Fear and Trembling at the Tower of Babel

Terryl Givens

Students of philosophy today are fully aware of the prevalence of pre-existence motifs in Plato. They appear in several dialogues: the Mino, the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, the Republic, the Symposium, the Timaeus.

Terryl Givens

Yet rather surprisingly, the emphatic Platonic teaching about theosis is seldom noted. David Sedley, for example, has remarked, If you asked any well educated citizen of antiquity to name the official moral goal, Or telos of each major current philosophical system, you will hear that Plato’s is homoiosis theoi kata toduniton, becoming like God so far as is possible. And yet, Sudley marvels, Homeiosis Theoi, universally accepted in antiquity as the official Platonic goal, does not even appear in the index to any modern study of Plato.

Terryl Givens

Implicit in several of Plato’s dialogues, including the Timaeus, the ideal is most explicitly stated in the Theetetus, where Socrates tells Theodorus A man should make all haste to escape from earth to heaven, and escape means becoming as like God as possible. Not only is this idea central to Platonic philosophy, it is inextricably connected in his thought with premortal origins.

Terryl Givens

The same is true of Neoplatonism. Plotinus had asked, What could be more fitting than that we living in this world should become like its ruler? If we were birthed in the realm of the gods, we can hardly expect, as eternal beings, to suffer corruption or demise. We must reascend to claim our inheritance. That is why this concept of theosis Also called theopoasis or deification, according to Erin Lichtenstein, became one of the dominant themes of the Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions.

Terryl Givens

Preexistence and theosis will increasingly be linked to the eventual detriment of both in the subsequent thought of early Christians. Tertullian, second to early third century AD, was one of the first to react strongly and vehemently against the doctrine of premortal existence. And here was his explanation.

Terryl Givens

For when we acknowledge, when we acknowledge that the soul originates in the breath of God, it follows that we attribute a beginning to it. But this Plato, he refuses to assign to it, for he will have the soul to be unborn and unmade. The problem with such a scenario is not that a soul’s eternal nature is philosophically implausible, it is rather the implications Of such a conception for Tertullian’s ideas, and this is going to be a pattern for the subsequent 2,000 years. It is the implications of such a conception for his ideas concerning God’s supreme divinity and absolute sovereignty.

Terryl Givens

Plato, Tertullian continues, has given to the soul so large an amount of divine quality as to put it on a par with God. In other words, it is preexistence that ineluctably translates into equality with gods. He makes it unborn, which single attribute I might apply as a sufficient attribution of its perfect divinity. He then adds that the soul is immortal, incorruptible, incorporeal. Since he believed God to be the same, invisible and capable of delineation, uniform, supreme, and intellectual, what more could he attribute to the soul if he wanted to call it God?

Terryl Givens

We, however, who allow no appendage to God in the sense of equality, by this very fact reckon the soul as very far below God, for we know it was born. This statement may be the most emphatic, and ultimately it is the most influential, objection to the doctrine of pre-existence in the early church. And it makes clear the central objection to that idea. It is the blurring or the eliding altogether of the creature-creator divide.

Terryl Givens

Still, the association persisted. Origen, his contemporary, argued that if humans pre-existed like Christ, it was logical to assume they could be deified like Christ. In the 17th century, an Anglican impatiently dismissed such persistent rationales for a preexistence, saying, We may as well prove we were all born of virgins because Jesus was.

Terryl Givens

Origen was also the author of the most explicit linkage between pre-existence and theosis when he argued that we can look to the future to divine the past. The end, he said, is always like the beginning. This is what’s known as his doctrine of apocatastasis, or the return. This idea is integral to his influential version of the principle of restoration, in which the future recapitulates the past. So any origin among the gods guarantees a return to that place and rank.

Terryl Givens

Some of the Gnostics imbibed a version of the same doctrine that sounds astonishingly similar to the Atrahasis myth. Adam was, in the Gnostic version, a composite of earthly materials and the divine spirit. given to him in secret or mediated fashion. This divine inheritance exalts Adam above the Creator God, and redemption consists in the awakening in Adam Of his knowledge of his true origin. This true knowledge is none other than knowledge of himself as being, quote, related to God.

Terryl Givens

The Creator God imposes restrictions on the tree of knowledge in order to thwart Adam’s greater potential. In Gnostic texts, the serpent of Eden thus performs the good work of enticing humans to eat the tree’s fruit, which imparts to Adam his appropriate godlike status. Mormons may notice interesting parallels here between their own reading of the Genesis myth, which may be one reason why Harold Bloom tends to think that Mormons should consider them themselves as good old-fashioned Gnostics.

Terryl Givens

Transhumanism represents just one avenue of re-exploring the possibility of theosis. There are others in mainline Christian thought. The main objection in contemporary Christianity, and this is just my own impressionistic opinion. Is based on a set of arbitrary assumptions about what constitutes godhood or godliness in the first part, in the first place.

