Mormon Exaltation Dilemmas, Pt. 1 (w/ Aaron Shafovaloff)

You're entering outer brightness.

Hello, fireflies. Thank you for attending and coming to this new episode of outer brightness. And we're thankful to have here a special guest. And if you don't know how to pronounce his name, I hope I don't butcher it.

Aaron Shafawaloff. He's our good Christian friend. He's done, he has a history of Christian apologetics, and he's now a seminarian.

So practice, he's learning to join the ministry. So we're very grateful to have you on here today. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks, Aaron.

We really appreciate it. And we just finished an interview with our Latter-day Saint friend Jackson Washburn on the nature of God. And so now we're going to kind of continue a similar discussion, but from an Orthodox Christian perspective.

And Aaron and I had been kind of talking about Christian Orthodoxy, divine simplicity, the view of God historically amongst Christianity, historically, and kind of how we're learning and reading certain books and kind of wrestling with it and understanding it. And so we thought that this article that Aaron wrote that was published this month at MRM, what does that stand for again? Mormonism Research Ministry. Thank you. Yes. I was like, is it Ministry of Researching Mormonism?

I couldn't remember how they went. But yeah, thanks for correcting me. So it's the article that Aaron wrote is called Dilemmas of Mormon Exaltation. And so before we get into that, Aaron, would you like to introduce yourself, know your background, things you've done in the past, things you're doing right now, anything you'd like to share with us before we go into the article? Yeah, just quickly, I spent almost 15 years in Utah, doing weekly evangelism to Mormons, minus winter, and was a part of three different church plants there.

So, so blessed. I have a wife and three kids. When COVID hit, I was working at home. And I thought I could work from home and go to seminary in the evenings. And so I moved to Kansas City.

And the idea here is to spend a season of life being more academically trained. And the hope is I could go back to Utah, God willing, and reenter the mission field there. I'm with also Mormonism Research Ministry, which is an evangelical ministry that does training and apologetics and evangelism. I quite enjoy it. I love the Mormon people. I love seeing them come to Christ. I love seeing them know the God of the Bible. Every season of life where I get a little discouraged about how much it's like pounding desert soil, I get an email from somebody that says, you know, thank you so much.

It's been so helpful. I've left the Mormon Church. I know Jesus now.

I'm in a local church with other believers. It's like, wow. So, it's just, you know, God's at work. And I also just love who God is. So, I mean, I theorize that, you know, even if ministry involved zero converts, there'd still be a joy and a pleasure in trumpeting the supremacy of who God is. Amen. Yeah. Thank you, brother.

Love that. I think I first came across your name when I was kind of a doubting Latter-day Saint or questioning Latter-day Saint around 2014, 2015. And I really started researching debates. And, you know, most of the debates that are held in Utah are on your YouTube channel. The ones, you know, that are either, you know, from James White in particular. I think there are several debates you posted there. So, would you like to kind of introduce people to your YouTube channel if they're curious to see your videos there?

Yeah. In 2006, I started posting. You can go to youtube.com forward slash Jesus, not Joseph. I started posting in 2006 stories of those who had left the LDS church and had become Bible-believing Christians. And we'd have training sessions in Manti. So, a lot of the videos, it was me coming down to Manti, Utah, and there would be a group of Christians there training in the mornings and evenings, late nights doing evangelism on the street.

That's a longer story. It's a really cool story. But we would have people there that would gather and train each other. And I just was like, man, I should record these training sessions. And I started putting those training sessions up and then getting more interviews of people who have their story to tell. And I think one of the first videos I did was with Bill McKeever explaining the untold story of the death of Joseph Smith, which just blew up. But, you know, I'm not a YouTuber in the sense of, you know, really paying a lot of attention to how to do marketing and clickbait titles and great intros. I usually just record an event like that and I put it up and I forget about it.

And that's it. And I just, you know, in the next season of life, I'll add more stuff and maybe do a live stream every so often. But it's been neat though, because it's like dropping a seed. And then it's like in the Gospel of Mark where the farmer wakes up one day and he's like, where did all these crops come from? It's like, oh, I guess there's the seed I planted earlier. And it's YouTube videos have a lot of reach.

There's people that are lurking and watching and questioning and yeah. Yeah, that's great. It sounds like you were Apologia Radio before Apologia Radio. They copped your style in terms of like, you know, the street evangelism and things like that in training. Yeah, I love those guys.

Yeah, they're great. And I think, like Matthew, I came across your stuff probably right around the time I was leaving the LDS church. I think some of your videos down there in Manti were some of the first that I kind of started watching on YouTube to get my feet wet.

Like, okay, what do these Christians actually say? You know, because when I as a teenager went to the Manti pageant, we avoided you all like the plague because, you know, that was kind of the direction we were given. But yeah, thankful for your ministry and thankful that you're on with us tonight. So looking forward to the conversation. Thank you. Which seminary are you at in Kansas City? Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Awesome. And just out of curiosity, I know that you've done some live streams or you've kind of, there was one live stream you did that I attended where you were preparing for an exam, I think, like a history of Baptist exam. And that was actually really fun to see you kind of like go through your notes and everything.

