Christology—literally the “study of Christ”—was not one of the points of contention between early Mormons and their many antagonists. When Joseph Smith and his few followers founded a church in 1830, they drafted a set of Articles and Covenants that explained the church’s organization. In the tradition of creeds, they also listed a few core beliefs.
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Excerpted from THE MORMON JESUS: A BIOGRAPHY by John G. Turner, published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
The Articles and Covenants asserted that the “Father and the Son, and the Holy Ghost is one God, infinite and eternal, without end,” a straightforward affirmation of the creedal Trinity.
The Book of Mormon’s title page announced that Jesus is the “CHRIST” and “the ETERNAL GOD.” The Book of Mormon states again and again that Jesus is God. “I am the Father and the Son,” Jesus asserts. The Book of Mormon Jesus is also human. In fact, the Book of Mormon teaches that even prior to his mortal birth, Jesus Christ had a body.
The Nephite king Benjamin prophesies that in the anguish before his death, Jesus will suffer pain, hunger, thirst, and fatigue. Blood will seep our of his pores. When Jesus appears in the New World, the Nephites come to feel his hands and feet.
When Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon and along with a handful of believers founded a church, they did not indicate any intention to question centuries-old Christian teachings about the relationships among God, Jesus Christ, and human beings.
Early Mormons also understood salvation in ways largely congruent with non-Calvinist branches of American Protestants. The “Almighty God gave his only begotten Son,” stated the founding Articles and Covenants, “that he was crucified and died and rose again the third day, and that he ascended into heaven to sit down on the right hand of the Father, to reign with almighty power according to the will of the Father, that as many as would believe and were baptized into his holy name and endured in faith to the end should be saved.”
The language again echoes that of ancient Christian creeds. Elsewhere, Mormon scripture referred to these teachings as the “plan of salvation,” a phrase common to American Protestants. Because of the shed blood of Jesus Christ, God forgave the sins of those who repented and were baptized in the name of his only begotten son.
More distinctively, Joseph Smith and his followers taught that baptism was a strict requirement for salvation, and not just any baptism. Only those baptized into the true Church of Christ would be saved. Still, becoming a Mormon meant joining a new church, not embracing a new understanding of God or Jesus.
Over the next twenty-five years, however, Mormon leaders gradually embraced a different metaphysics and a new way of interpreting God’s “plan of salvation.” God, Jesus Christ, and humans were members of the same species. They were uncreated, eternal, and material beings. Jesus Christ was the Firstborn, the premortal son of a Father and a Mother in heaven, and also the mortal son of that same Father and Mary.
In the premortal existence, men and women had the same parents. Jesus, then, was the “Elder Brother” of men and women, and mortal humans could become like him and like their heavenly parents. Mormons came to realize that their understanding of Jesus Christ both connected them to and separated them from other Christians.
“Do the Christian world believe in the Son of God—the Savior of the world?” asked Brigham Young. “They say they do, and we certainly do; and we also believe that he came and died to save the world.”
Were the beliefs the same? “Yes,” Young replied. “They do not know how to define it, but we do.”
Young recognized that Mormon and other Christian beliefs about Jesus Christ were alike but different, often employing the same terms, but defined in distinct ways. After the early Mormon reformulation of metaphysics and doctrine, the Latter-day Saints still understood Jesus Christ as fully divine and fully human, but they had redefined what it meant to be a god and what it meant to be human.
Shortly after the church’s founding, revelations introduced ideas about human salvation not present in the Book of Mormon or the church’s founding Articles and Covenants.
The Vision
In February 1832, while contemplating the fifth chapter of the Gospel of John, Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon “beheld” Jesus Christ, God the Father, angels, and “satan that old serpent even the devel” (also called Lucifer and Perdition).
Jesus Christ then instructed Smith and Rigdon to write what became known to church members simply as “The Vision.”
Elaborating on the imagery and language of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (which mentions “celestial bodies,” “bodies terrestrial,” and the respective glories of the sun, moon, and stars), the savior taught that the vast majority of humankind would receive at least some level of eternal blessing.
