Receiving Him - D&C 84:33-38

 

"whoso is faithful unto the obtaining these two priesthoods of which I have spoken, and the magnifying their calling, are sanctified by the Spirit unto the renewing of their bodies. They become the sons of Moses and of Aaron and the seed of Abraham, and the church and kingdom, and the elect of God. And also all they who receive this priesthood receive me, saith the Lord; For he that receiveth my servants receiveth me; And he that receiveth me receiveth my Father; And he that receiveth my Father receiveth my Father’s kingdom; therefore all that my Father hath shall be given unto him."

Let's leave aside for a moment the enlightening language of magnifying one's calling. Let's leave aside for a moment the voluntary walk in faith it takes to obtain--receive as the later verses amend it--the two priesthoods. Let's leave aside for a moment the fact that these divisions of the Priesthood are now being framed as things to obtain, not just a bundle of duties, not just a brotherhood, but a substance, or more properly a delegated power. Let's instead notice the chain of embedded receptions offered as an explanation of he results of faithful living, faithful Priesthood bearing.

The Savior isn't a self-help author. He doesn't tell us we can do it ourselves, we had it in us all along, all we needed was the right conditions and the right push. He doesn't offer a gospel of bootstraps, or DIY goodness.

He's also not merely a wish-fulfillment guru. Faith without works is, in fact, quite lifeless. He's not Santa Clause to lavish you with all you want with no strings attached. It's true that He wants your heart and since He can read it, He won't accept any less than full authenticity as you turn it over to Him for salvation.

Somewhere in between, He grants grace, but insists on justice. He describes Himself as a Father because when we accept Him, it's like a new birth, and we have to live a new life under new conditions of obedience and willingness to be led by Him directly--through His Spirit.

But He also describes Himself as an Intermediary, an Advocate, a Proxy for us, a Redeemer who buys us back from hell for another destination, a Savior who places Himself between us and the justice we deserve so that His grace can pull us out from our enslavement. He's an in-between. A Mediator. A High Priest.

The principle that He places Himself in an enabling position to grant us favorable terms on our eternity is a nested principle. He Himself organized that we would have fellows in positions of inspired enabling. Prophets speak for the Lord as the Lord speaks for His Father. Priests administer the sacrament as the Lord demonstrated the pattern of symbolically integrating His redeeming blood and flesh in living out a renewed covenant relationship with Him. This places them also in a position to enable coming unto Christ.

Every office of both Priesthoods includes functions of the same kind: mediating positions that enable some aspect of oneness with the Lord, some advancement or renewal of our relationship with Him, some symbolic locus of receiving Him and our inheritance with Him.

And it's by learning to accept those worthy ones He has placed in their positions of mediation that we learn to accept Him.

This is a bold, empowering doctrine: that we can serve as proxies for the covenant connection of others. Of each other. That receiving Him, is an analogous process to receiving love, service, blessings, symbolic administration of higher and holier communion from the very fellows of which our Zion will be composed.

But it's also dangerous: we have to trust in the people He's placed in their positions before we can accept the Lord. We can't fully commune with Him unless we're willing to accept the principle that both His ordinances and His ordained must be received for our personal covenant relationships to validate. Which means we have to approach our spouses, our Stake Presidents, our Bishops and our Apostles humbly, from a position of vulnerability, knowing they are fallible humans who could lead us astray, yet trusting God trusting them is representative of trusting the Father trusting the Son.

This doesn't mean we leap at every whim. But it does mean that when they are standing in their Priesthood functions, our test of receiving the Lord is shown in how we receive His servants.

I have a sudden urge to contact my ministering families.

Orders and Ordinances: Facing God and the Temple - D&C 84: 18-22

 

"The Lord confirmed a priesthood also upon Aaron and his seed, throughout all their generations, which priesthood also continueth and abideth forever with the priesthood which is after the holiest order of God. And this greater priesthood administereth the gospel and holdeth the key of the mysteries of the kingdom, even the key of the knowledge of God. Therefore, in the ordinances thereof, the power of godliness is manifest. And without the ordinances thereof, and the authority of the priesthood, the power of godliness is not manifest unto men in the flesh; For without this no man can see the face of God, even the Father, and live."

I've been too long away from writing about scripture, and it's partly because this Section is daunting. I went down a rabbit-hole trying to make sense of even matching subjects with verbs in Section 84's opening verses. They seem to cascade into sets of parenthetical statements, at times in series and at other times nested, without modern grammatical insistence on sentence length. And it gets even worse when you realize that the original manuscript versions of these revelations have zero punctuation--that all of the meaning cues we get from the punctuation we see in the D&C are some later editor's good-faith attempts to make sense of the pauses, the clauses, and the asides. Because of all this, I got a little stuck in verses 4-6, so let's quote and analyze:

"Verily this is the word of the Lord, that the city New Jerusalem shall be built by the gathering of the saints, beginning at this place, even the place of the temple, which temple shall be reared in this generation. For verily this generation shall not all pass away until an house shall be built unto the Lord, and a cloud shall rest upon it, which cloud shall be even the glory of the Lord, which shall fill the house. And the sons of Moses, according to the Holy Priesthood which he received under the hand of his father-in-law, Jethro;"

It seems clear that the Lord is commanding here, but also prophesying from His foreknowledge. He's calling for saints to gather and form a Zion society in a specific location with a temple at its center. The use of the term "shall" is ambiguous--it contains both predictive and imperative functions--but if we assume the imperative ones are operant to the contemporary recipients, we have grounds to understand why the predictions didn't all come to pass with that immediate generation (without moving to the also valid point that "generation" is often scriptural code for an entire dispensational period, not merely the 30-ish years on average between fathers and sons, or the 80-ish years of a natural lifetime which modern parlance often limits the meaning of "generation" to): the recipients weren't obedient to the commandment which would otherwise have guaranteed the prophesied signs and blessings.

Be that as it may, we still have a grammatical puzzle: the coordinating conjunction "and" in verse 5 operates to distinguish between functions of "shall," but the very next "and," initiating a new sentence as it does in our published, punctuated version, seems to either be parallel to it (requiring that the noun phrase immediately to its right be considered a grammatical subject, leaving us in search of a verb to kick off its predicate) or entirely disconnected from it (requiring that it also be considered the subject of a new sentence, leaving us in search of a verb for its predicate). In both cases, no predicate is forthcoming. The next 11 verses leave "and the sons of Moses" hanging, with a series of "and" statements coupled with a content string: the "priesthood lineage" of Moses. In other words, the command is to build a house to the Lord, and the promised blessing is that the glory of the Lord, in the form or sign of a cloud, will be present there; but since the command and the promise are both framed with the ambiguous "shall", we have to read the "and a cloud shall rest upon it" part assuming that the "and" is a consequential "and". It isn't a strictly neutral one because it's not parallel. It doesn't signal command A "and also" command B, but instead signals command A "and if you complete that, the result will be" prediction B.

