Dr Val Larsen thinks Lehi was a polytheist! That’s quite a statement! Val holds two Ph.D. ‘s, one in English and the other in Marketing. He teaches at James Madison University. He shares how he thinks Lehi synthesized the Canaanite & Israelite religions and shares his insights into theosis/exaltation in the Book of Mormon, divine mother, and lots of other interesting Book of Mormon topics. Check out our conversation…
Link to Val’s article: https://journal.interpreterfoundation.org/theosis-in-the-book-of-mormon-the-work-and-glory-of-the-father-mother-and-son-and-holy-ghost/
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Intro to Val Larsen
Interview
GT 00:45 Welcome to Gospel Tangents. I’m excited to have an amazing Book of Mormon scholar. I think most of you probably haven’t heard of them. But could you go ahead and tell us who you are and where you teach?
Val 00:56 Okay, my name is Val Larsen. I teach at James Madison University, and I’ve been there for about 22 years.
GT 01:01 Twenty-two years. They have a pretty good football team, I think. Don’t they? 1-AA?
Val 01:05 Well, they just went to the higher division this year.
GT 01:10 Oh, I didn’t know.
Val 01:11 And they actually were rated in the top 20 the first year. They’ve won the national championship at the double A level.
GT 01:19 Right.
Val 01:19 They came in for the first year in the Sunbelt Conference. And they had a pretty good season, they were rated like 20, or something like that for a little while for the last couple of games. But it’s pretty surprising, having come from 1-AA level to go to a ranked team. And your first year.
GT 01:39 We’ve seen Boise State do that. They did the same thing. They used to be in the Big Sky and then they went to the WAC, I think.
Val 01:45 Well, if they can do anything like what Boise State has done, they’ll be very happy. I’m sure.
GT 01:51 Well, very good. So, I introduced you as a Book of Mormon expert, but you actually don’t teach Book of Mormon. What do you teach?
Val 01:57 I teach marketing at James Madison University, but I had also taught English. I was an English professor, because I earned a Ph.D. in English and a Ph.D. in marketing.
GT 02:09 You’ve got two Ph.D.’s?
Val 02:10 Yeah. So, I’m pretty well trained in the social sciences from the marketing Ph.D., and in the humanities, in the English Ph.D. And the more relevant one to Book of Mormon scholarship is the English Ph.D. It’s not what I work in, but I draw on that much more heavily for Book of Mormon scholarship.
GT 02:28 Oh, nice. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Where did you get your undergrad grad and all your Ph.D.’s from?
Val 02:34 So I did my undergrad. Well, my first year was at then Rick’s college for one year. Then I had four years at BYU. I took double major in philosophy and English, so I had two undergraduate degrees. I then went to work for 18 months as an oilfield roughneck to earn money for graduate school. Then I moved to Charlottesville, Virginia. I earned a master’s degree and then went into the Ph. D. program in English there. So, both those were in English.
GT 03:04 At which school?
Val 03:05 I went to the University of Virginia for the master’s.
GT 03:08 Oh, you’re a Wahoo.
Val 03:09 And [I got my] Ph.D. in English. But while I was still working on my Ph.D. in English, I started working as an instructor at Virginia Tech in English.
GT 03:20 Is Blacksburg close to Charlottesville?
Val 03:22 Charlottesville and Blacksburg, and they’re probably two and a half hours apart from each other or three hours.
GT 03:28 Wow.
Val 03:29 And so I was writing dissertation and while writing dissertation, I was teaching English at Virginia Tech. And while I was there, I met a friend, Newell Wright, who you’ve met before, who was working on a Ph.D. in marketing. And there were a lot more jobs in marketing than there were in English.
GT 03:50 I’m not surprised.
Val 03:51 And, as a matter of fact, people, they were offering people, like, at that time $80,000 a year without even finishing their Ph.D., just ABD (All But Dissertation) without even writing a dissertation. And English jobs were hard to come by. So, I actually started a marketing Ph.D. before finishing the English Ph.D. and I started taking the classes and everything. And while I was working on the marketing Ph.D., I finished up and defended my dissertation in English, and then went on and finished up the Ph.D. in marketing.
GT 04:26 Which is why you teach in marketing and not English.
Val 04:28 Yeah, it’s a lot more money and a lot more job opportunities.
GT 04:31 James Madison, is that in Virginia?
Val 04:33 Yes.
GT 04:34 How far away from Blacksburg or Charlottesville?
Val 04:37 It’s really close to the University of Virginia, just over the other side of the mountain. As a matter of fact, we’re in the same stake as all the University of Virginia folks are.
GT 04:44 Okay.
Val 04:44 I actually spent some time before I went to James Madison, I went to Truman State University, which was in Missouri. And we were in the Nauvoo stake there, which was fun. We’d go to stake conference at Nauvoo.
GT 04:58 In the temple?
Val 05:00 The Temple wasn’t built there but it was announced. I was at a conference when they did the groundbreaking, but my family was all at the groundbreaking for that temple. And we moved about the time at that temple was getting completed. So, it was bad timing.
GT 05:17 Wow, interesting.
Val 05:18 I love Nauvoo and it was nice living in that stake for a time but I also love living in Harrisonburg or near Harrisonburg in Bridgewater, Virginia. It’s beautiful.
GT 05:27 Cool. So I’m trying to remember. We met at the Book of Mormon Studies Association Conference. Is that in Logan every year?
Val 05:36 Yes, it is.
GT 05:38 And so Chris Thomas, our famous Pentecostal Book of Mormon scholar has been the president. I think he’s going to be president one more year.
Val 05:46 Yes. I’m not sure how long he’ll continue with it.
GT 05:50 I think they usually do a three year term, but he was the guy who kicked it off, and so I think he’s going to go four and then he’s…
Val 05:56 Yeah, and they like to have an non-LDS person, and those are a little harder to come by than the LDS folks.
GT 06:03 Well, rumor has it they might turn it over to an LDS guy, but we’ll see. But you guys should come to Book of Mormon Studies Association, Utah State. I’m trying to remember. What month of the year was it?
Val 06:15 In October.
GT 06:16 Oh, was it October?
Val 06:17 It has been every year I’ve participated. Yeah.
GT 06:20 Okay. So just make sure you guys plan on coming to that. It’s really fun. It’s up in Logan. Country, too.
Val 06:27 Yeah, it’s free, too. What’s not to love?
GT 06:28 You can’t beat the price.
Val 06:29 Yeah, that’s great.
GT 06:31 So, that was where I met you, and we had a conversation where you blew my mind.
Val 06:41 Well, it was great. I learned that we have a little bit of a connection in that you have roots, not roots, exactly, but family in Moreland, Idaho, which is where I grew up. And I knew the Polatis family there, which I think is on your mother’s side.
GT 06:55 That’s right, my mom’s a Polatis.
Val 06:57 So, these relatives, actually my biggest claim to fame is I am a second cousin once removed of President Nelson. My mother was a second cousin to President Nelson. And his grandparents met each other when his grandmother was riding along on a buckboard with my great-grandparents. His grandfather came along on a horse and they kind of went along together traveling and that’s how they met. So, I’ve got a connection to a pretty high…. But I’m real low.
GT 07:36 Because the other prophets are Harold B. Lee from Idaho, and Ezra Taft Benson spent some time in Idaho, and I think they…
Val 07:43 Well, Present Nelson didn’t have any Idaho connection.
GT 07:46 Right.
Val 07:46 But our joint connection is down in Ephraim, Utah.
GT 07:51 Okay. Yeah. Well cool. And my daughter is at Snow College. Well, cool. All right.
