Source: Nels Lars Nelson, Scientific Aspects of Mormonism Or Religion in Terms of Life, pp. 275-283, 1904. Internet Archive link.
Having examined, in the previous chapters, those aspects and concepts of the Universe, and also those texts of Scripture which seem to antagonize the personal or Christ-type of Deity, and found them not inconsistent with the Bible revelation of Him, I shall let that question rest, and assume that the only supreme being to whom earth-spirits owe allegiance is Jehovah, our Father in heaven, the immediate Creator and controller of this earth and all things in it.
But since by this conception He is made to belong to the same order of beings as Christ, His Son, — the same order, indeed, as man himself, — and must consequently have attained to Godhood or creative power, it becomes a pertinent question to consider how He reached such divine sovereignty, (i ) Was He elected to the supreme place? Election may confer dominion, — it cannot add an iota to native ability; but is not dominion part of divine supremacy? (2) Was Godhood conferred upon Him? Ordination may give place and opportunity, — it cannot give creative power. But are not place and opportunity vital relations in creative power? (3) Did He attain to Godhood by the gradual development of powers inherent in His very being?
Whatever the answer shall be to these questions, one thing may be absolutely predicated on the start: He is God primarily by reason of supreme fitness; for Godhood, being omnipotence or the power to create in harmony with the infinite unity of the universe, is a thing, like brains, not conferrable by authority nor purchasable by money or influence. A being has either attained to this power, or he has not attained to it, by native self-effort. The universe itself could not give it to any man. A sufficient general answer, therefore, would be that God became God because He fulfilled the law of becoming perfect as His Father in heaven was perfect; or, in the terms of science, because He fulfilled the supreme requirements of psychic evolution.
But before considering specifically the meaning of these answers, let us see what we may learn from the analogy of human sovereignties; premising our investigation with this general consideration : that as man’s institutions of law and government are deductions from his interpretations of nature and life — which be it remembered are expressions of God’s ideals, — truth or the power analogous to Godhood is in these institutions to the extent that man has interpreted correctly, and afterward reasoned correctly on his interpretations; and it is needless to say on the other hand that error, and consequently instability, lurks in them to the extent that he has failed to grasp and generalize the full significance of the divine ideals. It follows, then, that any epoch of nature-study, any period during which multitudes of people depart from conventionalities, give attention to the innate significance of nature and human life, — must be characterized by rapidly changing human institutions, and their readjustment on lines more nearly in conformity with nature, as we say, — really more in conformity with the thoughts of God.
This is one way in which the text, “God rules among the nations of the earth” is made true; and, thank heaven, it is becoming more deeply and widely true every day throughout the world. The immediate conclusion, however, which I wish here to draw is : that in seeking an answer to the question how God became God, we are not to expect the light to break from some deep, occult cave of speculation, or even through some dark cloud of scriptural mystery, but rather from the very face of nature and of life ; and if in scanning human forms of sovereignty, we shall discover the filagree shreds of truth, we may be sure that such forms, by so much at least, exhibit types of God-hood; which, after all, is merely a concreted, organized aspect of universal, absolute truth or harmony.
Consider, then, the first type which human sovereignty assumed — the patriarchal. Is there anything in this form which corresponds with a definite relation of God to man? Yes; it is the very relation which we revere when we pray: ”Our Father who art in heaven.” We may be certain then that this relationship is part of God-hood, — a part that could not have been neglected by our Father in the attainment of creative power.
But it is not all of Godhood, nor even enough to form by itself a safe basis for sovereignty. In human governments it failed because of the narrowness of its base: men were driven to sacrifice love, mercy, even truth itself to uphold mere blood or parenthood supremacy, and consequently civilization stood still.
In monarchical forms of sovereignty, which followed next, there must be an element of Godhood, since they have been so long and so widely tried by mankind. That element lies precisely in this circumstance: that abstract law, whether human or divine, will not execute itself. The king therefore resembles God as executor of law.
Unfortunately, — and here lies the weakness of monarchy as a basis for sovereignty — the king soon came to regard his own will as the sufficient source of authority. The people were in time debauched into the same conception; and, consequently, as truth, honor, life itself, were made subservient to the fear or favor of kings, civilization— which, be it remembered, represents the progress of God’s social ideals — again stood still.
But the direst evil resulting from this form, was the universal reaction whereby God Himself came to be regarded as only a more absolute and less evadable King of kings, and the consequent power it gave to millions of priestly pretenders in every age and place, to extort obedience to anything which they could persuade or terrify mankind into believing was His will. And the world is yet in the shadow of this awful curse.
