In the beginning of his article, The Early Mormon Chain of Belonging, Samuel Brown discusses this illustration:
(Source)
Robert Fludd (1574–1637) illustrated his 1617–1619 … [“The Mirror of the Whole of Nature, and the Image of Art”], which depicts the Great Chain of Being in its late medieval/early modern splendor. Notice particularly the integration of humanity and cosmos and the incorporation of astral imageryinto the body
Later in the article he compares the LDS Book of Abraham’s illustrations, such as this image in an attempt to show a correspondence of ideas between the ancient Great Chain of Being and LDS Theology:
Fig. 1. Kolob, signifying the first creation, nearest to the celestial, or the residence of God. First in government, the last pertaining to the measurement of time. The measurement according to celestial time, which celestial time signifies one day to a cubit. One day in Kolob is equal to a thousand years according to the measurement of this earth, which is called by the Egyptians Jah-oh-eh.
Brown shows Joseph Smith's consistent drive to unite the Divine Realm and humanity into one eternal round of connectivity is based on the Bible itself. Brown's article supports my own research, that Joseph Smith was able to truly understand the real meaning of the Bible: which is that for the early Bible writers, God (Jehovah) was the source of the stars which represents the gods (holy ones) which is covered in the scholarship of Dr. Michael Heiser. For example:
“When the morning stars sang in chorus, and all the sons of God (bene ’elohim) shouted for joy?” (Job 38:7)
... “When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when He divided up humankind, He set the boundaries of the peoples, according to the number of the sons of God. For Yahweh’s allotment is His people Jacob is His special possession.” (Deut. 32:8-9)
“When you look up to the sky and see the sun, moon, and stars—the whole heavenly creation—you must not be seduced to worship and serve them, for Yahweh your God has assigned them to all the people of the world. You, however, Yahweh has selected and brought from Egypt, that iron-smelting furnace, to be his special people as you are today.” (Deut. 4:19-20)
(Source)
The Elohim (holy ones in God's Divine Council) were seen as representative of the glorious stars. So Paul is basically teaching that Christians as "saints" (meaning the earthly holy ones) will be like the stars in the sky, with new noomatic bodies that are star-like. This is why the Gospels then speak of Christians (holy ones) having their light shine. Joseph Smith built upon this theme when composing the Book of Mormon, where in Lehi's dream bright shining fruit represents LDS Christians as the glowing fruit-bearing branches of the True Vine (Christ's Genus).
The following are excerpts from his article, The Early Mormon Chain of Belonging by Samuel Brown with my commentary in between (words in bold my own for emphasis):
As part of his ongoing efforts to recover the lost language of Eden, Smith shared with his inner circle a “Sample of Pure Language.” In it Smith explained that Awman (spelled Ahman in publications) represented divinity, the divine species, “the being which made all things in all its parts.” This strange phrase emphasized the images of parts coming together to constitute a harmonic whole—a kind of dynamic integration at the center of the chain. Jesus, humans, and angels all received names in this revelation—Son Ahman, Sons Ahman, and Angls-man, respectively. The revelation also emphasized hierarchy. Even in this early statement stood the hint that humans would be superior to angels, for humans were “the greatest parts of Awman,” while angels were to “minister for or to” humans. [43] At the same time Ahman was beginning to figure prominently in revelations about the Garden of Eden, pan-human genealogy, and eschatology. [44] These ancient names for humans, gods, and angels emphasized their conspecificity and their integration as “parts” of a harmonious whole.
Note that Joseph Smith revised John 1:1 in the JST, wherein it basically argues that God and “part of” Him called the Only Begotten (Monogene) were in the beginning. Let’s examine John 1:1–34. We start with the JST John 1, verse 1 (words in brackets are my own):
1 In the beginning was the gospel preached through the Son [Son, as in God’s twin image]. And the gospel was the word, and the word was with the Son, and the Son was with God, and the Son was of God [of God’s Gene/DNA as the Monogene of God].
2 The same was in the beginning with God …
Now let’s compare the Joseph Smith Translation (JST) of John 1:1 discussed above with the following from The Joseph Smith Papers, Revelations and Translations Volume 1:
Sample of Pure Language, circa March 1832 by the Joseph Smith Papers:
Question: What is the name of God in pure Language
Answer: Awmen.
Q: The meaning of the pure word A[w]men
A: It is the being which made all things in all its parts.
Q: What is the name of the Son of God.
A: The Son Awmen.
Q: What is the Son Awmen.
A: It is the greatest of all the parts of Awmen which is the Godhead the first born.
(Source; Retrieved 1/6/14).
Notice that it states that the Word or Son Awmen (the name of God) is “the greatest of all the parts of Awman which is the godhead the first born.” This is important, Jesus as Son Ahmen is the bodily image of the godhead, which accords with the Fifth Lecture on Faith. God the Father is in the image of the Son’s earthly body, as they are twins. This is why the JST John 1:1 states that the Word or Son is “of God,” here the Word or Son is described as “part of God, the greatest of all the parts of Ahmen/God”. The Son is the Monogene, the first part of God’s DNA. Jesus is also known as “Son Ahman” in D&C 78:20 and 95:17. Thus the Son (as part of God) is God’s bodily image, first as a personage of spirit (Jehovah the Father) and then as the Son, a personage of earthly tabernacle (see Lecture on Faith #5). In other words, the Son is part of God just as we are part of our father genetically. Thus, the earthly Jesus “received all power, both in heaven and on earth, and the glory of the Father [Jehovah] was with him, for he [His Genome] dwelt in him [the earthly Jesus]” (D&C 93: 17). See Restoring the Original Mormon Godhead (Blog Series) for more details.
