I think a growing theological problem in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is that members are taking on the Nicene God without taking on the Nicene council. They want the God of Nicaea without Nicaea. It’s a byproduct of their desire to be “mainstream” and not “peculiar”.
You hear it whenever a member insists that God knows every outcome in advance and could cure any child of cancer with a word, but simply chooses not to. That is Augustine’s God, not Joseph’s.
The God of the Restoration exists within time, is an exalted being who instituted the eternal laws, and is bound by them. Alma said it plainly: if he broke them, he would cease to be God.
And this matters more than almost anything else we argue about, because Augustine’s God, the creedal one, has no answer for that child struck with cancer, but Joseph’s does.
Augustine’s God created everything from nothing. He wrote the laws of biology, knew before the first atom existed which children would get cancer, and can suspend any of it at any moment at no cost to himself. So every dead child was either decreed or permitted by a being who could have done otherwise for free. Augustine spent his life trying to talk his way out of that.
Joseph reveal a different deity. Matter is eternal and was organized, not spoken into existence (D&C 93:33). Intelligence was never created and cannot be (D&C 93:29). Agency is not a privilege God hands out but the grain of being itself, otherwise there is no existence (D&C 93:30). Law was irrevocably decreed before the foundation of the world (D&C 130:20). God is an exalted being who lives within time, works within that law, and is bound by it
That God is not choosing to let a child die. He is working inside a world of real agents and real matter running on real law, a world he did not build with cancer in it, and he is doing everything the law allows. That is why Enoch watched him weep (Moses 7:28). Augustine’s God cannot weep. Impassibility forbids it. A God who cannot be hurt by what happens to you never has to answer for it.
Joseph’s God weeps because he is inside the same story you are.
In Augustine’s world a child’s cancer was decreed or permitted.
In Joseph’s world it is grieved, shared, and one day undone.
When LDS members start arguing for exhaustive foreknowledge and a God who could fix anything at will, they are not defending the Restoration. They are handing back the one problem Joseph actually solved, and they inherit Augustine’s silence at the graveside along with it.
I know you believe in miracles. Tell me what do you think of miracles of healing? How do they happen? Do they happen because of faith? Gods will? Both? — I believe he can heal, that he can save, because of the number of times I have seen him heal and save miraculously. This tells me he can intervene, but it also is true that he doesn’t always, and overall it’s rare from my earthly view. — what is your belief as to how this squares with what you wrote.
BTW: I believe God works within natural law, that there are laws he cannot break, laws he will not break, and that this limits him in so far as we are talking about doing things that would break apart the reality we live in and the ultimate purposes of existence and his plan.
What I personally believe?
miracles are dynamic, real time divine responses to human agency rather than pre scripted events playing out on an unalterable timeline.
That’s all. I have no further explanations.
I wish I had a better answer.
There is a lot here but yes to a lot of it.
We need to have a space about this with a lot of the lds apologist.
But this has been discussed quite a bit on some podcasts in the past.
had a long thread on open theism that was really interesting. Some really good arguments from LDS in both firewood the open versus exhaustive. Was fascinating!
I am replacing as chief LDS apologist. It wasn’t my decision, but the people demanded it.
You are right , and I think Ex nihilo is the load bearing error. Creation-from-nothing solidified in Christian thought around Tatian, ~200 A.D.
If God invents you out of nothing, or out of His own mind/imagination…then every act you ever perform is the script He wrote before you existed. I have called that a form of panentheism: creatures as extensions of God’s mind acted out in a world He imagined.
- If He did not want a given person in hell, or a given rape to occur, He could have created that person differently, placed them elsewhere, or not created them.
-Calvinism is that logic made honest: nobody can do anything about their fate except God.
The LDS religion has “the best take on free agency… largely because of the rejection of ex nihilo creation. Foreknowledge is not as much of a problem by itself. Foreknowledge plus “I invented you from nothing and could have invented you otherwise at no cost” is the poison.
Joseph Smith taught something different, “how did a flawed nature happen?”
As you already quoted, “Intelligence / light of truth was not created and cannot be (D&C 93:29). “Man was also in the beginning with God.” Intelligence already acts. “All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence” (D&C 93:30). No agency, no existence.
Parley P. Pratt said each person is “an individual intelligence, an agent endowed with life, with a degree of independence, or inherent will.” Joseph said, God found Himself “in the midst of spirits and glory,” and because He was more intelligent, God created us spiritually before physically upon the face of the Earth. God raised us in a spiritual family before offering mortality. God instituted laws so the rest of us could learn God’s divine nature, voluntary self sacrifice, and God instructed the weaker intelligences and instituted the plan of salvation.
LDS understand that the core of a person is not a thought God had. It is an uncreated actor God found and then offered a path. It seems that even the transition from intelligence to spirit child is voluntary. At some point each intelligence is organized as a spirit child of Heavenly Parents.
Joseph Smith said the organization of spiritual beings was “agreeable to the most perfect order and harmony… their limits and bounds were fixed irrevocably, and voluntarily subscribed to by themselves.” The theory is that the move from eternal intelligence to spirit child is something each intelligence accepts, not something imposed on a blank.
Spirit children were never identical. Abraham 3 says some intelligences are more intelligent than others and have no beginning. Jehovah is “more intelligent than they all”. Jesus was. Firstborn not merely by clock time but as the Father’s chosen heir because of that superiority. He is the one who said, “Father, thy will be done, and the glory be thine forever.”
Agency was already real in that estate.
