Joseph Smith, Jesus, and Satanic Opposition

Atonement, Evil and the Mormon Vision

Douglas J. Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351924825
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book explores Mormon theology in new ways from a scholarly non-Mormon perspective. Bringing Jesus and Satan into relationship with Joseph Smith the founding prophet, Douglas Davies shows how the Mormon 'Plan of Salvation' can be equated with mainstream Christianity's doctrine of the Trinity as a driving force of the faith. Exploring how Jesus has been understood by Mormons, his many Mormon identities are described in this book: he is the Jehovah of the Bible, our Elder Brother and Father, probably also a husband, he visited the dead and is also the antagonist of Satan-Lucifer. This book offers a way into the Mormon 'problem of evil' understood as apostasy, from pre-mortal times to today. Three images reveal the wider problem of evil in Mormonism: Jesus' pre-mortal encounter with Lucifer in a heavenly council deciding on the Plan of Salvation, Jesus Christ's great suffering-engagement with evil in Gethsemane, and Joseph Smith's First Vision of the divine when he was almost destroyed by an evil force. Douglas Davies, well-known for his previous accounts of Mormon life and thought, shows how renewed Mormon interest in theological questions of belief can be understood against the background of Mormon church-organization and its growing presence on the world-stage of Christianity.

Chapter 1

Jesus in Early Mormon America

Jesus and Satan co-existed for over two millennia within the Judaeo-Christian tradition before being joined by Joseph Smith in a triad that would drive his newly founded Mormonism through its Plan of Salvation.¹ In this, Satan, Joseph and Jesus, respectively, frustrate and foster the establishing of Zion, God’s earthly kingdom, and the eternal kingdoms of ultimately exalted church members. This book explores their interplay through three prime scenes of conflict between good and evil that played fundamental roles in the rise of the Mormon world-view viz., a pre-mortal council in heaven, the passion of Jesus in Gethsemane and the first vision of Joseph Smith.

Historically speaking, early Mormonism resembled some Jewish sects that have been called ‘continuous communities’ because, initially, they ill-fitted either Jewish or Christian categories before evolving to adopt aspects of Christian identity.² Accordingly, we here describe early Mormonism as ‘Mormon-Israel’ whose ‘Jewish’ motifs would give way to the essentially ‘Christian-Mormonism’ of today as its Plan of Salvation was creatively appropriated under changing historical circumstances, a Plan whose functional but not theological importance will here be equated with that of the Holy Trinity in Christianity’s mainstream.³

Approach

This book continues the descriptive interpretations of my previous Introduction to Mormonism (2003a), and Mormon Culture of Salvation (2000a), and retains their academic and non-apologetic perspective upon LDS tradition. Linking selected social scientific and historical interpretations of individual and cultural creativity it sees religions as driving and often satisfying the desire for a meaningful world whilst managing human emotions by framing them with a moral sense. In its religious dynamics Mormonism values the influence of external powers and ‘principles’ whilst also emphasizing the latent potential of the individual and group ‘relations’ for eternal self-development, for, as Terryl Givens admirably demonstrates, ‘salvation’ for Mormons is not only ‘an endless project’ rather than an event but is also ‘agonistic’ in nature, ‘predicated on a process of ceaseless struggle’.⁴ This notion of salvation is intimately aligned with Jesus so that, to speak of salvation as agonistic is, inevitably, to anticipate struggle in the life of Jesus, a struggle that involves Satan and one in which Joseph Smith was to share.

