The seventh “Lecture on Faith” is an extended discussion of deification. It is a complete treatise on salvation as deification in the Mormon tradition. Lecture 7 argues that the Father and the Son are “saved beings” because they have the divine attributes and that any being is saved only by virtue of having these same divine attributes. “These teachings of the Savior must clearly show unto us the nature of salvation, and what he proposed unto the human family when he proposed to save them—that he proposed to make them like unto himself, and he was like the Father, the great prototype of all saved beings; and for any portion of the human family to be assimilated into their likeness is to be saved; and to be unlike them is to be destroyed; and on this hinge turns the door of salvation.” (Lecture 7, para. 16)
This, in order to be saved, it is necessary to possess each of
the divine attributes in their fulness. The Father and the Son are the
prototypes of saved beings and to be saved is to be like them in every respect.
To be saved in the same way that Christ is a saved being, we must become not
merely like Christ, but the same kind of being that he is in every respect.
Thus, by sharing the fulness of the deity the Saints participate in the fulness
of the divine attributes that is communicated by such intimate sharing of life in
unity:
It is
scarcely necessary here to observe what we have previously noticed: That the
glory which the Father and the Son have, is because they are just and holy
beings; and that if they were lacking in one attribute or perfection which they
have, the glory which they have, never could be enjoyed by them; for it
requires them to be precisely what they are in order to enjoy it: and if the
Savior gives this glory to any others, he must do it in the very way set forth
in his prayer to his Father: by making them one with him, as he and the Father
are one.--In so doing he would give them the glory which the Father has given
him; and when his disciples are made one with the Father and the Son, as the
Father and the Son are one, who cannot see the propriety of the Savior's
saying, The works which I do, shall they do; and greater works than these shall
they do, because I go to the Father? (Lecture 7, para. 15)
What has often been missed by Mormon scholars is that the
King Follett Discourse, which Joseph Smith delivered on April 7, 1844, is an expansion
of the seventh “Lecture on Faith.” That discourse again presents the same argument
that beings must be the same kind of being as God to be saved. The “Lectures on
Faith” assert that the attributes of God’s character (identified in Lecture 3)
are precisely those attributes in which we must share to be saved as God is.
That is exactly the starting point for Joseph Smith in the King Follett
Discourse. To comprehend ourselves and what our capacities are, we must
comprehend God: “If men do not comprehend the character of God, they do not
comprehend themselves.”
Blake T. Ostler, Exploring Mormon Thought: Of Gods and
Gods (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2008), 369-70
