On the philosophies of men, mingled with scripture

Summary: Mormons resist theology, thinking it to be the philosophies of men, mingled with scripture.  Instead, we ought to realize that the phrase originated in response to “orthodoxy”, and that it is orthodox dogma, not theology, that is to be avoided.  Indeed, theology gives us the tools to have dialogue about the nature of our spiritual experience, and helps us build loving communities of faith.

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In our temple creation narrative, we have Satan being asked what religion he teaches.  He says he teaches the philosophies of men, mingled with scripture.  In response, Adam rejects Satan’s teachings, looking for messengers from his Father in Heaven to teach him.

I see merit in this dialogue.  I grew up really delving deeply into philosophy and theology, not as a scholar, mind you, but more as a dilettante – a passionate hobbyist on understanding all the complexities of theology. 

Yet no amount of philosophy, no amount of analysis, could prepare me for life.  When my faith crisis came upon me years ago, my intellect could not save me from my self-destructive behaviors. 

Then, at some point in this Journey, I came to realize a relationship with a presence I have come to call Christ.  When I came to know this Presence, anything I could possibly know *about* god was complete nonsense. 

But to explain this presence, to understand what it means, when I go to church each Sunday and hear a correlated doctrine *about* god and all else, I am left to wonder why we must reject philosophical inquiry, why we must accept the correlated doctrine without question, when our personal experience – our truth – is so different.

Are we forbidden from exploring what our experience means?  Is talking about the nature of god so “sacred” that we must simply keep to the script, or not talk at all about it?

Eugene England grappled with the idea of who god is.  As he explored how god could once have been man and is now god, he pondered what this might mean.  Is god “progressing” he asked.  After all, it would seem that we are on a path of “eternal progression”, so when is it that we “arrive” at perfection?

When Eugene England opened up a theological discussion at BYU as to whether God progresses, Bruce R McConkie went on the warpath against him, declaring the notion the first of seven great heresies, and commanded England to echo what McConkie taught or remain silent.

In like manner, Orson Pratt was shut down by Brigham Young when Pratt explored the nature of God.

Yet here is the problem: Whether we like it or not, the notion of who or what god is, and how we come to believe it, is the work of theology.  And because “theology” is a kind of philosophical inquiry into the nature of god and our existence, LDS are doubly forbidden from exploring this line of thinking: both from the dogmatic statements by our leaders as well as our temple narrative.

But are we really forbidden? 

In 1990, the temple narrative was simplified, removing from it some elements that really were quite offensive to many.  While we cannot really talk about all parts that were removed, we can actually talk about the creation, garden, and telestial kingdom narrative – the interactions between God, Jesus, Adam, Eve, the Apostles, and Satan.

There was one more character in the pre-1990 account – a sectarian minister who was employed by Satan to teach religion.  While this was pretty offensive toward other religions – the minister was clothed in typical clerical garb – the narrative is important, because it sets the context of what is meant by condemning the “philosophies of men, mingled with scripture”.   Satan conducts an interview with the minister:

Satan asks, “Do you preach the orthodox religion?”

The preacher responds, “Yes, that is what I preach”.

Then, the preacher teaches the creedal, orthodox definition of god to Adam.  Although it is a bit of a caricature of orthodox belief, it is accurate enough to demonstrate how the orthodox definition of god is contradictory and confusing to most people. 

Adam’s answer is illuminating: “To me it is a mass of confusion”.

Then the preacher teaches Adam the orthodox definition of hell – one nearly verbatim from the beliefs of hell outlined in the Book of Mormon, to which Adam responds “I believe in no such place.”

All of the above dialogue was removed from the temple endowment in 1990.  But what remains in the endowment is the dialogue between the Apostles and Satan.  Satan is asked, “What is being taught?”, and Satan responds, “The philosophies of men, mingled with scripture.”

As I opened this post, I note that there is merit to this dialogue.  But the merit is significantly lessened when we lose the context of what the expression actually meant.  The religion being taught was *orthodoxy*: the religion based upon creeds and dogmas that had to be accepted without question in order to be “right thinking”/”orthodox” in one’s beliefs.

Properly understood, “philosophies of men” are not the problem here.  It is when a religion is based upon orthodoxy: the established dogmas and creeds derived from the “philosophies of men mingled with scripture”. 

So how is Orthodoxy the “Philosophies of Men, Mingled with Scripture”?

