By Sandra Tanner
Latter-day Saints often refer to a small couplet that neatly summarizes their core doctrine of ‘exaltation’ to godhood:
As man now is, God once was:
As God now is, man may be.
While LDS apologists insist that such a biblically unorthodox teaching is mere “folklore,” LDS leadership still teach and publish it in an official, important capacity.
During the seven years since the original publication of the previous article by Ron Huggins, Dr. Richard J. Mouw has continued to maintain that the Lorenzo Snow couplet is no longer promoted as LDS theology and refers to it as “folk Mormonism.”1 However, the official LDS priesthood manuals published in 2011 and 2012 have quoted it.
In 2011 the LDS Church issued the manual Teachings of Presidents of the Church: George Albert Smith. In it we read:
Eternal life is to us the sum of pre-existence, present existence, and the continuation of life in immortality, holding out to us the power of endless progression and increase. With that feeling and that assurance, we believe that “As man is, God once was, and as God is, man may become.” . . . we believe that it is not improper, that it is not unrighteous, for us to hope that we may be permitted to partake of the attributes of deity and, if we are faithful, to become like unto God; . . .
[Bold in quotations is added for emphasis and does not appear in originals.]
This year the study manual for both the LDS Priesthood and Relief Society is Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Lorenzo Snow. In chapter 5, “The Grand Destiny of the Faithful,” we read about Snow’s formulating of the couplet:
In the spring of 1840, Lorenzo Snow was in Nauvoo, Illinois, . . . President Snow later recalled, “the Spirit of the Lord rested mightily upon me—the eyes of my understanding were opened, and I saw as clear as the sun at noonday, with wonder and astonishment, the pathway of God and man. I formed the following couplet which expresses the revelation, as it was shown me . . .
“As man now is, God once was:
As God now is, man may be.”Feeling that he had received “a sacred communication” that he should guard carefully, Lorenzo Snow did not teach the doctrine publicly until he knew that the Prophet Joseph Smith had taught it. Once he knew the doctrine was public knowledge, he testified of it frequently. . . . His son LeRoi, said, “This revealed truth impressed Lorenzo Snow more than perhaps all else . . .”2
Further on the manual quotes Lorenzo Snow regarding God’s progression:
Through a continual course of progression our Heavenly Father has received exaltation and glory and he points us out the same path and, inasmuch as he is clothed with power, authority and glory, he says, “walk ye up and come in possession of the same glory and happiness that I possess.”3
However, the LDS view of a God who hasn’t always been God, and that man’s goal is to achieve the same level of godhood, would strike Christians as a great blasphemy. When God spoke to Isaiah, one of the great prophets of the Old Testament, He declared:
I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God. . . . is there a God beside me; yea, there is no God; I know not any.
(Isaiah 44:6, 8)
. . . from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.
(Psalm 90:2)
I am God, and not man; the Holy One in the midst of thee.
(Hosea 11:9)
Related reading:
Footnotes:
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Iw7EGzTPe0 (January 9, 2013), see comment at 41-minute mark. ↩︎
- Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Lorenzo Snow, LDS Church, 2012, p. 83. ↩︎
- Ibid., p. 85. ↩︎
Originally appeared in: