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- [00:00]
A
When you want to look smart in Sunday school, if you want your friends to think you're cool, when you want to seem wise and not a fool, it's Christie's Corner.
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B
In this podcast, we're going to discuss doctrine, covenant, section 93. So this section sheds light on a 2000 year old question relating to the nature of Jesus Christ. So, Garrett, what are some of the philosophical or theological issues that Section 93 helps to provide clarity for?
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A
Well, Section 93 is probably one of the most undervalued revelations of Joseph Smith in terms of what it brings to a believer in the Restoration, and especially in terms of how a Latter Day Saint views it. I think a latter day saint is well aware that D&C89 and the word of Wisdom is really important and they certainly have read and they know doctrine covenant, section 77. But I would guess if you ask them to rank the most important doctrinal sections, for many of them, 93 may not even be on the radar. Now you kind of brought up the reason why. At least part of the reason why it's so important is that this radical revelation discusses both the nature of God and the nature of Jesus, and especially Jesus divinity. The early church, the early Christian church has a real problem. And you know, I don't want to sound too terribly trite with this because the reality is the problem for the early Christian church is Jesus. Now, you don't get to make a lot of friends on a Christian podcast by saying that Jesus is the problem, Jesus is always the solution, he's not the problem. But what I mean by that is the understanding of just who and what Jesus is. This section of the Doctrine and Covenants does not have a whole lot of surrounding information around it. You know, when we talked about the Word of Wisdom, there was all kinds of stories to talk about. You know, the smoke in the room, you couldn't even see across it. We had a lot of context for where that revelation was coming from. Not as much context for things like, you know, why they weren't allowed to drink coffee. Right. But, but there was, there was context for the immediacy of that revelation. Doctrine, covenant, section 93 is a little bit different. We know when it was received. We have a date, May 6, right? 1833. But there's no commentary that's given by Joseph Smith on it. I mean, you know, sometimes people say, oh, if you got to meet Joseph Smith, what's one of the things you'd ask him? That'd be one of the first things I'd ask Him. That's probably a pretty high level nerd response of what would you ask him? Well, I'd ask him what the context was of his May 6th revelation from 1830. 33, of course. And they'd be like, I was going to ask him about what it was like to see Jesus, but. Well, you know, I mean, we've all got our different things, but the, the reality is this, this revelation that we don't have context for provides us a better understanding of who God is and who Jesus is than just about anything else. And it's actually the beginning point, maybe not the only beginning point, but a major beginning point of this theology about God that is going to make Latter Day Saints incredibly different than their Christian friends. You know, I don't know, Richard, if you've ever had the opportunity, have you ever had the experience of someone telling you that you worship a different Jesus?
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B
Absolutely. On my mission in Southern California, multiple times a day.
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A
Well, surprisingly that anyone in Southern California believes in Jesus. So, I mean, it seems like it was very different. Yeah, it seems like they would just say, they would just say, oh, you believe in Jesus?
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B
No, but this was, this was the, this was often the case and it didn't actually matter which sect of Christianity. If it was a non denominational evangelical Christian, if it was a Catholic, if it was Lutheran, Baptist, all of them would say that we worship different Jesus. And I remember not really understanding what that meant and taking it very personally and getting upset and saying, no, we do worship the same Jesus and, and not really understanding where they were coming from.
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A
And maybe what we can do with this podcast is what we're going to try to shed a little bit of light on that. The reality is, I'm guessing this is going to be somewhere around the second or third most boring podcast. I mean, what do you think? Third? Fourth?
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B
Well, yeah, I mean, right now we're off to number one.
- [04:38]
A
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So thus far, I promise the payoff is going to be slightly better than what it is right now, but only slightly. So the problem of Jesus, I guess we should go back to that. So early Christians have a problem. And of course Jesus is, you know, is, is the reason why they're Christians, but they have a problem because the defining characteristic of the people of God prior to Jesus, the defining characteristic of Judaism in Jesus's time was not that they offered sacrifices, pagans offered sacrifices. It was not that they believed God protected them and they were chosen people. Many other pagans believed that their gods protected them and that they were chosen people. The fact that they had commandments to live was a little bit different than many other pagan peoples. But the primary difference between Judaism and the primary difference between Judaism and the pagans around them is monotheism. It's not that the Jews just worshiped a different God than the Greeks did. It's that the Jews were saying that the Greek gods didn't actually exist. It's not just that my God can beat up your God, which is, you know, that's kind of the argument that you're making, right? Well, if you only knew the power of Dionysus, then you would know that. Or Dionysus doesn't even exist. And that's one of the things that makes it. It's not a way to win friends and influence people among pagan people in the ancient world. But Jews are going to hold fast to this idea in Judaism that there is only one God. It's the defining characteristic of Judaism. There's only one God and everything else is just, you know, everything else is just dessert, right? That God is just one God is the primary thing. And you worship that one God and you know, you have this all the way back to Moses, right? Who, you know, who. Shall I say something? You know, I am, right? I am that I am. God is. Is the one. And that's the only. The only power that exists. So Jews were already very different than their pagan counterparts at the same time, but they had more or less been able to work out a fairly unsteady existence. The Roman Empire, and certainly the former Alexander the Great empire is not exactly very kind to the Jewish people. But it's certainly. There's certainly at least been a measured acceptance of this monotheism throughout the, the. The European world. So you can see the problem that's created because Christians weren't just saying that Jesus was a really great teacher. Of course Jesus was a really great teacher. So, yes, Jesus was a great teacher. And they weren't just saying that Jesus was a prophet or that Jesus had lots of power. Christians were arguing that Jesus was in fact God. Well, that