I remember in seminary, sitting under Dr. John Hannah. He was out of this world (although some would say, “No, Michael, you mean ‘out to lunch’!”). Students would purchase a special “Hannah quote book” just to write down the “Hannahisms.” There were so many. The things he would say… The paradigms he would cause you to question… The language he would use! Let’s just say this: everything was unexpected. One day during class, we were talking about a certain heretic in church history. As a green student of theology, all I knew was that I hated heretics. Whoever was the “heretic” of the day, he was the anti-hero. The self-righteous theologian in me was glad that he was burning in hell. However, Hannah said something that did not fit in my puzzle. He suggested (even implied?) that this certain heretic would be in heaven. A heretic in heaven? He said that this heretic was “just doing the best he could.” He said he loved Jesus! What? Quickly, the students raised their hands. “Ummm…do you mean that this heretic was saved?”

Believe it or not, I have been called a heretic many times. The charges vary. One time it was simply because I did not believe someone else was a heretic! (In this case, I think it was Rick Warren). Don’t worry too much. I have about twelve more layers of skin than I used to have. Whether it has been my view of Bible, the Trinity, my stance on Roman Catholics and their eternal destiny, or my understanding of Christian freedom, I get in trouble with someone. To someone, I am always a heretic. Don’t get smug. So are you! Sometimes it will be because people think you are too liberal. Sometimes they will think you are too conservative. I have even had my orthodoxy questioned because of my sympathy for those who doubt their faith. There are always going to be people to the left of you and to the right of you. There are always going to be those people who think your beliefs and teachings are destructive. There are always going to be people who believe you are doing more harm than good. There are always going to be people who think you are a heretic.

But here is my question today: How does one determine if someone is a heretic? What is a heretic anyway? And, most importantly, can a heretic be saved?

The word “heretic” comes from the Greek hairetikos. It speaks of causing divisions. It is used in Titus 3:10 for those who divisively fracture the church. Throughout church history, it became a word used to describe those who divided the church due to doctrinal departures.

Here is a definition of heretic/heresy that I have used elsewhere: “A taught opinion, belief, or doctrine that is in variance to an established cardinal Christian belief. In Christianity, a heresy can have a historic value (more serious) or traditional value (less serious). In other words, a belief can be considered heretical to Baptists (e.g. paedeobaptism), but it is not heretical in the historic sense. To be a historic heresy, it would have to be in variance to that which has been believed by the majority of Christians of all places and all times and touch on a cardinal issue (e.g. the deity of Christ).”

And a heresy is not just an error. It is more serious than that. The puritan writer Thomas Adams distinguishes between mere error and heresy:

“There is difference between error, schism, and heresy. Error is when one holds a strong opinion alone; schism, when many consent in their opinion; heresy runs further, and contends to root out the truth. Error offends, but separates not; schism offends and separates; heresy offends, separates, and rageth… . . . Error is weak, schism strong, heresy obstinate. Error goes out, and often comes in again; schism comes not in, but makes a new church; heresy makes not a new church, but no church. . . . Error is reproved and pitied, schism is reproved and punished, heresy is reproved and excommunicated. Schism is in the same faith, heresy makes another faith. Though they be thus distinguished, yet without God’s preventing grace, one will run into another.”

Because many use the words heresy and heretic in a cavalier way, they have begun to lose their value. At least once a day, it seems, I hear someone calling someone else a heretic for something that is not really deserving of the designation. These will say someone is a heretic for being too strong of a Calvinist, for believing theistic evolution, for saying that drinking alcohol is not a sin, for denying inerrancy, or for being charismatic.

Calling a person the “h” word should be done with great fear and deliberateness. I don’t think we should call a moratorium on the word just because it can be very offensive or because it is so often misused. I think it can carry with it an important rebuke with the implications of grave consequences. However, here are the qualifications I suggest:

Distinguish between two types of heresy which people reference

Traditional heretic: those who depart to some degree from the faith of a particular tradition (e.g., Catholic, Protestant, Reformed, Dispensationalist, etc.) or denomination (Baptist, Anglican, Methodist, etc.). Actually, this type of departure should never be labeled “heresy.”

Historic heretic: Those who depart from the faith with regard to a belief that has been held by Christianity from the beginning (i.e., an orthodox belief). There can be two different types of historic heresy:

1) Departure from an essential belief (which should be limited to the person and work of Christ);
2) Departure from a non-essential belief.

In this case, we may do as some and say that only a historic departure from an essential or cardinal belief qualifies as a “heresy.”  A “heretic” is one who not only believes in the heresy, but actively and progressively teaches the heresy.

If this is the case, then a departure from a non-essential historic belief might be labeled “heterodoxy” (“different teaching”) rather than “heresy.” Heterodoxy, while bad, is not as bad as heresy.

Here is how I would designate some common errors:

Modalism (denies the distinction between persons in the Trinity): Heresy – any departure from the basic historic definition of the Trinity would make it into my heresy book.

Open Theism (denies that God is transcendent to time and, therefore, does not know the future): Heterodoxy – to deny God’s transcendence in favor of immanence is a departure from the church’s understanding about God, but I don’t see a belief in God’s timeless transcendence as being central to the faith.

Preterism: (believes that the second coming already happened and that we are living in the New Heaven and New Earth): Heterodoxy – definitely outside of any accepted historic eschatology and borders very close to dismantling the Gospel (i.e. what’s the good news if redemption is not complete?). Many would think it goes beyond heterodoxy because of this. They may be right. I am not sure here.

Universalism: (believes that all will eventually be saved): Heresy – denies the need for the proclamation of the Gospel, thereby completely replacing its hope with a false hope.

Annihilationism: (believes that hell will eventually be vacated with all those who reject God ceasing to exist): Heterodoxy – outside of what the church has generally always accepted about the duration of hell, but I don’t think it is destructive to the essence of the Gospel.

People can advocate heresy in a few ways:

1. Ignorance – some people have simply never been exposed to the orthodox teaching about a particular issue. They need to be educated.

2. Misguidance – some people have been taught wrongly their whole life. They need to be corrected.

3. Obstinance- some people have been taught the truth, but still refuse to conform their thinking accordingly. They need to be rebuked.

When one obstinately believes and teaches something contrary to the essence of Christian orthodoxy, he is a heretic. Someone who is ignorant or misguided is not.

Can heretics be saved?

I don’t know if I want to always connect salvation with orthodoxy. I don’t know how to always disconnect it either! Many people ask this question: What heresy is damnable, evidencing that the person is not saved? I don’t really like that question. Dwight Pentecost used to say that we are all entitled to just one pet heresy. That is Dwight Pentecost from Dallas Theological Seminary saying that! I do believe that one can be a saved heretic. I think we all are saved heretics to some degree. But we need to understand that our “pet heresy” cannot come in an area that is central to the core Gospel message…so be careful which pet heresy you choose! A denial of personal sinfulness, for example, necessarily and completely makes the Gospel ineffective in one’s life. A denial of salvation through Christ necessarily and completely makes the Gospel ineffective in one’s life. In the end, it is the act of unrepentance and unbelief in Christ (who he is and what he did) that keeps us from God, not whether or not our doctrine is perfect. However, I don’t have all this worked out by any means. I have never met anyone who does. Ironically, I don’t know of an historically “orthodox” position on what makes a heresy and which heresies are ultimately damnable.

All heresies are terrible. All need rebuke. While I think that all Christians are, to some degree, saved heretics, we dare not find our heresy in those areas in or around the heart of the Gospel.Similar Posts:

• Heretics
• Calling someone a heretic—thoughtfully!
• Are You Orthodox or Heretic?
• Must One Believe in the Trinity to be Saved?
• Where I stand on all things part 1

“With this doctrine of exaltation or human deification, though, Joseph Smith wasn’t actually moving away from Judeo-Christian tradition. He was returning to a forgotten strand of it. For ancient Christians and Jews also had a doctrine of human deification, which scholars call ‘theosis.’”

Scholars do indeed use the term theosis for what can be called a doctrine of human deification. Specifically, this term has its customary or primary usage with reference to the doctrine of deification taught in the Eastern Orthodox theological tradition. The roots of this Eastern Orthodox doctrine are to be found in the teachings of the early church fathers, especially (though not exclusively) the Greek-writing ones. This is the context in which Peterson offers brief quotations from Justin Martyr and Irenaeus (2nd century), Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Origen (all third century), and Jerome (fifth century).

It is not an accident that Peterson’s article includes more quotations from the church fathers (six) than from all of his other sources combined (two from the New Testament, one from the Book of Mormon, and one from a medieval Jewish text). The church fathers did indeed teach a doctrine of deification. The question is what they meant by it and whether it provides any support for Peterson’s claim that Joseph Smith’s doctrine of deification was a restoration of an ancient doctrine that had been forgotten.

1. The church fathers whom Peterson quotes were, from the LDS perspective, part of the Great Apostasy.

We may start with an ironic observation. The church fathers whom Peterson quotes were among the leading architects of the religious and theological tradition that Mormons regard as the Great Apostasy. These were all theologians, not prophets. The very writings in which an explicit Christian doctrine of human deification first appears are the earliest documents from what the LDS Church teaches was a growing apostasy, a spiritual and theological darkness that overcame the Christian movement in the second, third, and fourth centuries. This should be just about the last place Mormons would want to look for ancient precedent for their “restored” doctrines! Yet this is where Peterson draws the majority of his quotations. The problem may be illustrated by the following comments from Spencer W. Kimball:

“Many men with no pretense nor claim to revelation, speaking without divine authority or revelation, depending only upon their own brilliant minds, but representing as they claim the congregations of the Christians and in long conference and erudite councils, sought the creation process to make a God which all could accept. The brilliant minds with their philosophies, knowing much about the Christian traditions and the pagan philosophies, would combine all elements to please everybody. They replaced the simple ways and program of the Christ with spectacular rituals, colorful display, impressive pageantry, and limitless pomposity, and called it Christianity. They had replaced the glorious, divine plan of exaltation of Christ with an elaborate, colorful, man-made system” (Teachings of Spencer W. Kimball, 425).

The traditional LDS position is that this corruption of Christianity was largely an accomplished fact already in the second century. LDS apostle and teacher Bruce R. McConkie claimed, “In the Old World the great apostasy was complete sometime during the second century A.D.” (A New Witness for the Articles of Faith, 477). Similarly, LDS theologian Stephen E. Robinson states that “Latter-day Saints trace the Apostasy to roughly the second century and reject subsequent orthodoxy” (Encyclopedia of Mormonism, ed. Daniel H. Ludlow [New York: Macmillan, 1992], 400). Yet Peterson’s earliest explicit examples of a Christian doctrine of believers becoming “gods” come from the second half of the second century, and most come from the third century or even later.

Of course, it is theoretically possible that the church fathers might have been right about humans becoming gods and wrong about other things. A Mormon could argue that the Great Apostasy led to the loss of divine authority and to the gradual loss of some doctrinal truths but not others, with the doctrine of people becoming gods as one that was not lost right away. This might seem a sufficient explanation for how it was that the church fathers believed in humans becoming deified even while they also taught what Mormons regard as false doctrines. However, this explanation doesn’t really address the point, which is that the church fathers were the first Christian teachers to articulate an explicit doctrine of the deification of believers.

The fact that Peterson can document a patristic (church fathers’) tradition of deification from the second, third, and fifth centuries leads to another problem.

2. The doctrine of theosis cannot be “restored” because it was never lost.

The writings of Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Jerome have played an ongoing, continuous role in theological studies and reflection throughout church history. We are not talking here about long-lost writings like the Nag Hammadi “Gnostic gospels” or miraculously restored texts such as Mormons believe the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham to be. We are talking about the writings of men whose writings have never stopped circulating and that have been cited, quoted, and discussed in every generation from their own time to the present.

Moreover, the specific patristic idea of deification, or theosis, was never lost in any sense. It has been taught continuously in the Eastern Orthodox Church throughout its history with no interruption. It was being taught in Eastern Orthodox congregations in Joseph Smith’s day (although the first such congregation was not established in the continental United States until 1857, thirteen years after Joseph’s death).

3. The church fathers’ doctrine of deification lacked all of the distinctive elements of Joseph Smith’s doctrine of exaltation and explicitly differed from his view in crucial respects.

Establishing that the early church fathers taught a doctrine of deification does not, in and of itself, show that Joseph Smith’s doctrine of deification is a restoration of ancient truth. One must compare the substance of the two doctrines of deification in order to determine if the two doctrines are at all close in meaning. To that end, I will repeat here the seven specific doctrinal elements of Joseph Smith’s doctrine of exaltation:

1. God has not always been God; it is not true that he has been God from all eternity (though he may have existed from all eternity, he has not always existed as God).
2. God was once a man like us before becoming God our Heavenly Father.
3. God became God and is an exalted man, an exalted being.
4. Human beings are the spirit offspring of God, our Heavenly Father. We lived in heaven with God before becoming physical beings here on earth.
5. We became human beings precisely so that we would have the opportunity to attain exaltation just as God did.
6. Human beings can become “gods” in the sense of becoming exalted beings fully like Heavenly Father in all essential respects, just as he did before us.
7. As exalted beings or gods, we can become creators and have all the power, glory, dominion, and knowledge that God the Father has (in the worlds we create).

Read through Peterson’s quotations from the church fathers and you will quickly see that they express none of these seven doctrinal elements. Readers lacking some background in the theology of the church fathers might wonder if some of the quotations at least might reflect an acceptance of the last two doctrinal elements, but nothing in the quotations would even suggest to any reader a belief in the first five elements listed above. Here are Peterson’s quotations:

Justin Martyr: “All men are deemed worthy of becoming gods, and of having power to become sons of the Highest.”

Irenaeus: “We have not been made gods from the beginning, but at first merely men, then at length gods. … (Jesus Christ) became what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.”

Clement of Alexandria: In the “future life” we will be among “gods … those who have become perfect … and become pure in heart … They are called by the appellation of gods, being destined to sit on thrones with the other gods that have been first put in their places by the Savior.”

Tertullian: Through divine grace the saved “shall be even gods.”

