Matt McBride:
Probably the most well-known individual who struggled with the vision at first was Brigham Young.

Casey Griffiths:
How come it seems like a lot of early Church members responded negatively to the vision?

Matt McBride:
Church history is the story of a lot of people who are as flawed as I am and flawed as any, you know, trying their best to follow the Savior, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing. It teaches us something about God’s character and his mercy.

Casey Griffiths:
God is a lot more generous, and God is a lot more willing to save people. I never really held the view that most of Heavenly Father’s children are going to go to hell or that there even was a hell the way that it’s conceived of in popular culture, where it’s like a cave and everybody’s in ragged clothes and the devil’s presiding over. I just never really grew up believing that.

Matt McBride:
This thing came along and kind of blindsided them.

Casey Griffiths:
Welcome to Church History Matters. I’m Casey, and I have with me Matt McBride. This is one of those special episodes this year, Voices of the Restoration, which occasionally allows us to pause them, the Doctrine and Covenants, and do a deeper dive into some historical topics surrounding it. And today we’re doing a deeper dive into some of the history surrounding Doctrine and Covenants 76, also known as the Vision. We’re really happy to have Matt McBride with us today, especially because Scott is out of town. So I’m doing this solo. Let me read Matt’s bio, and then we’ll dive into things. Matt is a historian and director of publications for the Church History Department. He is a contributing author and co-editor of revelations in context, the stories the sections of the Doctrine and Covenants. Matt was a historian on the Joseph Smith Papers Project and a contributing writer in Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days. Matt McBride, welcome. We’re glad to have you with us.

Matt McBride:
It’s so fun to be here, Casey. Good to see you.

Casey Griffiths:
Would you mind taking a second and just walking us through some of the things that your team has put together?

Matt McBride:
Yeah, Revelations in Context is one element of, I think, a larger offering that the department has tried to put together. And then we’ve, of course, collaborated and worked closely with the team that does the Come, Follow Me lessons, and they’ve been really fantastic to work with and have offered to place links to some of this content that we’ve produced that is usually contextual in nature as something that will give you a better sense of the people, the places, the events, the historical context surrounding each section. Because as you know, when we read the Book of Mormon, we get the story that leads up to Alma’s sermon or we get a context for what King Benjamin is teaching his people. With the Doctrine and Covenants, we get the text of the revelation, but we’re missing that part of the story that helps us understand what led to those moments of inspiration and revelation that came, and then, of course, are now canonized in a part of our scripture that we get to study every four years. Several years ago, members of the Joseph Smith Papers team worked together to write short, we hope, very readable articles about the background behind some of the different sections of the Doctrine and Covenants.

Matt McBride:
That’s included in Revelations in Context. It’s available in the Gospel Library app in the Church History section. If you go to the front part of the library there, you’ll see Church History. And within Church History, you’ll see a section on Doctrine and Covenants study. You’ll see a few things in there, and one of them will be Revelations in Context. Some of the articles in that are linked to from Come, Follow Me. You’ll also see in the Church History section, Saints, which does, we think, the best job that could be done to try to tell the broader sweep of the story that’s happening in Church history during the time period in which most of the Doctrine and Covenants, well, all of it, really, but volume one in particular of Saints traces kind of the broader history of the Church during that time period. You’ll often see links to Saints from Come, Follow Me as well. And then what we’ve done is we’ve tried to compile as many of these great resources as we possibly can, including some short bios of every person who’s mentioned in the Doctrine and Covenants in a small publication in that same section that’s entitled Doctrine and Covenants Historical Resources.

Matt McBride:
And that’s broken down chapter by chapter, following Come, Follow Me. And you’ll find in there links to some of the other resources we mentioned, but also to these bios and to information about the historic sites where many of these revelations were received and important events occurred that our fantastic historic sites team has put together. That historical resources publication is designed to be kind of a switchboard that lets you come from a Come, Follow Me lesson and then discover any and all of the resources that we have compiled. We’ve included as well in that section the historical introductions and original transcriptions of each revelation that was given to Joseph Smith that appears in the Doctrine and Covenants as they appear in the Joseph Smith Papers. So we pulled those together into one publication.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, these resources are wonderful. I get emails a lot. People ask me, I got an email yesterday from someone saying, Hey, where can I find out about the seer stone? And I don’t know if people know that if you go into that Church History tab and you go to Church history articles, there’s an article on the seer stone that includes a photograph of the seer stone. There’s new articles that have been published in the last little while on Church finance. There’s an article on Lamanite identity, all kinds of difficult subjects that people sometimes have questions about. And normally, I’m just sending them the links to these great resources that your team has already put together. So thank you. And thanks to your team for all the good work you’re doing. I hope this gives them a little attention.

Matt McBride:
We want people to pick it up and lean back and enjoy it the way that they might enjoy a great novel. But we also recognize, as you suggest, that people have questions about some of the things that come up in the course of that history. The topics were designed to be a companion to Saints, so that as you have a question about, Oh, the Mark Hoffman situation or some other kind of thing, and you’re saying, Well, what is this? That the topics are designed to be a quick place to get some answers on those. So glad that you find those helpful as well.

