CWK: Becoming a god: deification in Mormonism and Orthodox theosis

[Markk]

Speaking of hiccups I think there is one with the question of where does the power and order come from? Some LDS are happy to say comes from God. I suppose an eternal regression might cover that. I suspect some sort of divine power center is implied , perhaps as in magic world view. (or the traditional trinity functions invisible or unthought by LDS speakers)

If I understand your question here, I believe it is pretty clear that the church "has" taught that the power and order comes from eternal laws, which when broken down are eternal truths. The great law or truth of eternal progression is the "main law" so the speak. While the eternal law of the priesthood provides the power and authority that governs the eternal laws.

As each "God," becomes a God, by obedience to these eternal laws, these laws become his laws. The 3rd AOF is clear that mankind "MAY" be saved by obedience to these laws, no promise, but a maybe.

Maybe the best book on the subject, in my opinion, was a long standing PH manual from the late 40's up through at least the 60's. It was in our family library and underlined with notes, for years while growing up. It is Gospel Through the Ages by Milton Hunter. He was commissioned to write it under the 1st presidency by the likes of JFS, Benson, and I believe Richards, and maybe even Widstoe if I remember correctly.

Also one needs to look at the teachings on the Holy Spirit, a thing, while not to be confused with the HG, who is a person....which is the light of Christ that permeates all things and allows a God to be omnipresent. The HS was taught to basically be a conduit from God to man.


https://archive.org/details/gospelthroughag00hunt

[huckelberry]

Speaking of hiccups I think there is one with the question of where does the power and order come from? Some LDS are happy to say comes from God. I suppose an eternal regression might cover that. I suspect some sort of divine power center is implied , perhaps as in magic world view. (or the traditional trinity functions invisible or unthought by LDS speakers)

If I understand your question here, I believe it is pretty clear that the church "has" taught that the power and order comes from eternal laws, which when broken down are eternal truths. The great law or truth of eternal progression is the "main law" so the speak. While the eternal law of the priesthood provides the power and authority that governs the eternal laws.

As each "God," becomes a God, by obedience to these eternal laws, these laws become his laws. The 3rd AOF is clear that mankind "MAY" be saved by obedience to these laws, no promise, but a maybe.

Maybe the best book on the subject, in my opinion, was a long standing PH manual from the late 40's up through at least the 60's. It was in our family library and underlined with notes, for years while growing up. It is Gospel Through the Ages by Milton Hunter. He was commissioned to write it under the 1st presidency by the likes of JFS, Benson, and I believe Richards, and maybe even Widstoe if I remember correctly.

Also one needs to look at the teachings on the Holy Spirit, a thing, while not to be confused with the HG, who is a person....which is the light of Christ that permeates all things and allows a God to be omnipresent. The HS was taught to basically be a conduit from God to man.


https://archive.org/details/gospelthroughag00hunt

Markk , ;you are game to say this. I realize you are speaking the standard LDS explanation. It is completely circular I think, laws establish laws? I can think of two kinds of laws. There are rules established by somebody in authority, meaning a person accepted by a population and having a police force to enforce the rules. Then there are laws which are descriptions of how things work, scientific laws like oxygen combining with carbon releases heat or how gravity works. I can understand moral law as a result of how things work like scientific laws but priesthood is pretty clearly a designation of power from someone who has power. Or is it?

I am inclined to suspect magic world view, formulae to access the power at the center of existence, as leading Smith along.(or Mormons are actually Trinitarians with a bunch of addons obscuring the matter)

[Kishkumen]

What cracks me up here, is that Kish did a piss poor job in his podcast in identifying the roots of LDS deification, in fact he totally whiffed on it, he did not even mention Joseph Smith and his teachings on it, he did not mention 132 or the KFS etc....and yet you are trying to some how align with his poor presentation? Good Luck!

