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Drawing on newly discovered accounts (1832, 1835) and lots of contextual research, James Allen and Milton Backman added an alternative memory to the buffer on which the saints could draw for memory resources. Believing historians formed a faithful, complex understanding of Smith’s vision that accounted for the incongruity the critics saw in the historical record. The believing historians selected and related new items to old ones. They showed how new elements could be integrated recursively with the long-established story. The laity hardly noticed, however. Compared to the expanding number of Mormons whose conversions were often tied to the canonized account of Smith’s first vision, Mormon historians were a tiny minority. Publishing their findings did almost nothing to alter the Mormon collective memory or make it more resilient to critics. The disruptive potential of the newly discovered records and ways of interpreting them remained latent, waiting for an information age to unleash it.

The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints has no professional theologians or clergy, so its beliefs are not always easy for outsiders to discern and discuss. The most controversial Mormon beliefs concern its depiction of God as eternally bodied. This means that on a metaphysical plain, Mormons are resolutely materialistic. This chapter proposes that Heavenly Flesh Christology can put Mormon metaphysics on a solid Christological ground while also opening the way for creedal theologians to learn from and appropriate Mormon metaphysics. This chapter examines the origins of Mormon materialism in the writings of Joseph Smith and investigates the relationship between Mormon materialism and hermeticism. It also discusses the work of Truman Madsen and the multiverse theory of Kirk Hagen.

Mormonism has the potential to bring various Christian traditions together due to the expansiveness of its theological vision. It also confronts atheistic materialism by providing a religious version of materialism.

As the number of Mormon converts pushed toward two million in the 1960s, Presbyterian minister Wesley Walters was not able to keep them from becoming Latter-day Saints. But he forced all serious scholars of Mormon history to reconsider the reliability of Joseph Smith’s first vision story with his novel research method and findings. Walters made the case that historical evidence disproved any sizeable revival in Joseph Smith’s vicinity in 1820, and therefore that Smith made up his story later, situating it in the context of a well-documented 1824 revival. Walters’s argument was later criticized for its fallacies of irrelevant proof negative proof, but it caused consternation among Latter-day Saint scholars at the time.