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The famous couplet coined by Lorenzo Snow in 1840, “As man now is, God once was: As God now is, man may be,”rears its head every now and then, inspiring both awe and some confusion among rank-and-file Latter-day Saints while causing at least a degree of discomfort for Church leaders and spokespeople who are trying to make Mormonism more palatable for our mainstream Christian friends and critics. Some observers have even suggested that the Church is intentionally downplaying this doctrine.Nevertheless, the couplet found its way into the 2013 Melchizedek Priesthood/Relief Society manual Teaching of Presidents of the Church: Lorenzo Snow, and this distinctive doctrine also appeared prominently in previous manuals containing the teachings of Brigham Young and Joseph Smith.

So, what are we to make of this theological nugget, this idea that God was once a mortal man going through similar experiences to ours, who overcame through faith and obedience and, presumably, the assistance of his own deified Father? Should we assume, as President Gordon B. Hinckley was reported to have said, that Lorenzo Snow’s couplet “gets into some pretty deep theology that we don’t know very much about”?

I would suggest that although our understanding of the particulars of the premortal existence is certainly meager, this radical doctrine is not something we should downplay.In fact, I would argue that without this doctrine, the boundary between Mormonism and mainstream Christianity blurs in certain ways, because it has inescapable ramifications not only for how we understand our own eternal nature and potential, but also how we view our relationship with God, including the question of why and how he is able to exercise authority over us. In short, this doctrine is perhaps the most distinctively “Mormon” of all our doctrines and is something we should neither gloss over nor disavow in any way. This tenet is not just an afterthought to Joseph Smith’s other teachings; it is, in a fundamental way, the culmination of what he was trying to teach the Saints in Nauvoo, and if we were to fully embrace this doctrine, it might, among other things, revolutionize the way we understand and exercise authority in the Church. Before we can do this, however, we need to clear up some theological loose ends. So let me set the table with some necessary doctrinal history. 

A Selective History of the Doctrine of Preexistence 

In a 2013 BYU Studies Quarterly article, Samuel Brown argued that adoption is a theology that, among other things, differs from the doctrine of spirit birth that has prevailed in the Church since shortly after the death of Joseph Smith.Before I began editing Brown’s essay, I spent some time reacquainting myself with the history of this doctrine. What I learned reinforced for me just how crucial our view of the premortal experience is and how important it is to examine the ramifications of certain beliefs, some of which remain very much unsettled. 

The doctrine of spirit birth plays an integral role in the development of the more encompassing doctrine of preexistence. Blake Ostler recounts a portion of this doctrinal history in a 1982 Dialogue article,as does Charles Harrell in a 1988 BYU Studies articleand in his more recent “This Is My Doctrine”: The Development of Mormon Theology.Ostler and Harrell begin with early Mormonism (roughly 1830–1835) when Latter-day Saints accepted the Catholic/Protestant idea of an infinite and absolute God and perhaps had no well-developed concept yet of an actual premortal existence of humanity. It has been argued that the spiritual creation mentioned in what is now the Book of Moseswas understood by early Mormons to involve a strictly conceptual creation rather than an actual creation of all things, including men and women, in spirit form. Ostler presents this argument,for instance, but Harrell contends that “no record from the early era of the Church offers any evidence that this spiritual creation was ever viewed in any way other than as a spirit creation.”Although we may not be able to discern exactly how early Latter-day Saints understood the concept of “spiritual creation,” we do know that Joseph Smith introduced the idea of uncreated intelligence in 1833 with the revelation that is now Doctrine and Covenants 93,but at that time the word intelligence was understood differently than Mormons today interpret the scriptural text. The notion of uncreated intelligence was understood to mean a general knowledge or awareness and not a personal preexistent spirit or unembodied but self-aware entity.Contemporary Latter-day Saints have been guilty of superimposing their current definition of terms on earlier statements, which creates problems in understanding what those early Latter-day Saints actually believed.

In 1839, Joseph Smith publicly rejected the notion of creatio ex nihilo and introduced the idea that each individual’s spirit was not created and has always existed.This teaching appears on several different occasions,and again what Joseph meant exactly with the term spirit is subject to debate, but he did use the term soul twice in describing the eternal existence of human beings, suggesting something more than a form of nonsentient intelligence. B. H. Roberts, for instance, insisted that Joseph was referring only to the mind or intelligence of man, not to the spirit body,but Joseph could very well have been referring to the spirit as an embodied form.

