Episode Transcript
Carey Griffel: Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot, where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel, and welcome to my hundredth episode. I know I've kind of been talking up this episode because I'm excited to get to 100 episodes. I have loved podcasting, and I still love podcasting, and I hope that I do it forever. And for those of you who are listening as this episode drops, thank you guys for listening to this podcast. If you're listening to the episode a later time, thank you also for listening to my podcast. I really appreciate all of my listeners, all of the engagement I get, and I do have certain things that I want to be giving away as thank yous.
[00:00:59] So I'm going to be starting to do that here, and if you're listening later, I hope that later on I also have some other giveaways that you can have. But I'll talk about that a little bit later, maybe. I will say that if you're interested in things like that, go ahead and sign up to my newsletter. You can do so at my website, GenesisMarksTheSpot. com. You can message me there. You can find blog posts and episodes and all kinds of other things at my website.
[00:01:29] But, at any rate, today I want to talk about the intersection of the Divine Council worldview, which is something I talk about pretty frequently here, with LDS theology.
[00:01:44] If you're familiar with who I am and my past and my faith journey, I did grow up in the LDS tradition, and I have my story about my faith journey in episode 18, if you're interested in listening to that story of how I went from LDS faith to historical Christianity, but I haven't really talked very much about the theology of the LDS Church.
[00:02:09] And honestly, I don't think of myself as an apologist. and by apologist, I mean somebody who tries to really firm up some sort of defense, for a belief or an argument against another belief. I just consider myself a teacher, and my opinion is that if you teach truth, then truth will be learned, and you don't really need to go around dismantling everybody else's belief systems. I have this idea, in fact, that the field of apologetics is... well, it's sometimes a bit annoying, and I say that as an admin of a very large apologetics Facebook group.
[00:02:52] It's called Advanced Apologetics, and it was started by my friend Zerik Pagan, who wanted to bring biblical theology and things like that more to the forefront of apologetics. For a long time, the Advanced Apologetics Facebook group was very small, a few hundred people. It grew into a thousand, or maybe fifteen hundred people, and then suddenly, the Facebook algorithms took over, and the group has just exploded, and we have fourteen thousand people, or something like that. It happened practically overnight. So, if you come and join the group, it's going to be a bit of a mixed bag as far as who you're going to find there, because we don't have a whole lot of control over who comes in, and they're not going to be necessarily on the same biblical theology wavelength and things like that.
[00:03:48] So, it's an interesting group, and it might not be what you expect to see in an Apologetics group. But that being said, I am one of the admins there, it's a great group of people who are running it. But I really don't consider myself an apologist, and the reason is, I think apologetics is too broad of a category oftentimes.
[00:04:11] I think that apologetics should be a field in which you are displaying the reasons why you have the faith that you do. But a lot of times, apologetics turns into this thing where you're trying to dismantle every other belief system, instead of giving a reason for your own faith. And so what I'm not trying to do here is dismantle LDS theology per se.
[00:04:36] I'm trying to teach the Bible in context, and proper teaching is going to defeat false teaching. I believe that. So that's what I'm doing. I don't think I have to go out and point out every error of LDS theology and say, you guys are all wrong because of these reasons. I think that apologetics should be about your own personal faith and the things that you believe and why you believe those things.
[00:05:02] And I also want to say that we need to be careful not to overly broad brush people and put them into categories that they might not actually fit so well into. Just because you make a category or you think a category exists doesn't mean that everyone that you think fits into that category actually fits into that category.
[00:05:24] Not all LDS people think the same any more than every Christian thinks the same. Now, there's some interesting aspects of LDS theology and LDS belief, and the typical way that you'll see LDS belief show up. Mostly what I'm going to be talking about in this episode is going to be based on my understanding, the way that I believed LDS theology, and the things that I thought back when I was an LDS person.
[00:05:58] Now, those things are based on actual LDS church prophets and teachings. So, I don't think I'm going to be telling you something that is out of line of most typical LDS belief.
[00:06:11] But there is a lot of difference, especially in the LDS community, and there's several reasons for that. For one thing, there is a really strong emphasis on personal revelation in the LDS church. There's also the fact of changing doctrine and historical understanding of what's happened in the past .
[00:06:34] If you are in the LDS Church, and you have a familiarity of your history at all, you know that it's changed. Everybody knows that it's changed, and there are LDS apologetics that explain why that is. People who are LDS will come out and say things like the LDS church is just an institution. And along with that personal revelation factor, that person can decide what to believe in the church and what not to believe.
[00:07:07] And in addition to that, we need to realize many LDS people have different levels of involvement in the church. They have different levels of understanding of what even the church has historically taught. And so, if you are dealing with an LDS person, if you have an LDS friend, if you're talking to somebody who is LDS, do not presume what they believe. Ask them what they believe, because quite often there is a difference between official LDS doctrine and teaching and the beliefs of individual LDS people.
[00:07:41] So again, I'm going to be talking about the common understanding that I had as an LDS person, and there is material from official channels that will back up what I'm saying, but we have to keep in mind that not everyone is going to think the same way.