When we explore the history of Christian Doctrine – and the works of Jaroslav Pelikan are essential to understanding this, we realize that as the Christian church grew, it changed, it became institutionalized, and the idea of personal revelation needed to be set aside in order to create a consistent doctrine. 

The Council of Nicaea is illustrative. Hundreds of Bishops gathered together by request of Emperor Constantine, in order to systematize Christian doctrine so that it could be used to govern the empire.  There were too many controversies in Christian doctrine – too many schools of thought, and there needed to be order. 

The deepest controversy was on the nature of God, and how Jesus was both God and man. 

The reality is that no-one knew.  They were all administrators – politically connected men who were well established in Church leadership.  Many were smart, inspired, and paragons of thought and Christian practice.  Both Eusebius, the great church historian, as well as Nikolaos of Myra (St. Nick) were there.  They were good people earnestly striving to grapple with the most essential doctrine of the Christian religion: How can two persons, God the Father and Jesus Christ, be One God?

Much as they tried, they could not find an answer to this in scripture.  So they turned to the philosophies of men, or specifically, the prevailing Greek philosophy of the time: Neoplatonism.  In Plato, the essence of God is the Form of the Good – a concept outside of creation.  This essence is One, or in Greek, “homoousion” – “Single Essence” or “Singe Being”.  Thus, the Nicene Creed introduced that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit were three persons who shared one “homoousion” – One god in three persons.

And from that point going forward, Neoplatonic philosophy more or less formed the ideas around what the orthodox god is in essence:  Neoplatonism says the Form of the Good is incomprehensible, so thus, God is incomprehensible.  Neoplatonism says that the form of the good is outside of creation, thus god is outside of creation.  Omnipotence, omniscience, all the extremes of perfection and unchanging nature come from these same philosophies.  Then, scriptures are cherry picked to support the philosophies of men.  And voila!  Orthodoxy is born.

Then, around 1820, a fourteen or fifteen year old farm boy has a personal experience with god. In this vision, the young man learns that the orthodoxy of the creeds was an abomination to God, that those who profess such creeds are corrupted thereby, and they “teach for doctrine the commandments of men”.

These are strong indictments against orthodoxy.  Indeed, the beauty of the Restoration was the undoing of orthodoxy, opening up the singular idea that man could have a personal relationship with god and receive revelation.  In contrast, orthodoxy demands that if mankind receives revelation, it can only confirm that which has already been revealed – there is no concept of “line upon line, precept upon precept”, for in orthodoxy, we seek to preserve what was, rather than embrace what might be.

For many years, the LDS church eschewed orthodoxy.  There were generations of LDS amateur theologians, whether Orson Pratt, BH Roberts, John A Widtsoe, James E Talmage, OC Tanner, Sterling McMurrin, and Eugene England.  Yet try as they might, another camp exists within the Church leadership, taking their lead from Joseph Fielding Smith, to shut down any kind of theology that doesn’t conform to orthodoxy.  Smith’s son-in-law Bruce R McConkie wrote Mormon Doctrine, a catechism for Mormon orthodoxy, in parallel with Harold B Lee and Boyd K Packer’s development and enforcement of the Priesthood Correlation. 

And while LDS correlated beliefs do include Mormon-specific ideas, they also are meant to be amenable to the prevailing Christian definitions of god – the precise same ones that came from “the philosophies of men, mingled with scripture.” 

To Correlated Mormons, God the Father is an unchanging being from everlasting to everlasting, who has always been God, yet was once man like us.  God is all powerful, all knowing, and all good, yet allows evil (including random evil such as tsunami) because he does not intervene in free will.  God is present everywhere, but is a body of flesh and bones and cannot dwell in our hearts (an old sectarian notion). 

In other words, LDS have taken the creedal definition of god: unchangeable and omni-whatever, and added to it that God was once a mortal man and is corporeal.  We have taken an already internally inconsistent and logically impossible dogma and done the miraculous: we have made it worse.

I have been dragged into my bishop’s office over my public statement: “In the beginning man created God in his own image.  In the image of man created he Him.  Father and Son created he Them.”  Yet I stand by my statement, because I was talking about orthodoxy: the creedal definitions of god, which I reject.  The philosophies of men, mingled with scripture, do not make for good doctrine.  It’s about how we *define* god, and whether we are free to have our own experience with god.

To me, this is the core idea of Mormonism: God lives and reveals him and her self to us personally.  And yes, this may stimulate us to think about theology, because the experience of god essentially calls into question any orthodoxy that defines god in defiance to personal witness.

So what does this mean to the everyday Mormon experience?