Terryl Givens

It is hard, of course, to discuss contemporary views of theosis without treating of Mormonism, since it is the religion that today most conspicuously and controversially teaches theosis. I want to suggest a few ways in which both those inside and outside the Latter-day Saint theological tradition may be getting it wrong.

Terryl Givens

Listen to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to his friend Eberhard Boethke while awaiting his execution in a Nazi prison. He said, Here is the decisive difference between Christianity and all other religions. Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world. God is the Deus Ex Machina. But the Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering. Only the suffering God can help. The God of the Bible wins power and space in the world by his weakness.

Terryl Givens

To my mind, this statement. Of Bonhoeffer is reminiscent of Joseph Smith’s most radical text, not the King Follett discourse. With its frank talk about eternal human intelligence, divine potential, and God’s origins, but the text that paved the way for his King Follett discourse I refer to his prophecy of Enoch, wherein that Old Testament prophet saw the heart agony of the Creator as he mourned the suffering of his creation.

Terryl Givens

How is it thou canst weep, seeing thou art holy, and from all eternity to all eternity? Three times Enoch asks this question incredulously. How is it thou canst weep? And it came to pass that the Lord spake unto Enoch, and told Enoch all the doings of the children of men. Wherefore Enoch knew. and looked upon their wickedness and their misery, and wept, and stretched forth his arms, and his heart swelled wide as eternity, and his bowels yearned, and all eternity shook.

Terryl Givens

This suffering is not relegated to one of God’s modes or persons. It is a central fact of his identity as Creator, Redeemer, and Father. As Joseph Smith made evident to a startling degree in the writings of Enoch, any relationship, any relationship. even involving deity, that is not facilely constructed as metaphorical, is a condition of vulnerability. And one that reveals itself as most authentic in its moments of most profound suffering. This is a condition from which to Enoch’s shock and horror, even God is not exempt. Exempt? On the contrary, God’s pain is as infinite as his love.

Terryl Givens

And insofar as man participates in a true and literal imitatio Christi. Or imitatio de, his pain will be infinite as well. That is quite clearly the point here. and why Enoch’s heart swelled wide as eternity. The divine nature of man and the divine nature of God are shown to be the same. A capacity for infinite empathy with its infinite pain.

Terryl Givens

What I want to emphasize here is the relevance of this construction of deity for the doctrine of theosis. If it is similarly true that, as an LDS text has it, no power on earth or in heaven Can be maintained except by persuasion, long-suffering, gentleness, and meekness, then once again we have the suggestion that the essence of the divine nature in Mormon thought May be most accurately characterized not in terms of power and dominion, but in terms rather similar to what Bonhoeffer called powerlessness, suffering, and weakness.

Terryl Givens

My whole point here is to suggest that the generalized anxiety about theosis, both that which extends backwards 4,000 years to the Akkadian texts, And exists in the contemporary theological scene, presume a model of the divine nature that is a careless projection of human conceptions about power and sovereignty.

Terryl Givens

Listen to a 17th century cleric who is fighting this same battle to predicate theosis on a kind of aspiration that would have caused less fear and trembling at Babel. This indeed is such a theosis or deification as is not transacted merely upon the stage of fancy by arrogance and presumption. But in the highest powers of the soul, of a living and quickening spirit of true religion, uniting God and the soul together in the unity of affection. Insisted the group’s John Smith. He was one of the Cambridge Platonists.

Terryl Givens

What is striking at this present moment in theological history? Is it while many critics continue to shun babble-evoking specters of theological hubris, a wide swath In the theological spectrum, has moved in a direction entirely consonant with the God of the Enoch text and the God of the Cambridge Platonists, like the one just quoted.

Terryl Givens

For example, here’s what one religious scholar has said recently. The idea that God cannot suffer, that he cannot suffer, was axiomatic. In Christian theology from the early Greek fathers until the nineteenth century. Now, writes another scholar There is a remarkable consensus behind the claim that God indeed suffers.

Terryl Givens

Indeed, nothing could be easier. than to align pre-nineteenth century formulations and contrast them with recent developments. Aristotle’s unmoved mover Augustine’s impassable God, the creedal formulation of a God without body parts or passions, these all stand in dramatic contrast. To Abraham Heschel’s invocation of God as the most moved mover, and recent book titles like The God Who Risks: The Suffering God.

Terryl Givens

In fact, scholars are referring to the surge in what they call theopascism, the suffering of God, as a revolution, as a structural shift in the Christian mind. And opined that, quote, we have only begun to see where systematic theologies rooted in the suffering of God might lead. And I am today trying to explore one such possibility of where it might take us. These are exciting developments, not least because they portend the possibility of other related, quote, structural shifts in the Christian mind.