you can see, if I had a visual representation here, I'd hold up one finger and say, well, if God is God, and I'd hold up my other finger and I'd say, and Jesus is also God. Then you've got a problem right here in River City, because how is it possible that God can be God and that Jesus can be God, but that you're still only. You're still a monotheist? Wouldn't you then be a limited polytheist? Right. Because you believe God is God and that Jesus is also God. How do you deal with this problem? There are other problems related to that. If Jesus is divine, and whenever I use the word divine, it means God. That's what it means. So if I say Jesus is divine, it means Jesus is God. Okay, if Jesus is divine, how in fact did he die? One of the definitions of gods is that there are immortal. Right? That's what makes you God, is that you can't die. So how is it that you can die? If we say that God is all powerful and is completely incomprehensible and is everywhere, nowhere, all at the same time, well, how does that same God become mortal and yet maintain godhood and then die? There's a lot of questions surrounding this, and a lot of these questions arise because of the world that these people lived in. It was a very difficult thing to reconcile. So, I mean, I want to talk about a few of the ways. Now, if you're an early Christian historian, you'll say, well, there's a lot of other things you could have talked about, but that will always be the case. But just an example of some of the different belief systems. We tend to think of early Christianity as this uniform thing. I don't know why we do, given the fact that we look outside at Christianity today and, you know, you can't even get two people to agree on a single passage of the Bible. But I'm sure every Christian in the early world, without any communication devices, just absolutely was 100% on board before there was a Bible. The reality is most of early Christianity is spread through word of mouth. Yes, missionaries go places, but the real way the church grows is, you know, a guy talks to a guy who talks to his wife, you know, and it's spread a little bit at a time long before there is a Holy Bible, long before those scriptures have been put together. So the questions that arise, they come out of, out of people's worldview. And one of those first ones is, how is it that Jesus could possibly be God? If you're saying that Jesus is God, how can he be God? Another one is, how does. How is it possible that Jesus is mortal? Right? Think about this. Was Jesus when he was in the manger in Bethlehem creating universes, Was Jesus the baby all powerful? And if he was all powerful, was he just like pretending to be a baby? You know, he pretended to spit up. I got to keep up appearances. Let me just say gaga goo goo, just so everyone knows that I'm a baby or was he all powerful? Because if you say that he wasn't all powerful, well, then there's a problem, right? There's a time when Jesus wasn't all powerful. And if you say he was all powerful, well, then that kind of creates another problem on the other end of the spectrum. Well, then how in any way was he actually mortal if he was all power from the moment he was born? And was he just pretending to be a kid? For those of you who are still awake or running to grab some caffeine, I mean, I can see why. These are probably questions that a lot of people haven't really thought about. So let me move on to some specific examples of this one early Christian group, and they're Christian by the sense, meaning that they believe that Jesus is the Messiah. Okay. What the Messiah is differs to different people. Remember, Jews did not all of them, they did not expect the kind of Messiah that Jesus was for sure. Right? Some Jews expected the Messiah to be a great lawgiver, a great teacher, you know, like a new Moses in that regard. Some expected that he would be this powerful military leader that would lead them to freedom away from the Roman armies. Others didn't really put stock in the claim of a Messiah coming at all. So there's a wide range of. But as far as we can tell at the time of Jesus, there doesn't seem to be, certainly not in any large numbers, Jews who expect that the Messiah is actually going to be God. That that seems to not be the expectation that it's gonna be some kind of a man and he's gonna have some kind of power, but that he would be God, that he would be himself divine. That. That doesn't seem to be the understanding. Now, of course, Christians will later read passages in Isaiah and say, yep, like he was trying to tell you this, but that's not how those passages were read at the time and certainly not how they're read today in Judaism. So the first of these groups that I want to talk about are the Ebionites. Now they are a group of Christians. So they're Jews that have accepted Jesus as the Messiah, but they don't believe that he was the son of God. The way that they. This is so they can maintain their. Their monotheism. Right? I only have a problem the moment I try to say that Jesus is God. I can throw all kinds of accolades on Jesus and it's not really a problem. I can say Jesus is like super Moses. You know, he's like Moses on a Harley. He's the greatest Moses Ever he, he has more power than Elijah had. He has more law giving than Moses. He is the greatest of all great men. And I'm fine. You can say that God poured out all of his power upon Jesus. But as long as there's a difference between Jesus the mortal and God, then we're fine because there's still only one God. And of course that one God can give his power to anyone however he wants. This is called adoptionism. In the early lingo, Jesus is the Son of God because God adopted him as his son. In much the same way other Old Testament prophets are called the Son of God. Right? Jesus is like the greatest prophet who ever lived, but that's all he was. He's not divine, he's fully mortal. So the Ebionites are saying Jesus is the greatest man, emphasize man who has ever lived. That's one side of the spectrum. Now because I said there's a spectrum, you know that there's another end, right? The other end of the spectrum, as you might already guess, is people claiming that Jesus wasn't in any way mortal. Now the cool thing about this too is that it also eliminates the problem of monotheism. If you simply argue, like monophysis or Docetus did, that Jesus only has one nature and that one nature is his divine nature. Or you know, there's varying levels of this. At the very least, it's the only part of his nature that matters. Jesus is, is divine. Jesus is God. Well then I don't have to deal with the mortal aspect of it. In fact, Docetus heavily influenced early Christian thought and certainly many Christians became Docetists. They argued that Christ was fully divine, he wasn't mortal at all. And in fact, at least the Docetus argues, he didn't even have a body. How big do you have to make that spear to kill an immortal God? I mean by the, by the very fact that we just said the definition is immortal, then you can't kill him. How are you able to do it? Docetists simply argue Jesus never actually had a body. He never had a body. Now you might say, well yeah, but people saw him, they touched him, they felt him. The response from a doses was you don't think that an all powerful God could make you think that you're touching a body. If you say that God doesn't have the power to make you think that, then I guess you don't believe God's all powerful, right? So for them they highlighted only the spiritual nature rather than the human nature of God.