[00:07:56] One example of the change of doctrine and historical understanding is something like the Adam God Doctrine, and this is something that the second LDS prophet, Brigham Young, taught. But it's now denied in the church.
[00:08:13] There are, of course, quite a few splinter LDS groups that have different beliefs. Some of them even still practice polygamy. But anyway, the Adam God Doctrine is the idea that Adam had a previous human life before he was on Earth. And he was given, or made himself, another mortal body as Adam in the garden. But he is also God the Father. And he is Michael the Archangel. He's all of these things at the same time, or maybe at different times, but he's the same being in all of those roles.
[00:08:51] According to the Adam God doctrine, Adam is not only our physical father, but also the father of our spirits before we lived here on Earth. This was something that Brigham Young taught, and it was publicly taught in the LDS Church until 1892. Now, there were always dissenting voices and people who disagreed with the idea, but it was taught in the LDS Temple in its endowment ceremony until about 1905. And then in 1976, President Spencer W. Kimball said that the church doesn't believe the doctrine and even called it a false doctrine. This was something that was in the endowment ceremony for decades.
[00:09:39] Now many Mormons still believe that Adam is the Ancient of Days from Daniel and that he's the Archangel Michael, but most of them do not believe that Adam is God the Father.
[00:09:52] And, again, I want to mention that I might go back and forth between the term LDS and the term Mormon, and that's just a reflection of my personal history. I grew up calling myself a Mormon and being okay with the term Mormon. So, I'm still going to be using that term, and I don't mean it in a derogatory way.
[00:10:11] Okay, so the Adam God Doctrine is an example of the changing tide of LDS doctrine, and there's always apologetic reasons for those changes, or sometimes there's outright denial that they ever believed or taught something.
[00:10:27] The benefit of having secret information and secret ritual is they can change it and the people who are involved aren't supposed to talk about it. Of course, they still talk about it and we still know about these details if you really want to go dig for them. But the secretive nature of it is really helpful in being able to change it on the fly.
[00:10:48] Now, while Christians might like to take a hold of this information that they change doctrine and things, and we want to use it to try and convince LDS people of the false nature of their doctrine, well, because of differing epistemological foundations, like the ways that we understand truth and knowledge, it's quite likely that if we try and argue that for an LDS person, it's often going to fall on deaf ears.
[00:11:19] They've heard these arguments before, they think there might be a good answer, or they'll just discount it by saying, well, the church is fallible, it's just another institution, or they'll have some other apologetic argument.
[00:11:34] And this is partly why I think we need to be careful about apologetics, and make it a defense of your faith instead of an attack against someone else's. What brings you to your faith? Why do you believe the things you do, and how did you get to that conclusion? That's what apologetics should be about. Not just attacking other people. And then the LDS people will come and have their defense and their apologetics for why they think the things they do.
[00:12:05] So again, I'm not doing this to dismantle things. I'm doing this to shed a light on what I believe and what I think the biblical truth is. I think it's helpful to look at LDS theology to understand the biblical ideas because if you compare two things and you can say this is what it is and this is what it's not, that can help us understand something.
[00:12:29] But also I'm doing this because I know that this is a frequent claim against the Divine Council worldview that people will learn about these ideas and they say, well, that's just LDS doctrine. Because that's the only framework they have for understanding these ideas. They've heard about it from LDS sources, or they have this vague idea of what LDS belief is. Maybe they know people who are LDS, maybe they were LDS, and they think, well, the Divine Council worldview is just LDS theology.
[00:13:03] And I'm here to tell you that's very not true. There are massive distinctions and massive differences here. And so I want to bring those out for you. Now, of course, there's a lot that we could talk about in regards to LDS theology versus Christian theology, but the things I want to focus on are the divine counsel, the idea that God has a council of heavenly beings. I want to talk a bit about the involvement of that council in creation, and I want to talk about who God is, who the spirit beings are, who we are as humans, and the idea of sanctification, or some might call it theosis in humanity, versus the LDS concept of exaltation and eternal progression.
[00:13:56] Now, it's really interesting to me that people jump to Mormonism when they hear about the existence of other gods, because really in Mormonism, other gods acting within our realm of creation is not entirely what is even about in the sense of the gods of the nations and people being divinized. Those are two different things. In general, their concept of multiple gods corresponds to multiple universes. Like, each god, or person who becomes a god, has his own realm, and that really doesn't interact with other realms.
[00:14:37] So in a sense, the god of Mormonism, the being who created everything, he is, in a sense, an all powerful, sovereign creator. Because the other gods who create other universes, those are separate things, right? That's not really like worship of other gods.
[00:14:58] But there's also the Divine Council worldview in Christian biblical form, and it's a bit similar to the way LDS people think about it, but again, there's massive disconnects, massive differences.
[00:15:11] So, in LDS theology, there is a heavenly council in our own realm, which is the council that we see in Psalm 82. This council is not the same as humans gaining godhood, but it's not entirely unrelated either. Now, regarding humans gaining godhood or theosis or sanctification, we're not going to get into that topic too deeply here, because it deserves its own treatment that I'll address later.
