'As man now is, God once was'

A doctrine taught plainly by Joseph Smith and for 150 years afterward is now described as something little is known or taught about.

What the Church claims

Prophets reveal the true nature of God; Joseph Smith restored that knowledge.

Once the evidence is in, this claim: Weak. The documentary record of teach-then-minimize is clear and rests on the Church's own publications; what it proves is institutional inconsistency, not the falsity of the doctrine.

The record

  • The Clayton manuscript of the King Follett discourse has Smith saying God 'is a man like one of yourselves - that is the great secret' and 'was once as one of us and was on a planet'. The Church's 1971 Ensign reprint reads 'God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man' and 'you have got to learn how to be gods yourselves'.
  • Asked by Time in 1997 whether the Church teaches that God the Father was once a man, President Hinckley answered 'I don't know that we teach it. I don't know that we emphasize it' and said he did not know a lot about it.
  • The 2014 Gospel Topics essay 'Becoming Like God' quotes the Snow couplet and states: 'Little has been revealed about the first half of this couplet, and consequently little is taught.' It quotes Hinckley calling it 'pretty deep theology that we don't know very much about'.
  • The discourse was never canonized; it survives in several scribal reports (Clayton, Bullock, Richards, Woodruff) later amalgamated.

The moving target

  • 1844-04-07: God was once as we are and is an exalted man; humans must learn to be gods.
  • 1971-04: Reprinted the King Follett sermon for the general membership.
  • 1997-08: 'I don't know that we teach it. I don't know that we emphasize it.'
  • 2014-02: Affirms deification; says little has been revealed or is taught about God's past.

The exchange

FAIR

Hinckley was answering whether God was a man 'like we are' and was truthfully saying the Church does not emphasize or know much about it; Time truncated the answer. He denied nothing.

The answer: FAIR's contextual points are fair as far as they go, and critics who say Hinckley 'lied' overstate it. But the Church itself reprinted King Follett in the Ensign in 1971 and the couplet appeared in Church manuals; 'I don't know that we teach it' to a national audience is, at minimum, public-relations minimizing of a distinctive doctrine. The 2014 essay then formalises the retreat by treating the first half of the couplet as largely unrevealed even though Smith presented it as 'the great secret' he was revealing.

What they get right: There is a real distinction between 'we do not teach it' and 'it is false', and the King Follett text is a set of longhand reports, not scripture.

common apologetic position

King Follett is not canon; only the standard works and united First Presidency statements bind the Church, so there is nothing to retract.

The answer: The 'not canon' move protects the institution at the price of the central claim: if a prophet's most famous sermon on the nature of God, delivered in general conference two months before his death, is not reliable doctrine, the value of having prophets to reveal God's nature is unclear.

Both cases at full strength

The skeptics' case

This is a documented case of doctrinal drift on the most basic question a religion answers - who God is. Smith announced God's human past as the 'great secret'; the Church circulated it to members for generations; its president then told the national press he did not know that it was taught; and the current official essay says little is revealed and little is taught. None of this proves the doctrine false. It does show that Church teaching about God's nature is governed by reception and public relations at least as much as by revelation, and that the 'first half of the couplet' can be neither affirmed nor repudiated without cost.

The apologetic case

The Church has never repudiated the teaching, and the essay still affirms that God is an exalted being and that humans can become like him. Reticence about what is not revealed is intellectual honesty, not evasion; Hinckley's answer accurately described emphasis. Ostler's reading (God's mortality was like Christ's) removes most of the philosophical sting.

What would change this

An official clarification either reaffirming or disavowing God's mortal past.

Closely related

Sources

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