God & Humanity

The lovely Katie Langston and I have been discussing some things in private, but I wanted to blog about this one publicly. It comes up on LDS & evangelical discussion blogs often enough that the greatest chasm between our camps comes down to what we believe about God and what we believe about humanity. In turn those two things pretty much hang on the debate between creatio ex nihilo v. creatio ex materia, but I don’t want to address that debate directly. I’m writing this post to talk about what I believe about who God is and who I am, and why those views appeal to me. It’s more of a testimony than a theological treatise.
God
I believe that God:
~ Is spirit by default (John 4:24), though He is perfectly capable of taking on a body and appearing however He chooses—I’ll save specifics of the Incarnation and the Hypostatic Union for another post.
~ Is omnipresent and transcends all of Creation. (1 Kings 8:27, Isaiah 66:1, Psalm 113:5-6)
~ Is the only God in existence. (1 Samuel 2:2, Isaiah 44:7)
~ Has always been and always will be God. (Psalm 90:2)
~ Is out of time because He made time itself. This is more of a philosophical preference than a necessity to my worldview, but it answers a lot of questions for me which would be otherwise theologically troubling.
~ Knows everything that has ever happened and everything that will happen. (John 21:17, 1 John 3:20)
~ Is able to do all things. (Genesis 18:13-14, Ephesians 3:20, Job 42:2)
~ Is personal. He feels anger, love, and compassion (Isaiah 54:8) for humanity as well as joy. (Isaiah 62:5)
~ Exists in three persons, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. I’m less concerned with enforcing the homoousia of the Nicene Creed than some evangelicals would be. The Bible says again and again that there is only one God, yet it calls the Father, Son and Spirit “God,” and that’s good enough for me. See my links at the end of this article for more in-depth discussion of the Trinity.
Humanity
I believe that human beings:
~ Were created by God in His image. While we refer to God as a “He,” I see this as largely a point of reference. Both men and women were created in the image of God, so I believe God created gender itself. (Genesis 1:27)
~ Do not choose God on their own. I’m still sorting out whether this is a nature or nurture question—do we sin because it’s our nature to do so and therefore God’s design, or is it our nature to do so because we live in a fallen world? What I know is that Adam and Eve were living a perfect existence, and they still turned away from God. No one has ever chosen God on their own without God’s help, not even under the most optimal conditions. We all need God’s grace and forgiveness.
~ Are creations. I believe we can become God’s children by His grace (John 1:12, Galatians 3:26); I don’t believe we are literally God’s children by nature. We sure don’t act like it.
~ Have the ability to choose to accept the work Christ did for us on the Cross because God enables us to. While I’m still sorting out the odds and ends of my patchwork Arminianism, I know that I believe free will exists because God allows it. (Joshua 24:15, Romans 10:13)
~ Can become by grace what God is by nature. I believe that the process of justification, sanctification and then glorification makes us into divine beings. (1 John 3:2, 2 Peter 1:3-4)
Thoughts & Appeal
In theory the palatability of one’s doctrines should not matter, all that ought to matter is the truth of who God is and who we are, and if you do not like it, it’s because you need to change. Nevertheless, Mormons and evangelicals often accuse each other of teaching outrageous, demeaning, or unacceptable things about the nature of God and humanity, so I wanted to explain why I believe the things I have written above are appealing as well as true.
I think that my beliefs tell me more about who God is. Mormonism has become very agnostic on the nature of God in recent years. The church has no official position on if God has always been God, if there are any Gods out there beyond the members of the Godhead, whether Heavenly Mother exists, and whether or not God has ever sinned. Classical theism has always known exactly how to answer those questions.
I also believe that traditional Christian theology has the edge on the gender question. Recently we discussed over at LDS & Evangelical Conversations the role of Heavenly Mother in LDS thought, and I made my case that the church’s agnosticism on the matter leaves Mormon women with an incomplete picture of their divine role and purpose. I have very few gender questions as an evangelical; I think God knows exactly how to relate to me as a woman because He created gender itself. I understand that most of my readers are LDS men who don’t struggle with this and whose wives, mothers, sisters and daughters don’t have a problem with this, but I hope you’ll be gracious in understanding why this is a serious issue for me.
