Not surprisingly, Quarles devotes about half of his review to a discussion of Licona’s handling of this one passage. Quarles offers what appears to me to be a very thoughtful and well considered critique of the apocalyptic interpretation of the pericope, which I will only summarize briefly here. He objects that the text of Matthew gives no clear indication of a shift in genre from historical narrative to apocalyptic. He posits that Licona’s arguments for the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection would also support the historicity of Matthew 27:52-53 (a point Quarles unfortunately does not develop, no doubt due to space constraints). He critiques the claim that the pericope is non-historical because it may be poetic. Quarles emphasizes that it is especially difficult to exclude historical and even evidential intent from Matthew’s statement “they appeared to many.” Finally, Quarles takes exception to Licona’s appeals to pagan parallels. His arguments here are worthy of reading and careful reflection.

Quarles mentions the controversy itself only very briefly at the end of the review:

“Recently, Licona’s position on these two verses has stirred considerable controversy, necessitating a more extensive treatment of his discussion of Matt 27:52-53 than a typical review would warrant. My hope, however, is that a treatment of two verses that amounts to only 6 pages out of the 641 pages of text in the book will not prevent conservative evangelicals from carefully reading and digesting the author’s many fine arguments for the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection” (843-44).

Amen to that.

Quarles offers no further comment on the Licona controversy, not even mentioning Norman Geisler, and says nothing about the claim that Licona’s view of the Matthean pericope is a denial of biblical inerrancy. This is rather ironic, given that JETS is the journal of a society founded on the issue of biblical inerrancy. To his credit, though, and as is appropriate in a book review, Quarles keeps the attention focused where it should be, on the relevant exegetical and hermeneutical issues and not on personalities or red-flag accusations.Similar Posts:

• Press Release: Michael Licona Response to Norm Geisler
• A Possible Error in the Bible?
• Is Inerrancy the Linchpin of Evangelicalism?
• What are the essentials to Christianity? Four Criteria
• Evidence for the Resurrection: Part 2 – External Evidence

“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

The remarks come from James L. Garlow in a guest column at One News Now, an evangelical Internet news outlet. Garlow, a Methodist pastor, author, and activist who sees himself as an advocate for the healing theology of the late John Wimber, came to national prominence earlier this year when Newt Gingrich named him to chair the nonprofit Renewing American Leadership. In his column defending his association with Beck and his “Restoring Honor” rally, Garlow offered the following argument:

Let me ask you a question.  Is your theology “off” at all?  Even one percent?  Only the most arrogant would say, “Oh, my theological understanding is 100% perfect.”  No, we all keep growing.  God’s Word does not change.  God’s truth does not change.  But we grow in our understanding of spiritual, biblical truths.
I suspect my theology is off by 1% or 4% or 7%.  And, I have news for you: yours is too.
Here is my question:  if your theology is off slightly, but you still trust exclusively in Jesus Christ’s death on the cross for your salvation, and in his resurrection, are you still saved?  Going to heaven?  Yes.
How far off might your theology be – and yet still trust exclusively in Jesus Christ’s death on the cross for your salvation, and believe in his resurrection – and still be saved?  Is it 10% or 15% or 20%?  Or what?
My point is this:  all of us are missing part of God’s full truth.  He knows all truth.  I don’t.  I am striving to understand all truth, but it is a journey of maturing in the understanding of God’s Word.
Someone might truly trust in Jesus Christ’s death on the cross for one’s salvation and believe in Jesus as Lord as demonstrated by the resurrection, yet be lacking in many points of doctrine.

This sounds like a plausible objection to thinking that if someone adheres to a heretical theology, such as Mormonism, that theology would not impede a saving faith relationship with Christ. Unfortunately, the argument is quite fallacious. The specific fallacy on exhibit here is popularly known as the fallacy of the beard. It gets its name from the conundrum that it is impossible to specify how many hairs must be on a man’s face before one may conclude definitively that he has a beard. How unshaven may a man’s face be and still not have a beard? Is it 10% or 15% or 20%? How long must the facial hair be before it’s a beard: 1/32 of an inch? 1/16? 1/4? No one can say. Does this mean, then, that we can never assert truthfully that a particular man has a beard? Of course not. When A. J. Jacobs grew his beard as part of his experiment recounted in The Year of Living Biblically, there was not some arbitrary point of time before which he did not have a beard and after which he did have a beard. Yet eventually there was no denying that he had a beard!

Likewise, we may admit that it is impossible to specify some mathematical measure of false doctrine, such that anyone accepting a greater degree of false doctrine cannot be saved. This admission, however, in no way entails the conclusion that a person can believe practically anything and still be saved. Such an argument is an instance of the fallacy of the beard. Underlying the fallacy is the assumption that what marks a person as spiritually lost is a certain amount of false doctrine. That isn’t the case. Heresy, like beardedness, is a qualitative matter, not a quantitative matter. It isn’t the number of erroneous doctrinal assertions to which one holds that constitutes heresy; it’s the nature of those erroneous doctrinal beliefs and of the whole belief system of which they are parts that results in heresy.

The relevance of understanding this particular fallacy for thinking about a contemporary controversial issue like the faith of Glenn Beck illustrates the great need of the church today for critical thinking skills and a deep, sound understanding of the principles of logic. I am very pleased and privileged to have the opportunity, starting tomorrow night, to teach an eight-week online elective course for the fall 2010 semester of The Theology Program on the subject of Critical Thinking. The course will not be a formal academic course on logic per se, although it will cover some fundamentals of logic. Rather, it will be an orientation to the subject of critical thinking that will include introductory (but not superficial) material regarding logic and the major methods of reasoning. Here are just some of the things we will be discussing in this course:

• Does the Bible discourage critical thinking or the use of logic? What about such texts as Proverbs 3:5-6 or Colossians 2:8?
• What exactly is critical thinking? Is it a covert form of relativism, always questioning everything and never arriving at settled conclusions?
• How do we identify and analyze real arguments “in the wild” of books, articles, and other media, as distinguished from simplistic textbook examples of arguments?
• What are legitimate, reasonable ways to challenge someone’s argument? How can we tell if a criticism of an argument is relevant or not?
• What are the values and limitations of deductive and inductive kinds of reasoning?
• What is “inference to the best explanation” and why is it so popular in evangelical apologetics?
• Logicians have identified a plethora of fallacies; how can we get a handle on this subject so we don’t get lost in a maze of technical terms (in Latin!) for all those fallacies?
• Are fallacies always poor reasoning, or can some fallacies be legitimate ways of reasoning in some contexts?
• How can we develop our Christian minds to be skilled in critical thinking without becoming hypercritical, fault-finding nitpickers?

Those who take this course will have access to some excellent Christian writing on subjects relating to critical thinking as well as the opportunity to work through some exercises to hone their skills in this area. The principles and methods studied in the course will be illustrated using examples from apologetics, theology, biblical studies, and ethics. I hope you’ll join me!Similar Posts:

• ARE MORMONS CHRISTIANS 19: Glenn Beck and that Question Again
• Can the Christian faith violate reason?
• Seven Common Fallacies of Biblical Interpretation
• Will Your Faith Grow this Fall?
• Entire APOLOGETICS Program Just $249.99 – For 3 Days

I must confess that I have a similar reaction to the latest “sequel” in the long-running debate over whether Mormons are or can be Christians, prompted this time around by the conservative TV talk-show host Glenn Beck. Do we really need to discuss this question again? Apparently we do, given the lack of clarity that continues to characterize much of what is said on the subject.

The Christian blogosphere recently lit up following the comments of World Magazine online columnist Andrée Seu in which she spoke of Beck not just as a Christian, but as “a new creation in Christ” who is “red hot” toward God. “I can say without hesitation that I have not heard the essentials of the gospel more clearly and boldly in any church than on his program.” Seu acknowledged that Beck is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and admitted that Mormon doctrine is problematic, but described Beck as a latter-day Apollos who needs a Priscilla and Aquila to help him with his theology.

Never Mind!

Evangelical bloggers were quick to contradict Seu. Justin Taylor, one of the most insightful Christians blogging today, commented on “Andrée Seu’s Tragic Mistake on the Gospel of Glenn Beck.” Taylor warned: “It is easy to be moved by talk of having faith in Jesus, without asking who the person understands Jesus to be…. Despite what mainline evangelicalism has taught for years, the gospel is not ‘I trusted in Jesus and he changed my life.’” Russell Moore, an astute Southern Baptist theologian, argued that evangelical enthusiasm for Beck’s religious rhetoric is a sign that American evangelicals have largely traded the gospel for American civil religion:

“It’s taken us a long time to get here, in this plummet from Francis Schaeffer to Glenn Beck. In order to be this gullible, American Christians have had to endure years of vacuous talk about undefined ‘revival’ and ‘turning America back to God’ that was less about anything uniquely Christian than about, at best, a generically theistic civil religion and, at worst, some partisan political movement.”

