Sister Pearson

[askandanswer]

On 8/4/2016 at 11:50 AM, Just_A_Guy said:

On the other hand . . . Wilford Woodruff was very clear that if the prophet is "leading the church astray", God would remove the prophet from his place. 

Brian Hales has an interesting proposed paradigm about the angel-with-the-drawn-sword issue.  Drawing (I think) on hearsay accounts from Mary Elizabeth Rollins, Hales suggests that these visits were years apart.  The idea is that Smith gets the original revelation as he is doing the JST in 1830-31, but procrastinates obedience for four years.  The first angel visit in 1835 precipitates Joseph's marriage to Fanny Alger.  But Emma finds out, it ends . . . badly, and Joseph retreats.  Around 1840 Joseph gets another visit.  At this point he attempts to comply in a way that is more sensitive to Emma's feelings, by entering almost exclusively into platonic "eternity-only" sealings with women who are already married for time.  But this isn't the sort of polygamy that the angel had in mind, and there's another visit in late 1841 or 1842; at which point Joseph finally begins practicing polygamy "properly" by marrying single women of child-bearing age.  By autumn of 1843 Emma is getting restless again and, after a brief period of acceptance, has turned against polygamy.  In the face of her opposition Joseph stops marrying new wives, goes so far as to officially end at least a couple of his marriages, and (as I recall) seems not to have cohabited with any of his plural wives beyond that point. 

And to that paradigm, I would just add that interestingly enough--by the next summer, Joseph Smith was dead.

It almost seems as if something similar happened to Joseph Smith's nephew. One of the tasks of a prophet is to give to the people the word that God gives to him. On the day before the October General Conference, President Joseph F Smith received a vision. He did not write the vision until 31 October and give it to his counsellors or the Quorum of the Twelve until 31 October and it was not until more than 60 years later, in 1976, that the church accepted this vision as scripture. During the conference, President Smith did not tell the saints of this vision. Instead, he said  “I will not, I dare not, attempt to enter upon many things that are resting upon my mind this morning, and I shall postpone until some future time, the Lord being willing, my attempt to tell you some of the things that are in my mind, and that dwell in my heart."   In other words, "I'm too scared to tell you what the Lord, through the Spirit, has been impressing on my mind." Six weeks later, he was dead. Perhaps because he failed to fulfill the most important responsibility of a prophet.

https://www.lds.org/manual/doctrine-and-covenants-student-manual/sections-132-138/section-138-vision-of-the-redemption-of-the-dead?lang=eng

Of course, an alternative explanation, at least equally plausible, is that, after a period of lengthy illness, the Lord kept him alive long enough to receive and write the vision, and then allowed him to enter into his eternal rest. 

[Just_A_Guy]

Perhaps; but then again--the Lord gave Joseph Smith almost twelve years to get D&C 132 written down!  It seems to me that Smith moved as expeditiously as he was able--he wrote it within two weeks, presented it to the Q12 at the end of November, and it was slated for publication in the December Improvement Era when Smith died in November.

[askandanswer]

1 hour ago, Just_A_Guy said:

Perhaps; but then again--the Lord gave Joseph Smith almost twelve years to get D&C 132 written down!  It seems to me that Smith moved as expeditiously as he was able--he wrote it within two weeks, presented it to the Q12 at the end of November, and it was slated for publication in the December Improvement Era when Smith died in November.

All true, but,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,there is also the possibility that the vision of the redemption of the dead was only one part of what God was impressing on him. There might have been much more than this. But we're not going to know either way.