For I know that God is not a partial God, neither a changeable being; but he is unchangeable from all eternity to all eternity. (Moroni 8:18)
Many Evangelical critics of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its theology point to this verse, as well other similar verses in the Book of Mormon and other unique Latter-day Saint Scriptures (e.g., Mormon 7:22; Moroni 10:28; D&C 20:28) that Latter-day Saint scripture refutes the belief that the Father experienced mortality, as did the Son, as Joseph Smith taught in the King Follett Discourse, as well as the doctrine of eternal progression. How can Latter-day Saints harmonise their theology with such texts? Note a number of things that show Evangelicals are guilty of superficial reading of these texts:
- The attributes of deity have always existed, having no beginning and will have no end, regardless of who holds or shares these attributes.
- The ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Latins did not understand such terms in the same way as we do today. Our ideas on the meaning of "eternal" and its cognate terms are wholly modern ideas which were not believed as they are before the fourth century; indeed, the term we often translate as eternity (Hebrew: עוֹלָם Greek: αιων/αιωνιος) and related terms, alongside having a qualitative meaning, meant an undetermined and unspecified period of time to the ancients. They were forced to use such words in repetitive phrases to come near the concept, but even then the meaning still had inherent time constraints. If we understand such phrases in the Book of Mormon as ancients understood them, the conflict vanishes. Our concepts of eternity and time are wholly modern concepts which ancient Semites and others did not hold to; they are later, post-biblical constructions. [1]
- The Book of Mormon (and biblical) authors cannot be speaking of metaphysical natures not being changed; if such were the case, this would contradict the claim that Jesus Christ emptied himself to become a man like us (cf. Heb 2:16-18 and Phil 2:5-11 where Jesus experiences a kenosis), notwithstanding Heb 13:8 stating that Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
- In Latter-day Saint theology, intelligences, and all the attributes inherent within intelligence (e.g., personality) have existed throughout all eternity (e.g., D&C 93:29); God the Father has existed in like-manner, according to the teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith[2]
- Note the language of D&C 132:20: “Then shall they be gods, because they have no end; therefore shall they be from everlasting to everlasting . . .”
As for Psa 90:2, the Hebrew reads:
בטרם הרים ילדו ותחולל ארץ ותבל ומעולם עד עולם אתה אל
The 1985 JPS Tanakh renders the verse thusly:
Before the mountains came into being, before You brought forth the earth and the world, from eternity to eternity You are God.
The Hebrew phrase אתה אל (“you are” and “[a] god”) appears elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible:
And she called the name of the Lord that spake unto her, Thou God [NRSV: You are El [god] Roi] seest me . . .(Gen 16:13)
Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the Saviour. (Isa 45:15)
And he prayed unto the Lord, and said, I pray thee, O Lord, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto Tarshiah: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil. (Jonah 4:2)
The literal meaning of the Hebrew is "you are a god." Latter-day Saints can reconcile this biblical passage with our theology of God the Father having experiencing a mortality of his own under the premise that, once he was perfected/exalted (similar to how Jesus was--Phil 2:5-11; Luke 13:32; Heb 1:4; 5:9, etc) to being "[a] God," he remained "[a] God" "from everlasting to everlasting" (cf. D&C 132:20, quoted above and the discussion regarding the ancient understanding of "eternity").
With respect to Gen 16:13, in his book, Angelomorphic Christology, the Lutheran scholar Charles A. Gieschen provided the following translation of Gen 16:13:
With respect to Gen 16:13, in his book, Angelomorphic Christology, the Lutheran scholar Charles A. Gieschen provided the following translation of Gen 16:13:
So she called the name of YHWH who spoke to her, You are an El of seeing” [ ותקרא שׁם־יהוה הדבר אליה אתה אל ראי]; for she said, “Have I really seen him, and remained alive after seeing him?” (Charles A. Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology: Antecedents and Early Evidence [Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1998; repr., Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2017], 58, emphasis in original)
Notice how Gieschen renders אתה אל as "You are an El" (note the indefinite article), the same phrase that appears in Psa 90:2. One raises this issue as some misinformed critics of LDS theology have argued that translating the Hebrew phrase אתה אל as "you are a god/El" is inappropriate when in fact they fly in the face of scholarship of the Old Testament and the Hebrew language itself.