Terryl Givens

Just one more hint of such shifts is a recent article in, of all places, Christianity Today, titled, How the Strange Yet Familiar Doctrine of Theosis Can Reinvigorate the Christian Life. In it, the author notes: In the ancient Hellenistic world in which the church was born, divinization in some form or other was a common way of describing humanity’s ultimate goal. And he propounds a doctrine of what he calls divinization, a project of becoming like God, conformity to Christ at every point, and he urges that salvation be viewed in terms of deification. He even quotes approvingly the dictum of Athanasius: God became man, that man might become God.

Terryl Givens

If I were to add just a side note or a footnote at this point, I would say Say that part of the problem, I think, in the Mormon tradition has been that notions of what constitutes godhood or godliness were largely formulated by Parley Pratt, who got so exuberant about the ideas of sovereignty and dominion and creative capacity. That he established the model that took hold very deeply in the Mormon consciousness.

Terryl Givens

In the Timaeus, Plato wrote, That the creator or demiurge was good, and one who is good can never become jealous of anything. And so, being free of jealousy, he wanted everything to become as much like him as was possible.

Terryl Givens

How that divine self is conceived in our own day will continue to dictate not only the kind of being that humans choose to worship, but the kind of God to which they may find it possible. To aspire. Thank you.

Speaker 2

We have a few moments for questions if there are any that you’d like to pose.

Speaker 3

I just thought it was interesting the the Tower of Beeville idea. One day I was reading about that, and it occurred to me that we’re at that point now where there’s the one language and anything we imagine. we can pretty much do now. That’s always been interesting to me because we’re going to that point where just about everything I mean nothing’s really just nothing out of our

Terryl Givens

Possibly so. That may be, you know, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I refer to him as having a particular reading of the myth of the Tower of Babel or Babel. And he saw it as a spiritual allegory about the disintegration of Christian community. And so, to his mind, the capacity to achieve Godlike status would be affected through a reconciliation of the Christian community. But I’m sure that he didn’t have the ability to conceive of what you’re referring to in terms of technologically enhanced

Speaker 4

You raise this provocative question about what constitutes the essence of what God is.

Terryl Givens

Well, that’s why I invoke the story of Enoch, because I think that You know, w one one irony I think is that uh the critic I quoted said that the the idea of a passable in right in Christian theology is called passable, passability. Or pascism. It said never appeared until the end of the 19th century. And of course, the Enoch text comes from 1835. And so I tend to think that that is, to my Mind the most therapeutic, theologically therapeutic way of conceiving of the divine nature is as a capacity for infinite pain born of infinite empathy. I think that that is a reality that any parent knows.

Speaker 5

Terrell, there’s a strain of transhumanism, they call themselves abolitionists, that Hold that suffering should be entirely eradicated from humanity and just generally, animals and young. What are your thoughts on that discretely?

Speaker 3

Yeah, I think we just ran out of time, though, so I’m um

Terryl Givens

The question is, and I noticed this, and I can’t remember if it’s part of the Transhumanist Manifesto or Constitution, or I don’t remember the name of the document, but the eradication of suffering. The declaration, the eradication of human suffering should be one of those, one of one of the goals or intentions. I don’t know. I do think, speaking out of my own religious tradition. I do think that Mormons have tended to fall into a number of scriptural misreadings and misprisms that have led in the direction of a kind of Catholic glorification of suffering that I think is dangerous and wrong-headed. I think there’s never any scriptural warrant for the notion or any ethical foundation for the notion that God would intentionally direct and inflict suffering at a human individual of any kind. But I guess I see suffering as inevitable as long as there are human relationships.

Speaker 6

You mentioned that uh the anxiety about theosis perhaps derived from um Projection onto the divine nature of human nature. Right.

Speaker 7

Um I was wondering if you could relate that to a thought we thought of looking before you about who I’m not very familiar with it, maybe through studies of what uh Karl Marx thought of him, but uh

Speaker 6

I got the impression that was this kind of you two who were projecting human nature onto the divine nature.

Terryl Givens

Yeah, I and I can’t address Fourier Bach’s thesis because I don’t know it well enough myself. But of course, you know, the notion that we construct gods after our own image is something that the ancient Greeks came to recognize at a fairly early time in their early history. But I think that we continue to do that. And I think it’s a problem that is endemic not just to the non-Mormon community, but I think it’s a statement, right, on the nature of power and authority and how they are to be exercised. As I said, I think we missed the point that God is effectively saying there, even as God, my dominion. Is contingent upon a kind of weakness and vulnerability and susceptibility. When you say that I will exercise no compulsion, constraint, power, or influence upon you except what I can extract through your devotion and love to me. That’s to put yourself in a condition of profound vulnerability. And so I don’t think that’s the kind of well, so I guess I would say that in that sense, that’s consonant with what Feuerbach Was saying that the God that we construct, and that’s what I was trying to suggest with my reading of the King James Version of the Babel story: there’s a kind of superimposition on the God of the Old Testament. Of a petty, jealous human attribute.

Speaker 7

Thank you very much. Thanks again.