So this puzzle made me stop and wonder about how it might be parsed with different punctuation. And it occurred to me that if the "which" statements were truly parenthetical, appositives providing extra descriptive details about the cloud, then the main verb in the prediction is "rest", and the "and" in front of "and the sons of Moses" could have been structurally attached as a second thing resting upon the temple. In other words, we can play a "what if" here. What if the period after "fill the house" was artificially preventing us from seeing the cloud (which is the glory of the Lord filling the temple) as thing A which rests upon the temple, with thing B being the "sons of Moses" along with the string of verses parenthetically explaining why this thing B has a logical connection to the glory of God and deserves parallel mention with the cloud as the two things resting upon or filling the temple?

See what I mean by rabbit-hole? That's a lot of close reading brain-twistiness to start with. So let's maybe back up a little.

The immediate occasion of this Section is the return of a wave of faithful missionaries to Kirtland, and a renewed need to incorporate solid, faithful men back into service of an expanding church as its offices and orders were being freshly revealed and expanded. In a conference 15 months prior to this revelation, the first "high priests" were ordained to that office, but as Smith and his scribe and theology partner Sidney Rigdon were working their way slowly through their "translation" of the Bible, it was becoming more and more clear that there was a structure to which the "offices" of these new officers belonged, into which the returning Elders needed to fit. The Priesthood was not merely a pattern of duty-bundles like modern LDS "callings" are, but was rather an "order"--a word found in increasing frequency in tighter proximity to the term "priesthood" than before that time.

It's also worth noting that between that conference and this section, both Smith and Rigdon were violently set upon by a small mob, forcibly removed from their homes, beaten, tarred, and feathered, and threatened with much worse. Smith, younger and more robust, spoke with a whistle for a decade, but escaped the violence with mere flesh wounds otherwise, even preaching a sermon on forgiveness as his own burnt flesh was still healing the next morning. Rigdon wasn't so lucky. He suffered a cranial trauma that prevented him from serving as closely as an advisor on matters of church governance: ecclesiology. Rigdon was an experienced pastor before joining the church with as many of his Kirtland congregation as were willing, but with him working out the day-to-day details less and less while healing, Smith was left more and more to ponder the administrative challenges on his own and take his questions to the Lord.

Can you think back to Section 20, often called the "constitution of the church", given just two short years before this one, back in April 1830? The offices of Elder, Priest, Teacher, and Deacon were spelled out with duties attached, and a procedure was specified to "ordain" each of these offices. Now review that section again to see where the words "confer" or "priesthood" are mentioned. They're not! We think of the Priesthood now in the same way we might think of a military or police organization--once enlisted, you can rise through various ranks like "offices" each with their own scope of authority, and even within certain ranks, there may be need to specify "keys" of leadership over a scope anyone with the same rank might be theoretically able to fill, but don't at the moment. Joining the Priesthood, in that sense, would mean obtaining a certain baseline authority under a certain special commitment of service. But in the 1830-1832 Restored Church, there were officers running their duties within their scope without yet having that overarching "joining" the Priesthood as a grand fraternal order concept. In other words, the Lord trained the first office-holders in this dispensation for two years before giving them the context that helps ground the "why" of their own functions and organization.

And the why is mind-blowing!

The temple--a symbol most Christians still see as a token of law of Moses-era Old-Testament worship that the New Testament covenant does away with through Christ, just as it did away with the need for prophets and continuing scripture because the Holy Ghost could now indwell our hearts under the new regime of grace--was a central organizing principle before Moses. It contained symbolism and housed rituals which transferred power and prepared hearts for closer communion with God than was possible outside of temples (or mountain tops as the ancients used to do) before Moses. Protestants and Catholics both have it wrong: the correct doctrinal analogy is not temple is to sacrificial or carnal liturgy as Christ is to sacramental or spiritual liturgy. Instead, the Mosaic tabernacle is preparatory to temple covenants as the Mosaic law was preparatory to the law of grace and its Melchizedek covenants. They have the central part of the Venn diagram right, but lump too many things in the "changed after Christ" column because they, like the Jews before them, have lost pre-Moses information they need to see how the paradigm actually makes sense to parse out. Moses had a Priesthood before he received the 10 commandments and the Levitical law that accompanied them.. The Patriarchs had access to one as well, one which was not necessarily passed from father to son, as we should note from the cases of Abraham and Esaias (who, stunningly, received it from Melchizedek and God Himself, respectively, despite all other examples showing a father-to-son conferral pattern) from verses 7-16. 

The temple is the house of the fulness of this "order" of the Priesthood. It is a spot of hallowed ground, connected to heaven and set apart from the world. Its architecture and the ordinances performed therein are rich in symbolism teaching of Christ and His eternal roles as sole Intermediary between the eternal heavens and this temporal world full of sin and wayward children of infinite worth, all needing His redemption. It is an earthly place of celestial preparation in a way ordinary meetinghouses can never be. It is the higher and holier locus to which the Lord's higher law has always pointed His believers, as it is there, in a holy of holies of sorts into which only priests and priestesses can penetrate, that revealed instructions are received, that covenants are entered into, that relationships with the Lord, between individuals, spouses, and families, are made new, made holy, sealed by the Holy Spirit of Promise. This temple is no longer a place of animal sacrifice, but a place where the law of sacrifice is fulfilled by a higher law of consecration, one where we, after having been prepared by evacuating sin through the outward ordinance of Baptism, can more fully receive an indwelling of His Spirit, advance in closeness to His uniting power, and enter into His rest--becoming more and more one with Him as He is with His Father, knowing them, knowing their mode of existence, their manner of living which is after the manner of happiness, which knowledge is scriptural code for eternal life. The temple is the place where men and women unite in the exercise of Priesthood authority for the commencement of eternal relationships, where covenant oneness endows us with His power from on High.

In other words, this revelation marks a turning point in the conception of the organization of the church. There is a purpose-driven principle organizing it which hadn't occurred to even its most ardent practitioners already on the ground: to make the power of godliness manifest; to impart the knowledge of God (which, again, is scriptural code for eternal life); to prepare us to not just be made innocent of sin, but agents of the Lord, filled with His knowledge and power. With this purpose now unifying the whole, the reasons for the "appendages" or offices have a context that makes them make sense. And with the idea of a temple now firmly at the center of a "Zion" community concept, all we need is a little explanation of the scriptural episode from Exodus to help ground the logical and doctrinal motivation for the paradigm shift from the Catholic conception of Priesthood (a hierarchical brotherhood of professional ministers with authority administered through ordination to essentially gatekeep certain required rituals) to the newly evolving Restored understanding of the Priesthood (as the actual power of God delegated to men, which confers an authority to act and results in a fraternity in a flat Zion-like network rather than in a lay versus cleric hierarchy--in which the priestly function of mediator is democratized rather than funneled).

