Dr Val Larsen concludes this conversation with a discussion of theosis in the Book of Mormon. We’ll also discuss his upcoming projects. Check out our conversation…
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Theosis
Val 00:29 Now I’m going to go on to a shorter description now of probably what is the most explicit theosis story in the scriptures. Let’s finish with a final, and in many respects, the best example of theosis in the Book of Mormon, the second Nephi, the second person named Nephi. The discussion here is shorter. It’s all pretty explicit. This Nephi provides the clearest example of theosis in scripture. He becomes the chief judge at the death of his father, Helaman. In that purely human role, he’s not a success. Almost all the Nephite lands are lost during his judgeship, and then only half of what’s lost is regained. He’s the main politician. He’s the head of state. Few politicians could survive as a leader in the wake of a military collapse of that magnitude. Unsurprisingly, this second Nephi loses his position as Chief Judge. The text blames the people for this loss.
Val 01:28 The Book of Mormon is, among many other things, a sympathetic history of Alma family rule. I’ve got a whole theory about that, that the Book of Mormon is a handbook, a governance handbook for the Alma family that got repurposed at the very end. I’m going to have that written up at some point. But one of the things it does is it never frames the Alma family as doing anything wrong. I mean it does initially, when they deviate from Christ, and it shows that’s the key part of the handbook: Don’t ever turn away from Christ. It doesn’t matter how much talent, success you have, you’re a disaster unless you have Christ. That actually illuminates the book a lot to think of it that way. Anyway, even though the Book of Mormon is letting Nephi off the hook here, the people wouldn’t have. You don’t get to lose half your country, as head of state. It’s very unlikely that his resignation was voluntary. The other political party, we see them take over. “You lost half our country. All right, goodbye.” No longer the Chief Judge, Nephi takes it upon himself to preach the Word of God all the remainder of his days. We get the great story about Nephi and Lehi in the same prison where Abinadi was imprisoned, having experiences like Abinadi that are described in words that echo Abinadi’s story. Nephi and Lehi are transformed into beings of light, like Abinadi was, and all the people they have ministered to become members of the Divine Council. If listeners want to know the details, they can read them in a 2023 Interpreter article that Newell and I wrote, “Theosis in the Book of Mormon.”
GT 03:18 Not Newell Bringhurst.
Val 03:20 What’s that?
GT 03:20 Not Newell Bringhurst.
Val 03:22 Newell Wright and I.
GT 03:22 Okay.
Val 03:23 Yes, my co-author. So let’s move on to the apotheosis of Nephi, who is given all God’s power to move within and affect the world. The predicate for this conferral of power is the alignment of Nephi’s mind with the mind of God. God speaks to Nephi using the same words Lamoni used when he equated his wife with divine beings, “Blessed art thou.” That’s what he says to his wife after he comes up and he has that vision. So here’s the quote, “Blessed art thou Nephi for those things which thou has done, for I have beheld how thou hast with unwearingness declared the word. And now because thou has done this with such unwearingness, behold, I will bless thee forever and I will make thee mighty in word and deed and faith and works, yea, even that all things shall be done unto thee according to thy word. For Thou shalt not ask that which is contrary to my will. Behold, I am God. Behold, I declare unto thee in the presence of my angels, that you shall have power over this people. Behold, I give you power, that whatsoever you shall seal on earth shall be sealed in heaven, whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Thus saith the Lord God, who is almighty.” At this point in his life, Nephi, like Christ, becomes an incarnation of God on the earth. That’s–I know that’s an odd way of speaking, but I think it’s true. He’s an incarnation of God.