So do you have like a favorite subject or topic that you, you know, that you kind of got into as seminary so far? Oh, definitely Greek. I've been developing software for helping people learn Greek, some parsing exercises and automatically generated tools for mixing and matching. And then I am taking intermediate Greek this semester. So just, this is maybe a geek point, but beyond parsing, we're doing syntactical classifications now. And so I'm, I'm brainstorming on how to help use software to help people with varying degrees of difficulties, sort of pedagogy and gentleness, just figure out how to step through sections of scripture that are easier than others in Greek and, you know, drill and kill practice. I mean, you read like mounts, you read like, you know, Costenberger and it's like, man, this is a lot to take in. But if it could, if I could learn a paradigm by practicing it like a thousand times or something ridiculous like that, just, you know, every time I'm like walking somewhere in my phone, drag and drop, and it starts to really sink in, it's really helpful.

So, yeah, I'm just, I'm a software guy. So Greek has been great also because it's, you know, blending the two worlds. But there's also like theology one. I've tried to get a lot of my theology one reading done over the summer before it starts this fall.

And we'll be diving into Aquinas and Anselm. And of course, the divine simplicity rabbit hole went down that. Wow. Loved it. And I got learning more about Christian history, you know, that's been a joy.

So, yeah, awesome. I love what you've been doing with the Greek software and seeing, you know, the posts you've made about that on Facebook. I did my MDiv while working full time.

I've got a 20 plus year career in the health insurance industry. So I know the challenge of trying to work full time and also, you know, continue theological studies. And I've been meaning to kind of revisit Greek. So I'm kind of excited to try to make use of some of the stuff you've come up with because it looks very intuitive. And, you know, I love some of the software for memorizing scripture that I use on my phone. So I look forward to using this, you know, seeing where you go with the Greek study stuff. Yeah, I think that'd be a great tool for, you know, for ministers, like you said, to get back into Greek, maybe if they haven't done it for a long time. And for lay people like me, like I've, I started to dive into mounds and stuff and get the very basics, but I just, you know, run out of time and, you know, it's hard to really dive deep into it when you're not actually in a seminary program, having someone instruct you.

So yeah, I'm really excited to see those tools also in the future. So yeah, I really, really appreciate everything you do. And so let's get to get into the article. So from what I understand the basic kind of goal of the article is to just talk about, well, as the title says, dilemmas and Mormon exaltation. So it's kind of describing different, different issues that I think Mormons will have to wrestle with in terms of their view of eternal progression and how man can become God. We can become gods and how we are the same ontologically in terms of who we are, in terms of being, we're of the same being as God, we're just at different levels of progression. So would you agree with that?

Or would you have more comments just generally about the article? Yeah, just for somebody who's new to this, Mormonism has this Lorenzo Snow couplet, which says, as man is, God once was, as God is, man may be. And the general dominant approach to that is to say that God's past is a pattern for our future, that there's something patterned in the generations of the gods, there's a repeated, repeatable cycle.

And even the purpose of life is to continue repeating this cycle and help others participate in the system. But when people start thinking through this, it, you know, it, it bothers the conscience. And so, people come up against brick walls and contradictions because, well, I mean, part of the problem, I think this is a good problem, is that a lot of Latter-day Saints, I think, are in denial about how much classic theism they're wanting to hold onto still. They kind of want to hold onto some vestiges of, you know, historic Christian approaches to God, the omnis, you know, they want the language, they want the bigness of God. And so, they'll kind of reach for that language and reach for the ideas initially, and then it gets deconstructed by their own theology. So, part of it's that Mormonism has, and this is so huge for people to understand, Mormonism historically has very different models for approaching exaltation and the cosmos and sort of a system of gods and exaltation. There's very different approaches to eternal progression, to what an intelligence is, what a spirit body is, and how those come about. And I don't think Latter-day Saints even realize that, you know, often they have a view and it's in contradiction to the views of other prophets and apostles within their own church or other, you know, members. And so, part of the dilemmas and contradictions that come about are owing to the fact that sometimes people are kind of picking from one view or another, and they're not really consistently picking a view. And then there's even contradictions within the views. So, this is my attempt at really getting people to think theologically. I mean, this isn't just like what to think, it's how to think.

Should we even pursue these lines? Should we just throw our hands up in there and say, oh, that's deep, that's difficult, that doesn't matter, it's not relevant to my salvation? Or should we, as a matter of worshipful contemplation and devotion, think about the greatness of God and really push that as far as we can, according to God's revelation and according to the minds that He's given us, should we love God with all of our mind by thinking these things out reasonably? I say yes, and my hope is that people would see how, you know, ridiculous it is to choose anything other than the great Most High, self-existent, simple Most High, say that again, Most High God. Amen.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I was just gonna say, I liked a lot of what you said there, and a lot of those were kind of questions I already had in my mind. You know, there's going to be a lot of people that say, well, this is just theological navel-gazing, you know, what does it really matter, you know, if you take one view or another? And also, how does that really affect our worship?