Casey Griffiths:
One reason why they’re really engaging is usually Revelations in Context is built around a person. So there’s a character that you can identify with. And the second thing is you can listen to them. I reread your article on the vision while I was driving home from work the other day by just tapping the little audio symbol on the side, and that’s how I reread it in preparation for this discussion that we were going to have today. So take advantage of those resources. I know if you’re watching this, you know how to use the Internet and computers and audio and stuff like that. So there’s a lot of good stuff out there that can help you understand these things, or if you’re helping somebody else who’s working through issues, understand them as well. Well, Matt, let’s dive into the vision a little bit. Section 76 of the Doctrine and Covenants. And Revelations in Context actually has two articles on the vision. One of them talks about the Joseph Smith translation, which, maybe to understand the vision, you have to understand Joseph Smith’s Bible project that he’s working on. So can you give us kind of a broad overview, a general feel for what Joseph Smith was trying to with the Bible, how long this took, and what the aim was?

Matt McBride:
So Joseph Smith, of course, translates the Book of Mormon. The Church is organized legally in April of 1830. And within, I think, a matter of weeks or just maybe a couple of months, he’s begun work on what comes to be known as the Joseph Smith translation or the inspired translation, or sometimes we’ll call it his Bible revision. It kind of happens during that summer, and he considers that just a crucial aspect of his calling. He works on that Bible revision from about June to July of 1830 until the summer of 1833. He starts with the Old Testament, and we’re familiar with parts of it because the Book of Moses in the Pearl of the Great Price, of course, is his translation of the early chapters of Genesis. Then, of course, our modern scriptures, thanks to the work of… Well, there’s a whole story we won’t go into there, but we’ve got footnotes and references in the back of our contemporary Latter-day Saint standard works that give us access to more of the revisions that Joseph Smith made during this time period. So he’s working on the Old Testament at first. He’s commanded to stop working on the Old Testament, and he’s commanded to turn his attention to the New Testament.

Matt McBride:
So he starts working on Matthew, and by the end of the year, he’s worked his way through Matthew and Mark. And in early February of 1832, he’s arrived at the Book of John, which is where our story is going to pick up in a minute. You asked that question about, Well, what is the project about? What’s he hoping to accomplish? His starting point is an idea that’s in the Book of Mormon, which is that there are portions of the Bible text that have been lost or altered in a way that prevents people in Joseph Smith’s world, our world, from having access as to everything that the Lord would want them to have through the text of the Bible. And so this Bible revision is an opportunity for Joseph Smith to reflect, you know, really closely and read really closely the Bible for a few years. In some instances, receiving long, revealed expansions to the biblical text. In other instances, he’s making very minor adjustments and corrections. So many sections of the Doctrine and Covenants, including Section 76, appear to be a direct result of his engagement, this sustained engagement with the text of the Bible over the course of those three years.

Matt McBride:
That’s kind of where this intersects with Section 76. On February 16, 1832, Joseph Smith says that he’s working with Sidney Rigdon. At the time, they’re living in Hiram, Ohio, which is several miles south of Kirtland, and they’re working on this Bible revision, and they reach chapter 5 of John, verse 26, which are some verses talking about the resurrection, the nature of the resurrection. This is, according to Joseph Smith, what spurs the revelation, the vision that he and Sidney Rigdon have that they now describe for us in Section 76.

Casey Griffiths:
The Joseph Smith translation is really sort of under-sold. When we talk about what Joseph Smith contributes scripture-wise, we go straight to the Book of Mormon, which undoubtedly is huge. But I mean, the Book of Moses, Joseph Smith-Matthew, many sections of the Doctrine and Covenants are answers to questions. And Section 76 is probably the crown glory, I guess you’d say, where they get this huge vision of the afterlife and see the celestial, terrestrial, and telestial kingdoms in vision. And then a couple other things like the Sons of Perdition and a vision of the Father and Son. In fact, this vision of the Father and Son is recorded before Joseph Smith writes down the First Vision. Isn’t that right?

Matt McBride:
Yeah, it is. So Joseph’s first account of the First Vision is recorded, we think, in the summer of 1832, so three, four, five months after he and Sidney write down their witness of the Savior in the wake of this vision in February.

Casey Griffiths:
So Matt, there are several people that see the vision that aren’t Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon who are seeing the entire vision, just people that are in the room when it happens. The most prominent one is Philo Dibble. Tell us a little bit about him and what he saw.

Matt McBride:
According to Dibble, who’s really, I think, the only person who’s left any kind of a detailed account beyond what little we get from Joseph and Sidney in their description of the vision. He thinks that there could have been as many as 12 other people in the room. Philo Dibble leaves at least three different accounts of varying detail later in his life. He’s leaving these accounts when he’s much older, when he’s in Utah. The first account is in some local ward minutes. It’s not very detailed. The second one, he says that he arrived at the Johnson home in Hiram, Ohio, just as Joseph and Sidney were coming out of the vision. He says, in which mention is made of the three glories. He says, “Joseph wore black clothes, but at this time seemed to be dressed in an element of glory as white. His face shone as if it were transparent.” He says, “Joseph appeared strong as a lion, but Sidney seemed weak as water.” Then he says, “Joseph, noticing his condition, smiled and said, Brother Sidney is not as used to it as I am.”

Casey Griffiths:
He kind of likes to take a little jab at Sidney there in all of his accounts, too.

Matt McBride:
Yeah, in that one. That’s one element that’s consistent between his accounts. In his later account, so that account was in the 1880s, the most well-known account that he gives is in 1892. And there he goes into all this detail about what was going on. Here, perhaps an attempt to correct the record, says that he was there for probably two-thirds of the time that they were in this vision. And he says that Joseph would at intervals say, What do I see? As one might say, while looking out the window and beholding what all in the room could not see. Then he would relate what he had seen or what he was looking at. And then Sidney replied, I see the same. Then Sidney would do the same sometimes. They have this conversation. Philo Dibble says that there were perhaps as many as twelve people in the room. They could not see the vision. They just look over and Sidney and Joseph sitting there still, almost, I think, in a trans-like state and having this conversation with one another until perhaps an hour elapses and the vision has ended. Then he repeats his thing about Sidney looking limber as a rag, whereas Joseph sat firmly and calmly.