These figures animate the drama behind Mormon thought, highlighting Mormonism’s visual sense and marking key paradigmatic scenes of its salvation narratives that drive this book. For Mormonism is a religion of images with temples reflecting the symbol-rich spaces of Eastern Orthodoxy, its Salt Lake City headquarters echoing Rome’s Vatican, and its prophetic figures evoking statuesque Protestant Reformers. Narratives depict the boy Joseph kneeling in a woodland glade visited by the divine Father and Son; the man Jesus prostrate in a garden, sweating blood yet sustained by an angel, and a pre-mortal heavenly council whose divine Father ponders alternative plans of salvation offered by Lucifer and Jesus. The interplaying implications of these scenes of glade, garden and council drive the vitality of Mormon culture’s visual sense and narrative matrix.⁵ Certainly, LDS spirituality cannot succumb to the misleading critique of Protestantism as favouring the aural over the visual sense in religious life. This is all the more germane given Mormonism’s commitment to texts in its Standard Works of The Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price, and its treasury of diaries, journals, reports and popular writing, all of which could detract from the concrete LDS visual culture of its literal promised land, temples and prophets.

Terms, Names and Theology

Because of potential difficulties associated with naming ‘Christian’ groups it is important to know that I view Mormons as self-defining Christians, deriving identity from the life and influence of Jesus. Accordingly, references to ‘Christendom’ or ‘mainstream Christianity’ will be descriptive and not pejorative, aware that some ‘reproachfully called … the people or Latter Day Saints … Mormons’,⁶ and that outsider name-calling created the original designation of ‘Christian’.⁷ This nomenclature is, however, complicated by the fact that Mormonism understands itself to be a special restoration of truth absent from that very ‘Christian’ world against which early Mormonism protested.

As with ‘Christian’ so with ‘theology’, a word that initially carried a positive sense, as with Brigham Young’s⁸ ‘Theological Institution’ of Salt Lake City.⁹ By the mid 1850s, however, theology was viewed as the plaything of the educated ‘theologians’ of established denominations whose complexity, doubt or ‘theological mysticism’ had ‘generally spiritualized away all the promises of God to Israel’.¹⁰ Even though the scriptures ‘are continually read by professing Christians’ they did so ‘as one would read a romance or a book of fables’.¹¹ One article on theocracy described major denominations or ‘sectarians’ in terms of apostasy whose ‘degenerating course’ of life has ‘principle after principle, truth after truth’ sacrificed until ‘their theology has become of all studies the most contemptible’.¹² Such apostasy was grounded in the LDS belief that Christianity fell from its possession of truth shortly after the time of Christ.¹³

Approaching Jesus, Narrative Power

Christian identity is, thus, ever a delicate matter involving the desire to protect its sense of privileged access to truth against ‘false’ interpretations. This often involves an internalized relationship with images of Jesus that is easily offended, sometimes by the new perspectives of theologians, iconographers, liturgists, film-makers and writers who, as Bernard Shaw trenchantly put it, ‘make the picture come out of the frame’.¹⁴ But, equally, piety-rooted creativity can also prompt a reinvigoration of religious narrative as when Protestant theologian Karl Barth depicted the incarnation as ‘the way of the Son of God into the far country’, enlisting the parable of the prodigal son to enhance his kaleidoscopic gestalt of Jesus.¹⁵

Narrative, itself, is of the essence of humanity, whether in daily gossip, personal reports or in historical, literary, theological or sacred texts.¹⁶ In Mormonism at least four narrative streams comprise the forceful current of new tradition. First, the Book of Mormon, The Pearl of Great Price and the Bible furnish scripture-like texts describing divine dealings with humanity.¹⁷ Second, the Doctrine and Covenants, alongside personal testimonies of LDS, provide accounts of how God discloses his will to prophets and ordinary believers.¹⁸ Third, thousands of written diaries, histories, and personal journals merge with communal traditions to describe ancient and modern Mormon life. Fourth, an extremely strong tradition of formal LDS history is symbolized by the Church Historian and through flourishing academic and lay commitments to Church history. However, this quadruple effect cannot be separated from a fifth, viz., the grand narrative that frames them all – the Plan of Salvation. Much that follows describes how this Plan affects the other narrative streams of Mormon life and the appearance of Jesus in them.

