Joseph Smith’s Welding Theology: An Introductory Overview

Last semester I came into contact with Jared Hickman’s senior thesis at Bowdoin on Joseph Smith as a New World Baroque figure. Hickman uses the welding metaphor Joseph utilizes in D&C 128 to describe Joseph’s project to weld all humanity together in union. The paper (which is over 200 pages long; it’s a book, really), frankly blew my mind and changed the way I look at Joseph Smith and Mormon theology.

It was given to me by Richard Bushman, who mentored Hickman at one point. I used it to help me write a paper for Bushman’s class last semester on “The Life and Thought of Joseph Smith. The paper is called “Friendship is Like Welding Iron to Iron: The Sealing Power, the Welding Link, and the Grand Fundamental Principle of Mormonism” Incidentally, I’ll be presenting it at a seminar on the Life and Thought of Joseph Smith, along with 4 other papers, on February 19 at Claremont Graduate University.

I’d always been interested in relational ontologies and theologies, but Hickman demonstrates that Joseph really took it to the next level. Philosophically, I explain below how his theology is relational but goes further than the merely descriptive nature of most relational ontologies and takes the plight of humanity as fundamentally estranged and isolated very seriously.

I posted the details for this seminar on LDS-Phil, a mailing and discussion list consisting of people interested in discussing LDS thought. It generated something of a discussion. I mentioned that I am just beginning to work on what I am calling Joseph Smith’s Welding Theology, based on Jared Hickman’s initial work on the subject. Someone asked for a description of what this is, and I’m including my response below. Keep in mind two things: 1) I am barely fleshing this out for the first time so many implications (perhaps obvious to some) are not yet present. 2) This isn’t a comprehensive overview, which isn’t really possible in part because the nature of Welding Theology potentially includes all human interpretative frameworks. But also, the sealing power and the nature of sealing in general, and a fuller explication of Joseph’s views on friendship (one of Mormonism’s “Grand Fundamentals”) are also absent, and these are essential to Welding Theology (I discuss them in the paper). I’d appreciate any feedback.

Sorry this won’t be brief. I think brevity is only possible where one knows his/her subject inside and out, and I quite frankly do not yet. This is a concept I am just beginning to work with, so only the most rudimentary of implications have been worked out. In essence, Welding Theology is essentially Joseph Smith’s notion of the dispensation of the fulness of times, which is “to gather together in one all things,” and that “there should not be an eternal fulness until every dispensation should be fulfilled and gathered together in one.” Joseph used the metaphor of welding several times in his sermons and letters (I discuss these in the paper), but the pre-eminent usage I’m considering is in his 1842 letters to the Saints that have since been canonized as D&C 127 and 128. There he describes welding in two ways: 1) welding as a link, where he fleshes out baptism for the dead as the welding link that will connect all generations of humanity together through priesthood, making the unification of all generations a necessary pre-requisite for salvation; and 2) welding as a discursive hybridization of all of human history, the welding together of dispensations, keys, powers, glories, and knowledge into a perfect union. In other words, Joseph Smith’s Welding Theology is the ultimate conceptual and practical working out of at-one-ment, an at-one-ment that is spiritual, theological, philosophical, epistemological, sociological, historical, political, biographical, etc. This is what I meant before by Welding Theology being an encyclopedic circumscription of human history, collapsing heaven into earth, and vice versa, welding not just human hearts but disparate worldviews and theological visions.

Joseph will ultimately say of such a project, one year later, “If a skillful mechanic, in taking a welding heat, uses borax, alum, etc., and and succeeds in welding together iron or steel more perfectly than any other mechanic, is he not deserving of praise? And if by principles of truth I succeed in uniting men of all denominations in the bonds of love, shall I not have attained a good object?” I think, through the rubric of Welding Theology, that Joseph was creating an infinitely revisable and expandable theology capable of truly, and not theoretically, encompassing the whole human family from beginning to end. This was why friendship was so important to Joseph, both practically and conceptually: such a project could not be accomplished outside the bonds of love. This was (partially) why he experimented with relationships, both symmetrically and asymmetrically (polygamy).  Different conceptions and configurations of relationship were crucial. This was why the Law of Consecration was enacted and Zion began as Christian communalism. His beloved Zion, in fact, was the physical iteration of a theology of welding. This is, in a nutshell (to the extent, as Derrida said, nutshells are useful, which is limited) what I conceive Welding Theology to be.

