HEAVEN AND HELL: DIVINING THE GHOST OF EMMANUEL SWEDENBORG
What is the damnation of hell? To go with that society who have not obeyed His commands…. The great misery of departed spirits in the world of spirits where they go after death, is to know that they come short of the glory that others enjoy and that they might have enjoyed themselves, and they are their own accusers. “But.” says one, “I believe in one universal heaven and hell, where all go, and are all alike, and equally miserable or equally happy.” What! … There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes. We cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter…. All who have died without a knowledge of this gospel, who would have received it if they have been permitted to tarry, shall be heirs of the celestial kingdom of God…. For I the Lord will judge all men according to their works, according to the desire of their hearts.
And the common idea of a soul is that it is something like ether, or air, thus that it is breath such as a man gives forth when he dies, in which, however, his vitality resides. It is thought that the soul is devoid of sight like that of the eye, of hearing like that of the ear, and of speech such as that of the mouth; when yet a man after death is none the less a man, and so fully is he a man, that he does not know but that he is still living in the former world…. There is this difference between a man in the natural world and a man in the spiritual world, that the latter is clothed with a substantial body, but the former with a material body, within which is his substantial body; and a substantial man sees a substantial man as clearly and distinctly as a material man sees a material man…. In a word, there are in the spiritual world all the things that exist in the natural world; but the things in heaven are immeasurably more perfect…. It must be kept in mind, that in the spiritual world the state of every nation and people in general, as well as of individuals, is according to their acknowledgment and worship of God, and that all who in heart acknowledge God, and, henceforth, all who acknowledge the Lord Jesus Christ as God, the Redeemer and Savior, are in heaven, while those who do not acknowledge Him are beneath heaven and are there instructed; that those who receive him are taken up into heaven, but those who do not are cast down into hell.
THE BOOK OF MORMON is almost Dantean, its discussion of hell ostensibly the stuff of Jonathan Edwards. The souls of men seem to hang in the balance. A third of the book has something to say about hell in particular. What it means, exactly, and whether the orthodox Protestant understanding is praised or criticized, is the question. Nothing in Masonry is more akin to Protestant eschatology than the lessons it draws from the brutal slaying of Hiram Abiff, the inevitability of death, and the final judgment to follow. Masons obsessed about death, locking themselves in dark rooms and sometimes even in coffins where they could contemplate the state of their immortal souls in earnest. The Book of Mormon does a good job of re-creating that same sense of foreboding within its pages. It is dark; the light it offers that much more exquisite. Nephi and others in the book bemoan the terrors of hell as integral to their ritual passage from boyhood to manhood. What we do not in all probability have here, then, is a thick stew of orthodox Protestant eschatology: the Book of Mormon discussion of the intermediate state and afterlife, of the propriety of infant baptism, and the future state of heathens are not a paper trail leading back to some New England seminary but more Masonic recitative that seeks to establish a common footing with its nemesis, Evangelical Protestantism.1
The prevailing school of thought, attributable in part to Mormon scholar Grant Underwood, has long maintained that a healthy fear of hell resided in the hearts of the early Mormon faithful. The same year Smith published the Book of Mormon (1830) he dictated another revelation that defined eternal punishment as qualitative rather than quantitative, “God’s punishment” rather than endless punishment. One heaven became three glories instead, with hell the abode of the devil and his angels. Where mortals feared to tread, devils rushed in.2 This was good news, one would think. Yet, the Saints stubbornly chose the fire and brimstone of orthodox Christianity over modern revelation of a cheerier kind, the Book of Mormon confirming them in their erstwhile Protestantism, according to some.3