Overview

Initially, the LDS Jesus is not an evangelical Protestant figure but more a Jewish-framed Messiah of Christian sectarians strongly self-identifying with ancient Israel now reconfigured to achieve God’s purposes. This is evident in the 1830–40 LDS phase of Adventist millenarianism that anticipated the arrival of Christ upon the clouds of heaven. While this Messianic King of Israel is ‘Protestant’, something America’s Puritan founders ensured, his Protestant attributes, evident in early Mormon hymnody, are suffused by his Jewish Messianic identity to ensure that, as King of Israel, it will be to an American Zion that converts are called to prepare for his arrival. This interwoven identity we designate as ‘Mormon-Israel’ and from its Adventist nature there emerged in the mid 1840s a ritualized Mormon-Israel whose Plan of Salvation crystallized around Jesus identified both as the Christ-Messiah¹⁹ and as Jehovah – the God of this world whose act of atonement both affirmed his role within the heavenly Plan and reinforced the demand for human endeavour. This added the LDS notion of exaltation to the previously familiar Christian idea of salvation and generated an ethic of serious endeavour – a Mormon Ethic – that would outstrip the Protestant Ethic itself. A developing world-view included a sensitivity to spirit-worlds in which Jesus found a place as a missionary and where LDS became increasingly active in vicarious ritual. The advent of permanent temples and the influence of temple experiences combined with Mormonism’s earlier commitment to visions, dreams and revelations to accentuate the idea of a transcendent Jesus. The development of genealogies and the ongoing importance of kinship and family life at the heart of Mormon society complemented this with the idea of Jesus as both Elder Brother and ‘Father’.

The mid twentieth century fostered a degree of LDS community stability and growth, including that of an emergent ecclesial bureaucracy, that established Jesus as the focal reference for the Church and generated a Church–Jesus Christology unlike that of other Protestant churches, its essence lying in the coalescence of church organization and an authoritative Jesus figure. Accordingly, the very name ‘The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ assumed a more descriptive accuracy than is implied by most church names, hence our use of the term ‘Christian-Mormonism’ to replace the ‘Mormon-Israel’ of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Within this twentieth-century context, especially its last two decades, Mormonism’s self-confidence grew alongside its numerical growth and geographical expansion, its increasing strength prompting ideas of a more personal and Protestant Jesus associated with notions of grace and spiritual rebirth and offering points of potential contact with American Protestant Evangelicalism. But, and this is a significant qualification, this Jesus of grace remains in tension with the Jesus of The Plan and of the Church. Unlike the Protestant Jesus of grace and personal conversion the LDS Christ could not be dissociated from the Church as a kind of free spiritual resource accessible simple by personal prayer. Behind all these developments lay a decrease in the notion of Jesus as King that had been so evident within Mormon-Israel.

Naming Jesus

Other kaleidoscopic references to Jesus speak of The Christ or Messiah, and include the Only-Begotten Son, Saviour, Lord, Our Lord and Elder Brother. Following biblical images, he is also the Great High Priest charged with the task of atonement. Uncommon references sometimes mix with their more usual counterparts, for example John Taylor’s reference to Jesus not only as ‘Redeemer and Resurrector, the Savior … the dictator and director on earth for the living and the dead’,²⁰ but also as ‘our President and great high priest’ above whom stands ‘God’ who is the ‘head of the Priesthood.’²¹

Brief accounts of Alternative Christs in Christian groups already exist,²² yet Richard Fox’s exploration of the thematic diversity of Jesus in America noted that hitherto there had been ‘no single history of Jesus in America’ precisely because ‘there have been so many ways t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Jesus in Early Mormon America
• 2 Mormon-Israel
• 3 Millennial Kingdom Experiment
• 4 Plan and Trinity
• 5 Jesus, the Living and the Dead
• 6 Joseph, Jesus and Lucifer
• 7 Atonement
• 8 Jesus, Satan and Evil
• 9 Jesus and Doctrinal Kinship
• 10 The Hope of Glory
• 11 Jesus and the Holy Ghost
• 12 Jesus, Opposition, Otherness and Sacrifice
• Bibliography
• Index