20 - Theological and Canonical Developments, the First Vision, and Collective Memory

Ben Finch

This reading was fascinating to me. I had never considered how the first vision became such a foundational part of church belief. I found Orson Pratt's witness to be very powerful, spiritually. You can tell that the first vision is super importance to his own testimony and beliefs about the restoration. The secondary analysis did a good job crafting a narrative about how the first vision really did enter our collective consciousness and why it took 35 years for it to be canonized. The first vision does establish a few key doctrines that separate the Church from other Christians, namely that God the Father and Jesus Christ are separate beings, and that it established priesthood authority upon the Earth again.