Matt McBride:
It’s, I think, interesting in the sense that we have all of these different accounts of Joseph Smith receiving revelations or translations over time. It’s just interesting to think about the different modes of revelation, the different ways that these revelations come. We think sometimes of the Nephite interpreters and the Urim and Thummim, the seer stone. We think of Joseph Smith dictating revelations of the Doctrine and Covenants. We have one account of him dictating Section 124, where he’s in a trance-like state and he’s being carried from room to room. I don’t how much to credit some of these, but there are a lot of different descriptions of the way these experiences happen.

Casey Griffiths:
You do make a good point, which is Joseph didn’t do this in a solitary state. There’s almost always someone around when he’s receiving the revelations that are in the Doctrine and Covenants, and they do record different things. But a major witness is that the people that see him receive the revelations do describe it as a kind of supernatural experience. Is that right?

Matt McBride:
Yeah. Parley P. Pratt, at one point, and others, they describe when Joseph receives revelation that he’s speaking the word slowly and clearly and pausing to allow time for scribes. Another common element is the idea that his countenance is shining in some sense. This is something that is noted by witnesses of Joseph Smith as he’s receiving revelations or witnessing visions. In this case, of course, it’s really interesting, and it’s different than almost any other revelation, perhaps aside from the experience of the Three Witnesses, in that Joseph and Sidney both are witnessing this together and serve as dual eyewitnesses to this, which is unusual and kind of remarkable. It’s also different in that what we have in Section 76 is not like many of the other earlier sections of the Doctrine and Covenants where Joseph Smith is speaking in the Lord’s voice. This is a description the vision that Joseph and Sidney are commanded to write while they are still in the Spirit after the vision is completed. It’s a complex text in that way in that you have elements of Joseph and Sidney describing things and invoking biblical passages that help them and their readers make sense of what they saw.

Matt McBride:
Then you also have moments in which he’s quoting or channeling or delivering the voice of the Lord as they presumably heard it during the vision.

Casey Griffiths:
So the actual text in Section 76 is written down after. But do they use that phrase? They say they’re still “in the Spirit” when they write it down?

Matt McBride:
Yeah, they’re still in the Spirit. They’re “commanded to write it while yet in the Spirit.”

Casey Griffiths:
And so this is written down. The major focus of your article is how the early Saints responded to the vision. So how does it start to circulate among the Saints? People are making their own copies, or is it published anywhere so that people can get access to it?

Matt McBride:
It’s published soon, but not immediately. We see this somewhat often that Latter-day Saints are so excited when Joseph Smith receives new revelations that they often asked for copies. In fact, most of the copies that we have, manuscript copies that we have of the early revelations, are not dictation copies. It’s evident that the Johnson brothers, Seth and Joel, they obtain a manuscript copy of this within weeks of the revelation, I think before it’s published. And I think it’s Samuel Smith, if I remember right, who’s on a mission. He learns of the vision from Lincoln Haskins, who’s the individual you mentioned at the beginning, who was a newcomer to the Church, was in Kirtland, heard all of the excitement about the vision. Then as he’s leaving and he encounters these two missionaries, tells them, Hey, Joseph and Sidney received this remarkable vision, and they’re happy about it. They rejoiced, but they don’t have it. Then within a matter of days, they encounter Seth and Joel Johnson who bring a manuscript copy, and they’re able to read it for the first time. That’s how the word starts to spread. Then it’s very shortly thereafter published in the Church’s periodical newspaper. This was called the Evening and the Morning Star.

Casey Griffiths:
You mentioned in the article that Lincoln Haskins was pretty excited about the vision, but not every Church member was. There were some that really sort of struggled with the vision. Tell us a little bit about that.

Matt McBride:
The earliest example we have of this is in May. So we’re talking just a couple of months after the vision has been recorded. Orson Pratt and Samuel Smith are visiting with a small branch of the Church, and there’s a man named Ezra Landing in this branch. And he’s upset. He says that, “Brother Landing said the vision,” as they often called Section 76, the vision, “was of the devil, and he believed it no more than he believed that the devil was crucified.”

Casey Griffiths:
Wow.

Matt McBride:
He said he wouldn’t have the vision taught in the church for $1,000. And it takes some work for Orson Pratt, for Samuel Smith to try to persuade him, and just as important, persuade the branch that he is helping to lead, that the vision is a revelation from God that’s been given through the prophet, and that they should accept it. There are other early examples. Probably the most well-known individual who struggled with the vision at first was Brigham Young. We don’t learn about this until later, but later in his life, while speaking to the Church, he talked about this. He said, “My traditions were such that when the vision came first to me, it was so directly contrary and opposed to my former education. I said, Wait a little. I did not reject it, but I could not understand it. I then could feel what incorrect traditions had done for me. Suppose all that I had ever heard from my priests and parents, the way they taught me to read the Bible had been true. My understanding would be diametrically opposed to the doctrine revealed in the vision. I thought, I prayed, I read until I fully understood it for myself by the visions of the Holy Spirit.”

