Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• He was confused by the failings of the Christians in the town. Like his mother earlier, he was aware of more hypocrisy and contradiction than harmony or devotion. “My intimate acquaintance with those of differant denominations led me to marvel excedingly for I discovered that they did not… adorn 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.” The revivals created a “stir and division amongst the people” where there was supposed to be love. “All their good feelings one for another (if they ever had any) were entirely lost in a strife of words and a contest about opinions.”
• He wanted, he later said, “to get Religion too wanted to feel & shout like the Rest but could feel nothing.”
• Joseph Sr. was filled with yearnings for peace and salvation combined with deep distrust of churches and ministers. He bestowed on his son a concern for the failures of the churches, Lucy, who wanted the comfort of religion and the respectability of church membership, also had trouble finding a church to join. The two imparted faith to their children but no clear direction or institutional support. Joseph Jr. was left on his own to find answers. Although the revivals brushed his life and probably awakened concerns about his sins, he found salvation in a private vision, not in a camp meeting. He was bred to independence.
• Finally Joseph said quietly, “I have taken the severest chastisement that I have ever had in my life.” The angel had met Joseph on the road near Cumorah and warned him that he “had not been engaged enough in the work of the Lord; that the time had come for the Record to be brought forth; and that I must be up and doing, and set myself about the things which God had commanded me to do. Joseph appeared calm. “I now know the course that I am to pursue, so all will be well.”
• To account for the disjuncture between the Book of Mormon’s complexity and Joseph’s history as an uneducated rural visionary, the composition theory calls for a precocious genius of extraordinary powers who was voraciously consuming information without anyone knowing it.”
• Joseph had not told his mother about his First Vision, and spoke to his father about Moroni only when commanded. His reticence may have shown a fear of disbelief. Although obscure, Joseph was proud. He did not like to appear the fool. Or he may have felt the visions were too sacred to be discussed openly. They were better kept to himself.
  • Not calculated or convenient
• The Book of Mormon actually recasts the meaning of the original scriptures by offering what has been called a strong reading of the Bible. Instead of seeing the Bible as a book of holy words, inscribed by the hand of God in stone, the Book of Mormon has a rather modern sense of scripture coming out of a people’s encounter with God. In places, the prophets grow impatient with those who separate sacred texts from the people who produced them.
• The book works on the premise that a history—a book—can reconstitute a nation. It assumes that by giving a nation an alternative history, alternative values can be made to grow.
• Joseph’s revision was more like Thomas Jefferson’s treatment of the New Testament. Without referring to the ancient manuscripts, Jefferson altered the text to suit his own preferences, except that, Jefferson pared back the text to the bare bones of Jesus’s moral teachings, while Joseph added long passages and rewrote sentences according to his inspiration.” As a son of the Enlightenment, Jefferson cut out the mysterious doctrines; as a prophet and seer, Joseph expanded and elaborated them. Unlike the scholarly translators, he went back beyond the existing texts to the minds of the prophets, and through them to the mind of God. As he said later in life, “I believe the Bible, as it ought to be, as it came from the pen of the original writers.”
• Joseph Smith’s Moses is a Christian, as are the prophets in all his translations.
• A Christian godhead with Father, Son, and Holy Ghost presides over the world from the beginning.
• There is no sharp drop after the Fall, followed by gradual spiritual enlightenment. Theologically, the ancient patriarchs were the equals of later Christians. The problem of history was to hold on to the Gospel, not to prepare for its coming.
  • Unapologetically Christian
• The Enoch narrative created a deep history for the young church. The revelation came while Oliver Cowdery and the missionaries to the Lamanites headed west to find a site for the City of Zion. The writings gave the little flock a pattern for their own city-building. Enoch’s people dwelt in a city called Zion “because they were of one heart and of one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them,” a city so righteous it “was taken up into heaven.”
• In 1835 the Church hired Joshua Seixas to teach Hebrew to the elders. Joseph joined the classes along with everyone else. The inspired translator of the Bible and Book of Mormon received instruction from a professor, as if he wanted to blend conventional learning with his own special gifts.
• Joseph later wrote that some strange notions and false spirits had crept in among them” which had to be “overcome.” But, of course, he could not discredit visionary experience. When Levi Hancock told about his vision of Christ after baptism, Joseph said it showed the Lord’s favor. He could scarcely say otherwise when the promise of visions and gifts was one of Mormonism’s great appeals. Corrill said Mormons “believe rather more firmly…than others do” in biblical promises “that these signs shall follow them that believed; in his name shall they cast out devils, heal the sick, etc.” Joseph had to restrain the excesses without discouraging spiritual gifts altogether.
• The line between laity and clergy, the most significant social division in Christian ecclesiastical society, was erased. Joseph, a plain man himself, inexperienced in preaching, trusted ordinary men to carry the message.
• The economic reforms put Joseph Smith’s Zion in company with scores of utopians who were bent on moderating economic injustices in these years. One startling revelation declared that “it is not given that one man should possess that which is above another: Wherefore the world lieth in sin.” Such a call for equality of property could be read as a criticism of the capitalist order more far-reaching than Robert Owen’s plans for New Harmony, Indiana, which self-consciously aimed at creating a new moral order mony, within industrial society, or the Transcendentalists’ attempt at Brook Farm to stop the degradation of labor.
• The revelations did not generate resentment against social injustice or try to motivate reform through outrage. The leading motif was concern for the poor rather than resentment of their exploiters.
• Unequal property prevented people from being “of one heart and one mind,” the ideal of Enoch’s city.
• The scene at the June 1831 conference typified Joseph’s relationship with his people in the early years. In a log schoolhouse on a hill in a forested countryside, plain people of little education and much zeal sit before him on slab benches. He is one of them, an ordinary man among ordinary men. He speaks of his visions and their possibilities, trying to invest them with power and intelligence beyond his capacity to describe.
