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There is no Immaterial God in the Bible Nor Mormonism

Research by Kerry A. Shirts

The one distinguishing doctrine of Mormonism is God with an anthropomorphic constitution. Through research various Christian scholars have concurred with the anthropomorphism of Mormonism and have noted that the Bible is exactly teaching the same thing. Several Mormon scholars have found internal integrity both within Mormonism and the scriptures. This paper will deal with the Mormon side of the issue and how we see God and why we believe our view is consistent with the scriptures.

Bruce R. McConkie made it plain: Who or what is God? Is he the incomprehensible, uncreated, immaterial spirit nothingness described in the creeds of Christendom, or a personal Being in whose image man is created? Is he the laws and forces of nature, or an exalted and perfected Man?

And how can finite man come to a knowledge of the Infinite? Can he find God in the laboratory? Or in the creeds written by contending religionists who haggled and quarreled over every word?

The fact is -- God stands revealed or he remains forever unknown. It is not reason or research which makes known the mystery of godliness. In one brief glimpse of heaven and its chief inhabitants, Stephen learned more about God and his glory than could be acquired through eons of research by uninspired philosophers. While the Holy Ghost rested upon him, Stephen saw the Father and the Son -- beholding them as glorified, exalted Men, which fact he then announced as he was moved upon by the Spirit.1

James E. Talmage noted an idea involving prayer and the nature of God I think is worth pondering: "We, as a people, profess to be a prayerful people. I ask you severally, and you may answer to your own conscience individually, do you pray or do you content yourself with saying your prayers? There is a vital difference between the two processes. Many of us are taught to say prayers and have not learned how to pray. What inconsistency is there, what glaring inconsistency, in the man who kneels and says: "'Our Father, which art in heaven," and then proclaims that he is the offspring of the brute and not the child of God; that God is no personage but an influence, an essence, an immaterial nothing--there can't be an immaterial something--and then address that conception of his as "Father." Oh, what sacrilege in the man who is profane of heart and who drags the name of God in the mire of his foul, blasphemous oath, and then says, "Hallowed be Thy name!2

B.H. Roberts in his nifty little study "Joseph Smith, The Prophet-Teacher" noted the kind of God men believed in in the 19th century.

"In regard to deity, Christian men, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, believed that God was an incorporeal, immaterial being, without body—that is, not material, not matter; without parts; without passions. And yet, with gravest inconsistency, they held that God was of love the essence; that He loved righteousness, that He hated iniquity; that He so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life! Notwithstanding this "love" and this "hate" God was without passions! He was, too, according to men's creeds, without form. Notwithstanding Moses, one of the God-inspired teachers of men, said that "God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him ;" and Jesus, by a prophet of the New Testament, was declared to be the express image of God's person (Hebrews 1: 2, 3). Notwithstanding this, I say, men, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, were possessed of a "morbid terror" of anthropomorphism—the ascription of human form, feeling or qualities to God—as if they could escape it and still hold belief in the Bible revelation of God! Or, for matter of that, hold to any doctrine of God taught either by religion or philosophy. At the very least, if the God-idea survive at all, God must be held to possess consciousness, both consciousness of self, and of other than self—self-consciousness, and other-consciousness; also He must be thought of as possessed of volition; and what are these but human qualities, which present God to our thought as anthropomorphic? Strip God of these attributes and He is reduced to the atheists' "force ;" to blind, purposeless force, that can sustain no possible personal relationship whatsoever to men or other things in the universe. As one writer in a great magazine recently said: " If we are to know the Supreme Reality at all, it can only be through the attribution to Him of qualities analogous to, though infinitely transcending, the qualities which we recognize as highest in man, and consequently [highest] in the world as we know it."3

He further notes:

"Against the dogma that God was an incorporeal, immaterial, passionless being, the Prophet announced the splendid doctrine of anthropomorphism—God in the human form, and possessed of human qualities, but sanctified and perfected. In the first great revelation which opened this last dispensation our Prophet beheld Father and Son as separate persons, distinct from each other; persons in the form of men, but more glorious and more splendid, of course, than words could describe them to be. All through the revelations received, and all through his discourses, the Prophet reaffirms the old doctrine of the Scriptures, the doctrine of all the prophets, asserting that man indeed was created in the image of God, and that God possessed human qualities, consciousness, will, love, mercy, justice; together with power and glory—in a word, a Man "exalted and perfected."4