That said, a good number who joined the Mormon church in the early years were heretics, many of them Universalists. Most of Smith’s family were not mere Bible-believing Christians but recalcitrants who put much stock in their reading of the sacred texts, arriving at conclusions on a wide array of theological issues that took them well outside the pale of mainstream Christianity. Some who joined had been looking for something that promised to douse the fire, not fan the flames. Sarah Studevant Leavitt, for example, had a vision of hell before becoming a Mormon. “I was seriously impressed and desired very much to be saved from that awful hell I had heard so much about,” she writes, the new faith disabusing her of any fear of dying.4 Milo Andrus had been “much exercised about a future State” before his conversion, finding Mormonism a welcome relief to the morbidity of orthodox Protestants.5 Oren Jefferds, a native of Rochester, New York, was restored to health “by the authority of the Eternal Priesthood”6 and later joined as a show of gratitude for the church’s role in ameliorating the psychological torment brought on by Evangelical preaching. Other such testimonies are not hard to find in the stacks of the LDS Church Archives, James Allen Browning’s being another whose conversion to Mormonism made him no longer fearful of eternal damnation.7
Evangelical preachers released as many heavy hearts as they ensnared, too. The difference was that Mormon converts who came in with heretical Universalist-like beliefs were not disabused of anti-Evangelical prejudice. Benjamin Brown is a case in point. A Universalist before converting to Mormonism, he writes in his journal: “In common with the rest of the ‘Universalists,’ I felt unfavourable to these [revivalist] meetings.” For Brown, “the horrible hell and damnation theories of most of the other parties … [were] inconsistent with the mercies and love of God.”8 Mormonism only confirmed Brown in his erstwhile Universalism. Thomas Steed, another dyed-in-the-wool Universalist, converted to Mormonism because it seemed to share his contempt for a wide range of orthodox Protestant doctrines, that of eternal damnation in particular.9 Brown and Steed hardly seem candidates for inclusion among the alleged Bible-reading Protestant Mormon majority.
Supposedly, the Book of Mormon offered little in the way of psychological comfort or eschatological support. What did early Mormons like Brown and Steed read, then? What attracted them to Mormonism in the first place?
Let us be clear, for starters, about where the Book of Mormon stands on the matter. In Protestant eschatology, there are two opposing, albeit accepted, interpretations of the intermediate state: (1) at death, the soul sleeps until the resurrection, when it will be judged and assigned to either heaven or hell; (2) at death, the soul is immediately consigned to heaven, hell, or purgatory, where it anxiously awaits the resurrection. In either case, the apportionments are final. To what degree the Book of Mormon agrees with one or the other should resolve the question.
Jacob is the first to expound the intermediate state: the souls in paradise and prison, the restoration of all things (the universal resurrection), and the final judgment. He begins: “For I know that thou hast searched much, many of you, to know of things to come.”10 He explains that death is a necessary part of the divine plan. “The Great Creator … suffereth himself to become subject unto man, in the flesh, and die for all men, that all men might become subject unto him.” Without the atonement, human souls would remain forever separated from their bodies and subject to the devil. “O the wisdom of God! His mercy and grace! For behold, if the flesh should rise no more, our spirits must become subject to that Angel which fell from before the presence of the Eternal God, and became the Devil, to rise no more. And our spirits must have become like unto him, and we 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” (p. 79). Jacob explains that “everlasting fire” and “endless torment” are reserved for the devil and his angels exclusively. Already, Brown and Steed have something to smile about, for this is not the orthodox Christian understanding by any stretch of the imagination. “They which are righteous, shall be righteous still, and they which are filthy, shall be filthy still” does sound suspiciously like the orthodox view until Jacob explains that “they which are filthy, are the Devil and his angels” (p. 80).
Jacob also claims that Jesus suffered the “pains of every living creature, both men, women and children, which belong to the family of Adam” (pp. 80–81). Devils are excluded. So far so good. The righteous, however, are said to have a perfect knowledge of their righteousness, the wicked a bright recollection of their guilt. Punishment is equated with the knowledge of one’s sins in the presence of God. “And, in fine, wo unto all they that die in their sins,” Jacob explains, “for they shall return to God, and behold his face, and remain in their sins…. Remember, to be carnally minded, is death, and to be spiritually minded, is life eternal” (p. 82).
