One question that likely occurs to many members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is what we mean when we speak of the “Restoration.” In the case of the priesthood, it was a restoration of authority that had been temporarily lost or removed from general accessibility. In the case of the Book of Moses, it was a restoration of text, bringing to light a story that had been lost due to “wickedness” (Moses 1:23). Other examples of Joseph Smith’s work of restoring key aspects of the Church of Christ could be multiplied. Contextually speaking, he differed very little from other nineteenth-century restorationists, such as Walter Scott or Alexander Campbell, both of whom strove to return to what they understood as the teachings of the “primitive,” or New Testament, church.

Where Joseph did diverge from his contemporaries was in the scope of what the Restoration could become through the way he reenvisioned the nature of “communication between divinity and humanity,” what historian Jan Shipps has termed a “radical restoration.”[1] Rather than relying on biblical interpretation, as thinkers like Campbell did, Joseph “learned from his own revelations. He claimed, in other words, to write and interpret scripture as the original biblical prophets had done.” Rather than returning to a point in time when the Church had functioned in some sort of complete or perfect fashion, Joseph “saw himself as completing a work that had never been perfectly realized.”[2] This realization led him to recognize, in the words of Terryl Givens, that “restoration was an open, not a closed, system,” meaning that Joseph “clearly claimed the right to look to the present and the past, but also to reveal things never before a part of human knowledge. Restoration was an open-ended receptivity to all that God had ever revealed, and all that he would yet reveal.”[3]

More recently, Patrick Q. Mason has suggested that Latter-day Saints could benefit from understanding that the Restoration is “ongoing” because “God has unfinished business with the world.” Rather than envision a God who sets up shop, sweeps the floor, and heads out to some far distant planet, Latter-day Saints “believe in Heavenly Parents who remain deeply invested and intimately involved in the lives of their children. . . . The Restoration is the ongoing reconciliation between God and humanity in modern times.” Fundamental to this view of an “ongoing restoration” is the central tenet of “ongoing revelation,” a “gift,” Mason writes, that “cannot be minimized.”[4] What Givens, Mason, and others are keying in on is that Joseph Smith placed a premium on knowledge. Not simply just names and facts gained from study, but knowledge gained from a divine provenance, from God and those who dwelt with him, through revelation, through vision, not just of the past but of the future. Near the end of his life, Joseph Smith would declare, “Could you gaze in[to] heaven 5 minutes you would know more than you would by read[ing] all that ever was written on the subject.”[5] The reason, simply put, was that such an experience was the means by which women and men could access knowledge, for as Joseph Smith taught, “Knowledge is power & the man who has the most knowledge has the greatest power.”[6] To increase in intelligence and knowledge was to become like God, for as Joseph further taught, “God has more power than all other beings because he has more k[nowledge].”[7]

An important reason Joseph Smith made the leap beyond his contemporaries in terms of a restoration is because he did not limit himself to what the teachings of the Bible, specifically the New Testament, entailed, such as the emphasis in Acts 2 on principles such as repentance and baptism. Rather, Joseph appears to have intuitively recognized that a critical pillar of the primitive Church was not just its doctrinal innovations but also its worldview. The Christians of the New Testament lived in a world where heaven was open, where human beings literally could gaze into it for much more than five minutes, where angels guided the righteous and demons hindered them. Traditionally, this type of worldview has been termed apocalyptic, a theologically loaded word that has taken on a variety of meanings in the modern world. What I want to explore here—and, ultimately, argue—is that an important reason why Joseph Smith’s restoration succeeded was because he restored a specific and potent worldview, a perspective on God and heaven that had been critical to the primitive New Testament Church but had begun to fade away from the mainstream consciousness in the wake of the Enlightenment.[8]

As such, this essay will proceed in four parts: First, I will consider what is meant by apocalyptic and why it is such a complicated term. Next, I will explore how Joseph Smith’s restoration reveals the supernatural world of angels through three categories: visions, texts, and authority. Third, I will explore how the same three categories inform how Joseph’s restoration reveals the supernatural world of demons. Finally, I will consider how these apocalyptic elements align with the ongoing nature of the Restoration.

What Is “Apocalyptic”?

The terms apocalyptic and apocalypse appear fairly frequently today, usually in settings where the end of the world is being discussed. The association between those words and the end of the world is due primarily to the biblical book of Revelation, or, more properly, the “Apocalypse of John.” Because the Apocalypse of John deals with events surrounding the end of the world and the Savior’s Second Coming, modern readers have come to strongly associate the two. But in reality there is much more depth and breadth to the idea of what constitutes “apocalyptic” than just the events preceding the Second Coming. For biblical scholars, apocalyptic refers to a specific genre of literature that became popular during Second Temple Judaism and had an impact on early Christians. However, the term and its boundaries are notoriously difficult to define. John J. Collins, a professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale Divinity School and a scholar who has written extensively on apocalyptic literature, defines apocalyptic as a “genre [that] has a distinctive conceptual structure, in which supernatural revelation, the heavenly world, angels and demons, and eschatological judgment play essential parts. This conceptual structure may reasonably be said to constitute a ‘worldview.’”[9]

The Greek word ἀποκάλυψις (apokálupsis), which gives the book of Revelation its name, simply means “to unveil” or “to reveal,” and thus apocalyptic literature can be understood broadly as a genre in which God pulls back the veil and reveals to his servants what heaven and earth look like from his perspective. Apocalyptic texts will often see prophets engaged in lengthy tours of the heavens (and even of hell, as in the case of the early Christian Apocalypse of Peter). The noncanonical texts of 1 Enoch, 2 Enoch, Apocalypse of Abraham, and 3 Baruch are examples of this type of visionary experience. More familiar to biblical readers are texts like the book of Daniel (specifically chapters 7–12) and the book of Revelation, in which future events are revealed to a prophet and relayed to listeners through bizarre imagery and symbolism. “These visions and otherworldly journeys” are, according to Collins, “supplemented by discourse or dialogue and occasionally by a heavenly book.” Of course, the prophets experiencing these visions obviously find themselves in terra incognita and thus often require some sort of divine, mediating assistance. As such, “the constant element is the presence of an angel who interprets the vision or serves as a guide on the otherworldly journey.” The worldview of those who utilized and embraced the “apocalyptic”[10] is one in which “human life is bounded in the present by the supernatural world of angels and demons and in the future by the inevitability of a final judgment.”[11]

The application of an apocalyptic worldview to Joseph Smith is, I would think, a fairly apparent one for most members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As both Grant Underwood and Christopher James Blythe have noted, the early Latter-day Saint church arose in a “millennial world,” and Joseph took seriously his role in promoting and constructing such a world.[12] He worked tirelessly toward the gathering of Israel and the construction of Zion. In this effort he shared the sentiment of many of his contemporaries whose progressivist vision in conjunction with an increasing sense of American exceptionalism led to an emerging postmillennial eschatological perspective—namely, that Jesus Christ’s Second Coming would occur after a millennial era of human progress and prosperity (as opposed to chaos and disorder). Yet Joseph’s revelations also hinted at a premillennial view in which the present age would come to an end and Jesus Christ would “come quickly” (e.g., Doctrine and Covenants 33:18).[13] All the while, as Christopher James Blythe has convincingly argued, in an era where the eschatological currents were becoming increasingly muddied, Joseph Smith and his followers consistently maintained an apocalyptic worldview (as do Latter-day Saints today). Joseph Smith’s spiritual experiences, beginning with the First Vision, pivot on the belief that heavenly beings and heavenly knowledge are accessible to those who desire it and believe that it can actually be obtained. Interactions with angels were frequent; visions became a regular experience. The texts he would produce, particularly the Book of Mormon and the Book of Moses, embraced a similar worldview and demonstrated that Joseph’s experiences were a primary way that God educated his prophets in every dispensation. While Joseph’s apocalyptic worldview could be explored further, here I want to focus on one critical element. Collins noted that a fundamental feature of apocalyptic literature was the belief that “human life is bounded in the present by the supernatural world of angels and demons.” This belief in angels and demons seems to me to be a critical element of Joseph Smith’s restoration.