Origen of Alexandria: He believed in “the Father as the one true God,” but acknowledged “other beings besides the true God, who have become gods by having a share of God.”

Jerome: “God made man for that purpose, that from men they may become gods. … They who cease to be mere men, abandon the ways of vice, and are become perfect, are gods and sons of the Most High.”

There is no suggestion in any of these quotations that God the Father was a man who progressed to Godhood, or that God has not always been God. There is also no notion in any of these statements that human beings preexisted in heaven as gods in embryo prior to their physical lives here on earth. The core theological and anthropological premises of Joseph Smith’s doctrine of exaltation are completely absent from these patristic quotations—and indeed are absent from the corpus of the church fathers’ writings as a whole.

Justin states that all people may “become gods,” and similarly Tertullian says that those saved through God’s grace “shall be even gods.” But what do these statements mean in context? They did not mean that believers will become deities possessing the same powers as the Creator of the universe. Let’s look at their statements in context. Justin wrote:

“But as my discourse is not intended to touch on this point [the fall of Satan], but to prove to you that the Holy Ghost reproaches men because they were made like God, free from suffering and death, provided that they kept His commandments, and were deemed deserving of the name of His sons, and yet they, becoming like Adam and Eve, work out death for themselves; let the interpretation of the Psalm be held just as you wish, yet thereby it is demonstrated that all men are deemed worthy of becoming ‘gods,’ and of having power to become sons of the Highest; and shall be each by himself judged and condemned like Adam and Eve” (Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 124, emphasis added).

We see here that Justin specifies precisely what he means by “gods”: that human beings were created with the intention that they be “free from suffering and death.” In other words, to be “gods” in this context means to be immortal beings. That is all that one can fairly understand Justin to mean by this language here. Furthermore, according to Justin, we are not already God’s children (as the LDS Church teaches), but may become his sons. What Justin teaches here is incompatible with the LDS doctrine that we were God’s preexistent children in heaven and that we came here to make progress toward “growing up” to become full-fledged Gods like our Heavenly Father.

Tertullian’s statement that “we shall be even gods” also does not mean that humans will become the same kind of beings as God:

“Truth, however, maintains the unity of God in such a way as to insist that whatever belongs to God Himself belongs to Him alone. For so will it belong to Himself if it belong to Him alone; and therefore it will be impossible that another god should be admitted, when it is permitted to no other being to possess anything of God. Well, then, you say, we ourselves at that rate possess nothing of God. But indeed we do, and shall continue to do— only it is from Him that we receive it, and not from ourselves. For we shall be even gods, if we shall deserve to be among those of whom He declared, I have said, You are gods, and, God stands in the congregation of the gods. But this comes of His own grace, not from any property in us, because it is He alone who can make gods” (Tertullian, Against Hermogenes 5, emphasis added).

Tertullian here insists that certain properties belong to God alone, and that human beings will never possess those unique properties of deity. They will be “gods” only in the sense that God will declare those to be “gods” whom he graciously deems deserving of this honor, not by virtue of them attaining “any property” that qualifies them as deities. The point here must be understood very precisely. Tertullian is not merely saying that human beings can become gods only by God’s “grace.” The LDS Church could (and in some contexts does) use these same words. Tertullian, however, means by this statement that human beings are accorded a status of “gods” as a gracious honor and not, as Joseph Smith taught, that they are transformed (even if by “grace”) into beings possessing the same properties as God.

Every quotation that Peterson (and other Mormon scholars and apologists before him) quote from the church fathers is like the ones just considered from Justin and Tertullian. If one reads the statements in context, one discovers that they express a doctrine that in substance is obviously different from the doctrine of Joseph Smith.

4. The view of God, man, Christ, and salvation taught by the church fathers is radically opposed to Joseph Smith’s doctrine of exaltation.

The difference between the patristic doctrine of deification and Joseph Smith’s doctrine of exaltation can be fully appreciated only by placing these doctrines in their larger theological and worldview contexts. A full-blown treatise on this point is out of the question here; I will content myself with a brief summary and a few example statements from the church fathers.

The doctrine of God. In Joseph Smith’s teaching, all humans and all other spirit beings in our world are eternal beings that had no beginning and no creation. Thus, the idea that God is an eternal being is, for Mormonism, in no sense unique. Furthermore, God, though he has existed eternally, has not always been God, but instead became a God by a process of exaltation that we can also undergo. God, according to Joseph Smith (notably in the Book of Abraham), was also not the sole creator or maker of the world. Rather, a plurality of Gods got together and “organized” this world into its present form. God the Father is a physically embodied being, an exalted, immortal Man of flesh and bones, of the same species or kind of being as we are but in a perfected state.

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the writings of the church fathers knows their view of God was radically different. For them, God is the only being with no origin, no beginning; he is the only uncreated, unbegotten, unoriginated being. God is the sole creator and everything else, including all other intelligent beings, exist solely as the result of his creative will. God is by nature an incorporeal being who transcends space, and who has been God from all eternity, and who is eternally unchanging in his divine being.

So, according to Justin Martyr, “That which always maintains the same nature, and in the same manner, and is the cause of all other things—that, indeed, is God” (Dialogue with Trypho 3). Justin denies that God is a physical or embodied being. “And again, when He says, ‘I shall behold the heavens, the works of Thy fingers,’ unless I understand His method of using words, I shall not understand intelligently, but just as your teachers suppose, fancying that the Father of all, the unbegotten God, has hands and feet, and fingers, and a soul, like a composite being; and they for this reason teach that it was the Father Himself who appeared to Abraham and to Jacob” (Dialogue 114). Robert M. Grant comments on Justin’s theological reasoning here: “Justin absolutely rejects a literal interpretation of biblical metaphors: God does not have hands, feet, fingers, or soul, for he is not composite (Dial. 114, 3); he is not moved nor does he walk, sleep, or wake. Though he can be said to be ‘in the heavens’ or ‘above heaven’ or ‘above the universe,’ he is not really located in space at all (Dial. 127, 3)” (The Early Christian Doctrine of God [Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1966], 22).

Other church fathers also taught that God is the sole uncreated Creator of all else that exists. Here are a couple of examples:

“Our God did not begin to be in time: He alone is without beginning, and He Himself is the beginning of all things. God is a Spirit, not pervading matter, but the Maker of material spirits, and of the forms that are in matter; He is invisible, impalpable, being Himself the Father of both sensible and invisible things” (Tatian, Address to the Greeks, ch. 4).

“But the things established are distinct from Him who has established them, and what have been made from Him who has made them. For He is Himself uncreated, both without beginning and end, and lacking nothing. He is Himself sufficient for Himself; and still further, He grants to all others this very thing, existence; but the things which have been made by Him have received a beginning” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.8.3).

Doctrine of Christ. According to Joseph Smith, Jesus Christ was one of God’s billions of spirit children, but the first to become a God alongside God the Father. When Christ became a physical man on earth, he was progressing toward a fuller or more complete realization of his divine potential because the Father himself is an exalted man of flesh and bones. Deity and humanity are simply two different phases of the same species or kind of being.

In the teaching of the church fathers, however, the Son was already fully God before he became a man, and he was God’s “Son” in an absolutely unique sense. To be “the Son” meant that he was of the same nature as God the Father—that he was deity by nature, just as the Father was. The Incarnation was God the Son’s gracious act of humbling himself for our salvation and the Father’s honor, not a stage of the Son’s own full deification. In becoming a man, Jesus Christ assumed human nature united perfectly and uniquely to his divine nature. Thus the incarnate Son is a paradoxical person, the union of infinite deity with finite humanity.

We see this doctrine expressed in startling clarity very early in the second century: “Look for Him who is above all time, eternal and invisible, yet who became visible for our sakes; impalpable and impassible, yet who became passible on our account; and who in every kind of way suffered for our sakes” (Ignatius, To Polycarp 3.2 [short version]). According to Irenaeus, the Logos (John’s name for the preincarnate Christ in John 1:1, 14) “took up man into Himself, the invisible becoming visible, the incomprehensible being made comprehensible, the impassible becoming capable of suffering” (Against Heresies 3.16.6).

If God the Son, the Logos, was eternal, invisible, impassible Deity, who then became incarnate as a man in order to be a visible, material human being and suffer in history for our salvation, then Christ is the only human being who was or ever will be Deity. He is not a man who became a God, but was rather God who became a man for our sakes. The patristic doctrine of Christ, understood in its full context, is absolutely incompatible with Joseph Smith’s doctrine of exaltation.

Doctrine of man. We have already touched on some of the obvious differences between Joseph Smith’s doctrine of man and that of the church fathers. For Joseph Smith, human beings have existed from eternity, with no beginning; they are uncreated beings. Moreover, they were gods in embryo existing in heaven before coming to the earth for the purpose of continuing their maturation toward becoming full-fledged Gods.

For the church fathers, human beings are creatures made by God and having a definite beginning to their existence. Most of the church fathers were very clear on the point that human existence begins with our physical lives, not as preexistent spirits (the third-century Origen was a notable exception, though even he believed those spirits were created beings). Human beings are not naturally disposed toward becoming gods, but God graciously adopts humans as his children and bestows on them immortality so that they may live as honorary “gods” with eternal life. A clear statement of the sharp divide between God and man is offered, for example, by Clement of Alexandria:

“But it has escaped their notice, though they be near us, that God has bestowed on us ten thousand things in which He does not share: birth, being Himself unborn; food, He wanting nothing; and growth, He being always equal; and long life and immortality, He being immortal and incapable of growing old” (Stromata 5.11).

Doctrine of salvation. In Joseph Smith’s teaching, we were already eternal beings before coming to the earth. We came as mortals here in order to become resurrected beings with physical immortality, which is what Joseph Smith taught that God the Father had done. To become “Gods,” in his doctrine, meant to become omnipotent beings, to become beings of the same nature as our God and with the capacity to do the same sorts of divine acts (e.g., creation) as our Heavenly Father.

For the church fathers, as we have already seen, we are physical, temporal beings by nature, created as such by God, though with the intended purpose that God would eventually make us immortal. Through our faith relationship and spiritual union with Christ, we who are redeemed will participate in God’s immortality, incorruption, and holiness, and in that sense will be “gods”; but we will not become Gods by nature, that is, omnipotent beings of the same nature as God that will be able to do the same sorts of divine acts that God alone does. Irenaeus explained:

“For it was for this end that the Word of God was made man, and He who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God. For by no other means could we have attained to incorruptibility and immortality, unless we had been united to incorruptibility and immortality” (Against Heresies 3.19.1).

When all is said and done, the church fathers’ doctrine of deification is more notable for its sharp contrasts with Joseph Smith’s doctrine of exaltation than for its superficial verbal similarities to some of the things that Joseph said. G. L. Prestige, in his classic textbook on the patristic doctrine of God, offers an exceptionally clear statement of the nature of their view of deification:

“All such expressions of the deification of man are, it must be remembered, purely relative. They express the fact that man has a nature essentially spiritual, and to that extent resembling the being of God; further, that he is able to attain a real union with God, by virtue of an affinity proceeding both from nature and from grace. Man, the Fathers might have said, is a supernatural animal. In some sense his destiny is to be absorbed into God. But they would all have repudiated with indignation any suggestion that the union of men to God added anything to the godhead. They explained the lower in terms of the higher, but did not obliterate the distinction between them. Not only is God self-dependent. He has also all those positive qualities which man does not possess, the attribution of which is made by adding the negative prefix to the common attributes of humanity. In addition, in so far as humanity possesses broken lights of God, they are as far as possible from reaching the measure and perfection with which they are associated in the godhead. Real power and freedom, fullness of light, ideal and archetypal spirit, are found in Him alone. The gulf is never bridged between Creator and creature. Though in Christ human nature has been raised to the throne of God, by virtue of His divine character, yet mankind in general can only aspire to the sort of divinity which lies open to its capacity through the union with the divine humanity. Eternal life is the life of God. Men may come to share its manifestations and activities, but only by grace, never of right. Man remains a created being: God alone is agenetos [without origin].”—G. L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London: SPCK, 1959), 74-75.

In conclusion, Joseph Smith’s doctrine of exaltation was not in any meaningful sense a restoration of a lost doctrine of theosis. The doctrine of theosis was never lost, and the doctrine of deification taught by the church fathers was radically different from the doctrine Joseph Smith taught. Joseph taught that God was once a mortal man who became exalted to Godhood, and that we can do the same thing and become Gods of the same nature and powers as our God. The church fathers taught that God is the only uncreated, eternal Being, existing eternally and unchangeably as God, and that he created human beings to become “gods” in the sense that they may be adopted as his children and receive immortality as the gift of his grace.Similar Posts:

• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part One: The Mormon Doctrine of Exaltation
• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part Three: The Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith’s Doctrine of Exaltation
• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part Four: Esoteric Jewish Theology and Joseph Smith’s Doctrine of Exaltation
• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part Two: The New Testament and Joseph Smith’s Doctrine of Exaltation
• In What Sense Are Jesus and the Father One? Part III: One in Purpose? C: John 17:21-23

Peterson introduces the quotation at issue here as coming from “an early Jewish midrash or scriptural commentary.” This is the one citation from a Jewish source cited in his article as evidence that Joseph Smith’s doctrine was a return to a “forgotten strand” of “Judeo-Christian tradition.” Here is Peterson’s quotation:

The Holy One … will in the future call all of the pious by their names, and give them a cup of elixir of life in their hands so that they should live and endure forever. … (And He will also) reveal to all the pious in the world to come the Ineffable Name with which new heavens and a new earth can be created, so that all of them should be able to create new worlds.

None of Peterson’s quotations from the New Testament, the Book of Mormon, or the church fathers surprised me. However, I must admit I was taken aback at this quotation from “an early Jewish midrash.” No, it didn’t surprise me that Peterson had found such a quotation somewhere in Jewish literature. What surprised me was his description of the source of the quotation. I am no expert in postbiblical Judaism, but even I immediately recognized that this quotation did not come from “an early Jewish midrash” and that the theology of the quotation is medieval, not ancient, in origin.