God is the Author of Evil?
GT 07:59 Well, why don’t you introduce the topic to us that we’re going to talk about it because this is a Book of Mormon topic, but you had an angle on it that I had never before heard. And it was just fascinating.
Val 08:12 So I want to frame the topic that I’m going to address today by alluding to one of your good friends, and a former guest, Steve Pynakker. Brother Pynakker is a Pentecostal who loves Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, in part, because they literally saved his life. And I’m using literally here, literally. His story is really interesting. And I really appreciate his charitable attitude towards Joseph Smith and the Restoration. But I’ve heard him say, at a recent Mormon history gathering, he bore testimony of the Book of Mormon somewhat as follows. “I love the Book of Mormon, particularly because it doesn’t have any Mormonism in it.” And by this, he meant the Book of Mormon doesn’t contain any of the distinctive doctrines of the Restoration. It’s just a powerful witness of Christ and the Trinity. And since he loves Christ, what’s not to like?
Val 09:06 So he’s building bridges with Latter-day Saints and shares a lot in common with us on his view. But this testimony was a playful dig at the Utah-based Restoration branches that embrace and emphasize Joseph Smith’s most distinctive teachings. Steve’s views are more or less entirely in harmony with the essentially Protestant Reformation branches headquartered east of the Mississippi. He has no real disagreements with the Community of Christ folks or Sidney Rigdon’s Monongahela branch of the Restoration. He preached in services of the Rigdonite Church there in Pittsburgh. But he likes to playfully poke us Brighamites, as some of the other folks call us, and would like to convert us to his and the eastern restoration branches’ more orthodox Christianity because he thinks that’s true Christianity. We try to convert people. We can’t blame him for taking the view he does on that. My broad thesis is that Brother Pynakker is wrong. The Book of Mormon does contain distinctive doctrines of the Restoration that we Utah LDS regard as being both precious and true. So, let’s briefly talk about what some of those doctrines are.
GT 10:27 Now you’re ticking off all my evangelical friends who are starting to be a little bit like, “Oh, maybe the Book of Mormon is not too bad.”
Val 10:34 Well, when I was talking to Steve at Book of Mormon Perspectives Forum, he’d laid all this out and I said, “I don’t want to steal any of your thunder with your Evangelical friends.” Because he’s trying to reconcile all them to the Book of Mormon. But I am. I’m essentially undercutting his position as he tries to sell the Book of Mormon to evangelicals.
GT 10:59 Ok, Steve’s friends, don’t listen to this.
Val 11:00 Yes, don’t listen to this. This won’t help his case. This dispensation of the gospel opens with Lehi and Joseph Smith’s first visions, in which a prophet initially sees a pillar of fire or light, then sees the corporeal Father and corporeal Son. And a lot of deep doctrine is implicit in that corporeal appearance of the Father and Son. It suggests that God is of a kind with us, rather than wholly different from us. His male body implies that we have a divine mother with a female body and the similarity of the Father, Mother and Son to us suggest that we can become what Father, Mother and older Brother are: divine beings. Both Lehi and Joseph Smith are told that contrary doctrines are an abomination in the sight of God. Both visions use that word: abomination. And the core of the condemned abominable creed is the false idea that God is infinitely and eternally different from us. The idea that he exists outside of space and time as pure BEING, this is BEING with all capital letters, as the only entity that fundamentally unnecessarily exists, with all other things being created by him ex nihilo, out of nothing and existing only contingently.
Val 12:21 If we accept this Orthodox Christian premise, it necessarily follows, as John Calvin understood and cogently argued, that everything that happens in creation happens because God willed it to be so and caused it to be so. Fiona and Terryl Givens have written that this idea of God makes God a kind of monster, as much the author of evil and damnation as of goodness and salvation, which Calvin would basically concede; not concede it, but actually he would argue it. If we accept this creed, the problem of evil becomes completely intractable. Every act of evil becomes an act of God because God’s outside of history, and knows what every created being will do before he creates them. He has the option of creating only the subset of beings who will not choose to be monstrously evil. As the first and sufficient cause of all that exists, He can’t escape responsibility for the evil that exists in the world. Of course, none of this applies to LDS theology, because there’s a part of us that is uncreated. And God works with that. But I’m not going to get into all that today, the problem of evil, but it’s a big problem for Orthodox Christianity. It’s really not a problem for us, for some of the same reasons of the points of doctrine I’m going to be talking about today.
GT 13:41 So wait a minute. So you’re saying that–I almost want to go with the problem of evil. Because God is in charge of everything, God is in charge of evil. You say that’s what Orthodox Christianity teaches?
Val 13:55 Calvin, who was a brilliant logician, conceded this whole point. The Calvinists will say [that] God created some predestined to damnation for His glory, and others predestined to salvation. And it really follows logically from a couple of premises. If God is the cause of all things, there’s nothing that exists before God acts. If God is outside of space and time, God knows everything that will happen before he ever causes it to happen. So, anything that happens, happens only because God willed and caused it to be so.
GT 14:31 So Hitler happened because God knew.
Val 14:33 God knew what Hitler was going to do before He created him. Hitler was no surprise to God.
GT 14:38 Steve’s not a Calvinist though. He’s not going to like this.
Val 14:40 Well, I want to talk a little bit about that. Not about Steve. But yeah, he’s not a Calvinist. But the Calvinists are the most logically rigorous of the Orthodox Christians.
What Orthodox Christians Get Wrong About God
Val 14:56 So let me just go on and say that it shouldn’t surprise us that the loving God that hundreds of millions of Christians, Jews and Muslims, and people like Steve, have known intimately, reject–Well, God rejects this conception as an abomination. That’s not a true conception of him. Nor is it surprising that most of those believers, again, like Steve, defy logic, and accurately think of their god as an inherently benign being, who nurtures and blesses His children, and saves all of us who are willing to be saved, who’s not responsible for the evil that’s in the world. So, they don’t think God is responsible.
Val 15:37 But while members of the Abrahamic religion reject the impeccable logic of Calvin, it’s the logic of their own position, if they would actually dig into it deeply enough. Many of these Christians, nevertheless, insist that we have to share their conception of God to be classified as Christian. This is the paradox. Their own position makes God the cause of both all good and all evil. A lot of them don’t believe that. But they do insist that we embrace their idea of God being outside of space and time.
Val 16:10 So, our doctrine that our Heavenly Parents are of a kind with us, and that through Theosis, we can become fully like them, separates Latter-day Saint Christianity from the other branches of Christianity. And that’s what motivates the common assertion that we’re not Christian. Orthodox Christians may, and indeed, they must concede that The Restored Church of Jesus Christ doesn’t differ appreciably from their denominations, in its teachings about the earthly life and saving mission of Christ. We don’t differ from them on that.
GT 16:40 You’re talking about Eastern Orthodox Christians.
Val 16:42 I’m talking about all of them. I’ll focus on Eastern Orthodox in a moment here. But here, I’m just talking about their understanding of the earthly mission of Christ and our understanding. If our earthly Christology were the focus of their analysis, they would be obligated to classify the Restored Church as a Christian church. They classify it as non-Christian [church,] primarily because we reject the Trinitarian formulation of God, which is a variant of the Jewish Christian Muslim formation I just mentioned, in which God is a being outside of space and time, who is ontologically–it’s a fancy word for in his being, in his essential nature, utterly different from humanity. Within this Orthodox Christianity, the eternal Trinitarian God may join humanity in history, incarnated as Christ, who mysteriously remains one with the Father who is outside of space and time, but humanity can never transcend its contingent existence and join God as a self-existent being, as true companions, whose existence is like God’s necessary and eternal.