Many early Mormons initially found the 1832 vision baffling.
Faithful members of “the church of the Firstborn” would become “gods, even the sons of God.” In celestial glory, they would dwell in the presence of God and Jesus Christ forever. Other men and women would receive “terrestrial” or “telestial” glory. Only a few “sons of perdition” would suffer eternal punishment.
The Latter-day Saints came to speak of three kingdoms or degrees of glory.
The idea of different realms of heavenly glory has a long history within Christianity. Many early Christians expected martyrs, bishops, and especially righteous individuals to ascend into the presence of God more quickly or to attain higher positions within heaven.
Jesus had said that his Father’s house had “many mansions.” The late-second-century Irenaeus, for example, expected the most worthy to be taken to heaven, a middle group to occupy a paradise between heaven and earth, and the least worthy to reside in the future New Jerusalem on earth.
Protestants rejected such ideas, and they also denounced as unscriptural the Catholic teaching of purgatory as a state for those ultimately bound for heaven but requiring postmortal satisfaction. For nearly all Protestants, the afterlife was strictly an up-or-down affair. European and American Protestants made a binary division between the faithful who would equally enjoy heaven and the wicked bound for hell.
At the same time, there were some recent antecedents for the ideas Smith and Rigdon introduced. The eighteenth-century Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg had divided the heavens into realms, the highest being the “celestial.”
The 1832 vision’s shrinkage of hell, moreover, reflected a trend within Protestant thought. While most American Protestants sharply rejected Universalism, they increasingly hoped that most people would be saved. Even before the American Revolution, Joseph Bellamy, a theological disciple of Jonathan Edwards, had speculated “above 17,000 would be saved, to one lost” by the end of Jesus Christ’s millennial reign.
Evangelicals still incessantly preached about the dangers of hell (as did early Mormons), but they expressed a growing hope that hell would be less populous than most Christians had previously believed.
Even so, more traditional Protestant ideas about heaven and hell held such sway that many early Mormons initially found Smith and Rigdon’s February 1832 vision somewhat baffling.
Brigham Young recalled that it was so “contrary and opposed” to his “former education” that he “could not understand it.” In their preaching, early Mormon missionaries bluntly stated that those who rejected their message would be damned.
One month after his joint vision with Sidney Rigdon, Joseph Smith outlined the common nature of God, Jesus Christ, and humans. In a revelation, Smith produced a “Sample of Pure Language,” the language of heaven, the Garden of Eden, and human society prior to the Tower of Babel.
Speculation about the Adamic tongue had intrigued generations of Protestants, especially after they encountered new peoples and languages in the New World.
Smith identified “the name of God in pure language as “Awmen” (Ahman, in later transcripts), meaning “the being which made all things in all its parts.” Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was the “Son Awmen . . . the greatest of all the parts of Awmen which is the Godhead the first born.”
Humans, or the “human family” were “Sons Awmen,” occupying a status higher than that of the angels, whom God sent to minister to people on earth. The revelation stressed the similarity between Jesus Christ and humans as the sons of God. All were “Sons Ahman,” with God’s firstborn son preeminent among them.
Doctrine and Covenants 93
In May 1833, Joseph Smith dictated another revelation. Little is known about the context of this message. The prophet was in Kirtland, wrapping up his revision of the King James Bible. It was a time of relative peace and stability for the church. Construction would begin on the Kirtland Temple in a few weeks.
The revelation came in the voice of Jesus Christ. It combined several themes, including chastisements of Frederick Williams, Sidney Rigdon, Newel Whitney, and Smith himself. The Lord warned the men to pay closer attention to their families and children.
“Joseph, you have not kept the commandments and must needs stand rebuked,” stated the Lord, who also instructed the prophet to “hasten to translate my Scriptures.”
Joseph Smith was not the church’s only creative theological mind.
The bulk of the revelation, though, concerned the eternity and glory of God the Father, Jesus Christ, and certain human beings. “I am in the father and the father in me and the father and I are one,” Jesus Christ asserted. The language echoes the Gospel of John’s repeated affirmations of the unity between the Father and Son.
