Mormon Deification vs. Orthodox Theosis

An interesting article by Bob Mims was published in the January 20, 2018 issue of The Salt Lake Tribune, the full text of which is presented below and discussed. The article is titled: “Humans can become like God? Mormons say Orthodox Christians have similar belief—but that’s news to Orthodox Christians”. It can be seen on their website here. It begins as follows:

“Ever since LDS Church founder Joseph Smith reported he had been visited by the illuminated, bodily forms of God the Father and Jesus Christ, Mormonism’s take on godhood has been, at the least, unique.

“Christian theologians have gone so far as to dismiss Smith’s 1838 account, and subsequent conclusions about the nature of deity, as errant if not outright heretical. Christianity’s foundational, creedal beliefs, they say, are and always will be in a bodiless, spiritual Trinity comprised of an eternally coequal Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”

I have already discussed the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, and the theological issues associated with it here, and I refer them to that. They also need to explain how Jesus can be God, and corporeal and anthropomorphic at the same time. The article then continues as follows:

“Now, approaching two centuries since Smith’s 1820 boyhood vision in western New York, the church he launched may be further exploring its take not just on God’s nature, but also on long-taught precepts about how, and to what extent, Latter-day Saints can aspire to godhood themselves.”

I doubt it! The course and direction of the development of Church doctrine is determined by its ecclesiastical officers and leaders, not by BYU professors and academics. They are free to express opinions, and engage in speculation and debate; but they don’t make the decisions or set the agendas.

“The irony? The source for this doctrinal exploration of Mormonism, one of Christianity’s newest expressions, is from the teachings and traditions of the faith’s most ancient one, the 2,000-year-old Eastern Orthodox Church.”

I doubt that too! The doctrine of deification, divinization, or theosis in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is derived from modern revelation and canonized scriptures of the Church. What has been revealed in modern scripture on that subject provides enough substance for Latter-day Saint thinkers to chew on without having to resort to the theological traditions of any other church, including those of the Eastern Orthodox Church. There is no other Christian church tradition that provides as complete and comprehensive a theological exposition of the doctrine of deification or divinization as found in modern scripture of the Church. D&C 76:50–70; 132:19–37 are important references (though not the only ones).

This is not to say that making such a comparison cannot be useful. It can be, provided it is made clear at the outset which is the superior of the two, and adequate measures are taken to ensure that the false impression is not given that the object of the exercise is to somehow lend greater legitimacy and support for, or acceptance of the theological position of the restored Church. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints cannot gain greater legitimacy or acceptance by comparing it with other (apostate) Christian traditions, including those of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The EOC is just another apostate Christian tradition like Catholicism and Protestantism, and it would be most unwise for any Latter-day Saint scholar to suppose that the theology of the Restoration can gain greater legitimacy or acceptance by favorably comparing, or equating it with one of those.

A more useful comparison to make would be between the doctrine of deification as taught in modern revelation, and the theosis theology of the Early Church Fathers, whose writings on this subject are large and extensive, and span over a long period of time (for examples see here). Such a comparison can lend greater legitimacy to the theological position of Latter-day Saints, because it demonstrates that this doctrine was taught and understood by the early Christians, before it was lost or distorted through the Apostasy in the later Christian tradition. There is a big difference between those two kinds of comparisons. The second can be very productive; whereas the first might not be unless very careful precautions are taken to avoid giving the wrong impression. The article then continues as follows:

“‘LDS thinkers are looking to Eastern Orthodoxy for some clarification on issues they are exploring,’ says Richard Mouw, former president of Fuller Theological Seminary. ‘We’ve had some long discussions on theosis, in particular.’”

“Latter-day Saint thinkers” might be; but they don’t determine the course and direction of the development of Church doctrine. Richard Mouw is a great guy, and a friend of Latter-day Saints; but on this issue it looks like he has been given misleading information by the “Latter-day Saint thinkers” he has been associating with. I doubt that Eastern Orthodoxy can provide any “clarification” on the theological issues related to deification, divinization, or theosis that Latter-day Saints may benefit from “exploring”—other than merely as an academic exercise. What has already been revealed in modern scripture on the subject of deification, divinization, or theosis far exceeds what may have survived in the apostate Christian traditions of today. The article then continues as follows:

“Orthodoxy’s belief in ‘theosis’—that a redeemed, resurrected humanity’s ultimate destiny is to be ‘deified,’ or united with both the eternal life and nature of its creator—does seem to echo within the Mormon doctrine of ‘exaltation.’

“J.B. Haws, a church history and doctrine instructor at LDS Church-owned Brigham Young University, certainly sees a likeness.”

Assuming that that observation is correct, the only thing it proves is how lucky “Orthodoxy” is to find such “likeness” between its theology and the revealed doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints! It doesn’t make Latter-day Saints any luckier for discovering such a “likeness,” nor lend greater legitimacy or support for their theology—while ignoring the differences or disagreements. The article continues:

“To mixed, sometimes dismissive reaction from mainline Christian theologians, Haws first wrote about the ‘potential for doctrinal parallels’ between Mormonism and Orthodoxy’s stance on the nature of God in 2004.”

As I said, I would be more interested in looking for those “parallels” in the extensive writings of the Early Church Fathers than in Orthodox theology itself. There is indeed such a parallel, which is very significant, and can be profitably explored for the reasons already given. Orthodoxy itself has little to offer in that regard—when the differences and disagreements are also taken into account. The article continues:

“More than a dozen years later, Haws and other LDS authors remain ‘fascinated with Orthodoxy,’ he says. ‘What I’m suggesting … is perhaps those dismissals have been too hasty—and that perhaps those comparisons are worth another look.’

“For instance, Haws notes, ‘Eastern Orthodox Christians believe that because of Christ’s victory, deified humans will receive their physical bodies in a glorious resurrection. Latter-day Saints believe the same.’”

I still don’t know what the fuss is about. The idea that the believers in Jesus Christ will be resurrected with glorious physical bodies is standard Christian and biblical theology. It is by no means a special feature of “Orthodoxy,” nor does it have a particular relevance to deification or theosis. According to the Bible, all mankind will be resurrected, the wicked and the righteous, some to honor and some to dishonor: some with the glory of the sun, some with the glory of the moon, and some with the glory of the stars (1 Cor. 15: 40–44). Why is that such a big deal with Haws (as far as this discussion is concerned), I have no idea. The article then continues:

“Orthodox Christians and Mormons also sound similar in their aspirations to the divine nature, he adds, and agree that while they may become ‘gods,’ they will ‘never cease to worship God, nor somehow replace him as their God.’”

Is that supposed to be an endorsement of beliefs and teachings of Latter-day Saints, or an endorsement of Orthodoxy? Still not clear. And what about the differences? Are the differences important as well, or not? And what about their protestations that the two are not the same! Do they have a say on this as well, or not? After all, it is their religion, not ours. They decide what their theology is, we don’t. They have as much a say on this (if not more so) than we do. The article continues:

“While Smith and succeeding leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints taught expansively on attaining godhood in the distant hereafter, the belief has often been summed up by the so-called ‘Snow couplet,’ penned by namesake Lorenzo Snow after an 1840 revelation:

“‘As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be,’ wrote Snow, who would become the Utah-based faith’s fifth president.

“It is the first part of that couplet, more than the last, that furrows the brows of Orthodox clerics.

“‘The LDS teaching on God, theosis, and the afterlife is considered heretical by Eastern Orthodox Christianity. It is heretical on many grounds,’ says the Rev. Josiah Trenham, an author, educator and frequent lecturer for the Orthodox Theological Society of America.

“‘First … God is spirit, not flesh,’ says Trenham, who also serves as archpriest and pastor at Riverside’s St. Andrew Orthodox Church in Southern California. ‘Latter-day Saints commit deep anthropomorphist misreadings of scripture [in teaching] that God has a body.’

“As for the couplet’s assertion that God himself was once a created being, like humans, ‘this, to an Orthodox Christian, is utterly blasphemous,’ Trenham says. ‘It undermines the union of the persons of the Holy Trinity.’

“He also tries to clearly mark the differences over what theosis means to Orthodoxy versus Mormons.

“‘Through faith in Jesus Christ, the God-Man, human beings can become by grace what God is by nature—loving, holy, all-wise, etc.,’ Trenham states. ‘[But] not so that we can function as a god of our own world and have wives and spirit children, but so that we can worship and adore and love the one true God forever.’”