Val 17:52 Now that’s true for their theology. It isn’t true for ours and Joseph Smith taught that we are uncreated in our essence, and in that sense, we are similar to God. We Latter-day Saints don’t believe in that unbridgeable separation between God and man. We believe in Theosis, human beings becoming what their divine parents are. So, a distinction is in order. We use the word Theosis, but we didn’t invent it. The word Theosis is a coinage of Eastern Orthodoxy that you were just mentioning, which is, by all accounts a branch of Christianity. Nobody denies that Eastern Orthodox are a branch of Christianity. In Orthodoxy, Theosis denotes the beautiful, compelling idea that the proper telos, the proper end state of a contingent being, is to achieve, through the ministrations of Christ and the Holy Ghost, mystical union with God. And mainstream Christians don’t think it’s heretical to affirm that humanity may become maximally like God, within the narrow confines of what’s possible for a contingent being. But if, as they insist, God is the sole self-existent being, who exists outside of space and time, it is heretical to affirm and logically impossible to cogently argue that contingent beings, the created creatures of the uncreated God become, as we LDS affirm, fully like their Creator.
Val 19:26 So while our LDS tradition is doctrinally closer to Eastern Orthodox Christianity than to any other branch of Christianity, we, nonetheless, remain very unlike them. And it’s no accident, that the Catholics who are very thoughtful about these kinds of things, insist that converts from our church be re-baptized, if we become Catholic. Even though on the surface, we meet their one requirement that a person be baptized in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. They rightly claim that the words Father, Son and Holy Ghost don’t have the same reference for us that they have for them. Again, if the referent were only the mortal ministry of Christ, there would be no difference between them and us. But for all of us, for them for us, for all of us, Christ is more than just his mortal ministry.
GT 20:15 So, I have a question about that, because I’ve studied a little bit about Eastern Orthodoxy. And this whole idea of Theosis was just like, I mean, it’s very similar to the LDS idea of exaltation. And I was just like, wow. Because, but that’s very different from Catholic/Protestant conceptions. Because that just, to them, seems very heretical.
Val 20:38 Well, no, they don’t think Eastern Orthodoxy is heretical. Really, there’s, the Catholics have long wanted to reunify themselves to Eastern Orthodoxy. When they do ecumenical, they talk about ecumenism, that’s who they care about, more than anybody else. They would rather unify with the Orthodox than anyone else.
GT 20:38 I mean, I don’t disagree with that. I always thought it was the Orthodox that wanted to unify with the Catholics more.
Val 21:08 I think the Catholics would be happy to take them in, at any time. But they…
GT 21:13 The question is, what do we do with the Pope, right?
Val 21:15 Well, or with the patriarchs and so forth. But this tradition is precious to the Orthodox folks. But really, they’re not deeply heretical in taking this position. They’re saying that you can become unified with God, but you’re still a contingent being. The Holy Ghost and the atonement can make you like God, but not like God in the sense that we were saying, where we’re truly and literally and fully like God. You’re only like God to the extent that is possible for a creature. The word creature is sort of a technical theological term. Somebody who was created doesn’t have their own existence. So, the thing that God has created can never become like the God that created them. Our theology is different on this point, because…
GT 22:06 Homoousios and homoiousios. Right?
Val 22:09 I don’t want to get into all that stuff because I’ll get it wrong somehow.
GT 22:12 It relates, though.
Val 22:14 I think it does, too.
GT 22:15 Because the question I mean, that was the big, where they dot every i or the one iota, that’s where that phrase comes from. Because, homo is of same substance.
Val 22:30 Yeah.
GT 22:30 Okay. Jesus and God are the same substance, whereas homoi says they’re different. So, my understanding is Catholics, and I would probably go with Eastern Orthodox, as well, and Protestants believe God and Jesus are homoousious, of the same substance. But there was a…
Val 22:51 Well, actually, there’s, I think, part of that, I’m not an expert on them. But the Eastern Orthodox are a little bit different from the Catholics and the Protestants.
GT 23:02 Are they homoi, maybe?
Val 23:02 I think so. I think that’s, maybe, again, don’t take my word for it. Go talk to somebody on the Catholics and Eastern Orthodox.
GT 23:12 Because the whole the whole thing about trinity is, Jesus is God. God is the Holy Ghost…
Val 23:17 They have a slightly different view about the relationship with the Father and the Son. And these things really matter to folks. And that’s part of what’s keeping them separate.
GT 23:27 I know, but, the thing is, with the Eastern Orthodox, if we’re becoming like, God, are we become are we homoousius? Are we the same? Or are we different, because different would be homoi.
Val 23:39 No, no, they’re only talking about the members of the Godhead.
GT 23:43 I know, but if we can become part of God, or unified with God, don’t we become with God?
Val 23:52 Maybe we become with God insofar as a contingent created being could be in some sense with God.
GT 23:59 But we’re always going to be a little different.
Val 24:02 God was perfectly sufficient and whole and complete without us. And He created us out of nothing, and we are totally His creatures. We’ll always be completely separate, infinitely separate from the being who created us.
GT 24:15 We’re going to be homoi.
Val 24:16 I don’t know about all of that.
GT 24:19 That’s my take on it.
Val 24:21 There’s just an infinite gulf that separates the uncreated Creator, and the creations. But what Joseph Smith said is, “God is uncreated. But so are we.” That means, that’s a whole different ballgame.
GT 24:38 Yeah, but that’s not in the Book of Mormon.
Val 24:41 Well, true. I’ll talk about that a little bit. There are things in the Book of Mormon that are not in, say the King Follett discourse, which is where that came out of that. That advanced, distinctive LDS theology, and there’s things in the King Follett discourse that aren’t fully in the Book of Mormon.
GT 25:05 You’re going there?
Val 25:06 Yeah.
GT 25:06 Okay. Now one other quick question. You had said that Catholics require LDS to be re-baptized. Don’t they require Protestants to be baptized?
Val 25:14 No, they don’t. If they’ve been baptized in the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost, you don’t have to get re-baptized. The Protestants are let in without rebaptism. I mean, it’s worth noting that they don’t insist that the members the Community of Christ, and other eastern branches of the Restoration be re-baptized, if they become Catholic. They just interview the convert and find out who they understand the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost to be.
GT 25:37 So, Trinity is the thing where if you believe in the Trinity, you don’t need to be rebaptized.
Val 25:42 Well, yeah, you have to believe in the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost in basically the Trinity. Look, the question of why did they have to interview the Community of Christ folks? This question of who the Father, Son and Holy Ghost are is a much more open vexed question for the Community of Christ than it is for us LDS. At a recent meeting of the Book of Mormon Perspectives Forum, where most of the participants are Community of Christ members, I asked what the Community of Christ doctrine of God is. And there was this long, uncomfortable pause. Then various non-definitive statements about what people personally thought and finally, the explanation that there’s no settled official doctrine. That’s why the Catholics have to interview them to see if they’re Trinitarian, which many and probably most, but not all of them are. There’s no need to interview us LDS. Our doctrine is clear, and it’s unacceptable to the Catholics, for understandable reasons.
GT 26:40 So, an LDS who becomes Community of Christ and then wants to be Catholic, they’re going to be like, Wait a minute, you’re too LDS. Because one of the things I love about the Community of Christ, they’re not correlated. So, you can still have LDS God theology.
Val 26:54 Yes you can.