Matt McBride:
And he describes further how it came in contact with his feelings. He says, “Though I never could believe like the mass of the Christian world around me, I did not know how nigh I believed as they did, that it was so nigh I could shake hands with them anytime I wished.” And this is a really interesting account from Brigham Young, and it just helps us see and understand that Brigham Young is bringing with him traditions and ideas from his former religious life to the Church, just as all of us do, just as all of the early converts did, the converts today as well. In this particular instance, the vision conflicted with something that he thought he understood and believed.

Casey Griffiths:
So no less a person than Brigham Young is open in saying, This was really tough for me because it goes contrary to my traditions. And it seems like it does. So can you kind of give us a theological picture? Like, how come it seems like a lot of early Church members responded negatively to the vision? This has always been something that I love about our religion. When I was a missionary, I remember being anxious to teach discussion number 4, which is where you actually draw the plan of salvation and talk about life after death. How come so many Church members were struggling with the vision when it was first received?

Matt McBride:
Well, the vision is dropped into a really interesting context in the history of American religion. It’s around this question of what we sometimes call soteriology, which is the study of the nature of salvation. The most dominant understanding of salvation in early America is just very, very heavily influenced by Calvinism. During the 17th century, most of the 18th century, and for a lot of the First Great Awakening, you have large numbers of Presbyterians and Congregationalists who have Calvinist understanding of salvation. And the Calvinist understanding of salvation is predestinarian. It’s the idea God is totally sovereign, that he knows exactly who’s going to be saved. There’s a fixed number of saved individuals that are chosen by him. They’re known only to him, and that that group of people would be small relative to the number of people who would not be saved, who would be consigned to torment in hell. Calvin is drawing on some New Testament phrases, “narrow as the gate, wide as the way.” The idea is that heaven is a small place for a small crowd, and that most everybody would be on their way to a less-favorable location in the afterlife.

Casey Griffiths:
Not to criticize our Calvinist friends out there, but that feels like a philosophy that would kind of make it hard to, I don’t know, get out of bed in the morning because God’s already decided who’s going to be saved, and it’s a small number, and most people are going to go to hell. In Calvinism, in these early American religions, how did you know that you were one of the pre-ordained? Were there signs manifest? Were there ways you could tell?

Matt McBride:
It’s the big question for everybody. It’s the, how can I know if I’m one of the elect? And so, anxiety over one’s salvation is kind of the story of the day for a lot of people. You have different people, different preachers that have different ideas about what that means. But people are always looking for signs in their feelings, in their heart, in their behavior that they are among the elect.

Casey Griffiths:
Maybe people were different than they are now, but if I had been living back then, I probably would have secretly been thinking, Yeah, I’m one of the chosen, right? But I guess it was easy to assume that other people weren’t, and maybe that’s what conflicts with the vision, is that the vision is very open about who’s going to be saved.

Matt McBride:
It’s interesting, though, because Joseph Smith’s lifetime really coincides with an inflection point in the influence of Calvinist thought in the United States. In the late 18th, early 19th century, and certainly during Joseph Smith’s lifetime, you have the rise of Methodism. There are just people converting to Methodism in droves, people who are becoming Baptist. There are a lot of complicated reasons why that’s the case. There are books and books and books written on religion in early America that try to understand some of these trends. But certainly, part of it is the idea that these other traditions are influenced pretty directly by some of the ideas of Jacobus Arminius, who’s a 17th-century Dutch theologian who is kind of more interested in emphasizing our own response to God’s grace when it comes to salvation and elevating the choice that we have, saying that we can choose to follow God, we can choose to accept the Savior’s sacrifice, and that free will is a part of the picture. It’s an abandonment of the idea of predestination. And of course, over time and throughout much of the world, now we live in a world where ideas about individual liberty and self-determination are just so culturally pervasive.

Matt McBride:
The predestinarian ideas of Calvinism don’t have quite the same appeal today as they once did. But there are still many, many Calvinist Christians that are amazing people, and there’s so much richness to that tradition. But that’s part of the picture of what’s happening at that time. You still have a lot of early Church members who have strong Calvinist backgrounds who come from maybe the Puritan-dominated northeastern United States who feel like the vision is, as Brigham Young said, it just flies in the face of everything he had ever been taught. Because it is so expansive and it’s offering salvation in a degree of glory to almost everyone. It’s reversing that picture of, instead of a small heaven in a larger hell, it’s an extremely large heaven. And then there’s this idea of the sons of perdition, presumably a very, very small number of people.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, it’s almost an exact reversal of what Calvinism was teaching, right? Because today we tend to think of the celestial kingdom as heaven, but the vision sort presents the celestial, the terrestrial, and the telestial as all being a kind of heaven, which is very contrary to the prevalent thought of Joseph Smith’s day.

Matt McBride:
The most radical kind of flavor of thinking, I guess, about salvation in Joseph Smith’s day is universalism. And I talk a little bit about that in the article. I know this is something that you’ve given some thought to and published on as well. Universalism is basically the idea that God is powerful and capable of saving everyone. And this was viewed as heretical and by people with Calvinist leanings. It was controversial kind of for everybody. But the universalist that I quote in the article, I love what he says, Caleb Rich. He says he didn’t love the idea that Christ would have “a mere few trophies of his mission to the world while his antagonist would have countless millions.” So it’s a repudiation of that Calvinist idea about salvation. He says that he feared his own spiritual situation appeared more precarious than a ticket in a lottery. That captures, I think, that feeling we talked about earlier of the anxiety that individuals felt as they tried to wrestle with this question of their own salvation. There’s a really famous universalist parable that Hosea Ballou, who’s a universalist preacher, used to say, “Your child falls into a mire. Its body, its garments are defiled. You clean it up and you array it in clean robes. The query is, or the question, Do you love your child because you washed it, or did you wash it because you loved it?”