And the time and area as well as the circumstances for the problems with understanding God were targeted by Roberts as well:

"Immateriality of God:--The evil which grew out of these contentions in respect to Deity is found in the conclusion arrived at that God is an incorporeal, that is to say, an immaterial being; without body, without parts, without passions. The following is the Roman Catholic belief in respect of God: "There is but one God, the creator of heaven and earth, the supreme, incorporeal uncreated being, who exists of himself, and is infinite in all his attributes, etc." The Church of England teaches in her articles of faith--"There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts or passions; of infinite power, wisdom and goodness," etc. This plainly teaches the great error of the immateriality of God; and, indeed, that is the orthodox notion in respect of Deity, notwithstanding it finds so many express contradictions in the scriptures.

In the work of creation, God proposed to make man in his own image and likeness, and the proposition was executed. Moreover, Jesus is said to be the brightness of God's glory, "and the express image of his person." Again it is said, that Jesus "being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God." All this teaches that God has a form similar to that of man's; that he has organs, dimensions, proportions; that he occupies space and has relation to other objects in space; that as a person, he moves from place to place; and that so far as his actual person is concerned he cannot be in two places at one and the same instant. The question here arises as to those passages of scripture which declare the omnipresence of God, a thing which is impossible--speaking of his person--if what is here contended for be true. But God may be and is omnipresent by his influence, by his power, if not in his person. While his person is confined to one place at a time, as other substances are, his influence extends throughout the universe, as does also his power, and through this means he is omnipotent and omnipresent.

To assert the immateriality of God as substance, is not only to deny his personality, but his very existence; for an immaterial substance cannot exist. It can have no relation to time or space, no form, no extension, no parts. An immaterial substance is simply no substance at all; it is a contradiction of terms to say a substance is immaterial--it is the description of an infinite vacuum; and the difference between the atheist and the orthodox Christian is one of terms, not of fact; the former says, "There is no God;" the latter in his creed says, "God is nothing."

Such were the absurdities into which the vain philosophies of the pagans led the Christians even in the early centuries of the Christian era; so that through these errors they even denied the Lord who bought them."5

Charles Penrose noted that the Christians today cannot understand Deity simply because they do not enquire of him. Disbelief has indeed led to apostasy in Christendom.

"But here, in the 19th century, among people called Christians, we hear a great deal about God, the God of the Bible, the God that made man, the God that rules the universe, and when we inquire of the wisest men we have in Christendom in regard to this Being, they tell us that he is incomprehensible; they tell us that he is an immaterial being whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere: that he has no body and no parts and no passions; that there is nothing which can represent him; there is nothing like him in the heavens above or in the earth beneath, and that man's mind cannot grasp anything about him. They say he is one, and yet he is three; that he is not three but is one. That there are the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost--three separate substances, and yet not three but only one. They say that one of these three beings without a body had a body; that one of the three parts of this partless being had both a body and parts, and that he, the Son, was in all things like the Father, and was also like us excepting that he was without sin, but had passions as we have. This is the result of the attempt on the part of the wise men of Christendom to find out God for themselves. It is impossible, and is so laid down in Holy Writ; "man by searching cannot find out God." The only way that can be relied upon whereby man can find out God is by obtaining information from the Almighty Himself. "Well," say the people, "but he does not communicate anything to any of the inhabitants of the earth." Why not? Has he not power to manifest Himself to mortals? Is He so great and mighty and so far above the human family that He cannot reveal Himself to humanity? "No. He used to do so hundreds of years ago." And why does he not do it now? "Because the day of revelation has gone by," they say. Who told them so? The fact is that for a long period the people have not been expecting to receive revelations from God. They have not sought for them and, therefore, have not obtained them. But we find in the Old Scriptures a promise something like this: "Return unto me and I will return unto you, saith the Lord: Even from the days of your fathers you have gone away from mine ordinances and have not kept them," you have "transgressed the laws, changed the ordinances and broken the everlasting covenant;" now "return unto me and I will return unto you, saith the Lord of hosts."