GT 26:55 And be a member of the Community of Christ, or you can be Trinitarian and be a member of the Community of Christ.
Val 27:00 Or you can believe that the Book of Mormon is history or fiction. So, the people in the Book of Mormon Perspectives Forum, they’re all people who hold on to the Book of Mormon in a more historical and literal, in ways that their tradition doesn’t anymore. That’s why they gathered there. That is my read on it. They want to hold on to Book of Mormon. They feel a strong kinship with us Utah LDS because…
GT 27:25 They are more literalistic I would say, than most Community of Christ. But, they still [open to other ideas] like John Hamer totally believes it’s 19th century work. I may have him on. They’re open.
Val 27:36 Yeah, they’re very open. It’s a great group of people and very open. But I think the underlying driving rationale for the group is, these folks hold on to the Book of Mormon in a way that the Community of Christ, as an institutional body doesn’t. And because they’re mostly older folks who come out of the time when the Book of Mormon would have been viewed within their faith, more as a historical–more as we tend to view it in the Utah branch, right?
GT 27:36 And so let me just mention, to those of you who don’t know what the Book of Mormon’s Perspective [Forum] is. It’s a Zoom meeting on Monday nights at 7pm Mountain Time. If you’re interested in joining, it’s fantastic. They meet every Monday night. Just send me an email [email protected]. I will forward you a message. It’s really, really interesting.
Val 28:27 Yeah, it really is. And you get so many different points of view on the Book of Mormon. But the core of it is a real belief in the Book of Mormon, its historicity and its power and importance as part of the Restored Gospel.
Theosis & Heavenly Mother in Book of Mormon
Val 28:46 Well, to get back on track, one important thesis of my research is that Theosis, man becoming fully like God, is a Book of Mormon doctrine. A doctrine that entails the existence of a divine mother, who with the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost, facilitates the deification of our children. To see this, we need to understand that the Book of Mormon opens in THE pivotal moment in theological history, the very moment when the theology we Latter-day Saints hold today diverges from that of Judaism, Islam, and Orthodox Christianity. This is the most important moment in, well, it’s not the most important moment in history. That’s Christ’s Atonement, but is the most important moment in theological history. The moment of what I call in some of my articles, the greater apostasy when Israel turns from the pluralistic religion of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and of contemporary Latter-day Saints, to the monistic religion that Jews, Muslims and Orthodox Christians have today. Much more than during the Great Apostasy in the years following Christ, this time of Lehi, Josiah and the Deuteronomists is when our theology diverges from that of the other Abrahamic religions. It’s really a remarkable fact, probably, I think, a providential fact that the Book of Mormon opens in this most important moment in theological history, in the very moment when our theology was diverging from what has become the dominant theology of the Abrahamic religions. So, a pivotal moment, the Book of Mormon opens in such an important moment.
Val 30:29 In a moment, I’ll discuss King Josiah and the Deuteronomistic reforms. I’ll talk a little bit about what they are. We can’t fully discuss them today. But those who want more information and evidence could read the article I published in Square Two in 2015, entitled, Hidden in Plain View, Mother in Heaven in Scripture. And another article I published in The Interpreter in 2020, entitled, First Visions and Last Sermons: Affirming Divine Sociality, Rejecting the Greater Apostasy. Both are available online. And in the Hidden in Plain View article, I demonstrate that Mother in Heaven is pervasively present in scripture. A quick way to illustrate this is to take the first verse, and the last chapter of the Bible as indices of what we find in between. The first verse in Genesis opens as follows: bereshit bara Elohim ha shamayim ve’et ha erezt. In the beginning, the gods, the word is Elohim, the plural of the word God. So, we have El, singular, Elohim, Plural. The gods created the heaven and the earth.
Val 31:32 The Father doesn’t stand alone in the creation and much of what follows, it becomes apparent that he stands with the Mother as Elohim. Now, for the last Bible chapter, anciently, the Divine Mother, Asherah was signified by an almond tree trained to grow in the shape of a menorah, an apt symbol of the Tree of Life. The staff that was in the Ark of the Covenant, was made of this almond, and it had branches, so that was linked to it, too.
GT 31:32 So, kind of like a menorah?
Val 31:32 I think it was linked to the menorahs that were used as the symbols of Asherah. We’re going to see that Mother in Heaven is consistently symbolized by the Tree of Life, and fountains or streams of pure water. In Revelation, as the Bible closes, Mother in Heaven is prominently featured in both of these symbols. The final chapter of Revelation opens as follows. “And he showed me a pure river of water, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of it was there the Tree of Life, which bear 12 manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month.”
Val 32:44 That every month, yielding of fruit is an allusion to the menstrual cycle. And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. David Butler, who I want to talk to you about later, because he would be a perfect guest for your podcast, just perfect. This is not David Butler, the seminary former seminary teacher. This is David Butler, the lawyer, science fiction writer, well-schooled in ancient Middle Eastern languages. Anyway, he’s persuasively argued that the setting of this image in the book of Revelation is the Holy of Holies, in the temple. [It is] the Tree of life, as they’re represented by the menorah, the 12 fruits, or the 12 loaves of shewbread, the bread of the presence, the food offering that’s given to God. As we come to the Tree of Life and partake of its fruit, we eat the temple food of God, because the atonement cleanses and perfects us, and transforms us into Gods. The 12 fruits also signify the sacrament, the 12 pieces of bread given to the apostles at the Last Supper. So, each Sunday, as church members partake of the sacrament, they partake of the fruit of the Tree of Life, the bread of the presence. The Last Supper, which if we consume it, worthily, will make us Gods.
Val 34:02 Now, I’ve just described the beginning of that last Bible chapter. At the end of that chapter, the Revelator sets the Tree of Life, and the pure fountain before us one last time, says, “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. Blessed are they that do Christ’s commandments, that they might have the right to the Tree of Life. Come and whosoever will let him take the water of life freely.” So, as we’re going to see, both the tree and the fountain are going to be important in the Book of Mormon, as well. So, they’re there in Revelation. They’re going to be really important in the Book of Mormon. We’ll talk about that.
Val 34:41 But getting back to the Bible, Mother in Heaven is present at both the beginning and the end of the book, and many places in between. She’s an alpha and omega of the Bible. She joins the Father and the Son as the alpha and omega of Scripture. I’ll get into the very clear reasons we have for identifying Mother with the Tree of Life and the fountain in a few minutes. Again, the article is hidden in plain view and looks at the many places Mother in Heaven shows up in the Bible. So, listeners might want to check that out, if they’re interested to see Mother in Heaven all over the place in the Bible. The article First Visions and Last Sermons focuses on a kinship between Lehi and Joseph Smith, that’s been too little noticed, and too little appreciated. It’s surprising, given that temporal and spatial distance that separates them that these two prophets seem to have, roughly, the same a classic ecclesiastical duty. They’re to establish a new priesthood line, authorized to administer the gospel, build temples and perform temple ordinances. They seem to confront roughly the same theological problem posed by elites [who are] teaching, roughly, the same incorrect ideas about who God is. The elites in both Lehi and Joseph’s time put forward a monistic conception of God. The two prophets have a pluralistic conception by contrast.