• Can they put the armies of mations at defiance? Sometimes they are uncertain. Sometimes they burn with perfect certainty. They feel their lives are being elevated, their persons empowered. The concerns of farms, shops, and families drop away, and they dedicate their lives to the work.
• The whole operation ran on faith. Joseph suppressed his own anxieties and required the same of everyone else.
• Bishop Edward Partridge was to grant inheritances to each Family. Another migrant, Sidney Gilbert, Newel Whitney’s partner, was to open a store. William W. Phelps, a newspaper editor from Canandaigua, New York, was to start a press.”
  • Key parts of a city
• In establishing his Zion, Joseph joined a large company of utopian community builders. Between 1787 and 1860, 137 communitarian experiments were undertaken in the United States. All sought to improve the world by forming miniature societies on ideal principles.
  • Fogarty, American Communal, xxiv
• To the end of his life, he gathered his followers into cities no matter the cost.
• The incident had persuaded Booth, a Methodist minister of more than ordinary gifts. Convinced by his own eyes, he accepted Mormonism. But from then on, every attempt at healing became a test, and, as his faith waned, he noted only failures, overlooking or not witnessing the successful healings recounted by the believers.
• More than one-fifth of priesthood-holding converts in Joseph Smith’s lifetime were cut off from the Church or turned against it.
• As the years went by, and one stalwart after another deserted him, Joseph came to value loyalty above every other virtue.
• Once Rigdon sensed hostility, he attacked, saying that Towle was in the “gall of bitterness, and the bond of iniquity.” Furthermore “all, that you have ever done in the world, was mischief.” According to Towle’s account, Joseph said nothing until she turned to him and demanded that he swear he had seen an angel. He replied that he never swore at all. “Are you not ashamed, of such pretensions?” she insisted. “You, who are no more, than an ignorant, plough-boy of our land!” Joseph calmly noted that “the gift, has returned back again, as in former times, to illiterate fishermen.”
• Other churches distilled their beliefs into brief creeds. The New England Congregationalists wrote “Platforms” to serve as church constitutions. But Joseph had an aversion to creeds. Later he criticized the very idea of them. They circumscribed truth when he wanted expansion. Revelation overturned old ideas and was forever evolving.
  • Are we evolving?
• In an inexplicabłe contradiction, Joseph was designated as the Lord’s prophet, and yet every man was to voice scripture, everyone to see God. That conundrum lies at the heart of Joseph Smith’s Mormonism.
• At an afternoon session in Jackson County, Joseph received a follow-up revelation on organizing a firm comprising nine men who were “to manage the affairs of the poor, and all things pertaining to the bishopric both in the land of Zion, and in the land of Shinehah [Kirtland].” Everyday management of the storehouse remained with the two bishops, Partridge in Missouri and Whitney in Ohio, but overall direction was to come from this higher council. Called the United Firm or the United Order, it functioned like a company, managing a tannery, steam sawmill, a printing press, and real estate in hopes of serving the Saints and turning a profit for the storehouse.”
• The two revelations on the firm, like the others on consecrated properties, were long on principles and short on detail. They presented a theological message, not a business plan. Almost nothing was said about division of responsibilities, organizational structure, or procedures. One revelation dwelt instead on the connection of earthly and heavenly societies.
• Nearly every day he visited the woods to pray. With nothing to do but meditate, old sorrows came flooding back.
• The passage gives us once again a Joseph weighed down with regret and yearning, the Joseph reflected in Enoch’s lament in the Book of Moses and Nephi in the Book of Mormon, grieving because of his sins: “O wretched man that I am.”
  • The fullest grain has a head that hangs the lowest.
• Mormonism came like a liberation. Young afterwards said he loved irs broad scope. “Were you to ask me how it was that I embraced ‘Mormonism,’ I should answer, for the simple reason that it embraces all truth in heaven and on earth.” Mormonism was “light, intelligence, power, and truth.”
• The exaltation revelations never reply to other texts, give reasons, or make arguments.
• The doctrine recast life after death. The traditional division of heaven and hell made religious life arbitrary. One received grace or one went to hell. In Joseph’s afterlife, the issue was degrees of glory. A permanent hell threatened very few. The question was not escape from hell but closeness to God. God scaled the rewards to each person’s capacity. Even the telestial glory, the lowest of the three, “surpasses all understanding.”
• A later revelation further softened divine judgment. In December 1832 the elders were told that glory was granted according to the law each person could “abide,” whether celestial, terrestrial, or telestial. One’s glory, it was implied, was tailored to one’s capacity. “He who is not able to abide the law of a celestial kingdom, cannot abide a celestial glory.” The glory one received was the glory one found tolerable. “For what doth it profit a man,” the section concluded, “if a gift is bestowed upon him, and he receive not the gift? Behold he rejoices not in that which is given unto him.” One’s place in heaven reflected more one’s preference than a judgment. “Intelligence cleaveth unto intelligence; wisdom receiveth wisdom; truth embraceth truth.” The last judgment matched affinities.
• One Mormon rellected later thar “my traditions were such, that when the Vision came first to me, it was so directly contrary and opposed to my former education, I said, wait a little; I did not reject it, but I could not understand it.”
• The priesthood had one purpose in every age: exaltation. Rather than being a governmental hierarchy or a corporate organization, the priesthood held the sacral power to bring people into the presence of God.
• Though Joseph’s light of truth doctrine pointed that way, he did not follow the Transcendentalists’ path to spiritual enlightenment. A revelation in May 1833 put Christ, rather than nature, at the center of salvation.
• The Saints were told to follow the path of Christ toward this fulness, not to search nature for signs of divinity.
• To become like God, as the word “fulness” implied, was to grow in light and truth-to be filled with intelligenca Holiness was not an end in itself but the avenue to intelligence. One b the commandments in order to receive truth and light.
