Trinity and Mormon godhead

[ronald_g_w]

You want to quote the Catholic Catechism, and then try to tell Catholics what it REALLY means?

I’m pretty sure the catechism means what we intended it to mean, and was written from a Catholic understanding.
Quoting the Catechism of the Catholic church only works if you understand what it is saying. The same is true of the Bible as well… But we have plenty of Christians who like to tell us what IT is “really” saying too.

So when Jesus inherits all that his Father hath and you become a joint heir, you are going to say ??? …it’s still something that is not mine…? When Jesus paid the price for you ?

 

[AshleyBelle]

So when Jesus inherits all that his Father hath and you become a joint heir, you are going to say ??? …it’s still something that is not mine…? When Jesus paid the price for you ?

You’re right. Jesus paid the price so that I could JOIN with Him and SHARE with Him in heaven… He did not, however, pay the price so that I could OWN myself, or BUY my own reward in heaven. There’s a distinct difference. Christ PURCHASED US with His blood. We are able to strive for heaven because we belong to God.

 

[BDawg]

You’re right. Jesus paid the price so that I could JOIN with Him and SHARE with Him in heaven… He did not, however, pay the price so that I could OWN myself, or BUY my own reward in heaven. There’s a distinct difference. Christ PURCHASED US with His blood. We are able to strive for heaven because we belong to God.

Hi Ashley,

I don’t understand why you think Mormons would disagree with you. We will still belong to God, and we will SHARE everything with Him. Everything. However, we will be completely ONE with Him (John 17). We will be WHAT he is. Our main difference is simply that you don’t think God can make us into the kind of being He is.

 

[AshleyBelle]

Hi Ashley,

I don’t understand why you think Mormons would disagree with you. We will still belong to God, and we will SHARE everything with Him. Everything. However, we will be completely ONE with Him (John 17). We will be WHAT he is. Our main difference is simply that you don’t think God can make us into the kind of being He is.

I believe if God wanted, He could make us like Him, that’s not the issue.

The issue, is that you assume, that because He “can” that He DOES…and this is simply NOT what we have learned.
We are to be as little children before God. Even if we share with Him in heaven, we are still little.

Christ calls us to come to Him as little children… Not as spoiled children expecting to be gods apart from the Father.

 

[BDawg]

I believe if God wanted, He could make us like Him, that’s not the issue.

The issue, is that you assume, that because He “can” that He DOES…and this is simply NOT what we have learned.
We are to be as little children before God. Even if we share with Him in heaven, we are still little.

Christ calls us to come to Him as little children… Not as spoiled children expecting to be gods apart from the Father.

Hi Ashley,

In ancient Jewish literature, God’s throne was the symbol of his rule. Nobody shared God’s throne. But in the New Testament, we have Jesus promising, “To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne” (Revelation 3:21).

So yes, we disagree about this. But I think that the Mormon idea that God grants his children who overcome the world to share everything with him is a reasonable interpretation of the New Testament.

 

[AshleyBelle]

Hi Ashley,

In ancient Jewish literature, God’s throne was the symbol of his rule. Nobody shared God’s throne. But in the New Testament, we have Jesus promising, “To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne” (Revelation 3:21).

So yes, we disagree about this. But I think that the Mormon idea that God grants his children who overcome the world to share everything with him is a reasonable interpretation of the New Testament.

Here is where we differ. Your “reasonble interpretation” is not from the apostles.

There are lots of reasonable interpretations we can make about the Bible. That does not make them all true.

How do we know which is true?

 

[ronald_g_w]

Hi Ashley,

I don’t understand why you think Mormons would disagree with you. We will still belong to God, and we will SHARE everything with Him. Everything. However, we will be completely ONE with Him (John 17). We will be WHAT he is. Our main difference is simply that you don’t think God can make us into the kind of being He is.

Thank you

 

[BDawg]

Christ calls us to come to Him as little children… Not as spoiled children expecting to be gods apart from the Father.

Hi Ashley,

Here again, you are painting our belief in the most negative possible light by distorting it. Why would we believe that we would be “gods apart from the Father,” when the point of our existence is to become one with the Father, just like Jesus (see John 17)?

Consider the following quotations by Brigham Young.

If men are faithful, the time will come when they will possess the power and the knowledge to obtain, organize, bring into existence, and own. “What, of themselves, independent of their Creator?” No. But they and their Creator will always be one, they will always be of one heart and of one mind, working and operating together; for whatsoever the Father doeth so doeth the son, and so they continue throughout all their operations to all eternity. (Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 2: 305–306.)