Val 04:41 He has all God’s power given to him. As he would be the first to insist, he didn’t live a perfect life like the Savior. Unlike the Savior, he wasn’t born as an incarnation of God. But through the grace and power of Christ’s Atonement, he has become one with the Savior and one with God. He has become what Christ commands all of us to become, perfect, even as our Father in heaven is perfect. He’s a full-fledged member of the Divine Council and by all, but the most abstract philosophical standards is a god, like the first Nephi. During his vision, he knows what only God can know. Like the first Nephi, he moves from place-to-place instantaneously as only a God could move. Unsurprisingly, as was true for Ammon, some of the people declare more in truth than in error quote,” Behold, he is a God.” That’s them confounding a man and a God. This is right in the Book of Mormon, a man who becomes indistinguishable from a God with all the powers of God. And so in the other things I’ve read symbolically and bringing symbols together to make explicit the theosis that’s happening there, and I think it’s powerful. I think it’s very cogent. Symbolically, it actually is, in a way, telling a deeper truth than this narrative is. But this is the narrative where it’s made fully explicit that Nephi has given all God says. Anything that you say happen, can happen. You have my divine powers and then the people start calling him a god. Nephi’s dual citizenship on earth and in heaven, but primarily in heaven, is signified like that of Alma the Younger. By the last thing we’re told about him, his death was not witnessed or recorded. All we know is that he departed out of land of Zarahemla, ‘Whither he went no man knoweth.”
Val 06:25 We are left to infer that, perhaps, like Moses, this Nephi was buried by God or that, like Elijah, without dying, he passed from earth to heaven. These ambiguities in how he passed separate him from ordinary mortals, again, positioning him between earth and heaven, or just in heaven. Taken together with the account we have of his receipt of divine power, this Nephi becomes our best scriptural example of how mortal man receiveth all that my father hath. Therefore, all that my father hath is given unto him.’ He has become a perfected Son of God, like his master and exemplar, Christ, and has thus become a Divine Being or another incarnation of God in the world. So, let’s wrap things up here. I’m sure your audience has had way more than enough of me. While some scholars have suggested that theosis is a Nauvoo addition to restoration theology, evidence suggests that it was present in the Book of Mormon long before the Nauvoo period. The fact that theosis is independently articulated in the Book of Mormon and the King Follett discourse, is evidence that the doctrine is an integral part of the gospel. There’s no reason to believe Joseph saw theosis in the Book of Mormon when he translated the book or that he developed his understanding of theosis from reading the Book of Mormon. Our ability to see it there, apart from this Nephi story, I would say, is a function of insightful modern scholarship and voices speaking from the dust at Ugarit, and other places that have given us an understanding of what was happening in Lehi’s Jerusalem that Joseph couldn’t have had.
Val 07:36 So the two articulations of the doctrine are independent and our understanding of theosis is made richer by these related, but distinct articulations. In his King Follett sermon, Joseph clarified aspects of theosis that are not fully explicit in the Book of Mormon. Joseph’s pronouncements about the ontology of God and man are particularly forceful and clear. What he clearly states is only implied in the Book of Mormon. Conversely, some elements of theosis theology are developed with greater clarity in the Book of Mormon than in Joseph’s, deservedly famous, sermon. For example, the close coupling of the Mother and Son as they play their linked role in salvation is especially clear in the Book of Mormon. Likewise, especially clear is the desire of the Father to feature the two most salient objects of His love, the Mother and the Son, who are the two most important gifts that come to us as humanity. We return to the Father, the Book of Mormon suggests, by coming to the Mother and Son, the Tree of Life and its fruit. That concludes my substantive analysis of theosis in the Book of Mormon. But let me say a thing or two about my sources. The first article that set me on the path to this analysis was Dan Peterson’s, “Nephi and his Asherah,” which Rosalynde also mentioned is something she was familiar with. That led me to Kevin Christensen, whose own contributions are significant, but whose biggest contribution was to bring Margaret Barker, the great Methodist scholar, to the attention of Latter Day Saint community. Margaret’s voluminous work on the Old Testament converges with LDS theology on a remarkable number of dimensions. Have you ever interviewed her? Probably not?
GT 09:39 No, you need to give me her email address.
Val 09:41 Get a hold of Kevin Christensen, who’s on the Interpreter board because he’s pretty good friends with her. Actually, when you interview Dave, talk with him about it because he’s been in touch with her, too.
GT 09:54 Okay.
Val 09:55 I think she’s read those books of Dave’s. I think she liked those books of Dave’s, and some of what he was doing.
GT 10:02 I’ll be talking to him in the next week or two.