Jacob does not fail to address the issue of baptism. “And he commandeth all men that they must repent, and be baptized in his name, having perfect faith in the Holy One of Israel, or they cannot be saved in the Kingdom of God.” This all sounds very final, very orthodox. However, there are far too many exceptions: little children and heathen, for example. “But wo unto him that hath the law given … and transgresseth [it], and that wasteth the days of his probation: for awful is his state” (p. 81). And so it seems we are back on track yet again. At least all those who willfully deny the tender mercies of God are bound for what seems to be the everlasting and unquenchable fires of hell.
Alma, in a sermon on “the restoration of [all] things” (p. 335)—ostensibly advice to a wayward son—explains that the spirits of all men are resurrected, a glorious reunification of body and soul—which, incidentally, is cause for celebration. The bodily resurrection operates according to the principle of like for like rather than as a judgment. This is a good bit of Christian theologizing, but then he goes off track. Some, he claims, will be “raised to happiness, according to [their] desires of happiness,” others “according to [their] desires of evil” (p. 336). The righteous and wicked are their own judges. At this point, Alma has sabotaged any chance the Book of Mormon had of not coming off as decidedly of the Universalist school. “Behold, it has been made known unto me, by an angel, that the spirits of all men, as soon as they are departed from this mortal body,” he explains, “are taken home to that God who gave them life.” First, “the righteous are received into a state of happiness which is called paradise.” The wicked, meanwhile, are “cast out into outer darkness.” But outer darkness is not a separate place. It is a state of mind that has “no part or portion with the spirit of the Lord” (p. 334). Heaven and hell are thus one place where vastly different mental states coexist.
The implications are extremely problematic vis-à-vis the orthodox Christian understanding of divine justice and mercy. Yet Alma is aware of the problem and supplies the following rejoinder. “God himself atoneth for the sins of world,” he reasons, “to appease the demands of justice, that God might be a perfect, just God, and a merciful God” (pp. 338–339). The universal atonement precludes the need for God himself to be anyone’s judge and jury, least of all executioner. “Whosoever will come, may come,” Alma says, “whosoever will not come, the same is not compelled to come” (p. 339). Their punishment is the anxiety associated with disembodied existence for the entirety of the millennium when the righteous rule the earth with Jesus as resurrected beings. This is still not quite eternal damnation—and not quite orthodox Protestant doctrine, either.
Smith’s subsequent revelations concerning three degrees of glory—the telestial, terrestrial, and celestial—are thought to represent a more liberal formulation when, in truth, they can be seen as a more sober and indeed static vision—unorthodox but not nearly as radical or dynamic as that in the Book of Mormon.11 Smith may have regretted this first amendment to Mormon eschatology, unwittingly sending his older brother Alvin—who died unbaptized a few years before the publication of the Book of Mormon and restoration of the gospel—to a lesser celestial globe for eternity. An 1836 revelation of the celestial kingdom would correct this, bringing things back in line with the Book of Mormon: “Also all that shall die … without a knowledge of it [the gospel and baptism for the remission of sins], who would have received it if they had been permitted to tarry, shall be heirs of the celestial kingdom of God.”12
While the Book of Mormon has a lot to say about hell, it is not the stuff of orthodox Protestantism, the psychological effect of sin being the only torment of the wicked.13 King Benjamin compares the guilt of sin to “an unquenchable fire, whose flames ascendeth up forever and ever,” which only the blessed atonement of Jesus Christ can extinguish.14 Such torment, he explains, “is as a lake of fire and brimstone” (p. 162). This is more like the Protestantism to which the early Saints were said to be partial. However, the appearance of the preposition “as” in too many instances proves problematic: the fires of hell are not meant to be taken literally. In some passages, hell is equated with mere ignorance of the mysteries of God. “And he that will harden his heart,” Alma adjures the rebellious Zeezrom, “to him is given the lesser portion of the word, until they know nothing concerning his mysteries; and they are taken captive by the Devil, and led by his will down to destruction. Now this is what is meant by the chains of Hell” (p. 255). Zeezrom goes straight to hell, where “he began to be harrowed up under a consciousness of his own guilt, yea, he began to be encircled about by the pains of Hell” (p. 262). From an orthodox point of view, this simply will not do.