The worst kind of reviewer is the one who criticizes you for not doing what they wanted you to do, when you had set out to do something else entirely. I did not set out to “identify the roots of LDS deification.” I mostly set out to compare LDS deification with Orthodox theosis, and then talk about how ritual is important to Mormon deification and Orthodox theosis in ways it is not important in Protestantism.

To remind you and refresh the memories of others:

Mormons are sometimes ridiculed for believing they will become gods. It is an esoteric teaching which is increasingly de-emphasized, but it is central to Mormon doctrine. Here I compare Mormon deification with Orthodox theosis. The two are quite different, but Mormonism, Orthodoxy, and Catholicism share a belief in the efficacy of ritual in the process of divinization that Protestants do not share.

[Kishkumen]

One other thought I have had, and this may be more appropriate for an offshoot thread, but I’ll throw it out here.

Within the whole scheme of becoming Gods and Goddesses and creating our own worlds, my thought was always that Jesus made the ultimate sacrifice and provided atonement for all of the worlds created, and all of those yet to be created. Therefore, we were not required to sacrifice a son for atonement for our worlds. This had already been “once and done” by Christ.

I have read opinions of folks that discount this, but I always thought this was our official view which is why we can all equally worship the same Christ because He is the Christ.

Just interested in thoughts.

There is one school of thought in Restoration theology that there is progression through roles in the Godhead, from Holy Spirit to Christ to Father. Not all armchair theologians have accepted that Christ was the savior for all the worlds.

It’s so nice to talk to someone who is interested in more than repeating the same script about Joseph Smith’s depravity.

[Kishkumen]

I would also like to add that the folks around here who have kindly supported the channel requested that I not do super-long installments like other channels on Mormonism do. So, I cut my episodes in half. The downside is that I cannot be exhaustive in my treatments of things, and I have to choose a smaller chunk of the topic. Same with this one. What interested me here is the shared emphasis on divinization between Mormonism and Orthodoxy, but with a much different idea of what divinization is.

[Zosimus]

Have you read this?

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/re ... CA9A583069

That's where I learned about Halhed's relationship to Richard Brothers. That book, along with Birth of Orientalism, flipped my view on how the Smiths may have approached the restoration.

Birth of Orientalism goes into detail about several efforts in the centuries before Joseph Smith to restore what he calls the Ur tradition, the ancient theology of Adam. Up until Joseph Smith, these Ur traditions were centered in India and China where, it was believed, Noah and his sons had carried the ancient theology of Adam, Seth and Enoch. Writers like Voltaire, Ramsay and Swedenborg all believed that the ancient theology was to be found in the far east, they all wrote of eastern traditions that resembled those of Noah and the patriarchs.

The editor(s) of the 15 October Times & Seasons had the same idea:

MOUNT ARARAT, AND THE EARLY ABODE OF NOAH AND HIS DESCENDANTS

In the opinion of the most learned among the moderns, Mount Ararat, where the ark of Noah rested, after the deluge, was in Armenia, or Thibet, and between 90° and 100° E. long. and between 30o and 35o north lat. north of Hindostan and Persia, west of the river Indus and of central Asia, and east of Mesopotamia and of the Caspian Sea. This is a temperate clime, and favorable to health and long life, as well as to the pursuits of the shepherd and agriculturist. The Ararat, the Caucasus, and the Taurus are connected, and form almost one group or range, extending a great distance from what is usually called Asia Minor, to India.

