THE MOST RADICAL CHASM BETWEEN MORMON BELIEF AND THE ORTHODOX Judeo-Christian tradition centers on the doctrine of God. This is the great divide.
“I am going to tell you how God came to be God,” declared Joseph Smith in his “King Follett Discourse” of 1844, the theological culmination of his career. “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted Man…. If you were to see him to-day, you would see him like a man in form—like yourselves, in all the person, image, and very form as a man…. We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea, and will take away and do away the vail, so that you may see…. The mind or the intelligence which man possesses is coequal with God himself…. Intelligence is eternal and exists upon a self-existent principle.”
Joseph Smith’s theology of God is summed up in an oft-quoted couplet by the fifth president of the LDS Church, Lorenzo Snow: “As man is, God once was. As God is, man may become.”
This is “quite bizarre,” was the reaction of the Reverend Thomas Hopko, retired dean of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, upon first reading the Follett sermon. In Hopko’s view, the doctrines are not rendered less bizarre by the attempts of the LDS scholars Philip Barlow and David L. Paulsen to locate support for them in the writings of early church fathers. According to this Orthodox academic, writers like Barlow and Paulsen “just didn’t understand” the patristic writers and the theological context of the early Christian church.
Educated Mormons are well aware that their doctrine concerning God the Father, particularly the idea that he was once a mortal man and has a literal body, is offensive to traditional Judeo-Christian believers. President Gordon B. Hinckley sidestepped the question in two 1997 interviews. Queried on that point by the San Francisco Chronicle religion writer Don Lattin—“Don’t Mormons believe that God was once a man?”—Hinckley responded, “I wouldn’t say that…. That gets into some pretty deep theology that we don’t know very much about.”
Hinckley’s response was almost identical when the same question was posed by Richard N. Ostling (this book’s coauthor) during an interview for the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and for Time magazine. Was God the Father once a man as we are? “I don’t know that we teach it. I don’t know that we emphasize it. I haven’t heard it discussed for a long time in public discourse. I don’t know all the circumstances under which that statement was made. I understand the philosophical background behind it, but I don’t know a lot about it, and I don’t think others know a lot about it.”
On the other hand, addressing an in-house, all-Mormon audience shortly afterward at General Conference, Hinckley talked about media depictions of the church and, in an apparently pointed reference to those interviews, assured his listeners, “None of you need worry because you read something that was incompletely reported. You need not worry that I do not understand some matters of doctrine.” He added, “I think I understand them thoroughly.” His understanding audience laughed.
Mormons fear, with some justification, that their theology might be trivialized. When they pray, most typical Mormons probably do not consider themselves to be praying to a limited, contingent deity. And the church’s “plurality of gods” doctrine does not translate into prayers addressed to any god other than God the Father (as some feminists have discovered, to their dismay, when they sought to invoke the Mormon Mother in Heaven). The doctrine of exaltation—progression toward deification—is a doctrine of eventual human potential, not a declaration of arrival anytime in this life.
Paulsen, a philosophy professor at Brigham Young University, has written that there is no “comprehensive or systematic statement of authoritative Mormon theology,” but the best approximation is the work of B. H. Roberts. He also wrote that Sterling McMurrin, the University of Utah philosophy professor, helped explain LDS beliefs in terms of traditional theological categories.
Roberts, in a famous 1901 exchange with the Jesuit priest C. Van Der Donckt, listed three “complaints” that traditional Christians have against the Mormon doctrine of God. These points still divide Mormons from the Judeo-Christian tradition:
First, we believe that God is a being with a body in form like man’s; that he possesses body, parts and passions; that in a word, God is an exalted, perfected man.
Second, we believe in a plurality of Gods.
Third, we believe that somewhere and some time in the ages to come, through development, through enlargement, through purification until perfection is attained, man at last may become like God—a God.
Mormon religion generally is uncomfortable with paradox, and it is not grounded in a culture of professional-level theology, philosophy, or training in biblical languages. From its founding, the church has made a point of forbidding the development of any professional and theologically educated clergy “class.” The church leaders responsible for declaring and interpreting doctrine, right up to the First Presidency, are almost without exception prayerful, practical men with no professional training in religion studies. Although Brigham Young University does have some scholars trained in ancient biblical languages, philosophy, and religion studies, the General Authorities who have defined doctrine—even the most influential ones such as Roberts, James Talmage, Joseph Fielding Smith, and Bruce McConkie—were not professionally trained in these disciplines.