[00:15:42] Let's go ahead and start with some biblical passages that suggest there is something going on there in a biblical way.
[00:15:51] We have John 1, verses 12 and 13, quote, But as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children of God. Even to those who believe in his name, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. End quote.
[00:16:14] Now that's not us becoming God, right? So there's a distinction here, but something is going on here, right?
[00:16:23] We have Romans eight, verses 16 through 19. The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God and if children, heirs also, heirs of God, and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with him, so that we may also be glorified with him. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God. End quote.
[00:17:00] Okay, that's something we've talked about before, and we should ask ourselves, what does it mean for glory to be revealed to us?
[00:17:07] Then we have Galatians 3 26, quote, For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. End quote.
[00:17:17] There is 2 Corinthians 3, verse 18, quote, But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord the Spirit. End quote.
[00:17:38] Okay, that is a big passage that LDS theology takes, and they take it to mean that we become God. But obviously that's not Christian theology, right?
[00:17:50] Then we have 1 John 3 verse 2, quote, Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when he appears, we will be like him, because we will see him just as he is. End quote.
[00:18:09] The final verse I'm going to bring up is 2 Peter 1 verse 4, quote, For by these he has granted to us his precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust. End quote.
[00:18:30] So all of those combined means that something is going on from a biblical perspective. What that is, we're not really going to get into, but I'm going to tell you what it's not. What it's not is LDS theology of us becoming gods, of us becoming who God is now. That is not what we have in the biblical story.
[00:18:54] But if you start talking about these ideas, then people get a little bit nervous, right? Because, ooh, it sounds like LDS theology. Alright, so the way I want to go about this is I am going to tell you my version of the LDS creation story. This is how I might have told it back when I believed it.
[00:19:15] Keep in mind there's going to be differences according to history and individual and how the church has talked about it from time to time. But I can give you quotes. I can show how this is stemming from LDS teaching. But I'm not gonna stop and give you all of the quotes as I'm going because I want you to focus on the content.
[00:19:36] Okay, so this is how I believed creation happened back in the day when I was an LDS person. I believed that God the Father lived on another planet, somewhere in another universe. He was a human being. He lived a life much like ours. He attained exaltation by obeying the commandments, by repenting from his sin, and being transformed into a being who is now capable of creating his own universe.
[00:20:10] It's like there's the story of maturation and development, right? Exaltation was a really big word for me growing up in the LDS faith. It means that you are growing into who God is. That's the concept of exaltation. I heard the word exaltation far more than I ever heard the word salvation.
[00:20:32] Okay, so you have God the Father, and He has a wife, and this is God the Mother, or usually known as the Heavenly Mother, but we didn't really talk about Heavenly Mother very much, and the reason for that was that there was supposed to be a level of respect. I think I've mentioned this in my previous episode about my faith history, and how strange that is. Like, why wouldn't a mother want her children to know her? It's strange.
[00:21:00] But anyway, so you have God the Father, you have God the Mother, and they have spirit children. We all existed as spirit children in the spiritual realm. And yes, there is an infinite regress to this whole story. There's no beginning, where there is a first God who started all of this.
[00:21:19] And there's a sense in which even though we have a bodily beginning, and even a spiritual beginning in this story, before we were spirits, we were intelligences. And intelligences are eternal and indestructible, as is matter, by the way. So, you have intelligences who become spirits who will then become embodied in human form with bodies.
[00:21:48] The intelligences are kind of like the spirit beings of the spirit entities that we become, that we're born of by the Heavenly Mother before the creation of the world. So, God the Father and God the Mother populate the spiritual realm that they've created with spirit beings who were previously intelligences.
[00:22:09] And then they're going to create the physical world. But here's the thing. They know there's going to be problems. They know there's going to be sin. But they want a world in which their spirit children, who are human with mortal bodies will be able to progress through all of the stages of maturity so that they can eventually become their own gods in their own universes. The problem is, they know that sin is likely to be a problem. Or potentially, I guess there might be multiple ways in which you could set up your universe in your world to mature people. So they need to figure out how to save people and how to mature them in this process.
[00:22:52] So, they get everyone together in this big family council, and they say, okay, how are we going to do this?
[00:22:59] What is the plan of salvation? It's another big term that I grew up with. The plan of salvation. Now the two oldest siblings are Jesus and Lucifer. They were born before everyone else, so they're a little bit more mature, a little bit smarter, and they both have a plan. Lucifer's plan is to force everyone to be perfect and to obey. So, there's no question, everyone will be saved.
[00:23:31] On the other hand, Jesus comes forward with a plan, and he says, well, we want to save everyone, but I want to give everyone a choice. Problem with that is that not everyone is going to be saved if we all have a choice. So, there's this big council, big heavenly meeting, everybody gets a vote.
[00:23:54] Jesus's plan is voted in, and Lucifer is not happy. He's not happy at all. So he rebels, and there is this big heavenly war. Lucifer takes his side of things, and Jesus takes his side of things. There's a big war, and Lucifer takes a bunch of spirits with him, and decides, okay, forget you guys. We're gonna do our own thing over here, but we're gonna fight against you.