Angels . . .

A belief in the reality of angels is apparent to even the most casual readers of the Bible. They appear in several different contexts playing a myriad of roles. For example, in the New Testament the Greek word angelos appears 175 times and functions as “a catchall term for the supernatural agents who faithfully attend God.”[14] To name a few, angels announce the birth of the Savior (to Mary and Joseph, Luke 1:26–38 and Matthew 1:20–24; to the shepherds, Luke 2:9–10), deliver the imprisoned (Acts 5:18–21; 12:7), prepare people for life-changing events (Acts 10:3–7), minister to the Savior after his time in the wilderness (Matthew 4:11), comfort the Savior in Gethsemane (Luke 2:43–44), are present in the tomb following Jesus’s resurrection (Matthew 28:2), offer protection (Acts 12:6–15), pass judgment on unbelievers (Matthew 13:49–50), and act as guides through heaven (Revelation 22:8). Archangels are mentioned twice (1 Thessalonians 4:16; Jude 1:9), and two angels are referred to by name—Michael (Jude 1:9; Revelation 12:7) and Gabriel (Luke 1:19, 26). Angels can be worshipped (Colossians 1:16; 2:18), are greater than humans (2 Peter 2:11), yet are below the Savior because he created them (Colossians 1:16) and bears a “more excellent name” than they do (Hebrews 1:4). Yet because of the incarnation Jesus is also “a little lower than the angels” (Hebrews 2:7–9). Angels do not know when Jesus will return (Matthew 24:36), but they do “rejoice” when the lost are found (Luke 15:10). Angels can be tempted (1 Corinthians 11:10; compare Genesis 6:1–4) and can even fall (Revelation 12:9). Overall, in New Testament times angels were seen as frequently interacting with God’s servants and bearing several responsibilities.

Visions

In a 2008 general conference address, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland spoke about the reality of angelic visitations:

From the beginning down through the dispensations, God has used angels as His emissaries in conveying love and concern for His children. Time in this setting does not allow even a cursory examination of the scriptures or our own latter-day history, which are so filled with accounts of angels ministering to those on earth, but it is rich doctrine and rich history indeed. Usually such beings are not seen. Sometimes they are. But seen or unseen they are always near. Sometimes their assignments are very grand and have significance for the whole world. Sometimes the messages are more private. Occasionally the angelic purpose is to warn. But most often it is to comfort, to provide some form of merciful attention, guidance in difficult times.

For most Latter-day Saints, myself included, Elder Holland’s statement about angels merely confirmed what I had long believed, namely that an important tenet of the Restoration was a conviction that angels existed and interacted with God’s children on the earth today.[15]

For Joseph Smith, confirmation of the existence of angels began as early as the First Vision, and angels were a critical part of his early spiritual growth. In his 1835 account of that experience, Joseph stated that, in addition to “two personages,” he “saw many angels in this vision.”[16] A short time later, while relaying the experience again, Joseph spoke of having received “the first visitation of Angels which was when I was about 14 years old.”[17] While Joseph says little about what this initial “visitation of angels” entailed, he says much more about a subsequent angelic visitation when he was “about 17 years” old. Joseph states, “After I had retired to bed . . . an Angel appeared before me; his hands and feet were, naked, pure and white; he stood betwen the floors of the room, clothed with purity inexpressible.”[18] This angel, whom Joseph would later identify as Moroni (Doctrine and Covenants 27:5), quoted a number of prophecies to young Joseph, including Malachi 4, and told him about the location of the hidden gold plates. The events set in motion on that night in 1823 would culminate in the translation and publication of the Book of Mormon in 1830.

Additionally, Moroni’s visit provided an important glimpse into the role angels would have in the Restoration. During the evening, Moroni recited a series of scriptures to Joseph Smith, including Malachi 4:5–6. Moroni’s version, however, contained some key differences from the biblical text. Here is a comparison of the text of Malachi 4 with Moroni’s variant text, now canonized as Doctrine and Covenants 2:

Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse. (Malachi 4:5–6)

Behold, I will reveal unto you the Priesthood, by the hand of Elijah the prophet, before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And he shall plant in the hearts of the children the promises made to the fathers, and the hearts of the children shall turn to their fathers. If it were not so, the whole earth would be utterly wasted at his coming. (Doctrine and Covenants 2:1–3; emphasis added)

Notice there are three key differences in Moroni’s recitation of Malachi 4: First, what is being revealed is not Elijah but the Priesthood; second, whereas Malachi has the hearts turning in both directions between fathers and children, there is only one direction in Moroni’s recitation, from children to their fathers. Finally, whereas Malachi claims that the absence of this visitation will end in the earth receiving a “curse,” Moroni changes the wording to “utterly wasted.” This brief example foreshadows the impact and import of angels in Joseph’s restoration—they were not merely divine figures who stood in the background or watched from heaven. Rather, in the latter days angels would serve as the vehicles bearing celestial understanding across the telestial threshold. Knowledge of scripture alone was insufficient, and thus angelic intervention became a necessity. In this case with Moroni, Joseph obtained crucial knowledge about the priesthood and its function in restoring the covenant of the “fathers”—the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Without this covenantal link firmly established, the Lord’s plan would be stifled and everything the Lord worked for “utterly wasted.” The knowledge revealed by Moroni to Joseph Smith would provide the principles that would guide the Restoration as it progressed from text to authority to ritual.

Text

Joseph Smith’s early prophetic career yielded two lengthy textual productions, the Book of Mormon and the Book of Moses, both of which would contribute to shape the early Church’s apocalyptic worldview. The opening chapter of the Book of Mormon centers on the experience of the Jewish prophet Lehi, who, overcome with the Spirit, is “carried away in a vision.” Lehi sees the heavens open and “thought he saw God sitting upon his throne, surrounded with numberless concourses of angels” (1 Nephi 1:8). Lehi is then given a book by “One descending out of the midst of heaven.” Lehi reads it and then pronounces a prophetic warning on Jerusalem (vv. 9–13). A few chapters later, Lehi experiences a dream in which a man “dressed in a white robe” leads him to a tree bearing white fruit (vv. 6–10). Lehi’s son Nephi experiences his own vision shortly thereafter when he finds himself on a mountain guided by an angel through a panorama of important scenes such as the birth of the Savior, the Savior’s visitation to the New World, the coming of the Gentiles to America, and the Second Coming (vv. 11–14). From the very beginning of its sacred narrative, the Book of Mormon emphasizes the crucial role of angels—they deliver books, they guide women and men to the tree of life, and they relay essential information about future events. As with the Church in the latter-days, the Book of Mormon demonstrates an apocalyptic worldview, one rooted in the belief that the heavens are open and that God’s messengers actively engage with humanity.