• This was not the truth of science or the knowledge found in libraries although Joseph would include these in the larger category of truth: “truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come.” Intelligence was a capacity for comprehension and insight, accounting for past, present, and future, grasping the moral and spiritual meaning of things, and radiating power. The uneducated Joseph Smith used the word “intelligence” to describe the glory of God. That capacity for seeing and comprehending supernaturally-with the spiritual mind, as he called it-was to him the zenith of human experience.
• Human beings in their essence were uncreated intelligences as eternal as God, and so radically free. In choosing the word “intelligence” to characterize this primal individual, Joseph invited comparison to the Enlightenment conception of the autonomous, reasoning individual. The individual, as conceived by Enlightenment thinkers, was autonomous because he or she possessed reason and therefore could choose. The individual had the right to consent to government, as the Declaration of Independence insisted, and to worship as he or she chose.
  • Worshipping God is a choice indicative of independence
• The “Olive Leaf” placed as much emphasis on spiritual preparation as on subject matter. “Sanctify yourselves; yea, purify your hearts, and cleanse your hands and your feet before me, that I may make you clean.” They were told to be careful about idle thoughts and excessive laughter. They were to cease to be idle and stop sleeping longer than was needful. Lustful desires, pride and light-mindedness, and all “wicked doings” had to be abandoned. The school required spiritual and moral discipline along with study out of the “best books.” Learning and sanctification went together.
• Little was said about engaging a teacher. The pupils were to instruct one another, pooling their knowledge, taking care that only “one speak at a time” while all listened “that all may be edified of all, and that every man may have an equal privilege.” The revelation envisioned egalitarian rather than authoritarian instruction. To that end, the revelations concluded with instructions on how to mold the elders into a brotherhood. “Above all things, clothe yourselves with the bond of charity,” they were told, and, to give that injunction form, a ritual was established for welding the students together.
• Speaking of the United States as a whole, Garry Wills has noted “there is no more defining note to our history than the total absence of a sacred city in our myths.” The only exception, he noted, “is the Mormons’ temple, fetched (like Jerusalem’s) from heaven.”
• The Mormon presence in Jackson County, as in every other county they occupied during the next fifteen years, tested democracy. The Mormon case illustrated an underlying democratic dilemma: can a majority, in defense of the public good as they see it, strip a minority of its rights?
• The conflict in Missouri changed Joseph’s politics dramatically. For the hrst time, government figured in his thought as an active agent. The revelations had never before acknowledged a nation or government, not even the Constitution. Zion had been considered a society unto itself. “There is and can be no ruler nor lawgiver in the Kingdom of God save it be God our Saviour,” Sidney Rigdon wrote in 1831.” But the Jackson County attacks made government an essential ally in recovering the Saints’ lost lands. The moderate revelation on August 6 advised the Saints to befriend constitutional law. The rights and privileges in the Constitution, the revelation said, belonged to all mankind and were justifiable before God, elevating those principles from the national to the universal. “As you know,” Joseph told his Missouri brethren in his August letter, “we are all friends to the Constitution yea true friends to that Country for which our fathers bled.” From then on, Joseph was never far removed from politics. For a decade, he sought protection from the government, usually without success, until finally, frustrated by his inability to rally government to the Saints’ side, he ran for president/
  • We acknowledge the necessity of engaging in eternal work in collaboration with finite systems
• The Mormon paper pointed out that if “a majority may crush any religious sect with impunity,” any religion could suffer; “the fate of our church now might become the fate of the Methodists” and then the Catholics. By asking for toleration and the right to worship, Mormonism had to present itself not as the one true church but as one church among a society of churches, all on an equal plane.
  • We do not ignore or disavow any who try to come to God by whatever means
• He asked how long Zion’s tribulation would last, and was told, “Be still, and know that I am God!” Considering all that he had been blessed with, Joseph knew he should not complain. “I am sensible that I aught not to murmur and do not murmur only in this, that those who are innocent are compelled to suffer for the iniquities of the guilty; and I cannot account for this.”
• The Saints learned that the mobs were the people and the people were the government. No law officer or court would come to their defense. In a destructive irony, the people of Jackson County, in the name of democracy, deprived the Mormon people of their democratic right to live, work, and vote in the county.
• Alter his bout with skepticism as a teenager, the affirmation of his belief he God of Creation did not calm him. He “cried unto the Lord for merey for there was none else to whom I could go and obtain mercy.” The vision of God in a “piller of light” was pacifying, but soon after, his transgressions and sins again “brought a wound upon my soul,” and the “persecutions and afflictions” suffered by his family left him in need once more.
• The journal entries, usually five or six lines jotted down casually when he had a spare moment, reveal a striving young man uncertain of his standing with God, yearning to be worthy, grateful when he finds peace.
• Like everyone else, Joseph wanted evidence of God’s backing. The expulsion from Zion had shaken his confidence. Although he never doubted his revelations, he was less certain about everyday events. The periodic instructions from heaven were beacons for the Church, but Joseph was on his own in carrying out the commandments.
• Joseph told the men around him “to cultivate thro’ life a modest and graceful demeanour, avoiding vulgarity,” a hard lesson for these rough-cut men, He told them to be careful about their posture while praying. “When we Kneel to pray we should be in a graceful manner such as would not cause a disgusting impression to arise in the mind of any spectator.”
• The failure to redeem Zion, the revelation made clear, was ultimately the Saints’ responsibility, not that of the Jackson citizens. The Missouri Saints had refused to impart their substance to the poor, and the Church at large did not volunteer enough men for the camp. Before they could succeed in Zion, the Saints must learn to consecrate. For now, the elders were to gather up their money, purchase land, and only then might they be found “throwing down the towers of their enemies” and taking possession. “But firstly, let my army become very great, and let it be sanctified before me.”
  • The people of the Lord have always been found largely inadequate
• Was Zion’s Camp a catastrophe? Perhaps, but it was not the unmitigated disaster that it appears to be. Most camp members felt more loyal to Joseph than ever, bonded by their hardships. The future leadership of the Church came from this group. Nine of the Church’s original Twelve Apostles, all seven presidents of the Seventy, and sixty-three other members of the Seventy marched in Zion’s Camp. Joseph’s own devotion to Zion and the gathering grew more intense.