Samuel Brown continues ...
… Phelps and Smith also included the hierarchical kingdoms ... [one] composite glyph is glossed as “the glory of the celestial Kingdom: The connection of attributes; many parts perfected, and compounded into one Having been united . . . one glory above all other glories, as the [sun] excels the moon in light, this glory excels being filled with the same glory equally.” This glyph reiterated the astral hierarchy described in the Vision in a way that emphasized the familial unity of the highest echelon of that celestial chain. When the Egyptian pictogram placed a man and a woman together in the presence of God, Smith subsumed the entire Chain of Being into the human family, whose “many parts” were thereby “united.” [75] Several other glyphs describe the “degrees and parts” of the many afterlife kingdoms described in the Vision. [76] …
… Historian Michael Walzer’s description of early modern English thought might as easily apply to Smith and his associates: “Within the great chain there were discovered a whole series of lesser chains—the animal hierarchy, presided over by eagle and lion; the nine angelic orders; the greater and lesser stars—and these were held to correspond closely to one another.”[78] Such was the language of the Vision and the Olive Leaf taken to its imaginative conclusion. By the inexorable if often metaphorical logic of correspondence, and with the authority of ancient tradition, many antebellum Americans also saw their postmortal fate in the stars. Invoking most often the Jobian “morning stars” who “sang together” with the “sons of God” during creation (Job 38: 4–7) or the story of Lucifer, the fallen star (Isa. 14: 12), a variety of cultural commonplaces confirmed a belief in the identity of the dead, often as angels, with astral bodies. [79]
... telling the Latter-day Saints to model their behavior on the ever-faithful stars: “Since the heaven was stretched out as a curtain between this world and the worlds beyond, neither the sun, nor the moon, nor the planets, nor the stars, have ceased for a moment, (except when Joshua commanded otherwise,) from performing their daily labors.” [80] Phelps extended this image in early 1835 by urging Christian belief and practice on his readers, “that we may be quickened in the resurrection, and become angels, even Sons of God, for an eternity of glory, in a universe of worlds, which have ever taught, and will forever Teach mankind, as they shine / God’s done his part,—do thine!” [81] Phelps’s “worlds”— his term for celestial bodies— inspired their human kin to greater obedience to the dictates of God.
Images of humans as stars were an important element in public memorials for the dead among many Americans. For example, when Elizabeth Griffin died of “inflammation of the bowels” in Nauvoo at the tender age of “10 months 19 days,” the memorialist, probably her parent, included an apostrophe to her astral spirit: “a pure and brilliant star, / Thou dost shine in realms afar.” A eulogy suggested a similar fate for Bishop Edward Partridge, who would “rise from a Saint to an angel of light.”[82] The sense of astral correspondence is also strong in the 1840 eulogy of Smith’s own father, delivered by Joseph Jr.’s secretary, which evoked the dead who “like the stars in yonder firmament, shone in their several spheres, and filled that station in which they had been called by the providence of God.”[83] Even critics recognized the currency of such expressions among the Saints. For example, the learned Congregationalist Jonathan Baldwin Turner (1805–99) reported of the Mormon faithful: “Doubtless they will shine as stars somewhere in [their] new firmament of gods.”[84]
… Finney’s peer, Lyman Beecher (1775– 1863), for his part, presented stars as steadfast witnesses of God worth emulating. [86] The ever-popular Josiah Priest (1788– 1851) compared a Mesoamerican tribal belief that the “sun and the stars” were the “souls of the departed” to the biblical book of Daniel (14: 12), which taught that the righteous “shall shine as the BRIGHTNESS of the firmament.” In this apparently shared belief of postmortal astralization, Priest saw proof that Native American afterlife traditions derived directly from ancient Israel. [87] Particularly across the boundary of death, a variety of early Americans saw themselves and their fates in the stars. What distinguished Mormons was the intensity of the belief in astral correspondence and the theological and ritual supports for the belief.
Again, it's important to note here that the concept of Christians as stars is supported by many Christian theologians: including the protestant scholar Michael Heiser. For example, see Paul’s Use of Genesis 15:5 in Romans 4:18 in Light of Early Jewish Deification Traditions: Part 3: Becoming as the Stars and the Inheritance of the Nations (Posted by MikeHeiser | Apr 26, 2017; This is Part 3 of the series by David Burnett ).
Note that in Part 1 of the series, David Burnett states that:
Reading Paul’s use of Gen 15:5 in light of ... already well-established deification or angelomorphic traditions in Early Judaism that see the destiny of the seed of Abraham as replacing the stars ... could illuminate the relationship between a complex nexus of ideas that Paul sees implicit in the one promise to Abraham in Gen 15:5. The promise of becoming as the stars of heaven would encompass the inheritance of the cosmos, becoming a father of many nations, and the resurrection from the dead.
