Mormonism: The Sanctification of Human Progress

Speaker 1

Our next speaker is Don Bradley. Don is a historian specializing in Joseph Smith and Mormon Scripture. He holds a BA in history from Brigham Young University. is finalizing his MA in history at Utah State University and will pursue a doctorate in religious studies. His writings include The Grand Fundamental Principles of Mormonism, Joseph Smith’s Unfinished Reformation, and the lost hundred sixteen pages, rediscovering the book of Lehi, forthcoming. Please welcome Don.

Don Bradley

So those of you who heard my son Donnie’s talk earlier and listened to mine will now have proof that human intelligence is still evolving further. Donnie actually pointed out to me that with my fiancée, Michael Ann, presenting just before our next keynote speaker this evening. Bradley’s and soon to be Bradleys will comprise something like one seventh of the presenters here. We resolve to do better.

Don Bradley

Five years ago, almost to the day, my little brother Charles came to visit. And as he left that night, Charles and I decided we’d hike Red Dome, which is a volcano, a dormant volcano down west of Fillmore. Three days later, I saw Charles again. He was dressed in a stylish suit and vest, with a cool European-looking cap on his head. All his family and friends were gathered there around him, where he lay on the mortuary table, every one of us just destroyed with grief. He was twenty five.

Don Bradley

Five years later, this past Sunday, the family gathered again grieving at the same mortuary around the casket of my father Ed Bradley, who was turning seventy-five. And in the resurrection, he will kill me for using this picture because he does not like it. The themes of my talk today are bound up in the lives and deaths of these two men whom I love. Each has led me to reflect on whether there’s a dichotomy or a unity between the spiritual and the temporal.

Don Bradley

The cataclysm of Charles’s sudden and early death initiated a shift in my religious identity and in how I understand the relationship between the spiritual and the temporal. Among other things, it gave me a keener understanding of what has become this paper’s thesis, that in Mormonism, unlike in more traditional theistic faiths, Spiritual and temporal are not a pair of opposites, but an integrated whole. For Mormons, all progress is spiritual progress.

Don Bradley

My father’s death has initiated a reflection on his life, a life that demonstrates the unity of spiritual and temporal and raises questions about its implications for how we should live. In this paper, I’m going to talk first about the spiritual crisis that I had precipitated by Charles’s death, and then further flesh out my thesis. And then I’ll address what I see as the major objection to this thesis. And I’ll end with a discussion of the thesis’s implications using some elements of my dad’s spiritual practice as a springboard.

Don Bradley

In the first few years before Charles’s death, that is the wrong direction. Does it not go two directions? Uh-huh. There we go.

Don Bradley

Um my spiritual journey took a winding course. I left the LDS church for a while I spent a few years as an atheist, and then I eventually regained my belief in God and a purpose or destiny for humankind.

Don Bradley

That sense of purpose was actually provided in part by Robert Wright’s arguments in Non-Zero, The Logic of Human Destiny. Wright demonstrates that both biological evolution and human social evolution have a trajectory. The increasing Integration of cells, organisms, persons, and groups into non-zero-sum games, that is, scenarios in which all succeed or all fail together. Humankind’s great challenge is to find ways of cooperating more and more completely across larger and larger scales so we all rise together instead of all sinking together.

Don Bradley

Uh just three months before Charles passed away, I’d found a faith that seemed tailor-made to meet this challenge. It was the Baha’i Faith. And that’s a really good Baha’i introduction to the faith, by the way. It’s fantastic. It’s this extraordinarily expansive religion. It was born in 19th century Persia. but it had a an almost it had a preternaturally global vision that speaks to the twenty first century. Its central principle is the oneness of humankind, and in many ways it constitutes a kind of systematic program for bringing about human unity and confronting collective challenges, just as Robert Wright’s arguments show that we need to.

Don Bradley

But the Baha’i Faith’s vision is not all this worldly. While God has a plan for the continual progression of the world, God also has a plan for the continual progression of the individual soul. The soul resides briefly in a body and then continues without a body on a trajectory entirely perpendicular to the fate of this world. It goes on to progress through other spiritual worlds, never again to intersect this one. So here’s my super advanced diagram. So if we’ve got horizontally, we’ve got the progress of the world as it integrates more. Then, on this view of the soul and its relationship to the world, you’ve got the vertical line there. That shows the soul going on through these spiritual worlds. They had this brief intersection here, and that’s it. Humankind progresses forward toward something, and the human soul progresses upward toward something else.

Don Bradley

Charles’s sudden death sent seismic shocks through my life and my faith. One was enduring the thought that I’d never see his face again, hear his voice. or see the mannerisms that were part of who he was. Another more theological dissonance was that I could not understand the eternity wide breadth of this gap between God’s purposes for thi this world, which Charles had been serving here, and the entirely different, unrelated, and perpendicular purposes he would be serving now and forevermore, with these lines diverging to infinity.

Don Bradley

The resulting crisis moved me theologically further from the Baha’i faith, further into Christianity and closer again to Mormonism. While there would be a lot of other windings before I’d returned to Mormonism, when I did, it answered the conundrum Mormonism showed me it took a spirit and a body to make a soul, and that God’s purposes for the world and for the soul were not mysteriously unrelated, but intimately integrated. In Mormonism, temporal progress, the progress of the world, is spiritual progress, the progress of souls. Because in Mormonism, living bodies are souls, earth is heaven, and God is physical and, like a superorganism, communal.

Don Bradley

One of Joseph Smith’s early revelations, DNC 29, began instilling this radically new world view into the newly minted Mormons. These new saints came from a background of Protestantism, from Protestant churches, and from Protestant culture that sharply Demarcated the spiritual or ecclesiastical from the temporal, such as business and economy. The burden of DNC twenty nine was to break down this dichotomy and thus prepare the early saints for the physical gathering to a Zion community. Let’s see. Yeah, so here’s one of the things DNC 29 says about the temporal, that to God there is no temporal, it’s all spiritual.

Don Bradley

Later developments in Mormon theology would make clearer just what it meant for the spiritual and the temporal to be one. Joseph Smith would teach that the human and the divine were on the same continuum. that God was embodied and consisted of divine communities or councils rather than a solitary individual, and that the transformed earth would be our eternal home, heaven.

Don Bradley

Other early Mormon leaders reinforced these teachings. If you want to heaven, go to and make it, said Jedediah M. Grant, who was in the first presidency.

Don Bradley

In this theology, we aren’t saved only by our own efforts. God meets, matches, and ultimately sanctifies these efforts. And our ultimate destiny and that of the earth are a co-creation, created jointly by all people, cooperating with one another and also with God. Through the lens of this distinctively Mormon theology, God’s purposes for the soul and for the world are intimately entangled.

Don Bradley

For Charles, as for us all, there is no radical disjunction between this mortal life and the future life. The good Charles did in the world, and that we each have done, has helped make the world more the heaven in which we will ultimately live. So if we were to diagram the Mormon view instead of the two diverging perpendicular lines You’d have the uh a person dies and the line sort of moves off the main line, maybe a dotted line, and but then it with resurrection it rejoins, it comes back, the lines converge. Come back together.

Don Bradley

With each constructive act, however small, we literally contribute to the creation of heaven. Since, in Mormon theology, heaven is the present earth, made paradisical or paradisiacal, or one of the many pronunciations of this word. And then celestial, each choice that makes the earth cleaner, more beautiful, more fertile, and more in tune with its own harmonious cycles participates in its transformation into heaven.

Don Bradley

Since heavenly society is one in which we are all linked in bonds of love every action that builds loving bonds, every act of friendship or of kindness, contributes to the making of a celestial Zion.

Don Bradley

And since heaven is a place where we’ll be fully empowered To fulfill our best desires, every act of discovering, learning, or teaching truth, every work of design or invention, and every moment of work that helps build abundance and the ability to generate greater abundance. Gradually constructs the city of God. Heaven is built by brick and mortar, one small brick at a time. So Mormonism gives sacred meaning and motive to every constructive endeavor.

Don Bradley

Because humankind and God, as also earth and heaven, are different points on the same continuum, what separates humankind from Godkind? And earth from the divine kingdom is the need for progression. All improvement of the earth is part of its transfiguration into paradise, and all progress of humankind is part of its exaltation into a divine community.

Don Bradley

This ability of Mormon theology to give the sacred motive and meaning to every act is potentially undermined by prophecy. LDS scripture is filled with prophecies that the world will be decimated in the last days. So DNC 29, which I mentioned, has these actually gruesome prophecies of you know, flies coming and plagues that will make people’s eyes fall out and all these things.

Don Bradley

If the world we’re building is to be largely destroyed Then there’s a bottleneck in which any progress we now make will be lost. And this is like just a silly image. There we go. If Mormonism’s theology gives meaning and motive to all human progress, Mormonism’s eschatology seems to threaten to take away that meaning.

Don Bradley

Why establish institutions to create international peace if our common destiny is wars and rumors of wars culminating in Armageddon? Why work to eliminate polio when the world is fated for plagues that will make people’s eyes fall out of their sockets? Why try to prevent runaway climate change on a planet fated for whirlwinds, hailstorms, vapors of smoke and a darkening sun? Given that gloomy apocalypticism like this has such power to motivate us to not do good, it merits questioning. Is it inevitable that most of the good we create in the world will be lost in an apocalyptic bottleneck? Has God stated with awful finality that our efforts at world peace, at ending world hunger, at protecting the earth, at eliminating plagues, are doomed.