Even passages in the Book of Mormon that discuss the “rest” of the faithful, seeming to toe the orthodox Protestant line, may not be what they seem. The souls of righteous Nephites slain in battle enter “into the rest of the Lord their God” (p. 396), but that “sleep” merely refers to their inanimate remains. Where the text speaks of all men being redeemed, “which bringeth to pass a redemption from an endless sleep, from which sleep all men shall be awoke by the power of God, when the trump shall sound” (p. 536), the reunification of body and soul at the resurrection is all that is meant. Elsewhere “sleep” is a metaphor for ignorance of the mysteries of the gospel. Nephi adjures his wicked brothers: “Awake from a deep sleep, yea, even from the sleep of hell” (p. 61). The Book of Mormon discussion of the intermediate state, therefore, lacks the finality and all that goes with it that would be necessary for it to be construed as even remotely orthodox.
A Masonic subtext may be partly responsible for such eschatological eccentricity, but more than that a set of Swedenborgian-like ideas seems to drive the Book of Mormon discussion of end things. Swedenborg was not simply a fan of Masonry; mystical Masons were also among his biggest fans. Brooke explains that “after Ramsay, the resurgence of a religious hermeticism in eighteenth-century Europe was grounded in the thought of Emmanuel Swedenborg,” which spread throughout various parts of Europe and America and was especially well suited to mystical and Templar orders of Christian Masonry.15 Waite’s New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry contains several references to Swedenborg’s importance as the inspiration for numerous late-eighteenth-century French “Swedenborgian Rites.” In 1784 Benedict Chastanier, a French Master Mason and Swedenborgian, established a lodge in London—the Order of Illuminated Theosophists—a “Text Society” that disseminated the revelations of the Swedish prophet.16
There is no need to go so far as to claim descent from Swedenborg, especially since the Book of Mormon does not endorse a gnostic understanding of body and soul. Swedenborgianism rejects the physical resurrection as a step down; according to gnostic propagandists, the body is a corruption of the spirit. The best of all possible worlds is spiritual (although the way Swedenborg describes it, you would never know—there is far too much riotous eating and connubial bliss to fit any normal definition of ethereal existence). The important point is that Swedenborg offers a more likely theological frame of reference for the Book of Mormon discussion of the afterlife and Mormon doctrine than does orthodox Protestant theology. In fact, Swedenborgianism might be said to represent the latest manifestation of the perennial heresy known as Universalism in the long and variegated history of Christian thought. Locating Swedenborg along some intellectual Christian continuum is the first step in understanding precisely where early Mormonism and its unorthodox ideas regarding the future life really belong.
Universalism per se traces its origins to the pre-Nicene church father Origen, through Erasmus and the liberal Arminian tradition, bypassing St. Augustine and veering far from both Luther and Calvin. The Reformation purported to go back to the original sources. On the twin matters of the godhead and original sin, it stopped at Augustine. In search of more ancient testimony, Universalists discovered (to their great delight) the heresiarch Origen. In their view, Origen had been unjustly accused and sentenced to oblivion by the courts of the church—ironic but fitting punishment for this early defender of hell’s captives. In their view, Origen had got it right, not Augustine, the latter the author in some respects of the doctrine of predestination that Universalists vehemently reject.