In 1842, Joseph began teaching that spirit is matter.He expanded the idea of uncreated, eternal spirits and their relationship to God until his death in 1844. In the so-called King Follett discourse, for example, Joseph taught that God found “himself in the midst of spirit and glory [and] because he was greater saw proper to institute laws whereby the rest could have a privilege to advance like himself.”If the record is an accurate reflection of what Joseph taught,it appears he understood that God did not “create” his spirit children, but found them and entered into a covenant relationship with them. This is consistent with the Book of Abraham, which explains that God “came down in the beginning in the midst of all the intelligences” that Abraham was shown (Abraham 3:21). Two comments on this statement: First, if neither God nor the human race has a beginning, what is this beginning Abraham talks about, which is also mentioned in D&C 93:29 (“Man was also in the beginning with God”)? It must be the beginning of our association with our Father. If we accept the notion that God was once as we are, we also must accept the idea that he was not always God and that he was therefore not always our Father, which means our relationship with him had to have a beginning. Second, Joseph seemed to use the terms intelligence, spirit, and soul interchangeably at times. Two verses later in Abraham’s record, referring to the “intelligences” mentioned in verse 21, the account states that “God saw these soulsthat they were good” (emphasis mine), so he likely wasn’t seeing what modern-day Mormons would consider “intelligences,” namely, some sort of self-aware prespirit entities, because this concept, as I discuss below, did not develop until many years after Joseph’s death. 

In all of Joseph’s teachings about the eternal nature of God and his children, there is no mention of exactly how they are related. Harrell and Ostler agree that there is no record of Joseph introducing the idea of a literal spirit birth, although Harrell argues that “Joseph Smith must be credited with having provided the impetus that led to an awareness of spirit birth.”Terryl Givens goes a step further, suggesting that Joseph must have given his close associates reason to believe not only that spirits are eternal but also that something such as spirit birth occurs. For instance, “William Clayton . . . recorded Smith as teaching that marriages which persist in the eternities will include the power to ‘have children in the celestial glory,’ implying that we may have been created by a comparable process. . . . Other evidence, however, suggests that Smith considered spirit and intelligence to be synonymous concepts, referring to an eternally existent entity.”If he had lived a year or two longer, he may have resolved this uncertainty, but we have no way of knowing which path Joseph’s thought may have taken. After his demise, though, his followers began openly developing the doctrine of spirit birth. According to Brown,

By 1845, several Church leaders were arguing publicly that Joseph Smith’s divine anthropology required a birth from prespirit into spirit, a transition graphically patterned on the process of gestation and parturition familiar from human biology. There is a relentless, albeit asymmetrical, logic in this attempt to describe the internal workings of the system Joseph Smith had revealed only in broad contours. . . . They could as easily have chosen the spiritual rebirth of conversion and baptism, or the covenantal fatherhood proclaimed by King Benjamin, or the rebirth of resurrection as the exemplar for the process of premortal birth, but they chose mortal parenthood as their reference point.

Givens traces the first printed mention of a Heavenly Mother to an 1844 letter of W. W. Phelps to William Smith.“He followed that exposition several months later with a hymn sung at the December 1844 dedication of the Nauvoo Seventies Hall, which announced ‘Here’s our Father in heaven, and Mother, the Queen.’”Later that year Eliza R. Snow, one of Joseph’s plural wives, published her poem that is now the popular hymn “O My Father.”But the existence of a Heavenly Mother requires spirit birth no more than the existence of a Heavenly Father does. References to a metaphorical parenthood and birth abound in scripture.Still, from the Pratt brothers, George Q. Cannon, Erastus Snow, and others, the doctrine of spirit birth began to seep into public discourse.

Ostler indicates that after Joseph’s death Brigham Young and Orson Pratt, who disagreed on the basic nature of God and humans, both nevertheless adopted the idea of a literal spirit birth.Although others promoted the idea of spirit birth,Young and Pratt were its two most influential early proponents. Young preferred the idea that personal identity was created at the organization of the spirit body and that intelligence was a raw material of sorts, without self-awareness or agency or accountability.Pratt’s theory, by contrast, involved “particles” that were eternal, self-aware, and capable of being governed by laws. They were organized at spirit birth into a new configuration that required them to act, feel, and think in union (as a spirit body).Both Young and Pratt agreed, however, that neither God nor his children existed as autonomous, self-aware individuals until after they had been organized through the process of spirit birth.