Note the similarities with the above and Joseph Smith's astral theology of deification.
Samiel Brown continues:
In the metonymy of correspondence [in the Book of Abraham], the central star seemed to point toward the center of the earth’s power, Eden, and its priest/patriarch Adam. Employing the sacred word Ahman to describe the site of Adam’s deathbed and of the reunion of the entire human family at the second coming of Christ (Adam-ondiAhman), Smith and Phelps foregrounded the priestly figure Adam or Phaheh within the Egyptian project. [88] The Egyptian project is obsessed with the overlap between genealogy and progeny on the one hand and priesthood on the other. Many of the glyphs as well as the Book of Abraham emphasize this point. In the published scripture, God told Abraham that he and his seed were by definition “Priesthood”(Abr. 2: 11). Degrees, the ramifications of meaning in the logic of the Egyptian grammar documents, draw attention to images of reproduction as extension of power. Emblematically a queen named Katouhmun (one of the mummies whose papyri Smith was interpreting) ascends the marital hierarchy, and a glyph for a powerful patriarch describes the “extension of power by marriage or by ordination.” The center of genealogical and sacerdotal power was Adam. The word Ahmanreturned as the paradisiacal home of all humanity. [89]
Note here how Brown follows my thesis in my blog series here when he points out that “In the published scripture [The Book of Abraham], God told Abraham that he and his seed [sperm] were by definition ‘Priesthood’ (Abr. 2: 11). Degrees, the ramifications of meaning in the logic of the Egyptian grammar documents, draw attention to images of reproduction as extension of power.” In other words, as I cover in my Restoring the Original Mormon Godhead (Blog Series), God begins as a Father (Progenitor) of star-like beings and replicates His Unique Genome through the earthly body of Christ as His Unique Monogene (Only Begotten); and then Abraham spreads his seed producing a People; and then Christ as the Monogene of God reproduces His divine seed producing Christians (holy ones/"saints") as star-like noomatic shining ones as the Children of Christ (with Christ as their Father/Progenitor). In all of this, there is the consistent theme of reproduction as extensions of Power which is based on the Bible itself, where Christ reproduces his seed (divine genus) to generate eternal lives (see John 10:10; 12:24). Compare D&C 132 that states that the "glory [of exalted ones] shall be a fulness and a continuation of the seeds forever and ever", wherein "exaltation" is the "continuation of the lives," and "This is eternal lives—to know the only wise and true God, and Jesus Christ, whom he hath sent [Christ as the Monogene]. ... Receive ye, therefore, my law [of the celestial reproduction of eternal lives]. ... for they [the plural wives of Joseph Smith] are given unto him to multiply and replenish the earth ... and for their exaltation in the eternal worlds, that they may bear the souls of men; for herein is the work of my Father continued, that he may be glorified" (D&C 132: 19, 22, 24, 63, words in brackets my own). Thus, as Brown writes above, reproduction [is an] extension of power. Note that the practice of plural marriage ended around 1890 and LDS members no longer practice polygamy; as the aim of the practice was in part to generate a Peoplehood, which was accomplishedby 1890. Brown continues:
… In the 1840s, Smith went to great lengths to explain the significance of Elijah and his mystical power, termed “priesthood,” to effect seals between people that would integrate them into the Chain of Belonging. Elijah’s priesthood was to be the power by which all of humanity would enter a hierarchy of power patterned on family relationships.
Baptism for the dead was the first temple rite of Smith’s adoption theology. This theology was rooted in the general Pauline sense that conversion to Christ created a new ethnicity to which believers could be united and in the fairly typical Protestant convention that evangelists “adopted” their converts into the family of God. This traditional sense expanded to incorporate patriarchal blessings and other aspects of the Mormon Chain of Belonging. [100] Although baptism had long been the symbol of becoming a new creature in Christ and entering God’s family (the congregation), Joseph Smith used the rite and its adoptive imagery to broaden the circle of belonging to include the living and the dead in a kinship network that merged genealogical and sacerdotal associations. Temple rites became the entry point for the Chain of Belonging. [101]
Brown then discusses the Chain of Belonging using Facsimile 2 from the Book of Abraham (depicted below). He explains that this "Nauvoo drawing of a hypocephalus among the funerary papyri strongly emphasizes the astral Chain of Being that Smith and his colleagues described in the 1830s. Times and Seasons 3, no. 10 (March 15, 1842): 720– 21.":
EXPLANATION
Fig. 1 . Kolob, signifying the first creation, nearest to the celestial, or the residence of God. First in government, the last pertaining to the measurement of time. …
… Fig. 3. Is made to represent God, sitting upon his throne, clothed with power and authority; with a crown of eternal light upon his head; representing also the grand Key-words of the Holy Priesthood, as revealed to Adam in the Garden of Eden, as also to Seth, Noah, Melchisedek, Abraham, and all to whom the Priesthood was revealed. …
… Fig. 7. Represents God sitting upon his throne, revealing through the heavens the grand Key-words of the Priesthood; as, also, the sign of the Holy Ghost unto Abraham, in the form of a dove. …
When he published the Book of Abraham in 1842, he added focused translations of three illustrations known to the Latter-day Saints as “facsimiles,” all of which are reproduced to this day in LDS editions of the Book of Abraham. The hypocephalus presented as facsimile 2— a circle divided into numerous shapes, each containing a symbol and the whole surrounded by a band containing other symbols— includes textual descriptions that exemplify the astral Chain of Being of the 1830s.