Rather than shunning theology as the “philosophies of men, mingled with scripture”, I believe we ought to embrace theology as a way to understand the personal experience with god that we all have in our own Way and in our own time.  Theology gives us the tools to discuss our experience with others, and to better understand our own relationship with god. 

Let’s take, for example, our testimony meetings.  The idea of a “pure testimony” is one which makes five claims:

1. I know that God is our Heavenly Father and He loves us.

2. I know that His Son, Jesus Christ, is our Savior and Redeemer.

3. I know that Joseph Smith is a prophet of God. He restored the gospel of Jesus Christ to the earth and translated the Book of Mormon by the power of God.

4. I know that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the Lord’s Church on the earth today.

5. I know that this Church is led by a living prophet who receives revelation.

For all intents and purposes, this testimony is fully correlated.  It is a creed, although instead of “I believe” (“credo” in latin), we say “I know” – asserting a certainty in place of faith/belief.  From a theological point of view, this testimony is fraught with serious problems.  There is no epistemological justification for saying “I know” such claims other than one’s personal feelings.  And a witness or testimony should not focus on the claim but rather, the observation.

A testimony is a personal witness, what I have observed to be true.  If I am to witness that God is my heavenly father, and that he loves me, it might be good to express why I feel that way.  How is the idea of god as “heavenly father” relevant to me?  In what way does he love me?  My experience with this is relevant, not my claim.  If I believe that God loves me, I have witnessed that love by some experience, and to bear witness is to explain the experience, not the certainty claim.

Theology gives us the tools of understanding our relationship with god in a common, shareable language.  To be sure, the personal relationship with god transcends any theological construct – if I have experienced god or spirit in some way, it’s not because I have the right theology.  At it’s core, the personal experience is ineffable.  That said, we share our experiences in dialogue, so how I *explain* my experience, how I dialogue with others, has everything to do with theology. 

Theology gives us a framework for discussing who god is (and is not) and who we are.  This is the discipline of Ontology: the study of the nature of being.  Theology also helps us properly define how we come to believe things.  This is “Epistemology”: the study of the nature of belief (literally, “pistis” in greek is “Faith”).  When we realize that epistemology and ontology are the First Principles of any theology, then, we can equate that to something more understandable to Mormons. 

In Mormonism, the First Principle is “Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ”.  This is a theological construct.  It is the idea that “faith” is our epistemology, and Jesus Christ is our ontology.  We must not simply throw off this First Principle as “I know Jesus Christ is our Savior and Redeemer”.  While I accept this as what we profess, we need to go deeper. 

First, we must realize that faith is “not knowing”.  Faith is a life-long process and relationship with truth.  We ever realize we don’t know, and then in that realization, we hope for things which are not seen, which are true.  Faith is the basis of our lives, as we seek to live with uncertainties, yet act with charity and love in faithfulness. 

And as we suggest who Jesus Christ is as Savior and Redeemer, we must go further, deeper, probe what it truly means to follow Christ, to become One with Christ.  We realize, theologically, that Jesus Christ repeatedly equated himself with YHWH – the I AM.  The Identity of Christ – the very nature of his being, and his being God is worthy of the deepest contemplation.  If we are to be like him, if we are to follow him, we must come to an understanding of what that means to us, to me personally. 

And Jesus prayed that we might be One with Him in exactly the same way he is One with God.  Such an idea has profound theological implications, both for ourselves, as well as for the nature of God.  When we say, As man is, God once was, and as God is, man may become, we are engaging in the deepest theology of all.

If God is our *ultimate concern*, then we must seek with all of our heart, might, mind and strength to follow god, to embrace god, to understand god, and all we can do to know god as a personal experience.  This need not be formal theology, but it is most definitely theology. 

And in realizing the importance of this quest, when we repeat the Shema, “Hear Oh Israel, I AM our gods, I AM One”, we are invoking the singular idea that not only is God One, but we are also One in God as we struggle in our theological quest.

Three Simple Questions

I think there are three deceptively simply questions in life:

1. Who am I?
2. How do I know?
3. What am I supposed to do about it?

I think Mormonism has a unique take on the answers to these questions. My believing self answers these questions like this:

1. Who am I?  I am a child of God.
2. How do I know?  Because the key of knowledge has been restored through prophets who cannot lead us astray.
3. What am I supposed to do about it?  Follow the prophet.  see (2).