• Mormonism succeeded when Other charismatic movements foundered on disputes and irreconcilable ill feelings partly because of the governing mechanisms Joseph put in place early in the Church’s history.
• The characterization of Joseph Smith as the prophet with no gift for administration, whose inchoate movement was saved by the genius of Brigham Young, misses the mark. Joseph did not attend to details the way Young did, but he could certainly organize. Almost all of his major theological innovations involved the creation of institutions-the Church, the City of Zion, the School of the Prophets, the priesthood, the temple. Joseph thought institutionally more than any other visionary of his time, and the survival of his movement can largely be attributed to this gift.
• Councils made the Church self-governing.
• Joseph told the high council in Clay that through them the will of the Lord might be known on all important occasions in the building up of Zion, and establishing truth in the earth.” Rather than monopolizing inspiration, Joseph spread it widely, always with the proviso that revelation at one level did not regulate the authority above.
• Joseph seemed surprisingly eager to reduce his own part in receiving revelations. He seemed uneasy about constantly appealing to heaven for direction. He told one inquirer that the Lord should not be petitioned for every little thing, especially if revelations on the same subject had already been given. “It is a gre[a]t thing to enquire at the hand of God or to come into his presence and we feel fearful to approach him upon subject[s] that are of little or no consequence… especially about things the knowledge of which men ought to obtain in all cencerity before God for themselves.” They should search out their instructions and rely more on their own judgment. Years before, Edward Partridge had been told in a revelation that “it is not meet that I command in all things.”
• The following fall, Joseph began blessing the men closest to him, Sidney Rigdon and Frederick G. Williame others. Joseph wrote down meditations on their characters that melded into blessings. Williams, Joseph felt, “is not a man of many words but is ever winning because of his constant mind.” “God grant that he may overcome all evil.” The next month he entered similar blessings for his father, morhen and sisters; his brothers Hyrum, Samuel, and William; and Oliver Cowdery. Of his father, Joseph wrote that “when his head is fully ripe he shall behold himself as an olive tree whose branches are bowed down with much fruit.” In these early meditations, he wove blessings, family, and the Old Testament patriarchs into a fabric of clan, spirituality, and priesthood.
• Priesthood was a father’s legacy to his son, counting for more than lands and herds. In the overall plan, material possessions had a part too. Zion promised an “inheritance” to all who migrated there. Fathers who lacked the wealth to provide for their children, as many did in this fast-moving , were promised land in the holy city. The word “inheritance” for describing properties in Zion expressed a father’s wish to bestow a legacy on his children. In restoring priesthood, Joseph restored fatherhood.
• But the confirmation of officers was not an election. Approval by the people indicated that officers were “upheld by the confidence, faith, and prayer of the church,” not that the officers represented the people’s interests.” “The people” had no political standing in Mormon thought. The word “people” never appears in the revelations except in phrases like “all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people.” The Church system was quite different from popular government. The latter was based in a fundament of popular sovereignty. Church officers served the people but were not beholden to them. In the Church, God was sovereign.
• As an ideal, righteousness served priesthood government as equality serves democracy. Never perfectly realized in practice, righteousness an equality constitute the inner spirit of their respective governmental systems. Ultimately, God checked unrighteous exercise of priesthood power. Unrighteous Church government would collapse. “The heavens with draw themselves the spirit of the Lord is grieved and when it has withdrawn amen to the priesthood or the authority of that man.”
• In the dark times of the Confederation, John Jay wrote to George Washington that “the mass of men are neither wise nor good, and the virtue like the other resources of a country, can only be drawn to a point and exerted by strong circumstances ably managed, or a strong government ably administered.” The problem was how to bring virtuous men to power, whether as patriot kings or as a corps of dedicated citizens ruling for the public good.
• His new histories and doctrines were tied to the Bible, and the Mormon elders claimed they taught an authentic Bible gospel, but for Joseph, the Bible was a gate, not a fence. Joseph’s daring—his blasphemous audacity, his enemies would say—erected a barrier to collaboration. “Monstrous claims,” Josiah Quincy called them in 1844. What point was there in looking for common ground, when Joseph had departed for other realms entirely? He created a transbiblical world unlike anything known in the Christian churches and had no interest in forming alliances with less venturous souls.
• The success of Mormonism, compared to Matthias’s short-lived Kingdom, was due to Joseph’s instinct for institution-building. In Utah, Mormonism easily moved from sect to established religion, because all the elements of a church were present already.
• Reliance on revelation made Joseph and the other visionaries appear marginal, but like marginal people before them, the prophets aimed a question at the heart of their culture: if believers in the Bible dismissed revelation in the present, could they defend revelation in the past.
• In reply to a minister’s inquiry about the distinguishing doctrine of Mormonism, Joseph told him that “we believe the bible, and they do not.” It was the power of the Bible that Joseph and the visionaries sought to recover. Not getting it from the ministry, they looked for it themselves.
• The missionaries had no plan, no pamphlets or books for the investigators to study, no standard message. The Book of Mormon was the only printed literature. The School of the Prophets had deepened their knowledge, but the missionaries did not learn key points or a set of principles. Joseph made no effort to homogenize the message or dictate topics. He exercised little oversight over Church communications save for publication of the revelations themselves.
  • The Church and gospel cannot be “over-prescribed.”
• Others were apprehensive about adopting a creed. Some of the Saints liked the improvisational character of early missionary preaching. Soon after the acceptance, Elder Almon Babbitt was charged with saying that “we have no articles of faith except the Bible.” The introduction anticipated these objections to regularization.”There may be an aversion in the minds of some,” the First Presidency acknowledged, “against receiving any thing purporting to be articles of religious faith, in consequence of there being so many now extant.” But “if men believe a system, and profess that it was given by inspiration, certainly the more intelligibly they can present it, the better. It does not make a principle untrue to print it.”