Commenting on passages such as Moroni 8:18 in the Book of Mormon that speak of God the Father being “unchangeable from all eternity to all eternity,” LDS apologist D. Charles Pyle wrote the following which is rather insightful:
We simply could here on this point of the Nephites thinking in terms of Hebrew meanings when composing in Egyptian words and sentences, but it also is of interest to note what ancient Egyptians would have expressed if the Nephites themselves also thought similarly to the way that the Egyptian people did while writing their own religious and other texts in Egyptian. For instance, the Egyptian word for “eternity,” ḥḥ, was expressed both by the word as well as by the ideographic symbol of the same meaning, both of which had the same range of meaning from “a great but indefinite number” to “millions” (as in the number of years, also seen in some writings) in their religious texts. A deity named Ḥḥ was in their pantheon, with the tacit understanding among the ancient Egyptians that this god thus himself also was “the god of hundreds of thousands of years.” Another way of writing the word was nḥḥ (meaning eternity). And in connection with this word’s form there also was a deity named Nḥḥ (described as “the god of eternity”).
The Egyptians, much as the Hebrews so did, sometimes also would string together word expressing long durations of time. Yet even those usages still represented long, measurable durations of time, thus demonstrating that even the Egyptians used various words (which frequently are translated as eternity, everlasting, and for ever and ever) similarly to how the Hebrews also did with respect to time. For instance, they might want to write a phrase like nḥḥ dt (or its fuller form nḥḥ ḥnc dt) to mean something like eternity with everlastingness. Thus, Egyptian also used similar approaches to meaning in which words were attached to other words, as also seen in the use of the phrase ḥḥ nn dr, or it fuller form ḥḥnn drc (meaning literally millions of years without limit, or, an eternity without end). The mere existence of such constructions shows us that even Egyptian ḥḥ and nḥḥ did not mean eternity as we have tended to think of the concept. Nor did dt by itself mean everlasting as we might assume it did. Also weighty is evidence we have seen that an Egyptian word for eternity in a phrase like ḥtr šn nḥḥ (meaning a tax fixed or ever or a perpetual tax) also reveals to us that said word did not have inherent within it a meaning we might want to attach to it with our Western way of looking at philosophical constructs. (D. Charles Pyle, I Have Said Ye are Gods: Concepts Conducive to the Early Christian Doctrine of Deification in Patristic Literature and the Underlying Strata of the Greek New Testament (Revised and Supplemented) [CreateSpace, 2018], 226-28, italics in original)
Notes for the Above
[1] For a thorough study of the meaning of the terms αιων/αιωνιος and their ancient meanings, see Ilaria Ramelli and David Konstan, Terms for Eternity: Aionios and Aidios in Classical and Christian Texts (Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias Press, 2007). For the difference between Semitic and post-biblical Greek concepts of "time" and "eternity," see Thorleif Bornan, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (New York: Norton, 1970).
[2] As representative examples, taken from The Words of Joseph Smith: The Contemporary Accounts of the Nauvoo Discourses of the Prophet Joseph Smith (Provo: BYU Religious Studies Centre, 1980), ed. Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook; spelling errors in original text retained: "God was a self exhisting being, man exhists upon the same principle. God made a tabernacle & put a spirit in it and it became a Human soul, man exhisted in spirit & mind coequal with God himself . . . Intelligence is Eternal & it is self exhisting" (p. 346); "Intelligence exists upon a selfexistent principle" (p. 360); "I believe that God is eternal. That He had no beginning, and can have no end. Eternity means that which is without beginning or end. I believe that the soul is eternal; and had no beginning; it can have no end” (p. 33)
For Further Reading
Blake T. Ostler, Exploring Mormon Thought: The Attributes of God (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2001).