World Magazine acknowledged Taylor’s blog and offered a retraction, stating, “Our website editing system failed in regard to Andrée’s post about Glenn Beck.” In a separate article, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Marvin Olasky, echoed Moore’s assessment: “Beck is syncretizing Mormon and Christian understanding in the service of a civil religion, but that’s a radically unequal yoking for reasons WORLD has pointed out before.”

One thing that seems to have been overlooked up to now is that Taylor and Moore offer two fundamentally different—and possibly incompatible—diagnoses of the problem. Both argue that evangelical enthusiasm for Beck reveals a lack of discernment and a shallow understanding of the gospel among American evangelicals. Taylor worries that Beck’s evangelical supporters are under the mistaken impression that anyone who claims that Jesus changed his life has accepted the gospel. Moore contends that those same evangelicals have mistaken American civil religion for the gospel. So which is it? Does Beck represent a personal-transformation gospel focused on Jesus as life-changer or a civil-religion gospel focused on a generic theism as the foundation for a stable society? I suppose it is possible to mix the two messages, and perhaps there are elements of both in Beck, but they don’t mesh naturally.

Mormon doctrine in two minutes

The main objection to viewing Beck as an advocate for the gospel is that the theology of the LDS Church, of which Beck is a member, is radically incompatible with the biblical gospel. The divide between biblical teaching and Mormon doctrine is so wide that from an evangelical perspective Mormonism falls outside the circle of acceptable, authentic expressions of the Christian faith. The crucial problems with LDS doctrine that impinge directly on one’s view of Jesus Christ and the gospel include the following unbiblical claims:

• All human beings preexisted in heaven, where they were the offspring of heavenly parents (God the Father and a “heavenly mother”), before their natural conception here on earth.
• Our Heavenly Father was a man who became a God—proving that we, too, can become gods.
• Jesus Christ is the “firstborn” of God’s billions of spirit children and the first of those children to become a God.
• As such, Christ is one of three Gods in the “Godhead,” as is the Holy Spirit, another of God’s spirit sons.
• Christ is the “Only Begotten,” which means that he is the only human being whom God the Father literally begat in the flesh. God is Jesus’ literal father in the flesh (allowing Jesus to “inherit” some divine powers other humans do not have) and Mary is his literal mother.
• Christ’s atonement guarantees immortal life in some heavenly kingdom to virtually all human beings, including those who willfully reject Christ.
• Christ (and God the Father) appeared to Joseph Smith to tell him to join none of the churches because all of them were wrong and their creeds were an abomination.
• Through Joseph Smith, God restored lost scriptures (e.g., the Book of Mormon) and inspired new ones (Doctrine & Covenants), from which Mormons learn the doctrines that set them apart from the rest of Christianity.
• Christ organized the only true Church in these latter days with a hierarchical system of “priesthood authority” required to teach or baptize others.
• Full forgiveness of sins and entrance into the highest heavenly kingdom, where God and Christ live, come to those who become members of the LDS Church, follow its teachings, and participate in its temple rituals, notably baptisms and other rites performed on behalf of the dead.
• The ultimate goal of the gospel and of LDS religion is to become gods, with the same powers and potential as the Heavenly Father.

You can find full documentation and discussion of these doctrinal problems in the LDS faith on the website of the Institute for Religious Research (IRR), where I am the director of research. In particular, we provide a thorough analysis of the doctrine taught in the LDS Church’s basic manual on doctrine, called Gospel Principles. Frankly, the evidence is overwhelming that the LDS understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ is radically different from that of the Bible.

“Mormons are not Christians”: Do they hear what we hear?

As I have already observed, these differences deal with such basic elements of Christianity that from an evangelical perspective we must conclude that Mormonism falls outside the boundaries of doctrinally authentic, theologically viable Christian faith. The usual shorthand way of making this point is to say that Mormons are not Christians. Unfortunately, what such a statement achieves in simplicity and rhetorical punch it loses in clarity and comprehension. What people hear when they are told that Mormons are not Christians may be any of the following:

1.      “Mormons are not nice people.”
2.       “Mormons are really part of another religion altogether, such as Hinduism.”
3.      “Mormons are another entirely different religion by themselves.”
4.       “Mormons are not saved from eternal condemnation.”

All four of these meanings are problematic.

(1) Many Mormons are very nice people indeed, so this statement is also objectively false, even assuming that it is ever appropriate to use the term Christian to mean a nice person.

(2) It is objectively false to classify Mormonism as part of another world religion, such as Hinduism. Regrettably, some Christians have actually tried to make the case that Mormonism is Hindu. Dave Hunt and Ed Decker, in their notorious book The God Makers (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 1984), argued as much:

“Although it uses Christian language to disguise its paganism, Mormonism is less Christian than it is Hindu. The basic dilemma faced by every Mormon is a direct result of its Hindu roots” (60).

The claim that Mormonism has “Hindu roots” is historically false. Mormonism historically arose as a Christian heresy—a religious offshoot of Christianity that still retains a focus on Christ as its central religious figure, albeit reinterpreted in a thoroughly unbiblical way. The LDS religion has no historical or religious connection to Hinduism and rejects basic Hindu concepts (e.g., Mormonism rejects the worship of idols, pantheism, reincarnation, and karma). There are similarities between Hinduism and Mormonism (as there are between any two religions), such as a belief in a plurality of gods, but such comparisons are superficial because the similar-sounding affirmations have completely different meanings in the contexts of the two religious traditions.

(3) Others have argued that Mormonism is sui generis, that is, in a class by itself, sufficiently distinct from Christianity to be classified as a new world religion. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, suggests that instead of viewing Mormonism as a “Christian faith” we should classify it charitably as “the fourth Abrahamic faith.” That is, Land proposes that we view Mormonism as a religion stemming from the Abrahamic tradition alongside Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This way of classifying Mormonism simply will not hold up. There is no more reason to classify Mormonism as a new Abrahamic faith than there is to so classify the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian heresy as large or larger and as diffused throughout the world as Mormonism. Indeed, there are numerous sects of Christianity that distance themselves theologically and religiously from orthodox Christianity while insisting that theirs is the true Christian church; Mormonism is simply one among many such sects. Historical, religious, and theological comparisons demonstrate that the Mormon tradition (including both the LDS Church and its hundred-plus splinter sects) belong in the broader category of “restorationist” Christian movements that view themselves as the instrument of true Christianity today. These include Adventism and its offshoots, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christadelphianism and other forms of so-called Biblical Unitarianism, Oneness Pentecostalism, the Sacred Name groups, The Way International and its offshoots, and the LDS Church and its offshoots, among others.

(4) It may well be argued that LDS doctrine and religion are so far removed from the biblical gospel that most Mormons will not believe the true gospel as long as they remain committed to LDS doctrine. However, this leaves plenty of room for a small fraction of LDS Church members to believe the biblical gospel in defiance or ignorance of their religion’s teachings. In any religion, there are always people who still consider themselves members but who are rethinking their beliefs or who are transitioning out of the religion. Many evangelicals who have come out of the LDS Church found saving faith in Christ before they removed themselves from the LDS membership rolls. Indeed, some retain their LDS membership, hoping eventually to bring their families and friends out with them. One could argue that such individuals are Mormons in name only, but again, there are people along a spectrum of situations from true-blue Mormons through pick-and-choose Mormons to Mormons in name only. The point is that unqualified generalizations about all Mormons are difficult to justify. And of course, we are not competent to judge the souls of other people, although we can make educated guesses as to their faith based on what we can observe.

A more nuanced statement of point (4) would be to say that we should presume that Mormons who accept and follow the LDS understanding of the gospel will be lost unless they repent and accept the biblical gospel (Eph. 2:1-10; Titus 3:4-7). Putting the matter this way recognizes the spiritually destructive effects of the false teachings of the LDS Church, while allowing for the fact that sometimes it is difficult to tell whether or to what extent a particular Mormon actually accepts (or understands) LDS doctrine. If this is the position that evangelicals should take—and I think it is—it becomes problematic to make the generalized, unqualified statement that Mormons are not Christians. That is, it is unlikely that anyone hearing “Mormons are not Christians” will understand this to carry the nuanced meaning “Mormons who follow the LDS understanding of the gospel are presumed lost.” If we want people to hear what we really mean, we must try to articulate our view more accurately, even if it loses some punch.

One might suppose that the problem can be avoided by saying that Mormonism is not Christian—that is, by punting on the question of whether Mormons are Christians and instead asserting only that the religion of Mormonism is itself not Christian. This may be something of an improvement, but the same sorts of problems remain. If Mormonism is not Christian, what is it? It is not part of another religion, nor is it a completely different religion.

Of course, from an evangelical theological perspective it can be even more misleading to say, without qualification, that Mormons are Christians, or that Mormonism is Christian. Such statements would seem erroneously to concede that the LDS Church is a legitimate denomination of Christianity, standing alongside those denominations and independent church bodies that affirm the essentials of the biblical gospel. I’m all for stating matters as generously as we can, but not at the expense of the truth of the gospel.