This isn’t the first time that Peterson has used this particular quotation. A web article summarizing a “Fireside” lecture by Peterson in 2009 reports him presenting a longer version of the same quotation and this time giving the source as “Mid. Alpha Beta diR. Akiba, BhM 3:32.” Here again, Peterson attributes the quotation to “Jewish Midrash” without further explanation.

The term midrash generally refers to a body of Jewish exposition of the Torah that began to be compiled in the second century AD, much of which eventually led to the publication of the Talmud (in two major compilations, ca. 400 and ca. 500). The term also refers to a sizable body of post-Talmudic literature. However, when Peterson refers to the source of his quotation as “an early Jewish midrash,” the use of the term “early,” especially in the context of his argument for the doctrine in question as “ancient,” clearly implies that the text is pre-Talmudic.

Peterson is not the only LDS apologist to use this quotation to support the Mormon doctrine of exaltation. D. Charles Pyle, in a 1999 FAIR Conference paper entitled “‘I Have Said, “Ye are Gods,”’” quotes the same passage and says that it comes from one of the “early Jewish texts found in the Talmud and in various Midrashim.”[1] (FAIR is a leading pro-Mormon apologetics organization.) Barry Bickmore introduces the quotation by saying that “Rabbi Akiba (d. AD 135) is credited with the following statement,” offering no further explanation.[2] Both Pyle and Bickmore give Raphael Patai’s book The Messiah Texts as the source of the quotation.[3] They also credit John Tvedtnes, another Mormon scholar, for supplying the reference. Tvedtnes later used part of this quotation in a 2004 FAIR Conference. Unlike these other scholars, he says nothing about the origins of the quotation although he also gives the reference (“Midrash Aleph Bet di Rabbi Akiba”) and cites Patai as his source.[4] Tvedtnes presents this quotation in a mix of quotations from medieval Jewish texts, the Talmud, and the church fathers. Daniel O. McClellan, a Mormon Old Testament scholar, claims that the text “is part of the Jerusalem Talmud, which was completed around 380 CE,” and says that “this text was extant for some time before being abridged into the Talmudic corpus.”[5]

So, just what text is this? The title is worded somewhat differently from one reference to another, but the Hebrew title is ’Otiyot De’Rabbi ‘Akiva’. In English it would be something like The Alphabet of Rabbi Akiba. (The Hebrew Aleph Bet and the Greek Alpha Beta are equivalent references to the first two letters of the alphabet, and similar in meaning to our idiom “the ABCs.”) This sounds like an impressive text; after all, Akiba, or more properly ‘Aqiva’, was one of the “founding fathers” of rabbinical Judaism, a noted and highly respected rabbi who lived through both of the Jewish-Roman wars of AD 66-73 and 132-35. If the quotation came from Aqiva, as Bickmore implies (without directly making that claim), that would be impressive indeed! Peterson’s description of this source as “an early Jewish midrash” implies that it originates from the same era of history as Aqiva. But does it?

The answer is emphatically no. We need look no further than Patai’s book, from which all of the Mormons derive the quotation, to discover that the text dates from at least six centuries later than Aqiva. In Patai’s “Chronological List of Sources” at the back of the book, the “Midrash Alpha Beta di R. Akiba” is listed as originating from the “8th-9th” centuries.[6] In another book, Patai explains the religious context of the work:

“The foundations of medieval Kabbalism were laid in Babylonia and Byzantium in the 7th and 8th centuries, when a number of Midrashim with marked Kabbalistic tendencies made their appearance. Several of these (e.g,, the Alpha Beta of Rabbi Akiba and the Midrash Konen) deal with the mysteries of Creation and the structure of the universe.”[7]

That’s right, the quotation comes from a foundational work in the development of the medieval mystical Jewish tradition known as Kabbalah. This isn’t just Patai’s opinion. It is the scholarly, academic consensus. For example, the Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion (the second edition appeared this year, 2011) states that it was “probably composed between the seventh and the ninth century CE.”[8] Strack and Stemberger’s Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash describes it as a “work of merkabah mysticism” and says that “a date between the seventh and ninth century is likely.”[9] The earliest possible date is that suggested by Joseph Dan, a leading scholar on The Alphabet of Rabbi Akiva. He describes it as “an esoteric collection of midrashim put together at the beginning of the geonic period,” that is, no earlier than the seventh century.[10] The latest possible date is the ninth century, as given for example in the 2007 reference work Encyclopaedia Judaica.[11] These are typical, representative statements of current scholarship on the date and cultural origins of the work. Furthermore, the earliest manuscripts of the work date from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The earliest published edition was published in Constantinople in 1515 or 1516. This and other published editions of the work reveal three or four different versions.[12] These facts make it uncertain whether the entirety of the work or the wording of a particular passage even goes back to the first millennium.

One may suppose that some Mormon apologists, upon learning that the source of this quotation is a medieval proto-Kabbalistic text, will argue that even if the text is medieval the idea it expresses may be ancient. Obviously, no text appears in a vacuum; all texts draw on ideas that predate them. However, the point of the quotation is supposedly to provide evidence that a particular idea is ancient, and a medieval text of checkered textual history is not good evidence for that claim. A Jewish text dating from about the eighth century cannot provide evidence that Joseph Smith was restoring a doctrine supposedly lost or suppressed in a second-century apostasy. If Mormon apologists wish to defend that claim, they will need to use earlier, different texts.

Furthermore, the idea expressed in the quotation from The Alphabet of Rabbi Akiva does not do much to establish even medieval precedent for the LDS doctrine of exaltation propounded by Joseph Smith. Here is a fuller quote as it appears in Patai’s book:

The Holy One, blessed be He, will in the future call all of the pious by their names, and give them a cup of elixir of life in their hands so that they should live and endure forever…. And the Holy One, blessed be He, will in the future reveal to all the pious in the World to Come the Ineffable Name with which new heavens and a new earth can be created, so that all of them should be able to create new worlds…. The Holy One, blessed be He, will give every pious three hundred and forty worlds in inheritance in the World to Come…. To all the pious the Holy One, blessed be He, will give a sign and a part in the goodly reward, and everlasting renown, glory and greatness and praise, a crown encompassed in holiness, and royalty, equal to those of all the pious in the World to Come. The sign will be the cup of life which the Holy One, blessed he He, will give to the Messiah and to the pious in the Future to Come.[12]

There is no hint in this passage of Joseph Smith’s doctrine that God was once a man who became God by a process of exaltation that we are to imitate. Nor does the passage suggest that human beings preexisted as God’s spirit children prior to their mortal lives on earth. It does affirm that pious people will be “exalted” in some significant ways: they will have immortality, renown, glory, greatness, praise, holiness, and royalty. Depending on exactly how these are understood, all orthodox Christians would agree (though we have a different understanding as to the basis on which these blessings will be received). The one element that sounds similar to Mormon theology is the reference to the glorified pious ones “being able to create new worlds.” Even here, though, the context is very different: the pious will be able to do this because they will know “the Ineffable Name,” and the worlds they will have will be given to them by “the Holy One” and are limited to a certain number. It is far from clear that this text means that the pious will become Gods of the same nature and power as “the Holy One.” They apparently will not be creating their new worlds by their own divine power as new deities but rather as rewards given to them and obtained by invoking or using the divine Name.

It is no doubt possible to cull a large assortment of conceptual and verbal parallels to virtually any and every element of Mormon theology by ransacking Jewish and Christian literature throughout history, but such a methodology is hopelessly fallacious as a method for establishing that Mormon theology is a restoration of ancient doctrines lost, neglected, or suppressed. There is nothing “miraculous” about Joseph Smith’s teaching having such parallels when the pool of texts from which the parallels are drawn include such texts as a fairly obscure medieval proto-Kabbalistic writing. One could do the same thing for the teachings of any nineteenth-century religious figure who claimed to “restore” true Christianity, such as Ellen G. White, Mary Baker Eddy, or Charles Taze Russell.

The fact that Peterson and several other Mormon apologists resort to utilizing such a quotation while failing to describe its source accurately is especially troubling. This is the only quotation in Peterson’s article that he does not identify specifically. Clearly, had he done so, it would have weakened his argument. Each of the Mormon apologists cited here had the wherewithal to track down the source of the quotation and to state accurately the period of history and religious perspective from which it originated. I make no judgment as to why they all failed to do so. In any case, the use of the quotation to support the Mormon claim that Joseph Smith “restored” original, true Christianity is simply indefensible.

Notes

1. D. Charles Pyle, “‘I Have Said, “Ye are Gods”’: Concepts Conducive to the Early Christian Doctrine of Deification in Patristic Literature and the Underlying Strata of the Greek New Testament Text,” 1999 FAIR Conference paper.

2. See Barry R. Bickmore, “Of Simplicity, Oversimplification, and Monotheism,” FARMS Review 15 (2003): 257.

3. Raphael Patai, The Messiah Texts: Jewish Legends of Three Thousand Years (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1988; earlier ed., New York: Avon, 1979), 251.

4. John Tvedtnes, “The King Follett Discourse in the Light of Ancient and Medieval Jewish and Christian Beliefs,” 2004 FAIR Conference paper, n. 53.

5. Maklelan (Daniel O. McClellan), “Do Mormons Believe They Will Rule Over Their Own Planets? Of course!” (Mormon Dialogue and Discussion Board, 17 July 2009).

6. Patai, Messiah Texts, 346.

7. Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, 3d enlarged ed. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 113.

8. Marc Bregman, in The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion, ed. Adele Berlin and Maxine L. Grossman; 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 43.

9. H. L. Strack and Günter Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, trans. Markus Bockmuehl, 2d ed. (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992), 349.

10. Joseph Dan, “Alphabet Mysticism/Letter Mysticism,” in Religion Past and Present: Encyclopedia of Theology and Religion, ed. Hans Dieter Betz, Don S. Browning, Bernd Janowski, and Eberhard Jüngel (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 1:156-57. The geonic period refers to a specific period in the history of Talmudic interpretation and education and is dated 589-1038, thus beginning just before the seventh century and running through the first third of the eleventh century. Dan, the Gershom Scholem Professor of Kabbalah at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is the author of a three-volume academic study, History of Jewish Mysticism and Esotericism, published in Hebrew at the Shazar Center, Israel Historical Society. Chapter 30 (in volume 3) of this work is on “‘The Alphabet of Rabbi Akiva’ and the New Conception of Language.”

11. Moshe David Herr, “Midrashim, Smaller,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Fred Skolnik, 2d ed. (New York: Macmillan Reference, 2007).

12. Three versions are described in detail in Kaufmann Kohler, “Akiba Ben Joseph, Alphabet of,” in Jewish Encyclopedia (1901-1906), Volume 1. Herr (“Midrashim, Smaller”) states that the work is “extant in different versions and in many manuscripts, only some of which have been published (Constantinople (1516), version A; Cracow (1579), version B; Wertheimer, Battei Midrashot, 2 (1953), 333–465, four versions), but most of them (including Mss. of the 13^th and 14^th centuries) have not yet appeared in print.” See also the listing for a 2004 auction of the first known published edition of the work, published in Constantinople in Hebrew and dated 1515. The auction listing describes the work as a “Kabbalistic treatise that considers, letter by letter, the cosmological and eschatological properties of the Hebrew alphabet, and what it reveals about the Al-mighty. The work is heavily referenced in kabbalah literature and attributed to the sage Rabbi Akiva.”

13. Patai, Messiah Texts, 251.

NOTE: This article was first posted on August 17 and was edited on August 20, 2011.Similar Posts:

• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part One: The Mormon Doctrine of Exaltation
• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part Three: The Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith’s Doctrine of Exaltation
• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part Five: Early Church Fathers and Joseph Smith’s Doctrine of Exaltation
• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part Two: The New Testament and Joseph Smith’s Doctrine of Exaltation
• Has God Preserved the Scriptures? . . . (Part 1)

Peterson’s Proof Text

According to Peterson, that doctrine was “implicit…though perhaps unnoticed, in the Book of Mormon,” in the following statement that the Book of Mormon attributes to Jesus:

“And ye shall sit down in the kingdom of my Father; yea, your joy shall be full, even as the Father hath given me fulness of joy; and ye shall be even as I am, and I am even as the Father; and the Father and I are one” (3 Nephi 28:10).

Peterson offers the following reasoning for construing this passage to teach that people can become “like the Father”:

When we apply the transitive law of mathematics to this passage — according to which, if “a” equals “b” and “b” equals “c,” it follows necessarily that “a” equals “c” — the conclusion is inescapable that, if humans can be like the exalted Christ, and if the exalted Christ is like the Father, then humans can be like the Father.

Here it is necessary to reiterate that all orthodox Christians agree that people can and should become “like” God the Father in some respects. For example, Peter tells us that we should be holy like God (1 Peter 1:15-16). The question is whether human beings can become like God in every respect. Frankly, 3 Nephi 28:10 says nothing of the sort. It is easy to see how one might think so if one takes the line “and ye shall be even as I am, and I am even as the Father; and the Father and I are one” out of context. Consider, for example, Paul’s statement, “I wish that all people were even as I am myself” (1 Cor. 7:7). Does this mean that Paul wishes that all people were middle-aged men with poor vision? Does it mean that Paul wishes that all people were Jewish, or that they all spoke Greek, or that they all traveled around without a permanent home? Of course not. To understand Paul’s statement, all we have to do is read it in context. When he says that he wishes all people were like him, he means he wishes all people could be single and therefore free of the distractions of marriage (see vv. 8-24).

Likewise, if we want to understand the statement in 3 Nephi 28:10 correctly, we need to read it in context. The first step in this endeavor is to find out to whom Jesus was supposedly speaking. According to the text, Jesus was giving special promises to “the three” (v. 4), that is, three of the twelve Nephite disciples. The text goes out of its way to distinguish Jesus’ conversation with the nine (vv. 2-3) from his conversation with the three (vv. 4-11). This means that we should at the very least be cautious about generalizing from verse 10 as to what God’s intentions are for all of his people. Peterson glosses over this contextual element by saying without qualification that Jesus made this statement “to his Nephite disciples.”