I think that the hard one for Mormons to accept is the teaching that we are “mere creations” and not divine by nature, but consider this. I have always adored the story of Pygmalion as found in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, once you get past the LOLmisogyny in the opening lines. There’s something very beautiful to me about something that is created becoming something real through grace and power. I like all of the Pygmalion-esque stories in modern literature, theater and film: Cinderella, Pinocchio, My Fair Lady, Pretty Woman (when you want dirty Pygmalion) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (for the darker side of creation). Think about it though, what’s more moving to audiences? A story about a noblewoman who was born a noblewoman who goes to a ball and makes everyone think she’s a princess, or a story about a wretched girl off the street who gets a crash course on how to be a noblewoman and then goes to a ball and makes everyone think she’s a princess?
I am not calling the LDS view unappealing. I know that there is great appeal to both views. I think that the power in my view lies in realizing that while it starts off lower, it posits a greater transformation by the end.

Comments

God & Humanity — 17 Comments

  1. Thanks for writing this, Bridget. I think it’ll be a helpful starting point for people and I would even consider linking to it from your “about” page.
  2. Jack,
    Thank you for this. I’ll need to re-read this a time or two, I’m sure, to understand it better. Right now it’s late and I need to get to bed, but I’m certain I will have several follow up questions for you. Thanks again. :)
  3. Aaron ~ I’ll think about it. I’m sure my LDS readers will want to add qualifications on what I’ve written about the LDS views of God (and maybe gender) and I welcome them to do that. I might revise it afterwards.
    Katie ~ Happy to do it, sorry it took me so long, and take as much time as you need. I’m really glad to be seeing you on the LDS-evangelical discussion blogs more often. :)
  4. Jack, I’m not sure that some of your metaphors obtain for me, but I want your permission before I start asking you comments about how evangelical (or your personal) thinking reconciles certain statements. To me you’d have to agree to take my questions as questions-for-information, rather than socratic style questions-to-challenge.
  5. BFF: Great post—and not an easy thing to write up. You said in your comment that you might want some LDS input, so here goes:
    First, on the “children of God by nature” issue, I think the LDS view is closer to what you believe in some ways. Joseph Smith taught quite clearly (even in scripture) that “God never had the power to create the spirit of man” (KFD, see also Abraham 3:18). Now where this gets closer to your view is that some LDS (myself included) take this to mean that God is not our father in the sense that he sired our spirits (’cause our spirits are exactly as old as—or, “eternal as”—he), but he is our Father in the sense that he adopted us into his care. So when you say, “I believe we are not literally God’s children by nature,” I agree. Where we differ is that I believe that we all agreed to follow God premortally, whereas you believe that the first opportunity for that choice was here on earth. (Of course, we are still radically divided by the “God did not create our spirits” part.)
    Second, I don’t want to bash what you find appealing, but I just don’t understand some of it.
    “I think that my beliefs tell me more about who God is. Mormonism has become very agnostic…”
    I don’t see your position as any more informative. The LDS view opens up questions that your view simply does not. “Classical theism has always known exactly how to answer those questions,” because it describes a God that doesn’t raise those questions. It’s analogous to a creationist claiming that he knows more about Adam than an Christian evolutionist: the creationist doesn’t have to be agnostic about the identity of Adam’s father, the presence of a belly-button, what made Adam “man” but his parents “ape,” etc.—those questions just don’t come up for the creationist Adam. (And lest you take this analogy too far: I am not saying that God was once a man and then became a God—on that issue, I am…agnostic hahahaha!)
    “I also believe that traditional Christian theology has the edge on the gender question.”
    I have to cede this point, but only on an “official LDS Church” level. I think that two solutions exist for individual LDS: 1) Believe in a HM and recognize that our fallen world is too ignorant/sexist to accept her. You want a God who knows what it’s like to be a woman? Well now you have a God who is (half-)woman. 2) Believe that “God” refers to a divine concert of glorified beings acting as “one”; individually some are male and some female. So why all the masculine forms and lingo? Well, your Evangelical non-gendered God has to answer the same question.
    “…something that is created becoming something real through grace and power….Cinderella, Pinocchio, My Fair Lady…”
    If you really like the Cinderella stories, then you should be LDS. At least Disney’s Cinderella was the daughter of a wonderful noble widower who was conned by a wretched woman and married her. After his death, she acted cruelly toward Cinderella, and so on. Thus, the movie ends with Cinderella being restored to the noble status she was born into. Pretty Woman, Barbie the Island Princess, Rapunzel, My Little Pony Princess Promenade, and more follow the same pattern. So there you have it— LDS:Evangelical::Cinderella:Pinocchio.