When shall we become entirely independent? Never, though we are as independent in our spheres as the Gods of eternity are in theirs. (Brigham Young, JD 8:190.)

So I understand, once again, that you disagree with us about the nature of deification. But that is no excuse for distorting our beliefs beyond recognition.

 

[BDawg]

Here is where we differ. Your “reasonble interpretation” is not from the apostles.

There are lots of reasonable interpretations we can make about the Bible. That does not make them all true.

How do we know which is true?

Hi Ashley,

Where did the apostles express an interpretation of deification?

 

[AshleyBelle]

Hi Ashley,

Here again, you are painting our belief in the most negative possible light by distorting it. Why would we believe that we would be “gods apart from the Father,” when the point of our existence is to become one with the Father, just like Jesus (see John 17)?

Consider the following quotations by Brigham Young.

So I understand, once again, that you disagree with us about the nature of deification. But that is no excuse for distorting our beliefs beyond recognition.

Original sin came into the world, because satan promised us we could be like gods.

You will understand my hesitation to repeat their mistake.

The question is, WHY is your understanding of what it means to share Christ’s divinity correct? Who is the one behind this deception?

 

[AshleyBelle]

Hi Ashley,

Where did the apostles express an interpretation of deification?

That’s for you to show us

 

[ronald_g_w]

CCC # 460

Quote:
Originally Posted by AshleyBelle
You want to quote the Catholic Catechism, and then try to tell Catholics what it REALLY means?
I’m pretty sure the catechism means what we intended it to mean, and was written from a Catholic understanding.
Quoting the Catechism of the Catholic church only works if you understand what it is saying. The same is true of the Bible as well… But we have plenty of Christians who like to tell us what IT is “really” saying too.

I don’t discredit your argument. The Catechism and the Bible really could be interpretted to imply that we become Gods. But the fact remains, your interpretation holds no weight against the way Catholics have always understood it for 2000 years. You can’t use a current document to prove a point that we didn’t write it to mean. If you want a definition of putting words into someone’s mouth, there it is.

Why did Paul warn us, to only accept a gospel if we knew it came from the apostes? If a teaching cannot be traced to the apostles, we are warned that it is a FALSE GOSPEL.

Ashley
What is it really saying, do you not take it as it is stated ?

 

[BDawg]

Original sin came into the world, because satan promised us we could be like gods.

You will understand my hesitation to repeat their mistake.

The question is, WHY is your understanding of what it means to share Christ’s divinity correct? Who is the one behind this deception?

Hi Ashley,

If you read that chapter in Genesis, you will find out that Satan was telling the truth about them becoming “as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). Note the plural “gods”. Verse 22 of the same chapter says, “And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.” Note the “one of us” phrase, there. Satan actually lied only when he said, “Ye shall not surely die” (Gen. 3:4).

So I hope you’ll forgive me for not taking the whole “Satan’s lie” angle on this too seriously. It seems to me to mainly work for people that don’t actually read the Bible much.

In any case, here is a little essay I wrote to help people understand the relationship between LDS and patristic concepts of deification. In my view, we have considerable historical justification for our interpretation.

Mormon and ECF Theosis

I agree that it is wrong to simply equate ECF statements about theosis with the Mormon belief. These are the issues, as I see them.

1. After the mid-second century, most of the ECFs believed in creatio ex nihilo. This tends to put “God” and “everything else” into two unbridgeable ontological categories.
2. After the mid-second century, most of the ECFs believed in a Greek philosophical definition of God, as a simple, eternally and absolutely immutable, immaterial, spiritual substance or essence. If God is absolutely “immutable” in every sense, then the Divine Substance can’t be added to in any way. This would make it impossible for humans to ever become part of the Divine Substance, and so they could only ever “participate” in God.

On the other hand, most Protestants don’t have any notion of deification, so when they criticize Mormons for having such a belief, I think it is legitimate to point out that theosis was one of those beliefs that nobody really questioned in early Christianity. Jewish Christians, gentile Christians, Gnostics–everybody. (See J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, Revised ed., 469-470.) Since there really was no controversy about theosis among these groups, it was clearly an original Apostolic teaching.

But if so, is it possible that the doctrine was originally interpreted in a more “Mormon-like” manner? I think there is decent evidence for this conclusion. In support of this, I will make the following points.

