The Restoration's Opening Act

Within Latter-day Saint theology, the First Vision functions as the founding event of what the tradition calls the Restoration, the recovery of Christian authority and doctrine the movement holds was lost through a general apostasy after the apostolic age. The vision's content, that existing churches held a form of godliness without its authority, supplied the movement's founding claim: not reform of existing Christianity but restoration of something Latter-day Saints believe had been withdrawn from the earth and needed to be given again directly by God. Everything that followed for Joseph Smith, translating the Book of Mormon, receiving what adherents hold was priesthood authority through angelic ordination, and organizing the church in 1830, is presented in Latter-day Saint teaching as continuous with the commission implied in the grove.

The vision also supplies the tradition's most distinctive claim about God's nature: that the Father and the Son are two separate, embodied personages rather than a single incorporeal being, a claim later developed doctrinally that put the movement at odds with the Trinitarian formulations of mainstream Nicene Christianity. The First Vision is retold and reenacted throughout Latter-day Saint devotional life, from missionary discussions to the Church History sites the church maintains at the reconstructed grove in Palmyra, and it functions less as one event among the tradition's scriptural narratives than as the interpretive key the rest of Latter-day Saint history is read through.