The heterodox Mormon Vision of the Redemption of the Dead of October 3, 1918 expands religious identity to the point of Universalism

The "vision" is notable for the way the Second Coming of the Son of Man as judge is minimized and rationalized away in favor of a now all-consuming Universalism.

Such rationalization is a feature of religion, not a bug.

The Pharisees were liberal democritizers of Judaism with their synagogue system, expanding the availability of the holiness of the Temple priests to the hinterlands of Israel and to the Diaspora. Paul for Christianity expanded membership in the lost sheep of the house of Israel saved by Christ to the Greek-speaking Gentile world of the Mediterranean. Even Muhammad for the Arabs gave them their very own Book which rewrote the erroneous Jewish and Christian Bible in their own language. The Protestant Reformers of hierarchical Catholicism created a  priesthood of all believers transmitted in the vernacular thanks to Gutenberg.

But Mormons would flat out save the entire human race, expanding the availability of salvation even to the dead. The specific impetus is the belief that the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel were scattered globally, multiplied, and are basically unknown even to themselves, and that the Mormon mission is to gather them in to the House of Joseph in America, the twin of the House of Judah in Israel.

It's not unlike the Muslim view of its own legitimacy asserted through Ishmael, not Isaac. Mormonism is to American Protestantism, particularly nonconformist Protestantism of the Second Great Awakening in Western New York, as Islam is to Eastern Orthodoxy, particularly Nestorianism.

It's as ingenious as it is unconvincing.  

The Whole Earth Shall Be in Commotion

It was just a few weeks before his own death when President Smith was in the depths of sorrow over the sudden death of his oldest son when he received the crowning heavenly revelation known as “the vision of the redemption of the dead.” In this vision, he not only saw his father in the Spirit World but the great gathering of millions of the righteous who had died into the arms of Christ. He also saw the offering of redemption to those who had done wickedly on the earth on the condition of their repentance in the Spirit World. This was Christ’s visit to the Spirit World during the 3 days His body was in the tomb, fulfilling His promise recorded in 1 Peter: 3, 4 . . .

 

While yes, Christ’s Second Coming will cleanse the wicked from the earth, after death, He offers healing to all who will accept it. He wants us to come home.  This gathering overcomes all the “separateness” and chaos that evil inflicts upon us. It not only gathers us into the arms of Christ but into the arms of each other. Even as we approach the Apocalypse and the center stops holding on earth, it does hold in eternity. I rejoice to know that, in the end, all things in heaven and earth will be gathered together as one in Christ.

Billy Graham, deceased at 99, followed the path first cut by George Whitefield, preacher of the new birth

Thomas Kidd, here:

George Whitefield, born on Dec. 16, 1714, was a Church of England minister who led the Great Awakening, a series of Christian revivals that swept through Britain and America in the mid-1700s. Whitefield drew enormous audiences wherever he went on both sides of the Atlantic, and his publications alone doubled the output of the American colonial presses between 1739 and 1742. If there is a modem figure comparable to Whitefield, it is Billy Graham. But even Mr. Graham has followed a path first cut by Whitefield. ...

“As you have made a pretty considerable progress in the mysteries of electricity,” Whitefield [once] wrote to [Benjamin] Franklin in 1752, “I would now humbly recommend to your diligent unprejudiced pursuit and study the mystery of the new-birth.”

A Rob Bell Sympathizer Admits "Spiritual" Experience Can Be Manufactured

"[S]o many Christian teachers oversell, and therefore inevitably underdeliver—or better, put God in the position where he will underdeliver. I suspect that in many cases, they are merely using hyperbole to drive home a point, but I'm convinced that readers and listeners take such exaggerations literally because they desperately want them to be true. ...

"I myself have experienced a healing of severe pain in my leg. I have also almost been "slain in the Spirit" (but got hold of myself just in time!). And as the Spirit leads, I speak in tongues. I have also had ecstatic experiences when the love of God penetrated my whole being.

"And in a life of 60 years, I can count these experiences on one hand. Because I've had such experiences, I understand perfectly the desire to have them all the time, and to imagine that maybe there is a technique, a method, a way to pray, a way to be open and alert—something!—that will allow me to experience this daily. Believe me, I tried that for a while and discovered that, yes, I could manufacture something very similar to a genuine spiritual experience. But it soon became clear that the search for daily wonder was creating a religion of Mark Galli."

-- Mark Galli, here

Yeah, well, what if the "genuine" experiences were in fact manufactured, too? It's the rare, unwilling conversions which interest me, the road-to-Damascus sort which are devoid of "the religion of feeling". Rob Bell's religion of feeling, on the other hand, appeals to an American culture which has finally surrendered to the sentimental in the post-war period because of the triumph of liberalism. And in an important sense Romanticized Christianity from the Great Awakening onward paved the way for that victory, just as it paved the way for socialism and communism in early 20th century Europe. To be converted today is to reject all these forms of Christianity.

"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?"

-- Jeremiah 17:9

"My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever."

-- Psalm 73:26

Why Did God Create The World?

It is one of those odd sweeping questions of idealistic youth which I've never really outgrown.

Today I cannot remember what caused the original fascination with the question. During college I think it might have gained some momentum from the ideas of the creation theologians of Europe whom Bo Reicke once told me about. I've still got those books . . . in a box somewhere. I'll have to dig them out and look at them again.

I do remember thinking at the time that an appropriate theological answer had to be "love," but every time I discussed this with serious people, the discussion, I think by mutual perception, always ended up feeling kind of, well, corny! 

The trouble was I couldn't exactly nail down any sources which propounded that answer, nor could I really point to a fully worked out history of the idea. I dabbled with it for a while, and like so many ideas and enthusiasms of youth, it ceased to preoccupy my attention eventually.

And then I happened to read this today and all that came flooding back. The selection finally gives me an historical fix on the problem, from an essay on the trinitarian theology of Jonathan Edwards, by one Daniel M. Harrell, here:

The infinite happiness of God in community generates a delight that cannot be contained (for then God would be less happy, a logical impossibility). God's love radiates outward, emanating forth like a fountain. Edwards preached:

There is in heaven this fountain of love, this eternal three in one, set open without any obstacle to hinder access to it. There this glorious God is manifested and shines forth in full glory, in beams of love; there the fountain overflows in streams and rivers of love and delight, enough for all to drink at, and to swim in, yea, so as to overflow the world as it were with a deluge of love.

It was this unhindered, radiating deluge of love that resulted in creation. Trinitarian love is manifest in the interrelatedness of creation—nothing exists in pure independence. Trinitarian love is manifest in redemption that ushers saints into participation in God's overflowing happiness, a happiness that extends infinitely into eternity.

As it turns out, Edwards was also responsible for another aspect of Christian theological thinking which prepared the way for the psychological-social interpretation of the Christian life as "relational," a concept derived directly from his conception of the trinity and necessarily following from it. It is uncanny how in Edwards' conception of the trinity the only begotten son of God is a kind of perfect projection of the infinitely perfect thoughts of the father, which conception has an interesting bearing on what people mean when they say they have a personal relationship with Jesus. Is he not also a projection of our own minds, mediated by the thoughts we have of him, absorbed through the Bible?

In retrospect it's no wonder that the interdisciplinary department in which I studied religion so long ago with experts in Hinduism, Confucianism, Judaism and Islam failed me on this one. The Great Awakening wasn't exactly their forte.

Looks like I have some work cut out for me. At least I know where to start.

(originally posted June 2011)