In February 1832, while working on an inspired revision of the Bible's Gospel of John, Joseph Smith and his associate Sidney Rigdon reported a shared vision, recorded as Doctrine and Covenants Section 76, that expanded and complicated the movement's inherited Protestant assumptions about heaven and hell. Rather than a single resurrection to eternal reward or eternal punishment, the vision described three distinct kingdoms of post-mortal glory: a celestial kingdom for those who receive the fullness of gospel ordinances and live faithfully by them, a terrestrial kingdom for honorable people who lacked full gospel knowledge or valiance, including many good people of other faiths and less committed members of the church itself, and a telestial kingdom, still described as a kingdom of glory rather than punishment, for those who lived contrary to the gospel but did not commit the specific unpardonable sin that alone consigns a person to outer darkness, called sons of perdition, with no kingdom of glory at all.
The revelation's language borrows directly from Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, which speaks of differing glories of sun, moon and stars in the resurrection body, a passage Joseph Smith's vision treats as a literal description of the celestial, terrestrial and telestial kingdoms respectively rather than a rhetorical figure. Section 76 was controversial even among early Latter-day Saints for its departure from the binary framework most contemporary American Protestants held, and its scope, that the overwhelming majority of humanity ends in one kingdom of glory or another rather than eternal punishment, remains one of the doctrine's most distinctive and frequently discussed features outside the tradition.