And that's kind of something that Paul brought up in our conversation with Jackson Washburn before. And so, you kind of already addressed that, that it does have effects. It does affect, you know, our salvation, you know, our relationship with God, not just knowing God, but salvifically, you know, are we actually in Christ if we embrace different views of God that are just antithetical to the teachings of Scripture? And when you have beliefs that are antithetical to these teachings, then that affects your worship, you know, it affects how you envision God, how we worship God, how we relate to God. So, is there anything you'd like to talk about that before we go into the specific dilemmas? Well, I mean, I'll just say this. At lunch today after church with my three kids, we're memorizing rock of ages cleft for me.

And I did a little exposition of the first stanza to my kids and explained why the hymn writer said rock and of ages and cleft for me. And we talked about how God as rock is referring to his stable, consistent, unchangeable, completely independent being. He doesn't have mood swings. He's not going to digress. He's not going to regress.

He's not going to improve. He's completely reliable. As the Old Testament says, you know, because he is who he is in the eternal past, we can depend on him going forward in the future. And he's not just the rock. He's the rock of ages. He's over time. He's responsible for time.

There's no prior season of where he wasn't the rock. There's no theoretical, you know, like out there season where he was malleable and improving in his morality and not yet obtaining perfection. And so for the hymn writer to say rock of ages cleft, cleaved or separated or pierced, you know, crucified for me, rock of ages, it's really it's bringing together this beauty of the most high, omnipotent, invisible God becoming a little, tiny, suffering, finite baby. And then he dies on it. He dies. The God of life, the God that has life in himself assumes humanity and then dies.

And there's something beautiful. There's no Marvel superhero story that even comes close to the beauty and the inimitable beauty of redemptive history, what God has chosen to do to reveal himself. So, if you were to tell me that God, well, that God actually used to be not yet God and that he became who he is, it would just destroy the hymn for me. I would have to sing it out of a poor conscience, a broken conscience.

I would have to just rip out the meaning of the words. And what it would do is it would destroy Christian worship. It would gut, it would just absolutely devastate the hearts of Christians if for some reason we found out that God was not truly the rock of ages. So, it affects my worship absolutely.

It affects the music and the emotions and the prayer and the devotion. And for Latter-day Saints to think, well, this is just, you know, it's not relevant to my salvation. So, this is what my salvation. So, this is my, this is relevant to my life. This is relevant to my existence. This is why I'm here is to know this great God. Anyway, I'm sermonizing. No, that's beautiful.

I really appreciate that. I don't even think I had actually thought about those words that deeply, but yeah, that's great. It's as a Latter-day Saint, we thought it was an advantage, or at least I did. I thought it was an advantage that we worshiped a God that was very similar to us. And then starting to question that in doubt and leave the LDS Church and find out that God is not like us in almost every way imaginable.

It's kind of scary, but at the same time, it opens your mind. It's like I had such a small, you know, like laser-focused view of who God is. And you realize God is so expansive and He's not changing and He is reliable and He's always going to be the same God. And it makes me really grateful that we are not like God because humans are broken, humans, you know, we're just not reliable. Like you said, we change emotions all the time, but God doesn't. And that's why we have such a wonderful, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

And it's just amazing to talk about and think about that. So I'm really grateful that you're on to dive more deeply into these dilemmas as to why we think Latter-day Saints should really think about this and think about why having a changeable God or that we can become gods just as He is, why that can be, why that will affect your worship, your understanding, your faith, and why ultimately, why we can't really open the hand of fellowship to our Latter-day Saint friends as fellow brothers in Christ. And we see these things as something that divides us in terms of the faith.

We're deal breakers. Right. Exactly. So let's go to the first section in your article. So if you'd like, we could just read each one out and then talk about it. So would you like to read that for us, Aaron? Would you like me to verbalize it? Oh, yeah, sure.

Does that work? Yeah. If I don't cover it, then please maybe interject. The first one concerns subordination and dependence, which I would actually split out now into two different dilemmas just for clarity. But this is simply that if we in our exaltation as gods in the Mormon system remain subordinate, and by subordinate, I mean positioning ourselves as a relational inferior to a superior. If we do that, then it stands to reason, given the Lorenzo Snow couplet coupling of the past and future, that Heavenly Father is still relationally subordinating himself as a relational inferior to Heavenly Grandfather. And I know from some Latter-day Saints, I just can't believe he just said, Heavenly Grandfather. Well, I don't like using euphemisms, and I like to be as crisp and clear as I can.

So the dilemma here is this. I think Latter-day Saints as a carryover from historic Christian doctrine and sort of like the echoes of the Christian conscience that have largely since been abandoned, but there's still echoes there. We know in our conscience that God doesn't bend the knee to Heavenly Father. He doesn't bend the knee to a higher God than himself. And we know that if we become gods, I mean, that's blasphemous.

That's a terrible premise to operate off of. But even if we did, in the LDS thinking, a lot of them think, well, surely we would still bend the knee to our Heavenly Father. We wouldn't like graduate from bending the knee to Heavenly Father.