[00:24:24] So, Jesus, then, is the winner of this whole battle, at least to that extent. And here's something a lot of people who aren't LDS don't understand. Jesus is Jehovah. He is Yahweh. So, we have God the Father, who is the ultimate creator, he birthed all the spirits. But you have Jesus who is going to be the one who's physically creating the world and Jesus is Yahweh.
[00:24:54] So under the guidance of his father, God the Father, he creates the world. He doesn't do it ex nihilo. He does it out of existing matter because again, matter and intelligences are eternal. It's not God himself who is eternal. It's matter and whatever our intelligences are.
[00:25:16] Now, Jesus was helped by others in the council. Probably Adam helped create. Adam, who is otherwise known as Michael. Probably Noah helped create. Noah is also the angel Gabriel. Probably Abraham and other men of note helped create the world.
[00:25:39] And importantly, there is a purpose to this creation. The purpose is for us to receive our physical bodies, for us to be tested so that we can prove our worth and grow and mature to become like God the Father and go on and have our own worlds.
[00:25:58] Now, in all of this, there's the idea that the sin in the garden was a good thing. It was supposed to happen so that we could be tested. We were meant to fall so that we could go through everything. If we didn't fall, things would be bad.
[00:26:18] Also included is the concept of the image of God as a physical image of God. Right? Unlike what we've discussed about the image of God here in this podcast, and I have a long series on that, the image of God isn't a status. It isn't something that is relating to how we reflect God's glory. But for the LDS person, the image of God is there because we are physical images of a physical God who was previously human himself. Again, an infinite regress.
[00:26:55] Now the LDS hope for salvation, again, according to how I would have explained it, is that you must pass the earthly test, you have to obey, you have to repent to gain salvation, but again, I probably would have used the term exaltation. And everyone gets physically resurrected.
[00:27:17] That's not super unlike Christian theology, right? in LDS theology, there are different levels of heaven. Everyone gets physically resurrected, but only those who have committed the unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost will go to hell, and they get no further advancement.
[00:27:37] But before you get physically resurrected, you die, of course, and then you go into the spirit realm, and you can go into spirit paradise if you've been good, Or you go into spirit prison, if you've not been very good.
[00:27:50] But in either one of those places, you can keep working to repent and obey. And if you haven't done things like be baptized, or get your temple endowments, then you're dependent on people on earth to do those things for you. Because they're a necessary part. So you go into spirit paradise, spirit prison, and then after that, maybe you've progressed a little bit and you can get to a higher level of heaven than you otherwise could, but you are eventually resurrected and you get into one of the levels of heaven.
[00:28:25] Now, depending on who you're asking, there is a possibility that you can still advance through the levels of heaven. But there's a lot of confusion and a lot of discontinuity in how people talk about that. Ideally, you want to get to the Celestial Realm, which is the highest realm of Heaven. And in the Celestial Realm itself, there are additional levels. There are three levels to the Celestial Realm.
[00:28:52] You cannot get into the Celestial Realm if you are not baptized, if you do not have your temple endowments, probably if you're not married, if you haven't repented of your sins perfectly, all of these requirements in order to get you there.
[00:29:08] Anyone who has gotten to the Celestial Realm will probably become a god to create your own universe and do all of the things over again. In addition, there's a suggestion that through our advancement, God the Father himself attains advancement of some sort, and he gains more glory and a higher level of a being, although that's really not explained anywhere, at least according to my knowledge.
[00:29:35] And somehow, in all of this, even with all of the different levels and things like that, families will be together forever. It's a very big LDS narrative. I never really understood how that was going to work if we were in different levels of heaven, and if we all went to create our own universes, but I guess the idea is that you can visit each other.
[00:30:01] And if you're in a higher level of heaven, you can visit a lower level of heaven. It's just that if you're in a lower level, you can't visit the higher level until you reach that point. Again, the language is about exaltation, eternal progression. The focus is on humans and what we can attain.
[00:30:21] So I hope you can see some massive differences in the way LDS theology and Christian theology is. And if you're in LDS theology and you're not used to understanding things from a Christian point of view, it's really hard for them to understand how we believe they're not Christian. That's a really big sticking point.
[00:30:42] They don't understand that because they're like, well, we believe in Jesus. And Jesus still does have a part to play in that salvation narrative in LDS theology. I understand it doesn't sound like he does. The way that I presented the creation narrative and the salvation narrative according to my LDS understanding is that Jesus really didn't have that much of a part to play.
[00:31:07] Now, here's a possibility. It depends on how deep into LDS theology you are and how much you are reading the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine of Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price, which are the other scriptures of the LDS Church, depends on how much you're reading those things, versus how much you are delving into Biblical studies and the Bible, and reading the Bible.
[00:31:35] Now, Joseph Smith had his own translation of the Bible, at least in part, and I can show you places where he said, look, we have translations that are wrong and we need to fix those things. So, I think a lot of the difference in LDS belief might be how you are looking at the Bible, and its authority, and its place in the world, and its place in your faith.