A similar story emerges with the revelation of the Book of Moses in 1830, which is bookended by two grand visions. The first begins with an encounter on a mountain between God and Moses. After the encounter, Satan appears to Moses and demands to be worshipped. An exhausted Moses drives away Satan and is rewarded by seeing in vision “the earth, yea, even all of it; and there was not a particle of it which he did not behold, . . . and he beheld also the inhabitants thereof, and there was not a soul which he beheld not; and he discerned them by the Spirit of God” (Moses 1:27–28). The vision is expanded further and Moses sees “many lands; and each land was called earth, and there were inhabitants on the face thereof” (v. 29). Moses, now speaking with God “face to face,” is told that “for mine own purpose have I made these things. Here is wisdom and it remaineth in me” (v. 31).

The second vision that bookends the Book of Moses involves the figure of Enoch, a man of whom little is said in the Bible (only five verses in the KJV) but who is allotted approximately 110 verses in the Book of Moses. In the Bible, all that is explicitly said of Enoch is that he “walked with God, and he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24). As with Moses, Nephi, Joseph Smith, and others, Enoch receives a lengthy vision guided by a divine figure (in this case the Lord). Enoch witnesses “all things, even unto the end of the world” (Moses 7:67).[19] Moses, Nephi, and Joseph Smith all followed up their visions by establishing a people upon the earth in the form of Israelites, Nephites, or Latter-day Saints. In similar fashion, Enoch establishes a city that he names Zion, and after he “walks with God” the city is received up into heaven (v. 69). These two grand visions further enlarge the scope of Joseph Smith’s apocalyptic world. Whether the nineteenth century AD, the sixth century BC, the twelfth century BC, or the dispensation of Enoch, God works through apocalyptic means. Angels come and go, knowledge and authority are mediated, and the people of God prosper.

Authority

With a restored knowledge of the Father and Son, the commencement of the translation of the Book of Mormon, and a sense of mission and purpose revealed through the angel Moroni, Joseph Smith was ready for the next phase of his restoration—the restoration of priesthood authority. In Joseph’s earliest recorded historical record, dated 1832, he wrote that he intended to give “an account of the rise of the church of Christ in the eve of time,” which included “firstly he receiving the testamony from on high secondly the ministering of Angels thirdly the reception of the holy Priesthood by the ministering of—Aangels.”[20] The catalyst for this “reception of the holy Priesthood” was likely Joseph and Oliver Cowdery’s efforts at translating the Book of Mormon, particularly 3 Nephi, with its talk of authority and ordinances.[21] The process of priesthood restoration began in May of 1829 when the two men received authority from a “messenger” whose name was “John, the same that is called John the Baptist.”[22] The process of restoring priesthood authority would continue over the years through the intervention of angelic beings such as Peter, James, John, Moses, Elias, and Elijah.[23] In a letter he wrote to the Church in Nauvoo on September 7, 1842, Joseph would reflect on some of these angelic encounters:

And again, what do we hear? Glad tidings from Cumorah! Moroni, An Angel from heaven, declaring the fulfilment of the prophets—the book to be revealed. . . . The voice of Peter, James, and John in the wilderness between Harmony, Susquehanna county, and Colesville, Broom County; on the Susquehanna river, declaring themselves as possessing the keys of the kingdom, and of the dispensation of the fulness of times . . . . And the voice of Michael the Archangel, the voice of Gabriel, and of Raphael, and of divers Angels from Michael or Adam, down to the present time; all declaring each one their dispensation, their rights, their keys, their honors, their majesty & glory, and the power of their priesthood.[24]

Part and parcel with the restoration of knowledge was this restoration of authority. In the same letter, Smith alluded to the language of Moroni’s visit from 1823 and the quotation of Malachi 4 on the potential fate of the earth without the restoration: “It is sufficient to know in this case that the earth will be smitten with a curse, unless there is a welding link of some kind or other, between the fathers and the children.”[25] The “welding link” that would permanently bind the generations together could only be bestowed with the proper authority, authority that could only be yielded through angelic intervention. Without this specific ministration of angels, Joseph’s vision of a world without a “curse” could not succeed.[26]

The Nature and Mission of Angels

As Joseph’s ministry grew and developed, he continued to ponder, in his typically pragmatic fashion, the origin, nature, and overall mission of angels. I will discuss two of these occasions. First, in a letter written from Liberty Jail on March 20, 1839, discussing one of his favorite topics, the means of acquiring divine knowledge, Joseph made the following rather provocative statement:

He [God] shall give unto you knowledge by his holy Spirit, yea by the unspeakable gift of the Holy Ghost, that has not been revealed since the world was until now, which our forefathers have waited with anxious expectation to be revealed in the last times which their minds were pointed to, by the angels as held in reserve for the fulness of their glory, a time to come, in the which nothing shall be withheld whether there be one God or many Gods they shall be manifest all thrones and dominions, principalities and powers, shall be revealed and set forth upon all who have endured valiantly for the Gospel of Jesus Christ.[27]

Here Joseph highlights the role of angels in preparing the minds of humanity to receive knowledge that had been heretofore unavailable. He then mentions “thrones and dominions, principalities and powers.” This is likely an allusion to Colossians 1:16, where Paul had asserted that Jesus was the creator of all things “in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him.” For Paul, these four titles likely represented different ranks or classifications of angels who each held distinctive roles and responsibilities in God’s government.[28] Separate categories of angelic beings—both benevolent and malevolent—are well attested in literature of the Second Temple Jewish period, such as this one from 2 Enoch, with the ranks of angels found in the Bible underlined:

And those men lifted me up from there, and they carried me up to the 7th heaven. And I saw there an exceptionally great light, and all the fiery armies of the great archangels, and the incorporeal forces and the dominions and the origins and the authorities [powers], the cherubim and the seraphim and the many-eyed thrones; (and) 5 regiments and the shining otanim stations. And I was terrified, and I trembled with a great fear. (2 Enoch 20:1)[29]

Paul’s letters espouse a clear belief in the existence of angels, which reflects that of the majority of his contemporaries; indeed, “the existence of spiritual beings of various sorts and their critical impact on the affairs of human beings were fundamental components of the ancient worldview.”[30] The question for many early Christians was how to understand these divine beings in relation to Jesus. Joseph Smith’s inclusion of these titles in his letter of March 20, 1839, suggests that he may have had an understanding similar to that of Paul—namely, that these angels existed and interacted with human beings. [31] He may well have hoped that a revelation on the nature of these angels and others like them would come to pass at a future point.[32]

A second noteworthy development by Joseph Smith in respect to understanding the role of angels came because of a series of instructions delivered by the prophet on April 2, 1843. Apparently responding to the question “Is not the reckoning of Gods time, Angels time, prophets time, & mans time, according to the planet on which they reside[?]” Joseph stated, “Yes but there is no Angel ministers to this earth only what either does belong or has belonged to this earth but they dwell with God.”[33] Ever the pragmatist, Joseph sought to emphasize that an order or stability pertained to angelic beings, in this case teaching that the angels who have ministered to this earth are beings who actually lived on it.