We wouldn't stop submitting and subordinating ourselves as relational inferiors. We would still bend the knee. So the problem here is when Latter-day Saints try to correct this, and they say, okay, well, maybe we can fix this. Maybe Heavenly Father doesn't bend the knee to Heavenly Grandfather.

Well, in that case, you have to be consistent. You have to be symmetric and say, well, when we become gods, we will graduate from bending the knee from our Heavenly Father. In other words, if Heavenly Father is not subordinate to our Heavenly Grandfather, then we're not going to be subordinate to him when we become gods. So another Latter-day Saints solution is to say, well, I mean, not solution, but kind of insistence is to say, well, we'll always be subordinate to Heavenly Father. And then you have to say, Heavenly Father is always subordinate to Heavenly Grandfather.

Anyway, I'm probably repeating myself, but you can repeat, you can sort of copy that dilemma with dependence. So I think we know that everything we have is from God and we are dependent on him. And it's not as though I grow independent of God. It's not as though I become like a source of goodness that's not downstream from God. It's all owing to God.

So I'm really in heaven. I'm growing more aware of my dependence on God. And I think a lot of even Latter-day Saints want to still affirm that, yeah, we will always be dependent on God. Well, then you have to extrapolate that backward in the LDS system to Heavenly Father is dependent on Heavenly Grandfather.

And then you have this similar problem when they try to fix one side or the other. Any thoughts or comments on that? Yeah, good. I love the way that you kind of couch this article in terms of, you know, dilemmas for Mormon theology, but then how there's interplay there with kind of latent Christian conscience within the Latter-day Saint mind. I love that, you know, kind of as I think about this first section of subordination, you know, I think a lot of times the reason that Latter-day Saints will kind of go to that subordination place to try to explain their theology is because there's this difference, right, between Latter-day Saint theology and kind of a plurality of gods and the classic Christian view that there is one eternally existent, eternally self-existent Supreme Being, right, whom we call God. And so Latter-day Saints try to kind of get out of that dilemma by recognizing, I guess, in their conscience that, well, if we say there's plurality of gods, then why don't we worship these other gods, right? And so that's why they go to the subordination place. I think it's interesting. So, do you think that's true? Do you think that's why they go there in their minds, Aaron?

The latent Christian conscience? Yeah. Is that weird? Yeah. And an attempt to kind of get out from under the dilemma of, well, we have a plurality of gods, but we only worship one God so that we can remain monotheistic if we say, if we go to the subordination place, right? Yeah.

It's kind of like a shorthand fix maybe, but yeah. So, these three dilemmas I've written out on this article, it's sort of a preview. I've written out, I think, 26 of them, and it's just a matter of can I synthesize, categorize, and then flesh them out. But yeah, there's other dilemmas that sort of start popping up really quickly when you start saying things like, well, God's not worthy of worship because of what He's like. He's worthy of worship because He's our particular deity. The idea goes, well, and I'll use my sort of crystal clear language here, He's our cosmic regional patriarch. He's our local deity.

He's our cosmic local regional deity for His particular domain and His particular generation of the gods. And so, you know, I asked a lot of Latter-day Saints, if you found out that Heavenly Grandfather had more glory, more knowledge, more power, would you worship Heavenly Grandfather instead of worshiping Heavenly Father? And the answer almost always is no, because Heavenly Father is my God. And so, the implication of that is they're not worshiping God because He is supremely omnipotent and supremely omniscient.

Christians worship God because He is supremely perfect, most high perfect. And the Latter-day Saint, you know, is at least the dominant system as it's fleshed out. You can never really stereotype an individual Latter-day Saint.

Sometimes you find out that they don't agree with the Latter-day Saint traditions. But sort of the dominant system is that we're not really worshiping God because He is the most high. He's not the source of everything good, true, and beautiful for all. He's just sort of the immediate conduit of what's good and true and beautiful for me. He's downstream from other deities and I'm quite thankful that He was sort of the mediating conduit of what's good in the larger cosmos on my behalf. That, though, just provokes so many other problems that we can talk about.

I'll mention one other thing that I should help. This will be helpful for a lot of Latter-day Saints, hopefully. There's different models of exaltation among Mormon thinkers. One, you might say, is the Brighamite view. And it's Brigham's notion that all the gods are always progressing in all of their attributes. And the only alternative to progression is digression. And so, he didn't think that the gods were stagnant in any of their attributes, especially knowledge and power.

Whereas other folks like Orson Pratt, as I understand it, and at least, you know, folks that came following Young, others who had formulated, like Bruce McConkie would be a good sort of modern example, he thought it was heresy to think that God himself was progressing in knowledge. So, this other view of progression, the gods, when they are exalted, they max out in their omnis, in their knowledge and power, and they no longer progress in their, you might call them, internal attributes. But they continue to progress in their external glory, their eternal increase.

