Where Did Joseph Smith Get the Idea of Temples? (John Hamer 1 of 6)

Where did Joseph Smith get the idea of temples?

It sounds like a simple question, but historian John Hamer’s answer stretches from the Bible to a domed assembly hall in Independence, Missouri, and includes a temple that was called for by revelation, designed by an architect, and never built. In this first conversation of his return to Gospel Tangents, John, a Community of Christ Seventy and co-editor of Scattering of the Saints: Schism Within Mormonism, walks me through the building blocks.

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John starts with the Bible. Solomon’s temple is only one model, he explains. The New Testament offers another: the idea that the new covenant fulfilled the old, along with the gatherings of the early Christians in the Book of Acts. That second vision, he says, shaped the Kirtland Temple, a building of stacked assembly halls, and it became the model for Community of Christ’s understanding of temples ever after.

When Community of Christ members regathered in Jackson County, Missouri, they wanted a temple on that Kirtland model. What they built, John argues, was Frederick Madison Smith’s Auditorium, a massive assembly hall that he sees as a 20th-century version of the Kirtland Temple in everything but name. He points to a published drawing of Joseph Smith III’s temple vision, which looks like the Auditorium with steeples added, and notes that the Auditorium was built without them. Then the story turns. Smith’s assertion of church authority sparked a schism, and a couple thousand members moved to the Temple Lot church, the Hedrickites.

Their own temple plans carried the same Kirtland DNA. Otto Fetting’s revelations called for a temple, and an architect gave it a front like a Greek temple, or a bank, and a long, thin plan with one assembly hall stacked atop another. It was never built. The Depression hit, Fetting was pushed out of the church, and the diggers had to fill in the hole they had started.

Restoration Groups Idea of Temples

Splinter groups from Community of Christ have echoed the pattern since. John describes the Remnant Church’s headquarters in an old high school across from the Temple Lot, with an inner room of Kirtland-style pulpits and a planned community center with a Kirtland-like exterior that was never built. When he asked its president whether that was a temple, the answer