For Joseph Smith, angels played a fundamental role in the ongoing restoration of the Church in the latter days, and he stressed their significance throughout his career. Angels were present during his First Vision. The early texts translated and revealed by Joseph, the Book of Mormon and the Book of Moses, pivot on key angelic encounters where prophets obtained knowledge that would be crucial to undertaking their missions. Multiple angels were responsible for the process of restoring authority to Joseph and other early leaders of the Church. Yet, as Samuel Morris Brown has noted, Joseph also “flattened the ontologies” of angelic hierarchies.[34] Joseph’s correlation of prominent archangels such as Michael and Gabriel with Adam and Noah, along with his statement on April 2, 1843, about angels ministering to the planet of their origin, suggest that Joseph viewed angels as ontologically similar to human beings and that human beings were, in some fashion, angels in embryo.[35] In 2 Nephi 31, Nephi had promised that, after the baptism of fire, “then can ye speak with the tongue of angels, and shout praises unto the Holy One of Israel” (v. 13). Joseph M. Spencer has argued that this refers not to some “banally defined ‘gift of tongues,’” but read in conjunction with 1 Nephi 1:8 such language signals a “promise that the obedient can, as Lehi had done, join the angelic council to sing and shout praises.”[36] Joseph Smith’s introduction of the endowment in 1842, with its ritualized journey through the heavens through the guidance of divine messengers, seems to have been designed in part with just that goal in mind as a sort of “democratization” of the apocalyptic experience, one that extends beyond just God’s prophets.[37] In Joseph’s capable hands, the apocalyptic worldview was not just a matter of unveiling the work of angels on earth, but a matter of what women and men could become in heaven.

. . . and Demons

The apocalyptic worldview tends toward dualism in how it represents the moral order—good is very real, and so is evil. Good, represented by God or Heavenly Father, utilizes his servants, the angels, who strive to bring to pass God’s plan and purpose for humanity. They operate primarily from heaven. But they do not operate without any opposition. Evil, represented by the figure of the devil, who also oversees his angels or devils (more commonly called “demons” today), eagerly works to foil God’s plan and build up a kingdom on the earth. A contest between the two forces is waged behind the scenes, out of sight of most of humanity, with glimpses given to those prophets or seers who can pierce the veil.[38] In the New Testament a great clash of these two kingdoms occurs at the incarnation, when Jesus leaves heaven and condescends to earth, where he engages, through a series of miracles and exorcisms, the devil’s “kingdom” (Matthew 12:26; Luke 11:18). Latter-day Saints typically refer to this figurehead of evil as “Satan,” a transliteration of the Hebrew word ha’satan, which means “the accuser.” While in the Hebrew Bible the role of Satan is somewhat nebulous, by the time of the New Testament the name Satan and the term diabolos, or devil, have become interchangeable, and both terms occur frequently throughout the New Testament, primarily to refer to a figure who stands in stark opposition to Jesus and his kingdom.[39] Satan is also referred to with other names or titles, such as “Beelzebub” (Matthew 10:25; 12:24), the “evil one,” (5:37; 6:13; 13:19), the “ruler of this world” (John 12:31; 14:30; 16:11), the “prince of the power of the air” (Ephesians 2:2), and a “dragon” (e.g., Revelation 12:3–4; 7, 9, 12, 16–17). Satan’s servants, his “angels” (Matthew 25:41; compare Colossians 2:15) or “devils” (e.g., Matthew 4:24; 7:22), typically possess people and need to be cast out. Devils are “sacrificed to” (1 Corinthians 10:20), there is doctrine surrounding them (1 Timothy 4:1), and they can produce miracles (Revelation 16:14). According to the book of Revelation (the New Testament’s primary example of an apocalyptic text), the conflict between Jesus and Satan will end with Satan bound with a great chain for a thousand years and, after a brief release, cast into a lake of fire and brimstone, paving the way for the temple of God to appear on the earth (20:1–10).[40]

Visions

In a 2016 general conference address, Elder Craig C. Christensen reflected on the conflict that ensued following Joseph’s First Vision and his encounter with the adversary:

In the war between good and evil, the Restoration of the gospel through the Prophet Joseph Smith has both inspired believers who follow him and also provoked antagonists who fight furiously against the cause of Zion and against Joseph himself. This battle is not new. It began soon after young Joseph walked into the Sacred Grove and continues today with added visibility on the internet.[41]

As with my reaction to Elder Holland’s address on the ministering of angels, my thoughts after hearing Elder Christensen’s talk were that it confirmed what I and likely other Latter-day Saints believe: we are living in the midst of a battle between good and evil that had only intensified in the wake of the Restoration of the gospel through Joseph Smith.

Understandably, post-Enlightenment America struggled with the nature and reality of evil as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth. Considering the advances that had recently been made in Newtonian physics and a move toward natural law, one could find God in the natural world, but was there also room for Satan and his demons? Stephen Taysom, who has closely studied early American accounts of demonic possession and exorcism, observes that as the eighteenth century came to a close, “belief in a literal Devil waxed and waned among the most dominant American religious groups.”[42] While a brief revival in such a belief flared up due to the Second Great Awakening, by 1830 or so “the clergy became increasingly educated, ministers sought to ‘tone down’ diabolism as part of a broader shift among evangelicals away from such ‘supernatural beliefs’ as witchcraft, divination, dream reading, and so forth.”[43] However, as some in America were turning away from beliefs in a physical, malicious Satan and his demons, Joseph Smith, as he had done with angels, was developing a deeper understanding of Satan and the threat he posed to God’s plan to raise up a kingdom on the earth. Writing in 1835, he implied for the first time that he had encountered an evil spirit at the outset of his First Vision experience: “My tongue seemed to be swoolen in my mouth, so that I could not utter. I heard a noise behind me like some one walking towards me: I strove again to pray, but could not: the noise of walking seemed to draw nearer; I sprang upon my feet and looked round, but saw no person, or thing that was calculated to produce the noise of walking. I kneeled again, my mouth was opened and my tongue loosed.”[44] In the better-known 1838–39 account, Joseph described the encounter as one in which he was surrounded by “thick darkness” and felt he was “doomed to sudden destruction” by “the power of this enemy which had seized upon me.”[45] While he did not explicitly mention Satan or the devil in those accounts, retellings by Orson Pratt and Orson Hyde do,[46] and in 1842 Joseph himself would add this amendment to the 1838–39 account: “It seems as though the adversary was aware at a very early period of my life that I was destined to prove a disturber & annoyer of his kingdom or else why should the powers of Darkness combine against me, why the oppression & persecution that arose against me, almost in my infancy?”[47] This amendment, termed by historian Steven C. Harper an “interpretive memory,”[48] suggests that as Joseph looked back over the events of his life, he recognized moments where Satan directly opposed him and attempted to impede his progress, including the key events that occurred in the Sacred Grove in 1820.[49] Notable here as well is the warning given to Joseph Smith by the angel Moroni in 1823 that “Satan would try to tempt me . . . to get the plates for the purpose of getting rich.”[50]

Text

As with angels, Satan and his followers would be highlighted in the scriptural texts Joseph revealed. In the Book of Mormon, Nephi’s grand apocalyptic vision described how Satan was the “founder” of the “great and abominable church” (1 Nephi 13:6) that stood in stark opposition and contrast to the “church of the Lamb” (14:10). In that capacity he was the catalyst for the removal of many “plain and precious things” from the Bible (13:28). Satan was also directly responsible for destruction of the Nephite nation, as it was he who “did stir up the hearts of the more part of the Nephites, insomuch that they did unite with those bands of robbers and did enter into their covenants and their oaths” (Helaman 6:21), which “did prove the overthrow, yea, almost the entire destruction of the people of Nephi” (2:13). Yet, the Book of Mormon tells us, it had not always been this way. The Nephite prophet Lehi taught his son Jacob that Satan was not always the devil but had likely been “an angel of God” who “had fallen from heaven” and “became a devil.” It was this fall from glory and grace that caused Satan to develop an enmity toward humanity and to “[seek] also the misery of mankind” (2 Nephi 2:17–18).[51] Such misery would have been the fate of all humanity—to “become devils, angels to a devil, to be shut out from the presence of our God, and to remain with the father of lies, in misery, like unto himself”—had it not been for the Atonement of Jesus Christ, which provided us a means by which to escape that horrible fate (9:9).