Next, we need to take a closer look at what the text says Jesus promised the three. The special promises the text says he made to them were that they would never die or feel physical pain, sit down in his Father’s kingdom (presumably in a special place), and experience “fulness of joy” (vv. 7-10; also vv. 37-38). These are spectacular promises, but they fall far short of promising that the three would become gods of the same essential nature as Jesus and the Father. When the text goes on to quote Jesus as saying, “and ye shall be even as I am, and I am even as the Father; and the Father and I are one,” this seems to mean in context that the three disciples will share the same joy that Jesus and the Father share.

We should observe, once again, that most if not all of the essential elements of the Mormon doctrine of exaltation cannot even be thought of as implicit in this passage. (I listed seven such elements in Part One and reiterated them in Part Two.) Nothing here so much as hints that God has not always been God, that he was a man like us before becoming God, that he is an exalted man, that human beings preexisted the world as God’s spirit children in heaven, or that we became physical beings as a stepping stone to becoming Gods like the Father. One must go beyond what the text says in context to read into it (as Peterson does) the notion that human beings can become like the Father in all essential respects.

The Book of Mormon God: Unchangeable from All Eternity

Not only does this lone proof text not offer clear support to any of the seven essential elements of the LDS doctrine of exaltation, the Book of Mormon as a whole exhibits a theological framework that precludes such a doctrine. The most serious conflict between Book of Mormon theology and Joseph’s Smith exaltation theology has to do with the doctrine of God. In the Book of Mormon, there is most emphatically only one God, and he has been God from all eternity. For example, Moroni 8:18 affirms, “For I know that God is not a partial God, neither a changeable being; but he is unchangeable from all eternity to all eternity.” Some Mormons argue that God is unchangeable now that he has attained deity, but that this doesn’t require him to have been unchangeable always or from eternity. However, Moroni 8:18 flatly contradicts this idea. Its wording clearly means that God’s existence and unchangeable nature stretches backward infinitely as well as forward infinitely. That is, it means that God has always existed and been unchangeable and that he will always exist and be unchangeable. No one, I assume, is willing to deny that “to all eternity” means that God will continue to exist, as God, forever and ever, absolutely without end. Given that understanding, which I think is beyond reasonable doubt, “from all eternity” in this same context must mean that God’s existence as God goes back forever and ever, absolutely without beginning.

Moroni 8:18 isn’t the only place in the Book of Mormon where this language is used. Mosiah 3:5 describes Jesus Christ as “the Lord Omnipotent who reigneth, who was, and is from all eternity to all eternity.” Alma 13:7 states that the order of the high priesthood of the Son of God “was from the foundation of the world; or in other words, being without beginning of days or end of years, being prepared from eternity to all eternity, according to his foreknowledge of all things.” Notice here that being “from eternity to all eternity” is synonymous with “being without beginning of days or end of years.” Similarly, Moroni 7:22 speaks of “God knowing all things, being from everlasting to everlasting.”

Other LDS scriptures outside the Book of Mormon that Joseph produced within the first couple of years after publishing the Book of Mormon reflect the same doctrine. Moses 6:7 describes Jesus Christ as “him who was without beginning of days or end of years, from all eternity to all eternity.” Twice more the Book of Moses describes the Lord as being “from all eternity to all eternity” (Moses 7:29, 31). Joseph Smith’s revelations during the first two years of the LDS Church also express the same idea. Doctrine & Covenants 20:17, perhaps the most emphatic of all these statements, says, “By these things we know that there is a God in heaven, who is infinite and eternal, from everlasting to everlasting the same unchangeable God, the framer of heaven and earth, and all things which are in them.” D&C 39:1 says, “Hearken and listen to the voice of him who is from all eternity to all eternity, the Great I Am, even Jesus Christ.” Here, in traditional Christian fashion, Joseph Smith uses the words “the Great I Am” as a title of deity that expresses the absolute eternity of Jesus Christ. Likewise, Joseph Smith affirmed concerning the Lord, “From eternity to eternity he is the same, and his years never fail” (D&C 76:4). D&C 61:1 describes God as the one “who has all power, who is from everlasting to everlasting, even Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.”

Such statements about God almost completely disappear in the LDS scriptures after 1832 (though see D&C 109:77, where in 1836 God was said to be enthroned “from everlasting to everlasting”). By 1843 Joseph Smith’s doctrine had changed so much that he could assert that those who faithfully practiced polygamy as part of their LDS faith would in the resurrection “be gods, because they have no end; therefore shall they be from everlasting to everlasting, because they continue; then shall they be above all, because all things are subject unto them. Then shall they be gods, because they have all power, and the angels are subject unto them” (D&C 132:20). Here “from everlasting to everlasting” does not refer to divine status from all eternity, as Joseph explains (“because they continue”). Well before this revelation, Joseph had begun teaching that all of us are also eternal beings without beginning. This passage in D&C 132 is explicit in teaching the human side of Joseph’s doctrine of exaltation.

By contrast, the earlier statements quoted above from the Book of Mormon and other early revelations of Joseph Smith all rather clearly express the traditional Christian belief that God, the personal Creator of the universe, exists eternally as God, without any beginning or end of his existence or of his divine nature. This conclusion is consistent with the evidence (and there’s a lot of it) to show that before 1833 Joseph Smith accepted more or less the same generic Christian conception of God that he had inherited from his early nineteenth-century Protestant Christian environment. During the period from 1833 to 1843 Joseph’s theology underwent almost constant development, leading to his radical departure from the more traditional theology found in the Book of Mormon.

The Book of Mormon, then, explicitly contradicts Joseph Smith’s later theological assertion that God has not always been God but instead became God.

The Book of Mormon God: A Spirit Who Became a Man, Not a Man Who Became a God

Consistent with its more traditional Christian theology, the Book of Mormon views God as a being of spirit who came to earth in the flesh, not as an exalted man of flesh and bones as Joseph later taught. The Book of Mormon teaches not that a man became God but that God became a man.

In one section, the Book of Mormon contains repeated references to God as “the Great Spirit” (Alma 18:2-5, 11, 18, 26, 28; 19:25, 27; 22:9-11), as in the following verse: “Believest thou that this Great Spirit, who is God, created all things which are in heaven and in the earth?” (Alma 18:28; cf. 22:10). This “Great Spirit” was not going to remain mere spirit forever, though, but was going to come to the earth as Christ. Later the book of Alma describes a group of people called the Zoramites who believe in God but with some false beliefs, including both a denial of the coming of Christ and a doctrine of election that sounds suspiciously like a modern caricature of Calvinism:

“Holy, holy God; we believe that thou art God, and we believe that thou art holy, and that thou wast a spirit, and that thou art a spirit, and that thou wilt be a spirit forever. Holy God, we believe that thou hast separated us from our brethren; and we do not believe in the tradition of our brethren, which was handed down to them by the childishness of their fathers; but we believe that thou hast elected us to be thy holy children; and also thou hast made it known unto us that there shall be no Christ. But thou art the same yesterday, today, and forever; and thou hast elected us that we shall be saved, whilst all around us are elected to be cast by thy wrath down to hell; for the which holiness, O God, we thank thee; and we also thank thee that thou hast elected us, that we may not be led away after the foolish traditions of our brethren, which doth bind them down to a belief of Christ, which doth lead their hearts to wander far from thee, our God” (Alma 31:15-17).

We should not understand this passage to be criticizing all of the beliefs the Zoramites affirmed but to be condemning their rejection of the traditions, their denial of Christ, and their belief in election. Their affirmation that God is “the same yesterday, today, and forever,” for example, is explicitly stated with obvious approval elsewhere in the Book of Mormon (1 Nephi 10:18; 2 Nephi 2:4; 27:23; 29:9; Mormon 9:9; 10:19) and in two early sections of Doctrine & Covenants dating from 1830 (20:12; 35:1). When the Zoramites say the same thing, however, they say it in support of their denial that God is going to come in the flesh as Christ. Their belief that God was, is, and always will be spirit is held up as false insofar as it denies that God will come in the flesh as a human being—as Jesus Christ. This passage, then, does not deny that God was simply spirit prior to his coming in the flesh as Christ.

Two passages that Mormons often cite to show that the Book of Mormon agreed with Joseph Smith’s later doctrine that God the Father was an exalted Man with a body of flesh actually show otherwise:

“And because he said unto them that Christ was the God, the Father of all things, and said that he should take upon him the image of man, and it should be the image after which man was created in the beginning; or in other words, he said that man was created after the image of God, and that God should come down among the children of men, and take upon him flesh and blood, and go forth upon the face of the earth” (Mosiah 7:27).

“Seest thou that ye are created after mine own image? Yea, even all men were created in the beginning after mine own image. Behold, this body, which ye now behold, is the body of my spirit; and man have I created after the body of my spirit; and even as I appear unto thee to be in the spirit will I appear unto my people in the flesh” (Ether 3:15-16).

Mormons assume that if these texts say that human beings were created in God’s “image” then the texts must imply that God had a physical body. However, the texts do not say this, and in fact Mosiah 7:27 implies otherwise and Ether 3:15-16 explicitly says otherwise. Mosiah 7:27 asserts that God created man after his image and that he was going to “come down…and take upon him flesh and blood.” It might be possible to quibble that here “flesh and blood” denotes the mortal human condition and not the physical body per se. However, Ether 3:15-16 is explicitly contrary to such an interpretation. The conventional belief (based on Genesis 1:26-27) that God created man after his image is interpreted here to mean that God created man “after the body of [his] spirit.” We see here the notion, which though not strictly orthodox has been a fairly popular belief in the history of Christianity, that God has a “body of spirit,” that is, an anthropomorphic shape composed of pure spirit rather than of flesh. That this is what the text means is confirmed by the conclusion of the verse, in which Christ (who in Book of Mormon theology is God in the flesh) announces that later he will appear to his people “in the flesh.”

Elsewhere, the Book of Mormon states that Christ “shall manifest himself unto them in the flesh” (2 Nephi 25:12; see also 2 Nephi 32:6; Jacob 4:11; Enos 1:8; Mosiah 15:2-7). It affirms that “the Lord Omnipotent who reigneth, who was, and is from all eternity to all eternity, shall come down from heaven among the children of men, and shall dwell in a tabernacle of clay” (Mosiah 3:5). The Book of Mormon also says that God “created all flesh” (Jacob 2:21), which would again seem to presuppose that God was not himself a being of flesh. The early sections of Doctrine & Covenants also express this same idea that Jesus Christ was God come in the flesh (D&C 20:1, 26; 93:11).

The Book of Mormon, then, disagrees with the idea that God the Father was a man of flesh who then went on to become a God. It teaches, rather, that God was a being of spirit who became a man of flesh by the name of Jesus Christ.

Book of Mormon Humanity: Not Preexistent Spirits

An essential element of the LDS doctrine of exaltation is that human beings preexisted in heaven as God’s spirit sons and daughters before coming to earth with physical bodies. This idea is essential to Mormon exaltation doctrine because that doctrine views God, humans, and angels as beings of the same species but at different stages of progression or development. In Joseph Smith’s later theology, as in Mormon theology now, it would not be correct to say that God created us. God may have created or made our physical bodies (or those of the first earth people, Adam and Eve), but in LDS doctrine we are eternal beings, just as much as God or Christ, and with the same divine potential.

The Book of Mormon, however, does not teach this idea that human beings preexisted as God’s spirit children in heaven. In fact, what it does say undermines or contradicts that idea. We have already noted the fact that it repeatedly refers to God as “from eternity to eternity” or “from everlasting to everlasting,” in contexts where this description clearly marks God apart from human beings and the rest of creation. Those affirmations about God, then, implicitly deny that we are also eternal spirits that have always existed.

The Book of Mormon presents much more evidence on this point in the form of statements that directly pertain to the nature of humanity. For example, the Book of Mormon refers ten times to Adam and Eve as “our first parents” (1 Nephi 5:11; 2 Nephi 2:15; 9:9; Mosiah 16:3; Alma 12:21, 26; 42:2, 7; Helaman 6:26; Ether 8:25). Since it never qualifies this description in any way (for example, by calling them “our first parents on earth”), the natural way to take these words is that Adam and Eve were literally our very first parents. By contrast, in Joseph Smith’s later theology, God the Father was our first literal parent (and in Mormon doctrine soon after Joseph Smith’s death, the idea arose that we were all spirit children of heavenly parents, Heavenly Father and a heavenly mother).

In a passage I quoted earlier, the Book of Mormon quotes Jesus as saying:

“Behold, I am Jesus Christ. I am the Father and the Son. In me shall all mankind have life, and that eternally, even they who shall believe on my name; and they shall become my sons and my daughters” (Ether 3:14).

This statement presupposes that human beings are not already God’s literal sons and daughters but affirms that they can become his sons and daughters through faith in Christ. We saw in Part Two that this is also the teaching of the New Testament. Mormons today sometimes try to explain such statements by a theological distinction not found in any of these texts. They suggest that human beings are already literal children of Heavenly Father but that through faith in Christ they can also become in a spiritual sense children of Jesus Christ. Such an explanation seems especially artificial when Ether 3:14 explicitly identifies Jesus Christ as both “the Father and the Son.” Of course, in the New Testament Christians become children of God the Father through their faith in his Son Jesus Christ (e.g., John 1:12-13; Rom. 8:14-17, 29; Gal. 4:4-7).

Elsewhere, the Book of Mormon consistently speaks of human beings as having the beginning of their existence as physical beings. God creates us as beings of flesh, formed from the dust (Jacob 2:21; Mormon 9:17). We owe our lives and continued existence from day to day to his creating and sustaining us (Mosiah 2:20-23). God “created all things, both the heavens and the earth, and all things that in them are,” and specifically “created our first parents” (2 Nephi 2:14-15). All of these statements reflect quite traditional Christian beliefs that were common to Joseph Smith’s theological environment in early nineteenth-century America, and there is no reason to take them in any other way than just as they sound in that context.