1. Recent scholarship on the origin of the creatio ex nihilo doctrine has concluded that it originated in the mid-second century AD, among Christians. Nobody, including the authors of the Bible, had ever heard of such a thing before that. And if these scholars are right, that narrows the “ontological gap” between humans and God considerably. In his 1990 presidential address to the British Association for Jewish Studies, Peter Hayman asserted the following:

Nearly all recent studies on the origin of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo have come to the conclusion that this doctrine is not native to Judaism, is nowhere attested in the Hebrew Bible, and probably arose in Christianity in the second century C.E. in the course of its fierce battle with Gnosticism. The one scholar who continues to maintain that the doctrine is native to Judaism, namely Jonathan Goldstein, thinks that it first appears at the end of the first century C.E., but has recently conceded the weakness of his position in the course of debate with David Winston. (Peter Hayman, “Monotheism—A Misused Word in Jewish Studies?” Journal of Jewish Studies 42 (1991): 3. See Jonathan A. Goldstein, “The Origins of the Doctrine of Creation Ex Nihilo,” Journal of Jewish Studies 35 (1984): 127—35; Jonathan A. Goldstein, “Creation Ex Nihilo: Recantations and Restatements,” Journal of Jewish Studies 38 (1987): 187—94; David Winston, “Creation Ex Nihilo Revisited: A Reply to Jonathan Goldstein,” Journal of Jewish Studies 37 (1986): 88—91.)

For a truly exhaustive treatment of this issue from a Mormon perspective, see these articles by Blake Ostler.

(Continued in next post.)

 

[AshleyBelle]

CCC # 460

Ashley
What is it really saying, do you not take it as it is stated ?

It is saying exactly what is stated, as the CHURCH states it.

You are the one who is reading into it differently than what it says.

 

[BDawg]

(continued from last post.)

1. Originally, Jews and Jewish Christians thought God the Father had a body in human form. The idea that God is some kind of immutable spiritual “substance” came from pagan Greek philosophy. If so, then this shrinks the “ontological gap” even further.

This has been addressed by many Christian scholars, but the best resource I’ve found is Christopher Stead’s book, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity. Stead is emeritus Professor at the Cambridge Divinity School, and a well known Patristics scholar. Here are a couple of representative quotations.

The Hebrews . . . pictured the God whom they worshipped as having a body and mind like our own, though transcending humanity in the splendour of his appearance, in his power, his wisdom, and the constancy of his care for his creatures. (Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity, 120.)

By saying that God is spiritual [Stead is speaking of verses like John 4:24, here], we do not mean that he has no body . . . but rather that he is the source of a mysterious life-giving power and energy that animates the human body, and himself possesses this energy in the fullest measure. (Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity, 98.)

In the third century, Origen wrote that the Jews and some Christians believed that God had a body in human form, but he rejected this idea because the philosophers thought it was silly. He also admitted that in his time, this was not a settled matter within Christianity.

The Jews indeed, but also some of our people, supposed that God should be understood as a man, that is, adorned with human members and human appearance. But the philosophers despise these stories as fabulous and formed in the likeness of poetic fictions. (Origen, Homilies on Genesis 3:1.)

We shall inquire, however, whether the thing which Greek philosophers call asomaton, or “incorporeal,” is found in holy Scripture under another name. For it is also to be a subject of investigation how God himself is to be understood,–whether as corporeal, and formed according to some shape, or of a different nature from bodies,–a point which is not clearly indicated in our teaching. (Origen, De Principiis Preface 9, in ANF 4:241.)

1. Finally, the original Christian Christology was a “Spirit Christology,” where Jesus did not have “two natures” in the sense of having both a human body/spirit and a separate “Divine Nature,” meaning the Divine Substance of the philosophers. Rather, Jesus’ Divine spirit inhabited a human body, just like a regular human spirit inhabits a human body. If so, then it cannot be that Jesus’ Divine Nature is so very different than human nature. J.N.D. Kelly, a famous Oxford patristics scholar, wrote that the first Christians had what he called a “Spirit Christology.”

The Christological theory (if theory is an apt name for what was usually a pre-reflective supposition) which commanded most support, and which lingered on beyond the second century, may be described as a Spirit-Christology. By this is meant the view that in the historical Jesus Christ the pre-existent Son of God, Who is divine spirit, united Himself with human nature. This could take a variety of forms, according to the underlying conception. The idea seems sometimes to have been that the pre-existent Christ-Spirit inswelt the man Jesus, sometimes that He actually became man. “Barnabas” provides an example of the former, with his statements that the Son of God “came” or “manifested himself” in flesh, or in the form of flesh, and that the body which Christ offered in sacrifice was “the receptacle of spirit”. An even more impressive illustration is Hermas’s theory that “God caused the holy, pre-existent spirit which created the whole of creation to dwell in flesh that He desired. (J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, Revised Edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978, 143-144.)