And I don't mean this merely to be cheeky, but it's just a really helpful analogy. In that model, the glory of the gods is sort of like an MLM, where it's a pyramid scheme or MLM where you get glory out of your children gaining glory, and so forth. And so, it's not really speaking to, you know, the infinite internal glory you have, it's really sort of an additive glory.

It's not reflecting of something, it's not reflective of something infinite, it's additive. So, you have these two models of progression where God is actually progressing in himself, or God is progressing no longer in himself, but is progressing outside of himself, sort of what his domains are. He has more clout among the gods, if you will. He's got more MLM representation of the generations of the gods.

Anyway, so, think about those different models, you know, when you're thinking about these dilemmas. ISKRA Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking of when I have traditionally heard that view, that God is growing in more dominion, and scope, and power, and as more of his children become exalted, you know, Moses, the Latter-day Saints have a book of Scripture called the Book of Moses, and one of the most famous passages is chapter 1, verse 39, where he says, For behold, this is my work and my glory, to bring to pass immortality and eternal life of man. So, when more Latter-day Saints are exalted, or, you know, people on other planets and other universes are exalted, the God that brought them to that exaltation grows in glory. That's kind of how I saw it, and I think a lot of LDS see it, rather than God actually changing himself. I've actually known very rare circumstances of LDS that believe that there is no God above God the Father. So, God the Father is the ultimate God, and so that kind of solves that issue, but that kind of, and they admit that that's not the historic LDS understanding. So, like you said, some LDS just diverge from their tradition entirely to kind of solve that problem. So, yeah, there's a lot of things that LDS really need to kind of understand and think about, and in our conversation with Jackson, sorry to go back to it because you just had it, but I think it's very relevant. He said that, you know, if you look in terms of timeline, the LDS prophet right now is approximately or almost exactly half the age of the church itself. So, the church really has not been around that long, and he says in terms of timeline, they haven't even reached, you know, the beginning of their church to what we would say from the beginning of the Christian church to the Council of Nicaea. And so, he's saying that, you know, that it's not correct for non-LDS to ask LDS these types of questions because even they haven't quite figured it all out yet. But to me, it's a much different situation because, well, we have the internet.

Information passes so much more rapidly now. They claim to still have prophets that could just ask God questions, and he'll give them the answers kind of a thing. You know, they could just still have conduits revelation that can just answer these questions immediately, whereas Christians historically have had to wrestle with Scripture and understanding it, you know, totally in the tradition of the faith.

So, it's, I don't know, I didn't really find that a convincing argument, but I didn't have time to really push him on that or talk about that, unfortunately, so. Brian Yeah, and it's really interesting for Latter-day Saints to say they've only had, say, I forget what it is now, 180, 170-something years, because what that implies is that they don't have 2,000 years. So, they're breaking continuity, whereas for Christians, we're acknowledging that God has had his pillar and buttress of the truth on the earth for 2,000 years. So, God has been equipping by the Holy Spirit His people for 2,000 years through the development of historical theology and combating heresies and revisiting God's word and reformation.

The Holy Spirit has been very active in the church for 2,000 years. So, for Christians, we don't want to become historically ignorant of the historical development. It's not a faith breaker for us to learn that it took time for Christians to kind of sort things out and develop ideas and crystallize and debate, you know, like that, things like that. But, you know, one of the things that you really don't see really promulgated within Mormonism is a really healthy historical theology.

By this, I back up a bit. For Christians, there's three different, you could say three different ways we want to do theology and we want to put them all together. One is we want to do exegesis. We want to look at the text and we want to know what the author's meant. And, you know, there's a zoom out and zoom in aspect of that where we want to know what the immediate text is saying in context. And then we want to zoom out and we want to see what God as the common author of all Scripture is doing as a singular, you know, author, sort of the threads or the themes or, you know, things that God has been up to through all the 66 books. So, you know, it's biblical theology, exposition, exegesis, hermeneutics. So, we want it to be textual.

We want to be tethered to the text. The second category you might call historical theology. We want to trace the development of thought in the thought. And we don't want to pretend like we aren't downstream from that or that we're not building on the standing on the shoulders of others or building on the work of others. Instead, we want to utilize the thinking of other Christians who are thinking about Scripture and think clearly about the categories and the debates. And in doing so, that'll help us more clearly think about Scripture because Christians have been thinking very deeply about Scripture for 2,000 years.

And if I try to go rogue or lone ranger on that, then I just become arrogant and I end up like recreating heresies or like reinventing the wheel or I end up not thinking as clearly. The third category is systematics. You're really connecting the dots and if you're just taking it, you're zooming out and you're looking at the big ideas and you're thinking harmoniously and systematically about the whole. So, Mormonism has a text and it's very disjointed, but that's another conversation. And they have a systematic theology. They've often said, well, we're proud not to have a systematic theology.

We don't have creeds. Well, you more or less have something like gospel principles reflecting an overall general system. It's a generally coherent system. You can poke holes in it, but as a superficial whole, you could say there's a generally coherent idea of what reality is like. It breaks down when you press it out to the implications, but it's a generally coherent worldview. Mormons are taught a system.