Matt McBride:
And that was Hosea Ballou’s way of trying to draw this comparison between universalism and other Christian or maybe more Orthodox conceptions of heaven and hell. And so they’re very open, and they’re saying, Everybody’s going to be saved. I think that because this is culturally somewhat controversial, you see these individuals that we’ve talked about who, when they see the vision, think, Well, Joseph Smith has just embraced universalism. This is not what I signed up for when I joined the Church.

Casey Griffiths:
That article that you mentioned, which is cited in your article, too, was one of the earliest things that I wrote. And I wrote it because I started noticing that the religious background that a person comes from really affects their interaction with the doctrines of the Church. And so everybody in the first generation was a convert to the Church. And I wanted to know, what is Joseph Smith’s religious background? And the closest I could find was universalism. Every member of his family, at some point, his dad, in particular, seems to have leaned towards this idea that God is going to save everybody. And early people like Martin Harris are universalists as well. In fact, in Section 19, when it’s talking about eternal damnation not being forever, my name is eternal. That’s why it’s called eternal damnation. It seems like it’s confirming some of the universalist teachings that are prevalent at the time, that God is a lot more generous and God is a lot more willing to save people than most of the churches in Joseph Smith’s day were teaching. So it’s not surprising that these ideas resonate with a Joseph Smith, but you can see how someone like Brigham Young, who was raised with a really strict heaven-hell dichotomy, might not be able to grasp the vision quite at first.

Matt McBride:
For every person that we’ve talked about that is like, Ezra Landing, you’ve got a Wilford Woodruff for a W. W. Phelps or a Joseph Smith who are just excited as they can be about the vision, right? W. W. Phelps of the Evening and Morning Star calls the vision “the greatest news that ever published to man,” as if he’s reviewing a movie. Wilford Woodrow loves it. Of course, he joins the Church afterward. And I think what you said about, you know, everyone’s a convert and the vision comes in at a particular moment. Like I said, maybe some people experience some whiplash because they say, Wait, this is not what I thought we believed. Converts thereafter are often, this is part of what really attracts them to the restored gospel is this broader vision of salvation. He says, Wilford Woodruff says, “When I read the vision, it enlightened my mind, gave me great joy. It appeared to me that the God who revealed that principle unto man was wise, just, and true, possessed both the best of attributes and good sense and knowledge. I felt he was consistent with both love, mercy, justice, and judgment. And I felt to love the Lord more than ever before in my life,” which is just amazing. It’s just a remarkable response to this incredible account.

Casey Griffiths:
I would say that that perspective that God is loving and that God wants to save has probably won out in the Church in the end. Maybe I grew up in a really sunshiny family, but I never really held the view that most of Heavenly Father’s children are going to go to hell or that there even was a hell the way that it’s conceived of in popular culture, where it’s like a cave and everybody’s in ragged clothes and the devil is presiding over. I just never really grew up believing that, and I’m grateful. I think the vision plays a big role in why we don’t see the people around us as going to hell, whether they’re Latter-day Saints or not.

Matt McBride:
Wilford Woodruff just nails it there when he characterizes the vision as a document that teaches us something about God, that teaches us something about God’s character and his mercy and his love and judgment.

Casey Griffiths:
While we’re emphasizing the unique nature of the vision, I think we should also emphasize that it’s not entirely unique. In fact, some people have tied the vision to figures like Alexander Campbell and Emmanuel Swedenborg. Can you talk a little bit about that, about others that may have seen a similar kind of vision of the afterlife?

Matt McBride:
Yeah, really interesting question there. Maybe to ask this question is to beg a larger question about kind of the 18th- and 19th-century influences on Joseph Smith, on his revelations, on his translations, kind of these supposed influences. These kinds of questions are frequently asked by people who are seeking maybe like a more naturalistic explanation for the Book of Mormon translation, for example. Where did this thing come from? Was it influenced by Solomon Spaulding or Ethan Smith? Was it influenced by Gilbert Hunt’s book, The Late War? Is Joseph Smith just borrowing these phrases, these concepts and ideas from other places in his culture? In this particular case, people often talk about the two individuals you mentioned, Alexander Campbell, who is one of Joseph Smith’s contemporaries. He’s another restorationist thinker. The other person that they often will refer to is Emmanuel Swedenborg. And Swedenborg lives, I think, about a century before Joseph Smith. He’s a Swedish, like a renaissance man, a polymath. He has a philosophy degree. He’s a metallurgist. He’s all of these different things. Then when he’s about, I think, my age, in his 50s, he begins to claim that God has called him to reveal new truths and had shown him visions of our life after death.

Matt McBride:
One of the things that Swedenborg does in this account of his visions is describes a tripartite heaven. There are three heavens. He calls them the celestial heaven. He says, That’s the innermost heaven. Then a spiritual heaven is the name of the second one, and then the last one is a natural. Then Campbell, Joseph Smith’s contemporary Alexander Campbell, also talks of three kingdoms. He talks about the kingdom of law, the kingdom of favor, and the kingdom of glory. It’s tempting to look at that and say, Oh, well, maybe Joseph Smith hears about these ideas or discusses them with Sidney Rigdon, and then they kind of make their way his thinking or into his description of the vision. What I would say is that in that, kind of the field of intellectual history, the history of ideas, when you’re trying to trace the dependence of one text on another or the influence of one person’s ideas on those of another person, it’s a really, really challenging thing to do. We have to demand a high standard of evidence, and we have to look at all the potential influences and weigh them against each other. You have to look at the nature of what Campbell and Swedenborg say, too.