In two subsequent books of scripture, the Book of Moses and the Book of Abraham, the figure of Satan and his followers would be developed further, particularly the details behind Satan’s origins as the figure who stands in opposition to God. Satan appears frequently throughout the Book of Moses. Claiming to be “the Only Begotten,” he tempts Moses to worship him before Moses casts him out (Moses 1:19–20). It is Satan who manipulates the serpent into tempting Eve (4:6), Satan who convinces Cain to worship him instead of God (5:18), and Satan who, in a similar fashion to what happens to the Nephites, initiates a “secret combination” among Cain and his descendants (v. 51). Satan is, undeniably, the source of evil and wickedness that has plagued and will continue to plague humanity for millennia. In Moses 4 his motivations for this become clearer. The text takes readers back to premortality, a council in heaven where Satan volunteers to the Father to “be thy son” and guarantees the redemption of all humanity if he is given the Father’s “honor” (4:1). Jesus likewise volunteers but does not make his volunteering contingent on receiving honor. Satan’s act was one of rebellion, and as such he is “cast down” and becomes the “devil, the father of all lies” who seeks to “deceive and to blind men, and to lead them captive at his will” (vv. 3–4). In a similar scene in the Book of Abraham, God chooses to send someone instead of, presumably, Satan, and an angered Satan leaves the presence of God but not alone, for “at that day, many followed after him” (Abraham 3:27–28). The books of Moses and Abraham cast the apocalyptic conflict between God and Satan all the way back to a time and place “before the world was” (Abraham 3:22) and in the process fill in much of the ambiguity left by the Bible involving, among other things, Satan’s motivation for tormenting humanity, his broken relationship with God and Jesus, and (presumably) the means by which he acquired his angels.

Authority

For Joseph Smith, the devil was very real, and he (and his followers) were deeply motivated to regain what they had lost. The Book of Abraham, for example, speaks of a “first estate” that must be “kept” to continue progression toward a “second estate.” By being cast out of the presence of God, Satan and his followers “kept not [their] first estate,” which resulted in their being deprived access to a physical, human body (3:26–28). Thus early Latter-day Saints “were taught to believe that this [life] was a literal, physical war in which the Devil and his angels sought to possess the bodies of those on earth.”[52] In a sermon given on January 5, 1841, Joseph taught that “the great principle of happiness consists in having a body. The Devil has no body, and herein is his punishment. He is pleased when he can obtain the tabernacle of man and when cast out by the Savior he asked to go into the herd of swine showing that he would prefer a swines body to having none.” The importance of having a physical body in respect to those spirits like Satan and his followers who had none was that “all beings who have bodies have power over those who have not.” Joseph further specified the means by which this power could be relinquished: “The devil has no power over us only as we permit him; the moment we revolt at anything which comes from God the Devil takes power.”[53] Thus the prospect that a physical body could be possessed was a very real one for Joseph and his followers, one that potentially threatened the very nature of the project Joseph envisioned, namely building the kingdom of God on the earth.

Fortunately for Joseph Smith and the early Church, the solution to the problem of demonic possession was readily available in the form of the priesthood authority that had been restored by God’s ministering angels. On May 21, 1843, while delivering a discourse on 2 Peter 1, Joseph observed the following:

When Lucifer was hurled from Heaven the decree was that he Should not obtain a tabernacle not those that were with him, but go abroad upon the earth exposed to the anger of the elements naked & bare, but ofttimes he lays hold upon men binds up their Spirits enters their habitations laughfs at the decree of God, and rejoices in that he hath a house to dwell in, by & by he is expelled by Authority & goes abroad mourning naked upon the earth like a man without a house exposed to the tempest & the storm—[54]

Joseph seems to have reached this understanding of the role of authority in waging a physical war with Satan and his angels through his own experiences. In April 1830 he was visiting the Joseph Knight family in Colesville, New York. Joseph Knight’s son, Newel, had several conversations with Joseph and at one point retreated to the nearby woods to pray. Newel returned home feeling “worse both in body and mind” and asked his wife to summon Joseph. Joseph found Newel with “his face and limbs distorted & twisted into every shape possible and finally he was caught up off the floor . . . and tossed about the room in a most fearful manner.” Newel requested that Joseph “cast the Devil out of him,” which Joseph did: “I rebuked the Devil and commanded him in the name of Jesus Christ to depart from him.”[55] This exorcism, considered to be the first miracle performed in the restored Church, Joseph claimed, was performed “not by man nor by the power of man, but it was done by God, and by the power of Godliness.”[56]

A few months later, in a revelation dated July 1830, Oliver Cowdery was told, in language with strong parallels to the apostolic charges in Mark 16:15–18 and Matthew 10:7–15,[57] that he was to “require not Miracles except I shall command you except casting [out] Devils healing the sick & against Poisones [poisonous] Serpents & against deadly Poison & these things ye shall not do except it be required of you by them who desire it.”[58] The point of the revelation was to encourage Oliver Cowdery to not perform exorcisms for the sake of being seen, but to reserve such miracles for those who truly need them. Likewise, a December 1830 revelation for Sidney Rigdon stated, “For I am God & mine arm is not shortened & and I will shew miracles signs & wonders unto all those who believe on my name & whoso shall ask it in my name in faith they shall cast out Devils they shall heal the sick they shall cause the blind to receive their sight & the deaf to hear & the dumb to speak & the lame to walk.”[59] Finally, in a discourse delivered to the Relief Society on April 28, 1842, Joseph Smith referenced Mark 16:15–18 and said: “No matter who believeth, these signs, such as healing the sick, casting out devils, &c., should follow all that believe, whether male or female. He ask’d the Society if they could not see by this sweeping stroke, that wherein they are ordained, it is the privilege of those set apart to administer in that authority, which is confer’d on them—and if the sisters should have faith to heal the sick, let all hold their tongues, and let every thing role on.”[60] The gifts of the priesthood, particularly the power to cast out devils, were integral to the success of the Restoration and the victory over Satan.[61]

Finally, Joseph Smith also taught his followers how to recognize and discern evil spirits. Joseph was likely aware of 2 Corinthians 11:4, where Paul warns against false apostles by claiming that even “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.”[62] It was one thing to recognize a devil, as in the case of Newel Knight’s possession, but what if Satan or his angels deceptively posed as God’s benevolent angels? In a sermon on June 27, 1842, Joseph addressed the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and taught them how to detect the difference between an “angel of God” and Satan: “When Satan appears in the form of a personage unto man & reaches out his hand unto him & the man takes hold of his hand & feels no substan[c]e he may know it is Satan for an angel of God (which is an angel of light) is a Saint with his resurrected body.”[63] For Joseph, the prospect that Satan or one of his servants could appear and attempt to deceive members of the restored Church and perhaps even possess their physical bodies was a legitimate concern, one they needed to be prepared for.

