The last time I substitute taught Gospel Doctrine, I got to teach John’s epistles that he wrote to the believers in his soon-to-disband Johannine community while he was living in Ephesus. His community was divided, something we are also experiencing within our Mormon congregations in the wake of the policy change toward homosexuals and their children.
Among John’s followers, there were traditional Christian believers as well as emerging Gnostics. The Gnostics developed several different theories about Jesus, particularly focused on Jesus not being truly human. These differences in belief began to split the community into different schools of thought. John’s advice to them all was to strip away their self-deception and focus on love for each other because that’s what God was really all about. He spent very little time talking about their pet theories and the nature of God and more time focused on detailing the ways in which people deceive themselves into thinking they are righteous when they are really forgetting the most basic Christian imperative: to love one another.
Divine & Human
There were some competing theories about the balance of human and divine within Jesus among those in the Johannine community. Marcionism theorized that Christ could not physically suffer because he wasn’t human. He didn’t have a body, but was a phantom. Another theory was that Jesus was a man but Christ was a separate entity, a spirit that entered his body at baptism and then abandoned him on the cross. This view is shared in the Gnostic work The Gospel of Judas in which Judas reports that Jesus has taken him into His confidence, asking Judas to kill him: “For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.”[1] He is describing his humanity as easily discarded, like clothing he can put on and take off, a temporary illusion.
Let’s take a closer look at the Gnostic movement from a more modern parallel. At heart, the Gnostics were wrestling with the idea of Jesus being both divine and human. All Christians struggle to understand what the Book of Mormon calls “the condescension of God.” In some ways, it’s a chicken and egg question; which came first: Jesus’ divinity or His humanity? And which takes precedence? Is it a 50/50 balance or what?
The reason there is a natural tension between the divine and human aspects of Jesus is simple. If He’s not human, He can’t succor. If He’s not divine, He can’t save.
Another relevant question is whether Jesus was descending to become human or whether he was ascending to become divine. The concept of condescension is the former, someone who was divine and became human to sacrifice Himself for humans. As it says in John “the Word was made flesh.” Eastern religions, by contrast, focus on the process of enlightenment or becoming. In Buddhism, one can ascend toward the level of enlightenment in which one becomes a Boddhisattva or savior. From wikipedia:
A bodhisattva is one who has a determination to free sentient beings from samsara and its cycle of death, rebirth and suffering.
This can be done in one of three ways: by seeking buddhahood to help others, by aspiring to help others achieve buddhahood, or by aspiring to delay one’s own buddhahood until all sentient beings achieve it.
Within Christianity, though, assuming that Jesus was divine and became human the question remains how do we as followers go from human to being divine? How do we accomplish the difficult task of “be ye therefore perfect”? And can we ever rise above our humanity to become divine?
Behind these questions is a bigger question, whether we are different from Jesus by degree or in kind. And this is one reason many Christian sects consider Mormons to be not Christian, because we believe we are only different from Jesus in degree, not in kind. We believe that we can achieve divinity.
John warns in 2 John 1:7 that those who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh are “anti-Christ.” Although he doesn’t dwell on these doctrinal differences, he does consider the view that Jesus wasn’t human to be heretical and dangerous.
This tension between divinity and humanity is also evident when we talk about the fallen nature of man. In some views, man is so fallen, so carnal and devilish, that there is essentially nothing redeemable about us. The atonement redeems us from the depths of depravity of the human condition. And yet in other views, also scriptural, man has the spark of divinity within. We are literally sons and daughters of God, in God’s image. Those who speak with disdain for humanity, who see our depravity as more prevalent than our divinity are still seemingly at odds, at least philosophically, with those who view human potential optimistically.
Self-Deception
John focuses his writing on how we as Christians deceive ourselves, and how we use that self-deception to justify not loving each other. He says that if we really knew God, we would see through these deceptions, and we would love others because that is what God is and what God does. He uses a set of contrasting parallels to make his points:
- Walking in darkness vs. walking in light (1 John 1: 5-7). The problem, as Plato pointed out, is that we don’t perceive that we are in darkness until we step out of the cave in which we dwell, into the light.
- Denying vs. admitting we are sinners (1 John 1: 8-10). He states in 1 John 2: 1-2 that the atonement only applies to us when we admit we are sinners. Denying we are sinners is the purview of the self-righteous. Church is full of sinners because we are all sinners. Either we admit we are or we hide and justify our sins.