God knew it wouldn't work beforehand, of course, but He still commanded Moses to work as if the Israelites who had successfully escaped Egyptian slavery and its polytheistic regime of concentrated authorities and mysteries which made no demands on the moral character of the masses were ready for Zion-like unity and purity of heart in consecrating all property and energy, talent and ability to the Lord, to the service of one another, and to each individual's highest potential. Instead, Moses learned, they were stuck in idolatrous and materialist thinking, selfish pleasures, and subservience to worldly leaders and impulses. They weren't ready for sanctification, for individual endowments of power from on high, for communion with the Most High behind His merciful veil which presence would wither all unprepared pretenders with the crushing knowledge of their own unrepented unworthiness. They needed further preparation.

So in another act of mercy, the Lord organized a new administration of the Gospel of repentance, of sacrifice, of His Son's atonement, and of our access to justification through faith in Him. The Hebrews still had the Aaronic Priesthood to make symbolic sacrifices for sin, to teach them in the ways of a humble walk with high moral standards, and mechanical safeguards as guard-rails to bring them later to the new and everlasting covenants available after the Lamb of God was to be sacrificed once and for all. The lineage of the Melchizedek Priesthood did not entirely vanish, is it was held by all the prophets throughout the Old Testament at a bare minimum. But its systematic ordination to all males, and its accompanying blessings and power to all humans, was denied until restored by Christ Himself.

One important note to nuance the interpretation: be careful of the word "ordinance". The modern usage of the term equates it to a rite, and it's not wrong to apply it that way as we read that the power of godliness is not manifest without the authorized rituals that enable covenants which bind us to Him and endow us with greater outflowings of His power than would otherwise be possible. But the 1828 Webster's dictionary reminds us that the term "ordinance" could refer as much to the person ordained as to the rite by which she or he became so. In that sense, it's possible to make the reading that the power of godliness is not made manifest without authorized people--men in the strictest sense, but women too according to God's prescriptions of place and manner. Without a prophet, we can't receive institutional revelation. Without an elder we can't receive the Holy Ghost. Without a Priest, we can't receive the sacramental symbols. The rituals invoked in these examples all also require an officeholder with authority sufficient to the liturgy involved. In other words, the power of godliness is being made manifest in their service, in their mediating position, in a way that isn't fully captured by the way it is manifest in the ritual itself. 

The Priesthood in all its senses--both the abstract authority to act in God's name, and the position of mediation that individuals in its brotherhood symbolically occupy--is an order that draws us to the Temple, to higher and holier communion with the Lord, to worthiness, and to openness to His power. Through its ministers and ministrations, the Priesthood prepares us for perceiving His life, His mysteries, His loving embrace. And the immediate recipients of this revelation were under a charge to develop all around them for these blessings--to prepare all for Temple worship, Temple covenants, Temple relationships. Its collection of doctrinal knowledge, its manner of administration, its hierarchical organization with an aim for a flat Zion society, and its institutionally necessary appendages enable all people to see the face of God and live.

The historical excursion into the Mosaic period re-frames the Restoration of this Priesthood and grounds our insistence on conformity to the organization of the Church at Jesus' time in a theology that bridges the Patriarchs, the Law of Moses, and the Christian era into a coherent belief system lost to all of our fellow Christian denominations. The Restored answer to our Protestant fellows is that God does require authority. The Restored answer to our Catholic fellows is that God wants all His children to be priests and priestesses. The Restored Melchizedek Priesthood is the administrative power through which we receive callings by revelation--we don't up and decide ourselves what we "feel" called to, and therefore it places the onus on the Lord to call, and the officer to worthily inquire as to the Lord's will for another within their scope. It is the power by which we receive an individual relationship with the Holy Ghost, an increased connectivity with Christ, and an eternal identity with the members of our eternal social unit, the family, and with the national unit--the kingdom of God, or Zion. And each of these covenant relationships both set us apart further from the world, and require increasing levels of individual worthiness--compliance to successively consecrated laws. This covenant path is what teaches us to live like Him, and therefore brings us eternal life as He Himself defined it: to know the Father, the true and living God. These covenants, these relationships, these Priesthood blessings, are Temple blessings. Every teaching, every ritual, every position of service, every revelation, every structure in this Order points to He whose house the Temple is, and to the eternal realms it connects to earth.

Binding the Lord - D&C 82:10

 

"I, the Lord, am bound when ye do what I say; but when ye do not what I say, ye have no promise."

Our God is sovereign: omniscient and omnipotent. But He is not arbitrary. He is the Lawgiver, and obedience pleases Him, but His proscriptions and prescriptions are never to indulge a whim. Instead they each teach principles of living like He lives. Even the most mundane physical rule has a spiritual underpinning, as Joseph Smith taught in Section 29, because learning to exercise control over temporal or physical matters teaches us to prioritize the spiritual purposes, the things of eternal importance, the meaningful over the self-gratifying.

In this section, where the previous establishment of the United Firm to put professional and resource-rich men in a committed corporation to profitably run Church companies in competition and cooperation with other vendors and service-providers in the world was confirmed, more commandments concerning its operation were received. And what was the nature of this commandment? For the parties involved to take the management of the company on as a covenant, not merely as a contract. None of them know ahead of time that their investment in a press, metal type, paper, and a suitable building will be wasted within days of its first run of the "Book of Commandments" because a mob will burn it all to the ground. None of them know ahead of time that missteps here and there will eventually make the firm's affairs unmanageable, and it will become bankrupt. None of them know ahead of time that their personal investments--some more substantial than others in terms of absolute dollars--will be lost and that they will each barely escape poverty despite being in the service of the Lord. But God does, and He also knows how the exercise will bring them each to greater ability to minister and to greater oneness with Him, with each other, and with tests that will teach them to strip themselves of pride. They each will learn something they could have learned through no other way than by failing at a task they were given in the same way Roger Federer speaks of growing the character it requires to be a champion by refusing to let self-doubt enter in after failing nearly half of the points he tries.

Each commandment--be it a concise formulation of a general moral truth like the 10 commandments, or a specific prompting to minister to a specific person in the scope of your calling--comes from a God of cause and effect, from a God of relationships, not just power. He teaches through His guiderails, and as we heed His warnings, our behavior moves from mindless compliance, to comprehension of His purposes to eventual similitude. We grow through obedience to become more like Him.

