Thursday, May 23, 2024

Pre-1835 Teachings on Adoption and Sealing in Joseph Smith’s Revelations

  

Several lines of evidence demonstrate that Joseph Smith had an adoption theology in place by 1835, including concepts of adoption into priesthood lineages and the divine family and the practice of providing church patriarchs as proxy spiritual fathers for those without natural fathers to bless them. . . . Smith drew adoptive concepts form passages of the King James Bible that particularly interested him. Romans 8:14-17 explained that Christians who receive the Holy Spirit “are the sons of God,” who “have received the Spirit of adoption.” As God’s adopted children, they are “heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ.” Thus Christians “groan” in anticipation of “the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.” Expanding on this idea a few chapters later, the same epistle compared Gentile Christian converts to “a wild olive tree, . . . grafted in” to Israel (Rom. 11:17). Similar ideas appeared in Galatians 3:26-4:5, in which Paul wrote that “God sent forth his Son . . . that we might receive the adoption of sons” and that all who are baptized in Christ become “Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.”

 

The Book of Mormon seized upon this biblical notion. It began with a set of dramatic promises to the Israelite prophets Lehi and Nephi that their numerous “seed” should inherit a “land of promise” in the Americas along with other blessings, including salvation (1 Ne. 10;13, 12:1). However, it also provided that Gentiles could be “grafted” into Lehi’s Israelite family line just as the branches of a “wild olive tree” could be grafted onto a tame one (Jac. 5). Through baptism, “first with water, then with fire and with the Holy Ghost,” the Gentiles could be “numbered among this the remnant of Jacob, unto whom I have given this land for their inheritance,” and could share in that inheritance (3 Ne. 21:22, Morm. 7:10). And in addition to becoming the seed of Abraham and Jacob, believers could also become the seed of Christ. All who hear the gospel, believe, and repent “are his seed, or they are the heirs of the kingdom of God” (Mosiah 15:11). The Book of Mormon thus merged the Pauline ideas of Chrisitan adoption with the idea of adoption into the House of Israel (and of Israel’s forefather Abraham).

 

Lineage also featured prominently in Smtih’s early revelations on priesthood. In a September 1832 revelation, he taught that there are two priesthood orders—of Aaron and Melchizedek—both lineally inherited. The Aaronic priesthood was conferred “upon Aaron and his seed,” and the Melchizedek priesthood originated with Adma and was handed down generation-to-generation to Melchizedek and then Abraham, “through the lineage of his father.” Both priesthoods continued “in the church of God in all generations,” down to the present day. (Joseph Smith, Revelation, Sep. 22-23, 1832) But one need not be born a descendant of Aaron or Abraham to receive the priesthood. Rather, one can become a descendant through a miraculous physical transformation by the power of the Holy Spirit: “for whoso is faithful unto the obtaining of these two priesthoods of which I have spoken and the magnifying their calling are sanctified by the spirit unto the renewing of their bodies body that they become the Sons of Moses and Aaron and the seed of Abraham.” (Smith, Revelation, Sep. 22-23, 1832) (Don Bradley and Christopher C. Smith, “Of Generations and Genders: Fanny Alger and the Adoptive Origins of Ritual Sealing,” in Secret Covenants: New Insights on Early Mormon Polygamy, ed. Cheryl L. Bruno [Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2024], 206-7)

 

Alongside adoptive concepts, Smith also developed sealing rituals. He found precedent for sealing in two biblical prooftexts: Jesus’s promise that “Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven” (Matt. 18:18) and the Apostle Pual’s statement that those “predestined . . . unto the adoption” can be “sealed with the holy Spirit of promise” as a guarantee of their election (Eph. 1:5, 13-14). (See the allusions to these passages in “minutes, 25-26 October 1831,” 10-12)

 

Smith and Sidney Rigdon introduced a sealing as a ritual of the church at a church conference in October 1831. Rigdon spoke first, telling the congregation “that he wished to make a few observations connected with the object as our assembling our selves together,” for God wishes to make “his children one, or he by his Holy Spirit binds their hearts from Erath to Heaven.” Following Rigdon, Smith preached that “the order of the High priesthood is that they have power given to them to seal up the Saints unto eternal life.” These remarks envisioned a ritual that stamped the individual soul with a “seal” guaranteeing salvation but that also “sealed” the Saints together “with one heart and one mind.” (“Minutes, 25-26 October 1831,” 10-11) As historian Jonathan Stapley notes, this ritual made the assurance of salvation “entirely relational.” (Stapley, Power of Godliness, 37)

 

According to Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner, who attended a church meeting at Smith’s home in 1831, Smith stopped mid-meeting and announced that Jesus Christ had been in their midst. According to Lightner, Smith said, “I want you to remember this as if it were the last thing that escapes my lips. He has given you all to me and commanded me to seal you to everlasting life.” She further explained that they were given to him “to be with him in his kingdom, even as he is in the Father’s Kingdom.” She did not provide a precise date for this experience, but it may have actually preceded the October 1831 conference and given rise to Smith’s teachings at that conference.”

 

Over the next few years, according to historian Samuel Brown, “Mormon elders sealed congregations to eternal life. Reynolds Cahoon (1790-1861) recorded in November 1831 that he ‘Blest the Children in the name of the lord & sealed the church unto eternal life.’ Orson Pratt did the same in 1833, while Smith himself did so in 1832 and 1834.” (Samuel Morris Brown, In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Mormon Conquest of Death [New York: Oxford University Press, 2012], 149)


 

A February 16, 1832, revelation referenced this sealing ritual and linked it to both priesthood ordination and adoption into the divine family. According to the revelation, faithful Saints who are baptized and “sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise” become “priests and kings . . . after the order of Melchizedek,” as well as “gods, even the sons of God.” (“Vision, 16 February 1832 [D&C 76],” 5-6) Thus sealing conferred not only the assurance of salvation, but also the rights and blessings of priesthood lineage and divine sonship. (Don Bradley and Christopher C. Smith, “Of Generations and Genders: Fanny Alger and the Adoptive Origins of Ritual Sealing,” in Secret Covenants: New Insights on Early Mormon Polygamy, ed. Cheryl L. Bruno [Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2024], 209-10)