A few of the 1830 revelations of Joseph Smith
give hints and intimations of a human preexistence, but only vague glimmers. A
September 1830 revelation references fallen hosts of heaven, though they were
historically taken to refer to fallen angels. That same revelation (like Moses
3) refers to God’s creation as “first spiritual, secondly temporal,” but
without elaboration (114). A passage in the 1830 Enoch text is the first
indication by Smith of an unmistakable basis for a specifically human
preexistence, leading to both poetic celebration and theological development of
the theme. In Smith’s account, Enoch learns in a vision about “the spirits that
God had created . . . not visible to the natural eye,” and is told clearly and unambiguously:
“I am God; I made the world, & men before they were in the flesh.”
These Enoch texts were not published until
1833, but it is clear that they were circulating earlier and had profound
impact, as two documents illustrate. In the first, dated March 1832 and titled “A
Sample of pure language,” the name of God is given as Awan, or “the being which
made all things in its part”; and the “children of men” are said to be “the
greatest parts of Awman.” The phrasing might not of itself have suggested a
premortal genealogy; together with a second revelation, however, the text
points quite clearly to a conception of human spirits as emanating from God,
with the teaching traceable to Enoch. Little is known of the context in which
this second revelation, dated 27 February 1833, was pronounced. An undated
broadside of a poetic rendering of the revelation indicates that the original
revelation was “sung in tongues by Elder D.W. Patten . . . and interpreted by Elder
S[idney] Rigdon.”. Recorded in the hand of Frederick G. Williams, this
translation of an instance of “tongue-singing” is clearly based on the 1830
prophecy of Enoch. For in this song, Enoch as in Smith’s version, “saw the
beginning the ending of man he saw the time when Adam his father was made and
he saw that he was in eternity before a grain of dust in the ballance was
weighed he saw that he emenated and came down from God.”
The cross-fertilization of the Awman
revelation and the Enoch hymn emerged when an anonymous writer, perhaps W.W.
Phelps, published in the church paper a poetic celebration of preexistence in
May 1833, bearing clear phrasing from these two sources (emphasis added):
Before the mountains rais’d their heads
Or the small dust of balance weigh’d,
With God he [Enoch] saw his race began
And from him emanated man,
And with him did in glory dwell
Before there was an earth or hell. (Evening and Morning Star 1.12 [May 1833]:96)
Or the small dust of balance weigh’d,
With God he [Enoch] saw his race began
And from him emanated man,
And with him did in glory dwell
Before there was an earth or hell. (Evening and Morning Star 1.12 [May 1833]:96)
Tellingly, Smith unambiguously affirmed the
eternal preexistence of human spirits early this same month, declaring that “man
was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was
not created or made, neither indeed can be” (1835 D& 82:5 [D&C 93:29]).
Yet Phelps published his poetic declaration borrowing its language not from the
definitive revelation of Smith but from the hymn of Enoch, showing the infiltration
of the Enoch text into LDS culture in these earliest years.
The importance of the Awman and Enoch texts
in founding the first clearly understanding of preexistence is further evident
in the fact that parley Pratt also relied on these two texts, invoking both the
language of the Enoch hymn and the imagery of the Awman revelation in his 1838
pamphlet, wherein he argued that “the redeemed . . .return to the fountain, and
become part of the great all, from which they emanated” (Parley P. Pratt, Mormonism Unveiled: Zion’s Watchman Unmasked
[New York: Pratt & Fordham, 1838], 27). So we see in Pratt yet another
link in the chain of influence that began with the Enoch text, showing it to be
the version of preexistence that resonated widely in the early church, both doctrinally
an artistically.
Today, legions of LDS children sing “I am a
child of God, and He has sent me here,” and official LDS texts refer to
heavenly parents who sired us, their spirit children. Recent research has done
much to indicate that Smith’s understanding of our primordial relationship to
God relied more on language of adoption than parturition, but around the time
of his death the model was shifting. “Emanation,” a term with Neoplatonic
associations, may be a cautious attempt to bridge the linguistic divide between
those competing models, and may be a sign that Smith considered neither
category of earthly filiation to be a strictly accurate description of
humankind’s descent from heavenly parents. (Terryl Givens, The Pearl of Greatest Price: Mormonism’s Most Controversial Scripture [New
York: Oxford University Press, 2019], 50-52)
The Christological Necessity of Universal Pre-Existence