[00:32:02] Now, luckily, I happen to grow up in a family that, yes, we were very LDS, We believed in LDS theology. We did LDS Bible studies. We bought books and studied those books and all of these things. But we also just read the Bible ourselves. And my parents brought forth this concept of a love of Jesus and an emphasis on Jesus as a Savior.
[00:32:33] Now, according to LDS theology, how does that work? Well, the idea is that if you are on this lower level of maturity, even though there's the idea that you can attain a level of maturity that is exactly like God's, you might not be able to get there yourself. You're gonna need help. The picture that I heard of is this idea of being in a pit. And you have to climb out of the pit, and you have to develop and grow, and you can do that to some degree, but you might not be able to get to the very top of the pit. You're gonna need some help to get over the edge. And Jesus is the one who reaches down and lifts you up and helps you to do the rest.
[00:33:19] Now, again, the way that an LDS person is going to think about Jesus and think about that salvation narrative is not going to be the same across the board.
[00:33:30] I was just talking to somebody, a family member, who was recounting some stories about his interactions with LDS co workers. And saying, well, when I talk to these people, I have to tell them that I really think they're going to hell. He didn't say that he brought that up to them himself and was preaching hellfire and brimstone. But an LDS person would occasionally ask, you really think I'm going to hell, don't you? And he would have to answer honestly and say yes.
[00:34:01] And that's wrapped up in the idea that we need to know God in a certain particular way. We need to have the affirmation of the creeds and understand the Trinity. And as I suggested in my previous episode that focused on LDS stuff, I think that we do rely too much on knowledge in that formulation and that we don't know what somebody's relationship to God is. We don't know how they understand Jesus. And as I'm trying to bring out here, an LDS person's relationship to Jesus and understanding of who he is and his part to play in salvation is not going to be the same from one LDS person to another. There's going to be wide discrepancies, wide differences in if you're trusting in yourself to attain everything, or if you are in fact trusting in God and Jesus to attain that salvation.
[00:35:00] There are wide differences, and so, please don't presume that you understand what somebody thinks, or where their heart is.
[00:35:09] And so, anyway, I just want to give that caution, because I think we tend to make ourselves the judge of people when we really shouldn't. When that's really not our place.
[00:35:20] Now, do we want to make sure that people have sound theology, sound doctrine, and know who God is, and why God can save us, and that He is our only hope, and that we cannot attain it ourselves? Absolutely! But guess what? There's people in the Christian Church itself who have the understanding that they too have to be really good in order to attain salvation. So don't go pretending like works-based salvation can be put into a box and you can see it at every time in every person, because I don't think that's the case.
[00:35:57] All right, so what are the differences in this creation narrative compared to the biblical narrative? I mean, it's probably pretty obvious to you if you're Christian, but I want to go ahead and list some of those differences. For one thing, God is a Trinitarian being. God, the Father, was never human. He has no wife. He did not have spirit children. God is the only eternal one, not intelligences and not matter. Only God did the creating. Jesus is not a created being. Jesus is not Satan's brother. There is no pre creation war or fall of Satan. We were not created as spirit beings. Angels and spirit beings are different from us ontologically, and they're different from God ontologically as well. The counsel of God did not deliberate over a plan of salvation. The purpose of creation is not to test humanity, but to glorify God. There is a massive disconnect of the understanding of what glory is. And the image of God is not physical.
[00:37:11] Now, are there similarities? Yes, there are. There is a council in LDS theology. We see a council in biblical theology, but the council in the Bible doesn't give advice in creation, and they didn't do anything in creation. I would even say that we can see chaotic matter and potentially No creation out of nothing in the Genesis story. But that's not because matter is self existent. We can agree that Adam is the image of God, but not in a physical sense.
[00:37:48] Okay, so let's ask some more questions. Who is God from a biblical perspective and an LDS perspective? From the Bible, we understand God to be the uncreated creator. He is a trinity. We never become God, though we are created in His image.
[00:38:07] From an LDS perspective, God the Father was a former man, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are both created beings. And in LDS theology, they have a Godhead, but they are three distinct people. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. They all have distinct human bodies, they've lived as men on a planet, and they've gained the transformation of glory into a deity. And we can hope to attain that ourselves, according to LDS theology.
[00:38:42] Who is Jesus, according to the Bible versus LDS theology? Well, according to the Bible, He is the second member of the Trinity, He is the Creator, He is our Savior, He was incarnated into the world and is now both man and God, and He did everything for us to save us. There is nothing we do in order to attain salvation.
[00:39:08] According to LDS theology, Jesus is our eldest brother. He is created, but he's also the creator. He is a member of the Godhead with the Father and the Spirit, simply because he was obedient enough and mature enough. He's like a real superhuman. He came into the world and was incarnated into the world in the sense of coming into the world to have a human body, but then we were all incarnated in that kind of a sense. In LDS theology, Jesus is our Savior, but the phrase that I grew up with was that Jesus will save us after all that we can do. That's a tagline from a prophet, I don't remember which one.