In 1884, after the deaths of Young and Pratt, Charles Penrose promoted a theory somewhat similar to Orson Pratt’s, endorsing again the idea that only “in the elementary particles of His organism” did God have no beginning and that “there must have been a time when [God] was organized.”In 1907, B. H. Roberts published the idea that before spirit birth we existed as individualized “intelligences” that were then given spirit bodies through a process similar to mortal conception, gestation, and birth.Whether this idea is original to Roberts is uncertain, perhaps even doubtful. As Jim Faulconer has pointed out,in 1895, Brigham Young Academy instructor Nels L. Nelson published an article in The Contributor in which he proposed three components in man: the ego, the spirit body, and the physical body. Defining the first component, Nelson wrote: “The ego [is] that in us which enables us to say: ‘This is I, and this is the universe.’ This principle is co-eternal with God. It never had a beginning nor can it ever have an end. It might appropriately be called the mind of the spirit.”This notion of an uncreated ego, he claimed, was the only way he could see to harmonize Joseph Smith’s teachings that the spirit is uncreated and yet is born of Heavenly Parents. Roberts had certainly read Nelson’s article, for he mentioned both “Prof. Nelson” and the “ego” in his own 1907 article,but he expanded upon this reasoning and perhaps adopted the terminology of Smith’s King Follett discourse, renaming this uncreated component the “intelligence,” a self-aware prespirit entity. Roberts was not alone in promoting this theory. In the draft of his 1914 Rational Theology that was submitted for approval to the First Presidency, John A. Widtsoe promoted ideas similar to Roberts’s.

Significantly, Roberts’s explanation of premortality was rejected by the First Presidency, as was Widtsoe’s, and the relevant text was deleted from Rational Theology before it was published. Roberts’s magnum opus, The Truth, the Way, the Life, in which he outlined his view of a two-tiered premortality, was not published until sixty-one years after his death (jointly by BYU Studies and Deseret Book, followed the next year by a Signature Books edition). But because of the inherent appeal of the idea of sentient prespirit intelligences, over time it gained ascendency and is now prob ably the most common understanding of the premortal existence held among Latter-day Saints.

Bruce R. McConkie and others, however, promoted a neoorthodox view more similar to Brigham Young’s, insisting that men and women did not exist as conscious entities before spirit birth.The Church has never weighed in with an official stance on this disagreement over our prespirit status, and so a degree of ambiguity reigns at this fundamental level of LDS theology. The one constant, however, from 1845 to the present—appearing in the theories of Pratt, Young, Penrose, Nelson, Roberts, McConkie, and many others—is the idea that we are begotten by our Heavenly Father and given birth by a Heavenly Mother in a process similar to human conception, gestation, and parturition. 

Ironically, it may have been Charles Darwin who indirectly cemented spirit birth’s place in the Mormon doctrine of premortality.Five years after Young’s death, Orson Whitney argued against Darwin’s theory of evolution, which presented challenges to Christian theology in general, by employing the notion of spirit birth in his defense of the biblical account of earth’s (and man’s) creation: “Man is the direct offspring of Deity, of a being who is the Begetter of his spirit in the eternal worlds, and the Architect of his mortal tabernacle in this. . . . For man is the child of God, fashioned in His image and endowed with His attributes, and even as the infant son of an earthly father is capable in due time of becoming a man, so the undeveloped offspring of celestial parentage is capable in due time of becoming a God.”

Twenty-seven years later, in November 1909, in the wake of a Brigham Young University centennial celebration of the birth of Charles Darwin and troubling statements in support of Darwin by faculty member Ralph Chamberlin and others, the First Presidency issued a document (“The Origin of Man”) drafted by Orson Whitney and based largely on his 1882 article. This document included the following: 

The Father of Jesus is our Father also. . . . Jesus, however, is the firstborn among all the sons of God—the first begotten in the spirit, and the only begotten in the flesh. He is our elder brother, and we, like Him, are in the image of God. All men and women are in the similitude of the universal Father and Mother, and are literally the sons and daughters of Deity. . . . The doctrine of the pre-existence . . . shows that man, as a spirit, was begotten and born of heavenly parents, and reared to maturity in the eternal mansions of the Father, prior to coming upon the earth in a temporal body to undergo an experience in mortality.