In his magnum opus De Principiis, Origen propounds an eschatological scheme for the ultimate salvation of everyone, which his critics assumed did not preclude the devil and his angels—although Origen did not actually teach this.17 His position was that immediately after death a provisional separation occurs: good and bad receive longer or shorter probationary sentences. Not until the judgment at the end of the world are any final decisions handed down. Partial to Gnostic prejudice against all things material and literal, Origin rejected the popular belief in the Parousia—the literal or bodily return of Jesus at the end of time—and the judgment, too, which landed him in the church’s bad books. He thought that the punishments doled out to the wicked were self-inflicted and psychological in nature: “Each sinner,” he writes, “kindles his own fire … and our own vices form its fuel” (cited on p. 473). Suffering ought to serve some purpose, healing the disobedience of those in hell, and thus come to an end for those so inclined. This was Origen’s doctrine of the apokatastasis or “restoration of all things,” condemned at an Alexandrian council in 400 C.E. and then again in 543 C.E. by Justinian at the Council of Constantinople. “Whoever says or thinks that the punishment of demons and the wicked will not be eternal, that it will have an end and that there will then be an apokatastasis of demons and the wicked,” Justinian ruled once and for all, “let him be anathema.”18
Origen’s ideas enjoyed a brief revival in the ninth century but required an intellectual awakening on the scale of the Renaissance and Enlightenment before they could filter down to the masses. Protestantism quickly understood the threat Universalism posed to their hegemony. The Augsburg Confession (1530), article 17, states that “Christ … will give pious men eternal life and perpetual joy, but He will condemn impious men and devils to torture without end” (cited on p. 22). The Church of England wanted nothing to do with the notion that “all men shall bee [sic] saved at the length” (cited on p. 23). Likewise, the Westminster Confession of Faith (1649) left Universalists little room to maneuver on the question of the state of men after death, the resurrection of the dead, and the judgment:
The bodies of men after death return to dust, and see corruption; but their souls, (which neither die nor sleep,) have an immortal subsistence, immediately return to God who gave them. The souls of the righteous, being then made perfect in holiness, are received into the highest heavens, where they behold the face of God in light and glory, waiting for the full redemption of their bodies; and the souls of the wicked are cast into Hell, where they remain in torments and utter darkness, reserved for the judgment of the great day. Besides these two places for souls separated from their bodies, the scripture acknowledgeth none…. For then shall the righteous go into everlasting life, and receive that fulness of joy and refreshing which shall come from the presence of the Lord; but the wicked, who know not God, and obey not the gospel of Jesus Christ, shall be cast into eternal torments, and be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of the power. As Christ would have us to be certainly persuaded that there shall be a day of judgment, both to deter all men from sin, and for the greater consolation of the godly in their adversity; so will he have that day unknown to men, that they may shake off all carnal security, and be always watchful, because they know not at what hour the Lord will come; and may be ever prepared to say, Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly. Amen.19
The whole matter turns on a theological point. Universalists insist that the mental torment of hell rehabilitates given enough time, whereas orthodox Christianity has consistently maintained in the face of stiff opposition that such anxiety does not qualify as remorse. How can it? Genuine sorrow for sin requires an infusion of grace, and there is no such grace in hell—no possibility of parole, let alone release. That is why they call it hell, after all! Universalists had a point, though, when they countered that this made God the author of sin and, if not, then a real hard case for a beneficent being. D. P. Walker explains:
If, then, one wished to diminish or eliminate the revengeful, punishing aspect of God, and to regard the torment of the damned as the inevitable, natural consequence of their sins, it was better to have a hell of only mental torment, or remorse and conscience-stricken guilt, which can be regarded as an automatic result of sin and as not directly caused by any punitive action on God’s part. This kind of mental torment was not available to theologians who wished to preserve the eternity of hell, since, if the damned feel remorse or contrition, as opposed to regret, they must be on the way to salvation; but for advocates of universal salvation it provided a simple and convincing method of reforming the damned.20
To be sure, some Universalists pandered exclusively to the notion of divine mercy.21 “Ultra-Universalists,” Grant Underwood explains, “denied the proposition that there would be any punishment after death, arguing that all such suffering by the wicked would occur during mortality and that at death all would be immediately restored to God.”22 Annihilationists or Destructionists attempted to circumnavigate the problem by going the route of too much justice, extinguishing the wicked together with their suffering.
