A Celestial Surprise

The cornerstones for the House of the Lord in Kirtland were laid on July 23, 1833. By January 1836, the structure neared completion. The Saints in Ohio had already faced serious obstacles to building the House of the Lord—selling acreage to finance the project was itself quite a challenge during a farmland spike in 1835; working a limestone quarry and erecting a sawmill extracted the most of the community’s limited skills; and a sawmill fire in December 1835 nearly wiped out the remaining timber supply. Costs by July 1835 already topped $10,000, with expectations the final cost could easily double that amount.1 (For reference, an adult farm worker earned between $150–200 a year.)2 Non-Mormon residents in the area coordinated a grain embargo, buying up all the available local grain and refusing to sell to “the Mormonites,” forcing JS and others into devising a new supply chain on “their mites” to avoid a major food shortage.3 Other supplies were down. Children went house to house collecting broken pottery and china that was ground into powders for making plaster.4 When January 1836 arrived, the interior needed work, but JS and others began holding meetings inside.

The Bible presented compelling accounts of the tabernacle of Moses, prophecies of the Lord’s return to his temple, and descriptions of priesthood that captivated JS and oriented plans for the House of the Lord. The list of relevant passages is long; indeed, JS at this time did something unique in synthesizing so many biblical elements and fashioning a mode of New Testament and Old Testament restorationism. Key passages at the top of the list, though, include:

• Exodus 30
• Malachi 3
• Joel 1
• Luke 24

Exodus 30 quotes revelations of the Lord to Moses directing the priests of Aaron to wash before entering the tabernacle, or perish; also to be anointed with holy oil before ministering in the priest’s office. Other instructions associated priesthood (in this sense, a priestly class, not a divine power as so many Latter-day Saints speak of it today) and priestly ritual with the tabernacle, which convinced JS that no true priesthood could exist without there also being a tabernacle of the Lord and the priests being washed and anointed before entering and performing rituals.

Malachi 3 prophesies of the Lord suddenly coming to his temple, a central prophecy for Latter-day Saints urgently anticipating the surprising and unknowable day of the Second Coming. For JS, certain prophesied antecedents to a doomsday event for the wicked needed to occur as part of the last days, and the Malachi prophecies took special priority. He emphasized the House of the Lord as a necessary development in the Saints preparing for the Millennium by creating the space for the Lord to suddenly come and fulfill Malachi’s prophecy.

Joel 1 associated a solemn assembly with a gathering of all the elders to the House of the Lord. Earlier revelations directed JS and the Saints to call their solemn assembly using the same verbiage as Joel, and promising an outpouring of divine power for those who would prepare themselves through repentance, holiness, and fasting. JS told the Saints they could not observe the solemn assembly minus the House of the Lord, hence, the urgency in finishing construction.

Luke 24 describes the Lord’s commandment to his disciples to tarry at Jerusalem until they should be endowed with power from on high before setting off to declare the gospel to every creature. Luke-Acts, the original work that was later split into Luke and Acts, itself associated Pentecost with this endowment of power. The Christian tradition had long been that the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was the divine power to which Jesus had referred and had direct bearing on the disciples’ ability to proclaim the gospel, since the most immediate barrier to such proclamation was the diversity of languages in the provinces of Rome. For JS, the Bible suggested the last days would occasion a great, global proclamation of the gospel, and he reasoned the proper sequence would entail a Pentecostal endowment of power, which required a solemn assembly in the House of the Lord, which required a House of the Lord, which required priests, which required priesthood, which required preparatory ritual washings and anointings.

In JS’s mind, the House of the Lord unified and fulfilled Exodus 30, Malachi 3, Joel 1, and Luke 24.

The events of early 1836 leading to and encompassing the solemn assembly in the House of the Lord brought all these biblical elements together, providing the Latter-day Saints with a powerful sense of restored Israelite covenant, an inauguration of a worldwide gathering of Israel to the New Jerusalem, and fulfillment of prophecy. Little wonder the occasion was celebrated with a Hosanna shout (as though welcoming the Lord to his house as had happened in Jerusalem with palm leaves and hosannas) and the debut of “The Spirit of God Like a Fire Is Burning.”

D&C 137 and 109–110 occurred during this Pentecostal and priestly season. Their elements and references are saturated in biblical lore and prophecy.

Doctrine of the Salvation of the Unevangelized

Christians have long held that salvation is possible through Jesus alone; that receiving Jesus’s grace is essential to salvation; and that proclaiming Jesus’s gospel is therefore urgent and necessary for ensuring everyone the chance of being saved. And, naturally, Christians and theologians have long considered the fate of the unevangelized—in plain terms, it’s that question of what will happen to those who never remotely had the chance of even hearing Jesus’s name let alone his gospel during their mortal life. For those Christians who understand salvation in even stricter terms—baptism is a necessary ordinance, for example—the concern over the unevangelized has included deep theological reasoning to reconcile legal notions of a final judgment with moral innocence, and even work a solution to the evidential problem of evil.

JS presents us an interesting case: raised in a Presbyterian household with a Universalist for a father and himself sympathizing with Methodism as a youth, he seems to have acknowledged the Calvinist/Presbyterian insistence on the sovereignty of God and God’s law; but also greatly desired for God to be universally merciful; and also believed human beings were moral agents capable of righteous works that could merit salvation. In this confluence of Protestant expectations within JS was the assumption that a soul needed to satisfy God’s law of baptism before qualifying to enter through the gates of heaven. And, as did so many believers including JS’s father, he described God as being universally good and patient, willing to develop pathways to salvation for the unevangelized that remained a mystery.