This lack of professional or scholarly training reaches back to the origins of the church. “The revelation of the Book of Mormon is not a glimpse of higher and incomprehensible truths but reveals God’s words to men with a democratic comprehensibility,” wrote Thomas O’Dea in The Mormons. “‘Plainness’ of doctrine—straightforwardness and an absence of subtle casuistries—was for its rural audience a mark of its genuineness.”
One: God as an Exalted Man
Mormon tradition, from Joseph Smith on, has tended to interpret literally the Bible’s miracles and anthropomorphic descriptions of God. Roberts wrote, “The Bible emphasizes the doctrine of anthropomorphism by declaring in its very first chapter that man was created in the image of God: ‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him.’” Similarly, Mormons believe that the biblical passages where God speaks to his people “face to face” must mean that God has a literal image or face. The Mormon God is tangible and comprehensible. The Mormon scriptures say, “The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; the Son also; but the Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of Spirit. Were it not so, the Holy Ghost could not dwell in us” (D&C 130:22).
If a believer’s understanding is uncorrupted by philosophy, according to Roberts, then the idea of man created in the image and likeness of God naturally tells us that man is the “counterpart of God in form.” This leads to the God of flesh and bones described by Smith in his Follett sermon and in the Doctrine and Covenants, since the Son is “in the express image of [the father’s] person,” as in Hebrews 1:3. We know Jesus had a body, Roberts reasoned; this verse tells us that God the Father must have had one too.
It follows that in Mormonism the incarnation of Jesus is not, in principle, a unique event. Roberts wrote, “I think the main difference between the Latter-day Saints and ‘Christians’ on the subject of the incarnation, is that the Latter-day Saints believe that incarnation does not stop with the Lord Jesus Christ. Our sacred books teach that not only was Jesus Christ in the beginning with God, but that the spirits of all men were also with him in the beginning, and that these sons of God, as well as the Lord Jesus Christ, became incarnated in bodies of flesh and bone (D&C 93).”
Mormons believe that spirit is matter, and that those biblical passages implying that God is immaterial must be a mistranslation. Smith freely rewrote biblical passages that conflicted with his own concepts. Exodus 33:20 states, “And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me and live.” The Joseph Smith Translation changed that to: “And he said unto Moses, Thou canst not see my face at this time, lest mine anger be kindled against thee also, and I destroy thee, and thy people; for there shall no man among them see me at this time, and live, for they are exceeding sinful. And no sinful man hath at any time, neither shall there be any sinful man at any time, that shall see my face and live.”
John 4:24 in the King James Version reads, “God is Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” In the jst version this becomes, “For unto such hath God promised his Spirit. And they who worship him, must worship in spirit and in truth.” The kjv of I John 4:12 reads, “No man hath seen God at any time.” In Smith: “No man hath seen God at any time, except them who believe.”
The Mormon God exists within time; in traditional Christian theology, God is outside time. Mormonism conceives of time as a line indefinitely extending back into the past and ahead into the future; in Mormon usage such terms as “infinite,” “eternal,” and “everlasting” are redefined and limited by being embedded within the context of this line. In traditional Christianity “eternity” and “infinity” are another realm, outside of this time line, and God’s time is this other realm, beyond human time. He does not participate in sequential time, as we do. This leads some Mormon writers to describe the traditional Christian God as “static,” a term perhaps more appropriately reserved for some conceptions of Buddha.
For Mormons, everything is matter and the elements are eternal. God, existing within the eternal of the Mormon time frame, organized the world out of chaos; the term “creation” in Mormon thought does not mean ex nihilo, out of nothing. Rather, God organized already existing matter.
Intelligence is also eternal in the Mormon understanding, and the intelligent spirit of man—in principle the same race of being as God—is on that same eternal line as God’s. God has progressed to his present exalted state, passing through mortality in former times until his immortal body is incorruptible. We are God’s spirit children. Our intelligence is coeternal with God’s in our premortal existence. When we are born, we progress through the next stage, our mortal existence. In the next life we have the potential of progressing into immortality and becoming like God.
At a theological level, this belief results in a finite, limited deity. A God who progresses is a God who changes, and a God who progresses must be more powerful today than he was yesterday. Apostle John A. Widtsoe wrote in 1915: “God must have been engaged from the beginning, and must now be engaged in progressive development, and infinite as God is, he must have been less powerful in the past than he is today…. We may be certain that, through self-effort, the inherent and innate powers of God have been developed to a God-like degree. Thus he has become God.”