Yet these three questions are much larger in scope than the simple LDS reflexive answers can provide.  As our faith matures, we realize the need for greater clarity:

1. Who am I?

By itself, our simplified Mormon identity as Children of God gives us no sense of unique identity --
all humans on this earth are equally children of God.  So what does it really mean? What is the nature of being co-eternal with god as his spirit-intelligence children?  What is the nature of God's being, if he was once like us and we are to become like him?  Where is Heavenly Mother in all this?  Is gender and our family identity persistent in both directions?

The Who am I question points us to a "First Principle" in both the metaphysical discipline of philosophy as well as religion:

Ontology: What is the nature of being?  

Mormonism does offer a unique ontology, although poorly explained in the correlated materials.  This ontology is best expressed in Lorenzo Snow's couplet, "As man is, God once was, and as God is, man may become".  We are divine beings on a divine journey.  Although Joseph and Brigham speculated on what this means - and often created confusion as a result -- we have a divine nature, origin, and destiny.

This fundamentally must change how we view others.  "God" is not some being beyond being, but rather, "God" is exalted humanity.  We ought to really explore how that affects our daily walk.  When we embrace who Jesus Christ truly is -- as both god and man, and yet, one of us and our Friend, then we must embrace that Jesus, the I AM, is the key to life itself.

Once we realize the Christ, this concept of being is not just about who am I, but also, who are you, who is Christ, and how do we connect to each other in love.  Life is about this connection.  Christ's first, second, greatest, last, and new commandment was to love one another as he loves us. This is what it means to have life in abundance.

2. How do I know?

When we look in detail at prophetic answers, not only is there insufficient knowledge within the words of the prophets, but we observe how inconsistent they are from the beginning. Prophets today are not prophetic, but rather, in the position of authority -- the only ones authorized to pronounce doctrine, yet they are neither scholars, scientists, nor particularly imbued with prophetic visions.  Thus, our reliance on their words as trumping science and independent investigation seems antithetical toward truth-seeking.

The "How do I know" question points us to another "First Principle" in both metaphysics as well as the gospel:

Epistemology: What is the nature of knowledge?

Mormonism offers five important epistemological concepts:

1. Truth is knowledge of things as they are, as they were, and as they are to come. 
2. All truth is circumscribed into one great whole.  That is to say that science as knowledge of the material/physical world, and religion as a kind of faith knowledge need not be opposed, but in fact, should harmonize -- not by relegating science to a second seat, but rather, by using the right tools for the right purpose.
3. While eternal truth may be unchanging and without question, mankind's understanding of such truths is limited to our ability to understand.  We receive revelation through our minds and hearts in the language of our understanding.  
4. We learn truth line upon line, precept upon precept, thus our understanding of truths must be both progressive and evolutionary.
5. We learn through our own experience and not by dogma and creed.  Alma 32 teaches an epistemic approach that allows us to work in faith to gain knowledge by experimentation.  

In our faith, we ought never to be afraid of the truth, nor in any way cover up inconvenient facts of our past and doctrine because they are not "faith promoting".  According to Alma, faith is not knowledge, but rather, hope in something that is true -- or at least "not false".  To believe something that is false in not faith, but rather deception, and ultimately will cause faith crisis.  As disciples of a God of Truth, we must be rigorously honest in our approach to learning truth.

3. What am I to do?

Mormon authority requires absolute, unquestioning obedience and uncompromising loyalty to the brethren and church in all things.  (see GBH: "Loyalty" 2003).  The basic principle is (1) the Love of God is the first and greatest commandment, (2) If we love god we keep his commandments, and (3) his commandments are expressed through the voice of his anointed servants -- the prophets, seers, and revelators.  All of Mormonism, today, can be reduced this simple principle: you love god by obeying the brethren with exactness.

Yet this kind of obedience does not save us, does not develop us, but rather destroys us by virtue of making us vulnerable to despotism and demagoguery.  This is not the Plan of God, but rather, the one who required absolute obedience. We really need a much better way to sort out what we are to do.

The "What am I to do" question leads us to a third "First Principle" in both metaphysics as well as the gospel:

Ethics: How are we to act?

Our religion has many ethical and moral standards, yet they are most often focused on separating our behavior from others in the world.  We do not have a strong, simple moral ethic that guides our living, other than "obedience" to the dictates of our Church leaders. We have created a kind of Mosaic/Rabbinical/Talmudic law unto ourselves.

