Theosis and Exaltation: Two Very Different Meanings of “Becoming Gods”

Few phrases cause more confusion between Christians than “becoming gods.” Orthodox Christians use the language, carefully, to describe salvation as union with God. Latter-day Saints use it to describe exaltation, the highest destiny their faith holds out. Both appeal to the same verses: Peter’s promise that believers may become “partakers of the divine nature,” and the line from Psalm 82 that Jesus quoted, “I said, ‘You are gods.’” It is natural to ask whether the two traditions mean the same thing.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has sharpened the question. Its Gospel Topics essay “Becoming Like God,” first posted in 2014, argues that “Latter-day Saint beliefs would have sounded more familiar to the earliest generations of Christians than they do to many modern Christians,” and it calls Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria and Basil the Great as witnesses.¹ If that is right, the Orthodox Church, which still teaches deification, would look like a natural ally of Latter-day Saint teaching.

The question is about God before it is about us. What we can become depends on who God is: whether he alone is uncreated, whether he was ever a man, and whether the “gods” of Psalm 82 share his nature or his grace. This article sets the two teachings side by side, each in its own words. It is written from the Orthodox side, but tries to describe Latter-day Saint teaching as a thoughtful Latter-day Saint would recognize it.

In brief

Orthodox Christianity teaches theosis, or deification. By grace, through union with the incarnate Son and the gift of the Holy Spirit, human beings come to share in God’s own life: his immortality, holiness and glory. The Fathers who taught this, from Irenaeus and Athanasius to Maximus the Confessor and Gregory Palamas, also taught that God alone is uncreated, that he made all things from nothing, and that creatures share his life without ever sharing his essence. Latter-day Saint exaltation, as set out in the Doctrine and Covenants, Joseph Smith’s King Follett discourse and current Church manuals, teaches that faithful men and women may become gods, receiving the kind of life Heavenly Father lives. It rests on different premises: an embodied Father who, in Joseph Smith’s 1844 teaching, was once a man; intelligence (the core of each human spirit) and elements that were never created; a plurality of divine beings; and exaltation tied to temple ordinances and eternal marriage. The Church’s essay is right that early Christians spoke boldly about deification and that much of Western Christianity later neglected the theme. But the shared vocabulary covers a deep difference in the doctrine of God. The early Church did not lose exaltation. It kept deification, inside the distinction between Creator and creature.

Thesis: Orthodox theosis and Latter-day Saint exaltation use the same biblical words for different destinies, because in theosis a creature is made god by grace and shares the life of the one uncreated God, while in exaltation a child of God grows into the same kind of being the Father is.

The same words, two different maps

Question	Orthodox theosis (the Fathers)	Latter-day Saint exaltation (Church sources)
Has the Father always been God?	Yes. No divine person “was man, and then became God.”	The King Follett discourse says God “was once as we are now”; the Church says little has been revealed about this.
Where do matter and souls come from?	God made all things from nothing.	Intelligence “was not created or made,” and “the elements are eternal.”
What does “gods” mean?	Creatures made god by grace, never by nature.	Exalted beings: “Then shall they be gods,” with “all power.”
How is it received?	Through Christ, by the Holy Spirit, in the life of the Church, for married and celibate alike.	Through Christ’s Atonement, with required ordinances including the temple endowment and eternal marriage.

What the Fathers meant by deification

The biblical starting points

Three passages carry most of the weight. Second Peter speaks of “exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust” (2 Peter 1:4). Psalm 82 (Psalm 81 in the Septuagint) reads: “I said, ‘You are gods, And all of you are children of the Most High. But you shall die like men, And fall like one of the princes’” (82:6–7). Jesus quotes it in John 10:34–35. And he prays, “the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one” (John 17:22).²

Carl Mosser has argued that the earliest Christian readings of Psalm 82, in Justin Martyr, Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria, treat it mainly as a declaration of divine sonship, drawing on Jewish traditions that read the psalm as the story of Adam’s lost immortality and glory and their restoration. On his reading, Christian deification grew from Second Temple Jewish roots, not from a Greek takeover of the gospel.³ Justin fits that description. The psalm, he says, shows that human beings “were made like God, free from suffering and death, provided that they kept His commandments,” and that “all men are deemed worthy of becoming gods, and of having power to become sons of the Highest.”⁴