The semi-official Encyclopedia of Mormonism continues in the same vein. God “the Father became the Father at some time before ‘the beginning’ as humans know it, by experiencing a mortality similar to that experienced on earth.” The central point of this doctrine, according to the Encyclopedia, is that “Gods and humans are the same species of being, but at different stages of development in a divine continuum, and that the heavenly Father and Mother are the heavenly pattern, model, and example of what mortals can become through obedience to the gospel…. Knowing that they are the literal offspring of Heavenly Parents and that they can become like those parents through the gospel of Jesus Christ is a wellspring of religious motivation.”
The most sophisticated explanation of the Mormon deity is in the writings of McMurrin, who delivered his ideas in “The Philosophical Foundations of Mormon Theology,” an address given at BYU and four other campuses in 1957–58. McMurrin believed that Mormon theology, having “developed for the most part within concrete historical contexts” rather than from abstract metaphysics, dealt creatively with the most profound human questions. He also thought that Mormon beliefs present a more reasonable approach to the problem of evil than does traditional Christian doctrine.
In traditional Judeo-Christian doctrine, God creates the world and its laws. The universe and its creatures are contingent on him. God is “necessary being” in orthodox theology, and “only God has the ground of his being within himself,” while in Mormonism “God is not the ultimate ground of all being” and “the human spirit has the foundation of its existence within itself.”
The absolute power of the sovereign orthodox Christian God raises the moral problem of accounting for those elements in his creation that are, as McMurrin put it, “not compatible with his goodness.” Traditional theologians have to struggle with theodicy, the “great paradox” of Christian theology: how can a perfectly good, all-powerful, all-knowing God create an imperfect universe in which pain and evil exist?
In orthodox theology, according to McMurrin, “what is meant by eternal is not that God has an endless existence but rather that his being is timeless in that he is not involved in the temporal sequence of past, present, and future.” For this kind of God, “all things happen simultaneously.” So, in addition to raising problems of moral theology, this conception of eternity has an obvious effect on questions of history and human freedom. With this kind of God, where is free agency?
In Mormon theology, McMurrin said, “God is an embodied being with a spatially configured form.” Mormonism affirms “the intrinsic worth of material things, including the human body,” as well as “the ultimate value of temporal human enterprise.” The future is not predetermined by God’s present, as in traditional theology, and the responsibility for moral evil can be assigned to freedom of the will.
McMurrin also posed an interesting definition of “supernatural.” The usual Christian definition of it is “that in miracle the supernatural intrudes upon the natural in such a way as to set aside the ordinary processes that are described by natural law.” For Mormons, he said, “an event is miraculous only in the sense that the causal laws describing it are unknown.” (James Talmage, the early-twentieth-century apostle-theologian, said substantially the same thing.)
Traditional Christian philosophy, McMurrin wrote, stresses absolutes, following the influence of Greek philosophy. It provides a theology of God being. Mormon theology has more in common with “process theology”: it is a theology of becoming. One difficulty is in satisfactorily tying a theology of becoming to an ethic of moral absolutes. Here McMurrin saw Mormonism as pragmatic but leaning toward value absolutes. His lecture did not resolve the problem of how a philosophy of becoming can posit a moral philosophy of absolutes or normative ethics.
Mormon thinkers believe the LDS tradition is better equipped than traditional Christian theology to resolve the problem of evil since it does not posit the orthodox sovereign God. The usual question of how an all-powerful and loving God can allow the existence of evil does not exist, in the same way, with a limited deity. The late Eugene England, founding editor of Dialogue, liked McMurrin’s description of Mormonism as a combination of liberal theology with a conservative personal ethic. For Blake Ostler, “rejection of absolute omniscience is consistent with Mormonism’s commitment to the inherent freedom of uncreated selves, the temporal progression of deity, the moral responsibility of humans, and consequential denial of salvation by arbitrary grace alone.” Traditional Mormonism denies the doctrine of original sin and stresses human free agency. Ostler wrote, “God makes all things possible, but he can make all things actual only by working in conjunction with free individuals and actual entities.”