Joseph Smith’s visions, his revealed texts, and his concern for exercising proper, restored priesthood authority demonstrate that he “saw his fight with Satan not as a contemporary Evangelical may have, as a personal struggle for an individual soul, but rather as a battle set against a cosmic backdrop in which two individuals with special powers fight over the fate of humankind.”[64] Revealed truths about Satan in scripture such as the Book of Moses and the Book of Abraham cast this struggle for authority and control back into a premortal setting and expose Satan’s motivations—his desire to possess the physical bodies of those who did what he and his followers could not, namely keep their “first estate.” Satan had been a very real presence at Joseph’s initial vision of the Father and the Son, and he would continue to attempt to thwart the building up of Zion in the latter days. The ability to recognize when Satan and his followers appeared and possessing the proper authority to cast them out were key to keeping the demonic forces at bay.

Conclusion

When Jesus began his prophetic ministry approximately two thousand years ago, one teaching he continually stressed was that he was here to build up “the kingdom” on earth.[65] John the Baptist, who paved the way for Jesus’s ministry as his Elias, loudly proclaimed that, with the arrival of Jesus, the “kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3:2). The problem was that there was already a “kingdom” on the earth, the kingdom of Satan and his devils. So Jesus entered into the “strong man’s house” (Mark 3:27) and bound him, spoiling his goods in the process. Demons were exorcised and miracles and healings were performed as chaos yielded to order. Jesus sought to build a kingdom where the righteous would be vindicated and divine justice instituted, and “the defeat of evil was fundamental to that hope. . . . God’s kingdom was coming, so Satan’s kingdom stood under attack.”[66] The ethos of Jesus’s kingdom, as laid out in the Lord’s Prayer, was “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). Heaven and earth met when, along the coasts of Caesarea Philippi, Jesus promised to Peter “the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (v. 19). Jesus’s own apocalyptic battle with Satan climaxed with the victory of the cross and his resurrection from the garden tomb on Easter Sunday, but the church he left behind could not escape from the internal schisms and the external persecution that plagued it during that first century.[67] The primitive, apostolic church would never reach the full potential of what the “kingdom” could have become, leaving the church to flee “into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God” (Revelation 12:6).[68]

Fortunately, the church would return, “called forth out of the wilderness” in 1830 by Joseph Smith (Doctrine and Covenants 33:5; compare 5:14). Joseph’s apocalyptic restoration sought to finish the project that Jesus and the early apostles had begun: to build up the kingdom of God permanently on the earth, to once and for all bridge the gap between heaven and earth. Of necessity Joseph brought back into center frame the worldview of the biblical writers in which knowledge was obtained through the unveiling of the heavens as prophets, guided by divine messengers, witnessed firsthand God’s plan for his children. Joseph revealed new scripture that provided additional witnesses to those of John the Revelator and Daniel, while angels ministered to early members of the Church, relaying the authority and knowledge critical to advancing the kingdom. Yet, while Jesus may have won the war, Satan still sought to win battles, striving to disrupt the efforts to establish Zion and to hold on to his own disintegrating kingdom as long as he could. Joseph placed a high degree of value on the apocalyptic experience, democratizing it through the introduction of a sacred ritual that replicated it, one that allowed women and men to speak with angels, to pass through the veil, and to witness for themselves the celestial kingdom. Because of Joseph Smith and the unique, ongoing restoration, modern Latter-day Saints live in a world where heaven and earth meet, where humans and angels interact, where the motives and means of Satan and his followers are laid bare, where the glory of God is literally made manifest.

Notes

[1] Jan Shipps’s discussion of “restorationism” and “radical restorationism” is helpful in maintaining the boundaries between Joseph Smith’s project and that of his contemporaries. According to Shipps, “enough similarity existed” between the different restoration groups to facilitate “the conversion of members of other restorationist groups to Mormonism.” Yet “Mormon restorationism differs in fundamental ways,” she asserts, because of the radical way it reenvisioned the nature of “communication between divinity and humanity.” Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 72.

[2] Richard Lyman Bushman, Mormonism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 7.

[3] Terryl L. Givens, Wrestling the Angel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 34, 40.

[4] Patrick Q. Mason, Restoration: God’s Call to the 21st-Century World (Meridian, ID: Faith Matters, 2020), 32.

[5] Christian K. Heimburger et al., eds., Documents, Volume 13: August–December 1843, vol. 13 of the Documents series of The Joseph Smith Papers, ed. Matthew C. Godfrey et al. (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2022), 168.

[6] David W. Grua et al., eds., Documents, Volume 12: March–July 1843, vol. 12 of the Documents series of The Joseph Smith Papers, ed. Matthew C. Godfrey et al., 310; hereafter JSP, D12.

[7] JSP, D12:186. See discussion in Richard Lyman Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling: A Cultural Biography of Mormonism’s Founder (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2005), 486–90.

[8] See James H. Moorhead, “Apocalypticism in Mainstream Protestantism, 1800 to the Present,” in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, vol. 3, ed. Stephen J. Stein (New York: Continuum, 1998), 72–107.

[9] The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature, ed. John J. Collins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 7. It was Collins’s monumental publication “Towards the Morphology of a Genre” in the 1979 issue of Semeia and his subsequent monograph The Apocalyptic Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1984) that altered the way biblical scholars understood apocalyptic. Perhaps the most important work before that of Collins was Klaus Koch, The Rediscovery of Apocalyptic (Naperville, IL: Alec R. Allenson, 1970).

[10] Biblical scholars often employ the term apocalyptic as a noun with the meaning “apocalyptic teaching, philosophy, or literature.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “apocalyptic,” www.oed.com.

[11] Collins, Apocalyptic Imagination, 4–5.

[12] Grant Underwood, The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); and Christopher James Blythe, Terrible Revolution: Latter-day Saints & the American Apocalypse (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

[13] As Blythe helpfully notes, it can be problematic to see the early Church as either premillennial or postmillennial, for it was often both: “My hope is to avoid the now well-trod discussion as to how well the Latter-day Saint tradition fits post-millennial or pre-millennial/millenarian models. . . . The Saints understood they had a responsibility to prepare the world for the millennium—that at some level God awaited their successful efforts to spread the Gospel and build Zion—but the emphasis was on God’s impending deliverance from their enemies. It was only with the Second Coming that the full utopian implications of the millennium would be enacted.” Blythe, Terrible Revolution, 4.

[14] Michael S. Heiser, Angels: What the Bible Really Says about God’s Heavenly Host (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2018), 120.

[15] Jeffrey R. Holland, “The Ministry of Angels” (general conference talk, October 2008), www.churchofjesuschrist.org.

[16] Karen Lynn Davidson et al., eds., Histories, Volume 1: Joseph Smith Histories, 1832–1844, vol. 1 of the Histories series of The Joseph Smith Papers, ed. Dean C. Jessee, Ronald K. Esplin, and Richard Lyman Bushman, 116; hereafter JSP, H1.

[17] Dean C. Jessee, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Richard L. Jensen, eds., Journals, Volume 1: 1832–1839, vol. 1 of the Journals series of The Joseph Smith Papers, ed. Dean C. Jessee, Ronald K. Esplin, and Richard Lyman Bushman, 100.

[18] JSP, H1:116.

[19] A wonderful reading of the vision of Enoch that highlights God’s passion and emotions and the Latter-day Saint concept of theosis is provided by Terryl and Fiona Givens in The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life (Salt Lake City: Ensign Peak, 2012).

[20] JSP, H1:10.

[21] See discussion in Michael Hubbard MacKay, Prophetic Authority: Democratic Hierarchy and the Mormon Priesthood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020), 28–35.