… Within this [Nauvoo temple] liturgy, selected Saints began to learn more about the possibility that they would be celestial royalty and were encouraged to imagine themselves within the Abraham cosmogony as priests and priestesses in the postmortal Chain of Belonging. [106]
As he revealed this temple liturgy, Smith kept the creation of eternal associations between people central. Though plural marriage has generated significant controversy, it was, among other things, an idiosyncratically biblical mode of increasing the number of people to whom a man was sealed. [107] The model of the Chain of Belonging imparted to polygamy a decidedly dynastic scope. [108] Smith used dynastic images explicitly to recruit wives, counseling young Lucy Walker that her acceptance of a sealing to him “would prove an everlasting blessing to my father’s house. And form a chain that could never be broken, worlds without End.”[109] Helen Mar Kimball’s son eulogized her as the “golden link” connecting her father’s family to Joseph Smith. [110] Though these specific phrases are probably influenced by later events, they correctly emphasize the familial chain that polygamy strengthened.
By merging the chain’s hierarchy with familial images, Smith made the chain relationally dynamic. The capacity to reproduce helped believers see how they could acquire endless glory in the afterlife. Joseph Fielding understood well the implication of the doctrine, diarizing in 1844: “I understand that a Man’s Dominion will be as God’s is, over his own Creatures and the more numerous the greater his Dominion.”[111] Benjamin F. Johnson recalled that “the Prophet taught us that Dominion & powr in the great Future would be Commensurate with the no of ‘Wives Childin & Friends’that we inherit here.”[112] The new grades of heaven reflected no simple statement of merit or ontological superiority: they were an index of one’s placement in the genealogy of eternal “intelligences.” These “intelligences” were the Mormon version of the “crowns of many stars” anticipated by Protestant evangelists. [113] In this respect, the Mormon chain tapped a potential noted at least as early as the thirteenth century. In Lovejoy’s paraphrase of Aquinas, a human could “be like God in having pre-eminence over another” within the structure of the chain. [114] In the Mormon version, the human capacity to reproduce held the promise of eternal progress, and patterns of family life pointed to a generational hierarchy within the chain.
The ostensibly tripartite heavens espoused in Smith and Rigdon’s 1832 Vision hid the real extent of Smith’s heaven, which resided entirely within the celestial kingdom reserved for those who have “enter[ed] into this order of the priesthood.” Using code words for his marital system, the persistence of family life, and salvation, Smith warned that, outside his celestial kingdom in heaven, the dead “cannot have increase.”[115] This heaven was organized around Smith’s Chain of Belonging, the harmonizing “economy” at which his 1832 revelation hinted. It was the single place that family could persist eternally. The 1843 revelation authorizing polygamy made the point emphatically. Those who did not enter this distinctive celestial family “cannot be enlarged”; they would remain “without exaltation,” a perfectionist term equated with salvation in this conception of the celestial kingdom. [116] Those who rejected this form of marriage and family would be neutered angels who would endure salvation “separately and singly.” According to a July 1843 sermon, they would be “single & alone in the eternal world.”[117] These disobedient souls would inhabit an essentially theocentric heaven without interpersonal relationships, while the obedient occupied the distinctively kinship based heaven of the Chain of Belonging.
… Binding the generations through temple rites and their associated priesthood constituted the Chain of Belonging [See Theology on Plural Marriage by the Gospel Learning Channel where Anthony Sweat explains Joseph Smith's belief in being "crafty" about taking advantage of God's sealing power in order to seal other's to you into a larger kinship group which expands your kingdom]. In May 1844, Smith explicitly told his followers that the temple would allow them to supersede the angels, a key element of the ontological flattening of the Chain of Belonging: “You must have a promise, some ordinance some blessing in order to assend above principalities.” [119] The “promise,” “ordinance,” and “blessing” were to be obtained in the temple.