Matt McBride:
There are some kind of similarities. There are three, right? Three heavens. Okay. Alexander Campbell, for him, it’s a progression from one state to another. There are these three kingdoms. And I think that progression, in his view, begins in this life and then continues into the next world. A little bit different, perhaps, than the way Joseph Smith describes the three degrees of glory. Swedenborg’s is interesting and different, too. He talks about… He goes into a lot of detail about who’s where and who’s allowed to move. But for him, nobody is able to move between kingdoms and even angels. But that they’re brought together by the Lord. What I would say is, if you’re a Latter-day Saint and trying to make sense of this, first of all, I would say that there’s probably a lot more likely explanation, and that is that Campbell, that Swedenborg, that Joseph Smith are all drawing on the Bible first.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, Paul talks about three heavens, right? Most of us are familiar with 1 Corinthians 15, where he talks about the celestial, the terrestrial, glory of the sun, glory of the moon, glory of the stars. It is interesting to me that Campbell and Swedenborg don’t adopt Paul’s language, except for, I guess, Swedenborg saying there’s a celestial realm or something like that.

Matt McBride:
Yeah, that’s the one noticeable instance where he’s adopting that Pauline language. But yeah, 2 Corinthians 12, Paul says, “I knew a man in Christ, such an one caught up to the third heaven.” And I think it’s telling, too, that he says, “Whether in the body I cannot tell or whether out of the body I cannot tell.” Joseph Smith, a few years after the vision in 1836, and he has another comparable vision, in some ways, comparable vision to the one that’s recorded in Section 76. A portion of it is in Section 137 of the Doctrine and Covenants, where he’s describing seeing a vision of the celestial kingdom. The original text says that he also saw the terrestrial kingdom in this vision. It’s in January of 1836, but he starts it by saying, I beheld the celestial kingdom of God and the glory thereof, whether in the body or out, I cannot tell. And so Joseph Smith’s very clearly aware of this passage in 2 Corinthians. He’s very much in this biblical milieu. And then you mentioned 1 Corinthians 15, where we’re talking about three different degrees, celestial, terrestrial, and they’re compared to the sun, the moon, and the stars. And it’s just so evident in Section 76, that the vision that Joseph Smith sees and that the language that he uses to describe what he saw draws so heavily on Paul.

Matt McBride:
We know Joseph Smith knows the Bible. We know he knows it. And so others have tried to say, Well, here are the plausible ways that Joseph Smith could have come across Emmanuel Swedenborg’s teachings in a pamphlet in Palmyra in 1830. We’re talking about Joseph Smith, whose mother said he wasn’t inclined to read. That’s not to say he didn’t find those pamphlets. I’m not saying that it’s impossible. It’s just that you have to kind of think about the likelihood. The Bible is just screaming at us as the clear place that Joseph Smith could go to and have recourse to find language to describe an ineffable experience that he and Sidney Rigdon have.

Casey Griffiths:
It’s not hard to draw a line from Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon to Alexander Campbell. I mean, Sidney and Alexander Campbell were contemporaries. They were colleagues. When it comes to Swedenborg, I’ll mention that J. B. Haws has written a pretty good article to try and track down what Joseph Smith have been aware of Emmanuel Swedenborg, and we’ve got that linked on our website. You can go and take a look at it. But you are right that we’re kind of looking past the big thing, ignoring the elephant in the room, which is that a lot of these ideas are there in the Bible, just in a very rough form, in a skeletal form that needs to kind of have flesh added to it so that it makes a little bit more sense.

Matt McBride:
It could be that as Latter-day Saints, we look at it and say, Well, if we believe that Joseph Smith, that God communicates to his children that there’s a long process leading up to the restoration of the gospel, why couldn’t God have shown something true to Emmanuel Swedenborg? I’m not trying to take anything away from Swedenborg. I think he’s a really, really fascinating person. He’s been influential on a lot of people. I think he was influential on Emerson. He was influential on a lot of others. But to the extent that people want to say that Joseph Smith is… That there’s kind of a direct influence or borrowing from Swedenborg to create a conception of the afterlife, I think that’s a very, very difficult thing to prove and just hard to even fathom in the face of what we know about Joseph Smith’s engagement with the biblical text, especially during the time period in which he received Section 76.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, I think you’re right in that we’re open to the idea that Joseph Smith doesn’t receive these revelations in a vacuum. And by the way, Emmanuel Swedenborg still has followers today. I’m friends with a guy whose wife is a Swedenborgian minister. But I think J. B. is probably right in that, you know, we dance around it, but the truth is the Bible is probably the thing that’s influencing Joseph the most. And everything’s right there, celestial, terrestrial. I think the word telestial is introduced into the lexicon because of Section 76, but it has Latin roots. I tell my classes, telephone, television, telestial kingdom. Telos means distance, that it’s the most distant from God, and yet it’s still a degree of glory. It’s still glorious beyond all description, according to the text of Section 76.

Casey Griffiths:
Well, Matt, if we can, I want to move to a couple more topics. Let’s talk about the poetic version of the vision. So you mentioned that W. W. Phelps was a big fan of the vision. He gives it a blurb. And then there’s this really unique a poem. He writes a poem called Vade Mecum. And then in response, Joseph Smith writes a poetic version of the vision. He’s probably helped by Phelps. But tell us a little bit about that and what you know about it.