  • Have we moved too far to the other extreme where we need the prophet to remind us that we “can’t survive spiritually” without revelation?
• The flow of revelations prevented him from ever saying the work was finished. Even near the end of his career, he resisted any attempt to stanch the springs of inspiration. “The most prominent point of difference in sentiment between the Latter Day Saints & sectarians,” a clerk later recorded him saying, “was, that the latter were all circu[m]scribed by some peculiar creed, which deprived its members the privilege of believing any thing not contained therein: whereas the L. D. Saints had no creed, but are ready to believe all true principles that exist, as they are made manifest from time to time.”
• Creeds fixed limits. They seemed to say “thus far and no further.” Joseph once said that Methodists “have creeds which a man must believe or be kicked out of their church. I want the liberty to believe as I please, it feels so good not to be tramelled.” Revelation meant freedom to Joseph, freedom to expand his mind through time and space, seeking truth wherever it might be.
  • Then why do we excommunicate people who think women should get the Priesthood?
• Because they had not known Jesus in mortality, these modern apostles had to know Him by revelation. “Never cease striving until you have seen God face to face,” Cowdery told them.
• “As we come nearer to God we see our imperfections and nothingness plainer and plainer.” (William W. Phelps)
• The daylong meeting dedicated Church government as well as the temple. Joseph described the organizational business in detail while skipping over the sermons and the accounts of spiritual gifts. Constructing a kingdom of priests meant as much to him as propounding a set of doctrines. The dedication gave him the opportunity to display the Church’s organization, one of his masterpieces, before the Saints and the world.
  • House of order. Organization matters.
• These exhausting and exhilarating three months, the zenith of the Saints’ ecstatic experience, came in the 1830s, at a high point of visionary religion American history. In 1837, Emerson would tell Harvard Divinity School graduates “that the gleams which fHash across my mind, are not mine, but God’s.”56 In the next year, the “Era of Manifestations” began in Shaker communities at New Lebanon and Watervliet, New York, where visions, tongues, and spiritual “operations” took over entire congregations. In 1844, Ellen G. White, the Adventist prophetess, would receive the first in a series of visions that eventually filled many volumes. In the late 1830s a cluster of evangelical theologians around Charles G. Finney at Oberlin contemplated the doctrine of sinless perfection. Under the influence of grace, a person could live a perfectly sinless life.’ For a number of the cap on human experience seemed to be lifting.
  • Was it freedom that sparked this religious awakening? Why did this happen?
• The episode behind the veil is mysteriously suspended at the end of the diary without comment or explanation, as if Joseph was stilled by the event.”
• By the winter of 1837, however, factions in Kirtland, believing Joseph had fallen, were trying to depose him.
  • Often after your most spiritual experiences are you susceptible to temptation.
• On the large issues of the next eight years—plural marriage, the temple endowment, the plans for the Kingdom of God—we hear virtually nothing from Joseph himself. He moves behind a screen of other minds: those of clerks who wrote his diaries, hearers who took notes on his sermons, enemies who, charged him with dire crimes, official letters written by others, sensational reports by newspaper editors, and later_remembrances of loyal old comrades and embittered former friends. The image of Joseph Smith shifts and goes out of focus. We know the facts of his life—a succession of battles and defeats, widening influence and doctrinal exposition, a reach for power and glory, and finally gunshots and death—but not his personality or attitudes. Was he the same hopeful Joseph Smith of the Kirtland years, the person who yearned to be the friend of God, or did he develop an insatiable appetite for position and eminence. Did he give way to his lusts? The answers depend on who speaks.
• Frederick Williams put it bluntly: “The church [is] poor, Zion [is] to be built and we have not means to do it unless the rich assist, & because the rich have not assisted, the heads of the church have to suffer and are now suffering under severe embarrassments and are much in debt.”
  • Can you blame the church for being incredibly cognizant if finances?
• The bank episode not only hurt the Saints financially, it tried their faith. The notes had their Prophet’s signature on the face. He had encouraged investment; his enthusiasm persuaded subscription.
• Far from flourishing as their prophet had foretold, the Saints were caught in a downward spiral of personal losses and narrowing opportunities. Heber C. Kimball claimed that by June 1837 not twenty men in Kirtland believed Joseph was a prophet.
  • Study what a prophet is and is NOT. There are no promises that he’s protected from failure, especially when people’s greed are more supportive than their faith.
• Woodruff began his diary—perhaps the best by a nineteenth-century Mormon—as he left on his first mission in January 1835.
  • He was 28 years old. Now is the time to get good at this.
• Joseph told them he had received a revelation about the society in an audable voice,” not just by impressions of the Spirit. Joseph did not disclose the revelation but “remarked that if we would give heed to the Commandments the Lord had given this morning all would be well.
  • Moses wandered for 40 years not just because of his own failings but the failure of the people.
• He was helpless to offer a solution. “All I can say to you is, that in this Republic, the vox populi is the vox Dei.
  • Mob rule
• All this was history when Joseph reached Far West in the spring of 1838. The site gave him his first opportunity to construct a city from the ground up.
  • We are a city building people
• Cowdery showed how easily a disaffected member could slip out of millennial, scriptural discourse into political talk, using republicanism to discredit Church leaders. Democratic discourse transformed obedience, faith, and loyalty into fanaticism and blind submission.
• The clash between Mormonism and republicanism was brilliantly summed up in an exchange between John Corrill and Joseph Smith late in he summer. For some time, George Robinson noted, Corrill had been out sten “with the great wheal which is propelled by the arm of the Tehovah.” To justify himself, Corrill insisted that “he will not yeald his Judgement, to any thing proposed by the Church, or any individuals of the Church, or even the voice of the great (I am,) given through the appointed organ, as revelation, but will always act upon his Judgment.”Corrill posed the question: must an individual sacrifice his autonomy to the revealed will of God, or should he decide for himself in all things? In republican theory, the individual was supreme. In the Kingdom of God, was an individual required to sacrifice that autonomy?