The Mormon heaven was emphatically not the Victorian hearth of the increasingly popular domestic heaven. Smith’s genealogical chain extended from Church members to their Prophet. From Smith, the chain extended to the biblical patriarchs, all the way to Adam, who would in turn present his priesthood chain to Jesus the Son and God the Father in the valley of Adam-ondi Ahman. [120] The domestic heaven was generally seen to consist of reasonably independent nuclear families; Smith’s heaven consisted of one boundless family of eternal intelligences—“a perfect chain from Father Adam to his latest posterity.”[121] This lineage was crucial to Mormon salvation, as in Smith’s 1842 revelation to Newel Whitney, promising “honor and immortality and eternal life to all your house both old & young because of the lineage of my Preast Hood.[see Abr. 2:22]”[122] In the solicitous phrase of British convert Joseph Fielding to his friends, “We are dependent on each other as links in one vast chain.” They were making a soteriological point. [123] The chain was the theological infrastructure and Smith’s temple priesthood was the welding that connected the links together in a way that secured their salvation. Through these rites and doctrines, Smith promised to “link the chain of the priesthood in Such a way that can not be broken.”[124]
Divine Anthropology: The Eternal Progression of the Sons Ahman
One of the most striking modifications Smith made to the Great Chain of Being was in his characterization of the relationships among angels, gods, and humans, what I call his divine anthropology. He had made his broad approach clear as early as 1832 with his “Sample of Pure Language,” and he and his followers had made continual references to the Mormon up-ending of the traditional chain, particularly with regard to the status of angels. In Nauvoo, the message became loud and unmistakable: the apparently suprahuman chain contained humans, the Sons Ahman. In the divine anthropology, angels, gods, and humans were conspecific, all members of the species called Ahman. Smith’s revision of the chain meant several things. What other Christians understood as angels were in fact resurrected humans; Joseph Smith reserved the term “angel” for a lower level in the chain. Angels were ultimately less than human, humans would advance forever, and God was a family man.
… An 1843 revelation strongly emphasized Smith’s redefined status for angels, whose superiority depended only on their lineal priority. In fact, angels who could not be integrated into the family tree (along with those humans unfit for “exaltation”) would be retained as servants to their more exalted cousins, an inversion of Augustinian teaching. [132] They would be “appointed angels in heaven, which angels are ministering Servants to minister for those who are worthy of a far more, and an exceeding, and an eternal weight of glory.”[133] Stripped of family, these intelligences would become inferior to the core hierarchy of heaven. The demotion extended so far that the Nauvoo High Council asked rhetorically “Know ye not that we shall judge Angels?” then confirmed explicitly: “The saints are to judge angels.”[134] The supernatural beings who had been critical to religious valences of the chain ceded pride of place to Smith’s priesthood family. Though the imagery may be inflected by concepts of fraternal initiation, it is striking that the polygamy revelation told believers who had been adopted into the priesthood family by accepting plural marriage that they “shall pass by the angels” in the afterlife (D& C 132: 19). …
Note how Brown emphasizes Joseph's physicalist heaven, which was different from Augustine's conceptions. Brown goes on to discuss what I see as Smith's theology of God as an affirmation of fleshly life, for God was not a vaporous bodiless nothing (a spirit without a body as Augustine and others taught), but instead God the Father was a real physical being composed of spirit matter; and that God wanted humans to advance to Godhood and expand His divine Image (His Monogene), which Divine "Gene/Genus" was the power to resurrect and continue the lives via the male seed. Brown continues:
… Smith emphasized an even greater future for humans, using his royal image for angelized humans: “every man who reigns is a God.” [137] …
… The obliteration of suprahuman beings and the exaltation of humans in Smith’s chain collapsed the space separating humanity from God. By eliminating this space, Smith opened up the possibility of recasting God’s place in the chain in a direct assault on theocentrism. Though Protestants called God “Father,” Smith’s sacerdotal system understood the relationship in a new way. Just as God had stood above the pulpits at the Kirtland Temple, so he would stand at the head of the eternalized human family. This is the great mystery that Smith publicized in his most famous sermon, an address to the April 1844 Church conference inspired by the recent death of King Follett. There Smith announced the “secret” that “God Himself who sits enthroned in yonder heavens is a Man like unto one of yourselves.” [139] Smith’s God was not the ontologically distinct creator of the Scale of Creation, but the founding parent of its genealogical hierarchy.
In his June 1844 “Sermon in the Grove” a few weeks later, Smith clarified his chain, situating his polytheism—a “plurality of Gods”—within both biblical proof-texts and a restatement of the chain’s principle of gradation. After explaining that the intelligences of his chain would be called “kings and priests” (and by extension “queens and priestesses”) in a temple-saturated allusion to Revelation 1: 6, Smith quoted from and amplified his Book of Abraham (Abr 3: 18). The Mormon prophet explained that there “may exist two men on the earth—one wiser than the other—wo[ul]d. shew that an[o]t[he]r. who is wiser than the wisest may exist—intelligences exist one above anot[he]r. that there is no end to it.”[140] To Smith, in a way he never entirely worked out, the family of divinities had no end. His main point, however, was clear: Eternity was organized as a family. In the Sermon in the Grove, Smith also returned to the 1832 Vision. He explained that “Paul—says there is one Glory of the Sun the moon & the Stars—& as the Star differs &C.” The heirs of the astral glories, Smith continued, “are exalted far above princ[ipalities]. thrones dom[inions]. & angels—& are expressly decl[are]d. to be heirs of God.”[141] Smith’s followers, the heirs of God according to adoption theology, towered above the various grades of angels. Employing traditional names for hierarchies of angels (Eph. 3: 10, 6: 12; Col. 1: 16), Smith strongly emphasized the inversion of the chain. [142]