It's hard for me to overstate this point: He has a certain character, and while its higher than our comprehension can attain, it IS comprehensible enough. He has enabled our capacity for reason sufficiently to be able to follow Him, not just in blind obedience, but logically "following" how, and sometimes even why one choice leads to its outcome. He doesn't want puppets, or even really followers--He wants children who choose to inherit all He has--His power and His joy, which glory comes from the work of Salvation. We can know, as we can know that one plus one equals two, that obedience to His commandments bring blessings. There is a mathematical certainty to complying with the orders of a Being of perfect love and justice: He always keeps His word. Every act of obedience therefore obtains its natural consequences, two of which are always a growth in liberty and a closeness of the Spirit. And every act of disobedience similarly brings its natural consequences, including a restriction of freedom and a distance from the Spirit.

But please keep in mind that this God is not an ethereal essence orchestrating compliance for its own sake. This is a Father in Heaven who is teaching us to be like Him, and therefore obedience--the first law of heaven--is never truly as transactional as its own inevitable cause-and-effect nature suggests on the surface. No, this Father of ours cares about our relationship with Him and with His Son. He is bound by His word, and by the principles of righteousness that He embodies to maintain accordance with His own principles, even if He has the theoretical power to choose something counter to them. He does not cease to be God. So this cause-and-effect which is as infallibly operative as the Being who ordered it so, is also only ever subordinate to a greater and deeper "law" of mercy and love. He binds Himself to us in covenants, not just in transactional exchanges of this reward for that action. He wants us to learn, through our obedience, how to be ONE with Him, with each other, with His Son, who succors us when we are weak, and who lifts our hands which hang down and strengthens our feeble knees. He wants us to obey, and then, when we fail, he wants us to RETURN to obtaining that promise through repentance--through repair of the damage in the relationship. We may have no promise after we break His commandments and sin, but on His side, He may still act in mercy, and in fact commands us to repent and accept His covenantal blood to cover our guilt.

There's a reason this Section speaks of binding. It's the language of slavery, of scientific laws, and of voluntary commitments to each be all-in, becoming a new unit where once there were two separate entities. Binding is the language of marriage, and marriage is the most frequent symbol Christ uses to characterize His relationship to His covenant people. He will never leave us behind, and is always ours. Up to us whether we will choose His offer, repent, and keep our covenant with Him. Let's keep our promise.

Lifting Up Hanging Hands - D&C 81:5

 

"Wherefore, be faithful; stand in the office which I have appointed unto you; succor the weak, lift up the hands which hang down, and strengthen the feeble knees."

In his inimitable poetic style, Isaiah delivered the word of the Lord to his courtly audience in ancient Jerusalem. He spoke in the present of the need for repentance, not merely because disobedience always has consequences, but also because growing world power Assyria had recently served as the instrument of the Lord's chastening hand upon the 10 tribes of the Northern kingdom, and if the Southern kingdom, where Isaiah prophesied, did not repent, they ran the risk of suffering the same fate as "Israel".

Assyrians introduced an innovation into empire-building in the early 700's BC. Rather than be satisfied with mere military victory, the Assyrians strategized measures to prevent local uprisings, future rebellions, and ensure that tributes got paid. Rather than minority rule by occupation, trusting in superior force or fear of reprisal from a more powerful center, and rather than taking a local ruler captive and/or consolidating power through forcible marriage into the local ruling family, the Assyrians broke their conquered kingdoms' national spirit by exiling vast numbers of ordinary citizens. They could use the populations elsewhere in their empire, and they could disperse them in ways that favored intermixing of the younger generations. Eventually, they thought, there would be no "home" the grandchildren would remember or want to go back to, having lost connection with their traditions, songs, stories, and most of all, worship.

Exile was a fear on the minds of the court of king Ahaz, whose lack of repentance nearly resulted in Assyrian victory, and on the mind of his more pious son, Hezekiah, who listened and who lived to see a miraculous deliverance. But Isaiah's poetic prophecies, as usual, described not only the present day, but a future in which Hebrew exile would be a more universal vehicle of chastening for the covenant people, and in which Gentiles bound to the Savior's covenant would have to be organized into a gathering force for exiled Jews to be gathered back in to Zion.

It is in this context of current threat of exile, and future prophecy of exile that the word of the Lord comes to Isaiah with the poetic command to those gathering the exiles in: "Strengthen ye the weak hands and confirm the feeble knees" (Isa 35:3). The message to those experiencing exile is that they have a God with them who loves them and is gathering them to a place of peace, of power, and of holiness. It's a message of encouragement and faith, of keeping one's meaning and purpose through distressing loss, or disconnection. The strength that the servants of the Lord are supplying is His strength--is a connection to His promises of eternal blessing no matter the current earthly challenge. Weak hands and feeble knees can still travel His path and can still perform His work when they believe in the worth of its end.

Paul picks this image up later in a different context in a message to other Hebrews at Jerusalem and wherever else they felt pressure from their Jewish communities to abandon their newfound Christianity. To this cohort of Christians having entered into a new covenant with the Messiah, and having been made victims of persecution for it, Paul's message is more about meaning-making than avoidance of exile through repentance. Paul's reason for harkening back to Isaiah was a reframing more strongly centered on the theme of chastening. To be fair, Isaiah was not wrong that God has the power of deliverance from suffering, but Hebrews also makes it clear that sometimes our suffering is His will, either as a test of faith or as a loving correction of the kind a devoted father must give his children who, in his wisdom, he knows stand in need of it. Under this new frame, "Lift up the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees," (Heb 12:12) is an encouragement to minister to those physically struggling, and metaphorically to those laboring under a social, mental, or spiritual weight working against their faith. The epistle itself--an extended theological argument speaking directly to sufferers familiar with Jewish doctrine and practice to bolster faith in Christ as the fulfillment of their faith, not as a betrayal of it--functions in precisely the way it encourages: firming up the weak in spirit.

I take comfort from this series of prophets, culminating with Joseph Smith, who teach that one of the highest privileges of every minister is to seek out those in doubt, in suffering, and in need, and then supporting them. As we support each other, we fill gaps, find complementary relationships, and allow our strengths to enmesh together, immunizing the community against hardship where possible, and against despair where hardship is unavoidable. The fundamental thrust of both Isaiah and Paul's references to hands hanging down and feeble knees is outreach, is top-down use of power, authority, and gifts of the Spirit for bottom-up benefit. And that tracks with Smith's allusion as well.

But there's another more ancient prophet whose example provides another valid direction for reading this Section: Moses. Moses did serve the people, and God supported them through Moses in a symbolic way during the battle against the Amalekites, but the Israelites noticed that the fight against their enemies went their way or their enemies' way in proportion to Moses's ability to keep his tired arms aloft with the staff of God in the air. So, to follow this image through, the lesson Aaron and his teammate Hur drew was that sometimes the direction of support needed to flow to the leader--they physically held Moses's arms up, and the Israelites prevailed.

