D&C 76 and continuing revelation

As I was reading D&C 76 this week, I was struck by how the "prologue" to that section (verses 1-10) emphasizes knowledge as the great promise of eternity: the great reward these verses promise to those who serve God faithfully is to have all hidden mysteries revealed to them, to be enlightened by the Spirit, to know the secrets of God's will, to attain an understanding that will make the wisdom of the wise perish and come to nothing, etc. From a historian's perspective, I think we're getting a window here into Joseph Smith's greatest longings: He wanted to know stuff. He was an intellectual, at least by temperament, even though obviously he didn't have the formal education that would make him recognizable, then or now, as a significant intellectual figure.

From that thought, my attention turned to... the structure, I guess I'll call it...the structure of the revelatory process by which D&C 76 came into being. And to tip my cards from the beginning, the thought came to me that this structure is decidedly liberal in terms of how we see Smith relating to what, for him and his society, was the scriptural canon.

1. Joseph finds a statement in the scriptures that doesn't mesh with reason. Joseph and Sidney are working on their "new translation" of the Bible, and they come to John 5:29, which says that those who have done good will come forth to the resurrection of life [or, as Joseph's "translation" puts it, the resurrection of the just] and those who have done evil to the resurrection of damnation [the resurrection of the unjust].

It's the standard biblical vision of a bifurcated afterlife and judgment: the righteous on this side, the wicked on the other. But something about that doesn't make sense to Joseph. How can there just be two destinations for people in the world to come? If God rewards everyone according to their works—plenty of scriptures along those lines—and given the reality that some people do more good (or more evil) than others, how can there be only two eternal rewards? Surely those who did more good will receive a greater portion of glory, which would require more options than just heaven or hell. That just stands to reason, Joseph thinks—or as he states it in the quotation from History of the Church that appears in the intro to this section: "It appeared self-evident..."

2. Joseph spends time wondering and reflecting about this dilemma. We're not told too much about that, just that "this caused us [Joseph and Sidney] to marvel," and that they "meditated upon these things" (vv. 18-19).

3. Joseph embraces a new vision, consistent with his reason and more expansive than the scriptural vision he found problematic. The boldly revisionist nature of Joseph's vision of the three degrees of glory may not be so apparent to Latter-day Saints who have grown up with this conception of the afterlife, and who are accustomed to talking about the three degrees of glory alongside rhetoric about a bifurcated judgment, since the two concepts coexist in LDS discourse. In other words, LDS readers probably tend to think of D&C 76 as a refinement on the bifurcated vision, not as a conflicting vision.

But the conflict becomes evident whenever you explain the three degrees of glory to someone raised to think of the afterlife in simple terms of "heaven and hell." I encountered this on my mission. You'd teach the plan of salvation (discussion 4 in those days), and the investigator would ask, "But what about heaven and hell?" And then different missionaries would offer different ways of reconciling the two visions. Sometimes they'd present the terrestrial and telestial kingdoms as subdivisions of heaven; sometimes they'd present them as subdivisions as hell. Those are dramatically different ways of understanding the system. That dramatic difference is a sign that D&C 76 isn't just adding more detail to the already established bifurcated vision (though Mormon orthodoxy's impulse to conceive of the scriptures as a unified whole pressures Latter-day Saints to understand D&C 76's relationship to the Bible in that way). D&C 76 is an alternative vision, which Latter-day Saints have to work to try to reconcile with the older vision—and they've come up with diametrically opposed attempts at a solution.

The bottom line here is that faced with a scriptural teaching that doesn't make sense to him, Joseph embraces in its place a vision that does make sense. Joseph's new vision goes beyond scriptural teaching and thus clashes with an understanding of scriptural authority that's prone to point to a verse in the canonical text and say, "Here's God's answer; discussion's over." Through new revelation to himself, Joseph gains access to a new way of understanding—something that eye has never seen, nor ear heard, nor has yet entered into human heart (76:10).

4. Joseph's new understanding involves reading the existing scriptures in new ways. The clearest example here is D&C 76's relationship to 1 Corinthians 15. Every missionary knows that D&C 15:40-42 talks about bodies celestial and bodies terrestrial, one glory of the sun, another of the moon, another of the stars. For years Mormons have used that verse as a prooftext for the three degrees of glory: look, right there, the Bible's talking about the celestial, terrestrial, and telestial kingdoms.

I don't think there's any disputing that Joseph's use of the terms "celestial" and "terrestrial" in D&C 76 is inspired by 1 Cor. 15. (Where he came up with the term "telestial" remains an intriguing question for me. Did he have enough of a working knowledge of etymology at that point that he could knowingly use the Greek-derived prefix "tele"—or is the new coinage as crude as replacing the "c" in "celestial" with the "t" in "terrestrial"?) I also don't think you can reasonably dispute (though there are plenty of unreasonably orthodox Mormons who will try) that Joseph's use of the terms "celestial" and "terrestrial" in D&C 76 has nothing to do with the meaning of those terms in 1 Cor. 15, which is simply referring to "heavenly" versus "earthly" bodies. To the degree that D&C 76 is inspired by 1 Cor. 15, it represents a creative misreading of 1 Cor. 15.

To me, that's not necessarily a mark against D&C 76. I don't have a problem with creative misreading. As other postings I've made to this blog attest, creative misreading is a big part of how I approach the scriptures. I read the scriptures knowing full well (and there my method differs from Joseph Smith's, I suspect) that the meaning I take from these texts is not the meaning the authors intend. But by their nature, words can yield meanings other than those their authors intend. Joseph's revelatory process involves drawing unintended meanings from passages of scripture—so does mine.

5. Joseph's new revelation is not the end. Later revelations alter the vision in D&C 76. D&C 76 says that the terrestrial kingdom is for people who died without law (i.e., the heathen, who didn't know the gospel) and for people who accept the gospel in the next life. Four years later (D&C 137), Joseph is surprised to have a vision of his brother Alvin in the celestial kingdom, whereupon he's told that—contrary to what D&C 76 indicates—people who die without a knowledge of the gospel can go to the celestial kingdom if God knows that they would have accepted it.

Take together, D&C 131-132 represent another revision to D&C 76. D&C 76 says that those who enter the celestial kingdom are gods, to whom all things are subject (vv. 58-59); the revelation also says that everyone in the celestial kingdom is equal in power and dominion and glory (vv. 92-96). But then D&C 131-132 tell us that there are different degrees within the celestial kingdom—so not everyone is equal—and only those in the highest degree are gods to whom all things are subject.

Again, orthodox Latter-day Saints who need to believe that the scriptures are a consistent whole will have to dance around to make the new information out to be simply a refinement, not a contradiction. In doing so, they miss a valuable lesson: Because the scriptures are based on a partial understanding of the "secrets" and "good pleasure" of God's will (76:7, 10), not everything stated in these texts is true. Continuing revelation doesn't just supplement our present understanding; it revises it. Which means that faith in continuing revelation implies accepting the possibility—the inevitability—that things we now think are true, on the scriptures' say-so, will turn out, in fact, to be wrong.