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B
So how early are some of these questions arising? How early in Christianity are docetists and ebionites?
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A
Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. Obviously our records from the time period are not very good. And you know, if we had an early New Testament specialist on here, which I'm not, they'd be able to give you a lot better ranges. But think about what you actually already have in the Bible. What you already have in the Bible are letters of Paul in which he is claiming that the problem is Christians thinking the wrong things about Jesus. Right. When he writes to the Galatians, he's not writing to them to say, I can't believe you guys became pagans again. He's saying, I can't believe that you're worshiping Jesus the wrong way. So what that shows you is that there is this kind of, you know, for lack of a better, you know, term, atrophy or catabolism that's already going on in the early Christian church. They don't have the technology to easily control this, especially something that's being spread rapidly, but in a person to person, storytelling to storytelling sort of way. And it's natural for people who hear about Christianity to simply plug it into their existing cultural beliefs. That's what we do today, actually, when we join the church, we bring with us all of our cultural beliefs that we had before until we realize, oh, I guess we can't, you know, unfortunately, we can't celebrate Oktoberfest anyway in the same way that we used to. Right? We, we have, we bring that with us. So as early as Paul, you have differing Christians divided about different things about Jesus. The Ebionites, these kind of adoptionists, they're much earlier, right? Because they're generally coming from converted Jews who desperately want to maintain the monotheistic understanding. That's the most important thing about God is monotheism. The later, the docetic viewpoints, they're going to develop a little bit later on because it's the Greeks and those who are Greek influenced who are much more concerned with the divine nature of Jesus. And so that's going to be highlighted. So you have these ebionites on one side, dosages on the other. I mean, and this leads to a host of heresies. And we could go through all of them. I assume if you ever take a Catholic catechism, like most of it is just all the heretical people from the early period of the church, church. But one really powerful heretic, if we want to call him that, is Marcion Marcion is this powerful preacher, well connected, and he is going to take a completely different view. So you have Ebionites saying that Jesus is only a man, he's not a God at all. You have Docetus saying that Jesus is only a God, he's not a man at all. And then you have Marcion saying, hey, let's just call it what it is. It's obvious that Jesus is a completely different God than the God of the Old Testament. So Marcion, instead of trying to swim upstream with the fact that how do I make it so that Jesus and God aren't the same thing? I'll just flat out say it. They both exist. So Marcion actually went against the idea of monotheism, or at least the idea that there's only one God. He claimed that there was this lesser God that had created the world, a jealous God, you know, the kind of God you get from the Old Testament, and that Jesus was the God of love. Now, I'm not saying that Marcion intended this. It's very difficult to determine what Marcion intended. But this idea that essentially everything that happened in the Old Testament was this lesser quasi evil God, you can see how very rapidly that could devolve into some virulent anti Semitism right, among early Christians, because those who are taking up that viewpoint, you know, they already are blaming Jews for the death of Jesus. What's leading to antisemitism. With Marcionism, they're now able to claim that not only did did the Jews kill their God, but in fact they'd been worshiping the wrong God all along. And so you could see why that can cause a problem. But Marcion, you know, he's gonna get a lot of followers with this idea that there's actually two separate competing gods. That makes more sense to a lot of people. And especially in a pagan world where everyone believes there's thousands of gods. The Christians seem to have, you know, with Martianism, come on board. Yep, there are two gods and they're fighting each other. Jesus is the good God. As you might imagine, he only accepts the New Testament of Scripture, rejects all the Old Testament because that's, that's, that lesser God, that's that bad God, the God who created everything and created it all terribly. That, that question about God and, and, and Jesus and how exactly Jesus is divine is. Look, there's going to be a lot of other iterations we could spend. I mean, there's legitimately entire college courses that just talk about Christology. Right. Ones that I'm not teaching. Therefore it's best that I move along as quickly as possible. Eventually these questions about who Jesus is and what his nature is are going to come to a head with the Arianistic controversy. If I was a Catholic, I'd say the Arianistic heresy. And what's this? Well, Arius is this teacher. Yeah. In, in Egypt, in Alexandria, who is going to try to settle this by making this argument that God created Jesus. Jesus is still divine in the sense that Jesus is the son of God. That Jesus, you know, you know, had a pre existence that Jesus came, you know, with, with all the powers of God, that he's divine in that sense. But in one very important sense God and Jesus are different. And that is God gave Jesus his power. This is essentially, it's a way of kind of playing both sides of the fence. And I think that's why Arius is doing it. You can still believe that Jesus is divine, but however, however infinitesimally different. The difference is since God created Jesus, Jesus has to be less than the Father or another way of thinking about it is this way for Christians today, although you probably won't get a hold of them to quote this to you, if you go talk to a pastor, they'll quote this to you all day long. They believe in something very central about the nature of God called the aseity of God. Again, probably not something that you've talked about in your Sunday school lesson unless you've got a really cool Sunday school teacher. But the aseity of God is the self existence of God. For Christians, one of the things that defines who God is is that God is a self existent being. Or to put it another way, no one created God. In fact, nothing existed before