They're taught a way of thinking about things. The problem though is that when Mormons study their theology, they're really not given exposure to the historical development of how the thinking expanded and developed within their own tribes. So, I would implore my Latter-day Saint neighbors to read something like This Is My Doctrine, The Development of Mormon Theology by Charles Harrell.

He was a professor at BYU. There have been other efforts at something along these lines like the Terrell Givens, but it's more or less devastating for Mormons to do historical theology because they start realizing that their prophets and apostles ended up taking positions that denounced as heresy the positions of prior apostles and prophets. You start learning about the streams of thought within Mormonism, say about exaltation in the cosmos, and you start realizing there's camps. There's literally categories of different ways of thinking within the tradition of Mormonism. One reason why this is devastating is that there's this common sense of, y'all Protestants out there, y'all are crazy because you have diversity of thought on theology, and you have different camps, you have Arminianism and Calvinism, and you have different variations of theology, you have different systematic theologies, you have different denominations. We don't have that problem. Mormonism is like, yeah, we've got things figured out. We have a standard curriculum.

We've got correlation. We've got prophets and apostles to prevent us from having the kind of problem that Protestants have, when really it's just, it's just, it's there, but it's not really known. And so, some of what I'm doing here is I'm kind of exposing Latter-day Saints to a variety of positions they have within their own religious camp. ISKRA Yeah, that's great.

Thank you so much for that, Aaron. Yeah, that was something that I really struggled with is the historical development of LDS theology and why it just seems like it seems you could take one prophet at any moment in time compared to what another prophet says. And, you know, it's hard to find a lot of agreement on these particular issues.

And it seems like what you're saying, like with correlated material, I think that's kind of what their solution was. It's like, okay, all of these disagreements are kind of on these like nitpicky, you know, quote unquote minor, you know, issues. So, we'll just kind of flatten it out and just talk about the main issues.

Okay. Jesus is the son of God, you know, we're not going to really talk about what that means and super a lot of depth. We'll just leave it at that, you know, but anytime you need to go into any kind of depth on these issues, it forces you to ask these kind of questions to go deeper, to understand what does it actually mean to be God?

What does it actually mean to be man? And I think that's the issue. There's a common objection that whatever we bring up is an official doctrine. And the solution that's proposed is for us to minimize our articulation of LDS doctrine to that which is the recently emphasized subset of the standard works expressed in general conference.

So, it's not even just the standard works. There's no official doctrine on what constitutes official doctrine. There's no binding an official position on what constitutes a binding an official position. So, there's like minimalists and maximalists approaches to LDS theology.

The one minimalist version is you're only allowed to critique the claims of Mormonism that you can find attested in its standard works and repeated in general conference recently. Because not everything that's canonical is official doctrine. Not everything in general conference is official doctrine. Not everything in a canon and general conference is official doctrine.

It's just, it's kind of messy depending on who you talk to. So, my proposed counter-solution is this. I'm not trying to misrepresent the Latter-day Saint people as individuals. I would rather give a holistic view of the Latter-day Saint faith by making note of what their canon originally said, because they diverged from it, and making note of the historical developments, like how Latter-day Saints have thought about this particular issue throughout the, you know, the years. And then sort of what is the sort of the generally coherent gospel principles idea today? And then what are sort of the cultural streams of thought you can find, if you look hard enough, within the Mormon people? So, if I put that all together and I represent it, like is that a better, can I do that?

Like is that a target that I won't be, you know, that's not official? Well, you know, just because it's not official doesn't mean Mormons aren't teaching it to their kids. Yeah, it's why I wrote an article that's on Fred Anson's website that's called The Chameleon Gospel, and it's like, you know, every Latter-day Saint you talk to, they've got their own view of how things work, who God is, what the, what salvation is, and that's why it's so difficult for us to witness to them, because even if you quote, you know, official sources, they'll be like, well, that's not how I see it, or that's not official, etc., etc. And it's very relevant to this discussion because, like I said, you know, for this first dilemma you brought up, subordination, you know, is God the Father subordinate to His Father God? Some will just, you know, solve it by just saying, well, I don't believe the King-Fall discourse is authoritative, or they just reinterpret it. So yeah, I'm sorry to divert so much from the dilemmas.

Maybe we should not hunker down on them. No, no, no, it's good. It's good. I think it's totally relevant. Paul, did you have any comments about this dilemma? Maybe not about the dilemma, but just kind of a cap on the conversation that was just flowing as, you know, Jackson kind of alluded to it tonight, and Blake Osler is someone who kind of promotes this idea as well within Mormonism is that it's a benefit for Mormons that there isn't an official position, as you were saying, Aaron, that they have this freedom of thought. In fact, I was reading one of Blake Osler's articles in dialogue that he had shared to me this morning, and he makes the statement, paraphrasing, of course, but essentially that, you know, Mormon thought is mind expanding rather than mind limiting, right, which he kind of views classic Christian theology as mind limiting because you can't just imagine what you want to be true, I suppose. But, you know, the real dilemma is that there is truth, right? If there's no absolute truth, then there is no absolute reality that we can understand and grasp as human beings and as thinking people. So I don't necessarily see that, you know, especially as a former Latter-day Saint as a benefit that there's just no solid ground that we can stand on theologically.