Yet Christ had a much simpler concept: to love one another as he loves us.  And how does he love us?
 he forgives, he is our friend, he is unconditional in his love.  Others have said as much: Confucius, Hillel, and almost every ethical system in the world: "That which we find hateful when done to us, we should not do to others."  Or positively said, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

Jesus, and Hillel, correctly claimed that this simple principle is the basis of all the law and the prophets. It ought to be the basis of how we act, and how we thoughtfully hearken to those who sit in Moses' prophetic seat.

Our Mormon ethic clarifies this kind of love in a way we ought to take very seriously: We are to lift one another's burdens, that they may be light, to mourn with those who mourn, and to comfort those who stand in need of comfort.  We witness in Mormonism of a godly love when we serve without reservation our communities.  I have seen this miracle of Mormon service -- we can make a difference by being Mormon in the Way Alma taught at the Waters of Mormon.

So,

Who am I?
How do I know?
What am I to do about it?

Jesus answers our questions by saying, "I AM the Way, the Truth, and the Life".

Who am I?  I AM, and in being One with Christ, I have Life in abundance.

How do I know?  Because I am here to learn through my own experience -- I will make mistakes, but as I test, doubt, and discover, the truth will become clear to our minds through objective, empirical experiments, and to our hearts, through our hope, faith, and love.

What am I to do about it?  As the first disciples called themselves "Followers of the Way", we follow not men and their opinions, but rather, Christ in his words -- the basis of all ethical systems: to love one another as he loves us.

The First Principle of the Gospel

It occurs to me this morning that the "First Principle" of the Gospel is "Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ". In my LDS experience, however, faith is not of any primacy, and while we speak of Jesus Christ, it seems that we are stuck in the literal and supernatural things he represents.

In Church. the first principle we teach is obedience, that we are here to be tested to see if we will obey, and we must do all we can do to be saved. Then, and only then, after all we can do, we are saved by grace. This obedience is not to the teachings of Jesus Christ, but rather, to the words and will of the Prophets, who speak in the Lord's name. Obedience to each and every pronouncement of the prophets is, by LDS definition, following Christ, because the Prophets are the Lord's representative. "By mine own voice or the voice of my servants, it is the same." (D&C 1)

Exploring a bit, I searched on "first principles of the gospel" in Google, just to see what came up. The first four links direct me to LDS . org, number 5 is the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, and number six is a speech given by a college professor at BYU on the topic.

While I do think that the LDS church employs a bit of "Search Engine Optimization" on key themes important to Mormonism, it's interesting that our Mormon thought starts with a term "First Principles". One would and should think that such concepts are important. More importantly, if "Faith" is truly the first principle, then where does "obedience" actually fit in?

To read the BYU professor's talk, he starts with the topic in Preach My Gospel about Faith in Jesus Christ, but takes it a step further. To him, "Faith exists when absolute confidence in that which we cannot see combines with action that is in absolute conformity to the will of our Heavenly Father. Without all three—first, absolute confidence; second, action; and third, absolute conformity—without these three all we have is a counterfeit, a weak and watered-down faith."

"Absolute confidence"..."absolute conformity"...without these, we have "counterfeit faith".

I wonder. I truly wonder.

When we speak of "First Principles" in the quest for truth, usually we mean that there is something upon which our entire quest depends--something so important that we must embrace this before everything else. My fundamental question is whether "Absolute Confidence" is an appropriate beginning to any quest for truth -- I do not believe it is.

This, to me, is the heart of faith crisis: the idea that we think of faith as something it is not, and we have not created the right "First Principles" in our faith journey to properly navigate our Way.

We have been told, repeatedly, that our Church and gospel are an all-or-nothing proposition: "Each of us has to face the matter—either the Church is true, or it is a fraud. There is no middle ground. It is the Church and kingdom of God, or it is nothing." (Hinckley, 2003) While the term "true" could be an indicator of "direction" or "allegiance", the more common interpretation of "true" has a more epistemic (how we know things) meaning: that which is without material error or subterfuge.

As a result, we embrace a testimony in the church that makes epistemic claims about the truth of the church and gospel: I know that the book of mormon is an ancient record, translated by the gift and power of god, I know that we have a living prophet on the earth, I know that if we follow the prophets we cannot go astray. Such claims of "I know" do not allow for the humility of "I believe", or the recognition that something may be false. It is an expression of certainty, of knowledge. A "pure testimony" makes these claims.