This doctrinal exposition effectively established spirit birth as the official doctrine of the Church regarding our premortal relationship with our Father in Heaven. As evidence of how influential this exposition still is, over a hundred years after its publication, “The Origin of Man” has been quoted in two official Church manuals in recent years (one manual actually quoting from the other).

The doctrine of spirit birth gained traction only after Joseph Smith’s death; nevertheless, it seems to be the only official teaching of the Church today, although the wording current Church leaders use is often more cautious and measured than in earlier days, likely because of the adverse reaction this doctrine elicits from mainstream Christians.

It may be that the doctrine of literal spirit birth emerged as an attempt to bridge the conceptual gap between Joseph’s early revelations (especially Moses 3) about a spiritual creation of everything, including humankind, preceding physical creation and his later teachings about uncreated and eternal spirits. This new doctrine, however, gave birth to another conundrum: how to account for evil and accountability in the world if, as Brigham Young taught, God created the spirits of men and women from impersonal eternal material called “intelligence.”This conundrum is identical to the dilemma created by the Christian doctrine creatio ex nihilo, merely moving it back one link in the chain of existence. B. H. Roberts (perhaps following the lead of Nels Nelson) solved this problem by introducing the idea of prespirit beings called “intelligences,” thus allowing for eternal inequality and accountability, but this idea introduced other philosophical difficulties, which Blake Ostler briefly outlines: “The doctrine of personal eternalism raises problems for Mormon thought. If the number of intelligences is infinite, then an infinite number of intelligences will remain without the chance to progress by further organization. If, on the other hand, the number of intelligences is finite, the eternal progression of gods resulting from begetting spirits must one day cease. Either way, the dilemma remains.”What we are left with today are certain unsettled points of doctrine. 

Doctrinal Possibilities 

These doctrines are unsettled primarily because Joseph Smith died before he made clear exactly what he understood regarding our premortal state, and apparently none of his successors have felt comfortable filling in all the gaps (or perhaps they have disagreed on the details). It is also possible that Joseph himself was uncertain regarding some of the particulars and that God, for some reason, was reluctant to reveal too many specifics about the nature of premortality. The revelations are intriguing but unclear on some points. According to Doctrine and Covenants 93:29, for instance, “intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.” But does this refer to some sort of unembodied yet individualized prespirit entity or a rudimentary, impersonal spiritual element? Whatever it means, the context suggests something more than the general conceptual notion of knowledge or understanding held by the earliest Mormons.The idea that intelligence cannot be created suggests it is a self-existent capacity or entity. Along these same lines, in the King Follett discourse, given just weeks before the Prophet’s murder and captured in longhand imperfectly by four scribes, Joseph taught, “The mind of man—the intelligent part is coequal with, God himself. . . . Is it logic to say that a spirit is immortal and yet have a beginning[?] because if a spirit have a beginning it will have an end. . . . Intelligence exists upon a self-existent principle—is a spirit from age to age & no creation about it.”Although Joseph seemed to use the terms mind, intelligence, and spirit interchangeably, he was very clear that the “mind of man,” the intelligent part that gives us agency, identity, and being, had no beginning. Whether that intelligent mind was already packaged in a spirit body is uncertain. Joseph left both doors open on that question. 

Because of the imprecision of Joseph’s statements and the equally imprecise records that preserved these statements, we are left with two initial possibilities: (1) our spirits always existed in an embodied form, or (2) our spirits were organized by Deity through either a process analogous to mortal birth or some other creative endeavor. The second option leads to two further possibilities: (1) prior to the creation of our spirits, we were already self-aware, individual, intelligent entities with agency and accountability; or (2) our spirits were organized from an impersonal spirit substance called intelligence, at which point we became sentient, accountable individuals. Dividing these possibilities along different lines, there are two ultimate alternatives: (1) at some point, we became individual, accountable entities; or (2) we have always existed as self-aware, individual beings, either as uncreated spirits or as intelligences who later acquired spirit bodies. During my investigation of our premortal past (and perhaps heavily influenced by Brown’s essay), the more I learned about the idea of spirit birth and its theological history, the less persuasive I found it. But that is not the most important question anyway. Whether my spirit always existed, whether I am a literal child of Heavenly Parents through a process of spirit birth, or whether my spirit body was organized using some other mechanism and was then adopted into the heavenly family does not really matter to me. Adoption is a perfectly viable method of joining a family, either in mortality or in a prior life.The more important question—indeed, the most important question, regarding our premortal existence—is whether, on the one hand, I was always “me,” an individual with a unique personality, strengths and weaknesses, and the inviolable right to choose my path, or, on the other hand, at some point in the past I was conjured into existence out of impersonal elements and given free will at that point, with its accompanying accountability. This is a crucial question for several reasons, and I believe the evidence overwhelmingly favors the idea that we have always existed as accountable beings with free will. Let me give only two of several possible arguments supporting this assertion. 