Val 10:03 Right. Margaret especially highlights the temple and the Divine Mother. On Heavenly Mother in the Old Testament, I found two books particularly valuable. [William] Dever’s, “Did God have a wife?” The answer is yes.
GT 10:18 Dever, I love him. He’s amazing.
Val 10:20 And Rafael Patai’s, “The Hebrew Goddess.” My broad outline of the Abrahamic religion is pretty uncontroversial. In my articles, I cite a number of biblical scholars to support various claims I make. Of course, none of them agree with my analysis, or each other in every detail. But given the thinness of the evidence, our reasoning is based on–we don’t have that much from the Old Testament time, it’s not surprising that there are some degrees of disagreement. But on this point about the Divine Council, as the older theology of Abraham, that’s really not a controversial point at all among the secular Old Testament scholars. But let me finish up by mentioning David Butler again. Dave makes a very important point. He has said that if the Old Testament scholars were to suddenly believe the Book of Mormon is what it says it is, a reliable, detailed, ancient manuscript from the time of Josiah, they would trample each other to death in their rush to get a copy. And having read the book, they would significantly revise their understanding of the Old Testament.
Val 11:27 Among other things, they would get on board with Margaret Barker’s work, because, like the Book of Mormon, Margaret sees the Old Testament Yahweh as Christ. And they would shift from a purely evolutionary model of sacred history to a dispensational model, in which God reveals His truth at various points in history, only to have the people turn away from it. Human understanding of God in the wake of these restorations often evolves, and that’s what I was arguing with the Abinadi point, sometimes towards deeper understanding, as with Abinadi or after Abinadi, but more often toward heresy and the loss of truth. The bottom line is that if the Book of Mormon is what it claims to be, evidence about Old Testament times, is much less thin for Latter-day Saints scholars than it is for those who don’t have the Book of Mormon. As I’ve argued in this presentation, the Book of Mormon fits in very well with what scholars tell us was going on in ancient Israel at the time of its opening. But it adds something very important. It clearly testifies that Christ was a much bigger part of events in the Old Testament than secular scholars realize. That’s on the scholarship point, and on the theology point, I’ve already talked about it. What it does is it links us back to that older theology, where there is a corporeal Father, there is a corporeal Mother. We are of a kind with them. This is the most profound and distinctive thing about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Iif we’re right on that, there is a really important respect in which we are the one true church in the thing that matters most: Who is God, what is his relationship to us, and who are we? Those are really important points.
GT 13:12 And that’s really where I wanted to go with this. I asked Roslynde this question, and I want to ask you, because the biggest criticism of the Book of Mormon for Protestants and Catholics and whatever, is that there’s way too much Christology in the Book of Mormon, especially the Old Testament period. And so, they’re saying, “Well, that’s just showing Joseph’s biases. That’s a 19th century theology.” So how do you respond to that?
Val 13:49 Well, our counterclaim is that the Deuteronomists took the corporeal God out of the scriptures, and the secular scholars actually agree with us on this point. I mean, the argument I’m making is that, actually, the theology we’re defending is the Abraham theology. That’s what the scholarship would tell us. So, if you go to the Catholics and start confronting them with this older theology, it’s problematic for them. They have to say something like this. They have to say that, well, understanding evolved across time toward the truth. So, in the earlier period, Abraham and the people of that time had a faulty understanding. And, but things kind of—
GT 14:42 They didn’t get it until Christ was born, basically?
Val 14:44 Well, no, they would be saying, “But that understanding dramatically improved when Josiah came along.” Josiah’s Deuteronomist revolution was what finally got God right. So, they had God wrong until that moment.
GT 14:59 So Josiah’s a saint, not a sinner for them, where he is more of a sinner to us.
Val 15:02 Well, he is for the Bible, right? I mean somebody has to be willing to read the Bible against the grain, at least on the Josiah story. Josiah is a great hero in the Deuteronomist Bible.
GT 15:15 Right.
Val 15:16 But he’s not the great hero in the Book of Mormon.
GT 15:20 Right.