On the evening of Saturday, January 16, 1836, Oliver Cowdery and John Corrill met with JS. “After pure water was prepared,” they “called upon the Lord and proceeded to wash each other’s bodies, and bathe the same with whiskey, perfumed with cinnamon. This we did that we might be clean before the Lord for the Sabbath, confessing our sins and covenanting to be faithful to God. While performing this washing unto the Lord with solemnity, our minds were filled with many reflections upon the propriety of the same, and how the priests anciently used to wash always before ministering before the Lord. As we had nearly finished this purification, bro. Martin Harris came in and was also washed.”5 The next day on the Sabbath, the “quorums of the Church were organized in the presence of the Church.” Cowdery wished, “O may we be prepared for the endowment,—being sanctified and cleansed from all sin.”6 Notice how the washing was associated with purification and a priestly preparation to participate in rituals of the tabernacle/temple—and how conscious JS and Cowdery and their associates were of this fact. Notice also how the endowment of power was contingent upon their collective sanctification. Finally, a key point is how the washing was separate from the anointing and distinct in its own right—JS attended to this in his own house, even preparing pure water (probably by boiling), a preparation outside the tabernacle/House of the Lord just as the Levitical priests had done. They washed to prepare themselves to be anointed.

On the following Thursday, JS again performed washings in the council room above the printing office in Kirtland, and at sunset, they assembled in the House of the Lord for the “holy anointing.” The group consisted of the Presidency of the High Priesthood, the presidency of the Church in Missouri, the two bishoprics, and JS’s scribe Warren Parrish. Soon after, the high councils of Kirtland and Missouri joined, but “waited in prayer” until after the first group received their anointings.

The procedure was significant: the Presidency of the High Priesthood (who at the time were JS, Sidney Rigdon, and Frederick G. Williams) first anointed Joseph Smith Sr. the Patriarch, and then Joseph Smith Sr. anointed each of the presidents in order of their ages. (I’ll say more in another post about why the covenantal theology of priesthood calls for a “literal descendant of Ephraim” to have the legal right to the patriarchy, and why Joseph Sr. was anointed as opposed to being ordained.) Joseph Sr. anointed JS and “sealed” upon him “the blessings, of Moses, to lead Israel in the latter days.” After this blessing, the presidency surrounded JS, laid their hands upon his head, and pronounced further blessings.

Think of this moment: the men assembled in the “president’s room” (also called the “west school room”) on the third floor of the House of the Lord, in a circle around JS, just after JS’s anointing and sealing as the modern-day Moses inside of the modern-day tabernacle, and in the attitude of closing a priesthood blessing, JS looks up and the heavens open—“I beheld the celestial kingdom of God, and the glory thereof,” he said, “I saw the transcendant beauty of the gate through which the heirs of that kingdom will enter, which was like unto circling flames of fire, also the blasing throne of God, whereon was seated the Father and the Son.”7 He saw Adam, Abraham, and Michael. And then something astonishing—he saw his father (who happens to be standing right there beside him) and his mother and his deceased older brother Alvin.

JS marveled, he said. The scene checked out: God the Father, Jesus Christ, Adam, Abraham, Michael, Lucy Mack Smith, Joseph Smith Sr. These were all noble and great ones, people squarely within the new and everlasting covenant.

Checked out, except for one: Alvin. JS’s brother had died “before the Lord had set his hand to gather Israel the second time and had not been baptized for the remission of sins”—how could Alvin partake in celestial glory? In this moment of marveling, JS contemplated the fate of the unevangelized, and seeing Alvin in God’s presence came as a surprise.

What follows ranks as one of the more significant revelations of the Restoration for me. We tend to forget that on January 21, 1836, there’s no temple theology yet (they’re exclusively calling the structure the “House of the Lord”), there’s no proxy ordinance theology yet, there are no “higher ordinances” yet, there’s no sealing ordinance or “welding link” theology yet. On this occasion, there’s Alvin—wonderful, stalwart, beautiful older brother Alvin—in celestial glory. The fact of his presence should arrest us as it did Joseph. When God speaks to explain, there is no mention of proxy ordinances, no mention of merit. Only this: God knows Alvin’s heart. God knows Alvin. And Alvin is a good man, a man God loves.

At the foundation of the D&C’s theology regarding the fate of the unevangelized, is this premise: that the Lord knows not only our works but the desires behind them, and, therefore, the Lord knows the whole person. He doesn’t seem capricious or even a technocrat with “The Law” or some such universe-standard. It’s simple. People like Alvin desire the gospel, the good news, and when afforded the opportunity to be with God, they embrace it, and God receives them. Does Alvin need baptism for the dead to abide in God’s celestial glory? No, not according to the Lord in this revelation. JS will seek assurance of salvation for his whole family, and in a future day, he will contemplate how baptism for the dead offers a sealing ordinance for the living, an assurance that he will resurrect together with his family members. That’s different than Alvin’s celestial glory being contingent on someone performing the baptismal rite on his behalf. (I’ll say more when we reach D&C 128, when JS expands his idea of baptism for the dead.)

I’m sure our judgments of fellow human beings, no matter how informed, cannot reach God’s level of knowing intents and desires. I fully expect, should the day come when I may glimpse the threshold of heaven, I will see people who will surprise me, and like JS, I’ll marvel, and the Lord will remind me of my miscalculations. The person next to us could just as well or better desire the gospel than we, a secret within their heart only God can tell. Let’s rather expect to see everyone someday—glorified, near the throne of God.

Next time: D&C 109–110. (Soon! I promise.)