The Indian and Hindoo traditions of the earliest times point to Noah and the Deluge; and they claim to be the descendants of that patriarch. Noah and his sons would not long remain on the mountain where the ark rested, on the subsiding of the waters. They advanced no doubt, to the south, to a milder climate and a more champaign country. In the fourth generation, or one hundred and fifty years from the deluge, they removed westward, to the plains of Shinar, where they began to construct a building which should reach to heaven. Dispersed from this place about one hundred and fifty or one hundred and sixty years after the deluge, they went forth, in different companies, east, west, north and south; but most to the south and to the east, as both the face of the country and the climate would invite. Noah lived two hundred years after this event, and probably journeyed east, where traditions relating to the flood, and the safety of a few from that catastrophe have much prevailed.— From Noah and his sons would be communicated to their posterity whatever was known by them of antedeluvian discoveries and inventions in the arts of life. These could not have been very small during seventeen hundred years, the duration of the old world, according to the common computation; but at this distance of time, and in the want of early records, no very accurate opinion can be formed as to how great, or what those inventions were. But we may safely conclude, that they were not very great; otherwise the early generations after the deluge would have been more civilized than there is now evidence or reason to believe.

This is pretty wild stuff. The idea of Noah's Ark landing somewhere east of the Caspian Sea was niche in 1842. The coordinates given place the ark somewhere in China, west of Lhasa, Tibet. The only way to interpret these coordinates as being near the Caspian Sea is by using the Ptolemaic system, which had fallen out of use in the 16th and 17th centuries. My take is that the Times and Seasons editors (including Joseph Smith) derived these ideas from older sources. After some searching, Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World is the most likely candidate. However, Joseph Smith probably accessed the majority of these ideas through the writings of Voltaire, which his father described as "the best Bible then extant."

[Markk]

If I understand your question here, I believe it is pretty clear that the church "has" taught that the power and order comes from eternal laws, which when broken down are eternal truths. The great law or truth of eternal progression is the "main law" so the speak. While the eternal law of the priesthood provides the power and authority that governs the eternal laws.

As each "God," becomes a God, by obedience to these eternal laws, these laws become his laws. The 3rd AOF is clear that mankind "MAY" be saved by obedience to these laws, no promise, but a maybe.

Maybe the best book on the subject, in my opinion, was a long standing PH manual from the late 40's up through at least the 60's. It was in our family library and underlined with notes, for years while growing up. It is Gospel Through the Ages by Milton Hunter. He was commissioned to write it under the 1st presidency by the likes of JFS, Benson, and I believe Richards, and maybe even Widstoe if I remember correctly.

Also one needs to look at the teachings on the Holy Spirit, a thing, while not to be confused with the HG, who is a person....which is the light of Christ that permeates all things and allows a God to be omnipresent. The HS was taught to basically be a conduit from God to man.


https://archive.org/details/gospelthroughag00hunt

Markk , ;you are game to say this. I realize you are speaking the standard LDS explanation. It is completely circular I think, laws establish laws? I can think of two kinds of laws. There are rules established by somebody in authority, meaning a person accepted by a population and having a police force to enforce the rules. Then there are laws which are descriptions of how things work, scientific laws like oxygen combining with carbon releases heat or how gravity works. I can understand moral law as a result of how things work like scientific laws but priesthood is pretty clearly a designation of power from someone who has power. Or is it?

I am inclined to suspect magic world view, formulae to access the power at the center of existence, as leading Smith along.(or Mormons are actually Trinitarians with a bunch of addons obscuring the matter)

Whether circular or not, it is what the church teaches and is rooted in what Josephs teachings evolved to. And I doubt today it is a standard exclamation. Most members do not care to understand the core doctrines as we were taught 40-50 years ago. But this is core LDS theology and when you know it, and you listen to GC and these old guys speak, although cryptic, it is still core doctrine.

from GTTA....

MEANS OF OBTAINING DIVINE VERITIES

The plan proposed by God for the government of men and women in their earthly career was "based upon eternal laws that always have been and always will be operative." Since all forms of matter and energy are controlled by laws, logic tells that a plan formulated by an eternal and intelligent being must be composed of laws. 2 Many of these laws were the same as those obeyed in the spirit world, and they are basically the same as the ones we shall have opportunity to obey throughout eternity. Thus the Gospel plan was laid upon a foundation of eternal truth. Among the laws to which all who come to earth were to be subject are faith, repentance, baptism, confirmation, love, charity, purity, industry, honesty, and many other Gospel principles, ordinances and eternal realities.