We also find in the scriptures the declaration, that God changeth not, that he is "the same yesterday, to-day and forever." And we may reasonably infer that if God was a God of revelation hundreds of years ago, he is the same God of revelation to-day, only the people do not inquire of him, they do not seek unto him in the right way that they may obtain communications from him. The Apostle James declares, "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God who giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed."6

Hugh B. Brown noted the importance of understanding God as anthropomorphic, and utilized the Bible to illustrate this Mormon view:

"If Jesus of Nazareth was and is God, as John the Beloved and others declared him to be (See John 1:1-3), then God must be personal and material. It was not an incomprehensible, immaterial essence that came forth from the tomb, but the glorified, resurrected body of Jesus the Christ; it was a body of flesh and bone, as he himself declared, and as Thomas was called upon to verify by touch as well as sight. It was this body which ascended into heaven in the presence of the amazed disciples. It was this body which the attending angels declared should come again when they said,

Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven. (Acts 1:11.)

When Jesus came and revealed God to men, he held up to them a personal, living ideal and exhorted them to become perfect, even as his Father is perfect. The value of having an ideal is that it inspires emulation. We seek to become like that which we adore. Surely no one aspires to become diffused, immaterial essence, devoid of body, parts, or feeling and without center or circumference. Faith that a living, personal God is the Father of the human spirit encourages men to push back their horizons, to look up instead of down for their source. It enlarges their vista and life takes on new interest and new meaning. It encourages men to live more abundantly, and he said this was one purpose of his coming.

Because the Father called us sons and the Savior called us brothers, we posit for man an exalted Godlike status with almost limitless possibilities. This God-image quality in man, which is the root of his dignity, gives deeper meaning and a higher purpose to life, establishes faith and fortitude, and supplies the necessary valor to realize the vision without which people perish. It renews man's determination to pursue the eternal quest for answers to the whence and why and whither of life.

Again, if God is not comprehensible, then man's salvation is impossible, for Jesus said,

And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent. (John 17:3.)

If, therefore, we cannot know him, then we cannot have life eternal, and if this be so, then the whole plan of salvation fails, the doctrine of the atonement is false and meaningless, and men are left in Dante's deepest hell, "desiring without hope." We agree with Milton that "the end of all learning is to know God and out of that knowledge to love and emulate Him."7

Heber C. Iverson noted an interesting confession of Thomas Jefferson:

What a fearful indictment of Christian teaching. This knowledge like their conviction of the immortality of the soul, and their instinctive turning to God in the hour of danger, is an organic instinct, and in spite of teachings to the contrary concerning the true character of God. They have deeply rooted in their soul instinct a belief in the true God. In the Church of England prayer book we have these words, "We believe in one living and true God, of infinite goodness, wisdom, and power, without body, parts or passions." In other words, an incomprehensible, immaterial being! Thomas Jefferson expressed himself in a letter to his distinguished friend, John Adams, in this wise, "When we speak of an immaterial existence, we speak of nothing; when we say that God, angels, and the human soul are immaterial, we say there is no God, no angels, no human soul." I cannot reason otherwise. At what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism or veiled atheism crept in, I do not know, but heresy it truly is. Christ taught none of it. True, he said, "God is a spirit!" but he had not yet defined what spirit is, nor hath he said that it is immaterial. And the Fathers of the first four centuries believed it to be material--fine, and ethereal, in very deed, but nevertheless material. The Prophet Joseph Smith declared that spirit is matter, that it is pure and elastic, fine and ethereal, but it is matter. Hence they found Christianity teaching an incomprehensible, immaterial, impossible God. Their belief in him is not founded upon the teaching of the past half century.

Concerning the equally vital question of belief in the Redeemer of the world, Jesus Christ, this is said:

When it comes to thoughts about Jesus Christ, answers are quite full and explicit. There is universal respect for him, though the heroic side of his character seems largely unknown. There is little knowledge of him as the Son of God, the atoning sacrifice, or as the source of living power. The men seem seldom to think of him until questioned. He is remote from their daily life. Very many letters said his doctrines were womanly and his character as presented in church sentimental. The "living Christ" is merely a name, and means little to the man. Christ is a historical figure, not a present Redeemer. The practical religion of the great mass of men seems to be a vague theism entirely disassociated from Christ.8

And so these questions, these concerns are exactly why Mormonism teaches the principle of God in plainness.

"It is a philosophical impossibility to believe that the Man Jesus is the Son of God in the literal and full sense of the word if we suppose that his Father is a spirit essence or power that fills the immensity of space and is everywhere and nowhere in particular present, and if we believe that God is an immaterial, uncreated Being without body, parts, or passions, as the creeds of Christendom recite. To know and understand Christ and his mission and ministry, we must know certain basic things about that Progenitor whence he sprang.