Agency and Accountability 

If we assume that God organized our spirits from some kind of impersonal spiritual element called intelligence, and that before this creative act those spirits did not exist as conscious, individual beings, then God did in fact create something—a conscious, self-aware, independent, accountable personality—where before there was nothing. And if this is the case, the creation of the spirit signifies the inception of agency, if this is even possible.

We know that spirits had agency in the premortal existence. But if God created a conscious entity from unconscious elements, knowing perfectly at the outset that this particular new being possessed substantial flaws and weaknesses and had no chance whatever (in God’s mind, at least, since he sees the end from the beginning)to gain exaltation, then God would be, in a very real sense, at least partially accountable for that being’s damnation. Why? Because he created that spirit child with insurmountable weaknesses, which he or she had no choice in acquiring. In essence, if God, using impersonal “intelligence” as his potter’s clay, chooses for some reason to make one spirit vessel adequately strong and another hopelessly flawed, then the ultimate exaltation or damnation of the individual is largely his doing.

Elder Neal A. Maxwell used this same argument to combat the notion that God created all things out of nothing: 

Latter-day Saints also know that God did not create man ex nihilo, out of nothing. The concept of an “out of nothing” creation confronts its adherents with a severe dilemma. One commentator wrote of human suffering and an “out of nothing” creation: “We cannot say that [God] would like to help but cannot: God is omnipotent. We cannot say that he would help if he only knew: God is omniscient. We cannot say that he is not responsible for the wickedness of others: God creates those others. Indeed an omnipotent, omniscient God [who creates all things absolutely—i.e., out of nothing] must be an accessory before (and during) the fact to every human misdeed; as well as being responsible for every non-moral defect in the universe.”

Antony Flew, the atheist philosopher quoted by Elder Maxwell (and who late in life became a deist),is pointing out the inescapable flaw in the notion of ex nihilo creation, but the same illogic applies to the idea that God created conscious and imperfect but accountable beings out of impersonal, unaccountable raw materials. On a significant level, this idea is precisely analogous to creatio ex nihilo and leads to the inescapable conclusion that God is at least partially (perhaps primarily) accountable for the evil in the world. Indeed, some of his children have an astonishing capacity and proclivity for evil. Given the choice, why would God create such beings? 

Blake Ostler similarly argues that a fundamental incompatibility exists between free will and the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo: 

If the causes of our acts originate from causes outside of our control, then we are not free and cannot be praised or blamed for what we do resulting from those causes. . . . Thus, a person must be an ultimate source of her acts to be free. . . .The source of the action is the agent’s own will that is not caused by events or acts outside of the agent but from the agent’s own acts of will. . . . If the libertarian demand that we must be the ultimate source of our choices to be morally responsible for them is sound, then God cannot create morally responsible persons ex nihilo.

Ostler’s argument is valid whether we are talking about the Christian notion of God creating the physical world and mortal souls out of nothing or the LDS view that God created (organized) all things spiritually before they were created physically. Free will, or agency, can only truly exist for God’s children if they are what theologians call “first causes,” uncreated individuals. 

Mormons do not believe in a deterministic God. We believe in a God who has perfect foreknowledge.But since the God described by those who favor the “impersonal intelligence” theory does indeed play a deterministic role in the lives of his children—by the choice of elements he employs in their creation—he is, therefore, ultimately accountable for their failures.