Let me comment briefly on one passage in the Book of Mormon that some Mormons cite as reflecting a belief in the preexistence of human spirits. That passage states that priests were “called and prepared from the foundation of the world according to the foreknowledge of God…. this holy calling being prepared from the foundation of the world for such as would not harden their hearts” (Alma 13:3, 5). Surely, though, we should understand this passage to mean not that the priests themselves existed “from the foundation of the world,” but rather their “calling” was “prepared” for them “according to the foreknowledge of God.” That is, God knew ahead of time that these men would be suitable for the priestly office and so “prepared” that calling for them. Such a passage cannot overturn the considerable evidence from the more than a dozen passages cited above that show that the Book of Mormon reflects the traditional Christian belief that our existence begins on earth as physical beings.

Conclusion: The Book of Mormon Does Not Teach the Exaltation Doctrine

If, as we have seen, the Book of Mormon teaches a more traditional view of God and man, one that is not compatible with Joseph Smith’s later doctrine of exaltation, then clearly the Book of Mormon does not teach that doctrine. And in fact no passage in the Book of Mormon supports the LDS belief taught later by Joseph Smith that human beings can become Gods with the same powers as God the Father and creating and ruling over their own worlds. It does not even teach anything that might be described as a form of theosis, or the Greek Christian doctrine of deification.

The Book of Mormon affirms, as Christians traditionally have also believed, that God’s people can do anything that he empowers and authorizes them to do (e.g., 1 Nephi 9:6; 17:50; 2 Nephi 1:10; Mosiah 5:3; Alma 20:4; 26:12; 37:16; Helaman 10:5; Moroni 10:23). However, these affirmations are not eschatological statements about our future, post-resurrection glorified state, but assurances of God’s powerful presence among God’s people in the here and now. They are not teaching that we will become omnipotent beings, but rather that the Omnipotent One is able to accomplish anything he wishes through the agency of his people when they trust him and obey his direction.

The disparity between the theology of the Book of Mormon and the theology of Joseph Smith in his last years cannot be overcome by citing isolated proof texts. The evidence is overwhelming that in teaching his doctrine of exaltation, Joseph Smith was not restoring a doctrine attested by the Book of Mormon.

 Similar Posts:

• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part One: The Mormon Doctrine of Exaltation
• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part Five: Early Church Fathers and Joseph Smith’s Doctrine of Exaltation
• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part Two: The New Testament and Joseph Smith’s Doctrine of Exaltation
• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part Four: Esoteric Jewish Theology and Joseph Smith’s Doctrine of Exaltation
• In What Sense Are Jesus and the Father One? Part III: One in Purpose? C: John 17:21-23

Keeping Focused on the Real Issues

At the end of Part One, I listed seven specific claims that are essential elements of the Mormon doctrine of exaltation taught by Joseph Smith and still taught by the LDS Church in such official instructional publications as Gospel Principles:

1. God has not always been God; it is not true that he has been God from all eternity (though he may have existed from all eternity, he has not always existed as God).
2. God was once a man like us before becoming God our Heavenly Father.
3. God became God and is an exalted man, an exalted being.
4. Human beings are the spirit offspring of God, our Heavenly Father. We lived in heaven with God before becoming physical beings here on earth.
5. We became human beings precisely so that we would have the opportunity to attain exaltation just as God did.
6. Human beings can become “gods” in the sense of becoming exalted beings fully like Heavenly Father in all essential respects, just as he did before us.
7. As exalted beings or gods, we can become creators and have all the power, glory, dominion, and knowledge that God the Father has (in the worlds we create).

It is crucial that we keep our focus on these specific doctrinal claims and not allow the discussion to be sidetracked by tangential questions or, worse still, nebulous or vague statements to which both evangelicals and Mormons could give assent if they are allowed to interpret them as they wish. For example, the issue here is not whether human beings can become “like God.” All evangelicals, as well as all Mormons, affirm that human beings can in some sense become like God. For example, all evangelicals believe that redeemed human beings will become perfectly sinless and loving—like God. The issue, then, is in what sense or in what ways human beings can become like God. To put the matter philosophically, the real issue is whether human beings can become beings of the same order and nature ontologically as God—and whether God himself was once a man who then became such a being. That is, the debate is really over whether humans can become beings that have the same metaphysical attributes as God, such as omnipotence and omniscience, and perform such defining works of God as creating universes—and whether God the Father himself is such a human being who became a God. Like all orthodox Christians, evangelicals say No; but Mormons say Yes. This is the issue that separates us, and it is the issue on which we need to focus, using the seven specific doctrinal claims listed above to keep that focus clear. Evangelicals need not object to the word “exaltation” or the Greek theological term theosis (see, for example, Robert Rakestraw’s article “Becoming Like God: An Evangelical Doctrine of Theosis”); what is objectionable from an evangelical perspective is the substance of the Mormon doctrine that Peterson and others reference using these terms.

For evangelicals, the crucial issue with regard to any doctrine is whether that doctrine is well supported by the teachings of the Bible. Thus, if a doctrine of the LDS Church were to find some support in the thinking of some Christian groups or teachers in the centuries following the close of the biblical era, that fact, though interesting, would not warrant acceptance of the doctrine. To show that a doctrine taught by Joseph Smith was a genuine revelation of truth once part of the Christian faith but subsequently lost (by neglect, suppression, or whatever), we will need to see some evidence that this “restored” doctrine was once taught by Jesus or his apostles. For all practical purposes, this means finding some evidence of the doctrine in the writings collected in the New Testament (NT).

Peterson quotes two NT passages in support of Joseph Smith’s doctrine of exaltation (Rom. 8:17; Rev. 3:21). No doubt he could quote more than these two (it was a very short article), but these two proof texts may be regarded as representative of the kind of texts that he and other Mormons view as support for the doctrine in question. But what sort of support do they really provide? It is my contention that these proof texts not only fail to support the LDS position but even context actually provide evidence against it.

Romans 8:17—Children and Heirs of God

Romans 8:17 says that “if we are children [of God], then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ” (NIV). Peterson offers no explanation for how this verse supports or reflects a doctrine of theosis or exaltation in the LDS sense, perhaps because he thinks it is self-evident. Thus, all he tells us is that critics of Mormonism “harshly” fault it for taking this verse (and others) “very literally.” But just how does a “very literal” reading of this verse support Joseph Smith’s doctrine?

One certainly cannot infer from this text any suggestion that God has not always been God, that he was once a man like us before he became God, or that as God he is an exalted man (our first three points above). Nothing in this text so much as hints at the idea that we can attain exaltation as the Father did, or that we can become like the Father in all essential respects, or that we can become creators with all the powers and knowledge that he has (our last three points). Our receiving an inheritance from God jointly with Christ is an inexpressibly glorious hope, but nothing in the text suggests that this inheritance will make us deities of the same ontological order and attributes as God.

Taken out of context, I suppose it is possible to argue that Paul’s references to us as God’s “children,” if taken “literally,” would imply our preexistence as spirit offspring of God prior to our mortal lives on earth (point #4). In fact, though, a “literal” reading of the passage in context precludes such an interpretation, because Paul in context is speaking of believers in Christ becoming God’s children by adoption (v. 15). If we are adopted as God’s children, then we are not naturally or literally God’s children in the sense of being his literal offspring. Elsewhere, when talking to pagans, Paul once adapted for his message a line from a Stoic poem that referred to human beings as God’s “offspring” (Acts 17:28-29), but there is no more reason to take such language literally in that context than there is here in Romans 8. Paul also affirmed that believers in Jesus Christ become God’s children by adoption elsewhere in his epistles (Gal. 4:5; Eph. 1:5).

Some Mormon apologists try to reconcile the LDS doctrine with Paul’s teaching on adoption by suggesting that God did not procreate our preexistent spirits in heaven but rather “adopted” us there in heaven as his children. I don’t think this theory satisfactorily coheres with what LDS Church leaders have taught over the years, but set that issue aside for the moment. It certainly will not cohere with the teaching of Paul about adoption. For Paul, the “adoption” process begins by our receiving the Holy Spirit to dwell in us when we come to faith in Jesus Christ and will be completed when we are raised from the dead to immortal, glorious, eternal life (Rom. 8:14-29; Gal. 4:4-7; Eph. 1:3-14). I won’t take the time to lead my readers through these passages verse by verse, but I urge you to walk through them in that way yourself. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit, which we receive when we become Christians, is the down payment or guarantee of the future consummation in which our adoption as God’s children will be fully realized (note especially Rom. 8:23 and Eph. 1:13-14). Trying to read into these passages the notion that we were “adopted” by God in a preexistent heavenly existence is an exercise in futility.

If Romans 8:17 does not support any of the seven specific elements of Joseph Smith’s doctrine of exaltation, then it has no value in showing that Joseph was restoring a lost doctrinal truth. In fact, we have seen that Romans 8:17 in context has a different view of human beings than the view taught by Joseph Smith. Paul views human beings as God’s children not by virtue of their preexistence but on account of God’s graciously adopting as his children those who put their faith in Jesus Christ, God’s divine Son (cf. v. 3).

Revelation 3:21—Sitting on Christ’s Throne

Revelation 3:21 serves no better as a proof text for any specific element of the LDS doctrine of exaltation: “I will grant the one who conquers permission to sit with me on my throne, just as I too conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne” (Rev. 3:21 NET).

Again, Peterson suggests that non-Mormons often take offense at Mormons taking this verse “literally.” I would suggest, though, that even Mormons do not take this verse literally, and if they did it would in no way support and form of theosis, let alone the LDS doctrine of exaltation. Is the Mormon claim with respect to this verse that exalted humans will be given the opportunity to sit in Christ’s chair—or in God the Father’s chair—in heaven? One can imagine a “literal” acceptance of such occurrences that would not entail those exalted humans becoming beings of the same order or essential nature as God. A king might let an adopted child sit on his throne, even on his lap, as an expression of love and closeness, without anything more being implied.

Presumably (he does not explain what he is thinking) Peterson understands Revelation 3:21 to mean that those who conquer will be given divine authority comparable to the authority of Christ, which in turn is comparable to the authority of God. Such an interpretation would hardly be literal, but in any case it does not fit the specific LDS doctrine of exaltation. According to that doctrine, exalted human beings, as I put it before (point #7 above), can become creators and have all the power, glory, dominion, and knowledge that God the Father has (in the worlds we create). But Revelation 3:21 does not say anything like this. It does not speak of exalted people receiving their own thrones of equal glory or authority to that of Christ or God. Rather, it speaks of God’s conquering people being welcomed to sit with Christ on his own throne. There is no idea here of a multiplication of deities that organize and rule over their own separate worlds. Mormons do not think that exalted people will become members of “the Godhead” or co-rulers of this world with the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (the three Gods who in LDS doctrine rule this world). They think that exalted people will become Gods and rule over their own new worlds. As it stands, Revelation 3:21 simply does not fit such a theological scenario.

The fact is that it is not anti-Mormon animus that leads evangelicals and other orthodox Christians to eschew a “literal” reading of Revelation 3:21. It is, rather, a recognition of the genre of the Book of Revelation as a whole, a book that exhibits clear signs throughout of an ancient Jewish genre commonly known today as apocalyptic literature. The apostle Paul used similar language in speaking about the present status and future hope of Christian believers:

“But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:4-7 ESV, emphasis added).

The idea in Revelation 3:21 is probably the same as in Ephesians 2:4-7. Believers in Jesus Christ in the present may feel like they are on the losing end of history. They are often persecuted and even more often ignored. There is no palpable difference in this mortal life between a Christian and a non-Christian (which is why we often have difficulty telling them apart). But whatever may be happening on the surface, in reality believers in Christ are assured of all the blessings that he came to acquire for us. Christ’s conquest of sin by his death on the cross counts as our death to and conquest of sin. His conquest of death by his resurrection counts as our conquest of death and assures us of our own future resurrection to immortal, eternal life. And his conquest of all spiritual powers that oppose God by his ascension to the right hand of God the Father counts as our conquest of those spiritual powers and our eventual enjoyment of eternal life in intimate relationship with God in his presence. That Christ’s death, resurrection, and  especially his ascension to the Father’s right hand have to do with his bringing all evil spiritual powers under submission is clear from several statements in the epistles (most explicitly, Rom. 8:34-39; Ephesians 1:20-21; Col. 2:9-15; 1 Peter 3:22). Read in this broader NT context, Revelation 3:21 affirms in apocalyptic fashion the basic Christian truth that those who are united to Christ through faith are assured of spiritual victory over all the evil forces of this age. This is the idea behind John’s description of faithful believers in Revelation 3:21 (and elsewhere) as those who conquer (note especially Rev. 12:11; 15:2; 17:14).

If we go back and review the seven specific elements of Joseph Smith’s doctrine of exaltation, we can find none of them implicit (let alone explicit) in Revelation 3:21. The text neither says nor implies that God the Father was a man who then became a God, that we existed in heaven before becoming mortals, or that we can become beings of the same ontological order or essential attributes as God. This text, then, also does nothing to support Peterson’s case that Joseph Smith restored a lost, forgotten doctrine. Again, in context Revelation 3:21 does not even fit LDS theology, which claims not that exalted people will share God’s rule over this world but that they will become divine rulers over their own worlds.

Possible Rebuttal #1: Other Biblical Proof Texts

At this point I need to anticipate and address three likely rebuttals to the argument I have made here. The first will be citations of other biblical texts thought to support the LDS doctrine of exaltation. I have already commented briefly on one of these (Acts 17:28-29). There are many such texts that Mormons have cited over the years and probably more that creative individuals may cite, and obviously I cannot discuss all of them here. I will be content, for the moment, to make the following observations.

(a) I do not think anyone will be able to offer any clear biblical support for the first three points of the seven I have listed. That is, there are no biblical statements that would appear to offer anything like clear evidence for the belief that the Father was once a man prior to becoming a God. Joseph Smith’s own proof text nicely illustrates just how weak any such proof text is likely to be. He reasoned that if, as Jesus said, the Son only did what he saw the Father doing (John 5:19), then the Father must have been a mortal man on an earth somewhere, died, and risen from the dead, just as Jesus did in our earth (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 346-48). Joseph’s interpretation fits neither the wording of John 5:19 nor its context. What Jesus said was not that the Son does whatever the Father did (past tense) but that the Son does whatever the Father does (present tense). That is, Jesus was saying that the works he did were the same kind of works that the Father also was doing. In context, Jesus was explaining to his critics that in giving life to the crippled body of a paralyzed man on the Sabbath, he was simply doing the very sort of thing that his Father God always does. The Father gives life and does other “work” on the Sabbath, Jesus said, and so does he. In short, the Son does the works of deity and exercises the prerogatives of deity, just as his Father does (John 5:17-23). That is Jesus’ point—not that everything Jesus ever did recapitulated something specific that the Father had done previously.