So yeah, but let's get back to the dilemmas. Mormon faith. All of us have left that religion and have been drawn to faith in Jesus Christ based on biblical teachings. The name of our podcast, Our Brightness, reflects John 1-9, which calls Jesus the true light, which gives light to everyone. We have found life beyond Mormonism to be brighter than we were told it would be, and the light we have is not our own. It comes to us from without.

Thus, Our Brightness. Our purpose is to share our journeys of faith and what God has done in drawing us to his son. We have conversations about all aspects of that transition—the fears, challenges, joys, and everything in between.

We're glad you found us, and we hope you'll stick around. Let's move on to the second dilemma, so the expanding Godhead versus overlapping Godheads. So Aaron, would you like to kind of explain what that dilemma is in a nutshell? Yeah, if Jesus in the Mormon system moves on, you know, if he becomes a heavenly father, a spirit father of his own spirit kids—say, him and his wife are wives, they've got their spirit babies, their spirit children, and they populate their own worlds and govern. He governs his own worlds, and he's functioning as a heavenly father. You know, in Brigham's view, there's a cycle here where, you know, every cycle there's a heavenly father, there's a son, there's a Satan. Well, so in this model, this repeatable model, Jesus is functioning as a heavenly father, and he's sending his own firstborn son, whatever that's supposed to mean in that model.

Some take it chronologically, some don't. So it stands to reason here that there's either a new Godhead where he's the father and he's sending his son, or—I'll shelf the or there, but just camp out for a second—if Jesus is a heavenly father for a second Godhead, that means that he either exited the other Godhead, either he's graduating or exiting this Godhead, or he's a dual member of two Godheads. So in this case, you have an overlapping set of Godheads. Well, that raises more questions because a lot of Latter-day Saints will say that the unity of the three persons in the particular Godhead over this planet—the unity is a unity of purpose. So you really have to—if you've got two Godheads or you've got many Godheads throughout the Mormon multiverse, if all the Godheads essentially have the same purpose, then why aren't they one big Godhead? If they're a multiplicity of Godheads, then you've got multiple purposes, ultimately. You've got multiple purposes, one for each Godhead. And if you've got someone who belongs to multiple Godheads, he's got two purposes that overlap. And so some Mormons will respond to me and say, well, there's no conflict of interest between dual membership of many Godheads. But I mean, I just want to take a step back and say, well, when Mormons say we believe in one God and they define that as a Godhead, Christians will often say, well, actually, elsewhere you agree that you believe in the existence of multiple gods of the same type of being as God beings.

Well, it's not only that. Latter-day Saints, at least in this model here, are not only affirming the multiplicity of divine beings in the highest sense that they can offer, they're in this model positing the existence of many Godheads, countless Godheads. Now, the other model is, and I've heard this before, is that when gods are exalted as gods, they join the existing Godhead and that there is one giant Godhead with an indefinite number of gods and that the Godhead as it's represented to this generation of the gods is really just a subset or sample or representative sample of the larger Godhead. So, the three, Father, Son, and Spirit, really, they belong to a Godhead with a whole lot many more divine beings, and they all share the same purpose. And so, if Mormons want to use, say, John 17 to argue that we're going to join the Godhead, if we're going to form new Godheads, they've got to deal with these issues. It's not a problem for Christians because we've got the Trinity and we've got a Most High God. Any thoughts or comments on that, friends?

SHERMAN ALEXANDER Yeah, for sure. As I was reading through this section of your article earlier today, it kind of struck me that, one, I like what you've done here in laying out these dilemmas, especially as it relates to the way Latter-day Saints will often couch things in terms of the oneness of the Godhead is in purpose. But what struck me is that Latter-day Saints will often kind of lampoon the Christian view of heaven as, oh, you just believe you're going to float around on harps or float around on clouds and play harps all day, praising God for all eternity. And what kind of eternity is that?

What kind of heaven is that? And the implication is that you're just doing the same thing over and over again. So how is that enjoyable, right, from the Latter-day Saint perspective? But what you've kind of pointed out here is that they run into kind of a similar dilemma if they run out their own thinking to its logical conclusion. Because to get away from the dilemma of potential competing purposes among multiple Godheads, then they would have to say that, as Matthew quoted from Book of Abraham earlier, I believe that this is my work and my glory to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man. If that's the sole purpose for eternity and for all gods on the Mormon view, then they are also doing the same thing over and over again. And when you get into the materialistic aspect of Mormonism, LDS feminists kind of recognized this a while ago when they kind of said they don't want to be barefoot and pregnant for all eternity, right? They recognized that there is a similar, I don't know if you want to call it stagnation or what you want to call it within LDS thought, if you're going to avoid the dilemma of competing purposes.

