We’re finishing up our conversation with Dr. Bill Smith and his recently published book on the Plural Marriage Revelation. In a previous conversation, we talked about how polygamous sealings were considered nearly permanent. There are cases in which those can be broken. After Joseph Smith died, Brigham Young claimed sole possession of the sealing power. Many apostles disagreed. How did it get resolved? Dr. Bill Smith explains in this interview. Does more than one man hold the sealing keys? And who is in charge of breaking sealings? Is it just one man, or are there several people who can do it?
Bill: I think that—opinions sort of vary with this but Brigham Young’s divorces where a sealing was involved, I think Brigham Young’s divorces that he granted were taken as dissolving the sealing.
GT: Theological? Ok.
Bill: Which is in perfect harmony with the idea that sealing. You could do it and you could undo it.
GT: As prophet he had power to loose.
Bill: Yes, so that’s another big point in the discussion of the book is that in the revelation it’s very clear that only one person at a time has this authority to decide you can be sealed, you can’t be. Or, you can engage in polygamy, you can’t, kind of thing. This has all evolved onto a single person. It even says historically, this is the way it has always been. I don’t know how serious to take that, but it supports the idea that it’s really a one-man job. So, who has the authority to decide? This is a huge issue in succession. Because obviously the guy who has this one-man authority is the guy to be in charge, right?
At one point, Joseph tries to separate his church presidency from his temple priest position as the one guy. People don’t like this. They are worried about it. They don’t want to accept Hyrum as the church president and Joseph as saying. Unfortunately, he is addressing a group, a very small group who is acquainted with his temple theology. The people who aren’t are really upset by this. “We don’t want Hyrum to be the prophet. You are.” He can’t be the prophet.
So, he takes it all back that afternoon. But yes, he is really speaking to this idea of where things are, and I can’t go into the background here, but his sort of presidency of the High Priesthood sort of vaults him into the position of the one guy. So, after he has died, after he is dead, the apostles weren’t in that tradition of High Priesthood. They weren’t in there at all. They try to write themselves in at first, and then they say you can’t really do that. It doesn’t work. So, we have to a new tradition about this.
Is adultery grounds for breaking sealings?
Bill: Adultery is a really touchy point within the revelation. It’s a little bit confused. Also, the whole thing is tied up in this idea where I mention in Matthew about the binding and loosing thing. That is sort of Mark Staker’s thing about Peter, James, and John. That’s connected in there. So, the text is not perfectly clear. That’s another point I try to make about the revelation.
Were you aware that many apostles felt they held the sealing power, independent of Brigham Young, following Joseph Smith’s death?
We also talked about the evolution of doctrine about how spirits are created.
Bill: There’s another issue we didn’t talk about and that’s the protological impact. When I say protological, I mean the theology of the beginnings. Where did everything start, king of thing? Revelation impacts that, not directly. It doesn’t talk about that. But the way people interpreted that or developed the surrounding superstructure of thought around it, that’s a very important issue.
Because Joseph lays out a protology in Nauvoo. He is really talking about the nature of the soul. The soul doesn’t begin anywhere. It’s always been around. This sort of conflicts with the idea that develops out of the revelation that souls are spirit babies that are born in heaven through heavenly sex. This is a really important issue that surrounds the revelation. How do we reconcile these two theological protologies that develop out of Joseph Smith’s Nauvoo teaching and then out of the subsequent teaching of the revelation about polygamy and all of this?
Are spirit children created through heavenly sex, or some other way (such as in vitro fertilization?) Are intelligences different from souls? Were you aware of the evolution of this doctrine? Is the thought of heavenly sex “icky”?
Wheat & Tares 
I think heavenly sex is probably the preserve of returned missionaries ie those who have had way too much time to think and too little maturity to realise that God may be a little beyond mortal imagination. Much as I like the idea of Heavenly Sex…
Yes, adultery is sort of a touchy point in the context of D&C 132. Nice to see some humor injected into the conversation.
Often LDS commentators speculating on the LDS practice and doctrinal justification for plural marriage are under the impression that God has a plan, a detailed plan, for how Mormons are supposed to practice polygamy. Hence discussion of keys and procedures and this or that scripture. As if somehow if we got access to some extra historical details and documents, and thought things through clearly and deeply, and maybe got an inspirational nudge from the Spirit, we could figure it all out. Publish a Handbook of Polygamy that got it all correct.
I think that’s a little naive, to think that D&C 132 is like half the story and if we could just fill in a few details we would have that Handbook of Polygamy. Well, quite naive actually, in light of the history. The practice had its own momentum and created its own justifications and modifications as it went along. D&C 132 is almost irrelevant. Almost nothing about Joseph’s practice of plural marriage conformed with D&C 132. His explanations and justifications, such as we have them, changed from day to day and from person to person. It was opportunistic, it seems, not rational in the sense of a coherent explanation. The proper point of departure for understanding LDS polygamy is the historical practice and how it evolved, not a textual analysis of D&C 132. [Caveat: I haven’t read Bill’s book yet.]
Dave B,
That’s why historians have focused almost exclusively on the practice of it, not the scriptural basis. As such, this book fills a need and breaks important ground.
My wife would not like the pot analogy. No spirit children are not from heavenly sex in my opinion. How are we to explain cow spirits, dog spirits, dinosaur spirits and Neanderthal spirits? What heavenly sex creates these spirits? My wife and I are both hoping for heavenly sex, just not for procreation purposes. I’m hoping there’s golf in heaven too.
Sex seems central to LDS doctrine of Heaven. I mean what’s so special about the highest degree of the celestial kingdom (the only place where heavenly marriages exist) if you can’t have sex with your spouse? Unless of course heavenly fornication is permitted. Trying really hard to not make lots of eternal sex jokes here…
Too many logic dead ends to try to figure out where spirit children come from.
When I was in college I met this girl and we fell intensely in love almost immediately. We got engaged 6 days after first meeting . We developed this theory about the origin of spirits. We imagined an eternal intelligence as a whole like a sphere. Spiritual birth was a process of fracturing of the sphere into a male and female half. If you found your other half, marriage and eternal relationship would be easy as we imagined we had done. If not you could still make it work with another hemisphere after smoothing off the rough edges. Later after the resurrection, the male and female hemispheres would be united into one complete whole again both on a spiritual and physical level.
This worked for us until she dumped me several months later when I discarded the theory.
This information was found on the Maxwell Institute podcast website.
Sam Brown explores how anticipation of death impacted the theological climate of early Mormonism. He also discusses his recent BYU Studies article, “Believing Adoption.” Through his historical research, Brown came to believe that in Joseph Smith’s theology, humans become the children of God through premortal adoption as opposed to being created in some sort of spirit-birth process. Brown reflects on reconciling his academic endeavors with his personal beliefs. You can download the article by going to the BYU Studies website.