The Vision

Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon were working through the Gospel of John for the inspired translation. They reached John 5:29 — the resurrection of life and the resurrection of damnation — and stopped. "It appeared self-evident," Joseph later wrote, that if the term heaven meant one place, then more than one kingdom must be intended, since people are so plainly different from one another.

The sequence is worth noticing: work, then a question, then marvelling, then meditation, then vision. Almost every major revelation of the Restoration follows this shape — D&C 138 came from President Joseph F. Smith pondering 1 Peter; D&C 110 came after a temple dedication; the First Vision came after reading James 1:5.

There were others present. Philo Dibble, who was in the room, later described watching the two men alternate — one saying "I see the same," the other continuing — for over an hour. The vision was not private, even if only two men saw it.

Verse 24 contains a doctrine that most Christian traditions do not hold and that Latter-day Saints sometimes state without noticing how large it is: worlds, plural, whose inhabitants are also begotten sons and daughters unto God. Moses 1:33–35 says the same. Whatever the Atonement is in this theology, its reach is not confined to one planet.

The vocabulary comes from Paul. 1 Corinthians 15:40–41 speaks of celestial and terrestrial bodies and compares the glory of the sun, the moon and the stars. The JST of that verse adds a third term — telestial — which appears nowhere in Greek and is, in effect, a coinage of the Restoration.

Verse 89 is the sentence that broke the old map. The lowest degree of glory — the destination of liars, sorcerers, adulterers and those who received not the gospel (76:103) — "surpasses all understanding." There is no hell in this vision for the overwhelming majority of the human race. What there is, instead, is a graded universe in which nearly everyone receives more than they deserve.

The category is defined by a very high bar: knowing God's power, having partaken of it, and then denying it — crucifying Him afresh with full knowledge. Joseph Smith taught that a person must know God as one knows the sun at noonday before they can sin against Him in this way. Whatever else this doctrine is, it is not a description of people who leave the Church, or who doubt, or who sin badly.

It is also the only place the vision reserves for outer darkness. Everything else in D&C 76 is a kingdom of glory. That imbalance — the narrowest possible damnation, and three heavens for everyone else — is the vision's actual shape, and it is the opposite of how the doctrine is often summarised.

One further note: verse 114 records that the Lord commanded them not to write "the end of the vision." What is in section 76 is described by the text itself as partial.