It is difficult to read Smith’s King Follett Discourse except as an application of the temporal Chain of Being. Smith explained that to be “joint heirs with Christ” (Romans 8: 17) meant “to inherit the same glory power & exaltation” and to “ascend [to] a throne as those who have gone before.” Speaking for Christ, Joseph continued, “when I get my K[ingdom] workfed [sic] out I will present to the father & it will exalt his glory” so that “he will take a Higher exhaltation & I will take his place and am also exhalted.” Thus the Father “obtns K[ingdom] rollg. upon K[ingdom]. so that J[esus] treads in his tracks as he had gone before.”[143] Speaking for Jesus, Smith explained the relationship between Father and Son as paradigmatic for all human relationships in the Chain of Belonging. “I saw my Father work out his kingdom with fear and trembling. . . . He obtains kingdom upon kingdom, and it will exalt his glory.”[144] Attendee George Laub employed even more typically the image of the temporal chain in his summary of Smith’s preaching: “We are to goe from glory to glory & as one is raised the Next may be raised to his place or Sphere and so take their Exaltation through a regular channel. And when we get to where Jesus is he will be as far ahed of us in exaltation as when we started.”[145]
The Chain of Being was the infrastructure of this progressive theology. In Smith’s phrase, “You have got to learn how to be Gods yourselves; to be kings and priests to God, the same as all Gods have done; by going from a small degree to another, from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation, until you are able to sit in glory as doth [sic] those who sit enthroned in everlasting power.” [146] These transitions are the progress of the entire chain. Adopting the traditional image of the ladder to explain the temporal Chain of Being, Smith said: “When you climb a ladder, you must begin at the bottom and go on until you learn the last principle; it will be a great while before you have learned the last. . . . It is a great thing to learn salvation beyong [sic] the grave.” [147] Smith was telling his followers to ascend a modern version of Jacob’s Ladder. As the Mormon faithful created sacerdotal families, they became heavenly fathers/mothers, priests/priestesses, and kings/queens. Thus did they become gods.
… William Phelps returned repeatedly to the image of the chain: in hymns, in a funeral sermon for the Smith brothers, and in a fictional presentation of the divine anthropology. Preaching Smith’s eulogy in 1844, Phelps used the rhetoric of the temporal chain, framing it within the Elijah sealing rituals. He announced to the grieving Saints, who had not yet completed construction of the Nauvoo Temple:
When the temple is made ready for the holy work . . . we can go on from birth to age; from life to death; and from life to lives; and from world to heaven; and from heaven to eternity; and from eternity to ceaseless progression; and in the midst of all these changes; we can pass from scene to scene; from joy to joy; from glory to glory; from wisdom to wisdom; from system to system; from god to god, and from one perfection to another, while eternities go and eternities come, and yet there is room—for the curtains of endless progression are stretched out still and a god is there to go ahead with improvements. [149]
In this particular version of the temporal chain, God the Father pioneered the future perfections of humanity; Elijah’s temple was the nexus for Latter-day Saint connections to the Chain of Belonging. [Again, see Theology on Plural Marriage by the Gospel Learning Channel where Anthony Sweat explains Joseph Smith's belief in being "crafty" about taking advantage of God's sealing power in order to seal other's to you into a larger kinship group which expands your kingdom].
In his short 1845 fiction, “Paracletes,” Phelps referred to a universe “filled with a variety of beings,” an oblique allusion to the chain, which he saw as operative at the cosmogony. He then interpreted the King Follett Discourse and the Sermon in the Grove, stating that the “head” God [see D&C 121: 32] was indeed God the Father of the Old Testament, supervising the endless ramifications of kings and priests in the sacerdotal genealogy. [150] Phelps’s dedication hymn for the Nauvoo Temple maintained that “the wonderful chain of our union / Is tighten’d the longer it’s stretch’d.”[151]
… [Parley] Pratt reiterated Smith’s claims from his King Follett Discourse in an essay in early 1845. Latter-day Saints were to progress “till the weakest child of God which now exists upon the earth will possess more dominion, more property, more subjects, and more power and glory than is possessed by Jesus Christ or by his father; while at the same time, Jesus Christ and his father, will have their dominion, kingdoms, and subjects increased in proportion.” [154] This was the temporal chain. …
… On December 26, 1844 , Apostle Heber C. Kimball, “in his usual philanthropic manner, use[d] a chain as a figure to illustrate the principle of graduation, while in pursuit of celestial enjoyment in worlds to come.” [155] …
… Apostle John Taylor in 1846 explained that the Saints needed to understand “what ordinances to administer” that would “place you in a relationship to God and angels, and to one another.”[156] Though Brigham Young invested great energy in completing the temple and codifying its liturgy in Nauvoo, during the exodus from Nauvoo the matter of adoption specifically became more prominent. Sacerdotal family units served to organize the migrating Saints, as they attempted to maintain their durable society in the face of severe dislocations. Young frequently and repeatedly used the image of the chain. A significant sermon in February 1847 communicated Young’s view of binding people to the ancients: Those sealed to an apostle were “bound . . . by that perfect chain according to the law of God and order of Heaven that will bind the righteous from Adam to the last saint and Adam will claim us all as members of his kingdom we being his children.”[157] Young promised to “extend the Chain of the Pristhood backthrough the Apostolic dispensation to Father Adam just as soon as I can get a temple built.”[158]
“Diagram of the Kingdom of God,” Millennial Star 9, no. 2 (January 15, 1847): 23, attributed to Orson Hyde. Image courtesy of the LDS Church History Library; copyright Intellectual Reserve, Inc. 34
Note that Brown's use of the diagram above is explained in this article:
Orson Hyde's Diagram of the Kingdom of God
This diagram by Orson Hyde was published in the Millennial Star in 1847. It shows his vision (and that of many early Latter-day Saints) of the organization of the Kingdom of God. The text below is quoted from the accompanying editorial.