That highlights the problem with Latter-day Saint scholars mindlessly “comparing” the theology of the restored gospel with those of other Christian traditions. Unless it is approached wisely, and with great care and caution, and appropriate measures are taken to avoid misunderstanding, it can create the false impression that Latter-day Saints want to gain legitimacy for their theology by tagging it onto theirs. It appears to have been the fault of some Latter-day Saint scholars to have (unintentionally perhaps) given that false impression by attempting that kind of “comparison”. That is an erroneous exercise that is counterproductive at best, and can be damaging at worst. 

A far more useful exercise would be in comparing the doctrine of deification as taught in modern scripture with the “theosis” theology of the Early Church Fathers, as shown above; than in comparing or equating Latter-day Saint theology with that of other apostate Christian traditions such as the Eastern Orthodoxy. Eastern Orthodoxy is just another apostate Christian tradition like the Catholic and Protestant. The last thing any Latter-day Saint thinker or scholar should want to do is to equate or compare the restored gospel with one of those. The article then continues:

“Mouw, known as a catalyst for evangelical Christian-Mormon dialogue, suggests there is theological wiggle room in plumbing the depths of such weighty mysteries. He says LDS teachings have expanded, if not shifted, to be at least marginally closer to mainline Christianity. Mouw cites comments by the late LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley that seemed to hedge on early Mormon thinking about a mortal beginning for God himself.”

I wouldn’t quite describe it that way. I think what has been happening is that in the past Latter-day Saints have been inclined to engage in a lot of speculative thinking on various theological issues which has sometimes been passed off as revealed truth. This has muddied the waters of Latter-day Saint theological thinking on various issues which President Hinckley I think was trying somehow to redress. I don’t think what he had in mind was trying to bring the theology of the Restoration more inline with the traditional Christian one. The article continues:

“In an 1997 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Hinckley was asked, “Don’t Mormons believe that God was once a man?”

“The LDS prophet responded, ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ downplaying the opening passage of the Snow couplet.

“Even a 2014 LDS Church online essay, ‘Becoming Like God,’ concedes that ‘little has been revealed about the first half of this couplet, and consequently little is taught.’

“However, Hinckley stood firm on Snow’s concluding words, ‘As God now is, man may become,’ saying it describes Mormon belief in ‘eternal progression.’

“The God-was-once-human proclamation came up again when Hinckley was interviewed by Time magazine, also in 1997.

“‘I don’t know that we teach it,’ Hinckley said. ‘I don’t know that we emphasize it. I haven’t heard it discussed for a long time in public discourse. … I understand the philosophical background behind it. But I don’t know a lot about it, and I don’t know that others know a lot about it.’

“The apparent doctrinal deflection coincided with what Mouw sees as an evolution in the LDS spiritual biosphere in the past 15 years.”

There may be an “evolution” taking place in the “Latter-day Saint spiritual biosphere,” but it is not of the kind that he thinks it is. He continues:

“Mormons today express a more pronounced ‘central emphasis on Jesus Christ,’ he says, including ‘a very strong sense we are saved by grace alone, through the atoning work of Christ, completed on the cross.’”

The theological position restored Church with regard to grace of God in the work of redemption is clearly taught in the Book of Mormon (2 Nephi 2:5–9; 10:23–24; 25:23). Nothing has changed from that point of view, nor will change. (“After all we can do” in 2 Nephi 25:23 means “in spite of all we can do”.) The article continues:

“However, what seems destined to continue making Latter-day Saints particularly peculiar among the thousands of Christian sects is their insistence on God’s corporeal nature.

“That perspective, according to the faith’s essay, also means ‘all people [are] children of God in a full and complete sense [and thus] every person [is] divine in origin, nature and potential.’

“The essay goes on to state that in the Book of Mormon, the faith’s foundational scripture, a prophet ‘saw the finger of the Lord’ and was astonished to learn that human physical forms were truly made in the image of God.

“That LDS belief about a literal, divine and physical father-child relationship finds no welcome within the long-accepted teachings of Orthodoxy—despite Mormon thinkers’ citing of perceived commonalities.”

I am sure it wouldn’t; neither is it right for Latter-day Saint thinkers to attempt to play down the differences while emphasizing the similarities. A reasonable comparison should focus equally on the differences as well as the similarities, be honest about it, and make an intelligent assessment of the merits and demerits of each; not smudge or hide the differences in the hope of endearing, or gaining greater acceptance for the restored gospel. It should always be able to demonstrate the superiority of the theological foundation of the restored gospel. If it is unable to do that, it should not be in the business of making such comparisons. The article continues:

“‘Only God is uncreated. … Created things are not the literal children of the Father,’ says another Orthodox scholar, Archpriest Andrew Stephen Damick, author of ‘Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy: Finding the Way to Christ in a Complicated Religious Landscape.’”