[22] JSP, H1:294. The idea that the restoration of authority was less of an event and more of a process has been thoroughly argued by Michael Hubbard MacKay. See his “Event or Process? How ‘the Chamber of Old Father Whitmer’ Helps Us Understand Priesthood Restoration,” BYU Studies Quarterly 60, no. 1 (2021): 73–101.

[23] This emphasis on authority being restored through heavenly beings can be seen in the April 5, 2020, proclamation entitled “The Restoration of the Fulness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ: A Bicentennial Proclamation to the World.” It reads in part: “We affirm that under the direction of the Father and the Son, heavenly messengers came to instruct Joseph and re-establish the Church of Jesus Christ. The resurrected John the Baptist restored the authority to baptize by immersion for the remission of sins. Three of the original twelve Apostles—Peter, James, and John—restored the apostleship and keys of priesthood authority. Others came as well, including Elijah, who restored the authority to join families together forever in eternal relationships that transcend death” (www.churchofjesuschrist.org).

[24] Spencer W. McBride et al., eds., Documents, Volume 11: September 1842–February 1843, vol. 11 of the Documents series of The Joseph Smith Papers, ed. Matthew C. Godfrey et al., 66–68; hereafter JSP, D11. Of the three angels (traditionally archangels) mentioned here—Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael—Joseph would identify Michael as Adam and Gabriel as Noah (see Mark Ashurst-McGee et al., eds., Documents, Volume 6: February 1838–August 1839, vol. 6 of the Documents series of The Joseph Smith Papers, ed. Ronald K. Esplin, Matthew J. Grow, and Matthew C. Godfrey, 542–43; hereafter JSP, D6), but the identity of Raphael was left unanswered. Raphael does not explicitly appear in the Bible but plays a significant role in the apocryphal book of Tobit, as well as appearing frequently in pseudepigraphic literature as one of the (often) seven archangels. Because the name means “God has healed,” a medieval Christian tradition developed that identified Raphael with the angel that stirs the waters of Bethesda in John 5:2–4 (Jennifer O’Reilly, Early Medieval Text and Image, vol. 2, The Codex Amiatinus, the Book of Kells and Anglo-Saxon Art, ed. Carol A. Farr and Elizabeth Mullins [London: Routledge, 2019], 241). Bruce R. McConkie speculated that Raphael “may be Enoch or some other great prophet from his dispensation” (Mormon Doctrine, 2nd ed. [Bookcraft: Salt Lake City, 1966], 618). For more on Raphael, see M. Mach, “Raphael,” in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, ed. Karel Van Der Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. Van Der Horst, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 688.

[25] JSP,D11:64–65; emphasis added.

[26] See discussion in MacKay, Prophetic Authority, 114–16. A thorough list of the different divine beings who appeared and ministered to Joseph Smith can be found in Brian L. Smith, “‘Taught from on High:’ The Ministry of Angelic Messengers to the Prophet Joseph Smith,” in Joseph Smith and the Doctrinal Restoration, ed. W. Jeffrey Marsh (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2005), 332–45.

[27] History, 1838–1856, volume C-1 (2 November 1838–31 July 1842)[b], p. 904[b], www.josephsmithpapers.org; emphasis added. Compare Doctrine and Covenants 121:26–29.

[28] The difficulty in pinning down exactly what Paul (and others) mean by these titles is that much of our information comes from an early Christian author now called Pseudo-Dionysius and his very influential treatise on angels called The Celestial Hierarchy, from which stems the now-popular belief in nine ranks or “choirs” of angels: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, and Angels. For more, see Scot McKnight, The Hum of Angels (Waterbrook: New York, 2017), 191–96.

[29] James H. Charlesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1, Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments (New York: Yale University Press, 1983), 134.

[30] Italics added. Douglas J. Moo, The Letters to the Colossians and to Philemon (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008), 123; emphasis added.

[31] Key eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theologians such as Jonathan Edwards and Timothy Dwight understood “thrones, dominions, principalities and powers” to refer to angels as well. Edwards wrote, “And as the angels, as the ministers of God’s providence, have a certain superintendency and rule over the world, or at least over some part of it that God has committed to their care, hence they are called thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers” (The Works of President Edwards: with a Memoir of His Life, vol. 7 [New York: G. & C. & H. Carvill, 1830], 503; emphasis in original), while Dwight noted that “Angels are the beings, intended by the phraseology of the text, will not be questioned. The four titles, by which they are here denoted, probably indicate four different orders of these heavenly beings” (Theology: Explained and Defended, in a Series of Sermons [New Haven, CT: T. Dwight & Son, 1839], 292).

[32] The argument against the idea that Joseph had in mind ranks of angels when he discussed “thrones, dominions, principalities and powers” in Doctrine and Covenants 121 is his letter of July 12, 1843 (Doctrine and Covenants 132:19), where Joseph mentions “thrones, dominions, principalities and powers” but adds to the list “kingdoms” and “all heights and depths,” additions that make little sense in the context of angels and seem to imply a meaning closer to political entities rather than to ranks of angels. However, Joseph did discuss angels extensively before making the addition cited above. It is also possible that Joseph attached both meanings to this specific language.

[33] JSP, D12:140.

[34] Samuel Morris Brown, On Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 259.

[35] Perhaps the best example of this, as Brown observes, is the “Sample of Pure Language,” where Joseph seems to construct an ontology between God, Jesus, angels and humans (In Heaven as It Is on Earth, 256–61). See Matthew C. Godfrey et al., eds., Documents, Volume 2: July 1831–January 1833, vol. 2 of the Documents series of The Joseph Smith Papers, ed. Dean C. Jessee et al., 214–15. Parley P. Pratt would later write, in a way that concretized this ontological equivalence, that “angels are of the same race as men. There are, in fact, men who have passed from the rudimental state to the higher spheres of progressive being. They have died and risen again to life, and are consequently possessed of a divine, human body of flesh and bones, immortal and eternal. They eat, drink, sing, worship, and converse” (Parley P. Pratt, Key to the Science of Theology [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1978], 69).

[36] Joseph M. Spencer, An Other Testament: On Typology (Salem, OR: Salt Press, 2012), 51–52; emphasis in original.

[37] This idea can be seen with Doctrine and Covenants 130 as well, with Joseph’s claim that all those who enter the celestial kingdom receive a personalized Urim and Thummim. As Bushman writes, “With his characteristic generosity, he [Joseph] wanted everyone to have a seerstone. What better heaven than access to boundless knowledge” (Rough Stone Rolling, 487).

[38] See discussion in Carol A. Newsome, “The Rhetoric of Jewish Apocalyptic Literature,” in Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature, ed. John J. Collins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 201–17, esp. 212–14. A broad overview of this complex perspective can be found in Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2015).

[39] For deeper discussion of the origins and evolution of Satan in the Bible, see Henry Ansgar Kelly, Satan: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Darren Oldridge, The Devil: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

[40] For an elaboration of how Satan and his demons figure in the New Testament documents, see Michael S. Heiser, Demons: What the Bible Really Says about the Powers of Darkness (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2020), 173–236.

[41] Craig C. Christensen, “A Choice Seer Will I Raise Up” (general conference talk, October 2016), www.churchofjesuschrist.org.

[42] Stephen Taysom, “‘Satan Mourns Naked upon the Earth:’ Locating Mormon Possession and Exorcism Rituals in the American Religious Landscape, 1830–1977,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 27, no. 1 (Winter 2017): 66. Taysom attributes this waning to “cessationism,” or “the belief propounded by leading Protestants that miracles had ceased after the death of Christ and the original apostles. Protestants argued that Catholics hid Christ in a thicket of ‘superstitious,’ miracle-inducing rituals; Protestants claimed to strip such things away and so leave their rational and reasonable Christ unobscured.” “‘Satan Mourns Naked upon the Earth,’” 66.

