“Thus Todd Compton’s analysis turns out to be an inadequate prologue to a study of the marital theology of Joseph Smith.”

I don’t think there is a general concensus on the topic you raise. If you ask the perma-bloggers at this site, you will find that most of us lean toward God having some limits to his knowledge. However, when it comes to the details of those limits, we disagree. I’m not sure we’ve explored it in great detail, I’ll see if I can post something tonight and we can see if anyone wants to discuss it.

Thoughts?

The Introduction is below.

Let me know what you think;
Steve St. Clair

Introduction

In Richard Bushman’s writings, he has provided an interesting map of the transformations that were going on in Joseph Smith’s mind during h)is experiences at the beginning of the restoration. He shows Joseph’s slow and painstaking discovery of his successive roles as (1) participant in forgiveness / redemption / conversion, (2) seerstone-gazer, (3) translator, (4) fulfiller of prophecy, (5) seer, and (6) prophet. It was the second half of his presentation at the Joseph Smith Symposium in Washington, D.C. in 2005. The text for that presentation is now available in hard-copy format, both in the February 2006 issue of BYU Studies (a double issue containing the full text of all the presentations) and a hard-cover book published by Deseret Book in March 2006.

In my first quick reading of Dr. Bushman’s new book Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling I had not noticed him doing the same thing for the issue of plural marriage. During my first reading, I was focused entirely on Joseph’s clearly unusual individual actions, such as marrying Fanny Alger, marrying women who were already married to other men, and so forth.

But in my SECOND reading (and subsequent readings), I have noticed that he uncovers what appears to be a very clear similar pattern in Joseph’s actions relating to plural marriage. I think this would be of great interest to scholarly members of the church who are wrestling with questions about plural marriage. It may also be of assistance to members wanting to throw a more positive light on the issue of plural marriage in the answers they provide to questions about Latter-day Saint history.

Based on Richard Bushman’s insightful information, arranged in order of dates and clustered around key occurrences in the history of plural marriage, it revolves around Joseph’s gradual discovery of Abraham as a pattern.

Joseph identified readily with him because of the Smith’s having to endure the loss of support of their extended family and kinship-group when they moved to upstate New York. He recognized that Abraham had undergone a similar experience in departing from his homeland in Haran to journey to the Promised Land, as well as nearly every other experience throughout his life.

Joseph came to realize that he needed to pattern himself after that patriarch in numerous ways, and it would have included living the law of plural marriage that Abraham had lived.

His reading of the Abraham narratives in the Old Testament made him realize that plural marriage was acceptable when done to preserve literal offspring.

His threatened emasculation, the death of most of his children, and the personal nature of the threats hurled by the Jackson County persecutors made him fear for the survival of his literal posterity, and he arranged the marriage with Fanny Alger to protect against it.

Between then and the time he began sealing women to himself or his family in 1841, many factors changed.

He learned the New Testament and Book of Abraham understanding of the children of Abraham as his converts, not his descendants.

His family circumstances changed in that his literal posterity became completely unthreatened, and the tragedy in Far West threatened his Abrahamic kinship group of all ages and genders.

His desired relationship to the women married to him or sealed or adopted to Emma and him during the 1840’s, resembled that of relatives or kinswomen in the Abrahamic sense, rather than involving romantic or physical attraction.

As things drew to critical point at end of his prophetic career, he realized that the marvelous blessings being unfolded to the Saints of the endowment, sealings of families for eternity, and the second anointing as an assurance of heaven, needed to be qualified for by a supreme Abrahamic test.

Joseph concluded that Abraham’s family had met a supreme Abrahamic trial or test, and that people in Joseph’s time would be asked to overcome a test of equal proportion. Not too far distant from that thought would be the idea that Saints in Joseph’s day invited to participate in the Abrahamic experience would each have some almost insurmountable Abrahamic test to overcome, customized to their own personality.

In their review of Todd Compton’s book titled “In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith” in the FARMS Review of Books, Richard L. Anderson and Scott H. Faulring correctly describe the historian’s dilemma when source materials about people’s innermost thoughts in short supply:

If we had the benefit of Joseph Smith’s explanation for each of his plural marriages, we would be in a better position to judge the motives and depth of his relationships; but, since we do not, wisdom and prudence dictate that we withhold many judgments until we do. Biographers in this area are tempted to create historical fiction, which purports to read minds and furnish all answers, but serious history cannot run ahead of responsible source materials.

Another reviewer of that book, Danel W. Bachman, described the dilemma about Joseph Smith and plural marriage in these terms:

Compton’s thesis is that early Mormon marital ideology explains why Joseph Smith had so many wives, some of whom were quite young, and a third of whom were already married and thus living in polyandry once they married him. Most certainly it is necessary to understand Joseph’s theology to understand his conduct; but my analysis of the prologue of Compton’s book clearly demonstrates that much more research into this area is required to give us an adequate picture of both Joseph’s doctrinal understanding and his actions as plural marriage was introduced into the church. (Danel W. Bachman, Prologue to the Study of Joseph Smith’s Marital Theology, Farms Review of Books, 1998)

My hope is that these ideas and concepts, drawing from the Abrahamic sources that Joseph had in his hands during the time of the unfolding of plural marriage, will help to illuminate his motives in some small way.

Now the problem is that for this to work MMP must go in both directions, something most MMP I’ve encountered don’t tend to discuss. i.e. someone in Celestial glory decides to fall. Now perhaps that’s what happened to Satan. (One might point to Adam in BY’s theology – but it seems to me that’s a special case) The point being though that ultimately judgment need not be accurate in MMP.

Now whether that really works is more complex. Partially for what you suggest. But more because we still demand God be just and so epistemological limits (maybe God can’t separate out the body from non-body) may render big theological problems.

In fact, I think many of the MMP detractors here have argued that MMP exacerbates the problem because of the lack of continuity introduced by so many and so frequent resurrections. If I live in the same body for a long time, I become more and more responsible for my brain structure. If you keep taking away my body and giving me a new one, it seems like that makes this problem worse.