In Heaven as it is On Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death. By Samuel Morris Brown. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. xii + 396 pp. $34.95 cloth.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)In Heaven as it is On Earth: Joseph Smith and Early Mormon Conquest of . By Samuel Morris Brown . New York : Oxford University Press , 2012. xii + 396 pp. $34.95 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesSamuel Brown begins his new monograph with a sigh-inducing, pedestrian line: Death has presided over life for all of human history (3). The remainder of his work, though, is remarkable. Brown, a professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine, provides most original and insightful reinterpretation of Joseph Smith and early Mormonism to emerge in last twenty years. Rather than retread familiar routes, Brown contextualizes early Mormonism within what he calls nineteenth-century culture of dying and explains Smith's seemingly fragmented theology and sacraments through this illuminating prism. In process, Brown not only reveals an aspect of early Mormonism that has been largely overlooked by other historians, he also highlights a part of antebellum American culture little studied--its frequent, sustained, and normalized ritual confrontations with in era before funerary industry. Additionally, Brown unveils an early Mormon theological system more eclectic in its origins, more systematically coherent, and more literal in its idiosyncratic biblical exegesis than most scholars previously imagined.Brown's focus on conquest of is not simply an account of Mormonism's quest for salvation. It is more particularly a focus on early Mormonism's negotiations of when and under what circumstances life ends, how much of earthly experience will persist, and what constitutes preparation for death (8). Brown's study of these negotiations transforms how historians can understand Joseph Smith and early Mormonism: Book of Mormon becomes a grave artifact and Smith's seerhood translates into a vocation to break death's silence. Joseph Smith's later theological innovations come into a new focus, too. By time of Smith's death, Mormon prophet had revealed a polyvalent family system [polygamy and ritual adoption], a utopian communitarianism grounded in mystical traditions about Enoch, a temple liturgy that taught his followers how to negotiate afterlife and promised them postmortal divinity, and a scandalously anthropomorphic God whom all humans could call Father (8). All of these seemingly disparate theological innovations found coherence in Smith's attempts to address problems posed by culture of holy dying--how one could be reassured of her eternal destiny, how one could know that earthly connections endured, and how one prepared for her own and hoped for assumption of immortality.Central to Smith's project was creation of what Brown calls a radical rejection of monogamous Victorian family. In heaven family, Mormons were bound together through sacramental links that stretched across time, as ancestors were connected through baptism for dead, and space, as new, complex families were created through sealings of ritual adoption and plural marriage. All of this sacramental welding could be comprehended within Smith's revision of the Great of Being, what Brown calls Mormon Chain of Belonging. Whereas Renaissance musings on Great of Being various static orders of species, heavenly and earthly, from God down to archangels and humans, Smith erased these traditional ontological distinctions and recast them all as variations in eternal glory, not substance or species, within one grand family that was dynamic, able to embrace possibility of progress (222). …