“I was in the beginning with the Father, and am the Firstborn,” the revelation continued. Again, the words evoke New Testament passages. The Epistle to the Colossians describes “Christ Jesus” as “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature.” The May 1883 revelation reaffirmed the long-held Christian doctrine that Jesus Christ is God’s eternal son.
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In the revelation, Jesus Christ announced that “the fulness of John’s record is hereafter to be revealed.” Accordingly, the revelation introduced the further testimony of John (either John the Baptist or John the Evangelist), who explained that Jesus had “received grace for grace” from his birth until he “received a fulness of the glory of the Father” at his baptism.
Jesus Christ promised that those men and women who belong to “the church of the first born” could become “partakers of the glory of the same.” Here the words recall a New Testament promise that those with faith in Jesus Christ will become “partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). Those who belonged to Christ’s true church could follow their savior’s example and obtain a full measure of divine glory.
The revelation clarified that just as Jesus Christ had been with God the Father in the beginning, so human beings had been as well. Men and women represented eternal “intelligence,” “spirit,” the “light and truth” of God. “Man was also in the beginning with God,” Jesus Christ said. “Intelligence, or the Light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.”
Like God and Jesus Christ, human beings had always existed. Humans are spirit, the revelation taught, “inseparably connected” to eternal “Elements.” The revelation identified eternity as a characteristic equally inherent to God, God’s Firstborn, and those whom the “Sample of Pure Language” had named as God’s other sons.
Philosophers and the King James Bible
By the early 1840s, Mormon leaders had more radically revised their ideas about God, Jesus Christ, and human salvation. Mormonism emerged at a time when certain strains of science and philosophy challenged traditional Christian concepts of God and the universe.
Thinkers from the philosopher Baruch Spinoza to the astronomer William Herschel to the theologian Thomas Dick, themselves reviving and revising the ideas of ancient philosophers such as Democritus and Epicurus, understood the universe as eternal, expanding, and infinite. Spinoza rejected the idea that a deity fundamentally separate from the universe had created it out of nothing (ex nihilo). God became a master creative organizer, rather than a conjurer of something fundamentally different from himself.
Thomas Dick strongly affirmed the eternity of matter, its dynamism, and the infinite expansion of the universe. “There is no reason to believe,” he asserted in 1829, “that, throughout all the worlds which are dispersed through the immensity of space, a single atom has ever yet been, or ever will be annihilated.” Dick wrote that “the Creator is replenishing the voids of space with new worlds and new orders of intelligent beings . . . new systems will be continually emerging into existence while eternal ages are rolling on.” Early Mormons found Dick’s ideas attractive and printed excerpts from his work in church newspapers.
Though such writings provided them with sources of inspiration and language, Mormon leaders did not simply borrow a ready-made metaphysics from Dick or any other early nineteenth-century philosopher. The preeminent influence on Mormon thoughts during the church’s early years remained the King James Bible, which church leaders often read in idiosyncratic ways.
Moreover, Joseph Smith was not the church’s only creative theological mind. William Phelps, brothers Parley and Orson Pratt, and Eliza Snow all contributed to the gradual emergence of new ideas. Given Mormonism’s blanket rejection of all existing churches, Latter-day Saint leaders did not feel beholden to ancient creeds or long-held dogmas. Instead, they approached the Bible and other sources of inspiration with striking openness and creativity.
The result was an understanding of God and the cosmos foreign to most other forms of nineteenth-century Christianity.
Gods in embryo
As it incorporated these new ideas, Mormon doctrine placed God, Jesus Christ, and human beings within an eternal and infinite universe, and the Latter-day Saints posited a correspondence between the order of heaven and human life on earth. The Mormon “plan of salvation” became a pathway for human progression toward divinity and the restoration of a heavenly family to which God, Jesus Christ, and men and women all belonged.
Before their mortality, human spirits were, as Parley Pratt termed it, “Men in embrio.” Many of those spirits progressed toward mortality on earth. Furthermore, as John Taylor later explained, each man on earth is a “god in embryo.”