Matt McBride:
I want to credit the historians who worked on this vision in the Joseph Smith Papers for uncovering this. I know the volume editors were Matt Godfrey and Mark Ashurst-McGee and others. Not sure who provided this, but they note in their introduction to Section 76 in the papers that Joseph Smith composes this poem in part as a response to his lawyer. So Justin Butterfield is a non-Latter-day Saint who is representing Joseph Smith in some of his legal situations that he’s facing in Nauvoo. At one point during his closing arguments at a hearing as he’s defending Joseph Smith in Springfield, Butterfield says that Joseph Smith was, quote, “An innocent and unoffending man, and that the only difference between him biblical prophets was that the old prophets prophesied in poetry and the modern in prose.” So the editor of the Times and Seasons, when this poem is first published, says that he hopes that people will “be convinced that modern prophets can prophesy in poetry as well as the ancient prophets, and that no difference, even of that kind, any longer exists.” Then what we have following that, of course, Phelps’ very brief poem that’s Come, Come with Me, Vade Mecum. Phelps loved Latin.

Matt McBride:
We think we have a sense that he ghost-wrote some things for Joseph Smith sometimes. So when you see Joseph Smith using Latin phrases, you can kind of feel the influence of W. W. Phelps, I think, when you see that. But so he calls it Vade Mecum, which means come with me in Latin, and he writes this brief poem. Then Joseph Smith responds with a poetic rendition of Section 76. It’s long, and it’s very, very textually dependent on 76. It follows the language of the revelation really closely and just makes adjustments to it to work with the meter, and in some cases, some of the very rough rhyming schemes in this poem. It’s kind of fun to read. It’s really interesting. The thing I think that’s most interesting about it to me is what it says about the way Joseph Smith understood, approached, thought about, treated these revelations that God had given him. We know that in many instances, he receives revealed texts, and then in the process of preparing them for publication, goes in and he expands and he tinkers and he adds. And he’s doing this based on further light and knowledge. He’s always learning, always learning new things, always asking God new questions, always getting new answers.

Matt McBride:
Then during the time that elapses between an earlier revelation and the time when they’re going to prepare it for publication, he’s like, No, okay, I’ve learned some new… We’ve got to add some things in here. And we see this again and again and again in the Doctrine and Covenants. You can also see it in this poem where for the most part, as I suggested, it follows the revelation to a T, the account of the vision in Section 76 to a T with those liberties taken for poetic purposes. But then he finds moments to introduce other things that he’s learned about this topic in the interim. You read the poem and he talks about Kolob. Well, there’s no mention of Kolob in Section 76. This is something that emerges as he works on the translation of the Book of Abraham in the years that follow. But he can’t help himself. He’s going to bring that in and he’s going to include it there because this is new light and knowledge, further light and knowledge that he’s able to graft into his treatment of Section 76. He does the same thing with baptisms for the dead. Right, so one of the things that’s really noticeable to Latter-day Saints today, when you read Section 76 is, okay, but what about baptisms for the dead?

Matt McBride:
You know, because it’s this glaring hole, it’s this glaring omission. And in his poetic version, he pauses as he’s giving an account of people who inherit these kingdoms of glory to say, quote, “To spirits in prison the Savior once preached and taught them the gospel with powers afresh, and then were the living baptized for their dead that they might be judged as if men in the flesh.” And so he’s completing the story based on subsequent revelation. I think that’s one of the most interesting aspects of that 1843 poetic version.

Casey Griffiths:
I’ll say, I don’t mind that Joseph Smith does that. And it also makes the poetic version of the vision kind of commentary on Section 76, where you can tell Joseph Smith is reading through the revelation. And then the poetic version of the vision is kind of like him elaborating. Like the passage I always fixate on is Section 76, during the vision of the Father and the Son has this moment where he says, “The worlds,” talking about the Son, “are and were created by him and the inhabitants thereof are begotten sons and daughters unto God.” And in the poetic version of the vision, he actually just flat out, like, says, “Yes, all the worlds were created by him, even all the career in the heavens so broad.” And then the phrasing is something like, “Whose inhabitants, too, from the first to the last, are saved by the very same Savior as ours, and of course, are begotten God’s daughters and sons by the very same truths and the very same powers.” And that’s huge for our cosmology. Basically, Latter-day Saints believe that there’s multiple worlds, that Jesus is the Savior of every world, and that the truth that saves a person on one of these worlds is the same truth that would be taught here on Earth as well, which is a very appealing idea to me.

Casey Griffiths:
I guess the science fiction part of my brain is coming out here to say, Hey, other worlds with other people and Jesus ministering to them. That’s amazing. I love the idea that we have an interstellar theology.

Matt McBride:
It’s a fun poem to read. Now, it’s not, like, the most artfully-done poem ever written. When it’s published in The Millennial Star, they say, Well, you know, you could criticize the way that the verses are put together. They say the rare and sublime doctrines that it contains more than make up for any weaknesses in the poem itself. You’ve shared one of those rare and sublime doctrines that maybe also originates in the Bible translation, right? In the Book of Moses, Moses chapter 1. It’s fun to see Joseph Smith in Nauvoo taking… We’ll say it’s standing at the end of his prophetic career. He has inklings of this, but maybe he doesn’t know it quite yet, But he’s looking back on everything that’s happened over more than a decade, and he starts to synthesize and pull all of these ideas together in a way that is just really beautiful. Section 76 is such an important part of that. We see that synthesis reflected in the temple ordinances that he introduces in Nauvoo as just kind of a final monument to this accrual of knowledge about what Joseph Smith calls the economy of God. That’s how he characterizes Section 76, a vision about the economy of God, how God works.