English Arians, Cambridge Platonists, and Philadelphians—Universalists of yet another type—expanded the parameters of human existence to include a disembodied preexistence as another solution to the problem of evil and suffering, absolving the Deity of any culpability by blaming it instead on the poor judgment of celestial free agents. Accordingly, the devil and his angels were all self-made.23 John Locke and William Whiston are among the more famous English Arians to propound such theories.24 Whiston established a society for promoting Primitive Christianity, reading the Scriptures and the pre-Nicene fathers in hopes that it would hasten the second coming of Jesus Christ. Whiston’s translation of Josephus was a product of such Universalist-chiliastic fervor. Jeremiah White, distinguished English Platonist and author of The Restoration of All Things (1712), devised a comprehensive Universalist eschatology based on the premise that God is love and mercy triumphant in the end,25 building on the work of Peter Sterry, who thought that God’s love and hellfire were one and the same.26 The damned, Sterry reasoned, not having partaken of the atonement of Jesus Christ, will “drinke of the Cup which he did drinke” and thus share in the resurrection of the just.27
Swedenborg’s is a darker Universalism by comparison, his vision of hell that of orthodox Christianity in many respects but reserved for the truly unrepentant: devils. Smith was not quite prepared to give up hell, either—a necessary evil in the eternal, eschatological scheme of things. Where the Swedish bard and the Mormon prophet seem to agree most in their two-pronged, conservative Universalist assault against Calvinism, however, is their belief in so-called spirit teaching. The good or evil one does in this life is said to be registered on the “spirit body,” so that after death, as Colin Wilson explains, “a man is known for exactly what he is. One’s actions are all important; a naturally good agnostic will achieve a higher status than an uninspired but punctilious churchgoer. ‘Compensation’ must be made for evil in the after-life, but there is no hell—it is a mental state. There is no upward limit to the progress of which the soul is capable, and which continues in the other world.”28
Nephite High Priest Alma speaks at length on this. “Now there must needs be a space betwixt the time of death, and the time of the resurrection,” where the “spirits of all men, whether they be good or evil, are taken home to that God who gave them life.”29 He goes on to describe two “states” into which the righteous and wicked are received: happiness and trepidation, respectively. Humankind will be judged according to “the desires of their hearts,” some “raised to happiness” according to their desires, others “to evil” according to their desires. In fact, hell is the “reward” of those who “desire to do evil all the day long,” whereas all sinners who repent and “desire righteousness are delivered from that endless night of darkness; and thus they stand or fall, for behold, they are their own judges, whether to do good or do evil” (p. 336).
The “natural man,” Alma explains, is “sensual, carnal and devilish” (p. 337). This is the very heart and soul of Swedenborgian “spirit teaching.” The “natural man” in Swedenborg’s visions is a “sensual man, and, if he continues, [one who] becomes corporeal or carnal.” Alma’s words are not mere Protestant (least of all Calvinist) self-deprecation; they are not, as some scholars believe,30 proof that Smith subscribed to the orthodox Christian doctrine of original sin and total depravity. Far from it. In Swedenborg, the “natural man” is a term that refers to “those who are in the hells [who] are sensual, and the more so the deeper they are in them.” They are most often learned, cunning, and crafty individuals who “captivate and ensnare the common people…. The covetous, the adulterous, and the deceitful are especially sensual,” he writes, “though to the world they appear to be men of talent. The interiors of their minds are foul and filthy, in consequence of their communication with the hells; and in the Word they are said to be dead.”31 In Swedenborg, to be sensual is not to trust the ethereal or the spiritual. Carnality and devilishness follow. This is the Book of Mormon view as well.