Val 36:04 Lehi and Joseph also received their prophetic calling, and are given their missions in the same way through similar first visions. And there are many thematic linkages between the prophets’ last sermons. Indeed, Lehi makes his connection to Joseph Smith the main theme of his very last sermon, the blessing he gives to his son, Joseph. So, to reiterate, the Book of Mormon opens in the pivotal moment in theological history, when the ontology, the character of God, and the existence of the Divine Mother are very much in play. In Lehi’s day, the pluralist theology is the old-time religion of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that’s been displaced by a new radically monist theology, ultimately understood to situate God entirely outside of space and time. This is the theology I mentioned before that, in Joseph Smith’s time, had itself become the old-time religion, the Orthodox religion. Lehi’s contemporary, King Josiah, ushered in this new monist theology, Lehi rejected it, remaining faithful to the older, pluralistic theology of Abraham and the Council of Gods.
Israelite Polytheism
GT 37:23 Okay, so I want to stop there for a second, because as I understand, and I remember Walter Zanger. He’s a scholar of Abraham, for sure. [He was in] Mysteries of the Bible, I’ll see if I can provide a link.[1] One of the things that he said about Abraham was Abraham was not a monotheist.
Val 37:43 Exactly.
GT 37:47 So you know, because there’s the story. Apparently, there’s a Muslim story that’s very similar to our Pearl of Great Price, where Abraham goes and breaks his father’s idols. But the idea here with the Canaanite religion and going back to Josiah, Israel had lots of different gods. Asherah was a female deity, Moloch, Ba’al. Yahweh, and El were actually two different [gods.] I’m trying to remember. I believe it was Trevan Hatch [It was actually Dan McClellan] said that Josiah, merged Yahweh and El.
Val 38:23 That’s what I’m going to be talking about, too. So, I’m going to review a lot of these.
GT 38:26 But the point is, like Moloch, if you go to the Bible, they were burning infants, to the god Moloch as a human sacrifice. And so, we have an Asherah. There were trees or something. This is not my wheelhouse. [I’m weak in] understanding these.
Val 38:48 I’m going to talk about those things.
GT 38:49 But the idea here is the Canaanite deities were, like, Zeus and Jupiter and…
Val 39:00 Yeah, I’ll talk about it a little bit.
GT 39:01 Because they were polytheistic, though.
Val 39:04 Well, yeah, so was Israel. Although, look. The fact that the Israelites worshipped this pluralistic set of Gods doesn’t mean that all those gods were true. I’m going to dig into this a little bit as I go along in our discussion. But, like, Moloch, I don’t think it was true in any sense. Like, we don’t find anything like Moloch in the Book of Mormon. We do find Asherah in the Book of Mormon. So, there’s, the sacrifice…
GT 39:37 Ba’al, what about Ba’al? Wasn’t Baal the lightning God? Do I have that right?
Val 39:41 Well, all of them had various kinds of associations, some true, some false. I’ll just give you my own speculation for a minute about Ba’al. Ba’al was a son of El, and Asherah. So was Yahweh. They’re alternative names for the same being is my read on this, in part, from the scholarship I read. So, a lot of the animosity to Ba’al is driven by the fact that he is the rival of Yahweh.
GT 40:17 Right.
Val 40:17 I mean, it’s like which name are you going to use? It’s like they’re the two different side-by-side groups that have the same father, the same mother, but then they’ve got these two different names. But I think it’s more than that. Josiah is going to get rid of a son. There is no father and son, anymore. There’s only, as you said, a collapsing of Yahweh, and El into the One God, means you’ve got to have a lot of animosity toward the son god, the son, meaning that the Son of God. And Yahweh had been a son of God in this earlier religion.
GT 40:31 A son of El.
Val 40:33 A son of El, as had Ba’al. And so, in the Josiahn reform, they’re going to go very aggressively after the idea that there can be any other god with God. There can be no wife God. There can be no Father God, or brother god.
GT 41:10 So, they’ve got to get rid of Asherah.
Val 41:11 You’ve got to get rid of Asherah, but you also got to get you get rid of Yahweh as the son. Now Yahweh is just…
GT 41:18 And that’s why Yahweh and El.
Val 41:22 …become the same being, and you’re really hostile to any representation of a son of God, because they’re rejecting what was in their own tradition, Yahweh, as son. There’s evidence to see that, some of them, that they thought they saw it that way.
GT 41:41 Aren’t there some other deities that I’m leaving out? Those are the only ones I can always remember.
Val 41:45 Well, I’m going to work down through a little bit. You have a whole host of heaven, right? I mean, let me go on because I want to talk a little bit about the theory behind that. And I’ll explain it just a little bit more. So, to really understand the theological issues in play, when the Book of Mormon opens, you’ve got to read the text in situ, that is in its time, with an awareness of what seems to have been happening in Jerusalem, when Lehi and Sariah lived there. And we figure that out by consulting Old Testament scholarship. And we’ve been sort of talking about it. I’m going to talk about a little bit more here. So let me digress a minute and comment on studies of the Old Testament. Secular Bible scholarship, through brilliant, creative, often persuasive reasoning, has constructed a set of coherent narratives that integrate and make intelligible, seemingly disparate and contradictory strands in the Old Testament. But we need to keep in mind that the evidential foundation for this scholarship is often remarkably thin. The conclusions being mostly grounded in intelligent close reading of the text. The important Old Testament scholar, Meyer Sternberg, highlights the problem when he says, I’m going to quote here, “The independent knowledge we possess of the real world behind the Bible remains absurdly meager. For better or worse, most of our information that’s culled from the Bible, itself. And culling information entails a process of interpretation. There’s no escaping this necessity, though again, many pretend they do. Critics often imply that they deal in hard facts. If seriously entertained, this is delusion.”
Val 41:46 Now, one important implication of that statement is that Bible study is mostly literary criticism. It’s close reading of the Bible text. It’s not just that. Historical evidence does matter. But where historical evidence outside the Bible is so limited, any evidence that by chance, survives and is discovered, can dramatically change the conclusions of Bible scholars. This happened in 1928 with the discovery of the Old Testament era texts at Ugarit. Those new voices speaking from the dust showed a strong kinship between the Bible religion and the religion of the surrounding Canaanites, an idea one could not have gleaned from the Bible alone. For example, it turns out, as we were talking about a minute ago, that El is the Father God in both religions. He has a wife, Asherah and a son, Ba’al in the Hebrew canon, as I was saying a minute ago, Yahweh. Once this was learned, it was quite evident that in the older parts of the Old Testament, the Hebrews, during the time of Abraham, had a very similar religion to the religion of the Canaanites. And that’s what we were just talking about.
GT 44:30 Right.
Val 44:30 Now, this wasn’t known when people were reading the Old Testament, before the discovery of some of these texts, at Ugarit, and a few other things that they found. They didn’t really know that the Canaanite religion was so close to the Hebrews religion. Because that’s not that story the Bible is telling us.
GT 44:49 Right.
Val 44:50 It’s telling us that any similarities that we find to the Canaanite religion, all that is apostasy and abomination, and so forth. But then it turns out that once they dug up these things, no, the same gods were operating in both places. And in some ways Old Testament scholars had known this just from reading the parts of the Bible. The Genesis, especially coming up to the time of Josiah, those older parts of the Bible had a lot of traces. the Psalms, the Proverbs, they had all kinds of traces of this older religion. And it all started to make a lot more sense as they find out, hey, their religion was really very similar to the religion of the Canaanites around them. And this is actually a really important point. And I want to talk about it a little bit more. The details are going to vary from one interpreter to another, because the evidentiary foundation is thin. But there is broad agreement among the secular scholars that Abraham’s religion can be described somewhat as follows. The High God El was an anthropomorphic being who lived in heaven, in a royal court, much like the royal courts of the Middle Eastern kings on earth at that time. Like the Middle Eastern kings, El governed his Dominions through the ministrations of those one would typically expect to see at court. Ella, his wife, also known as Asherah, the bene Elohim, the sons and daughters of El, noble and great heavenly servants, the Malachim or angels, and various representatives of the Divine army, the host of heaven with El being known as the Lord of hosts. You find that title all the time. That title, Lord of Hosts, fits with this idea that hey, God’s up there surrounded by all these heavenly hosts that armies. So, these and other participants in the court, were part of the Governing Council, the soad Elohim, who shared, to one degree or another, the divinity of El and the governance of El’s kingdom.