Val 15:20 If you read the Book of Mormon, Lehi is not going along with it.
GT 15:23 It never really mentioned Josiah, by name, at least.
Val 15:25 No, but he was a contemporary of Lehi.
GT 15:28 Right.
Val 15:28 I mean, he was king when all Lehi’s sons were being born. And all the stuff was happening at the time of Lehi.
GT 15:35 And Lehi had to get out, because he didn’t like Josiah.
Val 15:39 Well, Josiah died, but Josiah’s theology was taking–Lehi says he had to leave, because he was teaching that there was a God with God, there was a Messiah. The people were going to kill him because he was teaching that there was this other God with God, the Son, the Messiah. That’s exactly what Josiah was doing, was throwing out of the temple, all of the sons–I mean, they had tokens…
GT 16:04 All the Sons of God.
Val 16:05 Yeah, they had…
GT 16:05 Moloch and Baal.
Val 16:06 Yeah. Well, I don’t know about, no, with Baal…
GT 16:09 They didn’t like Moloch, but Baal for sure.
Val 16:12 Their name for Baal was Yahweh. Yahweh and Baal were alternative names for the same being, probably.
GT 16:19 Yes.
Val 16:19 In other words, in the Canaanites theology next to them, they were calling this being Baal, the son of El, Baal. In Israel, they were calling him Yahweh. And you can see how you start get a fight then. Right? What’s the right name? And you guys are believing in the wrong one and back and forth. Actually, we have the same thing with the Protestants. Right? Who has the true Jesus?
GT 16:45 Yeah, exactly. But it kind of goes to, where’s the story where the prophet called down lightning and he got it all wet. Because it was like, well, who’s the real God?
Val 16:59 Right?
GT 16:59 And Yahweh was the correct God, but he was going against Baal, wasn’t he?
Val 17:03 Yes, that was against the priests of Baal. But in that story, the people who read, like Margaret does, because it also mentions, and over on the side were the priests of Asherah. In that story, it’s…
GT 17:23 Was it Elijah that did this?
Val 17:25 You know, I can’t remember. This is embarrassing, but I remember from the story that the Asherah priests are over on the side, and it’s like, they’re kind of added in. They weren’t part of the initial story. So, someone like Margaret would read that and say, “Yes, there was real enmity toward Baal, but they went and revised after the Deuteronomist reforms and tossed in the Asherah folks, because it didn’t have that enmity toward Asherah running through the Old Testament.
GT 18:01 Okay.
Val 18:02 I mean, there’s places where it’s there. But it’s not the same way as with Baal. You could make the argument, and I think Margaret does pretty consistently, that the Asherah stuff is a distortion, like Josiah and post-Josiah distortion of the texts. She finds places where she can see the Hebrew being corrupted and tell you what the original thing said that was more complimentary and then they turned it into a condemnation instead of a compliment. I don’t have the kind of Hebrew to dig into that.
GT 18:39 I’ll have to see if I can get her. Where does she live?
Val 18:41 She’s in England, so SouthWest [airlines] won’t get you there. {Val chuckling}
GT 18:44 I guess I’ll have to do a zoom on that one. All right.
Val 18:47 But she comes over here once in a while. I don’t know if she, I mean, she’s been over here to the Temple Studies Group things. She’s got more devoted followers here in Utah than she has in England, probably.
GT 18:58 I will have to track down her schedule somehow. I wonder if she’s coming to the Maxwell Institute. Any idea?
Val 19:06 I don’t know what they do. I’m not in the club, again. {both chuckling}
Upcoming projects
GT 19:11 All right. Well, is there anything we need to finish up on this?
Val 19:17 Just thanks for the great work you do of getting all these different perspectives and views and voices of the Restoration out. A really rich work has been done. I didn’t appreciate it as much as I do now, until I joined that Book of Mormon Perspectives Monday night meeting, which other people are invited to. It’s open to anybody who wants to come. A lot of people from various Restoration traditions who love the Book of Mormon and love God and you start to see–my insularity was certainly exploded to some extent. And you go around exploding insularity all over the place. You’re a big bomb in the middle of insularity. {both laughing}
GT 19:58 Well, Bill Shepard is there all the time.