This Section's context is that of the first organization of the First Presidency--which is the Church's first formal calling of a "counsel" if I'm not mistaken. A President who holds Priesthood keys to make decisions for the exercise of God's power according to his sphere of influence, is the ultimate node of both authority and responsibility for the stewardship under his care, but he is not an autocrat, or even a holder of controlling shares, really. Church presidencies are populated by a keyholder and faithful counselors--usually two, but sometimes more--who provide candid advice on shared decisions, and then carry them out and inspire others to carry them out. And this "system" is fundamentally different from the way presidents and chairmen work in the world. Meetings, which come with firm agendas and a focus on efficiency in decision-making, have their place, and can be appropriate to tasks at hand--which is why nearly every corporate organization adopts their mode of governance ad "Roberts Rules" for their mode of operation. But Councils in the Church focus on people, on finding God's will in decisions to benefit individuals, and they are therefore inherently more consensus-driven, and more cooperative in direction. A good Bishop or Stake President is almost always a good man to begin with, but their reputation as such only grows in the measure that they have the support of good counsellors, a good Relief Society presidency, and a full set of good auxiliary leaders whose partnership lifts the leaders above as it attends to the needs below. It tends toward such a flattening of hierarchy in its operation that the terms "above" and "below" don't really even make sense to describe it anymore.

And it's this group of fellow-laborers, knit in one heart for the scope of their ministry, which are also what this passage means--we must lift up the weary arms of the leadership by performing our duties with honor and exactness, by magnifying our calling, by serving with care, by focusing on individuals entrusted to our care, by prayer and by work: in short, by faith. Counselors aren't subordinates, they are sustainers. Prophets aren't worthy of pedestals, but they are worthy of being upheld. When we make a sustaining vote, we aren't merely consenting to service, we are pledging our own efforts and faith.

Let us indeed succor the weak, alleviate suffering, confirm the faith, and align our will with God's for the unity of purity of heart He has with His Father--our perfect model of Zion, and of Councils.

Sacred and Secular Space - D&C 78:6

 

"if ye are not equal in earthly things ye cannot be equal in obtaining heavenly things"

It's become a little on the rare side that I connect lessons across Sections rather than dive deeply into a single passage, but I left myself a little unsatisfied with the last post discussing the Revelations Q&A session from Section 77, so I'm finding a way to take a mulligan and move together with the next.

I went back and took a cursory glance at the framing and contents of all revelations to Joseph Smith chronologically prior to Section 77 to see if I could quickly identify some key features of the "genre" of these revelations, and noticed a few elements. First, they almost always begin with "behold" or "hearken", which seems to be a convention for not only grabbing attention, but signaling a liminal space--everything before was just Joseph, everything after is the Lord speaking (except the rare occasions where there is another voice being activated, like Moroni citing Malachi in Section 2, or an angel or an Elias of some kind voiced in Section 65). Next, they almost always open immediately after the attention-setting with a reminder of who is speaking--most frequently specifying that what follows is the word of the Lord, but sometimes elaborating on various names, functions, and descriptors of Deity. These seem to serve as extra poignant calls to take the commandments, counsel, prophecies and explanations which follow seriously. It should also be noted that the vast majority of the revelations previous to March 1832 were directed at individuals, and so the convention includes options for addressing persons directly or indirectly. There are a few Sections which seem to diverge from these generic features, address the world, the Church, or Elders of the Church in general, and many of these contain instructional language, like you might find in a handbook establishing prescriptions for practices or parameters for offices like a narrative form of what one might see in today's modern org charts.

Section 77 really does stand out, however, as unique in the pattern of more and more established convention. It doesn't begin with the attention-grabber, doesn't specify the voice of the Master answering the questions, doesn't address anyone, and doesn't convey commandment, instruction, or prophecy to be carried out or believed. Instead, it's dialogic, it assumes familiarity with John's vision and responds with specifics to deepen what's already familiar, and it seems to be the only revelation in which Joseph Smith voices two sides of a conversation simultaneously. There's more to explore in the generic expectations and implications of these differences, but mostly I'm just noting here that readers have to approach it differently and that it sets itself up as collaborative--we can each imagine ourselves in Joseph's shoes, learning.

In fact, I have to imagine Section 77 as if I were at the Temple in Jerusalem witnessing a 12-year-old Jesus hold forth with learned men as they asked Him questions about his understanding of Scripture and were astonished at His responses. He was their Author, after all, but as He grew line upon line, through a closer companionship with the Spirit of Truth than any of us can imagine, in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man, this Lord of ours had to come back into an understanding that the Creator He was had already known. And as Smith posed specific question after specific question, we are left outside of the genre of "behold and hearken", outside of the expectation to put directly into practice some commandment, or carry out a prescribed mission in a prescribed manner, or to connect commandments to explanations. Instead, we have only images and their keys; someone else's vision, and tools to help interpret it; questions from a serious student, and answers from the Master Communicator, able to mercifully gatekeep the deeper meaning so those who would be condemned by it might have an excuse, and to grant the mysteries unto those whose efforts match the gift, and whose knowledge can flower to action in good works, in preparation for His Second Coming.

And thinking of it like that episode in His youth, puts us in a frame of mind to consider what the temple was doing--consider its function as a sacred space. Only in the temple could humans connect directly with Deity. Prayer can directly connect us anywhere, it's true, but that connection is limited to mediation--it's a channel for communication through language, feelings, thoughts, and perhaps opens to other forms of communication like visions, but it's not direct contact. The temple's location was chosen by God, its dimensions were likewise not chosen by man, and the practices prescribed for its hallowed walls were dictated by the Jehovah as well. At the time of Jesus's visit, the Jewish leadership were so careful about keeping the space sacred, that they proscribed even the occupying Roman forces from entry--down to the coins they used. When Jesus overturned the tables of the moneychangers 18 years or so after his pilgrimage as a youth, they were there because Gentile-originating coin was considered sullying, and was to be exchanged for a special "temple" currency before entry inside the walls for purchasing the sacrificial animals prescribed by the Law of Moses. Special knowledge is revealed in the temple. Special services are held in the temple. Individuals and families worship in special ways in the temple. The Lord renews covenants, both personally and collectively in the temple. The symbolism of the temple all points to a great and last Sacrifice, and prepares the mind to point higher, receive justice balanced with mercy, and stay faithful despite being surrounded by the world once one leaves. It is a liminal space, where the mundane is left outside, so the eternities can be contemplated within.