Val 46:57 So instead of this one being, Yahweh, or Elohim, who is outside of time and space, you’ve got this whole court/council of divine beings. That’s what was believed. Okay. And this is not really a controversial point. If you look at secular Old Testament scholars, if you look at fundamentalists, Christian scholars, they’re not going to believe this.
GT 47:21 Oh, absolutely.
Val 47:22 But, the people who do academic study of the Old Testament, as I say, they might quibble about who were these beings in the council and what were their names and so forth. But the idea that there was a council and the gods were considered, thought of in this way, that’s sort of standard, Old Testament idea. In this older theology, the ontology of El is not radically different from that of his wife, sons and daughters and servants. While this divine community, the Council of Gods, is obviously hierarchical, its members seem to be similar in appearance to each other and to human beings on earth. When Jacob wrestles God face to face at Peniel. Now the name Peniel means face of God. So, it tells you who Jacob was wrestling with. El is initially described as an unspecified Eesh. That’s Hebrew man, a man, a confounding of God and man that suggests that God is in form in essence, much like Jacob. God’s willingness to wrestle Jacob, as one man might wrestle another, likewise suggests ontological equivalence between God and His human son, Jacob. So, in the time leading up to 600 BC, we have multiple corporeal gods, a theology much like LDS theology today. So, I’m laying down a premise here for us to start reading the Book of Mormon. What did Nephi and Lehi think? Who did they understand the gods to be, as the Book of Mormon opens?
GT 48:54 See, and I hate to say this, because it going to scare away a lot of Evangelicals, for sure. But are you saying that Nephi and Lehi were polytheists?
Val 49:04 I’m saying they believed in the religion of Abraham.
GT 49:08 But Abraham was a polytheist.
Val 49:13 You can use the word polytheist for it, but are they, themselves, polytheists? They believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Now that the Jews would say to them, and the Muslims would, too, “You are polytheists. You believe in three gods we believe in only one God.” Both the Jews and the Muslims would say that.
GT 49:37 That’s where the whole Trinity comes in. Because they’re like, no, we’re monotheistic, but it’s three gods in one.
Val 49:41 Yeah, exactly, but the Jews and Muslims have got a pretty good argument, don’t you think?
GT 49:46 Absolutely. But, even…
Val 49:49 So, part of this is you have to say that we believe there’s more than one being, so do Orthodox Christians. And they believe there’s one being, but there’s also more than one being. They muddled up with…
GT 50:03 … the Trinity as well.
Val 50:05 Yeah, it’s one and it’s three. So, I’m not going to just easily concede this pejorative word, polytheist, is all I’m saying.
GT 50:16 Well, it is very pejorative, I’ll agree with that.
Val 50:18 We don’t need [that.] Let’s just say there’s a divine family. The theology is, again, not controversial among Old Testament scholars. We’re not off on some wild, speculative goose chase here with that idea.
Divine Mother
Val 50:42 Now, before we move on to a close reading the Book of Mormon, I want to mention one more Old Testament name of the Divine Mother Shaddai, because it’s going to be relevant in the Book of Mormon. A great place to start in understanding who Shaddai is, is the Patriarchal Blessing Jacob gives Joseph of Egypt. This is a passage Lehi surely scrutinized very closely, because he’s the one who fulfills part of the promise to Joseph, when he runs over the wall and goes to the promised land. In the Book Mormon, it talks about when Lehi got the brass plates, he started reading in them, and he found his genealogy there. One of the things he would have been really interested in is okay, I’m going to save the family as a descendant of Joseph. And Joseph’s patriarchal blessing is contained in the brass plates. And what I’m going to be reading here is Joseph patriarchal blessing, which talks about running over the wall.
GT 51:35 Joseph of Egypt.
Val 51:36 Joseph of Egypt. Yeah, right. So, the passage is found in Genesis 49. In this blessing, Jacob separately invokes El, the father; Shaddai, the mother; and Yahweh, the Son or good shepherd. Yahweh, in this passage, is called the Mighty One, ‘abir in Hebrew, a term that is always and only associated with Yahweh in the Old Testament. So, ‘abir, Yahweh, they’re kind of interchangeable. In this passage, Shaddai is explicitly linked to the blessings of the breasts and of the womb. So “Joseph is a fruitful bow whose branches run over the wall.” Again, there’s that allusion to Lehi going over the wall as he goes to the Promised Land. “His hands were made strong by the mighty one of Jacob.” The word here is ‘abir. It’s always Yahweh. And then it goes on, “From thence, the shepherd, the stone of Israel.” Well, who’s the Good Shepherd? Who’s the stone of Israel? For us Christians, that’s all really clear. And, then it says, “Even by El.” Now, it says, “Even by God,” but it’s translating El. “El, who shall help thee and by Shaddai. Now, that King James Version says Almighty here, but it’s translating the word Shaddai. “Who shall bless thee with the blessings of the breasts, Shadaiim, and of the womb.”
Val 53:07 Important meanings in this passage are expressed through wordplay. The ones I’m going to focus on here are Shaddai being connected to Shaddaiim. So, Shaddai, this God, being connected to Shaddaiim, breasts, suggesting a god with breasts or a goddess. Now, in the King James Version, Shaddai is always translated almighty. Every time the word Almighty shows up it’s Shaddai. In that translation, Almighty, is conjectural. They’re guessing, the scholars are guessing. It’s based on the assumption that Shaddai is related to the word Shaddad, meaning destroyer or plunder. But this name of God always shows up, as it does in Joseph’s blessing, in contexts where birth and fertility are in play. For example, it first appears when 99-year-old Abraham and Sariah are promised that, despite Sariah’s old age, they’ll have a son and great posterity. Other appearances are similar. So, the connection between Shaddai, the god and Shaddaiim, breasts, with this being, the Divine Mother, is more plausible than the translation, destroyer. And I focus on this Divine Mother translation because the word Almighty, Shaddai in Hebrew, is going to be important in Lehi’s first vision. So that’s why I wanted to focus on it. At the opening the Book of Mormon, it’s going to show up there in an important place.
Val 54:35 Let me say a bit more about Old Testament names. The ontological equality of God and man is crystallized in what secular scholars call divine kinsmen theology, the idea that human beings have a kind of blood relationship with God. Some biblical names reflect this theology. Human kinship with the father is reflected in the name Abi-El. So, you have Ab, father and then El, God. So, it translates as El is my father. Human kinship with the Son as reflected in Ahijah, which translates Yahweh is my brother. So, you’ve got jah at the end of it and Ahi, the brothers, being combined there. Yahweh is my brother. Human kinship with the Divine Mother is reflected in the name Ammishaddai, which translates as Shaddai is my kin or the people of Shaddai. So, leading up to the time of Lehi, Israel have this theology in which there was a Father God, a Mother God, Ella, Asherah, Shaddai, different names, and a son God Yahweh. But while Lehi lived in Jerusalem, the theology of Israel changed dramatically.
First Biblical Forgery?
Val 55: During the renovation of the temple, Hilkiah the high priest, found, or some think wrote, because it greatly enhanced the power of the priest. Everything had to be focused on the temple in Jerusalem.