[00:39:57] Now, who is humanity? Who are we, according to the Bible versus LDS theology? According to the Bible, we are physical creations, we do not have a premortal life, we are ontologically distinct from both God and spiritual beings, the image of God is a status, and we can be conformed to the image of Christ, but that is not becoming God.
[00:40:25] LDS theology is that we are intelligences that are eternal and indestructible, then we're spirits, and then we become humans. We are ontologically the same as God the Father, or any other spirit being. We might just have a different level of development.
[00:40:46] According to the Bible versus LDS theology, who are the sons of God? According to the Bible, they are spiritual beings. They were created by God, but not via procreation. We can also call them angels. They are ontologically unique. They're not humans, and they're not God.
[00:41:10] According to LDS theology, the sons of God are literal, procreated human beings. Human spirits, created by procreation between God the Father and God the Mother. We're the literal offspring of God the Father. And those who would have been human, with human bodies rebelled before they got bodies like Lucifer and his followers, and they remained spirits. They don't have bodies.
[00:41:38] Another question. Who are the angels according to the Bible versus LDS theology? Angels are spiritual beings. It's a job description in the Old Testament, but also a general term for spiritual beings in Greek. They are not humans.
[00:41:58] In LDS theology, they are the spirit children of God. And so, you can have pre mortal spirits waiting to be born on Earth, in this form. You can have a post mortal spirits, waiting for resurrection. Or you can have resurrected beings with physical bodies. Every stage of humanity can be an angel, except when we're just trapped here on the mortal realm, right? Unless we're just fulfilling that job description of the angel. According to LDS theology, Adam is the Archangel Michael, and Noah is the Archangel Gabriel. So, you can have different names according to where you are in your development. If you go through the temple, you're going to get a new special name.
[00:42:47] Okay, so what is the Divine Council according to the Bible and according to LDS theology? Well, as far as the Bible goes, we're going to actually split it up between the Old Testament and the New Testament. In the Old Testament, the Divine Council was always God's heavenly host or royal court. They're spiritual beings. There's a hierarchy of some sort. We have princes, archangels, so on. There's throne guardians, cherubim, and seraphim. We have angels, which again, that's a job description. They are messengers. The Divine Council was present at creation, but did not do creation. The Divine Council helps God make decisions, like we see in 1 Kings 22. Or the Watchers in Daniel.
[00:43:43] Now, when you move to the New Testament, how can we see the Divine Council? Well, here is where we can get into the concept of humans in the Council. Again, the terms we use are theosis, or sanctification, or even divinization. But we need to be sure to distinguish the fact that when we're being divinized, we are not becoming God Himself. We're just becoming more like him. And how do we see that in the New Testament? Well, we judge the angels. We are described as the sons of God or the holy ones. When you see the word saints in the New Testament, that's what it's talking about. I've read passages already earlier in this episode that show this reality.
[00:44:33] We do not become angels, but we are conformed to the image of Christ. So, the question we can ask is why? Why do we become members of the Divine Council? Well, the answer is as simple as looking at the Church. We are the image of God. We are becoming conformed to the image of Christ, and God wishes to participate with His creation.
[00:44:59] We don't become God. We don't become gods, and we were not part of the Council originally. But there is some sense, as I've read those passages earlier, in which something happens to humans. But, again, it's not what LDS theology teaches.
[00:45:18] So the Divine Council, according to LDS theology, is that it's God the Father's spirit children. It's no different from humanity, but it's a different stage of development, potentially. We have Jesus, Lucifer, the Devil, and all of us who are siblings of the same type. Jesus and Lucifer are more mature because they're older, and they've done things, they're more awesome. We were all there in the council at the beginning, and great people from the Bible were high up in the council.
[00:45:49] The divine council of LDS theology decided the plan of salvation. They participated in creation. Satan is fallen out of the council. And Psalm 82 is about, probably, this premortal council of creation. Actually, Psalm 82 as the premortal council of creation is how I grew up with the idea.
[00:46:14] But you will also hear the idea in LDS theology that is very similar to the Divine Council worldview and that Psalm 82 is about those , who were given authority.
[00:46:24] Alright, so who are the gods, according to the Bible versus LDS theology? And I know I'm doing a bit of repetition here, but these are different terms, and they have some overlap. So I think it's helpful to look at each one of them. According to the Bible, the gods of the nations are spiritual beings created by God. They are not a threat to God himself and his sovereignty. They do not have all of the qualities of God, just like we don't have all of the qualities of God, and we never will have all of the qualities of God. The gods of the nation are, again, they're not the Creator, they're not humans, but they do have human counterparts on Earth, in that idea of the mirroring of Heaven and Earth that I've talked so much about.
[00:47:14] The gods of the nations were placed in authority by God Himself. They are worshipped by humans. And there's crossover with the term Sons of God. Some of the Sons of God are the gods of the nations. We don't know if they all are.
[00:47:32] In LDS theology, the gods of the nations, again, they're spirit children of God. They are either humans who have not come down to earth and received a body, or they've gotten their body and they go back up to heaven and get more authority. But either way, in LDS theology, the ontology of all of the beings is collapsed into one. LDS theology says that God the Father, Jesus, the spirit beings, the sons of God, the angels, the gods of the nations, humans, resurrected humans, we are all the same, but we might have a different level of development.
