A Thought on Degrees of Glory
Comfort vs. Capacity
I’ve been part of various discussions, in my ward and through my writing life, about Doctrine and Covenants 76 and the degrees of glory recently. In most of them, someone brought up the idea that we’ll end up in the kingdom we feel the most comfortable in.
That’s been a pretty common idea for as long as I can remember. It might be interesting to look into the history of when we started talking that way. It is interesting to me that many early Saints struggled to accept the idea of degrees of glory because they’d been raised with hellfire and glory for everyone seemed dangerously permissive, while our concern seems to be the opposite. We talk about degrees of comfort, if you will, to explain to ourselves why a loving God would keep anyone in lesser glory.
I don’t pretend to understand what the heavens will actually look and feel like. Doctrine and Covenant 19 makes clear that we often misunderstand our postmortal future and that God is perfectly willing to have us misunderstand what will happen then if a flawed and partial understanding helps us make better decisions now. To my mind, Doctrine and Covenants 88 makes clear that the three degrees of glory described in Doctrine and Covenants 76 are a simplified model for a much larger and more complex reality.
That said, I feel ready to move on from the comfort model as a way to imagine the borders between kingdoms in the afterlife.
At the same time we were studying degrees of glory this year, I happened to run across a Brigham Young quote in the old teaching manual chapter about eternal progression. “What are we here for?” Brigham asked rhetorically. “To learn to enjoy more, and to increase in knowledge and in experience.”
Increasing in knowledge and experience are pretty familiar ideas to me, but I was struck by the first part of the quote: “What are we here for? To learn to enjoy more.” That tells me that part of the purpose of life is learning to elevate my attention and appreciation. God put beauty and glory all around me, but I have to learn how to see it.
I was talking with a friend recently who’s been processing questions about his faith and trying to figure out where he stands now. “How’s it going?” I asked him. He shrugged. “Still haven’t seen any angels,” he said. But technically he’s wrong. In Latter-day Saint thought, people are just angels with skin on. Seeing angels isn’t the hard part. The hard part is recognizing them.
What if we imagine heaven in the same way? What if we imagine the degrees of glory not as separate places, but as separate ways of seeing and experiencing the world around us? Maybe heaven is a concert and we all hear the music, but it penetrates most deeply into the softest hearts. Maybe marriage is wide as eternity only when we’ve developed the trust and vulnerability to take the whole breadth of experience in.
I don’t love the idea of an eternity where the most valiant people have to go slumming to see anyone else, and where tons of people aren’t willing to come over for dinner to a friend’s house because they’re too self-conscious about their relative unworthiness. I think that model is pointing to some truths. I appreciate that it helps many people reflect about the role of the human conscience in divine judgement and the weight of the glory of God. But the comfort metaphor is no longer bearing much fruit for me.
I like thinking in terms of capacity more. Maybe in heaven you and I will be hanging out together. And I’ll realize that you’re enjoying experiences I don’t fully understand. You’re seeing things I don’t see because you’ve become a kind of person I never learned to be. Like Brigham Young was saying, you know how to enjoy more.
And maybe in that world, I can still go to Jesus. I can still ask him to anoint my eyes clay. Maybe in that world, he can still teach me a higher law and turn the key of knowledge that comes with it. Maybe piece by piece, I’ll learn to see more and one day—boom—I’m standing in celestial glory. Because my eyes are open. And I can see that I was standing in the presence of gods all along.
I love that this is a process that starts today! I don’t love that so many of us seem to relegate that spiritual work of walking through the kingdoms of glory to some distant future date post mortality. The temple clearly teaches how Adam and Eve passed through this lone and dreary world and were brought by messengers from Father into the terrestrial kingdom, and implies that they passed through the veil into the celestial kingdom also. If that’s true, and the kingdoms are ours to transverse even now in mortality, then we have work to do to learn what it means to enjoy more of that terrestrial and celestial glory today!
Thanks so much for this piece! 🫶
You’ve beautifully captured something I’ve often thought about.
I’ve long understood the afterlife in our Latter-day Saint framework through the lens of the spirit world as I see it. I’ve never pictured the spirit world as some gated geographic realm with iron doors creaking open the moment someone accepts vicarious baptism. I see it as a difference of state of mind, of perception, of capacity for relationship and love.
Alma 34:34 says it bluntly: “that same spirit which doth possess your bodies at the time ye go out of this life… will have power to possess your body in that eternal world.” The person we are — our capacity for love, for suffering, for communion with others — is what shapes our eternal experience.
So when Doctrine and Covenants 76 speaks of those in higher kingdoms visiting lower ones, I don’t see celestial gated districts. I see those with greater capacity for love and suffering — which is to say, greater resemblance to God’s own relational nature — able to move freely among those whose capacity is narrower.
Those who’ve harmed others may find it impossible to share in the very sociality they once violated — not because they’ve been barred at the gate, but because their own souls can’t yet breathe the air there.
And this leads to the real theological question: Are these capacities fixed, or can they expand? For my part, I fully embrace the idea that people can choose forward forever — that progression through the kingdoms of glory is real. Our limits are not eternal ceilings. Growth is always possible, because love can deepen without end.
And since personality itself is communal, our growth isn’t solitary. We grow at our own pace and at each other’s pace. If progression is eternal, then the degrees of glory are not boundaries at all, but waypoints in a shared, unfolding capacity to love.
The degrees of glory aren’t gated geography. They are gradations of the soul’s capacity to love and to suffer for and with others — which is the deepest image of God we bear.