GT 55:58 The first forgery of the Bible, potentially.
Val 56:01 Anyway, he found this book called The Book of the Law, which many scholars believe to be part of the current book of Deuteronomy. The book condemned Israel for worshipping the gods of the Sod, the divine Council. It predicted that Josiah, his kingdom would be destroyed because the people did not strictly keep the Law of Moses and worship Yahweh, alone. Hilkiah gave the book to Chapin, the scribe who, accompanied by some other scribes, Ahikam, Akbar, Asahaya, carried it to King Josiah. Upon hearing the book’s content, the king rends his clothes, then initiated a violent theological reform. These are called the Deuteronomistic reforms, because they’re sort of prompted by this discovery of Deuteronomy. Now in a multi-dimensional push to centralize theology, ritual, worship and governance, Josiah took things in hand. The Jerusalem Temple is full of things associated with members of the Divine Council, the Sod Elohim. He destroyed them. He dragged the Asherah, Mother in Heaven statue, in the temple for at least 236 of its 370 years, down into the Kidron Valley and he burned it. He destroyed all the ancient temples and sacred groves and high places, Shekshem, Bethel, where the patriarchs had worshiped the gods of the Divine Council, as Deuteronomy 12:19 required. He centralized all public ritual in one place, Jerusalem, which made Hilkiah of happy, because he was high priest there, where he could oversee it and control it. As Deuteronomy 3:1-11 mandated, he killed all the priests who facilitated the worship of divine council members, and all the prophets who taught that there was any god with God.
Val 56:38 There’s a non-trivial connectedness to the Book of Mormon. There’s a non-trivial possibility he killed Zenos and Zenock. Zenock taught that there was a God with God, a Ben Elohim, a son of God, who would come down to redeem humanity from their sins. Zenos taught that and also emphasized the importance of humanity being closely, rather than distantly connected to the mother tree. If Josiah didn’t killed Zenos and Zenock, he would have if they’d been alive teaching these things during his reign, that the Book of Mormon tells us that they did teach. Now this theological revolution replaced the corporeal pluralistic divine kinsmen of the Sod, the Council of Gods, with a solitary sovereign, the transcendent one God, Yahweh Elohim. Yahweh and Elohim, as you are suggesting, collapsed into this one being.
Val 58:43 The reasoning behind this change may have been rooted in a perceived linkage between God’s name and the Hebrew verb ‘to be’, which yields a sophisticated reading of Moses’ first encounter with God in Exodus. There Yahweh declares that his name is Aya Asher Aya, I Am that I Am. This name statement can be read philosophically as saying that Yahweh is pure Being, again, capital B, Being, as such. The only thing that exists in and of itself, speaking in the first person, God says, “Aya, I am,” and reveals his unique status as pure Being. Speaking of God in the third person, we say Yahweh, he is. So we refer to God, the great I Am as Yahweh he is. We may think of him as the one and only thing that purely self-existently is. This monistic way of thinking about God as pure being, as the ground of all being makes him abstract, transcendent, prior to and separate from all creative things. So, that gets us to the God of contemporary Judaism, Christianity and Islam. So, this is what’s emerging in that moment. And I mean, Jews are so brilliant, you can see them figuring something like this out, right? It’s philosophically genius, what’s going on here. But it is a big change. And it’s a big change that everybody’s going to build on from that time. It’s going to be the reason that Christ gets rejected. He’s doesn’t fit with this idea, right, in the meridian of time. He’s coming along and he’s not a follower of Josiah. He’s contradicting stuff, and everybody that’s around him, the Jews at that time are followers of Josiah. They believe in this change that’s made at that moment. Lehi seems to elude and deprecate this new monist theology, when in a very philosophical, metaphysical passage, he asserts the need for opposition in all things, that all things must be a compound. That pure oneness is nihilistic, because if it should be one body, it must remain as dead, having no life neither death, nor corruption or corruption. Without plurality, Lehi says, There is no God. And if there’s no God, we are not, neither the earth. Wherefore, all things must have vanished away. For Lehi, a monist metaphysics, like that of Josiah is nihilistic and fundamentally false. My point here is related to one Paul Toscano made in his interview with you, where he says that God must be a compound of male and female. Of course, Paul then views this compound God as the first mover God, not as, not all that different from the God of Orthodox Christianity. So in that sense, he’s an Orthodox Christian, not a heretical Latter-day Saint like we are. But as Paul and I both emphasize, Lehi is arguing against Monism here.
Val 1:01:51 So in one of my articles, I do dig into this more deeply. But, basically, the premise is Lehi had som people in mind when he had that ‘opposition in all things’ sermon that he’s giving to Jacob. He’s giving it to Jacob. And he’s arguing with someone this isn’t coming out of nowhere. This is coming out of, “Hey, Josiah is saying there’s there is just one, everything collapses down into this one Being outside of space and time.” Lehi says, “Everything disappears.” You’ve got–God disappears. Everything disappears, if you believe in that kind of fundamental oneness. So, Lehi is not on board with what’s going on in this revolution. The person Lehi was speaking to, as he made this philosophical statement or argument, was his son, Jacob. And Jacob also seems to allude to and deprecate this change from a pluralist to a Monist theology, in his introduction to the martyr Zenos, this allegory of a olive. And it isn’t just Zenos. What we get here, so the account as Zenos gave it, but Lehi had the same teaching. It tells that Lehi taught about the allegory of the of the tree. So, we get the account from Zenos, and Jacob, but Lehi taught the same thing. Anyway, in this allegory of the olive, God portrays himself as a social being, working with other similar beings. And it’s God and he’s got this servant who’s with him and all the other laborers and so forth. That’s the older, Old Testament God, that’s not the one God that’s all by himself. I’m going to read what Jacob wrote as he was, as an introduction to the allegory of the olive tree.
GT 1:03:36 So, you’re saying the olive tree–because normally, when we talk about the olive tree, it’s like, oh, well, he’s grafting in the Gentiles in the tree, and we’re bringing in Israel and Gentiles together, but you’re saying there’s a different message in this?
Val 1:03:54 Well, it’s described five times as the mother tree, and all humanity is connected to this mother tree. And the apostasy that happens, happens because the elites have become too distant. It says the tops of the branches are disconnected from the root, which is…
GT 1:04:15 You’re talking about the elites. You’re talking about Josiah?
Val 1:04:17 Well, yes. And yes, that would be a fit here, certainly. So, the mother tree, what’s the mother tree? Divine mother, as I’m going to argue going through this.
GT 1:04:28 Asherah?
Val 1:04:29 Yes. And the apostasy that’s taking place is, it says, “The tops of the branches take power to themselves, and they stop being connected to the trunk.” And I mentioned a little bit earlier that Asherah was represented in various ways. You have the menorah, which was an almond tree trained to grow to look like a menorah. So, that’s what the Asherah cult object looked like.
GT 1:05:00 Oh, really?
Val 1:05:01 Was the Tree of Life.
GT 1:05:03 The Tree of Life, like the menorah?
Val 1:05:06 Yes, the menorah. The menorah is a residual Asherah, in the temple, is the argument here. Anyway, let me read Jacob’s introduction. I’m going to put in some little interpolations here to connect it to what we’ve been talking about. So, this is Jacob’s introduction to the allegory of the olive [tree.] Josiah is Jerusalem. Okay, Josiah is Jerusalem Jews. He just says Jews. I’m throwing that [in,] Josiah is Jerusalem. Josiah’s Jerusalem Jews were a stiff-necked at people. And they despise the words of plainness and killed the prophets Zenos and Zenock, for instance, and sought for things they could not understand. What were those they couldn’t understand? A radically other solitary God outside of space and time. It’s a lot harder to understand than what they had understood before. Wherefore, because of their blindness, which blindness came by looking beyond the mark, looking beyond the mark means you’re going way beyond something sort of obvious to something less obvious, right?