• According to Robinson, Corrill, who had accepted Joseph’s revelations while serving in the Church, “says he will always say what he pleases, for he says he is a republican, and as such he will do, say, act, and believe, what he pleases.” To which Robinson added:/“Let the reader mark such republicanism as this, That a man should oppose his own Judgment to the Judgment of God, and at the same time profess to believe in the same God.” The question could not have been stated more forcefully. How could a believer in God put his own will and judgment up against the will and judgment of God? On the other hand, how could an independent republican yield his judgment to another man, even one speaking for God? The exchange laid bare the source of Mormonism’s conflict with democratic society. Mormons believed they were building Zion according to God’s commands; to apostates and outsiders they looked like mindless zealots obeying a tyrant.
• However he felt personally about the Mormons, Boggs could not resist the popular will. He was caught in the predicament that Alexis de Tocqueville perceived as the classic dilemma of democratic society: the majority ruled even when it trampled the rights of a minority. No agency of government could stand against overwhelming popular opinion. As Tocqueville could have predicted, the Mormons had no redress, no matter how grievous the crimes against them.
• Ironically, persecution moderated the Saints’ relationship with the rest of the world. For conversion purposes, the errors in other religions could be emphasized, but for political purposes, goodwill was more important.
• At the end of his 1839 account of early Mormonism, Corrill explained why he abandoned the movement:
• When I retrace our track, and view the doings of the church for six years past, I can see nothing that convinces me that God has been our leader; calculation after calculation has failed, and plan after plan has been overthrown, and our prophet seemed not to know the event till too late. If he said go up and prosper, still we did not prosper; but have labored and toiled, and waded through trials, difficulties, and temptations, of various kinds, in hope of deliverance. But no deliverance came.”
• Everything Corrill said was true.
• Meanwhile he would pass through tribulation, be put in peril, accused falsely, torn from his family, cast into the pit, sentenced to death, and all nature conspire against him. And why? “If fearse winds become thine enemy if the heavens gether blackness and all the elements combine to hedge up the way and above all if the very jaws of hell shall tape open her mouth wide after thee know thou my son that all these things shall give thee experiance and shall be for thy good.” The abuse, the injustice, the horror-all were for experience. “The son of man hath descended below them all art thou greater than he?” Christ had gone through worse and so Joseph must submit too. The voice of God told him to “endure it well.”
  • We don’t always fail or suffer because we made a mistake
• When Joseph met with the Twelve in 1839, the newly appointed apostles John Taylor and Wilford Woodruff began taking notes. Their records show a prophet whose mind still overflowed with information about heaven and God, though he seemed wary of telling all he was thinking. Church members had to be prepared first. He told the Twelve everything revealed to him would be revealed to them, ”& even the least Saint may know all things as fast as he is able to bear them.”
• He gave tips on how to receive revelation:
• 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 [sic] it you may find it. fulfilled the same day or soon… and thus by learning the Spirit of god. & understanding it you may grow into the principle of Revelation. until perfect in Christ Jesus.
• He was more concerned with developing the Twelve into an effective working unit. Joseph cautioned them to forgive one another and be merciful. Don’t seek to “excell one above another but act for each others good & honorably make mention of each others name in our prayers.”
• Congress was less impressive. Overall they felt there was “little solidity and honorable deportment among those who are sent here to represent the people; but a great deal of pomposity and show.”
• There is such an itching disposition to display their oratory on the most trivial occasions, and so much etiquette, bowing and scraping, twisting and turning, to make a display of their witticism, that it seems to us rather a display of folly and show, more than substance and gravity, such as becomes a great nation like ours.”
• The name of our city (Nauvoo,) is of Hebrew origin, and signifies a beautiful situation, or place, carrying with it, also, the idea of rest; and is truly descriptive of this most delightful situation.
  • Empyrean: Ideal place
• For a year, Joseph devoted himself almost entirely to city-building.
• If just causes found no favor, the nation would be brought to “the very verge of crumbling to peices and tumbling to the ground.” The Latter-day Saints, the people the government had disregarded, would save it. At that day “when the constitution is upon the brink of ruin this people will be the Staff up[on] which the Nation shall lean and they shall bear the constitution away from the very verge of destruction. Joseph, who loved and hated the United States, saw the collapsing country supported by his own people.
• That winter, Joseph and Bennett put the city government together. In his inaugural address as mayor on February 3, 1841, Bennett called for the suppression of tippling houses, the organization of the University of the City of Nauvoo, the formation of the militia under the name of the Nauvoo Legion, and the construction of a wing dam in the Mississippi and a ship canal down the center of the peninsula to provide both navigation and water power.
• From being heavily negative, the appeal of Zion had become almost entirely positive. The aphorism from Nehemiah struck the note of the new gathering: “arise and build.” The Presidency urged people to come for a higher life, “for their prosperity and everlasting welfare, and for the carrying out the great and glorious purposes of our God.”
  • “Be up and doing.”
• He wrote from the Missouri jail, “As well might man streatch forth his puny arm to stop the Missouri River in its dicread cours or to turne it up stream as to hinder the Almighty from pooring down knowledge from heaven upon the heads of the Latter day saints.”
• After the completion of the council system in 1835, the number of written revelations opening with lines like “verily thus saith the Lord” diminished. Instead of formal, dictated revelations, the later teachings were delivered in sermons, conversations, or letters. Many are known today only from notes taken down by William Clayton, a literate English convert, or William McIntire, a tailor who spelled haphazardly.” The doctrine of baptism for the dead was given in a sermon and enlarged in letters. The revelation on eternal marriage was written because Hyrum requested it. Almost everything else, among them many of the richest passages in Joseph Smith’s thought, is delineated only in ragged, compacted listeners’ notes.
