myself. But I’m motivated most of all by the identity Mormon described best:

“I am a disciple of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. I have been called of him to declare his word among his people, that they might have everlasting life” (3 Nephi 5:13).

So I’m late but I’m here now. This is my first post. Subscribe if you want to be notified of the next one: Did Joseph Smith obey the Word of Wisdom? And the one after that, and the one after that. I’m not going away. I’m not changing sides.

The answer to the question above?

No. I’m not transitioning the narrative about the Book of Mormon. I’m telling the history as Joseph and Emma and Oliver did.

The question poses a false dilemma. It assumes that the Book of Mormon either came through revelation or translation. But it didn’t. The translation of the Book of Mormon came to Joseph Smith by revelation.

The question assumes there is conflict between the past and the present, the new and the old, between revelation and translation. There isn’t.

I have studied what Joseph Smith said about translating. I have studied the manuscript Oliver Cowdery wrote as Joseph dictated. I have studied the copy Oliver made for the printer. I have studied the statements of the people who witnessed Joseph translating the Book of Mormon.

Here are a few facts from all the evidence:

Joseph often said he translated by the gift and power of God—meaning the revelation/translation of an unknown ancient language through a stone or stones (either worked).

Oliver Cowdery wrote almost all of the Book of Mormon as Joseph Smith dictated it with the aid of seer stones but without books or notes between April 7 and June 11, 1829.

The records of those who knew Joseph Smith best show that they believed these things most.

That’s how I know the story. But this is how I know the story is true:

I read the Book of Mormon myself shortly before my mission. When I finished I did what the last chapter said I should. I knelt and said a simple prayer with faith in Jesus Christ, a sincere heart, and real intent. God answered my prayer with the thought: “You already know it’s true.” And that thought was accompanied by a feeling, a desire, an intense desire, to affirm the thought. I did know. I didn’t want to deny it. I never have wanted to fight it. It’s true.

I don’t have an answer for people who have asked God with faith in Christ, a sincere heart, and real intent, and not experienced what I did. I don’t deny their experience, or lack thereof. I don’t know why their prayer wasn’t answered as mine was. I just know that mine was.

I don’t know beyond a shadow of a doubt

I have shadows of doubts all the time. I just choose to not let doubts define me. I choose faith for that. I choose faith because I am better, happier, and holier when I live by the teachings of the Book of Mormon. I feel the Holy Spirit when I read it and try to do what it teaches me. I feel God’s love when I listen to Nephi explain how easily he was beset by sins, and how he trusted God and felt His love. I feel it when I listen to Enos, Alma, Amulek and others.

Their stories are the reason I became a born again Christian on my mission, where I internalized the Book of Mormon’s teaching that I am saved by the grace of Jesus Christ. So I testify that the Book of Mormon was translated from Reformed Egyptian by God’s revelation to Joseph Smith. I love the Book of Mormon and invite others to love it too.

Finally, notice how the question assumes that I’m much smarter and more capable and influential than I actually am. I’m ok with that part.