(b) LDS biblical proof texts for the preexistence of human beings as heavenly spirit children of God the Father are no better. Such proof texts typically are statements that refer not to human beings existing before their mortality but to God knowing and making determinations about human beings before they existed. This is the case, for example, with God’s statement that he knew Jeremiah before he was born (Jer. 1:5) or the NT texts that speak of God foreknowing people’s salvation before the foundation of the world (notably Eph. 1:4). I have discussed Mormon proof texts for human preexistence in an article on IRR’s website, to which I refer interested readers.

(c) It is possible to cite a number of biblical texts, especially in the NT, that affirm that God intends human beings to become like him in some way. Evangelical theology has no trouble enthusiastically affirming all such statements. We believe that God will glorify believers, conform them to the image of his Son, make them perfect and holy just as God the Father is perfect and holy, give them immortality and eternal life, and so forth. If these sorts of things are what is meant by theosis, then evangelicals believe in it as much as any other Christian tradition. If this were all Mormons meant by exaltation, evangelicals would agree with that understanding of the goal of human existence (even though we would still have some massive disagreements about other things). Again, the trouble with LDS eschatology is that it teaches that God and human beings are simply members of the same species at different stages of their progressive development and that we have the potential to become the very same kind of being—in terms of metaphysical attributes or ontological nature—as God. The Bible simply does not support such an idea.

Let me comment on just one such text, which of all NT texts might seem to be the most promising for the LDS claim. “Through these things he has bestowed on us his precious and most magnificent promises, so that by means of what was promised you may become partakers of the divine nature, after escaping the worldly corruption that is produced by evil desire” (2 Peter 1:4 NET). Is not Peter’s reference to becoming “partakers of the divine nature” exactly what Mormons are affirming? Not really. In LDS theology, divine nature is the natural potential of all human beings, a description of our own inherent nature as God’s spirit offspring. In Peter’s teaching, believers in Jesus Christ “become partakers” of the divine nature through God’s gracious promises. To “become partakers” here means that believers begin sharing in or participating in something that was not already their own. It does not mean that human beings become divine by nature but that in some way they participate or share in the divine nature. In context, the “cash value” of this hope is not that human beings will become omnipotent deities or creators, but that they will become people characterized by such attributes as virtue, knowledge, self-control, endurance, piety, brotherly affection, and love (vv. 5-7). If there is a doctrine of “theosis” here, it is a theosis of moral and spiritual transformation, not of ontological exaltation to Godhood. Christians are supposed to become “like God,” not in the sense of becoming beings of infinite power, but in the sense of becoming as holy, truthful, dependable, and loving as God. We should not minimize the importance of this hope—it is absolutely wonderful—but we should also not misinterpret it to mean something it does not.

Possible Rebuttal #2: The New Testament Is Unreliable

The second objection I anticipate hearing from some Mormons is that, to the extent that the LDS doctrine of exaltation cannot be substantiated from the NT, this merely shows that the NT as is stands is incomplete. Jesus and the apostles did teach this doctrine, they will suggest, but we don’t find it clearly revealed in the NT for some reason. This reason may be that the text of the NT writings was corrupted or changed, with clear statements of the LDS doctrine expunged or lost; or it may be that certain writings that did clearly teach the doctrine were omitted (excluded) from the NT canon in favor of the present corpus.

Those who take this approach to the issue will in effect have abandoned the type of argument that Professor Peterson presents in his article arguing that Joseph Smith restored the doctrine of theosis. What Peterson attempts to show is that the doctrine had been forgotten by Christians (or at least most Christians) but has been there in the sources or traditions of the Christian religion all along. Thus he quotes a couple of verses from the NT and claims that understanding these verses “literally” leads to the doctrine of exaltation that Joseph Smith taught.

Still, it is possible that even Peterson would like to reserve the right to argue that the NT (and his other sources as well) is not as clear as it might have been due to the loss or corruption of some of the textual material that might have belonged originally in the collection of Christian scripture. That is, he might argue that some or all of these sources attest to the doctrine as remnants or fragmentary allusions, passing or indirect references to a doctrine once clearly taught but now less than explicit in those sources.

I offer two responses to such a possible line of rebuttal to my argument.

First, I am afraid such a line of argument is nonfalsifiable and really meaningless as far as the evidence is concerned. It amounts to making the following three claims: (a) Any statements in the Bible that sound similar to the Mormon doctrine are evidence that the doctrine used to be taught. (b) Any statements in the Bible that seem to conflict with the doctrine are evidence of corruption of the text. (c) The lack of more affirmative or explicit statements in the Bible supporting the doctrine is evidence that the Bible is incomplete (either because it is missing some books or because the books it has are missing some material). Those with a flair for logic will immediately see the problem with this reasoning: any doctrine might similarly be defended. A similar three-prong strategy is in fact used by various religious groups to defend their doctrines. For example, those who believe that Jesus taught reincarnation cite a few biblical texts in support (e.g., Matt. 11:14; 17:11-12), explain away seemingly contrary statements as later dogmatic intrusions (e.g., John 1:21), and assert that the church suppressed the doctrine of reincarnation in the sixth century by altering the biblical texts to remove explicit references to it. If such reasoning can be used to defend every belief, then it really is of no use in supporting any belief.

Second, the evidence that we have does not support the claim that the text of the Bible was so corrupted that a doctrine like the Mormon doctrine of exaltation might have been lost from it, or that the canon of the Bible is incomplete because whole books that teach the doctrine were suppressed. This isn’t the place to go into all of the particulars on these two big topics, so I will simply summarize what I understand to be the facts, focusing on the NT because that is where one would expect to see the most explicit enunciation of such a doctrine (and where most Mormon proof texts for the doctrine are found).

With regard to the text of the NT writings, the problems necessitating NT textual criticism are generally variants and glosses to the text, not losses of original material from the text (the ending of Mark being the only possible significant exception, depending on one’s view of Mark 16:9-20). Variants are different wordings of the same text (e.g., “we have” versus “let us have” in Romans 5:1). Glosses are additions to the text (e.g., the lines about the angel at the pool in John 5:3b-4). That is, the issue with regard to the NT text is that we have more than the original text, not less. This point has been made quite convincingly by Parchment and Pen’s own Daniel Wallace, who is arguably the leading evangelical scholar on New Testament textual criticism. Thus, there is no serious chance that the NT writings originally taught something like the LDS doctrine of exaltation. Furthermore, if one searches through all the variants and glosses to the NT writings, one will no more find a forgotten (LDS) doctrine of exaltation than a forgotten doctrine of reincarnation.

As for the canon of the NT, to my knowledge no Mormon has ever proposed that a specific book teaching something like the LDS doctrine of exaltation was wrongly excluded from the NT canon. The reason is simple: there is no such book. Neither the ancient writings of the early church nor the heretical writings rejected by orthodox Christians teach a doctrine clearly comparable to the LDS doctrine (summarized in the seven points listed earlier). I will illustrate this fact later in this series when I comment on Peterson’s collection of quotations from the church fathers.

I have often asked Mormons who speculate about various extant books being omitted from the NT which of those books they think should have been included. Usually they don’t know, but occasionally they will suggest one or more specific books. If they do, my follow-up question is always the same: if any of those books should be in the NT, why has the LDS Church prophet never announced this fact? For example, if someone wishes to argue that Shepherd of Hermas or the Didache should be in the NT, what is preventing the LDS prophet from adding such books?

The reality is that our knowledge of the teachings of Jesus and the apostles is for all practical purposes limited to the writings of the NT. These writings simply do not support any of the seven critical elements of the LDS doctrine of exaltation.

Now, a Mormon might wish to argue that the Book of Mormon is another source of information about the teaching of Jesus, since it reports Jesus teaching the Nephites. In my next post, though, I will explain why the Book of Mormon is no help to Mormons on this issue.

Possible Rebuttal #3: Latter-day Revelation

The third likely rebuttal to the argument I have presented here is that Mormons know that Jesus and his apostles taught the LDS doctrine of exaltation because Christ restored this doctrine in the later days through Joseph Smith. This appeal to latter-day revelation begs the question that Peterson seeks to answer with evidence from the NT and other ancient sources. Thus, this likely response is not a defense of Peterson’s argument but an alternative to it.

Obviously, I cannot in this article go into all of the reasons for questioning the Mormon belief in Joseph Smith’s teachings as revelations from God. I will simply point out that from an evangelical perspective the argument runs in the opposite direction: since the teaching of Jesus and his apostles in the NT does not agree with Joseph Smith’s theology of exaltation, this is itself strong evidence against Joseph’s claim to be a prophet of God restoring true Christian doctrine.

Rob Bowman is the director of research for the Institute for Religious Research in Grand Rapids, Michigan. For a wealth of resources on Mormonism,  please visit IRR’s website.Similar Posts:

• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part One: The Mormon Doctrine of Exaltation
• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part Three: The Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith’s Doctrine of Exaltation
• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part Five: Early Church Fathers and Joseph Smith’s Doctrine of Exaltation
• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part Four: Esoteric Jewish Theology and Joseph Smith’s Doctrine of Exaltation
• In What Sense Are Jesus and the Father One? Part III: One in Purpose? C: John 17:21-23

Was it?

My response to Peterson will be rather detailed and so will be broken up into several parts. In this first part, I will review the doctrine of exaltation taught by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) and affirmed by Peterson. In subsequent parts I will examine Peterson’s arguments in support of that doctrine. This includes his New Testament proof texts (Rom. 8:17; Rev. 3:21), his proof text for the doctrine in the Book of Mormon, his claim that “an early Jewish midrash expressed the belief” in theosis, and his citations to show that Joseph’s doctrine restored an ancient Christian doctrine reflected in statements by various church fathers.

The Mormon Doctrine of Exaltation

Peterson summarizes the doctrine he wishes to defend as follows:

“Late in his life, the Prophet Joseph Smith began to teach that humans, being children of God, can become like their Father. The doctrine is most famously expressed in the couplet of Lorenzo Snow: ‘As man is, God once was. As God is, man may become.’”

Peterson refers to this teaching as the doctrine of “exaltation.” Let’s be clear on what this doctrine means. In Mormonism, exaltation is something that has already happened to God that made him what he is today and that can also happen to us to make us reach our full potential. There are two parts to Snow’s couplet, the first regarding God, and the second regarding man, and these two parts must be understood in relation to one another. The precise wording that Snow himself used was slightly different from the wording given by Peterson: What Snow said was, “As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be” (Eliza R. Snow Smith, Biography and Family Record of Lorenzo Snow [Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret News, 1884], 46). The wording used by Peterson, on the other hand, appears to have become standard in Mormon usage (see, for example, Encyclopedia of Mormonism 4:1474). In any case, the question is, just exactly what does this statement mean?

The first part of the couplet asserts that God “once was” as we are but he is now what he is. Exaltation for God denotes the change from what he “once was” to what he “is.” Furthermore, exaltation for man is the change from what “man is” now to what “man may become”—and “what man may become” is “as God is.” In other words, God was once a man, like us, and he then became what he is now, namely, God; and we can do the same thing and go through the same change from what we are now to becoming the same kind of being as God.

The basic conception that this doctrine expresses is that deity is an open category. The being that we call God was not always “God” but became God by the process that Mormons call exaltation. The beings that we call “man” were not always physical, earthly humans but were divine spirits living in Heaven and are living here temporarily in order to progress toward their own exaltation.

Joseph Smith stated explicitly toward the end of his life that God has not always been God. I will quote three paragraphs in full from his famous 1844 sermon known as the King Follett Discourse so that there can be no question about the context (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 345-46, emphasis in original):

God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens! That is the great secret. If the veil were rent today, and the great God who holds this world in its orbit, and who upholds all worlds and all things by his power, was to make himself visible,—I say, if you were to see him today, you would see him like a man in form—like yourselves in all the person, image, and very form as a man; for Adam was created in the very fashion, image and likeness of God, and received instruction from, and walked, talked and conversed with him, as one man talks and communes with another.

In order to understand the subject of the dead, for consolation of those who mourn for the loss of their friends, it is necessary we should understand the character and being of God and how he came to be so; for I am going to tell you how God came to be God. We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea, and take away the veil, so that you may see.

These are incomprehensible ideas to some, but they are simple. It is the first principle of the Gospel to know for a certainty the Character of God, and to know that we may converse with him as one man converses with another, and that he was once a man like us; yea, that God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth, the same as Jesus Christ himself did; and I will show it from the Bible.

One can easily see the first part of Snow’s couplet, “As man is, God once was,” explicitly in Joseph Smith’s remarks here: “God himself was once as we are now”; “he was once a man like us.” The second part is also found in the same sermon just two paragraphs later:

Here, then, is eternal life—to know the only wise and true God; and you have got to learn how to be Gods yourselves, and to be kings and priests to God, the same as all Gods have done before you, namely, by going from one small degree to another, and from a small capacity to a great one; from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation, until you attain to the resurrection of the dead, and are able to dwell in everlasting burnings, and to sit in glory, as do those who sit enthroned in everlasting power. (Teachings, 346)

Some Mormons will argue that neither this sermon nor Snow’s couplet are included in the LDS scriptures (their “Standard Works”) and therefore are not “official doctrine,” but this is an idle claim. As we have seen, Dan Peterson treats this doctrine without embarrassment or hedging as a doctrine miraculously revealed to Joseph Smith. As evangelical scholar Ron Huggins showed in an important article in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, when the LDS Church is not engaged in public relations, it clearly affirms this doctrine of exaltation, including Snow’s couplet and the King Follett Discourse, as accepted doctrine. The LDS doctrinal manual Gospel Principles, in print continuously since 1978 and published by the LDS Church as a primer on Mormon doctrine for its members, clearly affirms Joseph Smith’s doctrine (Gospel Principles, 2009 ed., 275, 277, 279):

When we lived with our Heavenly Father, He explained a plan for our progression. We could become like Him, an exalted being…. Exaltation is eternal life, the kind of life God lives. He lives in great glory. He is perfect. He possesses all knowledge and all wisdom. He is the Father of spirit children. He is a creator. We can become like our Heavenly Father. This is exaltation….