So that's kind of my thoughts on this section of your article. It reminded me too of conversations I've had with Latter-day Saints, because you can point out sections in the Old Testament, you know, the Messianic Psalms, and I wish I had pulled them up. I don't know if it was, it's the one where, or no, it's actually in Isaiah. I think Isaiah chapter 60, he says, you know, Jesus gets up in the synagogues and he quotes it. And then he says, today, this is fulfilled in your hearing. You know, he says, like the spirit of the Lord is upon me, that Messianic Psalm.

I love that one or that Messianic passage. I love that because you see, you know, you see hints of the three members of the Trinity. You say, you see the Messiah speaking from the first person, speaking of the spirit of the Lord is upon me, speaking of the spirit and, you know, and you see God, you know, Yahweh is spoken there. So you see hints and shadows of, you know, the three members of the Trinity. And so I ask Latter-day Saints, okay, we see, we can show where the father is called Yahweh or Jehovah. You can see where the son is called Yahweh or Jehovah.

And, you know, in the Old Testament, a lot of times you'll see the spirit of Yahweh, you know, speaking of the Holy Spirit. And so if they're united in purpose and, you know, they're each three gods in the Godhead, you know, and you hope to become a God, does that mean you hope to become or be called Yahweh or Jehovah? You know, because some of them speak of Yahweh or Jehovah as more of a title or an exalted status. So are all these gods called Yahweh or Jehovah? And, you know, some would say yes.

Some, some said no. Some were hesitant to respond, you know, and some, but to me, like an LDS thought traditionally, Jehovah was specifically speaking of Jesus. You know, that's, that's kind of what's been believed, at least since the 20th century.

I think that was kind of more codified in that time period. But, but when you have this expanding, either an expanding or multiple Godheads, yeah. Are, are they all Jehovah? Is it, you know, is it just, you know, this, this Godhead is Jehovah and the other ones have different names? It just makes me think right now is if I'm, if I'm supposed to worship the Father for all of who He is, and if my Heavenly Father is also a Son, a ideal member of another Godhead in which He is the Son, right? Ought not then I also worship the Father for being a Son? Like, does that make sense? Like, am I supposed to kind of block out from my head ideas and facts and truths about God and only worship part of Him?

Does He have kind of a double life that I'm not supposed to know about? And I'm not supposed to, you know, so it really starts raising the question of, well, if Jesus becomes a Heavenly Father over a different set of worlds, am I not supposed to esteem Him and adore Him for being a Heavenly Father? And, and so He might not be my Heavenly Father, but He is a Heavenly Father.

And suddenly here I'm worshiping my Heavenly Father and then the Son as a Heavenly Father. So it, yeah. Yeah, I totally hear that. And you're right. If there's not, you know, kind of as you say in this section that there's only one purpose suitable for any Godhead, if there's not one purpose, then you do run the risk of running into the dilemma that you kind of pointed out in your first section, which is that, you know, what do you, what, what would you do if you were to find out that your Heavenly Grandfather was greater in dominion and power and attributes, then, then the Heavenly Father, you know, and worship, would you be then, you know, compelled or, or, or, or wish to worship that other deity?

So that, that's a major problem. And, and, you know, I, I'm, I'm just always struck by the, the the verse in the, in the hymn Amazing Grace, you know, that talks about praising God forever. You know, when, when we've been there 10,000 years, bright shining as the sun, we've no less days to sing God's praise than when we first begun.

And that's, that's because of who God is, as you were kind of pointing out as we started out tonight, Aaron, and I don't think Latter-day Saints can kind of get to that, that feeling of, of, of joy that I, that I have in, in anticipating worshiping God forever and ever. All right, Fireflies, that's it for this week. We'll be back next week with more from Aaron Shafawaloff.

Until then, shine bright, Fireflies. You can subscribe to Outer Brightness wherever you listen to podcasts. If you're benefiting from our content, please write a review to help us spread the word. You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit that notification bell. Music for Outer Brightness is graciously provided by the talented Brianna Flournoy and Adams Road.

You can learn more about Adams Road by visiting their ministry page at adamsroadministry.com. And now I have the righteousness that is by faith in Jesus' name. I consider everything a loss compared to knowing Jesus.

For whose sake I have lost all things. Oh, because of the cross. On the cross, Jesus took away the written code.

The law of works that stood opposed and nailed it there for me. And through the cross, He put to death hostility, and did His body reconcile us to God and brought us peace. And I am crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but He lives in me. I consider everything a loss compared to knowing Jesus.

For whose sake I have lost all things. Oh, but when I gained Jesus, it was worth the cost. On my righteousness I count as a loss because of the cross.

Some demand a sign and some seek to be wise, but we preach Christ crucified. A stumbling pot of the Son, the foolishness of God, but wiser than the wisest man, the power of the cross. May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord through which the world has been crucified to me. And I tell the world so I take up my cross and follow where Jesus leads. Oh, I consider everything a loss compared to knowing Jesus. For whose sake I have lost all things. Oh, but when I gained Jesus, it was worth the cost. On my righteousness I count as a loss because of the cross. Because of the cross.