Friday, October 27, 2023

D. Charles Pyle on Isaiah 43:10

[On Isaiah 43:10:]

 

Those who become gods never are formed as gods; they are made gods. So it is also with LDS beliefs. Gods aren’t either born gods or formed into gods. They become gods and are made equal with Christ, becoming gods by the will of the Father and by the grace of Christ, by his imparting of the fulness of the Father to those who are joint heirs with Christ. No one in LDS beliefs actually is, or has been, either created or formed a god.

 

Yet still, though there is more to say about this verse, the utility of this verse of scripture to Evangelicals to attack LDS beliefs just received a further handicap. Since we do not believe that any god was formed a god, or created a god, the passage is irrelevant to us and doesn’t address our doctrine at all) as Evangelicals tend to think when they decide to use this verse to elicit unbelief in an unwary Latter-day Saint, or to cause doubt in an investigator of the Gospel message as presented by the Church). There are other nuances as well that may be seen in this form of the word, for this form of the word also can have several senses, most typically perfect and passive in meaning but which can also take a reflexive sense, which sense then would become “has created oneself,” or, “has formed oneself.” Sometimes the niphal perfect form just has a basic sense (“was formed,” or, “was created”), but if the reflexive meaning were applied one to easily could make the argument that the passage implies that gods don’t just form themselves (because people mold them, or otherwise form them into their varied shapes). One thus also could argue from this that God existed before humans on Earth molded idols, and that God will continue to exist even after all molded idols are gone.

 

This sense would bring us relatively closer to the real underlying meaning found in the Targum of Jonathan . . .

 

How did Jonathan ben Uzziel, who is attributed as the ancient author of the Targum of Jonathan, handle the text and its referents to time? That author simply interpreted the text of Isaiah 43:10 thus:

 

You are witnesses before me, says the LORD, and my servant, the Messiah, in whom is my desire, is that you may know and that you may believe before me, and be made to understand that I am he: I am he who is from the beginning; even ages of ages are mine, and apart from me there is no god.

 

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) (North Charleston, S.C.: CreateSpace, 2018), 106-7, 105