BASED ON ETERNAL LAWS

God provided the gift of the Holy Ghost as a means by which "a man may place himself in touch with the whole universe and draw knowledge from it, including the beings of superior intelligence that it contains." 3 The Spirit of God was also provided to serve with the Holy Ghost as another guide for man in helping him to establish communication with the Eternal Father. According to the Prophet Joseph Smith, all truth was to operate through the power of the Holy Priesthood. Man was to be given that Priesthood, and through it God was to reveal His will to mortals. To quote: [The Melchizedek Priesthood holds] the keys of the Kingdom of God in all ages of the world to the latest posterity on the earth; and is the channel through which all knowledge, doctrine, the plan of salvation and every important matter is revealed from heaven. Its institution was prior to the "foundation of the earth." . . . [It] is the highest and holiest Priesthood, and is after the order of the Son of God. 4

Hunter, Milton R.. Gospel Through the Ages . Deseret Book Company. Kindle Edition.

And this next quotes are critical....


HOW HE BECAME GOD

Yet, if we accept the great law of eternal progression, we must accept the fact that there was a time when Deity was much less powerful than He is today. Then how did He become glorified and exalted and attain His present status of Godhood? In the first place, aeons ago God undoubtedly took advantage of every opportunity to learn the laws of truth and as He became acquainted with each new verity He righteously obeyed it. From day to day He exerted His will vigorously, and as a result became thoroughly acquainted with the forces lying about Him. As he gained more knowledge through persistent effort and continuous industry, as well as through absolute obedience, His understanding of the universal laws continued to become more complete. Thus He grew in experience and continued to grow until He attained the status of Godhood. In other words, He became God by absolute obedience to all the eternal laws of the Gospel—by conforming His actions to all truth, and thereby became the author of eternal truth. Therefore, the road that the Eternal Father followed to Godhood was one of living at all times a dynamic, industrious, and completely righteous life. There is no other way to exaltation.

How MEN MAY BECOME GODS

Thus all men who ascend to the glorious status of Godhood can do so only by one method—by obedience to all the principles and ordinances of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Fundamental in the process of obedience to truth is knowledge. We must first learn true principles before we are capable of intelligent obedience. The word of the Lord came to the latter-day Prophet as follows: "Behold, ye are little children and ye cannot bear all things now; ye must grow in grace and in the knowledge of truth." 1 Also, "It is impossible for a man to be saved in ignorance." 2 And again the Lord declared, "Men are saved no faster than they gain knowledge." The Prophet Joseph described the process of going on toward Godhood as follows: When you climb up a ladder, you must begin at the bottom, and ascend step by step, until you arrive arrive at the top; and so it is with the principles of the Gospel—you must begin with the first, and go on until you learn all the principles of exaltation. But it will be a great while after you have passed through the veil before you will have learned them. 3 No prophet of record gave more complete and forceful explanations of the doctrine that men may become Gods than did the American Prophet, and, furthermore, he definitely pointed the course which men must follow. A small portion of his teachings is as follows: 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 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. . . . They shall be heirs of God and joint heirs with Jesus Christ. What is it? To inherit the same power, the same glory and the same power, the same glory and the same exaltation, until you arrive at the station of a God, and ascend the throne of eternal power, the same as those who have gone before. What did Jesus do? "Why; I do the things I saw my Father do when worlds came rolling into existence. My Father worked out his kingdom with fear and trembling, and I must do the same; and when I get my kingdom, I shall present it to my Father, so that he may obtain kingdom upon kingdom, and it will exalt him in glory. He will then take a higher exaltation, and I will take his place, and thereby become exalted myself." So that Jesus treads in the tracks of his Father, and inherits what God did before; and God is thus glorified and exalted in the salvation and exaltation of all of his children. 4 Thus we do not become Godlike in this world, nor Gods in the world to come, through any miraculous or sudden gift, but only through the slow process of natural growth brought about as a result of righteous living. Some people may think that when they die they will instantaneously get ridof all their bad habits and become purified. Such is not the case. We can become purified in this world, and the same holds true in the next life, only through repentance; that is, overcoming our faults and sins and replacing them with virtues. Charles W. Penrose sustains these thoughts in the following words: "Men become like God not by some supernatural or sudden change, either in this world or another, but by the natural development of the divinity within. Time, circumstances, and the necessary intelligence are all that are required."

