I had never, at all, heard the word “deification” used in official Mormon priesthood circles during my time as a Mormon (LDS) elder, missionary, and ward mission leader, from 1970 to 2000. That was a moment in that Joseph Smith, Jr.’s King Follett Discourse of 1844 was publicly regarded by the Mormon Church as simply an opinion of the lynched Mormon prophet rather than LDS canonical doctrine and theology. When asked publicly, during this time period, about Joseph Smith’s statements proclaiming that the Mormon heavenly father began his existence as a human man on some planet in the cosmos, or about Brigham Young’s Adam-God Doctrine, authorities presiding Mormon generals Mormon theology responded in unison that such statements by Smith and Young were not to be regarded as canonical scripture and doctrine. Although the Mormon hierarchy has, since about 1998, admitted that the Adam-God Doctrine was officially accepted as canonical theology from 1851 to about 1900, and that Brigham Young placed it in the Mormon temple rite in 1877, Mormon apostle Bruce R. McConkie, in his tome “Mormon Doctrine”, described the “Adam-God Theory” as a heresy concocted by a heretic” who was none other than Mormon prophet Brigham Young. Also, his complete encyclopedic book on the doctrine Mormon do not even mention the King Follett Discourse
The current use of the term “deification” arose suddenly by the Salt Lake City Mormon hierarchy during the second decade of the 21st century, and has been used as a defensive Internet apologetic response to the public disclosure of the 1984 LDS Melchizedek Priesthood study. guide “Lesson 21: Man can become like God”, for the worldwide Christian community to read and accept. Although it is strange that, if “deification” was a standard feature of Mormon theology during the 19th and 20th centuries, Mormon apologist Robert L. Millet did not mention it during his sophistical speech before the Harvard Divinity School, in which he allegedly , presented and explained the major canonical theological doctrines of Mormonism in March 2001. Additionally, the word “deification,” or its intended meaning, is not, and never has been, addressed during the six-part LDS missionary presentations given by the dozens of thousands of young full-time Mormon missionaries, men and women, and the ten thousand or more senior full-time married Mormon missionaries, in the US and abroad, who repeat what they are told to say to the hundreds of thousands of struggling Christian men, women, and families whose homes they enter each and every calendar year.
Supposedly, it was Abraham Lincoln who coined the truism: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some people all of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all of the time.” This phrase is very appropriate to apply to the 20th century apologetic devices that were used by the Mormon Church to obfuscate the fact that its basic theology, since around 1844, is and remains polytheistic and anti-Christian. Before the advent of the Internet, Mormon public deception through its vociferous missionary cadre of those thousands of indoctrinated young men and women took the form of pragmatic methodologies to deliberately keep the 90 percent Christian public, who was totally uninformed about the true Mormon history and theology. , and doctrine, continually misinformed. Between 1925 and 1985, the only avenue open to the average Christian to explore Mormon history, theology, and doctrine was through the printed word in public and university libraries, and Christian magazines and other periodicals mailed on demand. of Christian ministries. I personally know for a fact that the Mormon prophet president and the apostles, in Salt Lake City, led the older men, Mormon high priests called mission presidents, who were appointed to preside over the many LDS missions in the US. , from about 1925 to about 1990, to lead full-time young male missionaries, ages 18 to 24 (called elders) to obtain library cards in the various cities and towns where they proselytized from 8 to 10 hours a day, six days a week, and remove from public libraries all anti-Mormon books written by Christian scholars that reveal true Mormon history, theology, and doctrine. Those Mormon missionaries were then ordered to dispose of the books in various ways and then lie, telling the libraries that they had been lost. Later, the Mormon Church would finance the libraries by the appraised value of the books. This highly fraudulent process resulted in the destruction of thousands of books over a period of approximately fifty years, and the Mormon Church did it surreptitiously with impunity. This smear strategy effectively removed, at that point in history, most library resources for deliberately misinformed Christians to use to find the truth about Mormon theology, history, and doctrine. Then, in later times, the Mormon Church offered those libraries, free of charge, new books written by Mormon apologists, with seemingly impeccable scholarly credentials, to replace the supposedly “lost” books, in order to provide laughably “objective” information. . about Mormonism. They sent letters to these libraries saying, “Who would logically know more about Mormon history, theology, and doctrine than Mormon scholarly writers?”