  7. Okay, so per your point #2 in the Humanity section above, do you think it’s possible that man at one point had some inherent spark of divinity, but then lost it through the Fall? Or is there NO divinity in man, never has been and never will be?
  8. “I am not calling the LDS view unappealing. I know that there is great appeal to both views. I think that the power in my view lies in realizing that while it starts off lower, it posits a greater transformation by the end.”
    My respect to your views on christianity. There’s one thing I think that needs clarification though. If you’re attracted by profound transformations, how is the transformation from a man or woman into a God (i.e. the LDS view) not the greatest (and therefore most compelling) transformation that could take place?
    Peace.
  9. Just wanted to note that I’m gonna get to comments on this thread later tonight. I am waaaaay behind on comments I want to make and answering private messages, plus it’s my brother’s birthday and I need to go treat him to cake and ice cream.
    Take care everyone.
  10. OK, then, let me burden you with it. Bear in mind that what I’m after here is how evangelical Christian thinking is constructed, based on what *you* see. I’m not looking for a fight or a way to derail people’s trains.
    In my koine New Testament, John 4:24 reads: (forgive the transliteration, I can’t make the characters come out. I have no 5ki115.)
    [pneuma ho theos kai tous proskynountas auton en pneumati kai aletheia dei proskynein]
    I left out the punctuation, out of a sense that John’s scribe would not have used them. Westcott-Hort has punctuation, tho.
    I have two hangups:
    1 — “pneuma ho theos”, translates to “a god spirit” or something like that (am I wrong?), but does not translate to “God is a Spirit”. This is denoted in the KJV by an italicized “is”, which I’m told means the translators inserted stuff to create something sensible.
    The hangup here is that it doesn’t seem to be a complete sentence, doesn’t form a complete thought, and doesn’t appear to form a basis by which “those that worship him must worship in Spirit and in Truth”
    Other forms in the greek which appear to be translated “God is [something]” take an apparently different grammatical form in koine Greek, such as 1 John 4:16, reading in part, “Ho theos agape estin.”
    I would have expected the John 4:24 passage, therefore, to read “Ho theos pneuma estin,” but it does not. It’s seemed sensible to me on that basis to hold that claim (as it stands in English… the German Luther translation and a Spanish translation all match the English one) in abeyance, unless there were “further light and knowledge” available to interpret it.
    This then gets to my question: In evangelical Christianity, is there dependence upon more than John 4:24 to suppose, as Aquinas did, that God is not a body?
    Is there any worry among theologians that the passage’s translation is a best-guess on the part of translators, instead of a slam-dunk, the way Aquinas treated it, by appealing to no other scripture in defending the notion?
    Also, is the notion of “Spirit” understood by Evangelical thinkers the same way it was understood in antiquity?
    Again, I suppose that what I’m looking for here is apologetics supporting the idea, while not violating the notion of sola scriptura. No reference or refutation of Mormonism is required, IMO.
  11. BFF ~ I don’t see your position as any more informative. The LDS view opens up questions that your view simply does not.
    I’m not really sure I follow you here. Yes the LDS view opens up those questions, and then doesn’t answer them. Why? The church is supposed to be able to receive direct revelation from God. I don’t really see any logical reason why the LDS church needs to leave those questions unanswered other than it has grown uncomfortable with the answers.
    On the gender question, I would agree with you that the Bible does not clearly answer why God is called a “He” if both genders are in His image. However, the Bible (and the Christian world at large) does not put the emphasis on gender roles that the LDS church does. I feel like we’re under a little less obligation to delve into the question because of that.
    Cinderella was definitely the least of my examples, and I actually figured when I wrote it that someone would point out to me that in most accounts she was properly a noble woman to begin with and therefore is a better example of the LDS system. Meh. I always liked Pygmalion best.
    Katie ~ Humans are the only beings in creation who were created in the image of God, and all life does carry the breath of God in it. In that sense I think you could say that there’s something divine about us. That’s about as close as we get to the idea though.
    Loren ~ I’m not sure that the LDS view holds that men and women will become “Gods” anymore (capital G). I mean, it used to be that the church taught pretty clearly that God the Father was once a man on another earth who had to progress to become God and that we, likewise, will progress to becomes Gods and be put in charge of our own worlds and the progression of other spirit children, but now the church’s position is agnosticism in both directions. We don’t know what God was before and we don’t know if men and women will become Gods in the same sense that God is now. If people are just going to be gods and won’t be moving on to being in charge of their own universes, then the endgame of the LDS system doesn’t sound at all different from what I believe.