God. There was just God. Now for a latter day Saint, this is really hard to wrap our head around because for us we're like, you know, God's, you know, we're thinking of him kind of like floating up there with rocks and you know, comets flying by. And then God organizes everything, right? Well that's not how a Christian conceives of God and the creation. For a Christian, in the beginning there's nothing but God. There's not matter, there's not time, there's not space. There's just God, just God. And then God creates everything. And in fact when St. Augustine was asked, you know, well, what was God doing before he created everything? His response was that he was creating hell for people who ask questions like that. So you know, you don't want to ask that question anyway, back To Arius, his argument that, you know, in a lot of ways sounds really logical, right? If Jesus is the Son of God, then that means at some point, however far back you want to go, you go back billions and billions, trillions. Put a, put a, put an infinity sign around however many numbers you want to put behind it. If you go back far enough, at some point God must have created Jesus. That means that if God created Jesus, then no matter how much power Jesus has, you can call him God all day long. But there's going to be one very important way that Jesus is not equal to the Father and that is he has not the same aseity. That same word, he is not self existent. What does that mean? It means theoretically. Now of course it would never happen because the Father and the Son don't disagree, but theoretically, God could take away Jesus power, right, since he's the one who gave it to him. Incidentally, this is part of the reason why Latter Day Saints will sometimes wonder why it is their Christian friends revolt so greatly against the idea of the Latter Day Saint belief that you can become like your Father in heaven. The idea that men and women can become gods and goddesses, that's a pretty radical belief and it's one that's only held by Latter Day Saints. And so part of the reason why, you know, because you might say to your friend, you might say to your Christian friend, well, I don't understand. If you think God's all powerful, then why couldn't God make me like him? And you're essentially talking two separate languages because even though you're using the same words, your Christian friend is to him the definition of God is a self existent, non created being. There's no creation about it. He exists. That's it. And then he created everything else. So Arius is trying to get around this monotheism and this, you know, really the wider Christological argument about, you know, how Jesus was divine by essentially separating God and Jesus, giving Jesus ridiculous amounts of glory, but he's not actually equal with God. He's different in that one very important respect, and that is God created Jesus very. This is a very easy theology to understand, especially as the Bible and Christian writings start to make wider circulation. It's easy for people to read the Bible and you know, Jesus seems to be praying to God. I imagine many Latter Day Saints listening to me have made a very similar argument to someone about how they don't accept the Trinity. I mean, Jesus is talking to somebody. Who's he talking to up there? Is he throwing his voice, what's going on? It's a more natural view to see, you know, especially because we're talking about Jesus as the Son. So it's a much more natural view to say Jesus is the Son of God and therefore Jesus gets his glory and his power from the Father. It actually that Arianistic Christianity is very widespread, especially in areas outside of the Roman Empire in the early, you know, in the, in the four hundreds and five hundreds and, and actually well into even years beyond the fall of the Western Roman Empire. It'll eventually get tamped out. And, and again, Latter Day Saints don't know very many Catholic councils, but they do know the Council of Nicaea where, where that's going to be adjudicated. But before we can adjudicate this, we've got to get to the other side of the ledger, and that is Athanasius of Alexandria. Now Athanasius is revolted by Arius teaching. I mean, you couldn't find a more. I mean, you know, a debate between a democrat and a republican has nothing on Athanasius problem with Arius. And this is the primary reason why he has a problem with Arius. Central to Arius's argument is the idea that there was a time that Jesus didn't exist. Again, however many trillions of years. You know, you can put whatever zeros you want to put behind the years. You go back to the point when God created Jesus. There was still a point when God created Jesus. And if God created Jesus, then Jesus by definition is not an eternal being. He might be eternal going forward. That works out fine. But he can't be the same being as God because the definition of God is a self existent being being that's always existed. So this is Athanasius argument that instead of this Arianistic heresy, which is what it will very much be called if you ever see Catholic images of Arius and Athanasius, like Arius kind of looks like a, kind of looks like a homeless beggar like that you're chasing away from a Walmart rv. But Athanasius, you know, he's, he's got, he's got halos around him. I mean, you know, birds are landing on his shoulder. He's like the greatest. He essentially is the driving point of trinitarian theology of finding a way to make this apparent contradiction seem like it's not a contradiction. And he's going to argue that the Father and the Son, God and Jesus are actually, they are co. Eternal. And even further along with the Holy Spirit, they are co. Eternal. And that they are of the same substance. Right? That they are the same. Whatever God is, Jesus is. And how do you get around the idea of, well, he's begotten of the Father. If you begot something, as Arius argued, then that means at one point that thing didn't exist. Athanasius argues, no, Jesus is eternally begotten of the Father. Now, look, there are all kinds of theologians who can talk about trinitarian theology, and I'm not even a theologian, so I'm not the right person to talk to. Mainly anyone who is listening, who's a theologian, is probably banging their head against the table thinking, this is the worst description I've ever heard of Athanasius and. Or Arius, which it probably is. But when I go back and listen to it, then I can kick myself. This rages and. And you can see the central aspect of this is whether or not a couple of things. Occasionally, Latter Day Saints who know about this idea, they'll be like, well, we. We're kind of like Arianists are. Well, no, we're not. Right? Because we don't believe that there was a time that Jesus wasn't. At least not. Not the same way that Arius is arguing. Right? So even though it sounds like a tempting viewpoint because it separates God and Jesus into two separate beings, Athanasius is going to be making a point that's a little bit more nuanced. The point that Athanasius is going to be making is that God is. It's one God. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost are all God. And you'll see this as the Council of Nicaea. You know, they get together to hash this out. What they're going to come up with and what will eventually be rendered as this creed is that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in unity, neither confounding the person. So that's the persons is the way you describe God the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Confounding the persons, meaning you don't confuse them. You don't say that God is Jesus and that Jesus is God or the Holy Spirit is Jesus. I think today there's probably quite a few Christians who actually kind of confound them. Right. You're just as likely to hear someone say they prayed to Jesus as they prayed to God. I mean, it's. It's a. It's a. It's a. They kind of mix them together a little bit more now. But neither confounding the persons nor dividing the essence. This is this terminology, this, that whatever the essence that God is, Jesus is that same essence. And whatever that essence is, the Holy Spirit of that same essence. There's one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father and the Son of the Holy Ghost is all one. The glory equal, the majesty co eternal. Such as the Father is. Such as the Son, such as the Holy Ghost, the Father. And this is very noticeable, the direct shot across the bow at Aryanism here. The Father uncreated. Well, Aries would have agreed with that. The Son uncreated, the Holy Ghost on uncreated. And then it goes on, you know, say that they're not limited, that they're infinite. I mean, there's all kinds of things, and yet they are not three gods, but one God. Again, I think trinitarian theology is really difficult for a Latter Day Saint to understand because a Latter Day Saint from the time that they flew first started talking about God. Whether they're talking about God or Jesus or in fact even the Holy Ghost, they're always envisioning a person, a person who looks like them, right? They're taking it very literally. They are, for lack of a better term, anthropomorphizing God, right? That God is a man. So when you think of the God you're praying to, you think of a man, right? When you, when you think of the heavenly family, again, another Latter Day Saint heresy, right? You think of your Heavenly Mother as a woman, not as some amorphous entity that's floating around the ether, but as an exalted man and an exalted woman. The Holy Ghost we also think of as this being that isn't some weird creation of God or emanating from the same essence, but we, we think of them as this essentially man that doesn't have a body yet, very glorified. I don't want to, I don't want to belittle that at all. But not. We don't think of them as this kind of essence that fills everything, but rather this power, rather this. An individual rather than a power. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. This is. This is terrible. Anyway, that's the council and I see it so the, the next discussion that that is going to happen. And this kind of also, you got to be thinking, why in the world is he talking to us about this all? Because this is. You have to know the backstory to know how awesome doctrine, Kevin, section 93 is. Now, these things, they vacillate back and forth. Athanasius and the Trinitarian theology is made the rule of the Empire by Emperor Constantine essentially. But the very next emperor is actually going to rescind that, send Athanasius into exile, bring Arius back and try to push an Aryan doctrine in the Empire. And so it actually vacillate back and forth. And so this is not, you know, an issue that was, you know, fully decided at the time. In 325 it actually, it's going to take over a century before this is the more standard doctrine inside of the, of the Empire. But they still have a problem. Even if I've come to the terms of God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit are all the same God, they're all one God. And I've, I've eliminated, at least in their terms, the Arianistic heresies, it's still, I have a problem. And that problem goes back to that earlier question that I asked. When Jesus was a baby in the manger, was he fully God? You want to answer quickly to that because you think you know the answer, but then think of the implications of the answer. If you say yes, then that means Jesus was only pretending to be a baby. He was only pretending to learn. He was only pretending to learn how to walk. He was only pretending everything that he did because he was actually an all powerful God from the moment he was born. If you take it the other way and you say that Jesus wasn't fully God, well now we've got a real problem. What does that mean? Means there's a time that Jesus isn't God. You can see the dilemma that is, that is created by this. Well, it's at a council. It's at a council called chalcedon more than 100 years after nicene451ad that they're going to try to hash this out. And what they do is they actually take the extremes of both positions. The extreme adoptionist position is that Jesus is absolutely mortal and he isn't divine at all. Okay? He's just, again, please pardon my blasphemy, but just for, to prove the point, he's just a dude, okay? He's just a man. He's not, he's not divine. He's not God at all. Now he's a man that has all kinds of ridiculous power. He's a man that has the most of God's favor. He's a man who was resurrected, but he's a man. That's the adoptionist position. On the far side, on the other side of the ledger, you have this docetic Version or monophysicism, that this idea that there is only one nature of Jesus and it's a divine nature that he actually doesn't even. He didn't even have a body, he just pretended to have a body, he projected a body. And when someone says, well, why would he do that? Well, he wants you to be able to write to him. And so he makes it appear as if he has a body. But of course, he doesn't actually have a body. He doesn't have a body at all. So the Council of Chalcedon is actually going to affirm the positive aspects of both of those positions and reject their negative. Right. So you have adoption is saying that God, that Jesus is fully