Considerations such as those just discussed are the reason why, for several years now, I have argued that we should view the question “Are Mormons Christians?” as unproductive at best and misleading at worst. The question assumes that we should give it an unqualified “Yes” or “No” answer, neither of which is fully satisfactory. About three years ago on this very blog I addressed this question at some length, arguing that the answer depends on how one defines the term Christian. (That blog post was lost due to technical issues, so I re-posted it about two years ago with some revisions at IRR’s blog, The Religious Researcher.) If by “Christians” one means all members of all of the religious groups that belong to the world-religions classification of Christianity, then of course in that generic sense Mormons are Christians, along with everyone else who claims to be. If one uses the term to denote persons who have been saved from eternal condemnation through their faith in Jesus Christ, then the best answer we can give is that most Mormons evidently are not Christians in that sense although some may be. Evangelicals would also have to hedge their answer if they were asked “Are Southern Baptists Christians?” or even “Are evangelicals Christians?” since not all Southern Baptists or evangelicals have genuinely come to saving faith in Christ. After all, basic to evangelical doctrine is the conviction that merely accepting evangelical doctrine, or associating oneself with an evangelical denomination, will not save anyone, since it is through personal faith or trust in Christ, not merely doctrinal correctness or the right religious affiliation, that God saves us.

To avoid overreaching, I have proposed that we make qualified statements that are defensible as objective statements of fact concerning the LDS faith. For example, we can state that Mormons are not orthodox Christians, or that LDS theology is heretical. Mormons will, of course, dispute our understanding of what is orthodox and what is heretical, but we can define these terms to convey an objective meaning. For example, we can stipulate that orthodox means in agreement with the major Christian doctrines articulated in the creeds from the first through the fifth centuries, while heretical means deviating from those doctrinal standards. We should, in short, make clear that while we acknowledge that Mormons sincerely regard themselves to be followers of Jesus Christ, we are convinced that the LDS religious tradition is at odds with the essentials of the Christian faith as taught in the Bible.

Back to Beck

The need for a more flexible and nuanced approach to the subject of whether Mormons are Christians is well illustrated with the example of Glenn Beck. Let me state categorically that I have absolutely no inkling or opinion as to the state of Beck’s soul or the genuineness of his faith in Christ. I have never met him, do not follow his program, and do not have enough information on which to base a conclusion. The fact that Beck is LDS is, of course, of great concern and creates a general presumption that he is in need of the biblical gospel of salvation. On the other hand, there does seem to be some evidence that Beck’s personal understanding of the gospel is at least far closer to the evangelical message than one would expect of a typical Mormon. Consider, for example, the assessment of Beck’s soteriology (doctrine of salvation) offered just a few weeks ago by Bill McKeever. McKeever is the director of Mormonism Research Ministry, an evangelical parachurch organization based in the Salt Lake City area, right in the heart of the Mormon culture. McKeever and his associates at MRM are far from “soft” on Mormonism. They regard it as a heretical distortion of Christianity, and they actively seek to help Christians share the true gospel with Mormons. McKeever recently wrote an article for his website on “The Not-So Mormon Soteriology of Glenn Beck” in which he quoted the following remarks made by Beck on his television program on July 13, 2010:

“You cannot earn your way into heaven. You can’t! There is no deed, no random act of kindness, no amount of money to spread around to others that earns you a trip to heaven. It can’t happen. It’s earned by God’s grace alone, by believing that Jesus died on the cross for you. This is what Christians believe…. I also am wise enough to know that people will say, yeah, but Glenn Beck is a Mormon, he’s not even a real Christian. You can believe what you want. I will tell you that I am a man who needed the atonement more than most people do. I appreciate the atonement. I accept Jesus as my Savior. I know that I am alive today because I did give all of it to Him because I couldn’t carry it anymore.”

McKeever, who wonders aloud if Beck’s “close relationships with several evangelical Christians are not having a positive effect,” concludes that “it seems apparent that Beck does not agree with traditional Mormon soteriology…. Whether or not he knows he is out of harmony with his church, I cannot say, but if I understand the above correctly, he most certainly is.” McKeever admits that Beck might mean something different from what his words mean to evangelicals, but he finds no reason to suspect that Beck is anything but sincere and straightforward.

The point, again, is not to argue that Beck is or is not a Christian in the sense of someone genuinely redeemed from sin through authentic faith in Jesus Christ. He may be, we may and should hope that he is or will be, and those of us who have opportunity to engage him or other Mormons like him should caringly present the biblical gospel without compromise. The point, rather, is that in the real world people’s beliefs and affiliations are not always consistent or cut-and-dried. Most people’s thinking reflects a mix of religious, philosophical, and cultural beliefs, values, and assumptions. Making blanket statements about whether the members of a particular group are or are not Christians mistakenly assumes a uniformity of belief within the group that in most cases is simply not there. Avoiding such statements will enhance our credibility with those whom we are seeking to reach with biblical truth. It will help to foster mutual respect and constructive dialogue with those who need to know what true Christianity really means.

Similar Posts:

• Millet Lite: Mormon Scholar’s Christology Sounds Great, But It’s Less Filling
• Of Glenn Beck and Beards
• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part One: The Mormon Doctrine of Exaltation
• Those Pesky “Closet Doctrines”
• Did Joseph Smith Restore Theosis? Part Two: The New Testament and Joseph Smith’s Doctrine of Exaltation

Trinitarianism versus Unitarianism: Defining the Issues

The doctrine of the Trinity is biblical if and only if all of the following propositions are biblical teachings:

1. One eternal uncreated being, the LORD God, alone created all things.
2. The Father is the LORD God.
3. The Son, who became the man Jesus Christ, is the LORD God.
4. The Holy Spirit is the LORD God.
5. The Father and the Son stand in personal relation with each other.
6. The Father and the Holy Spirit stand in personal relation with each other.
7. The Son and the Holy Spirit stand in personal relation with each other.

The only theological position that affirms all seven of the above propositions is the Trinity. However, each of these propositions finds affirmation in at least one or more non-Trinitarian doctrines. Biblical Unitarianism affirms #1, #2, and #5; Jehovah’s Witnesses affirm #2 and #5; Mormonism affirms #3 and #5, #6, and #7; and Oneness Pentecostalism affirms #1, #2, #3, and #4. Since each of these propositions has some non-Trinitarian theologies that affirm them, none of these propositions presupposes the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity just happens to be the one theological position that can and does affirm all of the propositions.

Partisans for these different theologies claim that the Bible clearly teaches the propositions they affirm out of the seven listed above. Biblical Unitarians and Oneness Pentecostals think it is obvious from the Bible that the LORD God alone created all things; Oneness Pentecostals think it is obvious from the Bible that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one God; Mormons think it is obvious from the Bible that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are personally distinct. I agree with them! The Bible does clearly teach all seven of the above propositions.

Yet, when Trinitarians appeal to the Bible in defense of these same propositions, non-Trinitarians claim that Trinitarians approach the Bible from a biased Trinitarian perspective. Admittedly, a Trinitarian may be biased, just as anyone may be, but adherence to any one of these propositions is not in and of itself evidence of Trinitarian bias, since there are anti-Trinitarians who also agree in each case that the proposition is clearly taught in the Bible.

What really drives criticism of the doctrine of the Trinity is the perception that it is illogical, unreasonable, and irrational. Critics of the doctrine universally argue that it is logically impossible to affirm all seven of the above propositions at the same time. This is an important issue in its own right, but it is not the question we are addressing in this debate. The question here is which doctrine—Unitarianism or Trinitarianism—is most faithful to all that the Bible teaches. If the Bible teaches all seven propositions, then Trinitarianism is the correct answer to that question. I do not think the doctrine of the Trinity is illogical, but I do think that it may be that this is one aspect of God’s being that is beyond our comprehension. As I argued in Part 1 of this debate, the Bible does teach that God is incomprehensible, and so we ought not to reject a doctrine such as the Trinity merely because we find it logically puzzling. For those who are interested in the philosophical question of how the doctrine of the Trinity can be coherent—that is, how one can affirm all seven propositions—I recommend a new book by Thomas H. McCall, Which Trinity? Whose Monotheism? Philosophical and Systematic Theologians on the Metaphysics of Trinitarian Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010).

Since Unitarians and Trinitarians agree that the LORD God alone created the world (#1), that the Father is the LORD God (#2), and that the Father and the Son are personally distinct (#5), I have no obligation in this debate to defend these propositions. If I were debating a Mormon, a Jehovah’s Witness, or a Oneness Pentecostal, the debate would look very different, because I would be spending much of my time defending propositions that Dave and I both affirm!