There is a sense in which the spiritual is never purely abstracted out from the temporal, however. Special spaces of holiness like the temple are still made of material, after all, as are our own bodies which house a spirit and which can commune with the Holy Spirit. And so many of the prescriptions of the law of Moses which prepared the Hebrews for their Messiah's sacrifice dealt with what might look like purely material affairs on the surface.

In a similar way, Section 78 addresses a surface structure aimed at material needs. Since arriving in Kirtland and receiving the "law of the Church" back in Section 42, the members were commanded to arranged their temporal affairs in a new order that set a bishop in charge of a "storehouse" to benefit the poor--or in other words, which imbued an ecclesiastical officer with a spiritual charge to administer the material transactions necessary for the equal spiritual and temporal footing of the community. The leader was chosen to exercise spiritual discernment, but judge material matters. Each member was to labor responsibly like a good steward over what the bishop deeded over to him or her so that a surplus would be generated that could supply the lack for those who couldn't achieve such profits on their own.

The key difference in Section 78 seems to be not only that the storehouse should supply some of the operating costs of the Church (it had previously covered some expenses and living arrangements for a tight handful of leaders, but now was set to expand to cover the expenses of buying, setting up, and running a printing press for Church publications), but that its administration would be professionalized to a greater degree. The "firm" established still required the men involved to be called to their positions, but there were the perfect kinds of people among the now 2000 members of the church--a printer, a mercantilist, a theologian, and a member or two with literary talents--such that the people called could also form a reasonably professional board of folks who knew how to run a printing business and general store, and make money at it. The priorities were always the spiritual needs (Books of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, pedagogical materials, etc.) not profits, and proceeds were always destined to return to the storehouse, not benefit the "board". But the design was to help all contribute to the whole according to their strengths, to ensure all individuals had their needs supplied either through their own efforts or through the profits others could garner.

Keeping in mind that the term "equal" most likely meant "even-handed" or "fair" in the above passage, the idea of a United Firm, or a United Order, or the Law of Consecration is not equal outcomes, but instead the equal initiative we pledge to the service of growing whatever the Lord has allotted us. Because being all-in is what He requires for our spiritual growth, no matter what our material circumstances, and because being willing to pledge all our material is what shows our capacity for receiving those heavenly things that heaven's windows open upon us as we obey the Lord and love Him and our fellow humans.

Just like the temple is an earthly space for dialog with heaven, our individual consecrations can make of our earthly stuff the stuff of heaven.

Postmodernism, Ancient Imagery, and Forms of Revelation - D&C 77

 

"They are figurative expressions"

The Bible is a composite text with a single Author whose words passed through dozens of voices, filtration through scribes and translators, and conformity of form to various writing or speech conventions at the time of writing/sharing. We know from our own inability to reproduce messages word for word that the same idea understood by different people, can be restated in highly individualized ways. But I think we think a lot less about the impact of genre on the interpretive task. What impact does it have and what does it say about the Author for us to receive prescriptive legalese in a block of instructional text describing parameters of tabernacles or behaviors like Leviticus? Is the impact or is our interpretive approach necessarily different when the text is poetry like the Psalms, or Isaiah? Or when it's a long-form narrative, like the bulk of Exodus or a series of short-form stories like Genesis? How about testimonies like the Gospels, or corrective epistles like Paul's letters? What do the constraints of each of these very different text types do, or spell out as interpretive expectation horizons for us? Debates have raged for centuries about how literally to take the Bible. What does that debate even look like when part of the Bible is expressly written in poetry, for example, where the genre demands that we expect a high level of evocative and figurative elements to the meaning-making enterprise?

Within the Bible itself, we have several examples of passages that change meaning depending on what genre you expect that they are, but which are interpreted for us so we can see how the process works. I'll bring up just one episode: Nathan's parable of the lambs. A guilty king David was sitting in judgment when his respected spiritual advisor used court time to lay out a story that David originally mistook for the genre of testimony--a wealthy rancher had stolen the only lamb of a poor farmer. Because David expected that this was a literal narrative, given to tell immediate truth on its surface, he didn't think to look any deeper, and was immediately angry at the rich man, vowing vengeance upon him in his just wrath. Only after Nathan revealed that the genre was not testimony, but rather parable, did David look deeper into the meaning, find the symbolic key, and discover, to his own shame, that he was the guilty rich man himself.

The Book of Revelation, perhaps more than any other, reveals that there are some limits that the genre of a passage imposes on how understanding can pass from writer to reader. It's dense with symbolic imagery that our current culture has lost most of the interpretive keys to. It sounds like gobbledygook in places, and reads like an intense message that only insiders actually "get." It seems to suggest that we can't possibly take it completely literally, but it defies our modern conception of communication to locate any but the most hesitant of glosses. There are too many fantastical beasts combined with specific numbers, precious stones, prostitutes, prophets, and wars over the souls of humankind to make sense of--and often those who attempt it write even more confusing explications requiring quadruple the length of the original.

But there is a set of interpretive keys, and we have to assume that the messages were plain to the original intended recipients--that John the Revelator and the early churches he was writing to shared the same code for all the references we no longer get. So we can't make the facile assumption the postmodernists do: that the message is lost in signifiers all the way down.

Backing up a step, Swiss father of Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, rearticulated and modified a key insight about symbolism and interpretation that may have hearkened back to Plato: the idea that behind each word we use, there is a projection we are trying to connect to it--a concept, a thing, a reference. If I isolate the English word "tree" for example, it's because I want you to imagine a tall, living, wooden structure with a trunk, branches, and leaves or needles, usually green in general color, and often useful for climbing or chopping down for construction materials or fires. This is not ground-shaking as an insight--we intuitively get the point that words mean things--but now connect it to a pair of twin implications: a. that there's nothing natural connecting the monosyllabic sound string "tree" to the object it invokes (because if there were, every other language would use some recognizable local pronunciation of the same sound string, rather than an entirely different string); and b. that the presence of the word necessitates the absence of its referent (we can refer to present objects with the nouns that signify them without simply pointing, but even then the words point to an ideal we imagine, rather than the actual physical object right in front of us, which is merely an exemplar of the idea). These two things give us some deeper theoretical tools to play around with. If a sign is composed of a signifier and a signified, and the signified is always merely a concept, never an actual object, and if the connection between signifier and signified is always arbitrary, then maybe the signified itself is merely a signifier for some deeper idea. And even further, if we do enough work to shift the social meaning convention, we can even enforce a new signified to attach to a previously stable signifier through shifting the social meaning conventions.