We may argue that no weakness is insurmountable, that we can choose to accept God’s grace and overcome our weaknesses, so that “weak things become strong” unto us (Ether 12:27). Our ultimate destiny is then a product of our choices, regardless of any disadvantage we may have been given at the outset. But if we were burdened before we were ever capable of choice with fundamental weaknesses—perhaps even a basic incapacity to plant the seed of faith—how can we be accountable for not having sufficient faith to accept God’s grace and overcome that weakness? It is an eternal catch–22. Our strengths and weaknesses always influence our choices. Sometimes we are simply too weak to choose correctly. Sometimes we are too weak to even ask for strength. If God created us as sentient beings from nonsentient material, knowing from the outset that we would not choose to become as he is—and this is a very real scenario for the majority of his children who live to the age of accountability—we might very well ask why he would create us that way. For his entertainment? Because he needs other beings to worship him? Or perhaps so that he would be needed by us? But we do not believe in a sadistic or narcissistic or insecure God. So why wouldn’t he create us differently, make us more like his flawless Firstborn? Precisely because he did not create us from impersonal raw materials. 

Sin, Satan, and Punishment 

The notion of sin also argues against the theory that our spirits were formed out of impersonal raw material. Sin is more than simple bad behavior (doing things we know we should not do). The question that is rarely asked, or answered, is what causes us to do things we know we shouldn’t do? Temptation? No, temptation does not cause sin. The root cause of sin is our inability or unwillingness to resist temptation. In other words, sin results from weakness. If we had no weakness, we likely would not sin. Christ was sinless because he was not weak. He was tempted in all points, undoubtedly more severely than any of God’s other children, yet he never succumbed (see Hebrews 4:15). Someone once said: “Sin is not ignorance; it is insanity.”This is a perceptive distinction. When we have no knowledge of appropriate behaviors and attitudes, we are not accountable. Sin occurs when we know the law but act against our own better judgment. Sometimes we act against better judgment out of rebel lion (although it can be argued that rebelliousness is simply a particular manifestation of weakness), but usually our sins do not come from rebellion. Most often we are simply too weak to withstand temptation, too weak to break out of dysfunctional behavioral patterns, too weak to invoke God’s saving grace. So, if our weaknesses are God’s doing because he used an inferior quality or selection of “intelligence” when he formed our spirits, then we cannot be accountable for our failure to measure up. “It’s not my fault,” any of us could argue, “that God didn’t use top-quality intelligence when he organized my spirit. It’s not my fault that he didn’t make me more like Jesus.” Indeed, in such a universe, dear Brutus, the fault is not in ourselves, but in our stars.

The very existence of Satan creates difficulties for the intelligence-as impersonal-raw-material argument. God sees the end from the beginning. He knew, when he organized the spirit son named Lucifer, that he was creating a vessel doomed to suffer the horrible torments of eternal hell. Would a compassionate God create from oblivion a conscious being, a son he would love, if he knew with a perfect foreknowledge that this son would spend eternity in hellish agony? Not if intelligence were merely a mass of raw, impersonal material to be used as God saw fit. Such an act would be nothing less than sadism. The same, of course, holds true for his other children, many of whom, he knew at the outset, would suffer varying degrees of eternal damnation. 

The only logical explanation for the fact that we are completely accountable for our decisions and must suffer the consequences of those choices is that we have always existed, that our weaknesses and strengths are an intrinsic part of us, and that we have always been accountable for them. This makes perfect sense. If I am either an eternally existing spirit or recipient of a spirit body and have the opportunity to both expand my innate strengths and overcome my inherent weaknesses—through my own efforts and through the saving grace of Christ—it is I who am wholly accountable for my success or failure, and my free will is totally unimpaired. In this theory, instead of God being a preferential determiner of destinies, an omnipotent playwright who dreams up an infinitely varied cast to perform his bizarre eternal tragicomedy, he becomes a compassionate volunteer, aiding in our eternal progress, but never infringing on our eternal agency to become whatever we choose. The only logical explanation for our unfettered free will, our complete accountability, and a just God’s willingness to punish us for disobedience is the eternal existence of identity. And this, I believe, is what Joseph Smith was trying to teach. Eternal sentient existence redefines our relationship with God. If we were just impersonal intelligence before God “created” our spirit bodies, then his relationship to us is far different than if we existed forever as self-aware beings with agency and inherent strengths and weaknesses. 

It has taken many paragraphs and a good deal of doctrinal history and theological reasoning to reach the main point I am trying to make in this essay, but let us be clear about one thing: the notion that our basic personal essence and individuality have always existed is not just fodder for fascinating gospel speculation. It has some significant ramifications. At a fundamental level, it defines our relationship with Deity, our relationship with each other, and the source and nature of God’s authority over us. By logical extension, it should also influence how we view our own authority and the way we exercise it.