Irenaeus: “even what He is Himself”

Irenaeus of Lyons, writing around 180, gave the tradition one of its most quoted lines. Christ “did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.” The logic is adoption: “the Word of God was made man ... that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God.” The “gods” of Psalm 82 are those “who have received the grace of the adoption, by which we cry, Abba Father.”⁵

One passage sounds close to the Latter-day Saint idea of progression: “we have not been made gods from the beginning, but at first merely men, then at length gods.” Latter-day Saint readers are right to notice it. Yet in the same paragraph Irenaeus rebukes those who claim “that there is no distinction between the uncreated God and man, a creature of today.”⁶ Growth, for him, is a creature growing into incorruption, not a creature becoming uncreated. He is equally clear about origins: men can only work “out of matter already existing,” but God “called into being the substance of His creation, when previously it had no existence.”⁷

Athanasius: God became man, not man God

The best-known sentence on deification is from Athanasius’s On the Incarnation: “For He was made man that we might be made God.”⁸ The treatise gives it a precise frame. God made the universe “out of nothing, and without its having any previous existence,” and “man is by nature mortal, inasmuch as he is made out of what is not.” Athanasius reads Psalm 82 in that light: a creature who kept the knowledge of God “would live henceforth as God.” Deification is the rescue of a creature from the nothingness it came from, by the Word who made it.

Against the Arians, who on his account held that the Son was a creature promoted for his virtue, he draws the line sharply: “Therefore He was not man, and then became God, but He was God, and then became man, and that to deify us.” The Son is God “not receiving these prerogatives as a reward for His virtue,” but by nature. Our case is the reverse: “we too become sons, not as He in nature and truth, but according to the grace of Him that calls, and though we are men from the earth, are yet called gods, not as the True God or His Word, but as has pleased God who has given us that grace.”⁹ Deification and the Nicene faith arrive together. Only one who is God by nature can make others gods by grace.

The Cappadocians and Augustine

Basil the Great counts among the Spirit’s gifts “the being made like to God, and, highest of all, the being made God,” in a treatise defending the Spirit’s full divinity.¹⁰ Gregory of Nazianzus says Christ’s humanity was united to God “in order that I too might be made God so far as He is made Man,” and argues, “if He is not to be worshipped, how can He deify me by Baptism?”¹¹ (See our article on the Cappadocian Fathers.) In the West, Augustine reads Psalm 82 the same way: “He has called men gods, that are deified of His Grace, not born of His Substance ... this is the effect of Grace adopting, not of nature generating.”¹²

Maximus, John of Damascus and Gregory Palamas

Later Greek writers refined the teaching. Maximus the Confessor (died 662) divides reality first of all between “the uncreated nature” and “the universal created nature, which receives its being from becoming.” In Christ the human person unites the two “through love,” so that the whole creation is shown “wholly interpenetrated by God, and become completely whatever God is, save at the level of being.”¹³ John of Damascus says we become “deified, in the way of participating in the divine glory and not in that of a change into the divine being.” Explaining how Christ’s own flesh was deified by its union with the Word, he uses the image of iron in the fire: “the flaming steel burns, not because it has been endowed in a physical way with burning energy, but because it has obtained this energy by its union with fire.”¹⁴

In the fourteenth century Gregory Palamas gave the teaching its classic Orthodox form. God is “imparticipable in substance,” so “those deemed worthy of union with God are united to God in energy.”¹⁵ The divine energies are God himself acting and giving himself, uncreated, yet distinct from the essence no creature shares. (See our article on Palamas and the hesychasts and the infographic Theosis: Becoming by Grace What God Is by Nature.)

{{very-strong: From the second century to the fourteenth, the Fathers who speak of deification describe it as a gift of grace to creatures who never become God by nature or essence.}} That is what the Orthodox Church means by theosis, explained further in What Is Theosis?

