Early Christians believed that people were not saved or damned based on when they lived or died but based on what they decided to do with Christ’s offer of salvation when they learned about it. Over the subsequent centuries, however, death became “a firm boundary of salvation” in western Christianity.1
Based on teachings of Peter and Paul, medieval Christians continued to believe in what they called the “harrowing of hell,” Christ’s disembodied descent into the spirit world between his crucifixion and resurrection to redeem the captives. A rich tradition of drama and art depict the Savior’s mission of “deliverance” in which he declared “liberty to the captives who had been faithful” (D&C 138:18).2
A thousand years later, in 1918, the problem of death had not diminished and the aged Prophet Joseph F. Smith contemplated the same teachings of Peter and Paul. The Great War, known to us as World War I, raged, eventually claiming more than nine million lives. A global influenza pandemic dwarfed that total, reaping a grim harvest of perhaps 50 million souls or more worldwide. It killed over 195,000 Americans in October 1918, the deadliest month in American history, the month the Lord revealed section 138.3
In the midst of the dead and dying was Joseph F. His father Hyrum had been brutally shot to death when Joseph was five. “I lost my mother, the sweetest soul that ever lived,” Joseph wrote, “when I was only a boy.”4 His first child, Mercy Josephine, died at age two, leaving Joseph “vacant, lonely, desolate, deserted.” His eldest son died unexpectedly in January 1918, leaving President Smith his “overwhelming burden of grief.” In between those deaths, President Smith buried a wife and eleven other children.5
President Smith was ill as general conference approached in October 1918. He surprised the Saints by attending on October 4 and speaking briefly. “I have dwelt in the spirit of prayer, of supplication, of faith and of determination; and I have had my communications with the Spirit of the Lord continuously.”6 The day before, the Lord had given him the visions described in section 138.7
Section 138 is a Christ-centered testimony from beginning to end. It starts with President Smith pondering the Savior’s atonement, continues with a witness of Christ’s “harrowing of hell,” proceeds with the gospel of Jesus Christ being preached to departed spirits, and concludes in the name of Jesus. “I saw” (D&C 138:11), “I beheld” (vv. 15, 57), “I understood” (v. 25), “I perceived” (v. 29), “I observed” v. 55), “I bear record, and I know that this record is true,” Joseph F. declared (v. 60).
He used powerful verbs to describe how he sought revelation. “I sat in my room pondering over the scriptures; And reflecting upon the great atoning sacrifice that was made by the Son of God, for the redemption of the world” (D&C 138:1–2, emphasis added). He intellectually “engaged” the soteriological [relating to salvation] problem of Christian theology and the most terrible questions of his time in which “the sheer, overwhelming quantity of death awakened individual and communal grief on an unprecedented scale. With the loss came questions: What is the fate of the dead? Do they continue to exist? Is there life after death?”8 He returned to relevant Bible passages he already knew well and “pondered over these things which are written” (v. 11).
That resulted in a series of visions. Joseph F. saw an innumerable gathering of the righteous dead, those who had been faithful Christians in life, “rejoicing together because the day of their deliverance was at hand” (D&C 138:15). They had been eagerly waiting for Christ to deliver them from the bondage of being disembodied, what verse 23 calls the “chains of hell” (cross-reference D&C 45:17 and 93:33). The Savior arrived and preached the gospel to them but not to those who had rejected the warnings of prophets in life.
This vision led President Smith to wonder and inquire further. Christ’s miraculous three-year mortal ministry resulted in few converts. How could his short ministry among the dead be effective? What did Peter mean by writing that the Savior preached to the spirits in prison who had been disobedient? These questions brought another revelation, a recognition “that the Lord went not in person among the wicked and disobedient” but sent messengers. He mustered an army to wage war with death and hell. He “organized his forces” and armed them “with power and authority, and commissioned them to go forth and carry the light of the gospel to them that were in darkness, even to all the spirits of men; and thus was the gospel preached to the dead” (D&C 138:30).9
Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and Wilford Woodruff all taught that the Savior unlocked the spirit prison and provided for redemption of the dead.10 Not until Joseph F.’s vision, however, did mankind know how Christ “organized his forces,” “appointed messengers,” and “commissioned them to go forth” (D&C 138:30). That made it possible for the dead to act for themselves, to be fully developed free agents who were accountable for their new knowledge. The teaching fulfilled God’s just plan of salvation, making each individual responsible to receive or reject “the sacrifice of the Son of God” (v. 35).
President Smith saw “our glorious Mother Eve, with many of her faithful daughters who had lived through the ages and worshiped the true and living God” (D&C 138:39). He must have been moved to see his father, Hyrum Smith, together with his brother Joseph, “among the noble and great ones” (v. 55). Most comforting to me is his vision of
the faithful elders of this dispensation, when they depart from mortal life, continue their labors in the preaching of the gospel of repentance and redemption, through the sacrifice of the Only Begotten Son of god, among those who are in darkness and under the bondage of sin in the great world of the spirits of the dead. (v. 57)
As both orphaned son and grieving father, President Smith appreciated the vision’s confirmation of “the redemption of the dead, and the sealing of the children to their parents” (v. 48).
A survivor of the influenza pandemic repeatedly asked, “Where are the dead?” Section 138 “answers this question and speaks to the great, worldwide need that underlies it.”11 On October 31, 1918, ailing President Smith sent his son Joseph Fielding Smith to read the revelation to a meeting of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. They “accepted and endorsed the revelation as the word of the Lord.”12 The Deseret Evening News published the revelation about a month later. In the meantime, Joseph F. passed from life to death knowing better than anyone else what he could expect on arrival.