Joseph Smith’s “Heresy”: The Source of God’s Authority 

As a church, we claim to have been organized by men who had first received authority from divinely commissioned messengers. The Savior himself always grounded his own authority in the claim that he was sent by his Father and always executed the Father’s will (see 3 Nephi 27:13; John 7:28–29; 8:28–29, 42; 12:49). Regarding the gospel and the Restoration, everything is thus dependent on correct authority that can be traced back to God. But this leads to an even more fundamental question: What is the source of God’s authority? Although on the surface this query may appear either obvious or blasphemous, if we are to achieve a correct gospel perspective on authority and on the nature of our relationship with Deity, this is a question we must address, for its answer reveals the foundational pattern upon which all authority in the Church, and even the Savior’s own authority, must rest. Let me clarify here that when I talk about God’s authority I am not referring to his power over the physical universe. That is unquestionably a consequence of his perfection and intelligence. I am instead referring specifically to his authority over us. Why and how does he have authority over us? 

I am no expert in the beliefs of other religious traditions, but I assume the customary Christian answer to this question would be that since God is omnipotent and omniscient and since he created all things, including us, either ex nihilo (out of nothing) or ex deo (out of himself), then we are no different from any of his other creations and he can do whatever he pleases with us. His authority needs no source, because he is the source—of everything. Interestingly, if we as Latter-day Saints accept the theory proposed first by Brigham Young, that we did not exist as self-aware individual entities before our spirit birth, then our answer to the question regarding God’s authority would be quite similar to the traditional Christian answer, and because of nebulous doctrine here, authority figures sometimes do make statements that lean toward this view of our relationship with Diety.But I believe Joseph Smith suggested a radically different response to this question, a response most Christians would consider heresy. Indeed, Joseph completely redefined not only the nature of humankind but also the nature of God and of our relationship to him, which in turn circumscribe our ability to exercise authority in his name. In William Clayton’s notes of the King Follett discourse, we find the following, some of which has already been quoted above: 

Another subject—the soul—the mind of man—they say God created it in the beginning. The idea lessens man in my estimation. [I] don’t believe the doctrine—[I] know better—God told me so. . . . We say that God was self-existent who told you so? It’s correct enough but how did it get into your heads—who told you that man did not exist upon the same principle. . . . The mind of man—the intelligent part is coequal with, God himself. . . . Is it logic to say that a spirit is immortal and yet have a beginning because if a spirit have a beginning it will have an end—good logic—illustrated by his ring. All the fools and learned & wise men that comes and tells that man has a beginning proves that he must have an end and if that doctrine is true then the doctrine of annihilation is true. But if I am right then I might be bold to say that God never did have power to create the spirit of man at all. He could not create himself— Intelligence exists upon a self-existent principle—is a spirit from age to age & no creation about it. . . . That God himself—find himself in the midst of spirit and glory because he was greater saw proper to institute laws whereby the rest could have a privilege to advance like himself.

If Clayton’s notes from this sermon are accurate, it seems quite clear that Joseph believed God did not create the essence of humans—our spirit or intelligence, our mind. Our spirits, writes Abraham, “have no beginning” (Abraham 3:18). God came down among “the intelligences,” he told Abraham, and made some of these “spirits” his rulers (Abraham 3:21–23).This does not mean, however, that God came down among the weaker intelligences and forced them to accept his plan and his laws. Such a notion runs counter to everything we know about our Father in Heaven. It also runs counter to every notion we possess of behavior that is moral and appropriate in exercising authority righteously. If, as Joseph boldly declared, we are eternal beings whose minds or intelligence could not be created, and if, as the account of Abraham suggests, God came down in the beginning among a group of already existing beings, then we were, in a very real sense, self-existent and independent, and God, no matter how much more intelligent or perfect he was, would have had no right to dictate to us how we were to exist. To put it in modern terms, he did not conduct a hostile takeover of our eternal spirits or intelligences. No, this is not how God would behave. More consistent with the pattern he has established in all his dealings with us, he likely entered into a covenant relationship with his future children. Seeing his glory and intelligence when he “came down,” we naturally desired to become like him, so we accepted his offer to become our Father, and he promised to place us in a “sphere,” or repeated spheres (see D&C 93:30), where we could progress, where he would institute laws that would enable us to advance. We were not forced into the premortal “sphere,” where we were his spirit children, but accepted it freely as the price we had to pay to progress. And in both the premortal sphere, where we purportedly lived with and learned from him, and in this mortal sphere, where we are tried and tested away from his presence, we have always been free to obey or disobey his commandments and to accept the consequences of either choice. Because God did not create us ex nihilo or ex deo at either our mortal birth or our “spirit birth,” our relationship to him is not that of puppet to puppeteer. Nor do we exist merely at his whim and pleasure. Ours is a relationship founded on the principles of free choice, covenant, and accountability. 