God himself is the First Man and the Father of all men. In the pure language, spoken by Adam, the name of the Father is Man of Holiness, which means he is a holy Man: and when the scriptures speak of Deity creating man in his own image, they are to be understood as literal renditions of that which in reality occurred. "God himself. . . is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens," the Prophet Joseph Smith said. "The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man's" (D&C 130:22) is the scriptural assertion. When Paul says the Son is the brightness of his Father's glory, "and the express image of his person" (Heb. 1:3), he is certifying that the Risen Lord—who ate and drank with the apostles after he rose from the dead, and into whose riven side they had thrust their hands—had a resurrected body of the same sort and kind possessed by the exalted Father."9

"At the, beginning of the nineteenth century, it was generally believed that God was incorporeal and immaterial, without body, without parts or passions, disregarding the facts that God loves righteousness and he hates iniquity, and that love and hate, of course, are passions.

It has been claimed that God was without form, even though the holy Scriptures teach that God created man in his own image. In fact, we are told by Paul the apostle that Jesus Christ was in the express image of his Father. Are we then created in the image of a formless entity?

For us, God is not an abstraction. He is not an idea, a metaphysical principle, an impersonal force or power. He is a concrete, living person. And though in our human frailty we cannot know the total mystery of his being, we know that he is akin to us, for he is revealed to us in the divine personality of his Son, Jesus Christ, and he is, in fact, our Father.

The Church teaches that when God created man in his own image, he did not divest himself of that image. He is still in human form and is possessed of sanctified and perfected human qualities, which we all admire. All through the holy scriptures, the Father and the Son are seen to be separate and distinct personages. We reaffirm the doctrine of the ancient scripture and of all the prophets that asserts that man was created in the image of God and that God possessed such human qualities as consciousness, will, love, mercy, justice. In other words, he is an exalted, perfected, and glorified Being.

Man's eternal nature

The late President Brigham H. Roberts, in one of his later writings, discussed some of the principles of the gospel that I desire to give wider circulation. I shall quote and paraphrase him.

Under the uninspired teachings of men and creeds as they apply to man -- premortal, mortal, and postmortal man -- it was taught that while man's body was created by God, his origin was purely an earthly one. We believe that before the creation of the body, all men existed as intelligence, These intelligences were not created or made, neither indeed can they be; the intelligent entity in man which we call spirit or soul is a self-existing entity, uncreated and eternal. Thus man is crowned with the dignity which belongs to his divine and eternal nature."10

Jesus did not teach about the philosophers' God either, according to Keith Norman:

"But if some Jewish writers were beginning to show the influence of Greek ideas and culture, Jesus and his followers taught the God of the fathers, not a new or higher immaterial God. Jesus' summons for men to live as God would have them was entirely in the prophetic tradition of what Tillich calls "biblical personalism." In radical contrast to "philosophical ontology," he insists, "no ontological search can be found in the biblical literature." The authors of scripture were simply not concerned with defining the nature of being. As McGiffert explains it in a somewhat regretful tone,"Jesus' idea of God indeed is quite naive and anthropomorphic, and there is no sign that he was troubled by any speculative problems or difficulties."

During his mortal ministry, Jesus spoke simply of "the creation which God created" (Mark 13:19), without elaborating on the details, and this was in harmony with the Rabbinic view which regarded speculations on the nature of preexistent matter as "useless and dangerous," since "it is enough to say that God created the world and all that therein is."11

In his dialogue type article, William O. Nelson shows that Augustine was using and developing Plato's doctrine, rather than the doctrine of God found in the Bible, hence what we Mormons say is a part of the apostasy, teaching for doctrines of God, the doctrines of men instead.

"Augustine: Yes, Plato, were it not for your influence in my education, Christianity never would have been palatable to me. (Augustine, bk. 1 of "Confessions" in vol. 18 of "Great Books of the Western World", (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 9:14, 12:19, 16:25). The early Christian idea that God was bounded by the figure of a human body was so revolting to me, that I wrote, "I thought not of thee, O God, under the figure of an human body; since I began to hear aught of wisdom, I always avoided this." ("Confessions", bk. 5, 10:19-20, bk. 7, 1:1) But being partially convinced that Christianity was true by that noble scholar Ambrose, I sought a reconciliation. Couldn't Ambrose tell me? Couldn't the church? I finally found my answer among the Platonists. For fifteen years I had labored at the thesis on the Trinity without "ever reaching a satisfactory conclusion." I finally found that if I could accept the platonic notion of the reality of an immaterial being as God, then I could accept him and the doctrine of the Trinity. (Augustine, "Confessions," Bk. 4, 16:29-31; bk. 5, 10:18- 10:21, bk. 6, 3:4-4:5, bk. 8 of "City of God", in vol. 18, ed., Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 267-69.)"12

Concerning the idea of God as a personal being and some difficulties with accepting this doctrine Don B. Colton in his Conference Report of April 1927, said:

"...how does "Mormon" philosophy solve the problem and reconcile the omnipresence of God and yet proclaim him a personal being?