Swedenborg-like “spirit teaching” seems to be at the bottom of discussions of the afterlife and nature of sin in the Book of Mormon. In Nephi’s commentary on the allegory of the Tree of Life, “an awful gulf” is said to “separate the wicked from the tree of life, and also from the saints of God.” Then follows a question a Swedenborgian might ask: “Doth this thing mean the torment of the body in the days of probation, or doth it mean the final state of the soul after death of the temporal body, or doth it speak of the things which are temporal?” Nephi’s rejoinder is classic Swedenborg, too. “But behold,” he says, “the kingdom of God is not filthy, and there cannot any unclean thing enter … wherefore there must needs be a place of filthiness prepared for that which is filthy.”32 Swedenborg opined that the intermediate state was more of a sorting house where individuals come to terms with who they are, accepting their fate in the end, changing it for the better if they so desire, with incorrigible souls making their way to the work camps of hell and slamming its cast-iron doors behind them of their own accord, for eternity.
Some passages in the Book of Mormon that are thought to attack Universalism take on an entirely different meaning if understood as possibly Swedenborgian in nature. For example: “Eat, drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die; and it shall be well with us. Nevertheless, fear God, he will justify in committing a little sin. God will beat us with a few stripes, and at last we shall be saved in the Kingdom of God” (p. 113). The same goes for those who castigate “false churches” for teaching “there is no hell … [and] no Devil” (p. 114). Such taunts appear in Swedenborg but are criticisms leveled at Calvinism and not orthodox reaffirmations of the reality of the devil and verity of eternal punishment. In Swedenborg’s dialogues with a novitiate spirit on the true meaning of “delight” (the universal characteristic of heaven and hell), his spokesperson for Calvinism defines it as “nothing else but feasting, eating dainties, and drinking, and getting drunk on generous wine.”33 Such polemic is standard issue in Universalist and Arminian circles, because the Reformed doctrine of Predestination is easily misconstrued by its enemies as license to sin.
Other passages in the Book of Mormon could go either way, too, especially those that criticize churches for claiming to save people “in their sins” rather than “from their sins.”34 The Calvinist doctrine of election, for example, holds that grace alone (not works or even some combination of grace and works) saves sinners.35 Swedenborg berates Calvinism for not shunning sin and thus causing individuals to “remain in it,” to their great disappointment by and by.36 John Wesley, too, attacked Calvinists for justifying the righteous “in their sins” rather than saving them “from their sins.”37 American Universalist Hosea Ballou accused Calvinism of promising to save people “in their sins,” alleging that certain “doctors of the church” confessed that if no hell existed, they would “live in sin, year after year … that it would be better to live in sin if there was no death or condemnation hereafter.”38 They also said, “if we repent just before we die, we are just as safe, as if we repented in youth” (p. 108). Ballou used such testimony (probably apocryphal) to accuse Calvinists of denying the necessity of punishment for sin. Odd, indeed, for Universalists to seem to be so keen to see the wicked suffer or to presume the Calvinist equation of sinfulness with happiness an abomination. This was Swedenborg’s understanding, too. As the Book of Mormon puts it, “wickedness never was [true] happiness.”39
In the Book of Mormon are traces of liberal Protestant things to come. In concert with Cardinal Newman’s belief, the wicked live among the righteous in heaven but in constant mental torment as a consequence. Hell consists of incorrigible sinners only, whereas Heaven is a menagerie of benign, less-than-valiant souls as well as the great and noble. Divine punishment, in this case, consists of banishment to heaven, not from it, at least for those with a spark of divinity. “Do ye suppose that ye shall dwell with him under a consciousness of your guilt?” one Book of Mormon prophets asks. “Do ye suppose that ye could be happy to dwell with that holy Being, when your souls are racked with a consciousness of your guilt that ye have ever abused his laws?” The answer? “Behold I say unto you, that ye would be more miserable to dwell with a holy and just God, under a consciousness of your filthiness before him, than ye would to dwell with the damned souls in hell. For behold, when ye shall be brought to see your nakedness before God, and also the glory of God, and the holiness of Jesus Christ, it will kindle a flame of unquenchable fire upon you” (p. 535). This may approximate the orthodox Christian understanding; in that vision of hell, to be sure, the wicked suffer extreme mental torment. The difference is that in Mormonism such strong pangs of conscience are the product of remorse rather than the instrument of mere punishment.