On the other hand, if a finite God—a God with limits who did not create the world out of nothing—is off the hook on the question of being responsible for the existence of pain and evil, this leaves open another question: from where do we derive the principle of moral good? It is a difficult question if, as McMurrin seemed to indicate, Mormonism favors the principle of an absolutist or normative ethic rather than a relativist or situational ethic. With a finite God, and a philosophy of progressive becoming, how does one introduce the idea of universals? How does one define moral goodness without the moral sovereignty of God?
Kim McCall examined the question of moral obligation in a Sunstone Symposium paper, contending that “morality, in Mormonism, is independent of the will and dictates of God.” McCall held the traditional Mormon belief that “God and man are the same type of being.” He regarded moral commandments as “revelations in which God enlightens us concerning truths independent of himself.” He said that what matters is “not the action,” but “the reason it is being performed.” In a sense, we make our own moral laws, test and revise them in practice, and through this “self-realization and moral development” we, like God, progress “in developing our moral intuitions and capacities.”
A. Bruce Lindgren, former world church secretary of the Community of Christ, objected that McCall’s analysis results in an antinomian, relativistic ethic. “If right and wrong do not carry moral obligation with them, then they are meaningless terms…. God is not the source of moral obligation…. In what sense, then, is God really God?” he asked. That kind of God “has become nothing more than Superman.” Identifying himself as a conventional theist, Lindgren wrote that he “cannot worship a God who is simply a reflection of the limitations found in human experience. Right and wrong have their ground in God.”
The “omni” issue is a difficult one for Mormon theology. The Mormon God is a God who in some sense is finite and changes. Joseph Smith, in the famous “King Follett Discourse,” said that God became God. Roberts wrote, “God cannot be considered as absolutely infinite, because we are taught by the facts of revelation that absolute infinity cannot hold as to God; as a person, God has limitations, and that which has limitations is not absolutely infinite.”
As O’Dea put it: “Mormonism has developed the notion of a self-made deity, who through activism and effort has achieved a relative mastery over the world…a God whose transcendence is merely relative to human perception and whose relatively transcendent position with regard to man and other uncreated elements of the universe is the result of a conquest. God is God because he has risen to ‘Godhood’ by his own labor.”
How does one describe the characteristics of such a God? Currently popular writings by such BYU scholars as Robert Millet and Stephen Robinson, professors of ancient scripture, have borrowed a conventional vocabulary to describe a God who sounds very traditional: omniscient (all-knowing) and omnipotent (all-powerful), with the physically omnipresent element provided by the Holy Spirit.
But their BYU colleague Paulsen expressed it differently in his Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy, contending that LDS “eternalism,” the self-subsistent and uncreated quality of all matter, plainly entails the “finitism” of God, even though God is not explicitly characterized in this way. He relied on the thought of Roberts and others to deny that in the Mormon conception God is omnipotent, omniscient, immutable, omnipresent, or eternal, as those terms are defined in conventional discourse. God, Paulsen wrote, “once dwelled on an earth and earned the honorific title through a process of growth and development.” As he noted, this is “radically heretical” from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy.
One obvious difficulty is how to balance absolutist descriptions against the Mormon theology of God as a being who is progressing. England found “the doctrine of eternal profession in knowledge” to be “one of the reasons our ideal of becoming like God is so attractive…to experience the joy of learning forever.”
England believed that Brigham Young and B. H. Roberts developed a concept capable of resolving the “apparent contradiction.” In this explanation, “God is perfect in relation to our mortal sphere, has all knowledge regarding it, but is learning and progressing in spheres beyond ours that have nothing to do with ours—thus not endangering in any way his perfect redemptive plan and power in our sphere.” With this, the believer can “talk of God as perfect and unchanging when praising him in regard to us and our sphere” and speak “of him as developing and enjoying new ideas and experiences when imagining the adventure of Godhood in spheres beyond ours,” all the while remaining “right and orthodox” in LDS theology.
Writers such as England, Philip Barlow, and Blake Ostler thought that Mormonism should celebrate its own theological traditions as distinct from the absolutist God of the orthodox Judeo-Christian tradition. England feared that the absolutist vocabulary and ideas expressed by writers such as Robinson may be “part of [Mormonism’s] accommodation to American ways which is influencing our theology rather than the other way around.”
Ostler wrote: “The classical idea of absolute omniscience reduces faith and hope in God to absurdity. For if God infallibly foreknows the future then prayer could not possibly influence him.” Ostler said that “the point is not his [God’s] unlimited power and knowledge, but his purpose and love…. The classical definitions of timeless omniscience and unlimited power are quite irrelevant to one aspiring to understand his relationship to deity. Religious faith is more a function of intimacy than of ultimacy, more a product of relationships than of logical necessities.”