- Keeping the commandments vs. not keeping them (1 John 2: 3-6). Being a disciple means doing what Jesus taught. John doesn’t detail what the commandments are, but he points to the fact that disciples follow Jesus’ teachings.
- Love God vs. hating one’s brother (1 John 2: 9-11). It’s not possible to do both, according to John. It’s easy to say we don’t hate others, but whenever we justify our actions in terms of protecting ourselves from others, we are slipping into that territory.
- Denying vs. admitting that Jesus came in the flesh (1 John 2: 22-23). When we deny Jesus was human, we deny His ability to relate to humanity, to really redeem us, and our own potential to become like Him. We minimize our own potential as well as His sacrifice.
- Loving others in word vs. loving them in deed (1 John 3: 17-18). It’s easy to say we love others, but acting based on that love is much more difficult. It’s easier to write a check to charity than it is to serve in person. It’s easier to give someone $5 than to take them into our home and give them a meal and a shower. Our fear of exposure, of risk, of harm, or of being taken advantage of gets in the way of loving as Christ would.
John elaborated in 1 John 4 that if we don’t love each other, we don’t know God. It’s not possible to love God while hating others. Some theorize that this is because we are denying the atonement if we don’t love our fellow men since Jesus died for all of humanity.
Why is it so easy to deceive ourselves? I’m reminded of Kathryn Schulz’s excellent book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error in which she explains:
Sincere denial is also known as self-deception; it entails keeping a truth from ourselves that we cannot bear to know. How we are able to perpetrate a deception against ourselves is a longstanding mystery of psychology and philosophy.
Why would we subconsciously want to deceive ourselves? The stakes are simply too high. As she states:
Our beliefs are inextricable from our identities, our communities, and our overall sense of security and happiness. No wonder, then, that any major assault on our beliefs represents a trauma in its own right–one that can arouse denial just as swiftly as any other upsetting event.
Questioning our beliefs, including our self-deceptions, puts our very identity–our belief that we are honest, true, good, righteous–in doubt. That’s some scary stuff.
Fear vs. Love
One of my favorite verses is 1 John 4: 18: “Perfect love casteth out fear.” This implies that when we react to our fears, whether those fears are founded or not, we reduce our ability to feel love. Fear and love are incompatible in the same way some say that doubt and faith are incompatible. When we fear, we instinctively draw inward, we focus on our own survival, and we have a heightened perception of external threats that can cause us to lash out at others from a motive of self-preservation, to avoid harm. This is a very human response to feeling fear, the fight or flight response. The greater the fear, the more it makes it impossible to love others. Our focus on self blinds us to the harm that may be done to others.
While Donnie Darko argues that life isn’t that simple (and it isn’t!) fear does take precedence over other emotions. We only love when we transcend our fears, when we set aside our need for self-preservation. After all, isn’t that what Jesus did to the point that he could even ignore the actual harms being done to him and forgive his killers as they killed him? Now that’s love.
Because we are all human, we all struggle with the need to protect ourselves from real or imagined harm, and that fear of harm clouds our ability to love others and to achieve our divine potential. John wisely saw that this is a human trait that we as people need to overcome regardless of the nature of the arguments that divide us.
Thoughts to consider:
- Do we as Mormons feel more comfortable seeing Jesus as human or divine? How do we balance both aspects?
- If we view Jesus as descending to become human and us as needing to ascend toward the divine how does his example actually show us the way? Does it?
- What evidence do you see of these types of self-deceptions in yourself or others? Are these examples still true today?
- How are our interactions with others fraught with fear rather than motivated by love? How does fear enter into our family relationships? How do we learn to let go of it?
Discuss.
[1] When I first read that I thought “Jesus had a valet?”
Wheat & Tares 
The difference between mortal and divine is naïveté in the way that sleeping isn’t awake and aware.
Fallen can begin to be understood by understanding the abuse cycle. At first we tend to want to stone the Catholic Priest for abusing children until we come to the realization the he was once abused himself, that he IS the abused child himself. This is the fallen state of human kind exacerbated by shame that keeps us locked in our sins!