As for the term “deification” used by Joseph Smith, Jr., he never used it to describe the polytheism of Mormonism, which he detailed in the King Follett Address. Venerable Christian writers, such as Dr. Walter Martin, in his renowned 1965 book, “Reign of the Cults,” never referred to the Mormon polytheistic theology contained in Joseph Smith’s King Follett Discourse as “deification.” The word “deification” is not found in his book, which comprehensively covers the convoluted gamut of Mormon theology. Therefore, it can be affirmed in fact that there was no such term as “deification”, used by the Mormon Church to define its theology during the 19th and 20th centuries. Its official use began sometime in the second decade of the 21st century.
With the advent of the Internet and the widespread online publication by Christian ministries of PDF copies of books, documents, and library resources on true and correct Mormon history, theology, and doctrine, which were only available on role before the availability of personal computers, the Mormon Church hierarchy pragmatically changed gears around 1990 and has since spent hundreds of millions of dollars to super-computerize its corporate/church infrastructure in order to produce a Internet cyber barrage of high tech social media and apology websites aimed at dominating, denying and disputing the correct and true information published by Christian websites. However, the most important positive aspect of the Internet is that the truth, which was not available to the public before its advent, is readily available and accessible to any struggling Christian who wants to know the correct factual information about Joseph Smith, Jr. . . and the pagan cult he organized in the 1830s. That’s why the Internet posting of PDF copies of “Lesson 21: Man Can Become God” has so disturbed the general Mormon hierarchy in Salt Lake City, Utah. , and this is why the Mormon Church has published official articles on the Internet on “becoming like God”, as found on the following official LDS website:
(http://www.lds.org/topics/becoming-like-god?lang=eng;)
Opposing Christian Internet research and exposure of Mormon polytheism are found, for example, on websites such as the following Mormon Research Ministry website:
(http://www.mrm.org/exaltation;)
Although Mormon apologists will forcefully exclaim that the Mormon doctrine of “deification” was well defined in official 19th and 20th century Mormon publications for public knowledge, I have never heard the word “deification” used in the Mormon temple rite or in any gospel doctrine or missionary-oriented Sunday School class, or in any officially published LDS Melchizedek Priesthood manual or study guide. In 30 years of active LDS Melchizedek Priesthood activity, I have never heard any Mormon elder use the term “deification” in a testimony of Mormonism given during the hundreds of Sunday fast and testimony meetings I attended over a span of thirty years. in fifteen different LDS. wards (local Mormon congregations) and branches (Mormon congregations too small to be called wards). Furthermore, if, in fact, the Mormon doctrine of deification is an essential component of Mormon theology, why, in the name of sophistry, is it not mentioned in the full-time missionary’s six-part presentation given to the people called “investigators” by the Mormon church?
What is, incredibly, an irreconcilable and indefensible position taken by the Mormon Church, in the sense that it believes that the Holy Bible is the word of God to the extent that it is translated correctly, is that the Mormon hierarchy uses extra-biblical heretical sources. , rather than from his own Book of Mormon (BOM), which is supposed to contain the unequivocal fulness of Mormon doctrine and theology, to defend his deification process. Why is this so? Well, unless the BOM is radically changed today to remove the Biblical trinitarian doctrine written into it by Joseph Smith, Jr., there is no possible way Mormon polytheism, or deification, can be defended by it. If you ask an LDS Church Educational System (CES) director, who is a pure Mormon (TBM), to document Mormon deification doctrine, he will now invariably refer non-contextually to verses from New Testament and then apply them to spurious extra-biblical sources, which were considered controversial heresies by Christians in the second and third centuries. However, none of them will currently refer to the content of “Lesson 21: Man can become like God” to define the process of deification. In most cases, when the inquisitive student, CES director, ward bishop, stake president, or full-time missionary mentions “Lesson 21” they will quickly switch the topic of deification to some other doctrinal topic. . However, those defenders of the Mormon faith will never broach the issue of deification, especially full-time Mormon missionaries. You can ask my friend Ken Clark, a former CES director who resigned from the Mormon Church in 2001, about this, and he’ll be happy to tell you that well-paid LDS CES directors, who are equivalent to presidents of stake in Melchizedek Priesthood authority, they are officially expected to “lie for Mr. Mormon” about Mormon history, theology, and doctrine in order to retain the faith of their young Mormon college-level students.
Reference can be made to my previously published article titled “Anatomy of a Melchizedek Priesthood – Study Guide Lesson on Mormon Theology”, to understand the context of this article on Mormon use of the word “deification”; for Mormon polytheism by any other name, such as deification, is just as much the epitome of Christian heresy.