1. Jeffrey A. Trumbower, Rescue for the Dead: The Posthumous Salvation of Non-Christians in Early Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3–9, 126–40.
2. K. M. Warren, “Harrowing of Hell,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VII. (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910).
3. George S. Tate, “The Great World of the Spirits of the Dead: Death, the Great War, and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic as Context for Doctrine and Covenants 138,” BYU Studies 46 no. 1 (2007): 27, 33.
4. Joseph F. Smith, “Status of Children in the Resurrection,” in Messages of the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, compiled by James R. Clark, 6 vols. (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1965–75), 5:92.
5. Joseph Fielding Smith, compiler, Life of Joseph F. Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1938), 476.
6. Joseph F. Smith, 89th Semi-Annual Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1918), 2.
7. Smith, Life of Joseph F. Smith, 466.
8. Tate, “The Great World of the Spirits of the Dead,” 21.
9. The insight belongs to George S. Tate. See Tate, “The Great World of the Spirits of the Dead,” 34.
10. See Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook, eds. and comps., Words of Joseph Smith (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center Brigham Young University, 1980), 370; Brigham Young in Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (Liverpool: F.D. Richards, 1855–86), 4:285, March 15, 1857; and Wilford Woodruff, Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, 1833–1898, Typescript., ed. Scott G. Kenney, 9 vols., (Midvale, Utah: Signature, 1983–84), 6:390.
11. Tate, “The Great World of the Spirits of the Dead,” 39–40.
12. James E. Talmage, Journal, October 31, 1918, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University; Anthon H. Lund, Journal, October 31, 1918, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.
From Doctrine and Covenants Minute
The immediate context of Doctrine and Covenants 138 is given in the first eleven verses of the section by President Joseph F. Smith himself. President Smith received a vision on October 3, 1918, the day before general conference. He had been in poor health for several months before the conference, and he was confined largely to his room, so many were shocked when he appeared at the conference the next day. He only spoke once in the conference, briefly saying:
I have been undergoing a siege of a very serious illness for the last five months. It would be impossible for me, on this occasion, to occupy sufficient time to express the desires of my heart and my feelings, as I would desire them to you . . . I will not, I dare not, attempt to enter upon many things that are resting upon my mind this morning. And I shall postpone until some future time, the Lord being willing, my attempt to tell you some of the things that are in my mind, and that dwell in my heart. I have not lived alone these five months. I have dwelt in the spirit of prayer, of supplication, of faith, and of determination; and I have had my communication with the Spirit of the Lord continually.1
A combination of declining health, worry over world events, and a series of personal tragedies combined to create one of the most difficult and trying times of President Smith’s life. The revelation in Doctrine and Covenants 138 was received just thirty-eight days before the end of the most devastating war in history to that point. Estimates of military casualties in World War I are above thirty-nine million, with nine million dead.2 The war, longer and bloodier than anyone imagined, was drawing to an end. But in the wake of the Great War, another threat was rising. The influenza epidemic of 1918 would eventually cause more than double the number of deaths as the war. In the month of October 1918 alone, there would be more deaths than in any previous month in American history, largely due to the pandemic. One especially troublesome aspect of the pandemic was that this strain of influenza disproportionately affected people between the ages of twenty-five to thirty-four, those in the prime of their lives. Particularly in military installations and on troop ships, the number of dead was so high that corpses were stacked like cordwood in morgues. For instance, out of the 116,000 American servicemen who served in World War I, more than half died of the flu or resulting pneumonia.3
In the midst of these worldwide challenges facing the Saints, President Smith suffered a heartbreaking series of personal tragedies in his own family. On January 23, 1918, President Smith’s oldest son, Hyrum Mack, died of complications of a ruptured appendix. Hyrum, also a member of the Quorum of the Twelve, was only forty-five years old. Upon hearing word of his son’s death, President Smith wrote in his journal, “My soul is rent asunder. My heart is broken, and it flutters for life! O my sweet son, my joy, my hope! . . . O God, help me!”4 Just before Doctrine and Covenants 138 was received, Hyrum Mack’s widow, Ida Bowman Smith, died of heart failure on September 24, just days after giving birth to a son, whom she named Hyrum after his departed father.5 Hyrum and Ida’s passing left their five young children as orphans.
Immediately after the 1918 October general conference, President Smith shared the October 3 vision with his son Joseph Fielding. Joseph Fielding Smith then recorded the vision while President Smith dictated it. The text of the vision was presented to the Quorum of the Twelve and the Presiding Patriarch of the Church on October 31 and unanimously accepted by them. President Smith passed away on November 19. The text of the vision was first published on November 30 in the Deseret Evening News with the title “Vision of the Redemption of the Dead.” It was also published in the Church’s magazine, The Improvement Era, in the December 1918 issue. The vision was well-known among the Saints but not included in the scriptural canon until 1976, when it, along with Doctrine and Covenants 137, was added to the Pearl of Great Price. On June 6, 1979, the First Presidency announced that the vision would be moved to the Doctrine and Covenants and numbered as section 138. It first appeared in the 1981 edition of the Doctrine and Covenants.6
1. Joseph F. Smith, in Conference Report, October 1918, 2.
2. George S. Tate, “‘The Great World of the Spirits of the Dead,’ Death, the Great War, and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic as Context for Doctrine and Covenants 138,” BYU Studies, vol. 46, no. 1 (2007), 19.
3. Tate, 28–29.
4. Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Joseph F. Smith, 1998, 407.
5. Tate, 12.
6. Tate, 9–10.
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