Setting aside the three propositions to which both Unitarians and Trinitarians agree, this leaves four propositions for me to defend. However, the task can be simplified considerably. Basically, Trinitarians and Unitarians have two key differences. First, Trinitarianism affirms that Jesus Christ, the Son, is the LORD God; Unitarianism denies this claim. Second, Trinitarianism affirms that the Holy Spirit is a person; Unitarianism, particularly as Dave and other Christadelphians espouse it, does not. If the Holy Spirit is a person, Christadelphians will have to concede that he is distinct from the Father (who sent him) and the Son. Thus, in this debate I have focused on defending two claims: (1) that Jesus Christ is the LORD God, and (2) that the Holy Spirit is a distinct person.

In what follows, I will do little more than review the discussion that Dave and I had in the first five rounds of this debate. The rest of this post contains numerous hyperlinks that will take the reader to the specific posts or comments to which I refer. This will hopefully make this concluding post a useful point of departure for those wishing to follow and understand the back-and-forth discussions that we have had.

ONE GOD = THE FATHER: A REVIEW OF DAVE’S ARGUMENT

Most of Dave’s argumentation has focused on defending the claim that the Father alone is the LORD God to the exclusion of Jesus Christ. Dave’s main arguments for this claim were as follows:

• The Bible says that God is one (Deut. 6:4, the Shema), and the Jews have always understood this to mean that God is unipersonal. Since Jesus and the apostles, who were all Jewish, affirmed the biblical teaching that God is one (e.g., Mark 12:29), they must also have believed that God is unipersonal.
• The pervasive use of singular pronouns for God throughout the Bible proves that God is unipersonal, whereas the plural pronouns in Genesis 1:26 can refer to angelic members of the heavenly court.
• Jesus identified the Father as the only true God and excluded himself as that God (John 17:3), and elsewhere denied claiming to be God (John 10:34-36).
• Paul explicitly identified the “one God” as the Father and in that context distinguished him from Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 8:6).
• The Bible consistently teaches that Jesus Christ is a human being and that he needed to be a human being in order to redeem us; and he cannot be both a human being and God.
• The NT’s explicit teaching that Jesus is the Son of God is incompatible with identifying him as the LORD God.

Therefore, Dave concludes, God is a unipersonal being and is the Father alone, whereas Jesus Christ is not and cannot be God. Here is how I have responded to these arguments.

Jesus and the Shema. The Shema affirms that the LORD (Yahweh, Jehovah) is “our God” and is “one,” but, as I pointed out it in Part 1, it does not address the nature of God’s oneness. If we are to determine how Jesus and the apostles understood the Shema, we must let them speak for themselves in the NT. In fact, Jesus included himself with the Father in the identity of the “one” (John 10:30), and Paul referred to Jesus as the “one Lord” (1 Cor. 8:6; 12:4; Eph. 4:5).

Pronouns. The pervasive use of singular pronouns for God is perfectly consistent with Trinitarianism, which views the LORD God as one indivisible, infinite, and personal Being. In a comment on the issue of pronouns, I showed that singular personal pronouns do not always refer to a single person (e.g., Psa. 25:22; 130:8) and gave several reasons why the plural pronouns in Genesis 1:26 cannot refer to angelic members of the heavenly court.

Jesus never denied that he was God. In John 17:3, Jesus affirmed that the Father is the only true God. In Part 2, I explained that since Trinitarianism affirms that there is only one true God and that the Father is God, Jesus’ statement here actually agrees with Trinitarianism. The disjunction in that verse is not between Jesus Christ and God, but between Jesus Christ and the Father. At most, one might claim that John 17:3 implicitly excludes Jesus from being “true God,” but it does not do so explicitly. Thus, John 17:3 must be correlated with the rest of what John says about Jesus Christ, not used to deny what other texts explicitly say. Likewise, in John 10:34-36 Jesus did not deny that he was God, as I explained in a comment on John 10:31-39.

1 Corinthians 8:6—Jesus is the “one Lord.” A good deal of our debate focused on 1 Corinthians 8:4-6. In Part 3, I argued that Paul’s reference to that Father as the “one God” and Jesus as the “one Lord” both clearly allude to the Shema, so that the text identifies Jesus as the LORD himself. Against Dave’s objection that Paul’s use of the words “one God” exclusively for the Father disproves the Trinitarian claim that Jesus is God, I explained in an important rebuttal comment that this objection confuses vocabulary with meaning. 1 Corinthians 8:6 no more denies that Jesus is God than it denies that the Father is Lord. In a follow-up comment, I replied to some other objections from Dave and pointed out that Erik Waaler’s dissertation The Shema and the First Commandment in First Corinthians, which he had cited, thoroughly supports my conclusion. In another follow-up comment, I responded to James McGrath’s recent attempt to refute the same conclusion.

Jesus is a man. Unfortunately, throughout the debate Dave has insisted on treating the fact that Jesus was a real man as a key difference between Unitarianism and Trinitarianism. He claims, despite the emphasis with which Trinitarians throughout church history have affirmed that Jesus was a man, that they cannot really mean it. For example, after ticking off various aspects of Christ’s humanity, including his virgin birth, growth as a child, temptation, sinlessness, death, and resurrection, Dave claimed: “None of this is true of the Trinitarian Jesus.” As I pointed out in my rebuttal comment, this is a slanderously false criticism. There is nothing intrinsic to the nature or experience of being human that orthodox Christians do not regard as true about Jesus. This truth is absolutely essential to orthodox doctrine. Dave claims that I as a Trinitarian cannot affirm that Jesus is a man “without qualification.” However, not only is this not so, but it is Dave who must qualify and equivocate much of what the NT says about Christ. Thus, Dave doesn’t think the NT means it when it calls Jesus God, says that all things were created through him, or says that he came down from heaven.

Jesus is the Son of God. Dave also made the interesting—and bizarre—claim that Biblical Unitarians believe that Jesus is the “literal” Son of God. But as I pointed out in response, Unitarians do not believe that Jesus is God’s “literal” Son because they do not believe that God procreated Jesus or that Jesus is the same kind of being as God. In another comment, I showed that even though “Son of God” in Jewish parlance might be used simply as a synonym for “Messiah,” Jesus’ claim to be the Son of God was repeatedly understood by the Jews as claiming equality with God (John 5:17-18; 10:30-33; 19:7).

MY LORD AND MY GOD: THE CASE FOR THE ETERNAL DEITY OF CHRIST

As a Unitarian, Dave affirms that Jesus Christ is an exalted man in heaven, deputized by God to perform divine functions on his behalf. Thus, Jesus Christ is not really God at all. However, because he performs divine functions on God’s behalf, the Bible occasionally refers to Jesus as “God” in the sense of acknowledging him as God’s agent. Dave claims that the Bible speaks of other creatures as God’s agent in this way as well.

My case for believing that Jesus Christ is God, over against this Unitarian construct, rests on three main points: Christ’s preexistence, honors, and names.

Christ’s Divine Preexistence

The NT teaches in a variety of contexts that Jesus Christ preexisted his human life, especially in John (1:1-3, 9-10, 14-18; 8:56-59; 13:3; 16:28; 17:5), Paul (Rom. 8:3; 1 Cor. 10:4, 9; 2 Cor. 8:9; Gal. 4:4-6; Phil. 2:3-8; Col. 1:12-17), and Hebrews (1:1-3, 10-12; 2:17; 7:3; 10:5). We had the opportunity to discuss some of these passages in detail.

Galatians 4:4-6. Paul’s statement that in the fullness of time “God sent his Son, coming to be of a woman, coming to be under the Law” (Gal. 4:4) speaks of God’s Son as someone who already existed and then became a Jewish human being. In a comment on Galatians 4:4 responding to Dave, I pointed out four exegetical details in the passage that converge to show that this is the correct understanding of Paul’s statement.

Philippians 2:3-8. In Part 3, I made three key points in my brief discussion of Philippians 2 that support the conclusion that Paul there teaches the preexistence of Christ and that Dave completely side-stepped. (1) Paul uses Christ’s deference to God the Father as the ultimate illustration of a person treating an equal as someone more important than himself (vv. 3-5). This makes perfect sense if Christ was by rights equal with God but makes no sense if Christ is by rights not equal with God. (2) Christ existed in God’s form but took the form of a servant (vv. 6-7). I explained why this means that Christ existed in heaven in the glorious appearance of God but graciously took on the humble appearance of God’s servant. (3) Christ “emptied himself,” that is, humbly gave of himself, by “becoming in the likeness of human beings,” and he found himself in outward appearance as a man (v. 7). As I put it, “A human being cannot humble himself to become a human being because that is what he already and originally is. What Paul says here, then, must refer to Christ’s decision before the Incarnation to become a human being.” Dave failed to engage any of these arguments, and instead rather outrageously claimed that I “didn’t present any” evidence for my view. I reiterated these points and responded to Dave’s other criticisms in a detailed comment on Philippians 2.