"Mormon" philosophy. I say, has given an answer to that question. It has said, and does say, that God is a personal being, but that emaciating from him is a light which fills the immensity of space. The light of the sun, the light of the moon, the light of the stars--the light of all the heavenly bodies. Radio proves the presence of at least something that permeates every known object, no matter how opaque the substance. There is found in all the universe a substance, which for lack of a better term we call ether. In the 131st section of the D&C it is revealed to us that there is no snch thing as immaterial matter. But all the forces and everything that is in existence (and we know that the ether is in existence) is but a finer matter. I am not saying what it is. I do not know. It only proves, however, that there is a force, a something everywhere, and whether that be the instrument by which the Spirit of God. the light that emanates from him, operates and fills the immensity of space, perhaps is yet to be discovered. Suffice it to say that there is snch an instrumentality. This is in accordance with David's description of God, for he said, "If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me and thy right hand shall hold me."

So "Mormon" philosophy answers the question that has puzzled the thinkers of the day, in revealing how God can he a personal God and yet be omnipotent. Emanating from him is the light which proceedeth forth from the presence of the Father to fill the immensity of space. Ancient scriptures abundantly attest the fact that God is a personal being, and this is supplemented by the revelations of this day which at once answer the question that God may be and is a personal being, and at the same time his power and presence and influence are felt throughout all the length and breadth of the universe. So that "Mormonism" has answered one of the great perplexing questions of the day, and that alone would justify its existence.

Another question, and I must be brief: Next to the great and important question of finding God is to find out who is man, and to that question "Mormon" philosophy has given a definite and reasonable answer. No man who thinks can believe anything else than that man is a dual being. As we stand by the bier of a loved one, we know that something has departed. Evolution, if it were accepted as truth, explains only the body. That which we love, that which reasons, that which thinks, that which has ambition, that which distinguishes man and makes him a little lower than the angels, but much higher than the animals of the earth; that which is really man must be explained. So far as I have found, after extensive reading and earnest research, "Mormon" philosophy alone gives a reason and answer to the question, Who and what is man? He is composed of spirit and body which make up the soul, or the completed man, and that spirit did not have its origin by accident. It was and is the creation of our Father in heaven, and the material of which it is made is only finer matter, as explained in the 131st section of the D&C. If it exists it is something and is, therefore, matter."13

"It is by reference to this true doctrine of omnipresence that the sectarian world attempts to justify its false creeds which describe Deity as a vague, ethereal, immaterial essence which fills the immensity of space and is everywhere and nowhere in particular present. God himself, of course, is a personal Being in whose image man is created. (Gen. 1:26; 5:1; Moses 2:26; 6:9), but he is also an immanent Being, meaning that the light of Christ shines forth from him to fill all space. This "light proceedeth forth from the presence of God to fill the immensity of space -- The light which is in all things, which giveth life to all things, which is the law by which all things are governed, even the power of God who sitteth upon his throne, who is in the bosom of eternity, who is in the midst of all things." (D. & C. 88:12-13.)

God is the Creator; the power, light, influence, and spirit that goes forth from his person to fill all immensity is a creature of his creating. Thus it was that Paul, speaking of apostate peoples, said they had "changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever." (Rom. 1:25.)14

With that, we know that God cannot be found by searching, even though He be everywhere!

"Still others searched for Jesus in councils of debate. Such was the historic Council of Nicea in 325 AD. There, with the help of the Roman Emperor, the delegates did away in Christendom with the concept of a personal God and a personal Son -- the two separate and distinct Glorified Beings of the scriptures. The Creed of Nicea, the "incomprehensible mystery" of which its originators seemed so proud precisely because it could not be understood, substituted for the personal God of love and for Jesus of the New Testament an immaterial abstraction. The result was a maze of confusion and a compoundment of error. Jesus will not be found in councils of debate. Men of the world have modified his miracles, doubted his divinity and rejected his resurrection.