mortal and he isn't divine at all. What are they going to drop that isn't. And they're going to hold on to he is fully mortal. And then on the other side, where you have Docetus saying that, that Jesus is not mortal at all, that he's fully divine and not mortal at all, well, they're going to again affirm what the Docetists affirm and completely drop the mortal aspect. And so you get this glorious contradiction that Jesus is both fully human and fully God in some kind of impossible scenario. I mean, I know that the way we generally think of that is that, well, you know, Jesus is half human and he's half God. That's not what's being affirmed. What's being affirmed is that Jesus is not half human. He's not Hercules, okay? He's not half Zeus's kid. He's not half God and half man. He's 100% man, and at the same time somehow 100% God. Now, for those of you who failed remedial math like I did, you might think it'd be difficult to have two things that are that diametrically opposed. I mean, what is the definition of being immortal? You are not mortal. Right? And yet he's somehow both 100% mortal and also 100% immortal. And it's a, you know, and theologians will even say it's a contradiction. You can't understand. It's just the truth. This becomes adopted as the standard understanding, the standard Christology, the understanding of Jesus and the standard understanding of God, the trinitarian theology, all throughout Christianity, even with the great age of the Reformation, when Martin Luther breaks away from the Catholic Church and, you know, John Knox and Ulrich Zwingli and all these people that are reformers in the great era of the reformation in the 1500s, they are not rejecting those Core principles about the nature of God. So Catholic Church is evil, Catholic Church is corrupt. They're arguing, you know, pope is terrible. We, we have to have this reformation. But they are not rejecting those core councils of the early Christian church. So you might wonder, oh, well, does a Presbyterian who is not a Catholic, do they believe the same thing about the Trinitarian theology and the nature of Christ that Catholic does? In essence, yes, they do. I mean, obviously you're have theologians that argue different points, but these councils are accepted as having gotten it right. And, and that's part of the reason why Latter Day Saints are going to be always seeming like they're on the outs when they're talking to, when they're talking to their friends. Anyway. Well, again, we got to get to why this matters. I know you, I know you want to know. This understanding of God has developed into the time period in which Joseph Smith lives. That this is all throughout almost all of the Christian denominations. Now, there are some very notable few exceptions. I mean, Shakerism is an exception to this understanding, for instance. But the mainline Christians are all going to be advocating the same type of theology, which means we go back to the question. They would have to affirm that, yes, Jesus is fully God from the moment he's born. He's fully God, fully God before he's born, but he's fully God even from the moment that he's born. Meaning, yes, if you have to ask the question, could he create universes as a baby? You would have to say yes, because he's both fully God as well as fully human. And there's no growth, there's no separation. One of the aspects of God for Christians is that God is utterly incapable of change and growth. Well, why would you say that? Well, because God is already all powerful. You can't be all powerful. And then also here's some more power. Well, that would mean that there was some power that you didn't have in the first place. Right. So if you're all powerful, you already have every power that. That. Every power. Every power. If you're all powerful. And for Christians, the omnipotence of God is something that is shared across nearly every sect of Christianity. How do I describe God? He is absolutely all powerful. He is absolutely eternal in existence. He's always existed. But there's one other leg of that stool that a Christian wants to affirm. That one other leg of that, that stool that that changes. Look, there are other people who believe that God, that gods could be all powerful. I mean, the Greeks believed that Zeus was all powerful. He was the most powerful God, but he was also a jerk, right? I mean, Zeus was terrible. If you read anything, Zeus, Zeus is far more wicked than any mortal could hope to be. He's, he's like the guy who got all of his wishes and then used them to just self indulge, right? I mean he, Zeus is all powerful, he's just terrible. Now this actually made understanding evil pretty easy. In the pagan world, when something horrific happened, when something inexplicable, when your crops failed, it was very easy to describe. Why? Because Zeus is a terrible person and so he does terrible things. That's actually the reason why you worship in the ancient world. The reason why you worship Zeus isn't because you love Zeus. How could you possibly love this despotic madman, murderer, rapist? No, you don't love him, but you fear him. The gods don't care at all what you think about them. They care about whether or not you venerate them. So I go and I sacrifice an ox to Jupiter, not because I love Jupiter. And I just can't wait to see Jupiter again in the afterlife. In fact, many pagans don't even believe in an afterlife. Or the very least they believe that the afterlife is a terrible place. Like the life that matters is the life that matters here. So I go sacrifice to Diana, I go sacrifice to Mercury. I sacrifice so I don't incur the wrath of these all powerful beings who will then in turn bless my crops, bless my house, whatever. But key to that understanding is that the gods are fickle and feckless. Now they're fickle. They are, they are willing to do whatever. They are not loyal. They, they are willing to destroy you if you don't happen to toe the line. So when bad things happen in the, in the pagan world, in the ancient world, you actually had a pretty easy explanation for them. Well, Mars is a jerk. My son went to war and now my son's dead. Because Mars is horrible. And that's what Mars does, that. So the explanation for evil that occurred was, well, Neptune is terrible and Neptune caused this storm. You know, it was, it was an easy explanation. But Christians are going to affirm something very different. Christians are going to affirm that God isn't just all powerful and that he isn't just eternal. Right? They're going to argue that God is actually all powerful. Good. Now that, that causes some serious issues because Christians are