All things created through Christ (John 1:3, 10; 1 Cor. 8:6; Col. 1:16; Heb. 1:2). John, Paul, and Hebrews all teach that “all things” were created “through” the preexistent Jesus Christ (whom John calls the Logos and Paul and Hebrews call the Son and Lord). Dave’s strategy for handling the Pauline and Hebrews texts is to argue that “all things” (or “the ages” in Heb. 1:2) refers to the new creation that comes through Christ’s redemptive acts, not the original creation. I explained in a comment why this interpretive strategy will not work, comparing the language used for Christ’s role in creation to the language used for God’s role. In a comment on Hebrews 1:1-4, I also discussed the meaning of tous aiōnas (“the ages”) in Hebrews 1:2 and showed why it must also refer to the totality of creation. Dave had argued that when Hebrews 1:10-12 quotes Psalm 102:25-27 concerning the Lord creating the universe, it is referring to the Father rather than the Son. In my comment on Hebrews 1:5-13, I showed why that will not hold up exegetically and why Hebrews does apply that Psalm text to the Son.

Jesus is the Logos, who is God, incarnate (John 1:1-18). In Part 2, I laid out in summary form a Trinitarian understanding of this passage: the Logos, who was personally distinct from God and yet was God, became flesh as the human being Jesus Christ. Dave argued that John 1:1 means not that the Logos was “God” but that it was “divine,” and that the subject of John 1:1-3 is not Jesus (who is not mentioned there), but the impersonal Logos. Dave also proposed that John 1:10 should be exegeted to mean that the world “was split” or divided by Christ’s life and mission on earth.

In my first comment on John 1 in response, I pointed out that the omission of the name “Jesus” from John 1:1-3 is no more significant than its omission in Colossians 1:15-20 or Hebrews 1. In another comment on John 1, I showed that the Logos is a preexistent person and explained why John 1:10 must mean that the world “came into existence,” not “was split,” by Christ (a truly unprecedented and indefensible exegesis as far as I can tell). In a long comment on “God” in John 1:1c, I explained why the translation “the Word was divine” is simply untenable. As I showed in that comment, no major Bible version ever translates the nominative theos as “divine” in any other verse (LXX or NT), because it simply is not used with that adjectival meaning. The data overwhelmingly proves that “God” is the correct rendering.

Confusing preexistence with predestination? Dave argued that any NT passage that seems to describe Christ as preexistent is actually using language familiar in Judaism to speak of God foreknowing or predetermining his plans for human beings. According to Dave, this use of “preexistence” language is reflected in the Talmud and in texts that refer to God calling or preparing his prophets before they existed (e.g., Assumption of Moses 1:14; Jer. 1:5). Dave also quoted at length from Sigmund Mowinckel’s book He That Cometh to prove that in Jewish thought the Messiah was described as preexistent only in this predestinarian sense.

In my comment on preexistence in Talmudic Judaism, I showed that in general when the rabbis said that something existed or was created before the world, they meant it literally (e.g., Eden, Gehenna, the Torah). When they did not mean it literally, they typically said so (“Some of them were created, and some of them arose in the thought of God to be created”). The rabbis did not say that the Messiah preexisted but only that his name preexisted—a distinction that Dave’s argument overlooked. In my comment on prophetic calling texts, I pointed out that in such texts as Assumption of Moses 1:14 and Jeremiah 1:5 attribute no existence or activity to the prophet; they simply state that God prepared, designed, or predetermined that the prophet would serve in that calling. Finally, I showed in another comment that Dave had quoted Mowinckel out of context. Mowinckel shows that the Jewish “Son of Man” was a really (not ideally) pre-existent, heavenly, divine being. Thus, careful study of the Jewish background to the NT actually turns Dave’s argument on its head and shows that the NT preexistence language for Christ refers to him as a really preexistent divine person.

John 13:1-3 and 16:28. In John 13:1-3, John tells us that Jesus knew he had come from God and was going back to God. In John 16:28, Jesus asserts that he came from the Father into the world and was about to leave the world and go to the Father. As I explained in Part 4, since Biblical Unitarians agree that Jesus literally left the world and went to the Father, they cannot plausibly deny that these verses mean that Jesus literally left the Father to come into the world. Furthermore, the disciples acknowledge immediately after Jesus’ statement that he was not speaking figuratively (John 16:29)! These statements prove that Christ literally preexisted his human life.

Christ’s Divine Honors

The NT reveals that the Son is the proper recipient or object of worship, prayer, spiritual singing, fear (reverence), absolute love, and other honors that in a religious context all belong only to God (e.g., Matt. 9:28; 10:37; 14:33; 28:17; John 5:23; 8:24; 14:1, 14-15; Acts 1:24-25; 7:59-60; 16:31; Rom. 10:11-13; 1 Cor. 1:2; 10:16-22; 16:22; 2 Cor. 5:10-11; 12:7-9; Eph. 5:19-21; 6:24; Phil. 2:10-11; Col. 3:22-25; Heb. 1:6; 1 Peter 2:6; 3:14-16; 1 John 5:13-15; Rev. 5:9-14; 22:1-3, 20-21). The hypothetical construct that he is God’s human agent simply does not account for this unreserved showering of divine honors on Christ.

The divine honors that Dave and I discussed were prayer to and worship of Christ. In a comment on Romans 10:9-13, I showed, contrary to Dave’s objection, that “calling upon the name of the Lord” does mean praying, and that the NT instructs us to direct this activity toward Jesus Christ. I also argued that in order for Jesus to attend to any and all prayers directed his way, he must know what is in the hearts of all people at all times. This means that he needs to have the divine nature commensurate to the task.

Regarding the worship of Christ, Dave argued that the Greek word for worship (proskuneō) need not imply that Christ is God, since human beings in the Bible sometimes “bow down” (proskuneō) to other human beings. The problem is that the contexts in which the exalted Christ receives worship are clearly religious contexts. The disciples worship the risen Christ on the mountain (Matt. 28:17); if Christ was only an exalted man, would this not be like the Israelites worshipping Moses when they should have been worshipping God? In Part 2, I argued that the surrounding context of this worship makes it a religious act, and in a follow-up comment I defended this interpretation. In that same comment, I also responded to the argument from silence that the Bible never refers to Christ as the object of actions described using the latreuō or sebomai word groups. Hebrews 1:6 reveals that the angels also worship Christ, quoting an OT text (probably Deut. 32:43) in which God was the object of their worship. (In my follow-up comment on Hebrews 1:5-13, I briefly discussed some problems with Dave’s claim that Israel, not God, was the object of angelic worship in Deuteronomy 32:43.) In a later comment on Revelation 4-5, I gave four reasons why the worship that the Lamb receives in Revelation 5 must be regarded as the highest act of religious worship.

Christ’s Divine Names

The third major line of evidence for the eternal deity of Christ that I discussed in this debate is his divine names or titles.

While the Greek word kurios could mean simply “master,” in religious contexts quoting from or alluding to OT texts and motifs the term stands for the Hebrew name Yahweh (“Jehovah” or “the LORD”), which was the distinctive name of God in the OT. Examples of the NT calling Jesus “Lord” where this clearly means the LORD Jehovah are too numerous to dismiss. In addition to 1 Corinthians 8:6, I drew special attention to Romans 10:9-13 and Philippians 2:9-11 as examples in Part 3 of this debate (see also the follow-up comments on Romans 10:9-13 and Philippians 2:3-11). My treatment of 1 Corinthians 8:6 included a paragraph summarizing the evidence that Paul referred to Jesus as the LORD Jehovah repeatedly in 1 Corinthians. For example, Paul uses the expressions “calling on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ” and “the day of the Lord Jesus Christ,” two allusions to Joel 2:31-32, in the same context (1 Cor. 1:2, 8).

Although the number of texts that call Jesus “God” is comparatively few, they are potent in theological significance. I have already explained why John 1:1c (“and the Logos was God”) refers to the preincarnate Christ and identifies him as “God” (not describe an impersonal “logos” as “divine”). Dave acknowledges that Hebrews 1:8 refers to Jesus as “God,” and I explained (again in Part 3) why this reference cannot be explained away as meaning only that Jesus was God’s agent. Most difficult for the Unitarian position, however, is John 20:28, where Thomas confessed Jesus as “my Lord and my God!” Dave admitted that Thomas called Jesus “God” but supposed it was sufficient to point out that the Bible occasionally calls angels or people theoi. However, as I pointed out in a follow-up comment on John 20:28, Thomas did not simply refer to Jesus as “God” (or “god”); he called him “my God.” That is something no faithful Jew would ever call any creature. I documented in that comment that the OT is filled with over a thousand parallel expressions (“my God,” “our God,” “your God,” etc.), and in none of them is anyone or anything approvingly given such a designation. This is compelling evidence that John 20:28 refers to Jesus Christ as the LORD God.

Jesus has other divine titles, including “Savior” as a divine title and the parallel, exclusive divine titles “the First and the Last” and “the Alpha and the Omega” in Revelation. The cumulative weight of all this evidence is just too much to explain it all away.

Jesus: Super Agent Man?