Some other examples of “Spirit Christology” include statements by St. Hipploytus of Rome, St. Ignatius of Antioch, and St. John.

The Logos we know to have received a body from a virgin. (Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies 10:29, in ANF 5:152)

God the Word did dwell in a human body, being within it as the Word, even as the soul also is in the body. . . . (Ignatius, Philadelphians 6, in ANF 1:83.)

the Word became flesh (John 1:14)

But if the Word was just like a spirit inside a human body, how could Jesus really be human? If “God” is an eternally unchanging, simple essence, that’s a big problem. Eusebius of Caesarea put it this way in the 4th century.

For if it is unreasonable to suppose that the unbegotten and immutable essence of the almighty God was changed into the form of man . . . .” (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 1:2:8, in NPNF Series 2:1:83.)

In the third century, Origen expressed the problem this way.

But if the immortal God – the Word – by assuming a mortal body and a human soul, appears to Celsus to undergo a change and transformation, let him learn that the Word, still remaining essentially the Word, suffers none of those things which are suffered by the body or the soul . . . .” (Origen, Against Celsus 4:15, in ANF 4:503)

That’s why some Christian thinkers settled on the idea that Jesus must have had a human soul in addition to the Divine Nature. I think Origen was one of the first, but the details weren’t all worked out until the Third Council of Constantinople in 680 AD, where it was settled that Jesus had “two natures” and “two wills”.

So even though I don’t think Mormons can honestly equate our doctrine of theosis with those of the ECFs, I think we can make a good case for the proposition that our doctrine is closer to the original than the ECFs’.

 

[AshleyBelle]

Hi Ashley,

If you read that chapter in Genesis, you will find out that Satan was telling the truth about them becoming “as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5)./QUOTE]

You’re absolutely right… but you know what happened? IT KILLED them…it brought DEATH into the world.

SO forgive me for not applauding Adam and Eve’s decision to become like gods.

I’d much rather listen to what God said to do, than what Satan said to do

 

[BDawg]

It is saying exactly what is stated, as the CHURCH states it.

You are the one who is reading into it differently than what it says.

I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you mean by “it”. Do you mean the actual text of the New Testament? But now you seem to be convoluting what “it” (the NT?) says with “how the Church states it.”

Earlier you seemed to be saying that my interpretation was not in line with that of the apostles, and I asked where the apostles are recorded to have given an interpretation.

Can you produce such a thing, or are you just saying that the Catholic interpretation of deification automatically counts as the apostles’ interpretation, no matter what?

 

[AshleyBelle]

I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you mean by “it”. Do you mean the actual text of the New Testament? But now you seem to be convoluting what “it” (the NT?) says with “how the Church states it.”

Earlier you seemed to be saying that my interpretation was not in line with that of the apostles, and I asked where the apostles are recorded to have given an interpretation.

Can you produce such a thing, or are you just saying that the Catholic interpretation of deification automatically counts as the apostles’ interpretation, no matter what?

First… they do NOT teach deification. They teach theosis. Please do not try to muddy the difference, these are not interchangable ideas.

Secondly, what the Catholic church teaches IS what the apostles learned directly from Christ, because we have apostolic succession, and the promise of Christ Himself.

 

[BDawg]

You’re absolutely right… but you know what happened? IT KILLED them…it brought DEATH into the world.

SO forgive me for not applauding Adam and Eve’s decision to become like gods.

I’d much rather listen to what God said to do, than what Satan said to do

Hi Ashley,

But I thought you admitted that people CAN become gods (like the CCC and the early Church Fathers say.) You just disagree with Mormons about what that means.

Are you saying that when people become gods in the sense Catholics mean it, they will not know the difference between good and evil? Because otherwise it seems like you have exactly the same problem with “listening to what Satan said to do.”

So please explain what you mean. Can we become gods in the sense that the Catechism says, or not? If so, will we know the difference between good and evil?

 

[BDawg]

First… they do NOT teach deification. They teach theosis. Please do not try to muddy the difference, these are not interchangable ideas.

Hi Ashley,

Since “theosis” is the Greek word for “deification,” I have no problem using either. I’m not sure what you think the distinction is. Personally, I prefer sticking to English when possible.

Secondly, what the Catholic church teaches IS what the apostles learned directly from Christ, because we have apostolic succession, and the promise of Christ Himself.

So what is your stance on “doctrinal development.” Do you agree with John Henry Newman that Catholic doctrine “developed” over the centuries–i.e., what was taught changed somewhat? Or do you think that what the apostles taught is EXACTLY what is now taught in the RCC?