Latter-day Saint exaltation in its own words

The revelations

The clearest canonized statements of exaltation are revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants, which the Church holds as scripture. In the 1832 vision of section 76, those who “overcome by faith, and are sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise” receive the Father’s fulness: “they are gods, even the sons of God,” and he “makes them equal in power, and in might, and in dominion.” Section 88 says the saints will “be made equal with him.” Section 93 teaches that “Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be,” and that “The elements are eternal.” Section 130 says, “The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s.”¹⁶

Section 132, recorded in July 1843, says of those sealed by the new and everlasting covenant of marriage: “Then shall they be gods, because they have no end; ... Then shall they be gods, because they have all power, and the angels are subject unto them.” Those outside that covenant “are not gods, but are angels of God forever and ever.” Section 131 adds that to obtain the highest degree of celestial glory “a man must enter into this order of the priesthood [meaning the new and everlasting covenant of marriage].”¹⁷

The King Follett discourse

On April 7, 1844, Joseph Smith preached at a conference in Nauvoo, Illinois, partly in memory of King Follett, killed in an accident weeks before. The Church republished the sermon in the Ensign in 1971, noting that it was reconstructed from four men’s longhand notes and quoting History of the Church that it “was not a stenographic report.” In that text Joseph Smith says: “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens!” He tells his hearers that “you have got to learn how to be gods yourselves ... the same as all gods have done before you.” The Hebrew word for create, he says, “does not mean to create out of nothing; it means to organize,” and “Element had an existence from the time He had.” Of human spirits: “The intelligence of spirits had no beginning, neither will it have an end,” and “God never had the power to create the spirit of man at all.”¹⁸

In a sermon on June 16, 1844, answering critics who said he taught “a plurality of Gods,” he embraced the phrase: “the doctrine of a plurality of Gods is as prominent in the Bible as any doctrine.” The same report records him saying, “I say there are Gods many & Ld[s] many but to us— only one & we are to be in subjectn. to that one.”¹⁹ Both halves matter: many gods, but only one to whom we are subject.

The Church today is careful about the King Follett text. Its essay calls it Joseph Smith’s “most detailed known discussion of divine nature and exaltation,” but adds that “we are left without certainty about Joseph Smith’s exact or complete wording” and that “the surviving sermon text is not canonized and should not be treated as a doctrinal standard in and of itself.”²⁰

How it is taught today

The best-known summary is Lorenzo Snow’s couplet: “As man now is, God once was: / As God now is, man may be.” The Church’s manual on his teachings says he formed it in 1840 and, once he knew Joseph Smith had taught the doctrine publicly, “testified of it frequently.”²¹ The basic manual Gospel Principles puts the goal plainly: “Exaltation is eternal life, the kind of life God lives. ... We can become like our Heavenly Father. This is exaltation.” Among the blessings of the exalted it lists, “They will become gods,” and among the requirements, “We must receive the temple endowment” and “We must be married for eternity, either in this life or in the next.”²²

Leaders have spoken with more reserve about the first half of the couplet. In 1994 Gordon B. Hinckley, then First Counselor in the First Presidency, told general conference that “the whole design of the gospel is to lead us onward and upward to greater achievement, even, eventually, to godhood.” In 1997, by then President of the Church, he was asked by a reporter about God once being as man is and said, “That gets into some pretty deep theology that we don’t know very much about.” Asked about humans’ divine potential, he answered, “Well, as God is, man may become. We believe in eternal progression. Very strongly.” That October he told conference he had been “much quoted, and in a few instances misquoted and misunderstood,” without naming the reports, and added, “You need not worry that I do not understand some matters of doctrine.”²³ The essay agrees: “Little has been revealed about the first half of this couplet, and consequently little is taught.” It also stresses that “God’s children will always worship Him” and that “Our progression will never change His identity as our Father and our God.”²⁴

So there is a real range. Canonized scripture teaches that the exalted will be gods, that intelligence and the elements are uncreated, and that the Father is embodied; the claim that the Father was once a mortal man rests mainly on the uncanonized sermon and on the couplet, which the essay notes “has never been canonized” either. Latter-day Saint scholars defend the wider picture seriously: David Paulsen has argued that many early Christians believed in a corporeal God, and Daniel Peterson that Jesus’ use of Psalm 82 treats “gods” and humans as overlapping categories.²⁵ For the historical development, see Did Mormon Doctrine of God Change? and Becoming Gods?