The immediate and obvious criticism (and I’m sure there are many more) that should be apparent is the seemingly ideological and religious imperialism such a theology seems to embrace. It looks totalitarian and tyrannical: sure, weld all humanity together; through Mormonism. Hickman’s work, again, is foundational here, and here is where he really shines. I’ve already alluded to some of this, but he argues that Joseph’s project, and indeed the welding metaphor itself signifies syncresis instead of synthesis. To weld is to fuse extant entities together, to join different parts together, to connect individual units in greater network, preserving difference by maintaining the integrity of the individual unit even in its relations to other units. The text of a theology of welding includes sacred texts, but ultimately the living community of people that form the union it seeks is the text upon which it writes and infinitely expands. The lives of the people and their stories are what produce the text.

Anyway, Hickman’s thesis spells this out better and his response to such criticisms really are brilliant. Maybe I could get him to comment on this list.  The ultimate upshot, as he says, is this: “Smith hoped to heal sectarian strife and seal the whole human family together in love, to make all of humanity the people of God, capable of collectively ascending to the mount to see the face of God. This was the true meaning of the dispensation of the fulness of times.”

So, Welding Theology is the attempt to take seriously this project, to tease out all the implications and parameters of what is actually possible in uniting the whole human family. Comparing Welding Theology to other relational ontologies, these other ontologies (Network Ontology, Process philosophy, etc) all posit relationality and change as essential to ontology, essential to existence. This is a huge step forward from traditional substantialist ontologies that isolate entities and make them unrelatable to one another. But, Joseph’s theology, while thoroughly relational, takes seriously the fact that, in very real ways, human beings stand isolated from one another, estranged from God, other human beings, and even themselves. The nature of reality may be inherently relational and dynamic, but humanity is consistently and constantly blocked from accessing its own relationality, and therefore ultimately its own potential to be supremely related to all existence as God is (incidentally, this is how I read D&C 93, not as merely talking about resurrection, but as becoming intimately related to element itself, the entire universe). These other philosophies and theologies, normally interested in describing the multiple and pluralistic nature of the world/universe, are not normally interested in ways to unify and unite the multiplicity in ways that preserve it while also elevating it to a higher level of existence. I see Welding Theology as being essentially interested in and focused on this.

So, we believe that all truth will be circumscribed into one great whole. I see Welding Theology as taking this assertion very seriously and attempting to work out its implications. I think the potentially wonderful thing about it is that it theoretically requires all fields of investigation and inquiry to work out its implications and frame its theories. Though it is a theology, no one field has a monopoly on creating this framework; all are potentially critical in doing so, because all fields of inquiry are intimately related to human knowledge and its heritage.

In fact, I think Welding Theology touches on a number of fields and ways of conceiving Joseph’s theological project as welding all things together in one, but in a particular, specialized way. This is what Hickman says:

“[Joseph Smith sought to] chronologically weld past and present, sociologically weld ‘the family of Adam,’ cosmologically weld heaven and earth, andepistemologically/discursively weld all human knowledge.”

So his welding theology was a type of encylcopedism, what might be called an encyclopedic circumscription that attempted to encompass or circumscribe the entire universe. The circumscription utilized here is geometrical, not delimiting and homogenized. In geometry to circumscribe is to draw one figure around another, touching it at points but not cutting it. This is the sort of circumscription, whereby “all truth can be circumscribed into one great whole,” that might describe Joseph’s welding of the various disparate elements of the past and present, heaven and earth, all human knowledge, family of Adam, etc. Hickman probably puts it better:

“Welding does not entail a pat assimilation of difference, but it does entail an intense affirmation of relatedness.  It does not imply a myopic ethnocentrism, but it doesimply a strategic universalism.  Indeed, welding both preserves plurality and posits universality.”

So I see here a particular method of bringing all things into relation (an at-one-ment) that both preserves and connects, infinitely. In love.