    Anyways though, the LDS system teaches that Gods/gods are what people are by nature; “gods in embryo” and all that. People as intelligences are just as eternal as God is. In my system people had a very specific non-eternal starting point and go on to become by grace something that they aren’t by nature. So I’d still see it as the greater transformation.
    Rob ~ I’ll get back to you later today. The short story is, yes, there are many other reasons besides John 4:24 for believing God does not have a body by default.
  12. Jack: maybe you expect too much revelation. Just because the Church is “supposed to be able to receive direct revelation” doesn’t mean it should know everything about everything. Even if we only had one revelation—say, creatio ex materia—that’s a Big Revelation. We don’t have as much revelation as you want, that doesn’t mean we don’t still have that revelation. Still, your view is certainly a logical possibility (that the Church is just uncomfortable delving deeper into those questions). But tell me, does your faith tradition answer every question that it raises? Why not?
    I think we agree on the gender point as far as the official LDS Church goes.
    Now for Cinderella: I think you missed my point, but maybe that’s because I missed yours. I thought you were trying to claim that the Ev view is more compelling (“Think about it though, what’s more moving to audiences?”). My point was that lots of audiences have found the Cinderella story very compelling. “Audience favorite” is of course no basis for whether LDS or Ev is correct (and you weren’t saying that), but I wanted to respond to your point.
  13. Jack, “does not have a body” wasn’t precisely my question. I’m a little more focused here on the Aquinian phrasing of “is a body.” That is to say, I’m not looking for a refutation of a Mormon idea here, I’m looking for as much support of the Ev Christian idea as you can offer, without regard to Mormon ideas.
  14. “In my system people had a very specific non-eternal starting point and go on to become by grace something that they aren’t by nature. So I’d still see it as the greater transformation.”
    Which is the greater transformation: from 1 to 1,000,000 or from 0 to 100? The Ev transformation is infinitely greater (even if it was just 0 to 0.00001).
    I think you are right to say that LDS are becoming agnostic about the origin of God (whether he was once a man, etc.), but what makes you say we are backing away from our concept of exaltation? D&C 132 is still part of our canon: “Then shall they be gods, because they have allpower….” I realize that Evs are as diverse as any population, but what I understood from Aaron over on LDS/Ev Talk, he believes that “We will never get to the point where we can say we have fully appropriated and received the entirety of our inheritance in Christ.”
    “…be put in charge of our own worlds …don’t know if men and women will become Gods in the same sense that God is now. If people are just going to be gods and won’t be moving on to being in charge of their own universes, then the endgame of the LDS system doesn’t sound at all different from what I believe.”
    I believe that I will one day be one with God in exactly the same way that Jesus is one with God. Is that different from what you believe? (Well, of course it is because of our different views on the nature of God and Jesus, which makes the question nearly impossible to ask!) And I do not believe that moving on and moving out (like a teenager leaving his parents’ house and finally getting a place of his own) constitutes being “one.”
  15. Hey, BFF, I just want to say that I hope my answers aren’t combative. I’m writing kind of on the fly today as I run around. And I know that this post was meant to describe your reasons, so I’m not trying to tear those down.
  16. Your answers are fine, Brian, you don’t ever have to take things easy on me.
    I’ll get back to you and Rob tomorrow, I have some books that I want to delve into for my answers but I’m far too lazy to get them out today. Been busy soap-boxing and rattling cages at fMh.
  17. Agnostic is such a strong word, if you’re referring to the infamous “Oh that’s just a couplet” comment by our late great Gordon B, I can see where you’re coming from, but hey even prophets lie from time to time (i.e. Abraham, although I see the former instance as a case of not casting pearls before swine, and I’m not using swine as a pejorative, I think). Whether it’s a Big ‘G’ or little ‘g’ when it comes to unifying ones self with the ‘OG’, it makes no difference to me. I’ll take eternal increase with whatever the moniker it comes with. I’ve promised myself for the remainder of today to refrain from comments that could be interpreted as troll-like (which is my natural tone unfortunately), suffice it to say that both transformations are profoundly spectacular, rewarding the recipient with something that they don’t deserve.
    peace
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