GT 1:06:04 You’re going from polytheism to monotheism.
Val 1:06:07 You’re going from Gods with a form like us…. Anyway, they are going beyond the mark, gods in a form like us that are easy to understand. They must needs fall, for God hath taken away his plainness from them. What’s the plainness, the divine family? Father, mother and son. That’s a lot plainer than a solitary, sovereign outside of space and time. That is the first mover. It’s not nearly as plain as what they had believed. And I think that’s what he’s, and because they’ve looked beyond the mark, they must needs fall, for God hath taken away his plainness from them, this divine family, and delivered unto them many things which they cannot understand: a solitary sovereign outside of time and space, three beings in one, right? Everybody concedes, look, God is completely other. There’s no, we have no categories for getting at who God is. Jacob’s saying, that’s not– you’re looking beyond the mark here. That brilliant Jewish reasoning, they’re so smart, they went a little too far here.
GT 1:07:17 Another way of looking beyond the mark would be like the Trinity.
Val 1:07:21 Exactly right. But the Trinity is the effort to fit–when Christ came, Christ didn’t fit with this, right? The one God, there’s a God without any other beings with him. How do you fit Christ into that? That was a big problem. And the Jews have good reason for rejecting Christ, right? This is who they believed in. They believed they got away from this idea of more than one being. And so now Christ comes along and says, Yeah, I and my Father–I’m with the Father
GT 1:07:56 The Father and I are one.
Val 1:07:56 God was God. Right. We’re back to the pre-Josiah idea that hey, we have a Father God, and we’ve got a Son God. That’s a problem. That’s a big problem. It was a problem for the Aristotelians, too, right. So, you have this beautiful philosophy of Aristotle, about the first mover, God, the uncreated, first mover, God, from which everything came out of. So, that that kind of converged with the Josian solitary sovereign, you had both those two things. And then the Trinity, the Trinitarian idea kind of puts those two things together. You find a way to get the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost shoved into…
GT 1:08:37 Monotheisim.
Val 1:08:38 Into monotheism and into–also in the Aristotle’s version of monotheism. So, Aristotle had two possible explanations for the beginning. One was this unmoved mover God, that was outside of time and space. And then the other possibility was everything just always existed. And the philosophers all wanted to go with unmoved mover, because it’s a lot cleaner than having things always exist. Our theology is more on the other side with the Aristotelians’ other possibility, too. So, with both Aristotle, we kind of go down his other path.
Val 1:09:16 And on the theology, we stick with the older Abrahamic stuff rather than going with this new, sophisticated, brilliant idea, but false idea. Because, again, there’s no way to acquit God of all evil. If you follow the logic of this thing out, everything that’s made comes out of him. He knows what’s going to happen ahead of time. How do you ever absolve him of responsibility for Hitler? People will say, “Well, freedom. He gave Hitler freedom and Hitler chose to do this thing.” Yeah, but God can create only that subset of free beings who don’t choose to do monstrously evil things. He knew what Hitler was going to do before Hitler ever did it. So, how do you get him off the hook from that? That’s, anyway, we’re not we’re not going to talk about the problem of evil today. But Joseph Smith made huge advances on that. I mean, we Latter-day Saints escape a lot of problems because of this fundamental change in theology. It’s one of the beauties of LDS theology. Sterling McMurrin, actually, commented on this and liked this about LDS theology.
Val 1:10:25 Anyway, so, we end up getting this solitary sovereign that’s emerged, which both Lehi and Jacob are rejecting. Okay, so, Lehi’s, son Nephi, also alludes to and deprecates this change to a monist theology as he opens the Book of Mormon with the First Vision experience, which is going to involve the receipt of a book. Keep in mind, how did Josiah’s this thing start? It started with him receiving a book, Deuteronomy. Well, the First Vision is going to start with the receiving a book. So, these two things parallel. It’s going to parallel the experience of receiving the Book of the Law of the Lord that motivated Josiah to initiate his Deuteronomous purge of the gods of the So’od, and those who believed in them. He got rid of them, he got rid of the gods. He got rid of the people that believed in them as much as he could, too. All Nephi’s parallels between Lehi and Josiah, seem calculated to discredit Josiah and his reform. They discredit them by having, obviously, superior theological provenance. They come from a more sacred place, and diametrically opposite theological meaning.
Val 1:11:34 So the initial location of Josiah’s book is the temple, the house of God on earth, where the Mercy Seat, God’s symbolic throne is located. That’s where the book of the Law of the Lord was discovered. Relatedly but also, conversely, the initial location of Lehi, his book is in heaven, the place the earthly temple merely symbolizes, where the actual throne of God and God, Himself, are located. Hilkiah, the human high priest, chief administrator of the temple, finds the book and sends it to Josiah. El Elyan,, the Most High God, the divine high priest who sits upon the throne in heaven, and administers Heaven and Earth, sends the book to Lehi. So Hilkiah, dp you want to receive your book from Hilkiah,or do you want to receive it from God? Those are the two that are sending these books forward. Hilkiah gives the book to Chapin, the scribe, who carries it to Josiah, accompanied by other scribes. These scribes bearing and reading texts, mark the advent of a text-centered, Sofic, rabbinic religion that will reject Jesus, God with God, when he comes in the meridian of time. And I say here, some of the scholars will say [that] this is the beginning of rabbinic text-based religion. The texts are starting to be settled here, around this time.
GT 1:13:02 Which is what leads to the Pharisees? Is that what you’re saying?
Val 1:13:03 Yeah. It’s kind of a beginning for that where you have these authoritative texts and Josiah is interpreting the text. I mean, they’re really focusing in on the Law of Moses, and getting to the text and following the text. That is all getting it start right here in this moment. [This] is what some of the scholars will tell you. So, Hilkiah gives the book and sends it with the scribes to Josiah. El Elyan gives the book to Jesus/Yahweh, the Son of God who carries it to Lehi, accompanied by 12 hosts of heaven. So, this divine Son and His Apostle companions anticipate the advent of the Mantic revelatory religion, which they will preach in the meridian of time. Josiah’s book prophesized that Jerusalem will be destroyed because it believes in and worships other gods with God. Lehi’s book prophesized that Jerusalem will be destroyed, because it fails to worship God with God, the Messiah, who will come to redeem Israel, and the whole world, and who works side by side in Heaven on Earth, with his divine Father, Mother, Holy Ghost, and all the heavenly host. So, Nephi is actually setting this up, when he opens with that vision of a guide receiving a book, and that telling him what was going on wrong with Jerusalem. That is a point/counterpoint with Josiah receiving his book, that sets all of orthodox Christianity, Judaism and Islam on this course to believe in the God outside of space and time. So, that’s where I’m saying, this is THE moment in theology. It’s when we went from having the gods that we believe in, in the LDS Church, to have having this god everybody else believes in, that we’re separated from.
{End of Part 1}
[1] Zanger stated, “It’s hard to talk about Abraham as a monotheist. Abraham had an agreement, a covenant with his one god, who is the Lord. Abraham didn’t say, or believe as far as we know, that there weren’t other gods. All the evidence is that there were other gods for other people. And Abraham’s god never insisted on exclusivity.”
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