Seven Visions

A Review of "Seven Visions" by Rosalynde F. Welch and Adam S. Miller

How should we read the Doctrine & Covenants (D&C)? Is it a history of God’s dealings with Joseph Smith and other members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, despite having no clear narrative structure? Or is it a theological record of the Church’s doctrine and teachings, despite how its revelations are tied to specific moments and people? Historian Jan Shipps famously said that the Church “doesn’t have a theology; [it has] a history.” But is it possible the two are so closely linked that it’s both difficult and disingenuous to disentangle them?

In Seven Visions: Images of Christ in the Doctrine and Covenants, theologians Rosalynde Welch and Adam Miller explore how the Doctrine and Covenants (D&C) evinces a Latter-day Saint view of Jesus Christ through revelations that blend the historical and the ethereal. Written as a series of letters to one another, Miller and Welch use an exegetical approach to excavate seven sections of the Doctrine and Covenants, trading theological and personal insights on each.

This book builds on their previous book, Seven Gospels (2023), also published by Deseret Book, which follows the same correspondence format to study seven passages in the Book of Mormon. Both Miller and Welch have been active instigators of a decades-long project to provide philosophical but accessible Latter-day Saint theology, termed “speculative theology” by Miller for being exploratory rather than authoritative.¹ Welch holds a PhD in early modern English literature, currently serves as the associate director at BYU’s Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, and has written multiple books and articles on Latter-day Saint theology. Miller, a professor at Collin College with a PhD in continental philosophy, has pursued his project across numerous academic articles and more than a dozen books, including others published by Deseret Book. To date, much of Welch and Miller’s work has focused on the Book of Mormon as a touchstone of their speculative theology, including in their work as board members of the annual Latter-day Theology Seminar. By focusing on the D&C, Seven Visions expands their theological project to a newer and unique book of scripture.

As a book inviting readers to contemplate how the D&C blends history and theology to testify of Christ, Seven Visions succeeds for at least two reasons: it productively wrestles with the non-narrative structure of the D&C, and it places the D&C alongside other books of scripture, producing creative insights from the interplay between the texts. This move also brings the reader closer to Joseph Smith and his contemporaries as they contemplated the scripture, particularly the New Testament, that often inspired the D&C. While at times the book feels a bit uneven and the conclusions redundant with the authors’ previous writings, Seven Visions is a digestible and creative companion to any Latter-day Saint’s study of the Doctrine and Covenants. 

The book shines when Miller and Welch grapple with the somewhat slippery form of the D&C. Unlike the Bible or the Book of Mormon, the D&C is not a narrative book. It is not a story. Instead, it is a series of revelations primarily given to Joseph Smith, the inaugural prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, presented without much context. These revelations cover both the metaphysical and the mundane, and the seven sections that Welch and Miller discuss are no exception. But this wrestle with form is perhaps one of the strongest contributions of Seven Visions. From the juxtapositions within the sections, Welch and Miller draw out the lesson that life with Christ is, by definition, lived in relation with other people, encompassing both the eternal and the everyday. This is striking in Miller’s reading of D&C 19, which includes a sweeping view of God’s meaning of “eternal” and specific instructions for Martin Harris. “Taken at face value,” Miller comments, “the two halves of the revelation don’t appear to have much in common. But I think they’re actually talking about the very same mystery: how we, as Christians, are meant to emulate Christ in our handling of loss and suffering” (see 77–82). The theological insight in this section is not separable from the historical particulars, and the inherent tension enhances the meaning.

In turn, the form of Seven Visions as a series of letters between friends shores up this generative contrast. Some of the best moments in the book are when Welch and Miller’s relationship with each other and others takes center stage. For example, when they swap stories about first dates with their respective spouses² or when Welch nods toward their shared love for a series of Norwegian novels (94). These asides bring a richness to the book that is difficult to achieve in more didactic, solo-authored books. They demonstrate in situ the central importance of the human alongside the heavenly dimension.

Another major strength of Seven Visions is how Miller and Welch read the D&C in conversation with other scripture, particularly the New Testament. In fact, reading this book made me wonder why we don’t always read the D&C in just this way, since some of the revelations come in direct response to questions about teachings in the New Testament (or perhaps it’s just me who missed that boat).³ These cross-textual readings are particularly generative in Welch’s letters on D&C sections 45 and 110. Welch reads D&C 110 alongside Revelation 19 and Matthew 25, not just as the dedication of the Kirtland temple (which it is), but as “symbolically, the first temple wedding of the latter days” (96). Welch celebrates this temple wedding between Bride and Bridegroom as she would any other marriage, as “an absolute miracle” (97) full of mistakes and human error, but also intimacy and love.

Welch sees a universalism in section 45’s vision of Christ’s Second Coming to the city of Zion that contrasts with the parable of the ten virgins in Matthew 25, briefly referenced in D&C 45:56. We might assume, given the allusion to this parable, that Zion will be a locked fortress, like the door of the bridegroom’s chamber. But, Welch declares, “Not so! In contrast to the bridegroom’s chamber, the Lord describes latter-day Zion as a city of unlocked doors. The peace lovers of every nation will flock to Zion with joyful songs (see 45:69–71). But what will keep the warmongers and their bloody swords out? Their own faint hearts and their own faulty assumptions about glory and terror . . . from the perspective of sin, the brilliant light of the Lord’s love provokes dread and avoidance” (44–45). Like a collision of tectonic plates, Welch’s juxtaposition of D&C 45 with Matthew 25 provides the creative energy to produce a novel understanding of the millennial city of Zion, one that is protected not by battlements but by the love of God. In this way, Welch comments, “there’s something about the unlocked doors of Zion, its defenseless breachability, that reminds me of the bleeding body of Christ” (45). I was struck over and over again in Seven Visions by Welch’s creative analogies. This includes her statement that “from a blinkered human perspective,” Jesus’ life, with its high points of pre-mortal existence and post-mortal glory bracketing mortal suffering, looks a bit like a Nike swoosh (22) (I laughed aloud!).