He is found by humble prayer and pure heart

The formula for finding Jesus has always been and ever will be the same -- the earnest and sincere prayer of a humble and pure heart. The Prophet Jeremiah counseled, ". . . ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart." (Jer. 29:13.)15

So we are within the material universe with a material God as well as material ourselves, as John A. Widtsoe said:

"The Gospel holds strictly to the conception of a material universe. Much inconsistency of thought has come from the notion that things may be derived from an immaterial state, that is, from nothingness. This unthinkable view has been made the basis of doctrines concerning God and man, which have led to utter confusion of thought. The Gospel accepts the view, supported by all human experience, that matter occurs in many forms, some visible to the eye, others invisible, and yet others that may not be recognized by any of the senses of man. Spiritual matter is but a refined form of gross matter. In short, there is no such thing as immaterial matter, but some forms of matter are more refined than others. Light, heat, and other similar forces are held by science to be manifestations of subtle states of matter, beyond the immediate senses of man. The material universe may appear in a variety of forms, all of the same ultimate nature; but man recognizes directly only that form which is the ordinary matter of our daily lives."16

The Early Christians also held this view:

"One of the first things Peter says to Clement is this: "We affirm there is absolutely nothing evil in matter." Because this was the doctrine, you see. God had to be immaterial and had no contact with material at all. This was Neoplatonism, not Platonism. Plato was different. But Neoplatonism was that matter is bad and evil, and spirit is everything that isn't matter. So the only definition that they ever gave of God was the asomaton, "that which has no body." The bodyless one was God. That was all you could say about him, as Origen says. And you could see they had a legitimate reason for regarding material and the flesh as loathsome because that's the way everybody was behaving in those days. It was a period of decline, and they took it for granted that if people had bodies they would misbehave and do anything that felt good. That's what they were doing, and we have a rich literature on that, of course. The idea was that anything material was absolutely defiling; it was vicious. So you get to the Neoplatonists with the doctrine that even any contact with matter would defile God himself. Well, how could God have made the universe then? He made a physical world, after all. Oh no, that was made by the thirty Eons. So there are thirty steps between God and the final creator. And that was a mistake, you see. That was Sophia. The final Eon was Sophia, and she misbehaved. Being female, she wanted to rule things. She went wild in space, and the Lord gave her no more support. She had a terrible abortion and brought forth a lot of filthy matter, and from that the world was made. So God is not responsible for this world, not at all. He is pure unmatter, according to Neoplatonists. They are rabid on that particular subject. That is why it is so revolutionary when Peter says, "We affirm absolutely that there is nothing evil in matter," thus countering the favorite claim of the Neoplatonists and Gnostics.

Eusebius says it is unholy to say that matter is unbegotten or was only organized at the creation. Notice what they were preaching—that matter was not created and was only organized at the creation. It wasn't created out of nothing; it was organized, which is what we teach. He says that's what the early church taught, but it's unholy to say it. "The real human is an intellectual, bodyless, immaterial, rational being, and as such only is he in the image of God," he wrote. And then he reveals himself in the seventh book of the history. He says that it's the simple, old-fashioned Christians who believe in the old literalism. We're much too intellectual for them; we leave that all behind. We don't need that anymore.

What marks the fourth century, as Alfoldi puts it, is "the victory of abstract ways of thinking—the universal triumph of theory, which knows no half measures. The Gnostic idea of the body as a prison is entirely at home with the doctors of the church. They love it because matter is vile."

Now there was a very righteous old guy. He and his followers got quite close to the early church, and they suffered a lot of persecution for it. They were noted for their old-fashioned ways. He left the main church because of the immorality of the clergy and stuck to a literal interpretation of the scriptures. Even to believe, says Epiphanius, that we actually are in God's image. That actually refers to Adam's body. Three exclamation points Epiphanius puts in there. He listed over eighty of these heresies that carried over from the third century. He is writing in the fourth century. Everyone had his own doctrine and was preaching in his own way. But the thing to do was to leave out anything literal, physical, or material—anything that smacks of Mormonism.

St. Augustine goes all the way. "Christ is with us if we believe. His dwelling in you is more real than if he were outside you before your eyes."