The way out is to shed our denial (including the Pollyanna type) and seek enlightenment. The path to enlightenment isn’t rote obedience to the LDS checklist, it’s discipleship:
I think Momons lean towards seeing Jesus as human. Like you said, our theology of humans as “gods in embryo” combines divinity and humanity in a distinct way. Because of that, Mormons weren’t quite as bothered by the ideas in Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code about Christ being married and having children. While other theologies would have difficulty combining that with divinity, we don’t. We tend to obsess with physicality (his mortal body, the laying on of hands, physical weight of sins causing him to bleed in Gethsemane, the physical aspects of his death and resurrection, physical aspects of saing ordinances, the witnesses who physically touched his body). We talk about what he looked like when he appeared to early church leaders, even down to the color of his eyes.
The mortal body is critical in our theology, but I think it can get in the way of understanding his divinity and relationship towards us. I wonder if our view of him as a big brother sometimes impedes our understanding of the personal nature of the atonement. Many other Christians have a much more personal intimacy with their perception of Christ. He literally dwells in them and cleanses them from the inside out. With the physical nature of the saving ordinances, it sometimes feels that we think of cleansing as on the outside coming in. We think of God dwelling *among* us, rather than God dwelling *in* us. Sometimes we’ll talk in abstract terms, like that Christ knows what childbirth feels like. In reality, his experiences make it so he felt what my personal experiences with childbirth were like (which differed in many ways from others). When we do good to others, we are doing good to him because he is there with those other people, experiencing what they are experiencing.
In Eastern religions it’s all about transcending the restraints of the mortal body and connecting on a spiritual level with a universal life force. With our doctrine on the priesthood infusing every creation, with each human possessing the Light of Christ, we have a lot of space to relate to those Eastern concepts in striving to become one with the will of God, the Creator of all. In focusing on the mortal nature of God, we miss out on the spark of divinity already residing in us.
In focusing on the mortal nature of God, we miss out on the spark of divinity already residing in us.
Very well said!
We tend to personify God to the point that he ceases to be God, we condescend Him to us rather reach up to glorify ourselves (which we tend to discount as being Eastern in thought even as it is Christian). In spite of having a Christianity Plus doctrine, with the exception of the Temple we behave much more like an Old Testament Pharisaical church than New where bright line rules and their enforcement are regularly elevated above and concentrated on instead of living the beatitudes of Christ’s ministry.
Our scriptures teach us that Christ was fully God and fully human.
I think Latter-day Saints are reasonably good examples of Christ-like love. I appreciate the examples of charity in see in wards and branches across the country and the world.
Physiologically when a feeling beings to rise within us that we are in conflict with, it causes anxiety so we quickly attempt to quench that anxiety with a defense. ALL of this is subconscious, it is well understood, it’s called the ISTDP Triangle of Conflict.
The LDS faith requires belief in the logically unbelievable. When this is pointed out (as I just did) it causes Cognitive Dissonance in many TBMs and their defenses rise regardless of how illogical they may be. What they really want is for me (in this case) to just shut up about it so their anxiety will go away! From their perspective their (subconscious) anxiety is all my fault, I must be an anti-Mormon jerk because they rarely feel this way at church when they’re with other faithful Mormons!
It rarely occurs to them to take responsibility for their *own* (subconscious) feelings and resolve it logically or through prayer and discipleship.
Prayer and discipleship confirm to me the blessing of the restoration and all the promises of gospel of Jesus Christ. How wonderful it us to be a part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints!
If we view Jesus as descending to become human and us as needing to ascend toward the divine how does his example actually show us the way? Does it?
Well, theologically, He is half-human, so I guess we are supposed to take inspiration from the ascension of that human half as our “perfect example” to follow. But I think there is more inspiration to be gained in viewing ourselves as “divine,” as “Christ types,” as having within us the Christ archetype, the divine child. Christ is the ultimate embodiment of a universal archetype we all have a part in. Christ is OUR story. We came to earth with a mission to fulfil, a cup to drink, a death to die, same as Christ. We often say “I’m trying to be like Jesus” but this is not what we mean. We mean “I’m trying to be perfectly obedient to the commandments and ideals of the LDS church.” But that phrase really means asking “what is my mission, what is my bitter cup, what is my death?”
“Perfect love casteth out fear” has my attention, too. I like your commentary:
“This implies that when we react to our fears, whether those fears are founded or not, we reduce our ability to feel love.”
Your wording, “react to our fears” as opposed to “have fears,” is helpful to me, as we’re likely to have fears, whether we will or no. If I can’t avoid having them, perhaps perfect love can help me reduce the degree to which I react to them.