Val 20:00 Yeah, he is.
GT 20:01 He is a Strangite.
Val 20:02 Definitely. He’s there, essentially, every time. So, a Strangite representative and great guy, wonderful guy.
GT 20:08 I go when there are not Jazz games on Monday night. {both chuckling} So, all right, remind us what you’re working on in the future so people can keep an eye out.
Val 20:21 The thing I’m working on right now is a theory of the Atonement. So, it’s looking at, not only do we have a distinctive theory about who God is that separates us out from everybody else, and if we’re wrong, we’re way wrong. And if we’re right, everybody else is way wrong on this single most important issue of who God is. But the idea of who God is, has huge implications for how the atonement works. We talked a little bit about the atonement last time, and all these other these various theories that don’t work. But basically, none of the theories really work with a God who creates everything out of nothing. Because it’s God creating all the evil, and then atoning for all the evil and requiring himself to atone for all the evil. There’s just a ton of confusion and contradiction built into the various theories. But in our theology, the problem of evil essentially disappears. The Atonement is put in a completely different frame, because God is not outside of space and time, the creator of everything. God exists in a set of pre-existing circumstances. He’s dealing with those pre-existing circumstances. And we are part of those pre-existing circumstances. He didn’t create us in our essence.
GT 21:56 Okay.
Val 21:56 Intelligences are un-created. All kinds of interesting things follow from that theological shift. What I do is working with Newell there, I work out the theology of that and…
GT 22:13 And it’s not Penal Substitution, Christus Victor, Satisfaction. What are the others? I can’t remember.
Val 22:18 Well, the thing that gets closest to is moral influence.
GT 22:22 Okay.
Val 22:22 And we talked about that a little bit in the previous interview. But it’s not just that. I haven’t come up with a new name for it. And if I was a better marketer, a better practical marketer, I’d come up with a really good brand name for it, because it’s distinctive enough that it needs a brand name to really catch hold.
GT 22:38 Terryl Givens talked about Consequential something. I can’t remember now.[1]
Val 22:45 Terryl understands this theology. He understands the distinctiveness of this theology very well. He says a lot of things that are totally in harmony with what I’ll be talking about. If Terryl reads this paper…
GT 22:58 He doesn’t read anything.
Val 23:00 Yeah. Right.
GT 23:00 Not unless he has to.
Val 23:01 But if he were to read this paper, he would recognize, pretty much, all the claims that are made there. The thing that he would maybe not [agree with,] it would just be the specific interpretations of passages of Scripture. it’s a different way of anchoring it, too. I mean, I’m making a little bit of advance in the details. But the fundamentals, he understands how important it is that God is not outside of time and is not the creator of all time. That has huge theological implications. Terryl fully knows that.
GT 23:34 Okay, so this papers coming out, do you have any idea time wise?
Val 23:37 Well, it has two parts to it. The first part is about sin and death, and the second part is about justice, basically justice and the second part about mercy. I’m just about done with the justice half of it. I haven’t started the mercy half yet.
GT 23:52 So, it might be a year out.
Val 23:55 Yes, definitely. Well, yeah, by the time it gets published, probably.
GT 24:00 Okay, anything else?
Val 24:03 Well, I just had paper, I’ve got a paper coming out, which is looking at Moroni, and the five endings that Moroni composed for the Book of Mormon. I talked about how, his last ending, he got from reading the last writer in the small plates. That came out of that paper. But it’s just astonishing to watch Moroni mature as a person and as a writer, as he writes five sequential endings for the Book of Mormon over a period of many years. Its first ending, he’s writing it in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the battle. It’s very short. It’s like five verses and he’s just saying [that] I’m barely surviving here. My dad told me to write something. Here it is. And then the next ending, he just dumps on us. He missed the Dale Carnegie course on, “How To Win Friends and Influence People,” because he just dumps on us moderns: “You people are so worthless and wicked.” He’s rhetorically really ineffective. And I show that, in that ending. He just gets better with each subsequent ending, he gets more and more powerful. And by the time he gets to that, all of his faults as a writer are dropping away by the time he gets to that last ending that we all know and love. I show how he matures across time. He says in there [that] you put yourself in danger of hellfire if you focus on my weaknesses as a writer. But the argument I make is his weakness is actually a strength, in that this feeds into the historicity of the Book of Mormon. Because you’re seeing a guy, I mean, the kind of genius it would take to show, when you’re writing Moroni across time, to show him changing and growing as a person in his view of us, the moderns, and in his rhetorical effectiveness is… I mean, it’s just an astonishing level of literary sophistication, if that were put in by Joseph Smith because he was such a literary genius. So, Grant Hardy does a great job of framing this stuff. He’s one of my favorite Book of Mormon commentators, and I think, “Understanding the Book of Mormon…” Have you ever interviewed him?
