A Distinctive Vision of Destiny

This account of human origin and destiny is among the most distinctive Latter-day Saint teachings and differs markedly from the historic Christian view of an absolute Creator-creature distinction, in which humans are saved to fellowship with God but do not become gods in this sense. It gives Latter-day Saint life its strong emphasis on family, temple ordinances, and eternal marriage, through which exaltation is pursued.

The belief is presented here as Latter-day Saints hold it, noting that it is not shared by the trinitarian Christian traditions. The teaching rests on a broader Latter-day Saint metaphysics in which God the Father is understood to possess a glorified, physical body, a position articulated in Joseph Smith's 1843 revelation recorded as Doctrine and Covenants section 130, and matter itself is held to be eternal and uncreated. This departs sharply from the classical Christian doctrine of divine simplicity, affirmed at the councils of the fourth and fifth centuries, on which God is immaterial, uncreated in an absolute sense, and ontologically distinct in kind, not merely in degree, from any creature; historic Christian theology holds that believers are saved into loving union and glorified fellowship with God but explicitly rules out becoming God in nature, a distinction it regards as fundamental to monotheism itself.