Concerning “We Can Live With God Again”
I was browsing the new.lds.org this morning and came upon this paragraph in the “We Can Live With God Again” section of the site:
It’s comforting to know that God has a plan for us. He created our spirits before we were born and they’ll continue into eternity.
It brought me back to recent discussions on By Common Consent and elsewhere that the progression of pre-earth life is one of continual debate. Here, on the official Church website (albeit a “beta”), the doctrine or belief being proffered is that God the Father “created our spirits” somehow. Strange that Joseph Smith once said that if we have a beginning we will certainly have an end, and that God never had the power to create the spirits of humankind. Of course, this concept of viviparous spirit birth (a Brigham Young favorite) with its adjacent tripartite existentialism (thanks? be to B.H. Roberts) continues to kick around, and apparently is accepted enough by Church correlation to appear on the official site.
What are your thoughts on the subject?
4 Responses
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Big questions and debates, to be certain. As you may have guessed, I personally don’t follow the idea of viviparous spirit birth or the tripartite model. But there is certainly a long tradition of such ideas in Mormonism.
I suppose the question my mind is pondering about is: Does believing our spirits are uncreated rub against the official message of the Church? I always thought our resistance to creatio ex nihilo was one of the defining aspects of Mormonism. Is that changing?
I don’t understand how those two ideas would compete. To me, they support each other: we don’t believe in creatio ex nihilo of the universe, neither do we believe in creatio ex nihilo of spirits.
By the way, for your (great) BOAP site, there are hi-res images available of the facsimiles:
http://nathanrichardson.com/2011/09/the-book-of-abraham-facsimiles-in-high-resolution/#.UC-vW91lSEk
I am not familiar with these competing models. However, I thought D&C 93:29 was pretty clear. There is some element of intelligence that cannot be created or destroyed. Given the lessons in the temple it seems like this intelligence is then taken and put into spirit.
Of course, the way we use the word spirit can change everything. Abraham 3:18 says spirits have no beginning. I sort of think that spirit can refer to “spirit” and “intelligence” depending on the context. Moses 3:5 sort of backs this idea up “For I, the Lord God, acreated all things, of which I have spoken, bspiritually, before they were cnaturally upon the face of the earth.”
I guess you could argue another way of viewing it but I don’t know why you would. The essential point here is that there is an eternal element that is forever, without beginning or end and there is an element which is created which could have an end. For all practical purposes this doesn’t change anything.
In addition, we know that resurrected beings will forever have their body (at least thats a strong implication). That body has a beginning, but it does not have an end. I think when Joseph made the statement about having a beginning denoting having an end he was referring to the Id rather than any specific forms associated with that Id.
Comments? Disagreements?