I recently read, and greatly enjoyed, Richard Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling. (Yes, I know there’s a reading group going on; I don’t want to spoil it, but wanted to make a comment about the book generally, rather than about a specific chapter.)
One of the things Bushman did well was to describe some of the processes of Joseph’s doctrinal developments, particularly the doctrine of baptism for the dead. There was a very productive tension in Joseph between necessary, authoritative ordinances and a universalism arising from his understanding of the mercy of God. As he put it in his letter to Nancy Rigdon:
Our heavenly father is more liberal in his views, and boundless in his mercies and blessings, than we are ready to believe or receive, and at the same time is as terrible to the workers of iniquity, more awful in the executions of his punishments, and more ready to detect every false way than we are apt to suppose him to be.
The same tension between the mercy and the authority of God is at work in modern statements regarding the faithful who have no opportunity to marry in this life: the mercy of God will allow them the opportunity to receive all the same blessings in eternity, and we assume that some ordinance will be involved in keeping with the commandments of God.
Proxy ordinance work for the dead was an inspired solution to this seeming dilemma — a dilemma that other churches are currently wrestling with, and have been for some time. There are so many aspects of Joseph’s revelations that resonate with me, but this one, I think, is particular evidence of his prophetic stature: the revelation of a universal God of all people, who wants to make all of us his chosen, and has provided a means to reconcile these seemingly opposing ideas of chosenness and universalism: Saviors on Mount Zion.