In order to make sense of the divine names, honors, position, and works of the exalted Christ, Unitarianism postulates a principle of agency according to which Jesus bears those names, receives those honors, holds that position, and performs those works simply as God’s exalted human agent. Jesus’ statement, “He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives not me but the one who sent me” (Matt. 10:40), is the primary proof text for this supposedly “Jewish” principle or law of agency. It supposedly proves, as Dave quoted James McGrath as asserting, that the agent was “functionally equal or equivalent to the one who sent him” (Only True God, 62).

As I explained in a comment on the principle of agency, neither Matthew 10:40 nor the rabbinical literature attests to such a principle in the broad way that Dave and McGrath seek to employ it. The actual principle was a simple matter of receiving a messenger’s message as coming from the one who sent him. Neither Jews nor Christians employed this principle, for example, to mean that humans might worship, serve, or pray to angels. The very Christian text Dave quoted, Didache 11.4, illustrates the limited focus of the agency principle, as it instructs Christians to welcome apostles for one or two days as they would the Lord—and after that to regard them as false prophets seeking to exploit Christian hospitality! In the same comment, I responded to Dave’s list of biblical examples of the agency principle, showing that they do not exemplify the assignment of divine powers or privileges to creatures as God’s agents.

The theological construct that Christ bears the divine names “God” and “Lord” merely as God’s agent falls to pieces when we recognize that Christ was “God” before creation (John 1:1) and was performing divine functions before anyone else existed—and therefore before there was anyone to whom he might come as God’s agent. We should therefore take the NT at its word when it affirms that Jesus is our God, the LORD himself.

WITNESS OF THE PARACLETE: THE CASE FOR THE PERSONHOOD OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

Due to space limitations, I will have to be much briefer in reviewing the case for the personhood of the Holy Spirit. In general, my argument in Part 4 for the personhood of the Holy Spirit anticipated and refuted in advance Dave’s main arguments against this aspect of the doctrine of the Trinity. The simplistic argument that Luke 1:35 defines the Holy Spirit as the power of God is fallacious, as a comparison with such texts as Luke 22:69 (in the same book!) or 1 Corinthians 1:24, where the Father and the Son are also both called “the power of God,” makes clear.

There is some basis in the OT for viewing the Spirit of the LORD as a divine person. However, the fact that the Holy Spirit was a person distinct from the Father and the Son could not be and was not revealed explicitly until the Son had come to reveal the Father (Matt. 11:27; John 1:18) and was preparing to leave the disciples in the custody of the Holy Spirit. Such explicit revelation of the distinct person of the Holy Spirit is a major theme in the Upper Room Discourse (John 13-16). Jesus introduces the figure of the Paraclete (“Comforter,” “Advocate,” etc.) in the context of his leaving the disciples to return to the Father (John 13:1-3; 16:5-7, 28). When he leaves them, Jesus says, he will send “another Paraclete,” the Holy Spirit, to them—who will be someone like Jesus himself (cf. 1 John 2:1). The narrative context in which Jesus says these things as he prepares them for his departure rules out the notion that this is mere personification.

The Book of Acts confirms this conclusion. The Holy Spirit appears in the narrative at the very beginning and end of the book (1:2; 28:25-26) to mark him as the book’s primary witness, just as Luke had mentioned Simon Peter as the first and last named disciple in his Gospel (Luke 4:38; 24:34) because that book derived primarily from Peter’s eyewitness testimony. Acts also presents the Holy Spirit as a participant at key points throughout the book. The “personal” language in Acts about the Spirit speaking, being lied to, thinking, testifying, etc., is not personification, because it is integrated into a historical narrative account in which the Holy Spirit is a major participant and witness.

By contrast, the personification of Wisdom in Proverbs 8 takes place in the literary context of a poetic book of wisdom literature, not a historical narrative. Dave’s attempt to argue that if we don’t view wisdom as a person neither should we view the Holy Spirit as one ignores these genre and contextual differences, as I explained in a comment on personification.

The evidence for the personhood of the Holy Spirit, already quite substantial from John and Acts, is augmented and broadened when we look at the many instances of triadic statements about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the NT. I looked at a dozen major examples of these triadic statements in Part 5. These triadic statements provide further confirmation of the distinct person of the Holy Spirit, and testify to a threefoldness of Christian piety woven throughout the NT.

CONCLUSION: THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY IS BIBLICALLY GROUNDED

I have argued that the Son truly is the LORD God and that the Holy Spirit is a person distinct from the Father and the Son. I conclude, then, that the evidence presented here shows that the Trinity is biblically grounded in a way that Unitarianism is not.

Ironically, if the apostles did teach Unitarianism, their understanding of Christianity completely and suddenly disappeared after the passing of the apostles. As I pointed out to Dave in a comment on early Trinitarianism, historians find no trace of any religious movement even remotely akin to Unitarianism in the second or third centuries. On the other hand, the ante-Nicene Fathers were roughly or rudely trinitarian in their theology. This historical evidence provides significant confirmation that the Trinitarian reading of the NT is correct.Similar Posts:

• The Great Trinity Debate: An Introduction
• The Great Trinity Debate – Coming April 2010
• Must One Believe in the Trinity to be Saved?
• In What Sense Are Jesus and the Father One? Part III: One in Purpose? C: John 17:21-23
• The Doctrine of the Trinity in a Nutshell

A possible objection to my argument so far is that it does not show that the “threefoldness” of God that the doctrine of the Trinity affirms has any clear support in the Bible. I will therefore now address this aspect of the doctrine directly.

I think everyone is aware of the fact that the NT in many places exhibits a “triadic” pattern in which Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are coordinated in some fashion. The NT writers sometimes use these three specific designations, but they also use other terms, such as God, Christ, and Spirit, or God, Lord, and Spirit, or some variation of one of these triads. My online outline study of the Trinity lists well over fifty clear examples of such triads, and that is a conservative list. I won’t discuss or even list all such texts here, but will instead draw attention to several notable examples and comment on their relevance to the doctrine of the Trinity in some depth.

Matthew 28:19

“Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them into [eis] the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

It is not without good reason that orthodox Christians historically have usually regarded this statement as at least implicitly trinitarian. It specifies the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as all objects of confession in the initiatory rite of the Christian religion. No one claims that this verse presents a formal, systematic theological definition or complete exposition of the doctrine of the Trinity, but it does give us a particularly clear and straightforward example of a triadic statement in which the three persons are equally the object of Christian faith.

Don’t take my word for it. Consider the many anti-Trinitarians over the years who have grasped at the straw that the fourth-century writer Eusebius supposedly testified to an original form of the text in which Jesus said to baptize disciples “in my name” instead of what we find in all of the Greek manuscripts. Many continue to repeat this claim today, though it is hard to find any contemporary scholars who will support it. The Biblical Unitarian website that Dave recommended prior to our debate endorses this theory: “we believe that the earliest manuscripts read ‘in my name,’ and that the phrase was enlarged to reflect the orthodox position as Trinitarian influence spread” (emphasis added). In a comment in the first round, Dave implicitly disagreed with this claim; I cite it to show how popular it still is among anti-Trinitarians.

Note that these Biblical Unitarians acknowledge that “the phrase” does seem to “reflect the orthodox position”; indeed, they claim that it was written to promote a Trinitarian view. Yet in the very next breath they argue hard that even if the text is authentic it “does not prove the Trinity”! They cannot reasonably have it both ways.

The usual strategy of Biblical Unitarians to defuse Matthew 28:19 is the argument from silence. Matthew 28:19, they point out, does not say that the three are “one God.” The site just quoted makes this point, as does Anthony Buzzard (Doctrine of the Trinity, 333). The Biblical Unitarian site also insists that the text does not say explicitly that the Holy Spirit is a person. No text says explicitly that the Holy Spirit is not a person, either, but this doesn’t stop Biblical Unitarians from drawing that conclusion.

If Biblical Unitarianism is true, the Father is God himself, while the Holy Spirit is an aspect of God, specifically his power. Thus, two of the three names in Matthew 28:19 denote either God himself or an aspect of God, according to Biblical Unitarianism. The middle name, however, supposedly refers to a mere human being (though the greatest of them all) whom God exalted to a divine status. This would seem to be a problematic way of reading the text. If we simply paraphrase Matthew 28:19 to express explicitly how the Trinitarian and Biblical Unitarian theologies understand its meaning, the difficulty facing the Biblical Unitarian will become clear:

Trinitarian: “Baptize disciples in the name of God the Father, the name of God the Son, and the name of God the Holy Spirit.”
Biblical Unitarian: “Baptize disciples in the name of God, the name of the exalted virgin-born man Jesus, and the name of the power of God.”

Criticizing the Trinitarian interpretation based on arguments from silence ignores the fact that the Biblical Unitarian interpretation cannot simply repeat the words of the text without explanatory comment. Both views offer an interpretation of the text. The question is which of those interpretations best fits the text.

Jesus says explicitly here to baptize disciples “into the name of…the Holy Spirit,” so that “Holy Spirit” is a name, like “Father” and “Son.” Anti-Trinitarians commonly assert that the Bible never gives the Holy Spirit a name and therefore he is not a person (at best another argument from silence), but Matthew 28:19 says explicitly that “Holy Spirit” is a “name.” This would seem to be very good evidence that the Holy Spirit is a person after all.