The Book of Mormon’s Swedenborgian-like broadside against Calvinism uses the death of innocent children and damnation of heathens to beat Protestantism generally about the head. It perhaps matters little that most of Protestantism does not believe that children who die without baptism go straight to hell. No matter. “It is solemn mockery before God,” the Book of Mormon remonstrates,
that ye should baptize little children…. But little children are alive in Christ, even from the foundation of the world: if not so, God is a partial God, and also a changeable God, and a respecter of persons: for how many little children have died without baptism…. For awful is the wickedness to suppose that God saveth one child because of baptism, and the other must perish because he hath no baptism…. Little children cannot repent; wherefore it is awful wickedness to deny the pure mercies of God unto them, for they are all alive in him because of his mercy.
(pp. 581–582)
Perhaps the Book of Mormon means to attack the Catholic doctrine of limbo and possibly Lutherans and the German Evangelical tradition. That said, the Augsburg Confession avows the necessity and efficacy of infant baptism, but, as Charles Hodge explains, some “Lutheran divines … affirm that baptism is ordinarily necessary; yet that the necessity is not absolute, so that if its administration be prevented by unavoidable circumstances, the want of baptism is not fatal.”40 Finney exempted infants, too. In the end, whom the Book of Mormon wishes to single out may not extend much beyond Baptists and Campbellites for inadvertently condemning all who, for whatever reason, are not immersed in the waters of baptism.
The Book of Mormon’s discussion of the plight of the so-called heathen clearly toes the Universalist line. God’s mercy accommodates “also all they that are without the law. For the power of redemption,” it says, “cometh on all they that have no law.”41 “The curse of Adam is taken away from them … it hath no power over them” (p. 581). Orthodox Protestantism is guilty as charged. Hodge explains that “judged according to their works and according to the light which they have severally enjoyed, all men will be condemned” and that the Scriptures teach “the heathen are ‘without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God.’” And lest any misunderstand, “so far as adults are concerned,” he continues, “salvation must be confined to very narrow limits…. It is, therefore, as before stated, the common faith of the Christian world, that, so far as adults are concerned, there is no salvation without the knowledge of Christ and faith in him.”42 That God might throw a little prevenient grace heathenism’s way is repugnant to him. “If this sufficient grace does not actually save, if it does not deliver the heathen from those sins upon which the judgment of God is denounced,” he declares, “it only aggravates their condition” (1:30). It is just such Christian hubris that Smith—with Swedenborg before him and Origen before that—condemns.
In his supplement to The True Christian Religion, Swedenborg has much to say “respecting the Gentiles, who have known nothing of the Lord, distinguished according to their genius, and their capacity to receive light through the heavens from the Lord.”43 Here his “spirit doctrine” justifies their natural place in and right to inhabit the heavenly kingdom. They possess more grace than any Calvinist, rejecting the twin “heresies” of God’s ethereal nature and salvation “by faith alone” (pp. 772–773). They are naturally “interior,” the most spiritual of God’s children. St. Augustine, the bishop of Hippo, is even said to have preached to them, a fitting emissary of the Lord to Africa’s “lost” inhabitants (p. 774).
Given what we have seen that opens the text to a Masonic interpretation, that Swedenborg might also be there makes sense. At the same time, the Book of Mormon does not merely duplicate the Swedish philosopher’s cosmology, taking issue with gnosticism for rejecting the bodily (resurrection) in the end and erring on the side of radical materialism where the body of the Father and the millennial reign of the Son are concerned.