These theoretical insights are the ball the postmodernists ran with when they spoke of simulacra, deconstruction, and the death of absolute truths. Their linguistic turn noticed how nearly all of the meaning-making processes we use to make sense of the world--on a grander scale than an individual word--rely on this same arbitrary connection between signifier and signified, and its concomitant socially constructed nature. Morality, religion, politics, nationality, gender, class, many of these "grand narratives" are structured like stories we tell ourselves, whose base units are described by this fundamental signifier-signified relationship. And if that follows, then postmodernists can note how, as symbols proliferate, society evolves to ignore more and more of their bottom--the signified gets lost--until we have memes of memes, but don't know the characters from the movies they were freeze-framed from. Worse, we don't care. The original characters, plot, backstories, relationships--in brief, their context--no longer contribute to the meme's current meaning, and we are therefore free to make meaning without the constraints of context. Everyone gets their own truth. Perspectives have no claim to privilege--all are equally relevant and valuable. There is is no anchor point tethering reality to subjective interpretation, because it's all either irredeemably subjective or hopelessly arbitrary all the way down--there's no there there. What's important isn't reality, because reality is impossible to touch--instead what matters is the stories we tell ourselves. 

Here's one concrete example: The Rock sitting in the driver's seat of his taxi, looking back at a blonde teenager saying something surprising is a malleable enough image to support any surprising message. It has become a meme that comes up frequently with fresh new connections to some current thing in politics or pop culture, and people laugh about how apt it is to describe the current glaring hypocrisy of a politician, or the current shock normal people feel about a surprising news story. It doesn't matter what the current issue is, the image demonstrates its shocking nature. People have shared various versions of it on social media for hundreds of different issues. But no one remembers that the original surprise wasn't the content of anything she said--everything she said was completely normal and appropriate for the context--it was her presence. She and her brother were already known to the audience as alien beings who merely looked human, but possessed superhuman powers. The Rock's confusion was not coming from any clues his character could put his fingers on, but was memorable for the audience who knew that he should be suspicious. If the image had stayed true to context, it would have to be limited to a smaller range of surprise types than the ones the meme has ended up covering. It has taken on a life of its own, and people make meaning from it without care to attach it to only surprises where the audience is already in on the gag (although some still use it for that).

In a similar way, between the tendency for people to allow oft-repeated references like scriptures to take on a life of their own independent of their original context and the tendency for genres to define culture-specific conventions for the parameters of meaning-making, the symbolism in the Book of Revelation poses a huge danger of eisegesis. What a blessing then that we have section 77 in which Joseph Smith asks the Lord direct, pointed questions about some interpretive keys, and in which we get succinct, direct answers that restore some of them.

I won't detail each of the questions and answers because the text is plain on its own, and because I'd be tempted to do a thorough walkthrough of each symbol specifically--too long for this post. But please note one thing as you do your own re-reading of Revelation with the D&C 77 interpretive keys back in place--please note the Christ-centered story of triumph and encouragement it represents, granting Christians a hope that has endured nearly two millennia already knowing how the war plays out, and which is the winning side--take a step back and notice the genre of what you're reading. There are bold declarations, personal directives, heart-warming examples of personal touches, fire and brimstone speeches, careful and succinct explanations of doctrine and untwisting of false doctrine, encouragements and expressions of trust, and instructional passages outlining practices and parameters of rituals and offices within the 76 Sections we've previously read. There is no other example of a study guide quite like this. The others impart knowledge, inspire awe, and connect theory to practice, this one is ancient symbology test-prep. The others we have to read to prepare to understand and obey, this one we have to read to re-read, or maybe read to check ourselves to ensure we are interpreting correctly. It's an invitation to identify with a prophet--a truth seeker conversing with the Lord--and a manual about how to come to Him prepared with specific questions, and expect clear and unexpected responses. It's a genre that seems to quickly settle matters others have spun wild opinions upon, and to remind us that there is a bottom, there is a key, there is a context, original authorial intent matters, and never just write off what seems hopelessly hermetic, because the Lord wants you to understand and will help you get what He means.

The Lord gave us a vision of things to come through His servant John, and the elements of the story are instructive, and available. There is a decipherable meaning to all prophecy, which is for our profit and learning, but not our private interpretations. The postmodernists aren't wrong that meaning is made through symbols and conventional connections, and that perception of stimuli is filtered through narrative, but the conclusion that there is no truth at bottom is fundamentally either lazy or cynical--do the work, follow the directions, believe the bottom's depths can come into focus as we approach the Source of Truth with honesty, and line upon line it will be added unto you. We are learning His language, He isn't beholden to ours.

Your Vision of Heaven is Too Small - D&C 76

 

"'And shall come forth; they who have done good, in the resurrection of the just; and they who have done evil, in the resurrection of the unjust.' Now this caused us to marvel, for it was given unto us of the Spirit. And while we meditated upon these things, the Lord touched the eyes of our understandings and they were opened, and the glory of the Lord shone round about. And we beheld the glory of the Son, on the right hand of the Father, and received of his fulness;"

John's record of Christ's teachings during His mortal ministry included explanations and prophecies jarring to some prevailing notions of the day, particularly held by influential Sadducees, about the nature of the afterlife, which was not monolithic among observant Jews at that time. As often as Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven and His goal to align earth with it to the extent possible, it's not actually very strongly spelled out in the Bible what that unearthly target actually looks like, or what the criteria are for a felicitous judgment. We are largely left to our imaginations to apprehend what seems beyond our imagining, and while we can trust in the reason and justice of our omnipotent and omniscient Lord who is full of truth and mercy, and while we have all we need if we know that accepting His grace is the key to salvation, the basis on which He makes His decisions is left in scant binary terms in the Bible. There is an arbitrary division between just and unjust, between righteous and unrighteous, or, as the King James Version puts it, between "life" and "damnation". And while that's sufficient and clear to produce in every human spirit the motivation to do good, and to accept the Lord's grace, He leaves us with so much reason and light on so many other principles of how He wishes us to behave, why not this one?

There are a few common principles all of Christendom agrees on: 1. some kind of life after death, 2. some kind of judgment and assignment to an eternal fate, 3. the existence of opposed states of eternal dwelling--a heaven of blessedness, and a hell of punishment. But there are chasms of disagreement over what the Bible teaches in the details of each of the three.

Is there a literal resurrection of spirit to body? The Sadducees and some current Christians believe no, despite John's testimony (see 5:29, specifically), preferring to believe in a spiritual existence free from the physicality of our banal bodies, rendering the concept of "resurrection" metaphorical.

For those who believe in a literal resurrection, does the "life" of the spirit after death consist of active existence prior to resurrection as Calvin and the Catholics insist on, or, as Luther and the anabaptists believed, a kind of "soul sleep" where passive inactivity allows spirits to reunite with bodies on resurrection day with no perception of time lost?

Is there an immediacy of final judgment at death's instant or do spirits await in a state of some kind of prejudgment? Catholics have elaborated, at least since the 13th century, a doctrine of purgatory in which some whose deeds weren't sufficient to merit an instant felicity can continue to act in hope toward an eventual salvation while "purging" their debt of sin by suffering its punishments temporarily. Most Protestant denominations, however, find the concept extrabiblical, and prefer a clearer cut single judgment with only binary outcomes available.