In his view, the believer and God are “truly co-laborers.” Mormon Christianity, he asserted, celebrates a “personal and therefore finite God who makes a difference in human experience.”
Two: The Plurality of Gods
The second “complaint” that B. H. Roberts addressed in his exchange with Van Der Donckt was the Mormon “plurality of gods” doctrine. This doctrine relates to Mormon beliefs about the godhead as well as the belief that men can become gods. Joseph Smith clearly introduced this idea when he declared that the biblical Genesis should be rewritten. In a revelation written from the jail in Liberty, Missouri (D&C 121:32), Smith spoke of the “Council of the Eternal God of all the other gods before this world was.” In the Book of Abraham (4:1), the Genesis account becomes: “and then the Lord said: Let us go down. And they went down at the beginning, and they, that is the Gods, organized and formed the heavens and the earth.” As previously mentioned, Smith’s idiosyncratic understanding of the Hebrew plural Elohim, usually regarded as an intensifier to stress the magnitude of God, interpreted the term as indicating plural number.
In Mormon theology, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are tri-theistic, three separate gods or personages, united in purpose. In the classical Christian Trinity, the three persons are united not only in purpose but in substance, as truly one monotheistic God. Mormons dislike the term “polytheism,” generally regarded by non-Mormons as pejorative and pagan; some like to use the term “henotheism,” meaning one head God who is worshiped as supreme while allowing for the existence of other gods.
Non-Mormons and many Mormons regard Smith’s doctrine as having developed over time, with the Book of Mormon theology showing resemblances to Protestant thought in the late 1820s and early 1830s. In the view of these writers, the distinctives of Mormon theology largely stem from the Nauvoo period and continued development in Utah.
The deity as defined in 1830 (D&C 20:17) was “God in heaven, who is infinite and eternal, from everlasting to everlasting the same unchangeable God.” The account of the First Vision that is canonized for today’s Mormons was written by Smith in 1838: in it the Father and the Son appear as two distinct personages. However, the earliest written account of the First Vision, penned in 1832, mentions the appearance of only one personage, without the “explicit separation of God and Christ,” as pointed out by BYU Professor Thomas G. Alexander, who thought early Mormon theism resembled the Protestantism of that time.
The original version of the Book of Mormon called Mary “the mother of God, after the manner of the flesh.” In 1837 this was altered to stress that Jesus was a separate, subordinate personage. The verse (I Nephi 11:18 in the current edition) was changed to read, “mother of the Son of God.” Three other changes in the 1837 edition (I Nephi 13:40, I Nephi 11:21, 32) also tended to stress that Jesus is a separate personage from the Father.
According to Alexander, the Book of Mormon “tended to define God as an absolute personage of spirit who, clothed in flesh, revealed himself in Jesus Christ”; he cited Abinidi’s sermon to King Noah (Mosiah 13–14) as an example. Much of D&C 20, dating from 1830, resembles traditional Christian creedal formulations, and D&C 20:28 seems to be a ringing endorsement of standard monotheistic trinitarianism: “Which Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are one God, infinite and eternal, without end.”
Smith’s “Lectures on Faith,” delivered in 1834 and 1835, are another matter. Included in the scriptural canon from 1835 but removed in 1921, they appear to be ditheistic. In them Smith taught that there are “two personages who constitute the great, matchless, governing, and supreme power over all things…They are the Father and the Son: The Father being a personage of spirit, glory and power: possessing all perfection and fullness: The Son, who was in the bosom of the Father, a personage of tabernacle, made, or fashioned like unto man.” The Son is described as “possessing the same mind with the Father, which mind is the Holy Spirit, and these three are one.” The Holy Spirit, in other words, appears to be an aspect of the Father, not a separate person or god.
Smith proceeded from this to the Book of Abraham, in which the plurality of gods is clear. The creation/organization of our world is carried out by “the Gods.” The Trinity, as defined by the First Presidency in 1916, is now understood as three distinctly separate personages who share a common purpose, two with corporeal tabernacles.