arguing for a monotheism. I can no longer blame things on Zeus because Zeus doesn't exist. If the Only power that actually exists is God and my crops still fail. Who can I blame? Why really only have two, two ways to go. I can blame the one God that I now believe in, or I can blame myself. Right? What are the other actors? I mean, sure, you can blame other people, but even that you'll get to a point where you can't blame them that far, right? Because couldn't God, if he's all powerful, stop the other people from salting your farm and destroying your crops? The answer to the couldn't God have question always has to be yes. And always if you're affirming that God's all powerful, then the answer to the question couldn't God have always has to be yes. And so really it becomes a question of why doesn't he? In fact, this is actually the problem of the justice of God. It's a problem that philosophers have spent a great deal of time trying to figure out. How do you reconcile this? If you were to draw a triangle, right? And at the top of the triangle you say, these are the points of God that we affirm. The first is that God is all powerful, you know, meaning everything. It means he's omniscient, he's omnipotent, he's all the omnis. He's that. Right? Whatever you consider power. Because any other power you give God, you're like, well, I mean, he's not only all seeing, he's also all knowing. Yeah. If he's omnipotent, yes, any of the alls, he's that. Right. And that's, that's certainly what Christians and really Jews and Muslims are going to affirm as well about, about God, that God is absolutely all powerful. So that's kind of the point of our pyramid here. If you draw this out, if you got a little scratch paper, you know, draw the top of your, draw your pyramid. And the top point of that pyramid is God is all powerful. But again, Christians don't want to just affirm that God is powerful. Powerful. Key to Christian thought is that God is also good. And not just kind of good, not just a little bit good. Not just good whenever you happen to sacrifice the right bull to him, but good all the time. He is all good, or omnibenevolent, if you want to say. So God is both all powerful and all good. That sounds pretty awesome. What's the only problem? And that is this world is terrible. It's a dumpster fire on its best of days. And many of you, you know, could, could look to, you know, you know, just the events of the last several years and say, I'm not sure this could get any worse than it is. Right. You know, and, and, and not just talking about, you know, we're focused a great deal on, on. On Covid and the plague that it is. But even without that, you have plagues of malaria, you know, killing thousands every year. You have. You have war and malnutrition and children suffering in ridiculous ways. I mean, the reality is this world is filled with suffering and evil. And so that's what leads to that kind of dilemma for the believer. In fact, it's what causes some believers to lose their faith that God exists. Why? Because if God is all powerful and he's also all good, then why is everything so bad? Now, I think Latter Day Saints, like many Christians, try to get outside of this by the argument of agency, right? The argument of agency that says, well, God is good, God is all powerful, but people, you know, are terrible. And so because terrible people exist, as long as God makes you free, then people are free to do terrible things to you. This is an easy one to game out, right? I mean, I'm a BYU professor, right? So let's say on my way home from this podcast, I decided that, you know, things have been a little bit rough at work, and I pick up a bottle of Jack Daniels and I decide to drink it all the way on the way home. Well, I've made several serious stupid decisions at this point. And then I've compounded that by the fact that I'm now driving a car while I'm doing it, and I wreck my car into a telephone pole, okay? Now I'm gonna suffer all kinds of pain because I'm gonna be injured in the accident. I'm gonna have all kinds of financial loss. BYU is gonna find out that I, you know, how to, you know, 0.20 on the breathalyzer or whatever, and I'm. And I'm gone, you know, so. And then my family's gonna suffer both the embarrassment and the loss. You know, there's gonna be all kinds of negative things that happen. But a Latter Day Saint would probably say, well, I guess don't get a. Don't drive drunk. I mean, I. I feel bad for your family, I do, but don't drive drunk. Then I guess if. If you don't want to have those consequences, they. They wouldn't blame God at all for that, right? Well, now it's the same scenario. Let's paint the same scenario. Only this time, I don't wrap my car around a telephone pole. I wrap my car around someone else's car. Now the person in the other car, the three people in the other car that are killed, their families are going to suffer incredibly. So they didn't do anything. I destroyed their lives with my horrible decisions. I took my agency and I destroyed lives. They didn't have a choice to not get hit by me. That didn't happen. That's a lot harder for us to take that kind of second level of evil or difficulty or suffering. We have a harder time dealing with it, but we still try to deal with it essentially by saying, you know, kind of shaking our head and saying, look, in a world where people have agency, sometimes people will choose to do horrible things that will hurt people in horrible ways. And I think we've all experienced that. The problem is there's another level of evil and suffering that exists, and that that last level of suffering is very difficult to ascribe to anyone's agency. Right. The earthquake that just occurred in Haiti killed thousands of people in mere seconds. And a decade ago, there was an earthquake that killed tens and tens of thousands of people. We still don't know that the total death toll on this most recent one. Whose agency is that? Right. A tsunami kills a hundred thousand people in the space of an hour. Where's the agency now? I've heard people try to get cute with that. Well, the agency is because they decided to live in a town that was near the water. I submit to you that if you start getting that far down the line on agency, you'll eventually to the point where there isn't really even the. The ability to choose that.
- [56:39]
B
So what if that person was to say, well, sure, that person didn't necessarily exercise their agency, but Adam and Eve exercised their agency. And because of that fall, which isn't God's fault, God had them their agency or gave them their agency, it's ultimately Adam's fault or Eve's fault.