Weighing the essay’s appeal to the Fathers

Where the essay is right

Several of the essay’s claims are correct. Early Christians did speak boldly about deification; the essay quotes Norman Russell on the “ubiquity of the doctrine of deification.”²⁶ Mosser’s work also suits the essay’s case, since it tells against the old claim that deification was simply borrowed from Greek philosophy. Much of Western Christianity did neglect the theme, and the essay notes that it “remains a central tenet of Eastern Orthodoxy.” Both traditions agree that salvation is more than a legal verdict (see Why Is Salvation More Than Just “Going to Heaven”?). The essay is also candid: “What exactly the early church fathers meant when they spoke of becoming God is open to interpretation,” and “There are likely important differences as well as similarities.”²⁷ The question is how large those differences are.

Where the Fathers and the Restoration part ways

A Father who was never a man. The King Follett text says God “was once as we are now.” Athanasius’s case against the Arians turns on denying the parallel claim about the Son: “He was not man, and then became God.” A divine person who attained godhood would, for Athanasius, be a creature honored by grace, and could deify no one. The Church now says little about the Father’s past, but for the Fathers everything depends on God being God without beginning.

Creation from nothing. The essay argues that creation “out of nothing” arose in the second century under philosophical pressure and “widened the perceived gulf between God and humans.” It quotes Justin Martyr, who did say God made all things “out of unformed matter.” But Justin’s Dialogue, recounting the teaching that led him to Christ, states that “God alone is unbegotten and incorruptible, and therefore He is God, but all other things after Him are created and corruptible.”²⁸ Theophilus of Antioch, who wrote that obedient man would receive immortality “and should become God,” argues that if matter were uncreated, “God is no longer ... the Creator of all things, nor ... is the monarchy of God established,” and says the prophets taught “that God made all things out of nothing; for nothing was coeval with God.”²⁹ Joseph Smith taught the opposite, and the essay says he “fully repudiat[ed] the concept of creation ex nihilo.” For the Fathers, the gulf between Creator and creature is what makes deification a gift.

Honesty requires a concession. Scholars disagree about how early creation from nothing was explicitly taught. Gerhard May argued that the formal doctrine took shape in the second century; Markus Bockmuehl argues that Jewish sources, from the Dead Sea Scrolls to the rabbis, already affirm God as the creator of all things, matter included. The essay cites both scholars.³⁰ Second Maccabees, part of the Septuagint the Church received, has a mother say “that God did not make them out of things that existed” (7:28, RSV); Paul speaks of God who “calls those things which do not exist as though they did” (Romans 4:17).³¹ {{debated: Whether such texts mean creation from absolutely nothing, or only creation without visible materials, is debated.}} What is not debated is that the writers who first used deification language also held that God alone is unbegotten.

Grace or nature. The essay says Latter-day Saints see all people as children of God “in a full and complete sense,” and that “the divine nature that humans inherit can be developed to become like their Heavenly Father’s.” Here is the hinge. For Augustine the gods of Psalm 82 are “deified of His Grace, not born of His Substance”; for Athanasius we are called gods “not as the True God”; for Maximus we become what God is “save at the level of being.” Patristic deification is adoption into a life that is not ours by nature. Exaltation, as the essay describes it, develops a divine nature already inherited.

One God or many. When the Fathers call the saints “gods,” they mean many sharers in the life of one God. Section 132 and the King Follett sermon describe exalted beings who “have all power” and become gods “the same as all gods have done before you,” which Joseph Smith called “a plurality of Gods.” That differs from the Creed’s one God, the Father almighty, maker of all things, with his only-begotten Son and his Holy Spirit. (See the cornerstone One God or a Council of Gods?)

The road there. Both traditions have sacraments or ordinances. In Orthodoxy, deification begins in baptism (Gregory’s “deify me by Baptism”), is fed by the Eucharist, prayer and repentance, and is open to every faithful Christian, married or monastic. {{strong: In current Latter-day Saint teaching, the highest exaltation requires the temple endowment and eternal marriage.}} The Fathers knew no such requirement.

Objections and responses

“The early Church taught exaltation and later lost it.”

In its strongest form: the earliest Christians spoke freely of becoming gods and read Psalm 82 literally. Tertullian could write, “who will deny that God is a body, although God is a Spirit?”³² Justin spoke of “unformed matter.” Only later, under Greek metaphysics, did the Church insist on creation from nothing and an incorporeal God, and deification shrank to a metaphor. Joseph Smith restored what the first Christians believed.