Matthew 28:19, then, refers to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three names. The coordination of these names in this context of the initiatory rite of baptism strongly supports the conclusion that all three are names of divine persons. Keep in mind that Biblical Unitarians agree that the Father is a divine person (indeed, God himself), that the Son is a divine person (though “God” only in a secondary sense), and that the Holy Spirit is at the least an aspect of the divine being. Also recall the evidence I presented in the previous round that in biblical usage the term “spirit” (pneuma) commonly designates an incorporeal, invisible person, being, or entity. This means that the presumptive conclusion with regard to Matthew 28:19 must be that the Holy Spirit is also a divine person.

We agree that the Father is God. If the Holy Spirit is a divine person, obviously he must also be God, because (we agree) the Holy Spirit is at the very least an aspect of God’s being, not some creature or other deity. But if in Matthew 28:19 the Father is God and the Holy Spirit is God, then it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the Son is also God. Nor is this conclusion out of keeping with the context, which reveals the Son as one who has universal authority and is capable of being present with all disciples in all nations in all generations until the end of the age (Matt. 28:18-20). Thus, Matthew 28:19 presents powerful evidence in support of the doctrine of the Trinity.

John 14:26

“But the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.”

Here the Father, in the Son’s name, sends the Holy Spirit. It is remarkable that the Father does this in the Son’s name, since the Father obviously is not a mere agent acting on the Son’s behalf. Can one imagine Moses saying that the Father would send the Holy Spirit (or anyone or anything else) in his (Moses’) name? Can one imagine Elijah, or Michael the archangel, making such a statement? Recall also the evidence presented in the previous round that the Paraclete here is clearly a divine person, not an impersonal power or force. We have, then, three divine persons coordinated in a nutshell of the NT narrative: The Son came here, returned to heaven, and then the Holy Spirit came from the Father in the Son’s name.

Acts 2:33

“Therefore having been exalted to the right hand of God, and having received the promise of the Holy Spirit from the Father, he [Jesus] has poured forth this which you both see and hear.”

The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all in evidence here. Jesus (v. 32) has been exalted to the right hand of God; that is, he now sits on God’s throne at the Father’s right hand, exercising divine sovereign rule over the cosmos. As evidence that Jesus the Son performs the functions consistent with him occupying this position, Peter says that Jesus “has poured forth this which you both see and hear.” Earlier in the same speech, Peter has quoted Joel 2:28, where the LORD states that he will pour forth from his Spirit (Acts 2:18). Yet here Peter says that the Lord Jesus is the one who does this “pouring forth.”

The statement in 2:33 is not the only indication in Acts 2 that Peter identifies Jesus as the LORD of the Book of Joel. After his speech, Peter tells the people to be baptized “upon the name [epi tō onomati] of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins” (2:38). In context this statement means that they are to call “upon the name of Jesus Christ” for salvation when they are baptized, also echoing the words of Joel 2:32, “everyone who calls upon the name [epikalesētai tō onomati] of the Lord shall be saved” (quoted in Acts 2:21). We know from the rest of the Book of Acts that this is how the apostles and other early disciples applied Joel 2:32 (see Acts 7:59-60; 9:14; 22:16), and Paul makes this explicit (Rom. 10:9-13; see also 1 Cor. 1:2, 8, and my discussion of these texts in the third round).

Dave and other anti-Trinitarians think that Acts 2:34-36 shows that Jesus’ designation “Lord” in these contexts does not identify him as the LORD YHWH: “For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.”’ Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.” Biblical Unitarians interpret Psalm 110:1 to mean that the LORD YHWH exalted a mere man to be the Messianic lord, and so they understand Acts 2:36 to mean that Jesus’ designation as “lord” refers to a status that he acquired for the first time in his exaltation.

Taken out of context and read with modern eyes, “God has made him both Lord and Christ” may very well sound as if it means that before he was “exalted” Jesus did not have those titles. Luke, however, explicitly disagrees. In his Gospel, Luke reports the angel announcing Jesus’ birth with these words: “Today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11). Luke tells us several additional times that Jesus, prior to his death, was already both the “the Christ” (Luke 2:26; 4:41; 9:20; 24:26, 46) and “the Lord” (Luke 3:4; 6:5, 46; 7:13, 19; 10:1, 40-41; 11:39; 12:42; 13:15; 17:5-6; 18:6; 19:8; 22:61). Therefore, Luke clearly does not understand Peter to mean that Jesus receives these titles for the first time at his resurrection and exaltation to the right hand of the Father. Evidently, by “God made him both Lord and Christ” Luke understands Peter to mean that in his resurrection and exaltation, Jesus was vindicated or publicly presented or officially declared to the world as both Lord and Christ (cf. Rom. 1:4).

When we take Acts 2:36 against this background and in the context of the application to Jesus of the reference in Joel 2:28-32 to the LORD pouring forth from his Spirit on those who call on his name for salvation, the best conclusion is that Acts 2 is affirming that Jesus is indeed the LORD God.

Romans 8:9-11

“You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.”

Paul here refers to the Holy Spirit as (a) the Spirit, (b) the Spirit of God, (c) the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead (=the Spirit of the Father), and (d) the Spirit of Christ. The fact that the Spirit can be described in the same context as both “the Spirit of God” and “the Spirit of Christ” proves that “Spirit of God” does not mean the energy or power that belongs to and emanates from God’s being and that Christ supposedly “uses” as God gives it to him. Rather, the Holy Spirit can be called both the Spirit of God (the Father) and the Spirit of Christ (the Son) because he is the Spirit whose role it is in redemption to unite us to the Father and the Son. In Paul’s theology, one can say that the Spirit of the Father dwells in us, that Christ (or the Spirit of Christ) dwells in us, and that the Spirit (of God) dwells in us. All three are true statements. The Father and the Son both dwell in us through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and this is a real indwelling by the Father and the Son because the three persons are one indivisible divine being—one God.

Romans 8:26-27, 33-34

“Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God…. Who will bring a charge against God’s elect? God is the one who justifies; who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us.”

Here Paul speaks of two divine persons who intercede for us: the Spirit, and Christ Jesus. That these are two distinct yet complementary acts or types of intercession is clear from how Paul describes each. The Spirit intercedes for us from within us, “with groaning too deep for words.” The Son, Christ Jesus, intercedes for us from “the right hand of God.”

1 Corinthians 12:4-6

“Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit.
And there are varieties of ministries, and the same Lord.
There are varieties of activities, but the same God who works all things in all.”

The deliberate parallelism of these three lines practically speaks for itself. If a Jew unfamiliar with Christianity read these lines alone, he would certainly understand “the same Spirit,” “the same Lord,” and “the same God” to be three synonymous expressions for the same Creator. We know from the immediate context that the one whom Paul identifies here as “the same Lord” is Jesus (v. 3). Paul clearly attributes personhood to the Spirit, whose work of gifting believers Paul details in verses 7-10, concluding in verse 11, “But one and the same Spirit works all these things [panta tauta energei], distributing to each one individually just as he wills.” Paul here in verse 11 uses the same language for the Spirit’s working that he used in verse 6 for God’s working (“who works all things in all,” ho energōn ta panta en pasin). Thus, Paul can speak interchangeably about what the Spirit, the Lord, and God do in relation to spiritual gifts, while still distinguishing the three from one another. We have here at the very least an implicit Trinitarianism.

2 Corinthians 13:14

“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you all.”

Here the three names “the Lord Jesus Christ,” “God,” and “the Holy Spirit” appear in coordinated fashion, each in the genitive following a noun describing a spiritual blessing. The proper exegetical presumption is that all three genitives have the same grammatical function and nuance. “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ” can really only mean something like the grace that comes from the Lord Jesus Christ” or “the grace that the Lord Jesus Christ bestows” (what grammarians often call a subjective genitive). “The love of God” here as elsewhere in Paul means, not people’s love for God (that would be an objective genitive), but rather the love that God shows toward his people (e.g., Rom. 5:5; 8:39). Thus the first two genitives are both subjective genitives. This leads me to conclude that “the fellowship of the Holy Spirit” also is a subjective genitive, meaning the spiritual blessing of fellowship that comes from the Holy Spirit or that the Holy Spirit bestows. This statement, which functions as a benediction ending the epistle, is in effect a prayer that the Lord Jesus Christ would continue to be gracious to the Corinthians, that God would continue to show his love for them, and that the Holy Spirit would continue to bless them with fellowship. Here again is a statement that arguably expresses an implicit Trinitarianism.

Galatians 4:4-6

“But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’”

The most natural way of understanding this passage is that God’s Son existed before becoming a human being. Four elements converge to express this idea: (1) the statement that “God sent forth his Son”; (2) the description of this Son as “born of a woman”; (3) the contrast between Jesus as God’s (apparently natural) “Son” and believers as those who have received “adoption as sons”; and (4) the parallel statement that “God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son.”