The Kingdom of God
The above diagram shows the order and unity of the kingdom of God. The eternal Father sits at the head, crowned King of kings and Lord of lords. Wherever the other lines meet, there sits a king and a priest unto God, bearing rule, authority, and dominion under the Father. He is one with the Father, because his kingdom is joined to his Father's and becomes part of it.
The most eminent and distinguished prophets who have laid down their lives for their testimony (Jesus among the rest), will be crowned at the head of the largest kingdoms under the Father, and will be one with Christ as Christ is one with his Father; for their kingdoms are all joined together, and such as do the will of the Father, the same are his mothers, sisters, and brothers. He that has been faithful over a few things, will be made ruler over many things; he that has been faithful over ten talents, shall have dominion over ten cities, and he that has been faithful over five talents, shall have dominion over five cities, and to every man will be given a kingdom and a dominion, according to his merit, powers, and abilities to govern and control. It will be seen by the above diagram that there are kingdoms of all sizes, an infinite variety to suit all grades of merit and ability. The chosen vessels unto God are the kings and priests that are placed at the head of these kingdoms. These have received their washings and anointings in the temple of God on this earth; they have been chosen, ordained, and anointed kings and priests, to reign as such in the resurrection of the just. Such as have not received the fulness of the priesthood, (for the fulness of the priesthood includes the authority of both king and priest) and have not been anointed and ordained in the temple of the Most High, may obtain salvation in the celestial kingdom, but not a celestial crown. Many are called to enjoy a celestial glory, yet few are chosen to wear a celestial crown, or rather, to be rulers in the celestial kingdom.
While this portion of eternity that we now live in, called time, continues, and while the other portions of eternity that we may hereafter dwell in, continue, those lines in the foregoing diagram, representing kingdoms, will continue to extend and be lengthened out; and thus, the increase of our kingdoms will increase the kingdom of our God, even as Daniel hath said: “of the increase of his kingdom and government there shall be no end.” All these kingdoms are one kingdom, and there is a King over kings, and a Lord over lords. There are Lords many, and Gods many, for they are called Gods to whom the word of God comes, and the word of God comes to all these kings and priests. But to our branch of the kingdom there is but one God, to whom we all owe the most perfect submission and loyalty; yet our God is just as subject to still higher intelligences, as we should be to him.
… These kingdoms, which are one kingdom, are designed to extend till they not only embrace this world, but every other planet that rolls in the blue vault of heaven. Thus will all things be gathered in one during the dispensation of the fulness of times, and the Saints will not only possess the earth, but all things else, for, says Paul, “All things are yours, whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come: all are yours, and ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's”
(Orson Hyde, “A Diagram of the Kingdom of God,” Millennial Star 9 [15 January 1847]: 23-24).
My source for this is the excellent Words of Joseph Smith: The Contemporary Accounts of the Nauvoo Discourses of the Prophet Joseph compiled and edited by Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook. In their footnote, they add this:
According to the teachings that the Prophet gave in private (but which he only hinted at in this discourse [13 August 1843]), to be heir to Abraham's promise that he would head an innumerable posterity, each individual and his children must be sealed for time and eternity. If this sealing was performed, he taught, the covenant relationship would then continue throughout eternity. The Prophet taught, moreover, that such a patriarchal priesthood of kings and priests would have to be established by sealing children and parents back through Abraham to Adam in order to fulfill the mission of Elijah (Malachi 4:5-6). When this was accomplished, the order within the highest degree of the Celestial Kingdom would then be eternally set. Probably no clearer statement of Joseph's theology regarding this concept can be found than what is given in an editorial by Orson Hyde. The following diagram began the editorial after which came the text.
Joseph Smith, The Words of Joseph Smith: The Contemporary Accounts of the Nauvoo Discourses of the Prophet Joseph, compiled and edited by Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook [Provo: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1980], 297.)
Returning to Samuel Brown's article, he continues:
Perhaps the best visual depiction of Smith’s Chain of Belonging is the “Diagram of the Kingdom of God” published in the Millennial Star and generally attributed to first-generation Apostle Orson Hyde. In Hyde’s description, this was
the order and unity of the kingdom of God. The eternal Father sits at the head, crowned King of kings and Lord of lords. Wherever the other lines meet , there sits a king and a priest unto God, bearing rule, authority, and dominion under the Father. . . . The most eminent and distinguished prophets who have laid down their lives for their testimony . . . will be crowned at the head of the largest kingdoms under the Father, and will be one with Christ as Christ is one with his Father ; for their kingdoms are all joined together . . . and to every man will be given a kingdom and a dominion, according to his merit, powers, and abilities. . . . There are kingdoms of all sizes , an infinite variety to suit all grades of merit and ability.