The argument has real evidence behind it, and Orthodox writers should admit that early Christian thinking about God and bodies was more varied than popular apologetics suggests. But three facts weigh against it. First, deification was not lost; Maximus and Palamas developed it, and Orthodoxy still teaches it. Second, deification language and the Creator-creature distinction arrive together: Justin, Theophilus and Irenaeus are early witnesses to both. Third, the texts that sound closest to Latter-day Saint teaching say something else when read whole. Tertullian goes on, “Spirit has a bodily substance of its own kind, in its own form”; he does not say the Father was once a man. Irenaeus’s “at length gods” stands beside his warning against erasing the distinction “between the uncreated God and man, a creature of today.”

{{strong: None of the Fathers quoted in the Church’s essay teaches that God the Father was once a mortal man, and the earliest of them affirm that God alone is uncreated.}} The early Church taught that human beings are made for glory. What it taught was theosis, not exaltation.

“Orthodox theosis is just as polytheistic.”

This is a fair question. If the Fathers call the saints “gods,” and Palamas says the saints are united to uncreated divine energies, why is Orthodoxy monotheist and Latter-day Saint teaching not? Latter-day Saints also say the exalted will always worship the Father, and Joseph Smith said that “to us” there is only one God.

The difference lies in the kind of being involved, not the word. In Orthodoxy there is one uncreated divine nature, that of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. To borrow John of Damascus’s image, the saints receive God’s life as steel in the fire receives heat: the burning belongs to the fire, and the steel remains steel. The deified never become uncreated, never become a source of being or fathers of spirits, and never cease to receive everything as gift. In exaltation as Gospel Principles and section 132 describe it, the exalted receive “all power” and eternal increase, and in the King Follett sermon the Father himself walked that path before them. The essay rightly rejects the caricature of competing deities, and Orthodox Christians should not use it. The accurate description is Joseph Smith’s own, a plurality of Gods. Orthodoxy confesses one God, and calls creatures “gods” only by grace.

What we can say confidently

• The Fathers, East and West, taught that human beings are called to become “gods,” with Psalm 82:6 and 2 Peter 1:4 as central texts.
• They meant participation by grace in the life of the one uncreated God. Athanasius, Augustine, Maximus, John of Damascus and Palamas each deny that creatures share God’s essence or become God by nature.
• The earliest writers who use deification language (Justin, Theophilus, Irenaeus) also hold that God alone is unbegotten or uncreated.
• Latter-day Saint scripture teaches that the exalted are “gods, even the sons of God,” that intelligence and the elements are uncreated, that the Father has a tangible body, and that the highest exaltation requires eternal marriage (D&C 76, 93, 130–132).
• The King Follett sermon is not canonized and the Church says little about God once being a man, but it republished the sermon in 1971, and its manual teaches that the exalted “will become gods.”
• Deification never disappeared from Christianity; it remains central to Orthodoxy, as the essay acknowledges.

What remains disputed

• What each early writer meant by calling the saints “gods”; the essay is right that this is “open to interpretation.”
• Whether creation from nothing is explicitly taught before the second century (May and Bockmuehl disagree), and how to read Justin’s “unformed matter.”
• How widespread belief in a bodily God was among early Christians, and what Tertullian meant by calling God a “body.”
• Within Latter-day Saint thought, how literally to take the first half of Lorenzo Snow’s couplet and the King Follett text, given the Church’s own caveats.
• Whether Palamas’s language of essence and energies is the best statement of what the earlier Fathers meant; Barlaam and Akindynos disputed it in his own lifetime.

Conclusion

Latter-day Saints and Orthodox Christians both speak of a hope many Christians have lost sight of: that God means to raise his children into his own glory. The words sound alike, but a hope takes its shape from the God in whom it rests.

The Orthodox Church confesses one God, the Father almighty, maker of all things, who has never been anything other than God, with his eternal Son and his Holy Spirit. Out of sheer generosity he made us from nothing. When we fell toward death, the Son became what we are, without ceasing to be what he is, so that we might become by grace what he is by nature. We will never be his rivals or his equals in being. We will be his children, filled with his life the way iron is filled with fire, forever receiving and forever growing in the love of the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. That is what the Fathers meant by becoming gods, and it is the hope the Church still holds out to everyone, Latter-day Saints included.