Every religion has the right to define its own theology. Latter-day Saints should not attempt to define other faiths’ theologies for them, or to recast it in their own mold. When differences are observed, it then becomes a question of deciding which is the right one, or which is more correct or superior—and why—not to attempt to smudge the differences, or suggest that they are the same—especially to the loud protestations of the other side. The article continues:

“To Orthodox and the majority of other Christians, believers become God’s divine children ‘in the context of adoption, not apotheosis, where humans become gods by nature,’ Damick explains.

“While LDS writers point to some reinforcement for their church’s views on godly progression in Orthodox Christianity’s teachings on deification, remaining differences on God’s nature and humankind’s eternal destiny are varied and vast.

“For instance, LDS theology departs radically from Orthodoxy with its belief in a Heavenly Mother as well as a Heavenly Father. These Heavenly Parents are getting even more mentions nowadays from top Mormon officials at the pulpit and in print, including in a 2016 church essay.”

Agreed! It is certainly a serious error on the part of any Latter-day Saint writers to attempt to gain a “reinforcement for the Church’s views” by tagging it onto those of other (apostate) Christian traditions—or even to allow such an impression falsely to be received. The differences should always be acknowledged, not overlooked, obscured, or smudged over. It then becomes a question of deciding which is the right one, or the more correct, or superior, and for what reason. The article continues:

“Ultimately, though, any differences should not matter all that much, at least to Mormons, BYU ancient scripture professor Robert Millet wrote in his 2011 paper, ‘God and Man’:

“‘Whether the Latter-day Saint doctrines of exaltation and deification are the same as those delivered by the Church Fathers, by Eastern Orthodox thinkers of the past and present, or by modern Christians is absolutely immaterial,’ Millet wrote. Mormons do not seek a ‘theological imprimatur’ from older Christian dogma, ‘because bright and inspired minds of other faiths have used language or ideas similar to our own.’”

Robert Millet is wrong! That is a flawed and erroneous kind of reasoning. He is talking out of both sides of his mouth. He starts off by making a comparison, with the implied assumption of lending credibility and support to the theology of Latter-day Saints by comparing it favorably with theirs; and when they protest that that is not so, he dismisses their protests as unimportant and “immaterial”. It makes no sense, and serves no useful purpose for Latter-day Saint scholars to attempt to “bridge the gap” between the Latter-day Saint theological position and those of other Christian churches without their consent, and without taking into account their objections and preferred options; and when they loudly protest that the gap is unbridgeable, to dismiss their protests as “immaterial” and unimportant. Of course it is material and important. They decide what their theology is, and how it relates to those of other faiths, we don’t. The right approach is to let them determine what their theological parameters are, acknowledge the differences (as they define it), be honest about it, and then explain why the theology of the Restoration is the superior one. If Latter-day Saint scholars are incapable of doing that, they are in the wrong kind of business.

Comparing and contrasting the doctrine of deification as revealed my modern scripture with those of the Early Church Fathers, however, is a different proposition. There is a sufficiently wide gap in time between them and the churches of today, that today’s churches cannot rightly claim to be the soul interpreters of their theological thinking. Latter-day Saints have as much right to stake a claim to that as they do. And the teachings of the Early Church Fathers compare very favorably with the doctrine of deification of Latter-day Saints. Latter-day Saint scholars can safely make that comparison without at the same time giving the false impression of attempting to gain legitimacy for the restored gospel by comparing it favorably with the apostate Christian traditions of today—be it Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant. The article continues:

“‘Rather, the idea of deification, ‘has been around for a long, long time,’ he argues, ‘[and] it should require more than a tiny bit of cognitive and spiritual dissonance to dismiss or ignore it outright.’”

Agreed; but that is a belated response after the damage has been done. Avoiding the damage from the start is the wiser approach than damage-limitation exercise afterwards.

“Haws is of the same mind. And he would like to see a continuing exchange of ideas not just between LDS and Orthodox Christian thinkers, but also with Catholic and Protestants as well, on a range of other doctrinal differences and similarities.”

The same here. This is another damage-limitation exercise after the damage has already been done. A better approach would have been to avoid causing the damage from the start.