GT 28:45 I have not. I’ve asked him, I think he said no, if I remember right.
Val 26:48 Well, “Understanding the Book of Mormon,” I think, is the best thing done on the Book of Mormon in this century. It’s among the best things ever done on it. And what he does is he brackets the question of historicity. But then he goes and shows how sophisticated the Book of Mormon is as a work of literature. I’m, in a sense, building on what Terryl does is I show how Moroni grows across time in those interviews, or in those endings he writes. So, if you want to have a secular account, what Grant does, he puts you in this position. You can say that Joseph wrote it, because he brackets the question of historicity. But you have to attribute, as we read the text, the way the Jews do, and see more and more depth in it, you have to constantly attribute ever greater literary genius to Joseph. And how plausible is that at the end of the day? So, then we either get Joseph, the towering literary genius, or the farm boy translator of revelations from God. Take your pick. The Lord doesn’t force us on this. I mean, you can make a case for both. We have to choose the world we want to live in. We can live in the world where God does exists, reveals and is involved in our lives and everybody else’s lives. Or we can choose to live in a world where he doesn’t exist and we’ll live in the world, whichever world we choose. There’s enough evidence to let you choose either one of them. So, it makes this earth a good test of our preferences.
Val 28:35 That’s another thing Terryl Givens is really good on. He understands that Plan of Salvation is, God’s going to let us all get the thing that we choose, that we want. If we want to have a secular-type existence without Christ and the atonement, we can have that and we can have it through the eternities and that some people are going to prefer it. Satan and his bunch, , I talk about this in the atonement paper. God is a realist, so he’s totally anchored in reality, a reality outside himself. Satan is a romantic, a fantasist. And the English romantics I’m talking about, like Shelley and Byron, they really admired Satan in Milton, Milton’s Satan, and they aspired to be like Satan, creators of their own realities. That’s the romanticism: I’m not bound by existing reality. I create my own realities. Satan lives in his own created reality. But reality does exist. When we start creating our realities, this is a critique of the Church. The way, the Church’s critique of existing culture. You can make yourself anything you want to. Right? The libertarian, liberal, libertarian, woke idea now is we can make ourselves anything we want to be. I can make my body, whatever it is. I can make my sex, my gender, all this stuff is completely mutable. In my atonement argument, I am saying that is a species of–one of the things I say in this paper is, Satan gets us to believe in this world, in his Gospel, in his pre-mortal plan, rather than God’s plan. It’s showing up in in the evolution of our culture, which gets rid of reality and lets you create your own realities. It’s there in the theology, the theology of Orthodox Christianity, the God outside of space and time, unconstrained by anything else. That was the God that Satan conceived himself to be. And so Satan’s plan in the pre-existence has a lot in common with, say, Calvin’s theology and Luther’s theology. I’ll get into that in the atonement paper.
GT 31:05 Cool. We’re looking forward to it. Are you going to BOMSA in the fall?
Val 31:10 Yeah. I hope to go to it every year. We’ll be back next summer. Every summer is here and every Christmas.
GT 31:19 Okay. Well, great. Well, Dr. Val Larsen from James Madison University, thank you so much for being here on Gospel Tangents.
Val 31:28 Well, thanks for the work you do again.
GT 31:30 Thanks.
[1] Consequential substitution.
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