Yet we come to a realization that within our realm of "Absolute Confidence" that there are things for which we realize do not justify such certainty. Perhaps, by doing a little digging among the LDS . org site, we find that the Book of Mormon wasn't actually "translated" at all, but rather, was somehow expressed through "scrying" -- peering into a seerstone in a hat. Perhaps we find that the Book of Abraham -- what it says it is in the Pearl of Great Price, and authentic translation of writings of Abraham by his own hand -- has absolutely nothing to do with the actual characters in papyrus or especially in the facsimiles in the book itself. There are dozens of things for which we discover that the Church and gospel are in some ways "not true".

What, then, happens to our "Absolute Confidence" in the Church when we discover there is a profound flaw? Is "Absolute Conformity" justified if we come to know that there are some things in the Church's teachings that are false?

Rene Descartes was faced with much this same problem. He had discovered as he matured in life that there were a number of things he held to be absolutely true in his youth that are no longer true. This profoundly disturbed him, so he set aside some time from his work and teaching to meditate on first principles.

Importantly, his first meditation was to discover that his entire schema of knowledge was potentially flawed, and being such, the only way to really build the proper foundation was a complete "destruction" of his schema of knowledge. He not only had doubts, but embraced them fully, realizing that only by doubting everything could he build the proper foundation.

Many who read Descartes' first meditation call this kind of doubt "hyperbolic doubt". The reality is much deeper. Descartes was suggesting a methodical approach to determining truth, and part of that method was to recognize, in humility, that we don't know. Methodical doubt is the first step on a journey towards truth.

But in this process of methodical doubt, the idea of completely discarding our schema of what we know is so profoundly unintuitive to members of the Church, it's never a good idea to muse in public. I frequently say, here, that I do not *believe* a single truth claim of the church. I do not *believe* in prevailing omni-whatever definition of god (although Descartes most certainly did). Such statements rapidly escalate into an emotional issue for members of the church, immediately labeling me as a "nonbeliever" or an "atheist", which, while technically accurate terms, do not mean the same thing for me than for those who are labeling me.

But the First Principle of the gospel is not doubt by itself. Doubt simply is the beginning of refining faith. To be clear, the First Principle of the Gospel is "Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ". I'm going to suggest that when we refer to this as a "First Principle", we need to fully understand what "Faith" and "the Lord Jesus Christ" mean, not in a dogmatic sense of "doctrinal" answers, but rather, in terms of how these two things, together, constitute a "First Principle".

When we think of First Principles in the pursuit of truth, it's important that we start with some basics:
1. We need to address how we can "know" things. This area of concern is formally called "Epistemology". Curiously, the greek term for "faith" is "pistis" as a noun, and "epistomai" as a verb. In short, "Epistemology" is entirely about "Faith": how we come to know truth.

2. We need to understand the nature of the how things are, how they exist. This area of concern, discovering the nature of being, is formally called "ontology". The identity of things, how we label them, is all part of this exploration of ontology. Ontology asks questions like "Who am I?" "Who or what is god?" "What is the nature of existence?"

These two disciplines are essential to our quest for truth.

With respect to Epistemology, we need to understand how we can make the claim "I know that X is true" or "I know that X is not true", and what our approach shall be for that which is between these two poles of "knowledge". We will discover that "Faith" is the epistemic Middle Way between these two poles: the idea that Faith is not certainty, it is the humble recognition that we don't know, but given that we hope for things, we are willing to try them and to discover the truth of them.

With respect to Ontology, we will come to embrace an understanding what it means to say "I AM", and realizing this, we will come to embrace the Lord Jesus Christ as a being who was fully god and fully man, who marked the path and led the Way to an integrative oneness with all that is.

As LDS, we will discover along this journey that we have unique approaches to both epistemology as well as ontology. Alma 32 will express an epistemology that redefines "faith" away from assertive belief into an experiential reconstruction of both knowledge and faith. As we embrace the LDS view of the plurality and unity of gods, we will come to a unique ontology: we exist as eternal beings in an emergent progression toward godliness, as does the being we call "Heavenly Father". To realize the intimate name of God is "I AM", and eternal constants of the universe are its matter and laws, give unique ontological insight into our divine nature. Jesus revealed this nature in John as he spoke of us being in the present gods, and that he was "I AM".

Let us therefore explore the First Principle of the Gospel in a unique light. To embrace "Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ" is to recognize that I need to understand how I know things and what those things are in the first place. Such exploration cannot occur when the cup of our minds are full of preconceived dogma. We must cast aside everything we think we know, and come to a methodical deconstruction and reconstruction of faith.

This is the Journey of a lifetime.

Shall we walk upon this Way?