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Show Page 101 "These beautiful and curious phenomena, doubtless owe their origin to the refraction of the sun's rays through the minute, though differently shaped prismatic crystals of ice and snow, which float in the atmosphere." 1 Here we see the peculiarly Mormon material theology at work - if there are to be heavenly signs before the apocalypse, then certainly they must be analyzed as the purely natural consequences of a God acting in and through the material universe. There is little room for mysticism in a religious system that records in graphs and angle measurements the "signs and wonders in heaven" that presage the Second Advent. At the April conference of 1843 Orson Pratt discoursed on the "Ancient of Days," a mysterious figure who appears in the visions of the Prophet Daniel. He identified this personage as Adam and linked the rule of the first patriarch to the millennial age in which he would preside over unnumbered-millions. There is great emphasis in this address on the organization and preparation of worlds, on the calling of grand councils for the disposition of power and dominion over the mechanisms of the universe, on the suspended results of the great probationary war between darkness and light. Out of such discourses was shaped a theology of history peculiar to the Mormon mind. It is, of course, built upon the familiar fundamentalist notions of Biblical chronology - but it is far more broad at the same time, for history becomes a continuation of a philosophical debate in heaven, argued out repeatedly in the patterns of mortal decision. It infuses every word of scripture with ritual significance, that exalts what are considered generally in the modern world to be benign and archaic allegories into actual ordeals lived out by actual men and women. Though Adam stands for "man" in both the world and the temple, 2 in Mormonism there is no question of his historicity as well. |