Some Mormons, such as BYU’s Robert Millet, deny that the original Book of Mormon taught traditional Christian theism. In Millet’s view, the passages that speak of “oneness” in the godhood “need not imply trinitarianism.” Millet argued that the New Testament was not clear about trinitarian formulations; they were imposed on the ancient church by borrowings from Greek philosophy. In discussing the corporeality of God the Father, Millet noted that Smith rewrote John 4:24 (the “God is a Spirit” verse previously analyzed in chapter 17) by revelation in 1832.
Millet cited the second of Smith’s “Lectures on Faith” as evidence that the prophet taught progressive exaltation early. In the human family “the extent of their knowledge…will depend upon their diligence and faithfulness in seeking after him until,…they shall obtain faith in God, and power with him to behold him face to face.” This God, Millet wrote, is clearly “one who desires to glorify his children and make them even as he is.”
Three: Men Becoming Gods
This brings us to the third “complaint” that Roberts sought to address: that, through development, progression, and purification, man may become a God. In early Mormonism, this may have resembled the Methodist and Arminian view of sanctification, a doctrine of man’s potential perfectibility through free choice with the help of God’s grace. But Methodist sanctification was thoroughly trinitarian and retained a distinction between the creature and the creator. In Mormonism man has the potential for actual godhood through the doctrine of eternal progression, sometimes called exaltation or deification.
In recent years several Mormon scholars have sought validation for their belief in deification by citing evidence in C. S. Lewis, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the writings of the early church fathers. The Mormon scholar Philip Barlow called Lewis possibly “the most interesting modern adherent of the possibility of human exaltation.” Barlow found the concept of deification “utterly ubiquitous” in Lewis’s writings.
Lewis, the twentieth century’s best-loved and most influential apologist for traditional Christianity, is quoted so often that he is practically an honorary Mormon. Those who cite him have included the late President Ezra Taft Benson, Apostles Dallin Oaks and Neal Maxwell, and BYU Professors Hugh Nibley, Robert Millet, and Stephen Robinson. A number of Lewis titles are stocked in Deseret Book stores. The book Mormons on the Internet listed a C. S. Lewis home page with the description: “Yeah, yeah, so he wasn’t technically LDS. But his personal theology continues to speak to LDS beliefs to such a degree that he certainly deserves the status of honorary member.”
Typical Lewis citations chosen to support deification include this one, from Mere Christianity, tucked by Robinson into an Encyclopedia of Mormonism entry: “He [God] said (in the Bible) that we were ‘gods,’ and He is going to make good His words. If we let Him—for we can prevent Him, if we choose—He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy, and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine.”
Another frequently encountered Lewis citation is this one from The Weight of Glory: “The following Him is, of course, the essential point…. It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour…. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship…. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.”
Referring to these quotes as expressing Lewis’s belief in the Mormon deification doctrine, Robert Millet in The Mormon Faith: A New Look at Christianity asserted that Lewis “taught this notion.”
Did he? The real C. S. Lewis was aware of the Book of Mormon and assumed that Joseph Smith wrote it. Evan Stephenson, concerned that some Mormon scholars had made Lewis into a crypto-Mormon to the detriment of strengths in LDS distinctives, and had failed to understand the context within which Lewis actually wrote, contributed a corrective essay in a 1997 issue of Dialogue. The list of theological differences is long, and “one would sooner fit a camel through the eye of a needle than pour C. S. Lewis’s wine into Joseph Smith’s bottles,” Stephenson said.
Lewis did write a number of passages that do appear to express deification, but all of them are within a context of maintaining the unbridgeable gap between creature and creator, who are “different instruments.” Man has no luminosity of his own; he is only capable, through grace, of functioning as a clean mirror to reflect the brightness of God. Lewis developed his moral theology from the classical concepts of natural law and grounded his concept of good in God. Building on traditional orthodox Christian theology, Lewis believed that good is absolute and uncreated, and that evil is not the opposite of good; he believed that evil is the perversion of good.
In contrast to Mormon theology, Lewis’s God transcends time and is the immaterial being of orthodox theism. The British don frequently and vigorously disputed the idea of a God defined with literal anthropomorphic characteristics. Such a God is one for “simple-minded” people who are “savages” rather than believers in an “adult religion.” “In C. S. Lewis, Latter-day Saints do not find a unique figure who mirrors their own theology,” Stephenson wrote.