Miller also emphasizes putting the D&C in conversation with the Bible and Book of Mormon. He claims that newer text can even transform the old: “The Doctrine and Covenants is to the Book of Mormon and the Bible what the New Testament is to the Old. In one sense, things remain just as they were . . . But in another sense, things couldn’t look more different than they had just a moment ago” (12). However, it’s not always clear from Miller’s letters exactly how things look “more different” given the D&C. Those familiar with Miller’s own picture of grace and salvation find it mostly undifferentiated from how it appears in his other books.⁴ This is perhaps to be expected; it is his project, and repetition does not make it less true or useful to readers new to Miller’s work. 

Miller’s ideas do expand towards something new in Seven Visions, at least within his canon published through Deseret Book, in the letters meditating on metaphysics in D&C 88 and 130. Miller’s epistle on section 130 is perhaps his most unveiled writing on metaphysics since Future Mormon. This is a sensible move given that this section contains some of Joseph Smith’s most metaphysical (and heretical, according to his Christian contemporaries) statements on the embodied nature of God and Jesus. But Miller’s most interesting move is to weave God’s physicality with God’s temporality, thinking through what section 130 has to say about God’s experience of time. While Christians typically see God as existing outside of time, Miller takes section 130 to express the opposite view, that “temporality is real but relative. Time passes for God, angels, and humans” (112). Miller then adroitly asks, “What might it mean if eternal glory is not an escape from time-bound bodies, actions, and consequences?” (113). While Miller offers one answer (in the style of his project referenced above),⁵ this question pierces the heart of a truly Latter-day Saint theology of materiality and requires many more answers. These answers must grapple with basic and unsettled questions in Latter-day Saint metaphysics, not to mention philosophy writ large. In Miller’s words, “What is matter? And can matter be separated from time?” To answer these questions, scholars will need to engage more deeply with D&C 130 and its companion sections 129 and 131, the late-comer “crunchy little edge pieces” of the book,⁶ and probably with D&C 88 as well. I for one would like Miller to follow through on his comment to Welch that, “given its reach and complexity, you and I could, I think, devote whole books to reading just this one revelation.” In other words: bet.

In some ways, Seven Visions is a memoir of friends grappling together with Restoration scripture. It is a book animated by interactions: between the authors, between the divine and the daily within the D&C, and between the D&C and other books of scripture. Reading it convinced me that we, as a church, should be more diligent in reading the Doctrine and Covenants in tandem with other scripture. That the resonances between texts produce a richer song than the D&C on its own. It also helped me see that the form of the D&C, which can sometimes feel disconnected and contrary, can actually be a boon to its power, rather than a hindrance. This form helps glimpse the vision in Christ as the “fusion of the overwhelming and the intimate, of the infinitely big and the incredibly small” (95). I hope Welch and Miller’s work inspires others to produce more theological works imbued with that fusion.

Catie Nielson is a cognitive psychologist and assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is also active in the Mormon Studies community, where her primary interest is in Mormon materialism and its relationship to the broader philosophical tradition.

Art by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669).

1. See Adam S. Miller, Original Grace: An Experiment in Restoration Thinking (Deseret Book, 2021). For a summary of this movement see Rosalynde Welch, “The New Mormon Theology of Matter,” Mormon Studies Review 4, no. 1 (2017): 6.

2. p. 71: Miller’s date to see the movie Contact with his wife Gwen. p. 75: Welch’s date with her husband John to the opera Salome.

3. For example, D&C sections 76 and 138, two of the titular “seven visions” in Welch & Miller’s book, are both given as Church leaders are meditating on New Testament passages (John 5:29 and 1 Peter, respectively).

4. For instance, when discussing God’s definition of eternal in D&C 19, Miller comments, “Eternity seems to be a divine dimension of time, a qualitative way of handling time, that cares for and redeems time, even as time continues to flow” (p. 16). This formula—salvation as caring for rather than resisting change—is at the heart of the Millerian project across many of his books. For two examples: 1) In his Mormon: A Brief Theological Introduction, Miller says that Mormon “adopts a Christ-like mode of action that, sober and attentive, is capable of simultaneously witnessing the loss of all things and loving those same things even as they inevitably pass away” (p. 59). 2) In Original Grace, “My religious life has looked like God peeling away, layer by layer, my dogged beliefs in things that aren’t true . . . to a deeper and more original grace that, far from being a clean escape from suffering, turned out to be the substance of God’s enduring response to it” (p. 7). See also chapters on Sin and Love in Letters to a Young Mormon.

5. Miller’s answer: “Eternal glory doesn’t stop time or supplant time or allow us to escape time. Rather, eternity shelters and blesses it” (p. 115).

6. Continuing her humorous analogies, Welch compares section 130’s miscellaneous form to the “crumbly, crispy bits” on the sides of an apple crumble, which she would choose “any day over the soft center” (p. 116).