Nevertheless, after all is said, kinghood is part of Godhood ; for like the king, God is supreme in power, and from His judgments there is no appeal. His autocracy, however, lies not in the fact that He is supreme-by-will, but in the fact that He is supreme-by-law — the very incarnation, as it were, of the truth and harmony of the universe; and consequently he who would escape falling “into the hand of the living God,” need only conform to law as it touches him on all sides during every day of his life.
In pure democracy, the latest form of power, the basis of sovereignty is conceived to be the abstract quality of truth or right ; in other words, the quality which became subservient by the degeneracy of the patriarchal and monarchical orders, is here, in theory at least, made supreme. But as truth or right means nothing save as apprehended by an intelligent being, and as experience proves that no one being can be trusted to its apprehension, democracy bases its sovereignty on truth as apprehended by all the people ; in other words, upon what ought to be the highest conception of relative truth.
This is surely the noblest generalization of sovereignty yet attained by the race; and how near it comes to ideal Sovereignty is seen when we remember that the central fact of Godhood itself is absolute truth — truth as apprehended by a being in perfect accord with the universe.
Nor ought we to lose sight of this latter fact whenever we think of God : for though He is the Father of our spirits, and consequently deserves our love as the supreme Patriarch; and though He is King of kings, whose judgment, we ought to remember with fear and trembling, is absolute and final; yet, as when the people of a republic, in doing homage to their chief executive, reverence the authority rather than him who represents it, so in our worship of Deity, it is Godhood, the infinite power of the universe, rather than the exalted Man who wields that power, which should receive our devotions ; if, indeed, the two concepts, eternally united as they are, can be divided in thought at all.
At first sight this may seem a supercritical distinction ; but a little reflection will show that it is a point of view which has tremendous consequences in the shaping of our lives. For one thing in particular, it will tend to cure that neurotic disease in religion known as adoration, which is not truth-worship but person-worship; and in general it will teach us to reverence truth, the abstract relation, rather than the concrete forms with which it may be incidentally or temporarily related.
By this excursus into the analogies furnished by human sovereignties we have perhaps not directly advanced our answer to the question which is the thesis of this chapter, viz., How God became God; yet our time has not been wasted if we begin to see, even glimmeringly, that the answer is to be sought in life and nature, not in occult speculation ; that in fact whatever is vital or thorough-going in the relations which men assume to each other, is nothing other than the reflex of that very power whose origin we are seeking.
Coming back then to our general answer, that Godhood is the supreme and final outcome of psychic evolution, or of eternal progress, to use the phrase common to Mormonism, it will be seen that the line of our enquiry is precisely this : that if we would know how God became God, we have only to study attentively the plan whereby man is enabled to become perfect as his Father in heaven is perfect. This plan has already been somewhat exhaustively laid before the reader in previous chapters. Here I need only make a summary.
It is self-evident, is it not, that power which culminates in the ability to create and control a solar system is attained only as a progressive acquirement; involving cycles of time of which, indeed, man can form no conception ; but brought about, nevertheless, by processes of development of which the methods presented by his present life are fairly adequate samples.
As before pointed out, it is by means of our attrition with environment that we rise or fall, — counting by environment all those forces, spiritual or otherwise, not ourselves, with which the soul comes into relations. If we conquer, we rise toward Godhood by our added power; if environment conquers, — that is, if we flinch or fail in the trials of life, — we sink to a lower plane, because we have lost power.
Given, then, by our Father in heaven, an environment progressively differentiated so as to be matched with our growing powers ; given on our parts a steadfastness of purpose which shall not fail, no matter what the temptation — a purpose represented by the mental attitude, “Father, thy will be done”; given as much of eternity as we shall need for this psychic evolution, — and what heights are there, within the compass of omnipotence, that man cannot scale? — Consequently, what heights that God did not scale in order to become God?
Note here that the very essence of victory over environment consists in these circumstances: (i) that we discover the law, or eternal significance, of that which opposes us. This part of our triumph we call knowledge. (2) That we put our own lives in harmony with the law so discovered. Knowledge is thereby transmuted into intelligence. It follows, therefore, that the measure of our intelligence at any time represents the degree to which we have attained Godhood: whence the truth of another aphorism in Mormonism becomes apparent: ”The glory of God is intelligence.”
There is no other real glory attainable by the human race. The glories of wealth, or beauty, or place, after which we mortals strive so madly, are mere shams — pitiful, temporary counterfeits — compared with the power of Godhood; for the glory of intelligence is the glory of manhood and womanhood, the glory of virility and power, and not of pretension ; in short, the glory of character. The weakness of our civilization — though it is the strongest the world has ever seen — still lies in this — that ten thousand colleges and a million books enable us to see this glory but not to possess it; the education of the age teaches us to know, but does not give us the backbone necessary to do.
See also
- Mormon Quotes on the Regress of Gods, by Aaron Shafovaloff
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