Those with a testimony of the Restored Gospel, thankfully, have two additional sources from which to resolve some of these questions through scriptural means.

The first is the Book of Mormon, in which there are several sermons, father's blessings, and excerpts of paternal counsel touching on the idea that spirits after death move to a waiting space and retain memory of earthly actions, and are therefore conscious of an impending final judgment they can no longer fully affect while away from their physical means to carry out acts of repentance and covenant-making. We now refer to a "spirit world" divided between a heaven-like "paradise" and a hell-like "spirit prison", and we take proxy action in this life on behalf of those who have minds that can change and become converted, but who cannot carry out rituals like baptism while out of the body--all out of earnest belief that the Savior is the Redeemer of both living and dead, and that accepting His atonement is still possible in spirit prison. While the clarity on this concept is plain from Book of Mormon scripture, it's important to note that the concept itself is entirely Biblical. Three days after Jesus promised the repentant thief that he would be with Him that same day "in paradise", that same Christ returned glorified and resurrected, admonishing Mary Magdalene not to touch Him because He had not yet ascended to His Father. By these Biblical facts alone, we can deduce that the common use of "heaven" and "paradise" as completely interchangeable terms is erroneous, and that the Father does not Himself dwell in "paradise", but in another more celestial domain. 

The second source for details on the afterlife to which Christians may turn, is to the prophets, seers, and revelators to whom visions of the details have been entrusted for publication. The above passage refers to a rendering of John 5:29 which speaks in very binary terms of the single main distinction between types of resurrected humans, and then to the beginning of a series of visions that Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon experienced, in the presence of others who heard evidence of a shared spiritual experience between the two that they did not themselves see, which detailed several other major post-judgment categorial distinctions.

1. There is an Outer Darkness prepared for a relative few Sons of Perdition who chose, in full light of knowledge, to reject all good, and seek entirely after evil. A place with no glory, and only punishment. A lifeless "life" that the Book of Mormon calls the "second death", a "spiritual death" which is a removal from the source of all righteousness that is permanent (or at least eternal in quality if not quantity). This is a place whose glory is metaphorically compared to no light at all.

2. There is a Telestial Kingdom of glory prepared for those who rejected Christ until compelled to bow the knee at the judgment seat, for those who were punished in spirit prison for their sins, and didn't accept the Redeemer's atonement, for those who chose evil deeds but not in full light of understanding, and therefore not completely out of rebellion. They are those covered by a measure of grace despite not receiving it before it was too late. This is a place whose glory is metaphorically compared to starlight.

3. There is a Terrestrial Kingdom of glory prepared for those whose actions were mostly good, on balance, but which accepted Christ only after death. They were honorable, but so blinded by the craftiness of worldly influences that it took removal from this world for them to realize their sins needed to be overcome by the Lord. It should be noted that acceptance of Christ in the spirit world is characteristic of the inheritors of this kingdom, but that many in the spirit world who had no chance to accept Christ during their mortal period advance to the next kingdom. This is a place whose glory is metaphorically compared to moonlight.

4. Finally, there is a Celestial Kingdom of glory where God the Father dwells, along with all His Heirs. It is reserved for makers and keepers of covenants with His Son for His grace to fully cleanse them of sin because of their acceptance of His Gospel, and their hearts becoming purified through His atonement--it is reserved for His Church. The people are characterized as Zion's inhabitants--one with God and with one another, as well as pure in heart--and as heirs through their Christian faith of all the Father has. This is a place whose glory is metaphorically compared to sunlight.

The framework here resolves the ethical dilemma inherent in limiting God's justice to a binary. It explodes the categories of those "saved" or "glorified" in a way that fits punishments to crimes, and glories to well-doing--by defining degrees. The nonsense of assigning an unbaptized infant to the same hell as a mass murderer is thereby done away, and the Biblical allusion Paul makes in his second letter to the Corinthians (don't be confused, 1 Corinthians was his second letter, the first one was lost) to visions of bodies celestial and terrestrial as they compare to three, not two sources of light fleshes itself out. Paul wasn't merely contrasting heavenly with earthly in that 15th chapter, but was relaying metaphors about the same degrees of post-resurrection glory that Smith was.

But it also inverts another common misconception among Christians--that of a radically different nature of God between the Old and New Testaments, in which a harsh, judgment-focused punisher of evil gives way to a lenient granter of unearned grace to all for mere belief on His name. Instead, this vision of degrees of glory correctly keeps the two logically combined in purpose and character, mercy never robbing justice, and yet grace abounding to those who qualify according to standards. It accomplishes this through insisting that judgment day isn't and never was about the negative punishment of every wrong deed done in mortality, but rather is instead more positively about rewarding every possible good deed, and more abundantly to those who took up their opportunities, in mortality or in the spirit world, to qualify for Christ's conditions of grace: faith in Him, repentance for sin, baptism by His authority, reception of the Holy Ghost (which includes continual striving to maintain worthiness as its vessel), and endurance to the end in permitting Him to change our natures to become like Him in as many ways as possible.

When you think of a God who rewards all the good, rather than punishes all the bad, you still have to repent for the bad, but you can move forward through your own imperfections with confidence in His love, and seeking His help. You can advance in trust that He covers your mistakes, and supplies your power. You aren't afraid to try, and you aren't afraid to fail, because you know He's got the part you can't do for you. You aren't off the hook for your part, but you are on the line to be reeled in by Him as long as you don't utterly rebel. He's got your burdens, all you have to do is keep taking steps. There is no death-bed repentance, and there is no working your way to salvation--just the perfect balance of a just God requiring obedience, but extending grace for inevitable failure. Correctly understood, this conception of God's nature and of the role of the Redeemer motivates rather than disheartens, and insists on exactness in orienting behavior toward His Son's model and character.

This powerful explanation of the categories and criteria of judgment enable faith in Christ, and promote fidelity to covenants with Him. And they significantly expand the Christian view of Heaven's size and scope. We all have to aim for the highest degree of glory and will all suffer for every part of our infinite potential our own choices disqualify us from partnering with the Savior to achieve--all but the highest degree are ultimately, at the lengths of eternity, dams to progression--but Christ's power to grant glory is not limited by our traditional interpretations of scripture. Our vision of heaven needs to be more inclusive for us to see it like He does. He loves us, and His completed work will guarantee us all the glory we can handle--all the glory our characters will have developed the capacity for through our degree of faith in Him. More will be in heaven than we currently imagine, but it is up to each of us individually to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling before the Lord.

Christians rejoice, for His promises of our degree of glory are sure!