• One of Joseph’s most famed statements was a casual aside to a Methodist preacher: “There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter but is more fine or pure and can only be discerned by purer eyes. We cant see it but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter.” No one at the time made anything of the radical idea. Clayton remarked only that “the gentleman seemed pleased and said he should visit Nauvoo immediately.” Clayton thought the Methodist’s reaction was as noteworthy as the revision of Christian metaphysics.”
• They assumed that a man claiming to hear from God “wishes to place his authority above that of the State.” A prophet necessarily created a sovereignty in competition with the voice of the people.
• Despite the paper’s claim, Nauvoo’s prosperity was tenuous at best. The site had no natural economic advantages, as its precipitous economic decline after the Mormons’ departure was to prove. Land sales and construction were the city’s chief industries, and the supply of land was inadequate for the burgeoning population.
• A man is saved no faster than he gets knowledge for if he does not get knowledge he will be brought into Captivity by some evil power in the other world as evil spirits will have more knowledge & Consequently more power than many men who are on the earth. Hence it needs Revelation to assist us & give us knowledge of the things of God.
• “Our heavenly father is more liberal in his views, and boundless in his mercies and blessings, than we are ready to believe or receive, and at the same time is as terrible to workers of iniquity, more awful in the executions of his punishments, and more ready to detect every false way than we are apt to suppose him to be.” God was both kind and terrible.
• Like Abraham of old, Joseph yearned for familial plentitude. He did not lust for women so much as he lusted for kin.
• Joseph explained to Nancy Rigdon, Sidney Rigdon’s daughter, who refused Joseph’s proposal of marriage, how he justified the apparent breach of the moral code. The path to happiness, he assured her, was “virtue, uprightness, faithfulness, holiness, and keeping all the commandments of God.” Even in taking additional wives, he had to think of himself as virtuous. But the phrase about “keeping the commandments of God” suggested how plural marriage was justified. “God said thou shalt not kill,-at another time he said thou shalt utterly destroy.” What was a believer to do with conflicting injunctions? Joseph reached a terrifying answer: “that which is wrong under one circumstance, may be and often is, right under another.” This unnerving principle was the foundation of the government of God. “Whatever God requires is right, no matter what it is,” he wrote Nancy, “although we may not see the reason thereof till long after the events transpire.”
• To Joseph’s mind, revelation functioned like law. The revelations came las “commandments,” the name he gave to all the early revelations. They required obedience. The marriage revelation laid down rules about adultery, binding partners to each other by covenant. If a woman “be not in the new and everlasting covenant, and she be with another man, she has committed adultery.” The same for men. “If her husband be with another woman, and he was under a vow, he hath broken his vow, and hath committed adultery.” The rules were as strict under plural marriage as under monogamy, except that revelation set the standard.
  • Are non-temple marriages considered lesser?
• The marriage covenant prepared the Saints less for wedded bliss than for heavenly rule.
• “The Lord said unto me, these two facts do exist, that there are two spirits, one being more intelligent than the other, there shall be another more intelligent than they; I am the Lord thy God, I am more intelligent than they all.” Like the stars, the spirits rise in ascending order God, echoing the traditional idea of the Great Chain of Being.” The verse suggests that the source of God’s authority comes from his being the highest and greatest of the intelligences, “more intelligent than they all.” Years earlier, Joseph had written that “the glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth.” Now he showed a universe filled with individual intelligences ruled by a God who was “more intelligent than they all.” God’s power grew out of his glory and intelligence rather than his having created everything out of nothing.
• Intelligence seems closely related to comprehension, including the understanding of good and evil. Through obedience and following the light, intelligence goes on growing through eternity.
• Did Joseph realize he was departing from traditional Christian theology? The record of his revelations and sermons gives no sense of him arguing against received beliefs. He does not refer to other thinkers as foils for his views. He was only vaguely aware of overthrowing entrenched theological traditions in making matter and intelligence eternal or in depicting the Saints on their way to becoming gods. His storytelling was oracular rather than argumentative. He made pronouncements on the authority of his own inspiration, heedless of current opinion.
  • “Prophets always have.”
• Joseph considered revelations like these to be of immense importance. In his last more than ever, he stressed that “knowledge is power & the years man who has the most knowledge has the greatest power.” “The reason why God is greater than all others Is He knows how to subject all things to himself.” Knowledge was power over evil, power over matter. “God has more power than all other beings, because he has greater Knowledge, and hence he knows how to subject all other beings to him.” Joseph said in a sermon in 1843 that “the principle of knowledge is the principle of Salvation.” Knowledge was the to ascend. One declaration that reached the Doctrine and Covenants was “Whatever principle of intelligence we obtain in this life will rise with us in the ressurrection; and if a person gains more way knowledge in this life through his diligence & obedience than another, he will have so much the advantage in the world to come.”
• A religious society under religious government had been his goal for thirteen years. Instead of creating parishes, he built cities. Instead of leaving people to worship where they lived, he gathered them. He aimed for a new social order patterned after the “order of heaven.”
• “The Lord has not given me Revelation concerning politics,” he said when explaining his vote for Walker. “I have not asked the Lord for it.—I am a third party [and] stand independent and alone.”
• Eventually, the Saints did build a vast inland empire, but one they conquered by industry rather than by arms.
• He did not intend to force his religion on anyone. He thought of himself as the champion of free worship. Nauvoo’s ordinance for religious freedom listed a dozen religions allowed to practice in the city. Josiah Quincy was surprised to hear Joseph invite a Methodist to preach from a Mormon pulpit. The socialist John Finch noted that “Joe Smith was in the practice of inviting strangers who visited Nauvoo, of every shade of politics and religion, to lecture to his people.” Joseph could honestly say that “it is one of the first principles of my life and one that I have cultivated from childbood, having been taught it of my father, to allow every one the liberty of conscience.” He made it an article of faith to allow people to “worship how, where, or what they may.” He declared, “I am an advocate of unadulterated my freedom.”
