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.

Bill Johnson of Bethel Redding erects his whole theory of signs and wonders on a Christological lie

From When Heaven Invades Earth (2013), p. 29, where Bill Johnson attempts to drive a wedge between the two natures in Christ in the manner of an Arian, an Adoptionist, or a Nestorian:

'Jesus could not heal the sick. Neither could He deliver the tormented from demons or raise the dead. To believe otherwise is to ignore what He said about Himself, and more importantly, to miss the purpose of His self-imposed restriction to live as a man. Jesus Christ said of Himself, "The Son can do nothing" (John 5:19). ... He had no supernatural capabilities whatsoever! While He is 100 percent God, He chose to live with the same limitations that man would face once he was redeemed. ... He performed miracles, wonders, and signs as a man in right relationship to God. . . not as God.'

But it's Johnson who does the ignoring about what Jesus said about himself, and he does so utterly dishonestly.

Not only does Johnson rip John 5:19 from its broader narrative (where Jesus is defending a Sabbath miracle by actually appealing to his intimacy with the Almighty as the divine Son), Johnson deliberately shortens it into a fragment, representing that as if it were the whole:

Then answered Jesus and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.

 

-- John 5:19

Johnson ignores "but what he seeth the Father do". Jesus is not emphasizing his limitations as a man in this statement, but his glory as the one who is so close to God that he cannot but do what God himself does, because it would be contrary to his nature to do anything else. "No man hath seen God at any time" the Evangelist has said earlier (John 1:18), but here the Son clearly has, and does. Accordingly he cannot do anything but what he sees his Father do. Whereas John is out to show Jesus' divinity in this way in the narrative, Johnson is out to show Jesus' mere humanity.

But Jesus' Jewish opponents in John are not out to kill him for claiming to be a mere man, but for claiming equality with God!

Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, making himself equal with God.

 

-- John 5:18

Bill Johnson specializes in nothing so much as a violence of his own . . . to the text and to those who follow it.

 

If there were a jail for heresy, Bill Johnson should be celebrating his tenth year in it.

St. Cyril anathematized the way heretic Bill Johnson says Jesus laid aside his divinity

The third anathema against Nestorius:

If anyone divideth the hypostases after the union in respect of the One Christ, connecting them by a mere association in dignity or authority or rule, and not rather by a conjunction of real union, be he anathema. 

The heresies of Bill Johnson of Bethel Redding were long ago anathematized, by Cyril of Alexandria in 431

Anathema Nine from Cyril's Third Epistle to Nestorius:

If anyone says that the One Lord Jesus Christ was glorified by the Spirit, using the power which came through Him as if it were foreign to Himself, and that He received from Him the power of working against unclean spirits and of fulfilling divine signs and tokens, and does not rather say that the Spirit was His own, through whom also He wrought the divine signs, be he anathema. 

Muhammad the plagiarist: Age of Koran manuscript pre-dates his career by as many as forty-two years

The story is here (subscription required). The UK Daily Mail here had the money quotes:

Historian Tom Holland, told the Times: 'It destabilises, to put it mildly, the idea that we can know anything with certainty about how the Koran emerged - and that in turn has implications for the history of Muhammad and the Companions.'

Keith Small, from the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library, added: 'This gives more ground to what have been peripheral views of the Koran's genesis, like that Muhammad and his early followers used a text that was already in existence and shaped it to fit their own political and theological agenda, rather than Muhammad receiving a revelation from heaven.'

Students of the Koran in the West have long doubted the story of the miraculous origin of the words of the Koran given to the illiterate prophet, based in part on Muhammad's version of Christianity in it, which is derivative of heretical Nestorianism, not revelation. Muhammad had contact with Nestorians according to various accounts, but it is thought that it was primarily through the family of his wife Khadija, from whom he must have learned much of what he knew about Christianity and Judaism. An anonymous philologist (who fears for his life) has even proposed that much of the Koran was originally a Christian Arabic lectionary translated from Syriac sources, which makes even more sense now that a manuscript of the Koran appears to be dated precisely to the period when the words were supposedly circulating only as oral tradition, as recitation.

It would seem that Muhammad and his companions raided more than caravans.