These are some of the blessings given to exalted people:

1. They will live eternally in the presence of Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ (see D&C 76:62).
2. They will become gods (see D&C 132:20–23).
3. They will be united eternally with their righteous family members and will be able to have eternal increase.
4. They will receive a fulness of joy.
5. They will have everything that our Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ have—all power, glory, dominion, and knowledge (see D&C 132:19–20)….

Joseph Smith taught: “It is the first principle of the Gospel to know for a certainty the Character of God.… He was once a man like us; … God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth, the same as Jesus Christ himself did” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, sel. Joseph Fielding Smith [1976], 345–46).

Our Heavenly Father knows our trials, our weaknesses, and our sins. He has compassion and mercy on us. He wants us to succeed even as He did.

Note that Gospel Principles quotes with approval statements from Joseph Smith’s King Follett Discourse, from the very pages we quoted above, including the statement that God “was once a man like us.” It also affirms that God is “an exalted being” and that we can become exalted beings too, that we can “become gods” in this sense of becoming like God in every way. For example, it asserts that God is “a creator” and that we can “become like” him in this respect. It claims that exalted people will have “all power, glory, dominion, and knowledge,” just like God the Father and Jesus Christ.

Let us draw these ideas together in a brief summary. The LDS doctrine of exaltation, taught by Joseph Smith himself, found in the current Mormon doctrinal primer, and defended by Mormon scholar and apologist Dan Peterson, includes the following doctrinal claims:

• God has not always been God; it is not true that he has been God from all eternity (though he may have existed from all eternity, he has not always existed as God).
• God was once a man like us before becoming God our Heavenly Father.
• God became God and is an exalted man, an exalted being.
• Human beings are the spirit offspring of God, our Heavenly Father. We lived in heaven with God before becoming physical beings here on earth.
• We became human beings precisely so that we would have the opportunity to attain exaltation just as God did.
• Human beings can become “gods” in the sense of becoming exalted beings fully like Heavenly Father in all essential respects, just as he did before us.
• As exalted beings or gods, we can become creators and have all the power, glory, dominion, and knowledge that God the Father has (in the worlds we create).

What we want to know is whether any of the evidence from the New Testament, Jewish literature, or the early church fathers adduced by Peterson really supports the antiquity of any of these doctrinal claims. This is the question that will be addressed in the subsequent installments of this series.

Rob Bowman is the director of research for the Institute for Religious Research in Grand Rapids, Michigan. For a wealth of resources on Mormonism,  please visit IRR’s website.Similar Posts:

• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part Three: The Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith’s Doctrine of Exaltation
• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part Five: Early Church Fathers and Joseph Smith’s Doctrine of Exaltation
• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part Two: The New Testament and Joseph Smith’s Doctrine of Exaltation
• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part Four: Esoteric Jewish Theology and Joseph Smith’s Doctrine of Exaltation
• In What Sense Are Jesus and the Father One? Part III: One in Purpose? C: John 17:21-23

Now I am not sure anyone reading this would voluntarily enter a cult.  If there is an advertisement hung over a building or there were pamphlets distributed that were labeled “cult”, we would probably run as well as if the elements listed below were glaringly obvious.  However, one of the deceptive tricks of cults is to gain members by promoting something attractive that will respond to the desires, wants, and lack that individuals experience.

What I found fascinating is that these elements can (and sadly do) exist in some evangelical churches.  No, not in full bloom that would label the ministry a cult – there are still beliefs founded on the work and person of Christ.   But there are symptoms, I believe, that can create a cult-like ministry.  So here are the five points that were raised in our notes and class discussion that I think make a compelling case for cult-like influences, or even worse, may point to the very existence of a “church” being a cult.

1) Time Factor – teaches new ideas: major cults have developed new ideas about what Christianity is that deviates substantially from the historic understanding of the faith of “what has been believed always, everywhere and by all”.  Christianity has existed for over 2,000 years.  It is founded on the work and person of Christ, and we have his written revelation that provides the foundation according to the apostolic witness.  While understanding of that revelation has certainly grown and developed, the foundation has remained the same.  The first four centuries experienced a refinement of definition  of what exactly is Christianity through the ecumenical councils based on the apostolic witness transmitted through an oral tradition and sacred writings.   What is interesting, is that this refining process was a result of unique ideas that were confronting the church at that time.

In the quest for cultural relevance today, tenets of the Christian tradition can be ignored or rejected in favor new ideas about what Christianity is about.  Some might go so far as to project error on the work and position of the councils or the process by which key doctrine was established.   If church leaders reject that foundation as irrelevant in favor of new doctrines and interpretations, especially where they deviate from what has been handed down, this could be a warning sign.

2)  Doctrine Factor – denies some essential of the faith: with cults, some element of the faith is majorly distorted or eliminated, such as sin, grace or Christ.

The cult-like ministry will probably not overtly present distortions.  But little twists can be introduced that start to uproot the faith.  I believe this is compatible with the time factor, that relies on new ideas and new “revelation” as the presentation of truth.  One reason this could happen is by isolating certain passages, lifting them out of context and/or not correlating them to the unified message of scripture.

Doctrine is important.    It is not some boring academic exercise but is a set of teachings about the tenets of the Christian faith.  Some may even dismiss doctrine as irrelevant and this could be a warning sign.  I love what Spurgeon says about this

Some say such and such doctrine need not be preached and need not be believed.  If it need not be preached, it need not be revealed.  You impune the wisdom of God when you say a doctrine is unnecessary.  For you say that God would reveal something that is not necessary.

Moreover, if a ministry determines that essential Christian doctrine is not valid because of some new or unique interpretation, it could be a sign that the interpretation of scripture is askew.  I think what is important to realize is that scripture serves as the foundation for all distorted doctrine but whose meaning has been subject to faulty hermeneutics.  This makes a solid case for leaders to get properly trained in Bible study methods and hermeneutics, church history and even the original languages to understand what has been handed down based on the complete witness of scripture.

3)  Leadership Factor – elevates leadership to the level of authoritative spokesman: Cult movements have risen on the backs of the leaders that have founded them.  There is something special about the leadership that addresses the needs and desires of people.  Typically, they possess a charismatic personality that facilitates persuasion.  People will follow this person unquestioned.

I am not saying that just because a leader has a magnificent presence, they are automatically suspect.  Rather, this kind of leadership demands unquestioned obedience.  You must believe what this person says as the dispenser of truth.  Questioning their authority would be like questioning the very authority of God.

The church receives gifted leaders for the equipping of the saints (Ephesians 4:11-14).  Those leaders are to train others regarding their growth and participation in the body of Christ to create maturity.  It is not for the sake of promoting the leader, but promoting Christ, as Paul indicates in Colossians 1:28 – “we proclaim him, teaching and admonishing every man, so that we may present every man complete in Christ”.  A leader that is truly pointing others to Christ will get out of the way, so that others see Christ and not the leader.  That will include teaching the flock to examine scripture for themselves, promoting love and unity among the body that will provoke a willingness to serve other.   But if we are talking more about what the pastor said or any other leader that has put himself in an authoritative position, it could be because that leader has exalted their position and teaching over scripture.

4)  Biblical Authority Factor – there is a need for additional authority outside of the Bible:  usually this has come in the form of direct “revelation” from God that has elevated the leader.  It is what I call the Jesus Plus authority, which requires some performance or obedience to a written or verbal code outside of scripture.

The cult-like ministry will tend to undermine the authority of scripture and may have a low view of scripture. This can be intrinsically linked to the leadership factor that makes obedience to the leader on par with obedience to scripture.  There may be an insistence that the leaders’ interpretation of scripture is important, which also may be fueled with other requirements that he insists are needed.  Because there are extra factors incorporated into the fabric of faith, the members’ faithfulness to the ministry may be contingent on performance and result in a legalistic and grace-less community.  Members may get worn out trying to live up to all the standards set for obedience prescribed by the ministry.

By grace are we saved through faith in Christ; it is a free gift due to God’s rich mercies (Ephesians 2:4-9).  Sanctification is orchestrated by God in response to him (Philippians 2:12-13) and we are warned in scripture to accomplish ministry through life in the Spirit as opposed to humanly motivated works (Galatians 3:1-5; Colossians 2:16-18).  That does not negate our human responsibility but there should be a culture of grace and promotion of brotherly love that encourages support and trust in Christ.

5)  Organization Factor – they are the only dispensers of truth. Cults make the claim that they have an exclusive claim on the truth.  Cults will insist they everyone else has missed it.  This is compatible with the leadership factor whereby the leader has been given some kind of  special divine “revelation”.

The cult-like ministry may not be so direct as to proclaim it’s teaching as exclusively true, but it may elevate their teaching above others.  There may even be comparison’s drawn to other churches or doctrines, with an emphasis on how good the ministry’s interpretation is and that no one understands “Christianity” better than this particular ministry.

The truth is, only God is truth and he has revealed his truth through scripture.  His word is truth (John 17:17) but our capacity is fallible.  I believe a pastor that seeks to dispense God’s truth should be on a continual learning path and utilize whatever tools are available to understand God’s word better.  While there should be a confidence in scripture, there has to be the humility to recognize that interpretive errors can, and do, occur.

A big warning sign is when leaders insist that they be the only voice of reason and teaching and discourage instruction from other sources.  In fact, I would say this is a huge red flag.  Why?  Because we learn in community and no one person has a corner on truth.  I believe the pastor that is committed to seeing his flock grow in grace and the true knowledge of Christ will encourage instruction from other sources, including voices of the past.  This is why commentaries and systematic works are so valuable.

In closing, I think the cult-like ministry may take various forms based on one or a combination of these five elements manifested  in a range from the mild to the extreme.  I am not sure that leaders even set out to establish cult-like ministries but can end up taking detours somewhere along the way that results in ministries with these symptoms.  But it ends up having the same devastating impact, nonetheless.  I thought this quote is very revealing of cultish lure in this regard,

But the more secretly they conceal themselves under shelter of the Divine Law, so much the more are they to be feared and guarded against. For they know that the evil stench of their doctrine will hardly find acceptance with any one if it be exhaled pure and simple. They sprinkle it over, therefore, with the perfume of heavenly language, in order that one who would be ready to despise human error, may hesitate to condemn divine words. They do, in fact, what nurses do when they would prepare some bitter draught for children; they smear the edge of the cup all round with honey, that the unsuspecting child, having first tasted the sweet, may have no fear of the bitter. So too do these act, who disguise poisonous herbs and noxious juices under the names of medicines, so that no one almost, when he reads the label, suspects the poison. (Vincent of Lérins, The Commonitory)

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Somewhat surprisingly, in the third edition of Jehovah’s Witnesses Defended Stafford drops his objections to Jesus being properly the object of prayer. Stafford now concedes that Jesus receives, hears, and answers prayer:

“According to the Bible, the Son does hear and respond to our prayers (John 14:13-14). Therefore, no Christian should feel uncomfortable addressing Jesus directly, either as Jesus taught in John 14:13-14 or as Stephen did according to Acts 7:59” (302).

This statement represents a clear change from Stafford’s earlier position (which, again, was and is the standard JW position). Oddly, though, in a footnote Stafford refers readers to the now missing appendix E on John 14:14 from the second edition, in which Stafford had laboriously sought to deny that we may direct prayers to the Son: “For more on the biblical teaching of praying and appealing to Jesus, see Appendix E on pages 583-586 of my Jehovah’s Witnesses Defended….” (302 n. 2). Does he suppose that we have forgotten his earlier view?

As recently as June 2008, Stafford apparently still denied that Jesus was the proper object of prayer, and had intended to include a version of that same appendix in the third edition of his book. Perhaps wrestling with this issue was one of the reasons behind the delay in the book’s release. In any case, Stafford now clearly allows that Christians may properly approach Jesus directly in prayer and that Jesus both hears and answers prayer. One would think this significant change in position would merit some sort of acknowledgment from Stafford that his older doctrine has had to be modified, but to the contrary, Stafford cites his second edition polemic against praying to Jesus as if his position had remained entirely unchanged.

One may state the traditional Christian argument for the identity of Jesus as God from his reception of prayer as a simple syllogism:

• The only proper recipient of prayer is God.
• Jesus is the proper recipient of prayer.
• Therefore, Jesus is God.

I should mention that in Putting Jesus in His Place, Ed and I put this and numerous other lines of evidence in a larger, cumulative-case argument, so that we were not treating this piece of evidence in isolation. Still, the above deductive argument is, we think, a good one. Until recently, Stafford has sought to refute this argument by objecting to the second premise: in his older view, Jesus was not the proper recipient of prayer. Now that Stafford has conceded this second premise, one might suppose that he would have to admit that this argument wasn’t so bad after all. Not so: Stafford now argues that Ed and I are in error in affirming the first premise (with which Stafford himself used to agree).

Ed and I had made the statement, “One basic functional definition [of deity, god, or God] is that a deity is an object of prayer. Any being (real or imagined) perceived to have a supernatural or spiritual nature and to whom devotion is expressed and requests are made is in practical terms one’s deity” (Putting Jesus in His Place, 47). Stafford criticizes this statement, complaining that we “provide no historical discussion or even any modern source for [our] ‘functional definition’ of ‘deity, god, or God’” (Stafford, Jehovah’s Witnesses Defended, 3rd ed., 301). Notice that Stafford does not deny that this functional definition can be supported, only that we didn’t make such documentation explicit. The fact is that various sources do define prayer as communication with a deity or god:

• “an address (as a petition) to God or a god in word or thought” (Merriam-Webster)
• “a reverent petition made to God, a god, or another object of worship” (Free Dictionary)
•  “the act of communicating with a deity” (Princeton)
• “the act of addressing a god or spirit for the purpose of prayer or petition” (Wikipedia)
• “A practice of communication with one’s God” (Wiktionary)

In any case, in the Bible, the only legitimate object of prayer is the one true God, whom the Old Testament calls Yahweh (Jehovah). We cited quite a few biblical texts in support of this point, which is the first premise of the argument as stated above (Gen. 4:26; 1 Chron. 16:8; Ps. 65:2; Is. 44:17; 45:20-22; Joel 2:32). Throughout the rest of the Old Testament, Jehovah alone is the only proper recipient of prayer—and the only deity who really is there and able to answer prayer. So confident of this point was Elijah, the prophet of Jehovah, that he challenged the prophets of Baal to a contest in which “the god who answers . . . is indeed God” (1 Kings 18:24 NRSV). Of course, we know that Jehovah won that contest!