Attempts to circumvent this evidence inevitably fail to consider how these elements function cumulatively. God sent his Son from heaven to redeem his people, and then he sent the Spirit of his Son from heaven to dwell within them (see further Putting Jesus in His Place, 89 and the notes there). The parallel between the sending forth of the Son and the sending forth of the Spirit, in turn, supports the conclusion that the Spirit is a person. Thus, this short passage in Galatians treats the Father, Son, and Spirit as three distinct preexistent persons, each of whom is integrally involved in our “adoption as sons.”

Ephesians 2:18-22

“…for through him [Christ] we both [Jews and Gentiles] have our access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God’s household, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, is growing into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit.”

Christ is the central figure in this passage, as he is throughout the epistle (Paul mentions him explicitly in 58 of the 155 verses of Ephesians, as compared to 38 verses for God the Father and 14 for the Spirit), but he is closely flanked by both the Father and the Spirit. In verse 18 Paul states that through Christ both Jews and Gentiles have “access in one Spirit to the Father.” The language distinguishes the three from one another and attributes distinct but essential roles to each. Paul names the three again in close association in verse 22: “a holy temple in the Lord…a dwelling of God in the Spirit.” Paul describes the dwelling place (the temple) as being both “in the Lord” and “in the Spirit.” The phrase “in the Lord” is a favorite of Paul, who consistently uses it in reference to the Lord Jesus (about 51 times; it occurs only once elsewhere in the NT, Rev. 14:13). Yet this phrase in the Greek OT refers uniformly to YHWH (about 24 times).

Ephesians 4:4-6

“One body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling;
one Lord, one faith, one baptism,
one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all.”

If we had only this passage we might be forgiven for not seeing a triadic pattern in this passage, since the text has seven occurrences of the word “one.” However, three exegetical considerations prove that this text does exhibit a triadic pattern within the sevenfold statement of Christian unity. (1) This passage repeats, in reverse order, the triad from an earlier Pauline passage, 1 Corinthians 12:4-6 (Spirit, Lord, God), with the word “one” modifying each name instead of the word “same.” (2) Both passages in context introduce the subject of spiritual gifts (cf. 1 Cor. 12-14 with Eph. 4:1-16, especially 4:7-11). This thematic connection makes the recurrence of the three names Spirit, Lord, and God all the more likely to be significant. (3) The structure of the sevenfold statement actually places the three names at specific junctures in that statement. Thus, the affirmations of “one Spirit” and “one Lord” are interrupted by a whole clause “just as also you were called in one hope of your calling” (instead of simply “one hope”), and “one God and Father of all” comes at the climax with the threefold flourish “who is over all and through all and in all.” This analysis supports the conclusion that “one Spirit,” “one Lord,” and “one God and Father of all” are references to deity, as distinguished from the other four terms in the sevenfold statement.

Ephesians 5:18-21

“And do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord; always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to the God and Father; and be subject to one another in the fear of Christ.”

As I explained in the previous round, NT language about being “filled with the Spirit” does not imply that the Spirit is not a divine person. Paul in this same epistle speaks of both Christ (Eph. 1:23; 4:10) and God (Eph. 3:19) “filling” the church and its members. Thus, the whole epistle in a sense presents a kind of “triadic” or implicitly “trinitarian” view of divine filling, since Father, Christ, and Spirit all fill God’s people.

Paul says three things in this short passage that exalt Jesus above all creatures. The first is that believers are to sing spiritual songs “to the Lord.” For Jews steeped in the faith of the OT, to “sing to the Lord” meant to sing to Yahweh, the LORD (Ex. 15:21; Judg. 5:3; 1 Chron. 16:23; Ps. 7:17; 9:11; 92:1; 95:1; 96:2; 104:33; Is. 42:10). Yet in context, Paul is speaking of singing to the Lord Jesus. We know this because of the typical Pauline triad “Spirit-Lord-God” that we have already seen more than once, and also because Paul in the same breath refers to him as “our Lord Jesus Christ.” Thus, Paul directs Christians to sing hymns to Jesus as if he were Jehovah.

Second, Paul tells the Ephesians to thank God the Father “in the name [en onomati] of our Lord Jesus Christ.” While Paul distinguishes the Father and Christ here, he does not distinguish them as sharply as one might suppose. “The name” of the Lord Jesus has a place unimaginable in Judaism for any man. The Jews would never dream of giving God thanks in the name of Moses or even in Michael’s name. Furthermore, Paul’s language here actually echoes the words of the Psalmist who spoke about thanking God in his name: “In God we will make our boast the whole day, and in your name [en tō onomati sou] give thanks forever” (Ps. 44:8).

Third, Paul instructs the Ephesian believers to behave “in the fear of Christ.” The KJV and NKJV (which generally follows the textual tradition of the KJV) say “in the fear of God” here, but modern translations follow the better textual evidence that supports “in the fear of Christ” (ESV, HCSB, NAB, NASB, NET, NIV, NJB, NRSV, etc.). In the parallel passage in Colossians (the two epistles closely parallel one another), Paul directs servants to obey their masters, “fearing the Lord…. You serve the Lord Christ” (Col. 3:22, 24). Paul, then, teaches Christians to “fear the Lord,” that is, to fear Christ (see also 2 Cor. 5:10-11; Eph. 6:7-8). Of course, to “fear the Lord” in a Jewish context means to fear the LORD Jehovah (Deut. 6:13; 10:20; Prov. 1:7; 2:5; 9:10; etc.; Is. 8:12-13).

The epistle of Paul to the Ephesians presents one of the most concentrated series of triadic passages that in various ways reflect what must be called at the very least an implicit or incipient trinitarianism. Paul not only repeatedly refers to God, the Lord, and the Spirit in statements that coordinate them in complementary roles in cosmic history and the Christian life of the believer, but he articulates a Christocentric faith in which Jesus Christ is identified as the divine Lord and is the object of confession, the singing of hymns, and the holy fear of the LORD.

1 Peter 1:2

“…elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ: Grace to you and peace be multiplied.”

Anti-Trinitarians often raise an objection to the doctrine of the Trinity on the basis that the salutations of the epistles do not mention the Holy Spirit. The objection rests on a fallacious argument from silence, but it also misses this salutation, which does mention the Holy Spirit. As with the benediction in 2 Corinthians 13:14, this salutation features names of the three, each in the genitive case associated with specific divine blessings. The exiled believers in the diaspora, Peter says, are “elect” or chosen in relation to the blessings that come from God the Father, the Spirit, and Jesus Christ. The “foreknowledge of God the Father” refers to the divine blessing of God foreknowing his chosen ones. The “sanctification of the Spirit” refers to the divine blessing of the Spirit sanctifying those chosen ones. The “obedience and sprinkling of the blood” refers to the divine blessing of Jesus Christ bringing us into a new covenant relationship with God in which we are redeemed and freed to live as his obedient children (1 Peter 1:14-19). Here again, then, a NT author describes the Father, the Spirit, and Christ as each acting, performing divine functions of salvation that are coordinated and complementary to each other.

Conclusion

The NT repeatedly speaks of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (sometimes with these specific designations, sometimes with others) in triadic statements that attribute divine functions to each of the three. There is nothing arbitrary about the Trinitarian claim of a threefoldness in Scripture’s revelation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—as if, for example, one might just as easily speak of a quaternary of Father, Son, Michael, and Gabriel, or of God, Jesus, Peter, and Paul, or perhaps a fivefold revelation of the Father, Adam, Christ, Power, and Truth. No, this threefoldness of Father—Son—Holy Spirit or God—Lord—Spirit is found throughout the NT in the Synoptics, John, Acts, the Pauline epistles, the Petrine epistles, and elsewhere that space prevents me from documenting with any detail.

Dave and I agree that the Father is God. We agree that the Holy Spirit is at least an aspect of God (Dave thinks the Holy Spirit is God’s power, I think the Holy Spirit is God). Thus, we agree that two of the three referents in this common NT triad refer to God or an aspect of God. There is some force to the argument, then, that the third referent in this triad is also God. I have argued in rounds two and three of this debate that the Son is in fact God and in round four that the Holy Spirit is a divine person. I have further shown in this round that the triadic passages in the NT often provide additional confirmation of the essential deity of the Son or of the personhood of the Holy Spirit or both. These passages therefore provide substantial support, within the larger context of the biblical teaching already examined, for the doctrine of the Trinity.

In the final round of this debate next week, Dave and I will give our closing statements and invite your questions and comments. In my closing statement, I will draw the threads of the arguments together and offer a comparison of the Biblical Unitarian and Trinitarian theological positions.Similar Posts:

• Must One Believe in the Trinity to be Saved?
• The Great Trinity Debate – Coming April 2010
• The Great Trinity Debate, Part 4: Rob Bowman on the Holy Spirit
• The Great Trinity Debate, Part 6: Rob Bowman’s Closing Statement
• The Doctrine of the Trinity in a Nutshell