Don Bradley

The answer to this depends entirely on how one understands the function of prophecy. Whether prophecies of the world’s doom indicate that our efforts to improve are in vain depends on whether the prophesied terrors are seen as inevitable. If they are inevitable, this in some way lessens the value actually of warning about them.

Don Bradley

Imagine two possible warnings you could be given when crossing a street. The first, given as you’re stepping onto the street, is, that car approaching the crosswalk isn’t going to stop. Don’t go out in front of it.

Don Bradley

The second, given perhaps when you’re in the middle of the street, is brace yourself because you’re going to get hit Personally, I judge a warning that enables you to actually avert calamity as far superior to one telling you to merely brace for it. And based on your presence here today, I see that your parents agree. Yet often we Mormons understand our heavenly parents to have given us through prophecy only warnings of the second kind, and now you get run over.

Don Bradley

What if in they intend instead to warn us in a way more like how our earthly parents do? What if the correct response to the The voices warning figuratively of the oncoming car isn’t to brace for impact, but to get the hell out of the way.

Don Bradley

Prophecy isn’t meant to satisfy idle curiosity about the future like a fortune-telling game. Prophecy is meant to motivate action. It isn’t meant to ensure that terrible things will happen by robbing us of the will to prevent them and lulling us into fatalistic inaction. One of the primary purposes of prophecies of catastrophe is to inspire us to change the conditions that would lead to the catastrophe, a change, of course, we often call repentance.

Don Bradley

But to use prophetic warnings of disaster to help us avert disaster, we must come to view them as conditional. Fortunately, the conditional nature of prophecy is both taught and demonstrated in the LDS canon.

Don Bradley

God explains to Jeremiah, for instance, that the fulfillment of both positive and negative prophecies is conditioned on human behavior. At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom to pluck up and to pull down and to destroy it, if that nation against whom I have pronounced Turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them.

Don Bradley

And Scripture models two ways prophecies of calamity may be received. The first can be seen in Jeremiah. Immediately after God explains that prophecy is conditional, he has Jeremiah tell the people of Jerusalem he is quote-unquote framing evil against them. and that they should therefore repent and make your ways and your doings good, obviously implying that by doing good they could deflect the calamity. Yet the people respond fatalistically, lamenting, There is no hope and continue their evil ways. Despite the hope held out to them, the people don’t want to believe prophecy is conditional because then they might have to do something to change the conditions. Preferring the ease of fatalism over the work of hope, they lull themselves into the sleep of death.

Don Bradley

Contrast the citizens of Jerusalem with those of Nineveh in the Jonah story. Jonah declared unconditionally to the inhabitants of Nineveh, yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. Had the king of Nineveh held, with many of us, that prophesied events just will happen no matter what, then this one would have. Nineveh would have been annihilated. Instead, he ordered his people to repent on the chance that this could avert God’s judgment. Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not? And so the people repented, and God saw it says that their works Saw their works, and that they turned from their evil way. And God repented of the evil that he had said he would do unto them, and he did it not, just like he says in Jeremiah that he’ll do. So here’s the illustration of that concept. God didn’t follow through on the prophesied destruction because the point of the prophecy had never been to ensure the people’s destruction, but rather to secure their repentance and avoid their destruction.

Don Bradley

In Ezekiel he says, Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live? This idea is also borne out in other biblical narratives, such as those of Hezekiah and Ahab, who are both told they’re going to die, repent, and God changes his mind. Far from advocating fatalism in the face of prophecy, these and other scriptural examples, such as the prophecies of destruction given to Hezekiah and Ahab, Demonstrate that prophecy of catastrophe can help avert catastrophe when we respond with repentance. As in the case of Jonah’s oracle to Nineveh, a prophecy of doom can be a source of hope. Once we know that our behavior may bring destruction, we can change that effect by changing its cause. Whether prophecy gives us hope or eliminates hope depends on our willingness to work for change.

Don Bradley

Here, then, is a reason why the view that prophecy is unconditional is so popular. By leaving everything to God, it lets us off the hook.

Don Bradley

Nothing in the LDS canon dooms us to a future in which our current progress will be eliminated. While we can doom ourselves to this, By our immorality, laziness, and despair, we also have the power to circumvent that fate and follow a trajectory of progress that leads to Zion. Indeed, in surprising ways, we’re on that trajectory now.