Within this framework, Jesus Christ’s sacrificial death provided for the resurrection of all human beings. It also provided an opportunity for a more select number to progress toward exaltation, which meant a higher level of glory within the celestial kingdom. Those that on earth made and kept covenants with God—beginning with baptism, but also including other ordinances performed in temples—would be exalted back into the presence of God, become gods themselves, and reign alongside God and Jesus Christ.
Each progression—to mortality, and then toward exaltation—rested on the free choice of men and women to align themselves with Jesus Christ, to take the righteous side in a cosmic conflict between Jesus and Satan. On this point, Mormon scriptures and doctrines intersected with long traditions of Christian thought.
Exaltation hinged on the fulfillment of divine ordinances.
The Book of Revelation narrates that in the midst of a “war in heaven,” a “great red dragon” (Satan) “was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.” Building on such texts, the idea of Satan or Lucifer as a fallen angel became a staple in Western literature, figuring prominently in Milton’s Paradise Lost, for example.
In the Book of Moses (Joseph Smith’s 1830–1831 revision and expansion of the early chapters of Genesis), Satan makes an offer to God after the earthly creation of the first man and woman: “send me I will by thy Son & I will redeem all mankind that one soul shall not be lost.” God’s “beloved Son,” by contrast, tells his father simply, “thy will be done.” God rejects Satan’s rebellious attempt “to destroy the agency of man” and is “cast down,” where he becomes “the Devil the father of all lies.”
The Mormon appropriation of Satan’s fall was novel for its identification of “agency” as the issue at the heart of his rebellion. Latter-day Saint leaders described Satan as having offered to save individuals regardless of their actions, thus inviting disobedience and immorality.
Joseph Smith returned to the conflict between Satan and Jesus Christ in a later scripture, published as the Book of Abraham. In a portion Smith dictated in 1842, God shows Abraham that he is one of many eternal beings that existed before the world’s creation. The text identifies beings as “spirits,” “intelligences,” and “souls” without explaining the relationship among these terms.
The Abraham material clearly describes uncreated beings and an uncreated universe, however. The Lord shows Abraham “the intelligences that were organized before the world was.” They were not created out of nothing, but instead were organized. God chooses some of the Spirits, including Abraham, to be his rulers.
Another spirit, a being “like unto God” (Jesus Christ) proposes making an earth. “We will go down,” Jesus says, “for there is space there, and we will take of these materials, and we will make an earth whereon these may dwell.” Again, it is a question of organization, not creation out of nothing.
God approves of the plan and asks who will take charge of the task. Two spirits—Jesus and Satan—volunteer. “I will send the first,” answers the Lord. “And the second was angry, and kept no this first estate and forfeited his future glory.” The texts adds that “many followed after him.” The devil’s punishment, Joseph Smith stated elsewhere, was to never received a body.
In the Abraham narrative, “the Gods” then create the world and create mortal humans in their image. In a premortal existence, spirits choose whether to follow Christ in accepting God’s plan or whether to follow Satan. Those who align themselves with Jesus Christ advance to mortality. In this framework, mortality is not a punishment or misfortune. Instead, life on earth is a reward for premortal obedience and righteousness.
In the early 1840s, Joseph Smith expanded on what mortal men and women needed to do to progress from mortality to divinity. Exaltation hinged on the fulfillment of divine ordinances, and several of the ordinances Smith introduced in the early 1840s were for couples rather than individuals. Church members needed an eternal companion to attain exaltation, and the exaltation of eternally sealed (i.e., bound together for eternity) families rather than the salvation of individuals became the primary end of Mormon doctrine and ritual. As families, the Saints would return to the presence of their heavenly Father and Savior, and they would participate in the creative work of the gods.
Marriage and procreation were the heart of exaltation. Those who failed to marry “for eternity,” Smith privately instructed a few trusted church members, would “cease to increase when they die” (i.e., would not have any children in the resurrection). By contrast, the Mormon prophet promised that those “who are married by the power and authority of the priesthood in this life . . . will continue to increase and have children in the celestial glory.” To be exalted meant the eternal increase of progeny.