[43] Taysom, “‘Satan Mourns Naked upon the Earth,’” 67. Christine Leigh Heyrman’s work is also critical in understanding this nineteenth-century transition. She writes: “In part, those shifts register the emergence of a more mature and educated clergy among the Baptists and Methodists, men who prized acceptance among the South’s well-read and well-heeled. But these changes also suggest that evangelicals, feeling more secure in their influence by the early nineteenth century, now felt equal to the task of taking on all competitors who claimed leverage in dealing with the supernatural” (Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997], 73–74). This transition does not mean, however, that a belief in the supernatural was abandoned wholesale, as Jon Butler’s important work has demonstrated (see his Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990], esp. 225–56).

[44] JSP, H1:116.

[45] JSP, H1:212.

[46] See Opening the Heavens: Accounts of Divine Manifestations 1820–1844, ed. John W. Welch with Erick B. Carlson (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2005), 19–23.

[47] The amendment is in the hand of Willard Richards on December 2, 1842. See Willard Richards, Journals, 1836–1853, Willard Richards, Papers, 1821–1854, CHL.

[48] Steven C. Harper, First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 40.

[49] It is also possible that Joseph Smith explicitly omitted any reference to Satan in his earlier accounts because of the uncomfortable nature of the topic. Christopher J. Blythe has argued that Joseph Smith decided to speak openly about his encounter with Satan only after Heber C. Kimball had described his own demonic encounters while serving in England. See Christopher James Blythe, “Vernacular Mormonism: The Development of Christian Apocalyptic among Latter-day Saints” (PhD diss., Florida State University, 2015). For Kimball’s demonic encounter, see Christopher James Blythe, “Heber C. Kimball and Orson Hyde’s 1937 Vision of the Infernal World,” in An Eye of Faith: Essays in Honor of Richard O. Cowan, ed. Kenneth L. Alford and Richard E. Bennett (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2015), 175–88.

[50] JSP, H1:230.

[51] In this sense, the Book of Mormon may here be aligning with a theological trend that emerged in the early Christian centuries of conflating Isaiah 14:12–16 and its metaphorical description of the Babylonian king as “Lucifer” with the fall of Satan described in Revelation 12:7–10 (as well as Jesus’s words in Luke 10:18). Jerome, the translator of the Latin Vulgate, used the term Lucifer to translate the Hebrew term helel and the Greek word eosphoros, which mean “morning star” or “dawn-bringer,” a likely reference to the planet Venus. The King James translators simply kept the word Lucifer in their version of Isaiah 14. See the helpful discussion in Charles R. Harrell, “This Is My Doctrine:” The Development of Mormon Theology (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2011), 195–96.

[52] Taysom, “‘Satan Mourns Naked upon the Earth,’” 60.

[53] Matthew C. Godfrey et al., eds., Documents, Volume 7: September 1839–January 1841, vol. 7 of the Document series of The Joseph Smith Papers, ed. Ronald K. Esplin, Matthew J. Grow, and Matthew C. Godfrey, 495.

[54] JSP, D12:326; emphasis added.

[55] JSP, H1:383–84.

[56] JSP, H1:384.

[57] “Although the word apostle is not used in this passage, the language describing Cowdery’s calling closely parallels Jesus’s instructions to his apostles. For Cowdery, it may have reinforced the June 1829 revelation describing him as having the same calling as ‘Paul mine apostle’ and the 6 April 1830 revelation that referred to him as ‘mine apostle.’” Michael Hubbard MacKay et al., eds., Documents, Volume 1: July 1828–June 1831, vol. 1 of the Documents series of The Joseph Smith Papers, ed. Dean C. Jessee et al., 157; hereafter JSP, D1.

[58] JSP, D1:159, 159; emphasis added. Compare Doctrine and Covenants 24:13–14.

[59] JSP, D1:220–21; emphasis added. Compare Doctrine and Covenants 35:8–9; 46:7; 84:67; 124:98.

[60] The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-day Saint Women’s History, ed. Jill Mulvay Derr et al. (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2016), 202–3. Joseph’s journal has this entry describing the sermon: “Gave a lecture on the pries[t]hood showing how the Sisters would come in possession of the priviliges & blesings & gifts of the priesthood—& that the signs should follow them. such as healing the sick casting out devils &c. & that they might attain unto. these blessings. by a virtuous life & conversation & diligence in keeping all the commandments.” Andrew H. Hedges, Alex D. Smith, and Richard Lloyd Anderson, Journals, Volume 2: December 1841–April 1843, vol. 2 of the Journals series of The Joseph Smith Papers, ed. Dean C. Jessee, Ronald K. Esplin, and Richard Lyman Bushman, 52.

[61] “Unlike most Protestants who insisted on the idea of an informal ‘priesthood of all believers’ and tended to reject the need for special authority to mediate between God and human beings, Joseph Smith believed . . . this priesthood had to be conferred by the laying on of hands, and that Smith himself had been ordained to the priesthood during visits from John the Baptist and Peter, James, and John.” Taysom, “‘Satan Mourns Naked upon the Earth,’” 62.

[62] In a letter dated September 6, 1842, Joseph referred to “the voice of Michael on the banks of the Susquehanna, detecting the devil when he appeared as an angel of light!”

[63] Discourse, 27 June 1839, in JSP, D6:510. The connection between this teaching and Joseph’s recent introduction of temple ritual has been noted by Steven C. Harper, who writes, “D&C 129 contains esoteric knowledge. That is, it says much more to those who have been taught than to those who have not. It is a temple-related text” (Steven C. Harper, Making Sense of the Doctrine and Covenants: A Guided Tour Through Modern Revelations [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2008], 472). For an exegetical approach to Doctrine and Covenants 129 that deepens its esoteric or temple-related nature, see Alonzo L. Gaskill, “Doctrine and Covenants 129:8 and the Reality of Satan’s Physicality,” Religious Educator 8, no. 1 (2007): 31–54. Gaskill also provides a valuable overview of early Latter-day Saint encounters with devils and demons and places those encounters in a useful context.

[64] Taysom, “‘Satan Mourns Naked upon the Earth,’” 73.

[65] A fine treatment of the scope and manner of Jesus’s “kingdom” is Nicholas Perrin, The Kingdom of God: A Biblical Theology, ed. Jonathan Lunde (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2019). Those seeking a more detailed study should turn to John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 2, Mentor, Message, and Miracles (New York: Doubleday, 1994); and N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996).

[66] Darrell L. Bock and Robert L. Webb, “Introduction to Key Events in the Life of the Historical Jesus,” in Key Events in the Life of the Historical Jesus: A Collaborative Exploration of Context and Coherence, ed. Darrell L. Bock and Robert L. Webb (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2009), 829.

[67] One need only read the three letters of John to get a sense for how the church was fracturing from within. First Peter, Hebrews, and the book of Revelation all speak to a persecuted church.

[68] For more on the origin and nature of what Latter-day Saints typically refer to as “the apostasy,” see Jason R. Combs, “Introduction: Understanding Ancient Christians, Apostasy, and Restoration,” in Ancient Christians: An Introduction for Latter-day Saints, ed. Jason R. Combs et al. (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2022), 2–23.