[00:48:15] So, again, there are similarities between the biblical concept of the Divine Council and the fact that we have spiritual beings who are put in authority, and there's similarity to the LDS concept of things like that. And when people come to the Divine Council worldview at first, sometimes they're shocked and it makes them think of LDS theology, so you're going to have these over conflations of, " You're just teaching LDS theology" when it just couldn't be more apparent that we're not because of the massive differences. Again, just because there are similarities does not mean there are not also differences.
[00:48:59] The final question I'm going to talk about is, does LDS theology use the Divine Council worldview to prop itself up? Is this a dangerous idea? Well, first of all, we have to realize that Dr. Heiser did not make up the Divine Council worldview. It is a very old idea. And just because somebody uses an idea does not mean that they have legitimacy to use that idea, or that we should say that everything they say is true.
[00:49:31] I want to mention a paper that Dr. Michael Heiser wrote in 2007 that he submitted in the BYU Journal Farms Review. His paper is called, You've Seen One Elohim, You've Seen Them All, A Critique of Mormonism's Use of Psalm 82. And some people will see that he's got a paper in an LDS journal and they'll additionally freak out and say, wait a second, he's propping up LDS theology when really he's critiquing it and BYU is actually publishing his critique, which is kind of interesting. And I don't have time to go through this paper. It's freely available online. Just give a search for Dr. Heiser BYU paper. It'll pop up for you, I promise.
[00:50:19] But I want to mention a few points, which he actually admits that, hey, we have some agreement with LDS people and LDS theology on these things, but we also have wide disagreement, and there's major differences . So I just thought I would mention some of these agreements and disagreements to make this clear for us what the massive disconnects really are.
[00:50:43] What do we agree with LDS theology in? Well, we agree that plural Elohim are spirit beings. Of course, we massively disagree on what a spirit being is, but we can agree on that one point. We can agree that monotheism is an inadequate term. We can agree that Genesis 126 is not the Trinity, but references the Divine Council. We can agree that denial statements in Isaiah are not about non existence of other spiritual beings, but something else entirely. We can also agree that God revealed himself in corporeal ways in the Old Testament. We can agree that LDS theology may not actually be polytheistic in the way that we usually think of polytheism. We can agree that spirit beings are part of the created order. We can believe that Jesus doesn't quote Psalm 82 in John 10 to refer to just humans.
[00:51:44] Okay, that seems like a lot of agreement. What are we going to do here? Well, here's our disagreements. We disagree in these ways. The Elohim of the Council are not ontologically the same as God, and Dr. Heiser stresses this abundantly. We can say that henotheism, monolatry, and polytheism, none of those terms are really suitable. Yahweh is not a son of El. The Godhead is a Jewish idea and stems from Old Testament thought. And it's not a Greek invention. Yahweh does not have a beginning. God's corporeal appearance in the Old Testament does not mean that He Himself is corporeal. The image of God does not mean that He was once a man and that God has a body. Jesus use of Psalm 82 in John 10 does not give us grounds to equate humans and the gods.
[00:52:49] Again, these are major differences. The differences of ontology between created Elohim and God cannot be overstated. The differences that we see in the nature of God, that God is the uncreated creator, and that He is triune, and not a Godhead of three separate beings. We have massive differences on the nature of man. We are not preexistent, we are not ontologically sons of God. We do not become God after we're resurrected and achieve perfection.
[00:53:28] And I'm gonna say this again, just because someone claims that an idea props up their idea does not mean inherently that they have that sole claim of the idea. The Divine Council worldview does not say that gods are men. The Divine Council worldview does not say that men become gods or God.
[00:53:50] Being part of the Council is really not that much different than our participation with God in the form of the actions that we do in the Church. The Church on Earth is to be equated to our participation in the Divine Council.
[00:54:06] But there's really massive disconnects here, and I have so much more I could say about that. And there's a lot we could say about theosis, and glory, and glorification, and all of these ideas, and how they are so vastly different from LDS theology.
[00:54:24] The Divine Council worldview does not give credence to the idea that the Council of God created, or even had a say in creation. It says that the council was present and was glorifying God, and in the sense that spirit beings are also the image of God, it's only in the sense that if the image of God is a status given to humanity to represent God and give Him glory, reflecting glory back to God and reflecting the glory of God to each other, then in some sense, we can say that the spiritual beings who were created by God also have that function. They also represent God. They also glorify God. They also show God's glory to others.
[00:55:15] There's differences between humanity and the spiritual beings, though. The spiritual beings cannot be resurrected. They're never going to attain embodiment. In the sense that they do become embodied, like I talked about last week, it's this temporary thing in which they become a human, not in the sense of actually being a human. There's a massive difference there.
[00:55:41] And if you just want to hand wave away those differences and say they don't matter, then I've got some words for you. Because it's not fair to say that it has to fit in the way that you are describing it if you're going to ignore all of the cautions.