Hunter, Milton R.. Gospel Through the Ages . Deseret Book Company. Kindle Edition.


This is just a start, there is much more.

[Markk]

What cracks me up here, is that Kish did a piss poor job in his podcast in identifying the roots of LDS deification, in fact he totally whiffed on it, he did not even mention Joseph Smith and his teachings on it, he did not mention 132 or the KFS etc....and yet you are trying to some how align with his poor presentation? Good Luck!

The worst kind of reviewer is the one who criticizes you for not doing what they wanted you to do, when you had set out to do something else entirely. I did not set out to “identify the roots of LDS deification.” I mostly set out to compare LDS deification with Orthodox theosis, and then talk about how ritual is important to Mormon deification and Orthodox theosis in ways it is not important in Protestantism.

To remind you and refresh the memories of others:

Mormons are sometimes ridiculed for believing they will become gods. It is an esoteric teaching which is increasingly de-emphasized, but it is central to Mormon doctrine. Here I compare Mormon deification with Orthodox theosis. The two are quite different, but Mormonism, Orthodoxy, and Catholicism share a belief in the efficacy of ritual in the process of divinization that Protestants do not share.

Kish again you are just butthurt, get over it and improve your podcast. If a person that did not know and understand LDS deification, as it is taught, and listened to your podcast, they would not have a clue of the truth of what was and is taught by the church past and present. If that was your goal, you did a great job.

How on earth did you compare LDS defecation to a supposed orthodox, when you admittedly did not even identify the roots, and I will add the very teachings of LDS deification? The main ritual to LDS deification is one has to enter into polygamy, which today is just eternal marriage.

LDS deification is about obedience to eternal laws. It is about the eternal family and the continuing cycle of progression. It is about eternally continued peoples being eternally procreated through sexual relations.

I did not want you to teach anything, I just pointed out what you expounded on is does not compliment LDS theology. Read the quotes I pasted to Huckleberry from a LDS PH manual....that is a brief overview of LDS deification.

[Kishkumen]

Kish again you are just butthurt, get over it and improve your podcast. If a person that did not know and understand LDS deification, as it is taught, and listened to your podcast, they would not have a clue of the truth of what was and is taught by the church past and present. If that was your goal, you did a great job.

Markk, it is difficult to be butthurt with a guy as obtuse as you are. No one, and I mean no one who has an ounce of self-respect, gives a damn about the carpers who go around telling them what they should have done. Here’s an idea: do it yourself! I did the episode I wanted to do at the time, covering the information I wanted to cover. It could not possibly cover the entire topic in 25 minutes. That would be impossible. I am sure I will get back to the topic of deification again in the future, and at that time I will cover different things about it.

How on earth did you compare LDS defecation to a supposed orthodox, when you admittedly did not even identify the roots, and I will add the very teachings of LDS deification? The main ritual to LDS deification is one has to enter into polygamy, which today is just eternal marriage.

Yeah, I did not compare LDS defecation to a “supposed orthodox.” Get back to me when you have the time to cool down and type your thoughts coherently.

LDS deification is about obedience to eternal laws. It is about the eternal family and the continuing cycle of progression. It is about eternally continued peoples being eternally procreated through sexual relations.

I did not want you to teach anything, I just pointed out what you expounded on is does not compliment LDS theology. Read the quotes I pasted to Huckleberry from a LDS PH manual....that is a brief overview of LDS deification.