In “Christian Apologetics,” Lewis, an Anglican who believed in the theology of the Book of Common Prayer, including its thirty-nine Articles of Religion, proclaimed his own faith to be “the faith preached by the Apostles, attested by the Martyrs, embodied in the Creeds, expounded by the Fathers,” that is, the conventional, historic faith of traditional Christianity. That was in 1945, in a paper delivered at a conference for Anglican priests and youth leaders. He described God the same way in Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1963), his last major religious work. Lewis’s definition shows the clear difference between classical Judeo-Christian theism and the God of Smith’s “King Follett Discourse.”
God, Lewis wrote is “the Unimaginably and Insupportably Other.” In contrast to the progression in Mormon doctrine, Lewis believed that “in Him there is no becoming.” The difference between God and his creatures is a difference of kind, not a difference of degree: “All creatures, from the angel to the atom, are other than God; with an otherness to which there is no parallel: incommensurable. The very words ‘to be’ cannot be applied to Him and to them in exactly the same sense.”
Mormon writers, including Millet, Robinson, Paulsen, and Ostler, generally criticize this definition of God as one corrupted by Greek philosophy during the “Great Apostasy” in the early centuries of the Christian church as it strayed from the primitive truths of New Testament days. In this, Mormon theology resembles the intellectual critique made by some liberal non-Mormons and taught in many university graduate schools of religion.
Traditionalist scholars disagree with this interpretation. The early church fathers did not import Greek categories wholesale, they maintain; the patristic writers picked and chose carefully, baptizing and transforming what was necessary to develop the church’s theology within the bounds of the New Testament. “The idea was cut to fit the Christian faith,” wrote the English patristics scholar G. L. Prestige, “not the faith trimmed to square with the imported conception. Conceptions of pagan philosophy were radically altered in their Christian context, and not seldom utterly discarded after trial.”
Similarly, according to the late patristics scholar John Meyendorff, a professor at St. Vladimir’s Seminary (Orthodox) and at Fordham University (Catholic), adapting Greek words and concepts to the needs of Christian experience was “not simply a verbal adjustment but a radical change and transformation of the Hellenic mind…. The confrontation between the Academy and the Gospel ended with the reality of Christian Hellenism, not hellenized Christianity.”
The New Testament LDS proof text used in support for deification is Matthew 5:48: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” Mormons interpret this as New Testament foundation for exaltation in eternal progression. Their writers, such as the BYU professors Daniel C. Peterson and Stephen D. Ricks in a 1988 issue of Ensign, have often expressed a kinship to Eastern Orthodoxy in that branch of Christendom’s use of the term “deification.” Peterson and Ricks traced deification to such early church fathers as Irenaeus (second century a.d.) and to the notion of theosis, which is “very much alive” in the Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches.
The embrace, however, is one way. The Eastern Orthodox tradition is also firmly rooted in a distinction of kind, rather than of degree, between man and God. “The idea of deification must always be understood in the light of the distinction between God’s essence and His energies. Union with God means union with the divine energies, not the divine essence,” wrote Timothy Ware (Bishop Ware), who was the longtime lecturer in Orthodox Studies at Oxford University, in The Orthodox Church. “The human being does not become God by nature, but is merely a ‘created god,’ a god by grace or by status.”
Bishop Ware elaborated on Orthodoxy and deification in response to a query:
It is clear to me that C. S. Lewis understands the doctrine of theosis in essentially the same way as the Orthodox Church does; indeed, he probably derived his viewpoint from reading such Greek Fathers as Athanasius. On the other hand, the Mormon view is altogether different from what Lewis and the Orthodox Church believe.
Orthodox theology emphasizes that there is a clear distinction—in the current phraseology “an ontological gap”—between God the Creator and the creation which He has made. This “gap” is bridged by divine love, supremely through the Incarnation, but it is not abolished. The distinction between the Uncreated and the created still remains. The Incarnation is a unique event.
“Deification,” on the Orthodox understanding, is to be interpreted in terms of the distinction between the divine essence and the divine energies. Human beings share by God’s mercy in His energies but not in His essence, either in the present age or in the age to come. That is to say, in theosis the saints participate in the grace, power, and glory of God, but they never become God by essence.
Citing the early church fathers in support of the Mormon deification/ exaltation doctrine became a frequent theme among Mormon apologists toward the end of the twentieth century. Barlow wrote that Irenaeus and Clement seem to provide “the earliest lucid and indisputable formulations of the divinization (theosis) view of salvation which have been preserved to us.” He cautioned that some of the allusions he uses may have “only verbal similarities to Mormon understandings of exaltation,” but he proceeded to affirm the “affinities” as “striking.”