Hyde explicitly equated moral (or the ontological) with sacerdotal-genealogical gravity within the chain. The worthiest servants would stand highest in the chain, kings of their own subkingdoms. Degrees of glory, rendered here as “grades of merit,” are explicitly defined by their patriarchal scope. …
… Orson F. Whitney, in his epic poem Elias, published in the late nineteenth century, returned to the images Smith had employed. Whitney evoked “might of heaven, the pure and potent chain.” It was
The all-creating, all-controlling chain Whereby the Gods perpetuate their reign Whereby the higher, bending, lift the lower. [161]
Whitney continued to appreciate that the chain was central to Smith’s conquest of death and family-ordered heaven—that it was a way to describe the connections among people. Mormons were “Welding the parted links of being’s chain / Old making new, the dead live again.”[162]
… —Smith [had] announced to his followers a solution to death, one that mediated the contradictory demands of rising sentimentalism and the vast grandeur of patriarchal order. … Smith’s distinctive version of a formal philosophical construct provides several important windows into the cultural work of early Mormonism … [which] demonstrates his impressive intellectual resourcefulness in the face of death. Where others saw a defense against atheistic explanations of creation, Smith saw the weapon to vanquish the King of Terrors and protect kindreds from dissolution.
Finally, understanding temple rites and Smith’s divine anthropology as aspects of his death conquest provides an emotional and spiritual valence missing from accounts of Mormon eschatology based primarily in perfectionism or biblical hermeticism. Smith and his followers anticipated not just crowns and sacred power in the afterlife; they looked forward to the tender embraces of loved ones to whom they were connected by both blood and deliberate allegiance. Although Smith is hard to summarize simply, the thrust of his later years was the creation of a kinship network whose ties were invulnerable to death.
Note that we see in proto-orthodox Christianity and then in Catholicism and Protestantism, an emphasis on the angelic realm or the stars as stagnant, genderless, immobile, celibate, unmarried, etc., which are ideas stemming from the apostle Paul living in the first century based on his miscalculation of the immanent second coming of the Lord in his lifetime; which he was simply mistaken about. This is not to take away from Paul's genius as a theologian but to show that he did not emphasis family and children and retirement planning because he believed all mortal life was ending soon. Yet Paul still promoted the goodness of physical affection among married couples in 1 Corinthians chapter 7, even while promoting celibacy as the ideal based on his end-times expectation. In contrast, Augustine would stain the Christian tradition with a very negative attitude of all forms of sexual desire and his invention of the dogma of Original Sin which Smith repudiated in Article of Faith #2. So the restored gospel is if anything the radical affirmation of the sensual body and the human reproductive "seed" leading to the growth of families and kinship networks of friends and families through the vision of Zion. This can be said to be the restitution of all things. In other words, it was the restoration of the reproductive seed as holy, and the role of mothers and fathers as kings and priestesses in the holy role of generating a royal lineage as one finds in the Hebrew Bible. This was the restoration of the original Hebrew conception of God's kings given an elevated status by integrating human kings with the status of the Sons of God in the Divine Council. For these divine beings were sexual beings and were capable of breaking the rule of not mating with mortal women in Genesis 6. So Joseph restores the Hebrew theology of a physical Jehovah with a body and sexual Sons of God (in the Elohim/Divine Council) by describing Paul's holy ones (saints) as not ideally celibate but ideally sexually potent like Abraham and the kings of the Hebrew Bible.
In his article, Joseph Smith on Government (August 27, 2020), Craig R. Frogley provides these additional thoughts on the subject:
As early as Kirtland, Joseph was given a view of God’s government. The restoration of the priesthood after the order of the Son of God, was its beginning but without Joseph’s vision of God’s government, priesthood would remain simply as a delegation of tasks rather than the majestic preparation and puzzling of an eternity of interdependent authority, vision, and channel of divine power.
In the school of the prophets, Orson Hyde reported the following sublimities from the prophet:
“The above diagram shows the order and unity of the kingdom of god. The eternal Father sits at the head, crowned King of kings and Lord of lords. Wherever the other lines meet, there sits a king and a priest unto God, bearing rule, authority, and dominion under the Father. He is one with the Father, because his kingdom is joined to his Father’s and becomes part of it…
“The government of the Almighty has always been very dissimilar to the governments of men, whether we refer to His religious government, or to the government of nations. The government of God has always tended to promote peace, unity, harmony, strength, and happiness[1]; while that of man has been productive of confusion, disorder, weakness, and misery.
SPRING: New life and abundant growth
Summarizing and customizing his data in a table shows us today’s shivering reality.
... Samuel Adams, cousin to the later president John Adams, ... stated it clearly, “While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.”[3] ...
... In this on-going war over the agency of man, the divine solution is a proximal caring for each other that will lead to a Zion society:
“And for your salvation I give unto you a commandment…let every man esteem his brother as himself, and practice virtue and holiness before me…I say unto you, be one…” DC 38:16, 24, 27