[00:55:59] You have people like Dr. Jordan Cooper in the Doreen Virtue video speaking against Dr. Heiser, and Jordan Cooper has done this many times before that video, of trying to make it fuzzy. Trying to make it look like what Dr. Heiser is talking about is actually LDS theology, and there is no difference. But then Dr. Cooper will still go on and say, well, there is a sense in which this can be biblical. It's like, look, why can't you give that credence to what Dr. Heiser is saying?
[00:56:34] You have to listen to the whole story and the whole idea. And if you're not understanding something in the way that somebody is actually presenting it, then you're not being a good faith communicator. You're not trying to understand somebody else's perspective. You know, when you're having a conversation and you're trying to bring your perspective to the other person, and they're saying, Well, I just don't agree with any of that, and I'm going to completely ignore everything that you said, and I'm going to fit you into my box instead. That's not fair. That's really bad communication, really bad interaction.
[00:57:13] So, partly why I wanted to do this episode was just for interest's sake, because I know there's a lot of people who don't understand LDS theology, and who are curious about it, and who are curious about the differences between these things, and who also want to witness to LDS people and talk to LDS people about Christian theology, and they don't know how to do it if there are similarities sometimes.
[00:57:39] It's like, oh, you know, I used to use those verses in Isaiah to witness against LDS people and say there's no other gods. But if there are other gods, then how do I then do that? And it's not that difficult if you understand the concepts well, and if you understand the similarities, but more importantly, the differences. They are crucial.
[00:58:03] Alright, I hope that this is a helpful conversation. Whether you are coming at this from not understanding LDS theology at all, whether perhaps you are an LDS person who is curious about the intersection of these ideas, or something entirely in between. I hope this was helpful to you. I do welcome and encourage you to reach out to me with comments, with feedback, with questions. If there's anything I can do to help clarify things or to present things in a helpful way, I would love to do so.
[00:58:37] Perhaps at some point in the future, I can actually read some more of this literature from the LDS perspective, or from what Dr. Heiser has written, and actually give live commentary on it, so that we can see the ways that we can think about these things and the ways that it has legitimately been presented on both sides of the aisle.
[00:58:59] . We don't need to be afraid of learning. We don't need to be afraid of ideas. We don't need to be afraid of shining light on good things, and even investigating bad things and giving them a chance to speak for themselves.
[00:59:13] I would encourage you to find the ways in which you can express your faith in helpful ways to others, and to provide that defense for yourself, and why you believe the things that you do. And have conversations with people.
[00:59:27] At any rate, I thank you for listening to my hundredth episode. For those of you who are interested in my giveaways, you do need to be signed up to my newsletter, or be interacting with me on social media, or you can connect to me through my email. In all of these methods, I'm going to try to give a legitimate chance to win one of the books that I have.
[00:59:51] What I have are an amazing collection of books. I'm so excited. I have three copies of the Answers to Giant Questions book by T. J. Steadman. I will be giving those away in different ways.
[01:00:04] Anthony Delgado, who has been on my podcast before, he has a book called The Gospel is Bigger Than You Think. Why a Comprehensive Gospel Creates Lasting Kingdom Impact. I also have a copy of his book, The Watchers and the Holy Ones, an evangelical reading of 1 Enoch, the Book of the Watchers.
[01:00:25] And I have a copy of Dr. Heiser's book, The World Turned Upside Down, Finding the Gospel in Stranger Things. So if you like the show, Stranger Things, this is a really fun book. He brings out parallels of the story in Stranger Things with the gospel with the caveat that he doesn't think this was intentional. It's just happenstance, but it's a fun view of the show and the gospel, which, by the way, I hear that the last season of Stranger Things is coming out next year. Unfortunately, this book won't cover that season, but I think it covered everything else. I think he put it out right at the end of the last season. He had to binge watch the last season and hurry up and write some more to add to this book. It's just a fun book.
[01:01:14] And last but certainly not least is a copy of Caleb Lewis's book Through the Waters, A Biblical Theology of the Book of Genesis. Caleb has also been on my podcast talking about great ideas from his book. I'm sure a lot of you are really interested in getting a copy of his book. So I have all of these books. You're going to have to connect with me some way. Either through email, newsletter, social media, in order to get a chance to win one of them.
[01:01:46] But with all of that being said, I appreciate all of you. Thank you guys for listening. Thank you guys for being a great audience, for giving me great feedback. Please keep it up. I love to hear from you. I love to get your questions. I love to get your reactions and interact with you in real ways. Thank you to all of you who helped sponsor this podcast.
[01:02:09] All of the books I'm giving away, I actually got for free. So, thank you to T. J. Steadman and Anthony Delgado for giving me those books, and Caleb Lewis for tracking me onto the way that I can get a copy of his book. Thank you guys for all of that.
[01:02:26] We are headed into holiday season, and I am looking forward to celebrating my second year of podcasting coming up pretty soon. If you guys have questions or things that you'd like me to address in the future, please don't hesitate to contact me and let me know what those ideas are.
[01:02:44] But for now, I wish you all the best, I wish you a blessed week, and we will see you later.