- [57:02]
A
Right. And so because of the fall of Adam, this world's a terrible place. Right. Again, this is how most Christians deal with the problem of evil in the world. God created a perfect world. And, you know, Adam and Eve decided that they liked apples. And so that. And so that's the problem again, though, I think that's still pretty difficult to. To fully absolve God in that scenario, because God knows all things. So God therefore knew that Adam was going to fall. If you say that God didn't know that Adam was going to fall, we've got a real big problem. Right? Because he's no longer all powerful. So why didn't God just, I don't know, build a better Adam? I mean, he's creating him from scratch. Why doesn't he just like, you know, make him allergic to fruit? Why doesn't he do something other than condemning billions of people to the horrors of mortality the way that he did in the, in the Christian viewpoint of the fall of Adam? The world was perfect. God's plan was perfect. And people are so terrible that, that, that we, we messed it all up. But the reality is, even in that scenario, even in that scenario, God, if he's all powerful, could a completely reverse the acts of that. He doesn't have to make us all suffer because of Adam's transgression. And he could have not made the consequence of Adam eating the apple, the abject suffering of billions of people either. He's God, he can do whatever he wants. So the fact that he didn't leads to, it leads to these kinds of questions. I mean, it's not just that, it's not just the question of that. If we were to go through them, I mean, ask this question, why did God create Satan? Now again, a Christian will affirm, no, God created a perfect angel, you know, named Lucifer. And that angel rebelled against God. Absolutely. I'll go right along there with you. The problem is if God has ultimate foresight and ultimate foreknowledge and he's all powerful and he's creating Satan out of nothing, you know, you can hopefully do the math at this point. If God is the one creating Satan and he knows exactly what Satan is going to do, and he absolutely, because he's all powerful could change that. Why doesn't he? We're not talking about a being that's always existed. Remember, there's only one being that's always existed, that's God. Lucifer didn't always exist. Lucifer was created by God. In Christian theology, God created him. So that kind of begs the question why? Now of course Christians will very quickly from God created Lucifer as a perfect angel. But then that also begs the question of what perfect means. Because apparently one part of his perfect wasn't the not rebel against God and try to destroy everyone's soul part. And couldn't God have, you know, sent in some better specs to the 3D printer to try to make sure that Lucifer didn't become this, this force of evil. And so even in ways that we try to deal with the, the reality of suffering, we often don't actually deal with it. We end up only partially Dealing with it. These questions about the justice of God are actually, I mean, they're some of the most difficult questions and I don't mean to be too trite to talk about them. There are people far smarter than me that have devoted their lives to try to deal with the problem of suffering and evil in the world, in the existence, because you really do have this paradox. You have a paradox of an all powerful God who's also all good. Again, we don't get the out of bound, we don't get the out of just saying, well, you know, God does all kinds of bad things the way that the, the Romans could. Instead we have to deal with the fact that God's all powerful and all loving and all merciful and all, all the alls, every, all you can give him. And also this world is terrible and Satan also exists and death exists and suffering exists. And by the way, even if you make it to the end of this suffering existence, since you have to have faith in Jesus in order to be saved, and the vast majority of people don't have faith in Jesus, what does that mean? It means after this suffering world, you're going to go to hell. And you don't, you know, you don't pass co, you don't collect 200, you go directly to hell and you're going to be in hell forever. This, you know, seems in some ways, and certainly seems to people who criticize it, it as an almost unfair aspect of the being of God. And it led people like Jonathan Edwards to try to describe the things that seem to be unfair by simply saying that who are you to question God? I know you think that that earthquake in Haiti was unfair, but God's will is being done and who are you to question it? You don't know God. God's thoughts are not your thoughts. And in fact he will go on to say this. Jonathan Edwards, God created us to demonstrate his glory. Well, okay, I think Latter Day Saints could kind of go along with that. I mean, at least they go along with, you know, the work and the glory, right? Is, you know, to bring to pass the immortality and turn to life man. So I think they kind of at least accept that he created Satan to demonstrate his goodness. So, so why is this horrible evil being created? Because of course God has to know that he's going to fall to show what goodness is. He created a world that he knew would fall and become evil to demonstrate his goodness. There's a lot packed into that sentence. Think of all of the suffering in this world. And Jonathan Edwards the great Calvinist theologian is saying he did it to show you what goodness is by showing you how evil, terrible evil is now. But back to my very last point on that. Even after you make it through this suffering world, in most cases you burn in hell forever. He said he created people that he knew would not be saved to demonstrate his justice. I want you to think about that. No one believes in a pre existence except for Latter Day Saints. That is a Latter Day Saint theology for Christians. Okay? Obviously there's other religions that do, but Christians don't believe in a preexistent life. They believe Jesus had a pre existence because he's part of God, but none of us existed until God created us. Usually they'll say at the moment of conception, but sometimes in the moment of birth. But it doesn't actually matter. Those nine months aren't really the factor here. The idea is that we didn't exist. Humans have no ac. We didn't exist. The only way we existed at all was that God knew that he was going to create us at some point. So that begins to beg the question. If God knew that he was going to create me, and of course he did, because if you say he didn't know, then that means he didn't know something. And he also knew that he was going to have me born in a country, you know, in 400 AD where I've never even heard the name Jesus, let alone had a chance to have faith in Him. Then God created me, knowing not only that I wouldn't be saved and that I would burn in hell forever. He. He created me knowing full, full well that I would never even have a chance to be saved again. This is where the doctrine of predestination really factors heavily in Calvinist theology. If you say God is all powerful and that God controls everything, then of course God is the one deciding who has faith and who doesn't. So that kind of paints this kind of stark picture on the one side. Now in our next episode, we're going to talk about how Doctrine and Covenant Section 93 helps answer these questions. The questions about the nature of Jesus, the question about the nature of God, and more importantly, the questions about our own nature that will actually help us answer the question, the problem of evil. I hate to leave you on a cliffhanger, so make sure you wait to see how bad the answer is before you decide how bad the the question was next week. But we will talk about this and how powerful Joseph Smith's revelation is to really, it revolutionizes theology and certainly latter Day Saint Theology. Thank you for listening to the Standard of Truth podcast, hosted by historian Dr. Garrett Dirkmot and Dr. Richard LeDoux. If you know of anybody that could benefit from the material in this episode, please share it with them. Until next time.