Joseph Smith confirmed this meaning of exaltation when he dictated by revelation on eternal and plural marriage:
If a man marry a wife by my word, which is my law, and by the new and everlasting covenant. . . . Then shall they be gods, because they have no end. Therefore they shall be from everlasting to everlasting, because they continue.
Doctrine and Covenants, Section 132
Only those to whom Smith sealed for eternity would remain married in heaven, and their families would continue to expand. Other human beings would be eternally single, without their earthly spouses and children.
Joseph Smith’s King Follett Sermon
In the spring of 1844, Joseph Smith publicly proclaimed many of the ideas he and other Mormon leaders had developed since the church’s founding. Smith did not preach on the eternity of marriage. Closely connected to the practice of polygamy, the subject remained largely private. Otherwise, though, the Mormon prophet taught boldly. In April 1844, Smith spoke in reference to church member King Follett’s tragic death. About one month earlier, Follett had died while working in a well. As a group of men lowered a tub of rocks into the well, a rope broke. The rocks crushed Follett, who had belonged to the church since 1831 and was—according to an obituary in the Nauvoo Neighbor—”one of those who bore the burden . . . in the days when men’s faith was put to the test.”
He would discuss “how God came to be God.”
Follett had endured the church’s persecutions in Missouri. He had lost his property and briefly been imprisoned. The Nauvoo Neighbor praised him as “ever ready to lay down his life, if necessary, for the cause and the witness of Jesus.” A procession a mile long accompanied his corpse to its burial. A month later, his death still troubled the Nauvoo Saints.
How might an evangelical minister have responded to the tragedy? Given Follett’s long church membership and known faith, a Methodist preacher would surely have comforted those who mourned with the solace that the deceased would be in the presence of God and Jesus.
Joseph Smith, however, did not provide consolation through such ideas. One could not, after all, peer into Follett’s heart and know for certain that he had faith. An evangelical preacher in the nineteenth century may have also moved from solace to exhortation, warning those that remained to prepare for their own deaths. Smith did not take that tack either. Instead, Smith discussed the eternity of matter. The prophet contended that something without a beginning would necessarily have no end. God had fashioned the universe out of eternal “elements,” which could not be annihilated. He urged his listeners to savor this doctrine, whose sweetness the prophet compared to that of honey.
Earlier in his sermon, Joseph Smith had insisted that “in order to speak for the consolation of those who mourn for the loss of their friend it is necessary to understand the character and being of God.”
Smith revealed “the great secret,” knowledge other churches had obscured or denied. “God himself who sits enthroned in yonder Heavens is a man like unto one of yourselves,” Smith announced. God had once had a mortal existence similar to that of his son. “God himself the father of us all dwelt on an Earth same as Jesus Christ himself did.” The prophet refuted the idea that “God was God from all eternity,” immaterial and unchanging. Instead, Smith explained, he would discuss “how God came to be God.”
As Jesus Christ later did, God the Father at one point had chosen to “lay down his body and take it up.” “Jesus treads in his tracks as he had gone before,” Smith added.
In short they are all gods.
Joseph Smith used Jesus Christ as a means of understanding the nature of God. He worked from Jesus back to his Father, who necessarily had all the glories—including a body—that his son enjoyed. Having established that a time of mortality was common to God, Jesus Christ, and his listeners, Smith urged church members to “learn how to be a God yourself and be a King and Priest to God same as all have done by going from a small capacity to another.”
This potential for exaltation, the Mormon prophet explained, should comfort mourners. It was not just that King Follett’s matter persisted but that, for faithful members of Christ’s true church, “all Earthly tabernacle shall be dissolved that they shall be heirs of God and joint heirs of Jesus Christ to inherit the same powers [and] exaltation.” For its twin assertions that God was an exalted man and that men could become gods, the King Follett Discourse became Joseph Smith’s most famous sermon.