Notes

1. “Becoming Like God,” Gospel Topics Essays, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, churchofjesuschrist.org. The Gospel Library currently cites it as “Gospel Topics Essays (2016)”; it was first posted in February 2014. ↩
2. Scripture is quoted from the New King James Version (NKJV) unless noted. Psalm 82 is Psalm 81 in the Septuagint. ↩
3. Carl Mosser, “The Earliest Patristic Interpretations of Psalm 82, Jewish Antecedents, and the Origin of Christian Deification,” Journal of Theological Studies 56, no. 1 (2005): 30–74 (summarized from the published abstract). ↩
4. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 124, trans. Marcus Dods and George Reith, Ante-Nicene Fathers (ANF) vol. 1. ↩
5. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5, preface; 3.19.1; 3.6.1, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut, ANF vol. 1. ↩
6. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.38.4, ANF vol. 1. ↩
7. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 2.10.4, ANF vol. 1. ↩
8. Athanasius, On the Incarnation 54.3; also 3.1 and 4.6, trans. Archibald Robertson, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series (NPNF2) vol. 4. ↩
9. Athanasius, Orations against the Arians 1.39 and 3.19, trans. John Henry Newman and Archibald Robertson, NPNF2 vol. 4. ↩
10. Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit 9.23, trans. Blomfield Jackson, NPNF2 vol. 8; the passage the Church’s essay quotes. ↩
11. Gregory of Nazianzus, Orations 29.19 and 31.28, trans. Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow, NPNF2 vol. 7. ↩
12. Augustine, Exposition on Psalm 50 (49 in the Septuagint), 2, trans. J. E. Tweed, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 8. ↩
13. Maximus the Confessor, Ambiguum (Difficulty) 41, PG 91:1304D–1305A, 1308B, in Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor (London: Routledge, 1996). ↩
14. John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 2.12 and 3.17 (the chapter on the deification of Christ’s flesh and will), trans. S. D. F. Salmond, NPNF2 vol. 9. ↩
15. Gregory Palamas, The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters 75, in Robert E. Sinkewicz, ed. and trans., Saint Gregory Palamas: The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1988). ↩
16. Doctrine and Covenants 76:53, 58, 95; 88:107; 93:29, 33; 130:22. ↩
17. Doctrine and Covenants 132:17, 19–20; 131:1–4. The July 1843 date is from “Becoming Like God.” ↩
18. “The King Follett Sermon,” Ensign, April 1971, 13–14, and May 1971, 13, reprinted from History of the Church 6:302–17. ↩
19. “Discourse, 16 June 1844–A, as Reported by Thomas Bullock,” The Joseph Smith Papers, josephsmithpapers.org. The editors note that the Nauvoo Expositor of 7 June 1844 had labeled his teaching “plurality of Gods.” The manuscript’s inserted “<s>” is shown here as “[s].” ↩
20. “Becoming Like God,” note on the King Follett discourse. ↩
21. “Chapter 5: The Grand Destiny of the Faithful,” Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Lorenzo Snow (2011). ↩
22. “Chapter 47: Exaltation,” Gospel Principles (2011), 275–80. ↩
23. Gordon B. Hinckley, “Don’t Drop the Ball,” October 1994, and “Drawing Nearer to the Lord,” October 1997, general conference. The 1997 interview is quoted from “Becoming Like God,” which cites the San Francisco Chronicle (13 April 1997) and Time (4 August 1997). ↩
24. “Becoming Like God.” ↩
25. David L. Paulsen, “Early Christian Belief in a Corporeal Deity: Origen and Augustine as Reluctant Witnesses,” Harvard Theological Review 83, no. 2 (1990): 105–16; Daniel C. Peterson, “‘Ye Are Gods’: Psalm 82 and John 10 as Witnesses to the Divine Nature of Humankind,” in The Disciple as Scholar, ed. Stephen D. Ricks, Donald W. Parry and Andrew H. Hedges (Provo, UT: FARMS, 2000), 471–594. ↩
26. “Becoming Like God,” quoting Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). ↩
27. “Becoming Like God,” text and notes. The note points readers to Jordan Vajda’s comparative study of patristic and Latter-day Saint teaching (FARMS Occasional Papers 3, 2002). ↩
28. Justin Martyr, First Apology 10 and Dialogue with Trypho 5, ANF vol. 1. ↩
29. Theophilus of Antioch, To Autolycus 2.4, 2.10 and 2.27, trans. Marcus Dods, ANF vol. 2. ↩
30. Gerhard May, Creatio ex Nihilo, trans. A. S. Worrall (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994); Markus Bockmuehl, “Creatio ex nihilo in Palestinian Judaism and Early Christianity,” Scottish Journal of Theology 65, no. 3 (2012): 253–70. The essay cites Bockmuehl as volume 66; the journal’s record gives volume 65. ↩
31. 2 Maccabees 7:28 from the Revised Standard Version (its footnote offers “God made them out of things that did not exist”); Romans 4:17 from the NKJV. ↩
32. Tertullian, Against Praxeas 7, trans. Peter Holmes, ANF vol. 3. ↩