Don’t flatter yourself, Markk. Nothing you have brought up here is new to me or a surprise. All you are saying is that I didn’t do the podcast you wanted to hear. Well, ya didn’t pay for it, so I don’t feel like I’ve done you wrong there. It was 25 minutes Markk. I did what I set out to do in that time. You would rather I had done something else. Yes, got it. I don’t see the point in continuing this discussion. It is clear we don’t agree. It is clear what your agenda is. I don’t see the point in you pretending that you are illuminating anything when you are not.

[Kishkumen]

Have you read this?

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/re ... CA9A583069

That's where I learned about Halhed's relationship to Richard Brothers. That book, along with Birth of Orientalism, flipped my view on how the Smiths may have approached the restoration.

Birth of Orientalism goes into detail about several efforts in the centuries before Joseph Smith to restore what he calls the Ur tradition, the ancient theology of Adam. Up until Joseph Smith, these Ur traditions were centered in India and China where, it was believed, Noah and his sons had carried the ancient theology of Adam, Seth and Enoch. Writers like Voltaire, Ramsay and Swedenborg all believed that the ancient theology was to be found in the far east, they all wrote of eastern traditions that resembled those of Noah and the patriarchs.

The editor(s) of the 15 October Times & Seasons had the same idea:

MOUNT ARARAT, AND THE EARLY ABODE OF NOAH AND HIS DESCENDANTS

In the opinion of the most learned among the moderns, Mount Ararat, where the ark of Noah rested, after the deluge, was in Armenia, or Thibet, and between 90° and 100° E. long. and between 30o and 35o north lat. north of Hindostan and Persia, west of the river Indus and of central Asia, and east of Mesopotamia and of the Caspian Sea. This is a temperate clime, and favorable to health and long life, as well as to the pursuits of the shepherd and agriculturist. The Ararat, the Caucasus, and the Taurus are connected, and form almost one group or range, extending a great distance from what is usually called Asia Minor, to India.

The Indian and Hindoo traditions of the earliest times point to Noah and the Deluge; and they claim to be the descendants of that patriarch. Noah and his sons would not long remain on the mountain where the ark rested, on the subsiding of the waters. They advanced no doubt, to the south, to a milder climate and a more champaign country. In the fourth generation, or one hundred and fifty years from the deluge, they removed westward, to the plains of Shinar, where they began to construct a building which should reach to heaven. Dispersed from this place about one hundred and fifty or one hundred and sixty years after the deluge, they went forth, in different companies, east, west, north and south; but most to the south and to the east, as both the face of the country and the climate would invite. Noah lived two hundred years after this event, and probably journeyed east, where traditions relating to the flood, and the safety of a few from that catastrophe have much prevailed.— From Noah and his sons would be communicated to their posterity whatever was known by them of antedeluvian discoveries and inventions in the arts of life. These could not have been very small during seventeen hundred years, the duration of the old world, according to the common computation; but at this distance of time, and in the want of early records, no very accurate opinion can be formed as to how great, or what those inventions were. But we may safely conclude, that they were not very great; otherwise the early generations after the deluge would have been more civilized than there is now evidence or reason to believe.

This is pretty wild stuff. The idea of Noah's Ark landing somewhere east of the Caspian Sea was niche in 1842. The coordinates given place the ark somewhere in China, west of Lhasa, Tibet. The only way to interpret these coordinates as being near the Caspian Sea is by using the Ptolemaic system, which had fallen out of use in the 16th and 17th centuries. My take is that the Times and Seasons editors (including Joseph Smith) derived these ideas from older sources. After some searching, Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World is the most likely candidate. However, Joseph Smith probably accessed the majority of these ideas through the writings of Voltaire, which his father described as "the best Bible then extant."

Thank you for the book reference! Very intriguing! I would not at all be surprised if he had relied on Voltaire for some of his views.