Two months later, in another sermon only eleven days before his murder, Smith said he would “preach the doctrine [of] there being a God above the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Fleshing out ideas introduced in the Book of Abraham, the prophet suggested that “there are gods many and Lords many . . . but to us there is but one God pertaining to us.”
Joseph Smith reiterated his point: “if Jesus Christ was the Son of God and . . . God the Father of Jesus Christ had a father you may suppose that he had a Father also.” Again, Smith explained that Jesus “laid down his life and took it up same as his Father had done before.” Smith’s words hinted at a chain of divine beings who had “laid down” their lives and taken them up again: a possibly infinite regression of gods and saviors.
Drawing on an array of Old Testament and New Testament passages, Smith also spoke of a single “head of the gods” presiding over a divine council of heavenly beings, one of whom because became earth’s god. The universe contained a plurality, perhaps an infinitude of gods.
By the time of Joseph Smith’s 1844 death, Mormonism sharply challenged several key tenets of Protestant belief. Nothing but matter existed in the universe. “All spirit is matter,” he taught, “but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes; we cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter.”
Within an uncreated, eternal universe, God and Jesus Christ were father and son, two resurrected and exalted men, Smith and other church leaders now skewered creedal definitions of the Trinity. If “all are to be crammed into one God,” Smith joked, “it would make the biggest God in all the world . . . he would be a Giant.”
Creedal ideas about the Trinity, Smith asserted, were an affront to reason. The Latter-day Saints came to revel in their dissent from Protestant creeds in particular. Brigham Young, president of the church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in the early 1840s, lamented the “sectarian God, without Body parts or pa[s]sion his center everywhere and cacormfrance [circumference] no where.”
Mormon thought had become radically materialist and its doctrine of God unashamedly anthropomorphic.
Parley Pratt summarized Jesus Christ’s eternal materiality in 1845:
What is Jesus Christ? He is the Son of God, and is every way like his father . . . He is a material intelligence, with body, parts, and passions; possessing immortal flesh, and immortal bones. He can and does eat, drink, converse, reason, love, move, go come, and in short, perform all things even as the father—possessing the same power and attributes. And he too, can traverse space, and go from world to world, and from system to system, precisely like the father, but cannot occupy two places at once.
Parley P. Pratt
God the Father and Jesus Christ were two separate beings. They were of the same species, of the same family. And so were humans. As Pratt explained, men, angels, and God were “one great family, all of the same species. . . . In short they are all Gods; or rather, men are the offspring or children of the Gods, and destined to advance by degrees, and to make their way by a progressive series of changes, till they become like their father in heaven, and like Jesus Christ their elder brother.”
Although some biblical texts presented God in very human terms, both Catholic and Protestant theologians maintained a stark ontological chasm between creator and created. The Latter-day Saints dramatically narrowed this divide.
Heavenly Parents
Shortly after Smith’s murder, the Latter-day Saints introduced an idea that brought the orders of heaven and earth more closely together. “O Mormonism!” proclaimed William Phelps. “Thy father is God, thy mother is the Queen of heaven.” Phelps had worked as Joseph Smith’s ghostwriter and clerk; he traced the idea of a heavenly Queen and Mother to the church’s founding prophet.
Other church members also advanced this idea. In 1845, Eliza R. Snow, a widow of Joseph Smith, wrote a poem titled “My Father in Heaven,” which gained popularity within the church as a hymn:
In the heav'ns are parents single?
No, the thought make reason stare!
True is reason—truth eternal
Tells me I've a mother there
She looked forward to her eventual reunion with her heavenly parents in their royal courts.
“Elder Brother”
Also around the time of Smith’s death, the title of “Elder Brother” for Jesus Christ gained currency in Mormon rhetoric. Many nineteenth-century American Protestants described Jesus as “elder brother” or as a “brother.” Unitarians and others skeptical of Jesus’s divinity emphasized his humanity and brotherly fraternity with men and women. Mormons, by contrast, had no interest in stressing Jesus Christ’s humanity to the point of diminishing his divine majesty.