It's more real to have Jesus in there than out there. "When everything dissolved into abstractions, it left an uncomfortable feeling behind. The generation that rids itself once and for all of the old literalizers of which Jerome speaks…" Jerome lived in a monastery in Bethlehem for fifteen years and knew the Christians at Jerusalem. There were old groups that still hung on. He called them the old-fashioned Christians, the literalizers. They would take you up to the top of the Mount of Olives and show you a plot that the church owned where they said the temple was going to be built when Christ came again. This was the sort of thing they taught, and Jerome was shocked. "Whom Jerome speak of crave no other, the presence of physical objects to tie them to the reality of the scriptures." (That's in the fourth century.) In his day everybody started making a pilgimage because they wanted contact with something that was physical. They went to the temple site, but Jerome says, "Don't go to the site of the temple in Jerusalem. Does not the sepulcher of the Lord appear more venerable to you? In the resurrection you have heard that all things will be without bodies. (This is from the eleventh volume of the Patrologia.) There is a passage that says this is what we will do when we are resurrected. Of course, we must be resurrected physically because the scripture says we will. So you will rise up with your body, but as soon as it is completely incorporated and put together, it will start to melt and dissolve and presently go away so you won't be bothered with it anymore. So that accounts for the resurrection and makes it spiritual at the same time. He says, "All things will be without bodies for they will have no need of them, and all matter will return to the nihilum [the nothing] from which it was once made. All matter came out of nothing originally and with the resurrection will all be restored, and then it will return to nothing."

Jerome admits though that Tertullian, Victorinus, Lactantius—the earlier fathers, all believed what the old Christians believed: that the Saints would reign with the Lord after the resurrection in the flesh.17

Endnotes

1.Bruce R. McConkie, "Doctrinal New Testament Commentary", Vol.2, p.77;

2. James E. Talmage, Conference Report, October 1914, p.102.

3. B.H. Roberts, "Joseph Smith The Prophet-Teacher," p.14f.

4. B.H. Roberts, "Ibid.", p.22.

5. B. H. Roberts, Outlines of Ecclesiastical History, p.191f.

6. Charles W. Penrose in "Journal of Discourses", Vol.23, p.157f.

7. Hugh B. Brown, Conference Report April 1957, p.105f.

8. Heber C. Iverson, Conference Report, April 1920, p.84. Cf. the entry in the "Times & Seasons", Vol. 6, p. 970: An extract from a letter written to JOHN ADAMS BY THOMAS JEFFERSON, of Virginia, published by Mr. John Stewart, of New York, in the second volume of the 'Bible of Nature,' page 271-272.

"I feel, therefore I 'exist'. I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existences, then. I call them matter. I feel them changing places: this give me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void. or nothing, or immaterial space. On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need. I can conceive thought to be an action of a particular organization of matter, formed for that purpose by its creator, as well as that attraction is an action of matter, or magnetism of loadstone.

when he who denies to the Creator the power of endowing matter with the mode of action, called thinking, shall show how he could endow the sun with the mode of action called attraction, which reins the planets in the track of their orbits, or how an absence of matter can have a will and by that will put matter into motion, then the materialist may be lawfully required to explain the process by which matter exercise the faculty of thinking. When once we quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wid. To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothing. To say that the human soul, angels, God, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is not God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by the Locks, the Tracys, and the Stewarts. At what age (Athanasius and the Council of Nice) of the Christian Church this heresy of immaterialism, or masked atheism, crept in, I do not know. But a heresy it certainly is. Jesus taught nothing of it. He told us, indeed, that God is a spirit, but he has not defined what a spirit is, nor said that it is not matter. And the ancient fathers, generally of the three first centuries, held it to be matter, light and thin indeed, an etherial gas; but still matter.

9. Bruce R. McConkie, "The Mortal Messiah", Vol.1, p.20f.

10. Hugh B. Brown, Conference Report, April 1969, p.51.

11. "Ex Nihilo: the Development of the Doctrines of God and Creation in Early Christianity" Keith Norman, BYU Studies, Vol. 17, No. 3, p.300.

12. Whither the Aim of Education Today? A Symposium of Thought

by William O. Nelson BYU Studies Vol. 28, No. 3, pg.10.

13. Don B. Colton ,Conference Report of April 1927, p.125.

14. Bruce R. McConkie, "Mormon Doctrine", p.544.

15. Thomas S. Monson, Conference Report, October 1965, p.142 - p.143

16. John A. Widtsoe, "A Rational Theology", p.11.

17. Hugh Nibley, "Ancient Documents and the Pearl of Great Price", p.7, 11f.