Robert Millet, speaking at a 1998 Church Educational System Fireside, said, “A study of Christian history reveals that the doctrine of the deification of man was taught at least into the fifth century by such notables as Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Justin Martyr, Athanasius, and Augustine.” Stephen Robinson in his books Are Mormons Christians? and How Wide the Divide? cited such patristic authors as Irenaeus (“‘Ye are gods; and all of you are sons of the Most High.’…For it was necessary at first that nature be exhibited, then after that what was mortal would be conquered and swallowed up in immortality”) and Athanasius (“‘The Word was made flesh in order that we might be enabled to be made gods…’”).
But non-Mormon scholars specializing in the patritistic era say the basic theological assumptions that lie behind those quotes—the assumptions of the patristics and of Mormon theology—are radically and fundamentally different. Millet’s Fireside address, for example, expressed standard Mormon orthodoxy when he said, “God is not of another species.” Traditional Christian scholars say the God of the early church fathers is monotheistic, always the self-existent creator of another species.
A non-Mormon contrast: “The gulf is never bridged between Creator and creature,” wrote patristics scholar G. L. Prestige. “Eternal life is the life of God. Man may come to share its manifestations and activities, but only by grace, never of right. Man remains a created being: God alone is agenetos [uncreated].”
Queried about whether the early church fathers support the Mormon doctrine of deification, the late Yale professor Jaroslav Pelikan pointed to his discussion and definition of theosis in his Gifford Lectures (1992–1993). In this, according to Pelikan, “It was as essential for theosis as it was for the incarnation itself not to be viewed as analogous to Classical Greek theories about the promotion of human beings to divine rank, and in that sense not to be defined by natural theology at all; on such errors they pronounced their ‘Anathema!’” In defining theosis Pelikan cited John Meyendorff and Georges Florovsky.
That man remains a created being, while God alone is uncreated, is a point Pelikan emphasized in a discussion of Athanasius (fourth century a.d.): “Athanasius was the spokesman for the Eastern tradition that God the Logos had become man in order that men might become God; but if this was to be the gift of his incarnation and if man was to be rescued from the corruption that so easily beset him, it was indispensable that the Logos not belong to things that had an origin, but be their framer himself.”
Man, according to Athanasius in Ad Afros, “cannot become like God in essence…. But a mutable thing cannot be like God who is truly unchangeable, any more than what is created can be like its creator.” For Athanasius, man is a contingent creature and remains such. In De Decretis he wrote: “Yet does God create as men do? Or is His being as man’s being? Perish the thought….”
Irenaeus (second century a.d.) also said that God is uniquely self-existent, the one who created ex nihilo. “The rule of truth which we hold,” he wrote, “is, that there is one God Almighty, who made all things by His Word, and fashioned and formed, out of that which had no existence, all things which exist.” God “commands all things into existence.”
Irenaeus taught that “God is always the same and unbegotten.” He stressed that “in all things God has the preeminence, who alone is uncreated, the first of all things, and the primary cause of the existence of all,…being in subjection to God is continuance in immortality, and immortality is the glory of the uncreated One.” The Uncreated One is perfect; man makes progress “approximating” to God. But man remains a contingent creature; he does not in essence become God, and God in the patristics writings has never been man.
Humans participate “in the divine activities by faith, through grace,” said Orthodox scholar Thomas Hopko. The idea that “God himself was human” is not “classical Christian belief.” Hopko explained that for the ancient Greek fathers, deification clearly meant only that humans “can have divine qualities” or share in “divine life. Other terms for this are participation, resemblance, communion, imitation—becoming imitators of God.” He regarded the writings of Mormons such as Barlow and Paulsen as a search for patristic proof-texts. “They were trying desperately to find justification for their idiosyncratic teaching in the fathers.”
It seems clear that support for the Mormon doctrines of a corporeal and limited God, eternal progress, and deification cannot be found in Eastern Orthodoxy, the early church fathers, or the twentieth-century writings of C. S. Lewis. On the other hand, the idea of eternal progression, which has some parallels with nineteenth-century liberal Christian thought and twentieth-century process theology, is deeply embedded in Mormon doctrine. Behind that lies a philosophical potential of genuine creative subtlety that Mormon thinkers, drawing on their own doctrinal history, are developing into a theological heritage of considerable depth and complexity.