William Phelps wrote that, in the preexistence, Jesus Christ
was anointed with holy oil in heaven, and crowned in the midst of brothers and sisters, while his mother stood with approving virtue and smiled upon a Son that kept the faith as the heir of all things.
William W. Phelps
It was not a relationship among equals. Instead, Jesus occupied a position of unquestioned preeminence.
Other Protestants used the phrase “elder brother” to explain that when God adopts believers as his sons and daughters, they become the brothers and sisters of their savior. “Pronounce me, gracious God, thy son,” stated one hymn popular among Protestants in the early nineteenth century, “own me an heir divine . . . Jesus, my Elder Brother, lives / With him I too shall reign.”
The language of adoption resonated strongly among the Latter-day Saints, though as was often the case, they imbued a Protestant term with new meaning. Through his death and resurrection, Jesus Christ, God’s “Firstborn,” had returned to his Father in royal glory. Men and women, who had been with God and Jesus Christ as eternal spirits, could aspire to share in their Elder Brother’s glory.
God would make them his children as well. If they molded their earthly lives according to the order of heaven, they could anticipate an exalted return to their heavenly family.
“As Man Now Is, God Once Was”
Joseph Smith’s 1844 murder left many of the ideas introduced during his lifetime unresolved or unclear. Was there a single head of the gods above the father of Jesus Christ? or did that being also have a father? If there were worlds without end, were there gods and saviors without end as well?
Also, Mormons taught that matter was eternal and that humans were eternal. They were also “sons Ahman,” the children of God. Had they always been God’s children? If not, how did they become his sons and daughters? What was the relationship between eternal “intelligence” and “spirit”? What did it mean for a man to become like god? To become a god?
In February 1849, Lorenzo Snow raised a question at a gathering of church leaders. It was the first winter in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake for many church members. Days earlier, Snow had been ordained as a member of the church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.
During these years of doctrinal innovation and experimentation, church leaders often spent evenings chatting about matters of theology. Snow objected to the use of the title “Elder Brother” for Jesus Christ. For Snow, Jesus Christ was “of a different grade than prophets or more than our [brother] he is God the Father, and not our Elder Brother.”
Brigham Young rejected the idea of a strict divide between God and humanity. “As he [God] was, so are we now,” Young explained. “”As he is now, so we shall be.”
Men could follow the example of their Elder Brother and become like God. Young said the idea had come to him almost a decade earlier while leading the church’s mission to England. Snow apparently was persuaded.
He articulated what became a well-known couplet within the church:
As man now is, God once was.
As God now is, man may be.
Lorenzo Snow
Excerpted from THE MORMON JESUS: A BIOGRAPHY by John G. Turner, published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
About the Scholar
John G. Turner is a Professor of Religious Studies at George Mason Univeristy. Turner holds a PhD in American History from Notre Dame and a Masters of Divinity from Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and is a member of the Burke Presbyterian Church. He has written several books about American and Latter-day Saint history, including Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet, The Mormon Jesus: A Biography, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet, and They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Content for American Liberty.
Further Reading
Learn more about Latter-day Saint Christology in these From the Desk interviews:
- What’s in John Turner’s Joseph Smith Biography?
- Does Atonement Theology Matter to Latter-day Saints?
- How Important Is the King Follett Sermon to Latter-day Saint Doctrine?
- Why Did Eerdmans Publish a Book About Latter-day Saint Theology?
- What Are the “I AM” Statements of Jesus in the Book of Mormon?
Mormon Jesus
See what other scholars and publishers have to say about John Turner’s book, The Mormon Jesus: A Biography, and Latter-day Saint beliefs about Jesus and the Godhead:
- The Mormon Jesus: A Biography (Harvard University Press)
- What Latter-day Saints Believe About Jesus Christ (Church Newsroom)
- Lifted up Upon the Cross (General Conference)
- Grace vs. Works: Has the Pendulum Swung Too Far? (From the Desk)
- What the Book of Mormon Teaches About Jesus Christ (BYU Religious Studies Center)