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Multiple Degrees within the Kingdoms

Multiple Degrees within the Kingdoms

Last updated on: May 8, 2026 at 4:42 pm by Dan Peterson

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Multiple Degrees within the Kingdoms 2026-05-08T16:42:58-06:00 Dan Peterson

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A clearly unsuspecting director, Mark Goodman, with David Martinez

They’re all here. Every single one of the currently-available episodes of Becoming Brigham. And every future installment of the series will appear here, as well: https://becomingbrigham.com. And the 37-second teaser for Episode 16 (“Sweeter than Honey”) is also now up. Watch them!

And don’t miss the newest article to appear on the never-changing website of the Interpreter Foundation. This one (“Multiple Degrees within the Celestial, Terrestrial, and Telestial Kingdoms”) is published in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 68 [2026]: 443-490) and was written by David W. Smith:

Abstract: Based on Doctrine and Covenants 131:1, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that there are three degrees within the celestial kingdom. There has been a proposal that this teaching is incorrect and instead this scripture should be interpreted as a reference to the three kingdoms described in Doctrine and Covenants 76 (celestial, terrestrial, and telestial). This proposition is based on two claims. First, the word celestial, in Joseph Smith’s day, meant heavenly or belonging to heaven, so Doctrine and Covenants 131:1 should be interpreted to mean “in heaven there are three degrees.” The second claim is that interpreting Doctrine and Covenants 131:1 as referring to three degrees in the celestial kingdom is a twentieth-century innovation based on one sermon by one Apostle, with almost no other apostolic support before or after that sermon. This article shows that the first claim is very likely incorrect and the second is demonstrably false. The article then briefly addresses the question of degrees in the terrestrial and telestial kingdoms.

Contrary to apparently common assumptions, this isn’t a photograph of a Latter-day Saint vehicle in downtown Salt Lake City. Rather, it’s a scene in modern Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. And still not Latter-day Saint. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

I ran across this little gem a few days before departing from North America this time around. I cannot now recall where I saw it, so I apologize for not crediting my source. But I wanted to share it:

A man was being tailgated by a woman on Foothill Boulevard in Salt Lake City. Suddenly, the light turned yellow just in front of him. He did the right thing by stopping at the crosswalk, even though he could have beaten the red light by accelerating through the intersection. The tailgating woman slammed on her brakes and leaned on her horn. She opened her window, stuck her hand out, and made a certain gesture, all the while screaming in frustration because she’d missed her chance to get through the intersection with him. As she was still in mid-rant, she heard a tap on her window and looked up into the face of a very serious-looking police officer.

The officer ordered her to exit the car with her hands up. He next took her to the police station, where she was searched, fingerprinted, photographed, and placed in a cell. After a couple of hours, a policeman approached the cell and opened the door. She was escorted back to the booking desk where the arresting officer was waiting with her personal effects. “I’m very sorry for this mistake,” he said. “You see, I pulled up behind your car while you were blowing your horn, flipping the guy off in front of you, and cussing a blue streak at him. I noticed the “Choose the Right” license plate holder, the “Families are Forever” bumper sticker, the “Follow Me to Sunday School” bumper sticker, and the chrome-plated Angel Moroni emblem on the trunk.

“Naturally, I assumed that you had stolen the car.”

Magdalene Bridge and College, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom (Wikimedia Commons photograph by Simon Palmer). Relatively late in his teaching career, C. S. Lewis left Oxford and took a professorship in this Cambridge college.

Our group went punting on the River Cam this morning. Then we walked past the site of the former White Horse Tavern or White Horse Inn and over to St. Edward’s Church (strictly speaking, to the Church of St. Edward King and Martyr). It’s dedicated to Edward the Martyr, who reigned as King of England from 975 until his murder (under thoroughly unclear circumstances) in 978.

More importantly, it was at midnight mass on Christmas Eve 1525 — just slightly more than five hundred years ago — a man named Robert Barnes delivered what is generally regarded as the first openly evangelical sermon in English history, accusing the Catholic Church of heresy. Over the next decade or so many of the great English reformers preached at St Edward’s, including the future Bishop of Worcester and Oxford Martyr Hugh Latimer, whom I’ll have more to say about in a few days, who was a regular preacher in the church until he left Cambridge in 1531. For this reason, St Edward’s is sometimes called the “Cradle of the (English) Reformation.”

According to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, although the claim has been strongly disputed both in detail and altogether, such figures as Robert Barnes, Hugh Latimer, William Tyndale, Miles Coverdale, and the future Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer had been meeting frequently in the White Horse Tavern (in a group sometimes called “Little Germany”) to discuss the ideas of Martin Luther, which were beginning to arrive from the European continent

We were given a fine twenty-five minute introduction to St. Edward’s and its history and significance by the church’s wonderful old treasurer, who left little doubt as to his feelings toward the Roman Catholic Church and what might be termed Romanizing tendencies within his own Church of England.

Another scene in Cambridge. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

From St. Edward’s, we walked around the legendary original Cavendish Laboratory, past multiple Cambridge colleges (including Trinity, where a descendant of Sir Isaac Newton’s famous gravity-related apple tree stands below his former window), and over to the Round Church, which has been turned into a very helpful visitor’s center that’s dedicated to the Christian history and heritage of this beautiful and fascinating city.

King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, as viewed from Great St. Mary’s Church by Jean-Christophe Benoist (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

In the evening, after I had substantially reduced my descendants’ hopes for an inheritance by buying a couple of Ancient Greek texts at the main Cambridge University Press bookstore, we attended a service of Evensong in the magnificent King’s College Chapel, which is one of my very favorite buildings not only in England but in all the world. The visual surroundings were, of course, stunning, but so was the music. English choral singing can have an absolutely unearthly beauty, and this evening’s music was of that ethereal quality.

Posted from Cambridge, England

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