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982. 2 Maccabees from the Revised Standard Version.
• Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies. Trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut. Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1885.
• Justin Martyr. First Apology and Dialogue with Trypho. Trans. Marcus Dods and George Reith. Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1885.
• Theophilus of Antioch. To Autolycus. Trans. Marcus Dods. Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 2. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1885.
• Tertullian. Against Praxeas. Trans. Peter Holmes. Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1885.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Athanasius of Alexandria. On the Incarnation (trans. Archibald Robertson) and Orations against the Arians (trans. John Henry Newman and Archibald Robertson). Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 4. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1892.
• Basil the Great. On the Holy Spirit. Trans. Blomfield Jackson. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 8. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1895.
• Gregory of Nazianzus. Orations. Trans. Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 7. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1894.
• Augustine of Hippo. Expositions on the Psalms. Trans. J. E. Tweed. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 8. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1888.
• Louth, Andrew. Maximus the Confessor. London: Routledge, 1996.
• John of Damascus. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. Trans. S. D. F. Salmond. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 9. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1899.
• Sinkewicz, Robert E., ed. and trans. Saint Gregory Palamas: The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters. Studies and Texts 83. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1988.

Other scholarship

• Bockmuehl, Markus. “Creatio ex nihilo in Palestinian Judaism and Early Christianity.” Scottish Journal of Theology 65, no. 3 (2012): 253–70.
• May, Gerhard. Creatio ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of “Creation out of Nothing” in Early Christian Thought. Trans. A. S. Worrall. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994.
• Mosser, Carl. “The Earliest Patristic Interpretations of Psalm 82, Jewish Antecedents, and the Origin of Christian Deification.” Journal of Theological Studies 56, no. 1 (2005): 30–74.
• Russell, Norman. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Paulsen, David L. “Early Christian Belief in a Corporeal Deity: Origen and Augustine as Reluctant Witnesses.” Harvard Theological Review 83, no. 2 (1990): 105–16.

Sources from the Latter-day Saint tradition

• The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Becoming Like God.” Gospel Topics Essays. First posted 2014; cited by the Church as 2016. churchofjesuschrist.org.
• The Doctrine and Covenants. Sections 76, 88, 93, 130, 131, 132.
• Smith, Joseph. “The King Follett Sermon.” Ensign, April 1971, 13–14; May 1971, 13.
• The Joseph Smith Papers. “Discourse, 16 June 1844–A, as Reported by Thomas Bullock.” josephsmithpapers.org.
• Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Lorenzo Snow. Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2011. Chapter 5.
• Gospel Principles. Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2011. Chapter 47, “Exaltation.”
• Hinckley, Gordon B. “Don’t Drop the Ball.” General conference, October 1994; “Drawing Nearer to the Lord.” General conference, October 1997.
• Peterson, Daniel C. “‘Ye Are Gods’: Psalm 82 and John 10 as Witnesses to the Divine Nature of Humankind.” In The Disciple as Scholar: Essays on Scripture and the Ancient World in Honor of Richard Lloyd Anderson, ed. Stephen D. Ricks, Donald W. Parry and Andrew H. Hedges, 471–594. Provo, UT: FARMS, 2000.