Don Bradley

The dramatic global decline in violence, documented by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature, is an excellent example. Which with each passing year, as this shows. With each passing year, there are fewer wars and rumors of wars, and more people beating their swords into plowshares. While in theory the time for Armageddon gets closer and closer, in practice the number of people who would fight such a battle shrinks further and further.

Don Bradley

The idea of a necessary apocalyptic bottleneck in our future progress is the only obvious barrier that I can see. To accepting Mormon theology’s implication that all human progress is progress toward the deification of humankind and the transfiguration and ultimate celestialization of the earth. With that bottleneck seemed to be a figment of our irresponsibility, it becomes crystal clear that we are tasked with creating an increasingly heavenly world and an increasingly divine society.

Don Bradley

What are the implications of this Mormon vision that all progress is progress toward making people into gods and earth into heaven? This Mormon vision of temporal progress as spiritual progress has a number of important implications, and I’ll just develop a couple.

Don Bradley

First, on this vision, the principle of stewardship extends to every human endeavor. So stewardship doesn’t just apply to church callings and families, it also applies to work. into personal consumption and management of resources, care of our community, and every other domain.

Don Bradley

This was crystal clear to my dad. He didn’t believe that the world was divided into temporal and spiritual domains. He carried out his business work as a stewardship from God, just like his church calling. And he believed strongly that he was entitled to personal revelation in the one stewardship. As entitled to personal revelation in the one stewardship as he was in the other.

Don Bradley

My dad is an exemplar of the outlook I hope to convey. Yet the specifics of how he united the spiritual with the temporal raise problems with which we need to grapple.

Don Bradley

Dad attributed some significant business successes to his use of personal revelation in business. Yet it also visibly resulted in some rather large business failures. I pondered just where my dad sometimes went wrong in his attempt to integrate his spiritual and temporal worlds. Because the spiritual and temporal were not really distinct, Dad assumed he could transfer the model he had for solving spiritual problems to solving temporal problems.

Don Bradley

The trouble with this, as I see it, is that the models we use for solving temporal problems are increasingly complex and systematic and informed by a wide cumulative experience. While our common models for solving spiritual problems tend to be simplistic and rooted more in an oversimplification of our doctrine than in actual experience.

Don Bradley

While our actual history, scripture, doctrine, and collective experience as Latter-day Saints suggests that revelation is a process of co-creation between us and God. and that learning how to participate in this co-creation and understand its results is a painstaking lifetime project of growing in wisdom. We are often inclined to reduce this complexity to a simple arithmetic in which we just ask God a question and then take any good feeling as yes and any bad feeling as no.

Don Bradley

Using this oversimplified model for dealing with the spiritual and applying it to the temporal realm, one can lay aside the spreadsheets, the decision matrices, the operations analysis, and the statistics. And lapse into a misguided divination by worm fuzzy. But, and this is the second implication I’ll draw from the Mormon vision of temporal progress as spiritual progress.

Don Bradley

There’s another approach. Perhaps our approaches to the spiritual and temporal should reciprocally inform each other, and maybe instead of just transferring the simplicity with which we often approach spiritual problems. Problems, to dealing with temporal problems, we should transfer some of the complexity and rigor we’ve developed in dealing with temporal problems to how we engage spiritual problems.

Don Bradley

In temporal problem solving, we take for granted that we might need to learn methods and practice, practice, practice in order to hone skills. Yet in spiritual problem solving we seem to expect that God will do all the work, except for the nom the nominal studying out of the problem in our minds, after which God is obligated to give us the right answer.

Don Bradley

We read in the Hebrew Bible that in ancient Israel there was a school of the prophets. Might this need for prophetic education suggest that there were methods and cumulative knowledge that went into becoming a prophet? We expect that calculus will be hard, but that gaining revelation from God Almighty will be easy.

Don Bradley

One implication of the intimate relationship of temporal and spiritual is that lessons learned in our temporal lives May have relevance for how we pursue our spiritual lives. And surely, one of these lessons is that great accomplishment requires great and systematic effort. And the higher levels of attainment require us to meet our challenges at greater and greater levels of complexity.

Don Bradley

We have been too at ease in our spiritual lives. The effort we put into temporal endeavors may provide a fitting model for how to enhance our spiritual growth. We’ve seen that Mormonism embraces all human progress as part of a continuous process of collective salvation.

Don Bradley

If we take this to heart, we’ll be more motivated in every constructive endeavor, all of it, reading a book, teaching a child, practicing a skill, mastering in technology, enhancing a relationship. Making a useful object, recycling, making a good decision, is part of the actual work of exaltation of godhood of heaven-making. It is all part of what exalts us as individuals and as a species, and it is the same kind of work we will do as exalted beings. If you are eager for the work of exaltation, of creating worlds, you need not wait. It begins here.