[Page vii]Abstract: The early Latter-day Saints viewed the Book of Mormon not only as a symbol of Joseph Smith’s prophetic calling but also as the most powerful evidence for that calling. However, perhaps because they were ardent believers in the Bible who had been formed in a distinctly Bible-drenched culture and perhaps also because many of them had come to the Book of Mormon relatively late in their lives, they tended to quote from the Nephite record only rarely. Surprisingly, this was the case even for Joseph Smith himself — which can be taken as a sign that he didn’t write the book.

In the early 1980s I attended a presentation at the Latter-day Saint Institute of Religion located on Hilgard Avenue, adjacent to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Delivered by Grant Underwood, who was then a doctoral student at UCLA, it made a deep and lasting impression on me. An article setting forth Underwood’s argument that night was eventually published in BYU Studies as “‘Saved or Damned’: Tracing a Persistent Protestantism in Early Mormon Thought.”1

In it, Underwood makes the case that the vision of the three degrees of glory recorded as Doctrine and Covenants 76 — commonly known in the nineteenth century as “the Vision” — had surprisingly little discernible impact on Latter-day Saint thought in general and, most shocking of all, little or no noticeable impact on the thinking of Joseph Smith himself, for several years after its reception. And it was received quite early in the Restoration. Although many tend, and not without reason, to associate Latter-day Saint notions of a plurality of gods and of human deification or exaltation with the Nauvoo period of Joseph Smith’s ministry (roughly 1839–1844), Section 76, which strongly [Page viii]suggests both of those concepts, was given on 16 February 1832, fewer than two years after the formal organization of the Church.

Underwood contends that what he terms “the minimal role of the Vision in early LDS thought”2 was the result of theological backgrounds and assumptions brought into the Church by both Joseph Smith and his early converts. On the basis of numerous biblical passages, he explains,

in the world into which Mormonism was born, it was customary to conceptualize man as either saint or sinner, righteous or wicked, bound for heaven or headed for hell; and this formed an important part of the cultural baggage early converts carried with them into the Church.3

Underwood sketches “the persisting lineaments of traditional salvationist rhetoric” among Latter-day Saints of the 1830s and even 1840s and demonstrates that “the vision of the three degrees of glory did not begin to alter such notions until the end of the Nauvoo period.”4 Surveying the historical sources, he remarks that

it seems clear that a saved-damned duality was deeply entrenched in early Mormon thought. But what about the vision of the three degrees of glory? Did it not immediately uproot all the old “either-or” notions? Did not the Saints quickly discard their former thinking as theologically naive when presented with this vision of a pluralized rather than a polarized afterlife?