Until recently, Stafford agreed with the first premise of the above argument. Now, however, he dismisses the premise. While he implicitly admits that the premise holds true in the Old Testament, Stafford contends that “God can designate someone else to ‘hear’ and to ‘respond’ to prayers that are directed to such agents but because they are God’s agents who only express his will” (301). Stafford alleges that Ed and I fail “to accept the biblical teaching considered earlier, namely, that God has appointed someone (his most beloved Son) to hear and to respond to our prayers in some sense” (303). Here again, Stafford’s assertion is rather odd, because he has not actually demonstrated from even one biblical text that God had appointed Jesus to hear and respond to prayers as God’s agent. Instead, Stafford deduces that this must be the explanation for prayers directed to Christ, since on other grounds he has already determined that Jesus is not God but only God’s agent. There is no biblical passage teaching that God has assigned to Jesus, as his created agent, the responsibility of hearing and answering prayers on God’s behalf. No such statement appears anywhere in the Bible.

If God had assigned to Jesus, as a creature, the task of receiving and answering prayers as God’s agent, this would be surprising in at least two ways.

1. As Stafford himself seems to concede, it would be unprecedented. No creature in the Old Testament hears and answers prayer on God’s behalf, and in fact the Old Testament everywhere assumes that Jehovah is the only proper recipient of prayer, as has been documented.

2. If God had assigned to a creature the task of hearing and answering prayers as his agent, this would be surprising because it would be inexplicable. Although the idea of the infinite Creator of the universe hearing the prayers of all people (silent as well as audible!) at all times is rather mind-boggling, it is still rationally explicable, because an infinite, transcendent Creator possessing omniscience would presumably have no difficulty hearing (and keeping track of!) all prayers at all times. But this is truly an astonishing activity to suppose any creature capable of performing, even for a minute or two, let alone constantly, at every moment of every day (which is clearly what would be required). If Christ is merely a creature, no matter how great a creature (and undoubtedly Stafford views Christ as a wondrously great creature), it is simply inexplicable how he could hear the prayers of all people who pray to him. As Ed and I pointed out, “Only the transcendent, omniscient, omnipotent God can hear the prayers of all people and respond to them as he chooses” (Putting Jesus in His Place, 47).

I should emphasize here that the really astounding problem for Stafford’s view is not so much that God might answer prayers through Jesus acting as his agent, but that Jesus himself should receive and hear all of the prayers himself. In our book, Ed and I even acknowledged that God is free to choose to answer prayers through created agents: “God may choose to answer prayers through creatures acting as his agents, but that is for him to decide” (ibid.). Stafford ignores this acknowledgment and critiques our position as if we have no awareness of God’s freedom to act through agents. This is a fatal error in his critique. Our position is, not that God cannot delegate certain responsibilities to created agents, but that there are some things that only God can do, and hearing the prayers of all his people is one of those things.

If Jesus can receive and hear all of his people’s prayers, then it would seem that there is nothing Jesus cannot do. Thus, Stafford’s concession implies some astonishing conclusions about Jesus Christ that Stafford’s agent Christology seems ill-equipped to handle.

According to Stafford, in speaking of the reception of prayer as a function of deity Ed and I are defining God in an improper manner. “Bowman and Komoszewski define what it means to be ‘God’ but not in terms of what is done by God. . . . Rather, Bowman and Komoszewski attempt to define what it means to be ‘G-god’ by what is done to God, in this case, prayer.” Stafford’s criticism here illustrates the dangers of treating one aspect of the biblical evidence for the deity of Christ in isolation. We were quite clear in Putting Jesus in His Place that there were multiple streams of evidence for the identity of Jesus as God and that the honors Jesus receives (including prayer) represent just one stream of that biblical evidence. As anyone who has read our book knows, we “define” God in several converging ways, including (among other ways) both what is done by God (his “deeds”) and what is done toward God (his “honors”). Prayer is a perfect example. Jesus both receives the divine honor of receiving prayer and performs the divine deeds of hearing and answering prayer. For example, when Jesus says, “If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it” (John 14:14), we see Jesus receiving divine honors (as the proper object or recipient of prayer, “If you ask me”) and performing divine deeds (as the one who hears the prayer and “will do” it). For largely pedagogical reasons we chose to discuss prayer under the heading of honors instead of deeds, but we could have discussed it under the heading of deeds, or under both headings for that matter.

Finally, John 14:14 directly conflicts with Stafford’s agency Christological explanation of Jesus’ role in answering prayer. Stafford’s position is that believers may approach Jesus in prayer because Jesus acts on Jehovah the Father’s behalf, as his agent. In other words, believers may ask Jesus to do something, on the authority of Jehovah whom Jesus represents as his agent, and Jesus, acting in that capacity as God’s agent, will do it. But there is a key phrase in Jesus’ statement that undermines this theological interpretation: “If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it” (emphasis added). We are so used to hearing prayers ending perfunctorily in the words “in Jesus’ name” that we are likely to miss the point. Jesus here specifically invites his disciples to pray to him, Jesus, in his name, on his own authority—not, as one might have expected, on the authority of the Father.

Stafford might reply that the preceding verse establishes that Jesus was offering to answer prayer on the Father’s behalf: “Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son” (John 14:13). But there is no Son-as-agent principle here. Jesus promises in both verses that he will do whatever the disciples ask in his name. In verse 13, Jesus describes the result (not the condition) as the glorification of the Father in the Son. This is not the Son as a created agent acting only to bring glory to the Creator. Rather, as we see throughout the Upper Room discourse and prayer in John, this is the Father and the Son as two divine persons who are intent on glorifying each other and being glorified in each other (John 13:31-32; 14:13; 15:8; 16:14; 17:1, 4-5).

In conclusion, Jesus’ promise to receive and answer our prayers illustrates all five of the streams of biblical evidence for the deity of Christ discussed in Putting Jesus in His Place:

• Honors: Jesus is the proper recipient of prayer, a supernatural, transcendent person to whom we may rightly bring our petitions.
• Attributes: It is only because the Son is exactly like his Father, sharing in his divine attributes of omniscience and omnipotence, that the Son has the ability to back up his promise to do whatever we ask in his name.
• Names: Those who truly know the Son as their Lord and God (John 20:28) will be perfectly free to pray to the Son in his own “name,” knowing that because the Father and the Son are “one” (John 10:30) whatever glorifies the Son glorifies the Father and vice versa.
• Deeds: Jesus actually hears all of the prayers of his people and answers them.
• Seat: Prayer directed to the Son is directed to one who is intimately alongside the Father in divine glory (John 1:18; 17:5) and thus sits on the very seat of God’s throne, from which he has the authority—not as God’s created agent, but as God’s eternal Son—to receive and answer our prayers.

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Stafford’s first chapter, on the name Jehovah, has grown from 54 pages in the second edition to 126 pages in the third. This represents by far the most sizable addition to the book. He has added about 19 pages defending Christ’s real (though temporal) preexistence against the Unitarian position of Anthony Buzzard. Stafford’s already lengthy treatment of John’s “I am” sayings of Jesus now includes a 13-page discussion of the early interpretation of John 8:58. Perhaps of most interest to some is Stafford’s addition of a 50-page chapter that critiques a Reformed view of human will and predestination. Finally, Stafford’s chapter defending the Watchtower’s position on blood transfusions has been replaced with a chapter that, in part, critiques that position. The rest of the chapter urges a more tolerant approach on various issues of morality, notably “sexual orientation” (homosexuality), regarding which Stafford seems, well, ambivalent. In all, there are almost 200 pages of new material.

In order to add all of this new material to the third edition, Stafford has dropped almost as much material from the second edition. Gone entirely is the second edition’s chapter 3, a 57-page chapter rebutting Trinitarian proof texts for the deity of Christ (Zech. 12:10; Acts 20:28; Rom. 9:5; Col. 2:9; Titus 2:13; Heb. 1:8; Heb. 1:10-12; John 12:41; and the “Alpha and Omega” texts), as well as a 40-page excursus on Sharp’s rule. Gone also are some 13 pages defending the inferiority of Christ to the Father from various texts (John 14:28; 1 Cor. 11:3; 15:28; Mark 13:32/Matt. 24:36; 1 Cor. 8:4-6). Stafford has also dropped all of his earlier appendices, which discussed Luke 23:43, defended Frederick W. Franz, defended the Watchtower’s citations of spiritist Johannes Greber on John 1:1, and defended the NWT rendering of John 14:14. In short, Stafford deemphasizes Christology in the third edition in order to give attention to a wider range of topics without making the book prohibitively long. According to his Introduction to the third edition, he will eventually reprint this omitted material elsewhere.

One apparent reason for the delay in the appearance of the third edition is that Stafford broke ties with the Watchtower Society a few years after the publication of the second edition. Stafford started his own fellowship, the Christian Witnesses of Jah, as a haven for disaffected Jehovah’s Witnesses who do not accept some of its nonbiblical restrictions (e.g., with regard to blood transfusions). Ironically, this means that most Jehovah’s Witnesses will not feel at liberty to read Jehovah’s Witnesses Defended.

From time to time, I will post some additional comments on Stafford’s book. I feel something of a responsibility to do so, because I am the number one target in his book. In fact, in a number of places in the third edition Stafford cites Putting Jesus in His Place: The Case for the Deity of Christ (Kregel, 2007), which I co-authored with Ed Komoszewski. Stay tuned.Similar Posts:

• Greg Stafford on praying to Jesus
• Book Review: Evidence for God
• Did Christ have a Physical Body?
• The Great Trinity Debate Challenge
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“The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, together with the vast majority of Christian denominations in the United States, does not regard the Mormon church as a Christian church. That is because the official writings of Mormonism deny fundamental teachings of orthodox Christianity. For example, the Nicene Creed confesses the clear biblical truth that Jesus Christ, the second Person of the Trinity, is “of one substance with the Father.” This central article of the Christian faith is expressly rejected by Mormon teaching — thus undermining the very heart of the scriptural Gospel itself. In a chapter titled “Jesus Christ, the Son of God: Are Mormons Christian?” the president of Brigham Young University (Rex Lee, What Do Mormons Believe? [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1992] summarizes Mormon teaching by stating that the three persons of the Trinity are “not… one being” (21), but are “separate individuals.” In addition, the Father is regarded as having a body “of flesh and bone” (22). Such teaching is contrary to the Holy Scriptures, destructive to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and indicative of the fact that Mormon teaching is not Christian.”

Presbyterian (USA)

Presbyterians in many parts of the United States live in close proximity with Mormon neighbors. Historically, these contacts with one another have often involved mutual difficulties. Today Presbyterians are challenged to apply the learnings we are gaining about interfaith relations to our relationships with Latter-day Saints.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, like the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), declares allegiance to Jesus. Latter-day Saints and Presbyterians share use of the Bible as scripture, and members of both churches use common theological terms. Nevertheless, Mormonism is a new and emerging religious tradition distinct from the historic apostolic tradition of the Christian Church, of which Presbyterians are a part.

Latter-day Saints understand themselves to be separate from the continuous witness to Jesus Christ, from the apostles to the present, affirmed by churches of the “catholic” tradition.

Latter-day Saints and the historic churches view the canon of scriptures and interpret shared scriptures in radically different ways. They use the same words with dissimilar meanings. When the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints speaks of the Trinity, Christ’s death and resurrection, and salvation, the theology and practices related to these set it apart from the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant churches.

It is the practice of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to receive on profession of faith those coming directly from a Mormon background and to administer baptism. Presbyterians do not invite officials of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to administer the Lord’s Supper.

Roman Catholicism

Question: Wheter the baptism conferred by the community «The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints», called «Mormons» in the vernacular, is valid.

Response: Negative.

The Supreme Pontiff John Paul II, in the Audience granted to the undersigned Cardinal Prefect, approved the present Response, decided in the Sessione Ordinaria of this Congregation, and ordered it published.

Mormons

Yes.

Michael Patton

Since Mormonism has redefined Christianity in such a way that the answer to the question “Who do men say that I am?” is not in accordance with the biblical and historical understanding (e.g. Jesus Christ is the eternal God-man) and since they reject the doctrine of the Trinity as one God who eternally exists in three persons, Mormons cannot be considered Christian without doing violence to the very essence of what it means to be Christian. The Mormon Church follows a different Christ, redefining the designation “Christian” such that the commonality which does exist between Mormonism and Historic Christianity is minimal in comparison to our differences.

Is the Mormon faith a true representation of Christianity? No.

Can individual Mormons be Christian? Only if their belief about who Christ is deviates from official Mormon teachings. In this case, they may be members of the Mormon Church yet hold a traditional view of Christ. Considering the paramount importance of the doctrine of the person of Christ in God’s self-revelation and considering all of the other false teachings of the Mormon Church it is incumbent upon the Mormon to leave the Church in search of a representation of a  biblical and historic Church. It is also incumbent upon orthodox Christians to stress the seriousness of this issue, yet with gentleness and respect.

See our new course on Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, taught by Robert Bowman Jr. here. (New episodes weekly).Similar Posts:

• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part One: The Mormon Doctrine of Exaltation
• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part Three: The Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith’s Doctrine of Exaltation
• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part Two: The New Testament and Joseph Smith’s Doctrine of Exaltation
• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part Five: Early Church Fathers and Joseph Smith’s Doctrine of Exaltation
• Can Heretics Be Saved? Or “Aren’t We All Saved Heretics?”