• As he told the Nauvoo High Council: “It was the principles of democracy that the peoples voice should be heard when the voice was just, but when it was not just it was no longer democratic, but if the minority views are more just, then Aristarchy should be the governing principle. e.g. the wisest & best Jaws should be made.” He was more devoted to rights and justice than to government by elections.” Rule by the wise seemed more sensible than government by the mistaken.
• At the annual conference in April, he gave what the literary critic Harold Bloom has called “one of the truly remarkable sermons ever preached in America.” Though never canonized as scripture, the King Follett sermon, known only through the overlapping notes of four diarists, has been called the culminating statement of Joseph Smith’s theology.”
• The point of this radical doctrine was obvious: God was one of the free intelligences who had learned to become God. The other free intelligences were to take the same path. “You have got to learn how to make yourselves God, king and priest, by going from a small capacity to a great capacity to the resurrection of the dead to dwelling in everlasting burnings.” Souls were meant to grow from smaller to greater.
• That made individual persons radically free. Their nature was not predetermined by their creator. They were what they were, not what God made them. Rather than God being the sovereign creator of all things from nothing, He was the most intelligent of the free intelligences. The universe is a school for these free, self-existing intelligences. God, finding “himself in the midst of spirit and glory because he was greater[,] saw proper to institute laws whereby the rest could have a privilege to advance like himself.” God nurtures the intelligences, giving them laws to help them progress to greater capacity. “God has power to institute laws to instruct the weaker intelligences that thay may be exhalted with himself.”36 He is their teacher, not their maker. Each one is free to choose. The intelligences have independent, self-existing wills, and each one must make the decision to ally with God or not, to join the order of the gods or not.
• He was bringing order out of chaos rather than making something from nothing.
• But the relationship took on a new meaning if people were invited to become kings, priests, and gods themselves. They remained subjects, to be sure, owing all deference and obedience to their sovereign, but they were subject to the monarch as princes and princesses are subject to their mothers and fathers. They subordinated themselves to the higher power in preparation for assuming that power themselves. The purpose of allegiance and obedience was not order and happiness but training. The subjects of the king were learning to become kings. King and subjects were separated by rank, not by class. All were members of the same order of beings as children are of the same order as their parents. Family became the ultimate and truest model of the heavenly order.
• The King Follett doctrines can sound profoundly American. Every man a god and a king fulfilled democratic aspirations to a degree unknown in any other religion. Joseph’s assertion that “all mind is susseptible of improvement” opened up the possibility of limitless growth.
  • Gods in embryo. Gods in training.
• At the trial, the defense argued that no single individual could be held responsible for the deaths of Joseph and Hyrum when the assassins were carrying out the will of the people. If the defendants were guilty, then so too were “every man, woman and child in the county guilty.” After six days of testimony, the jury acquitted the defendants.
• Anti-Mormon fury had erupted out of these otherwise unexceptional lives. Quite ordinary people were roused to levels of hatred and fear they never reached at any other time. “The unfortunate víctims of this assassination, were generally and thoroughly hated throughout the country,” Ford told the Mormons, thinking of the area around Hancock County. Among their nearest neighbors, Mormons were as generally detested as abolitionists in the antebellum South and, later, black freedmen during Reconstruction. One can only speculate on the reasons. It was not a hatred of the alien: the role of a prophet was well known to every believer in the Bible. It was more a fear of the familiar gone awry. Joseph was hated for twisting the common faith in biblical prophets into the visage of the arrogant fanatic, just as the abolitionists twisted the principle of equal rights into an attack on property in slaves.’ Both turned something powerful and valued into something dangerous. Frustrated and infuriated, ordinary people trampled down law and democratic order to destroy their imagined enemies.
• He had never been considered a model man, nor had he encouraged adulation. “I do not wish to be a great deal better than any body else,” he told one congregation.” His ambition was invested in what he called “the work.”
• Nothing admirable or even interesting could make its way past this fixed view of the impostor and his followers. The character of the fanatic was like racial stereotypes in excluding human qualities. Outside observers saw only a man who pretended to be inspired of God and made himself master of thousands. No one saw him as a biblical prophet.
• Almost from the beginning, he wanted more than a church. He was not satisfied with conversions or building up a congregation. Six months after the organization of the Church, the revelations directed him to organize “Zion.” The word implied a society, and in Joseph’s revelations, Zion became a city. The unit of organization was not the parish or the synod but the community. He worked all his life to organize communities, and in the end he succeeded. The judgment of history has been that Joseph’s great achievement was the creation of the Mormon people. Forming a “kingdom” was exactly what the critics feared. To them, the Church looked like an authoritarian regime with Joseph as the potentate. And yet this Zion was in its way democratic. The historian Nathan Hatch has observed that Joseph used his immense authority “to return power to illiterate men.” His was a religion for and by the people. It was not of the people-electoral democracy was absent-but if democracy means participation in government, no church was more democratic. Joseph was a plain man himself, and he let plain men run the councils and preside over the congregations. They were ordained elders and high priests, and they did the preaching. In his theology, unexceptional people could aspire to the highest imaginable glory. In belated recognition of this populist side, Joseph Smith’s Mormonism came to be understood in the twentieth century as an American religion.”
• Only a person of powerful conviction could have remained productive and hopeful through the discouragements. For years, the kingdom existed primarily in Joseph’s mind. He was one of those unlettered men who could have built a railroad or governed a state. Josiah Quincy saw in him “that kingly faculty which directs, as by intrinsic right.” But where his powers came from is a mystery. His upbringing seems so inadequate to his ambitions. He was undoubtedly blessed with intelligence and will, and the Bible, his chief cultural resource, was a trove of possibilities, but how was he able to perceive what lay in its pages? Whence the new scripture, the global schemes for a kingdom, the stories of eternity? He lacked the learning to conceive of the world on such a scale.