Those who are familiar with the apocalyptic ideas common to nineteenth century Latter-day Saints would not be surprised by his visions. “Spencer” had had a series of near-death experiences and visions detailing parts of the afterlife and most importantly he had seen his own future as it led from great destructions in Salt Lake City to the establishment of the New Jerusalem in Jackson County, Missouri. Pontius published a book in 2012 entitled Visions of Glory: One Man’s Astonishing Account of the Last Days, in which he tells the story of a man he refers to as “Spencer,” an anonymous Latter-day Saint visionary from Salt Lake City. A couple discussed in the interview included John Pontius and Julie Rowe. ![]() Still, there are some notable examples of visionary Latter-day Saints who have published apocalypses, even in recent history. For example, the Restoration Proclamation is “a great example of how millenarian thought remains a key part of Latter-day Saint identity in the twenty-first century,” though it displays a less apocalyptic outlook than the 1845 Proclamation of the Twelve with the latter document’s “greater detail about how the Saints are to fulfill their last days assignment and how the last days will proceed.” Joseph Smith portrayed his visit from Moroni as an experience of being lectured by an angel about the Last Days, and, as Blythe put it: “The Book of Mormon is filled with apocalyptic material and details the destructions of several civilizations.” While we “spend much less time talking about apocalyptic events in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries than we did in the nineteenth,” it is still a part of our thought today. Latter-day Saints have been apocalyptic in outlook from the start. But, in the case of his book title, Blythe was invoking both the genre and eschatology, though he focuses “more on prophecies predicting the downfall of the United States and less on the millennium that comes after” while discussing “a lot of Latter-day Saint visionary accounts.” … In popular usage, the apocalypse is the end of the world.” The genre of literature is, first and foremost, “the story of a visionary being brought into otherworldly realms often with the aid of an angelic guide,” and not necessarily a discussion of the end of the world. It’s also a genre of scriptural literature, which is best represented in the Bible with the Book of Revelation. What follows here is a co-post to the interview (a short discussion with quotes from the interview), but the full interview is available here.Īs Blythe put it, an apocalypse is “literally an unveiling-a revelation. He recently had an interview with Kurt Manwaring to discuss his research and book. These types of discussions interested Christopher Blythe, who has “always had a deep interest in apocalypticism” and felt that “much of the scholarship on Latter-day Saint last days beliefs seem to focus on official doctrine rather than the conversations occurring among lay Latter-day Saints.” His recently-published book Terrible Revolution: Latter-day Saints and the American Apocalypse(Oxford University Press, 2020) focuses on “how lay Latter-day Saint beliefs intersect with the official doctrine of the faith” by examining the full span of apocalypticism among Latter-day Saints in the nineteenth century. ![]() It is not an uncommon topic of conversation among Latter-day Saints that I have known, including the occasional discussion of dreams or visions about the End Times. Perhaps it is because of that drama that the idea has captured the imagination of human beings for thousands of years and continues to do so today. The end of the world is a pretty dramatic scene.
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