Casey Griffiths:
Very good. Well, Matt, maybe just a couple more questions. So we’ve talked about how the vision was difficult for a lot of early members of the Church. Today, you know, I’ve seen T-shirts and bumper stickers and little kits you can buy to just explain the plan of salvation, which is largely informed by Section 76. Any insights as to how we went from being a little skittish about it to fully embracing it as a vital part of our faith?

Matt McBride:
A couple of reasons come to mind, and maybe this first one is stating the obvious. It goes back to something I said earlier, where if it was upsetting to a Brigham Young or an Ezra Landing, part of it’s because it was new to the Church, right. They are converts to the Church. They had an understanding of what to expect. And then this thing came along and kind of blindsided them. You can see Wilford Woodruff then later, this is something that is part of what he embraces. That’s part of his receptivity to the restored gospel as a convert. You suggested earlier that the contents of this vision, in part, are an important part of the way we teach the gospel to new converts today. That goes back to the late 19th century. We’ve got a church full of people who were either receptive to this idea when they joined the Church or raised their children to be excited about and to understand this idea. And so it’s this brief period at the beginning where it just is so new that I think leads to some of those negative reactions early on. Then the other thing, I guess, is just what I said before, is just kind of that shift in attitudes toward salvation, that maybe a little bit of a decline in the influence of Calvinism.

Matt McBride:
Then just the rise in these ideas about self-determination and free will that are so important to kind of most people, certainly in the United States, but in a lot of other places in the world. These are important values to the modern world. And so we come to this and we say, Yes, we love that we can choose. We can choose what we want to do. Our agency has a role in our salvation, and that God has prepared this incredible future for everyone, and that that future will be a reflection of our choice.

Casey Griffiths:
Thank you for that. Just maybe one last question. You are immersed in Church history all the time. It’s your job. You’ve produced just mountains of material to help people understand this. How has your study of Church history helped you strengthen your faith in Jesus Christ and the divinity of the Restoration?

Matt McBride:
Yeah, I love this question. I’ve been asked this before, as you can imagine. What is it like to to sit and think about Church history all day and how does that relate to your faith? Does it have a positive impact? Does some of it have a negative impact? Church history is two things. The story of a lot of people who are as flawed as I am and flawed as any, you know, trying their best to follow the Savior, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing. It’s also a story of God and the Savior and their influence on the lives of their children in this world. I love the stories of people on the one hand, because they give me hope, because I get to see how they stumble, how they pick themselves up after they stumble, and how they then succeed. I get to feel their goodness. I get to mourn at some of the things that go wrong. I guess it’s just opened my heart to other people in a way that I needed. Then this idea of the history of the Church also being part of the history of the Savior. Every bit as much a part of the history of the Savior as the accounts that we read in the four gospels.

Matt McBride:
He’s working in the world. He speaks to prophets. He cares about what’s going on in our lives, and we get to see that manifest as we study these stories. One of the things that I will add is that as historians, the focus of our study is change. It’s the dynamics of change. How do things change over time and why do they change? When you look and you approach Church history closely, you just see a tremendous amount of change, sometimes way more than you expected. You say, Well, I didn’t know we used to do it that way. I didn’t know this has changed five times. I thought this was an eternal principle or something like that. One of the things that’s been helpful to me is to try to take all of that and survey all of that change because in the process of seeing all the things that change, you start to observe and notice the things that don’t change, the things that are lasting. And so my study of Church history has really helped me to focus my faith in on the core principles, the most important core of my beliefs, which, as Joseph Smith articulated it, are “the testimony of the prophets and apostles, that the Savior died and was resurrected, and that everything else in our faith is an appendage to that.”

Matt McBride:
That’s what a deep study of Church history has done for me. It’s helped me love people more. It’s helped me recognize a little bit about who God is as I observe the way he interacts with his children. Then it’s helped me focus my attention away from things that… They’re not distractions. They can be important. Things that change are still important, but focus a little bit more intently on some of those really important, enduring doctrines of the gospel that are at the core of what we believe. One of the things I love about Section 76 is that it’s this grand vision of the eternities. Joseph Smith said he only wrote down a portion of what he saw. I like to wonder, well, what else did he see in the same way that the brother of Jared say, I saw this grand vision, and I can’t write it down because I just can’t. There’s this vision that’s there that they have. And Joseph Smith, at one point in his life, says that you can learn more by gazing into heaven for just a few minutes than you could from reading all of the books that had ever been written about it.

Matt McBride:
The really cool thing about it is that Joseph Smith then would turn around to us and say, This vision doesn’t have to be reserved for prophets. This is, I want everyone to begin the work now to prepare themselves, to purify themselves so that they can one day experience that same vision. And so that’s one of the things that’s, I think, really beautiful about this experience that Joseph and Sidney have is that it kind of spurs me to think, Well, what can I do and what do I need to do so that someday, probably in the far-distant future, when I’m ready, when I’m prepared, I can have this same remarkable kind of experience that another Joseph or a Sidney or a John or a Moses or a Nephi might have had in the scriptures.

Casey Griffiths:
Well, thank you very much. And thank you for your insights. And thanks to you and your team for all the resources that you’ve brought to bear so that we can understand the Doctrine and Covenants a little bit better. And like you said, understand this story, this gospel of Jesus Christ that’s still happening in our day.

Matt McBride:
Thank you, Casey.