Significantly, this redefined relationship of humanity to Deity also redefines the source of God’s authority over us. If I am correctly assessing what Joseph was trying to teach toward the end of his life, then God’s authority does not come from the mere fact that he is perfect, omniscient, and omnipotent or from the mistaken idea that we were created at his caprice for his own purposes. Rather, his authority must be a consensual matter. He has authority over us only because we granted it to him. Truman Madsen suggested as much: “In all-important ways even He, the greatest of all, can only do with us what we will permit Him to do.”I am not suggesting that we can escape God’s authority simply by declaring we are no longer answerable to him, nor am I implying that our relationship with him is in any way democratic, even though he has built this feature to a certain degree into his Church, at least on a theoretical level (see D&C 20:65; 26:2). Of course God has great authority over us. That issue was settled long ago—in the “beginning,” I assume. If he wishes to, he can punish us or even end our earthly sojourn. All I am concerned about here is the source of this authority. Where did it come from? Must it not exist because we elected at some point to grant him this authority, trusting him to use it perfectly in helping us attain our full potential? If so, this explains why he is so careful about our free will, why Jesus insisted that authority among his disciples was to be exercised differently than the authority wielded by unbelievers (see Matthew 20:26–28), why Joseph Smith outlined strict parameters within which priesthood authority is valid (see D&C 121:34–42), and why the human race is so compelled to seek freedom and so abhors oppression. Thus, the source of God’s authority is not power or force or position. He is neither tyrant nor dictator. He is the ultimate Leader because we chose to follow him. And apparently, this pattern is the one we should emulate, not the opposite pattern, the one so common in the world, a pattern of usurping power and exercising it unilaterally. Those who chose to not follow God—Lucifer and his followers—were, in essence, reneging on their part of the covenant they had made that granted God authority over them. Consequently, they were cast out of heaven and will eventually be consigned to a place where they can no longer progress, because they chose to reject the course that would have led them onward and upward to eternal glory and perfection. 

Concluding Thoughts 

The picture of God I have painted above presents, I believe, a sound argument regarding our premortal existence. If God did indeed, at some point, create us as sentient, individual personalities from some sort of impersonal spirit element, then in a very real sense we are his creations—his property, as it were—and he does not need our consent to do with us as he pleases. He can place us in the most awful circumstances and refuse to help us or even give us any understanding of why we are going through disease, disaster, and destitution. In such a universe, God is indeed the source of all intelligent beings and of all authority, as well as the source of all weakness and suffering. But according to this theory, since he created us so imperfectly, with inherent flaws, how can we possibly trust him to perform his works of salvation perfectly? Something in this view of eternity, to put it in Joseph’s terms, tastes bad.

What I have attempted to establish here is the idea that we have always been sentient, individual beings, which leads inexorably to the conclusion that God’s authority over us and his relationship to us is far different than if we assume he created our individual personalities, or minds, out of raw material (or out of nothing). In other words, I am arguing that he is not the source of his authority over us—we are. I have also attempted to demonstrate that this idea is central, even essential, to Mormonism’s unique message, because without it, our relationship with God is not fundamentally different than that imagined by traditional Christianity, our belief in premortality and in an embodied God notwithstanding. This unique Mormon understanding of our eternal nature implies that as individuals we have certain eternal, unalienable rights, and it is apparent from God’s dealings with us that he strictly honors these rights, two of which are the freedom to choose and the accountability for our choices (see 2 Nephi 2:26–27; D&C 101:78; Galatians 6:7).

Elsewhere I have discussed two basic types of authority—personal and institutional.God’s authority over us is certainly personal, unless he is merely an officer in some larger, eternal organization. In that case, we should not be worshipping our Father but some other superior God who gave him authority over us. We would have a hard time supporting this notion. But personal authority is an influence over others that comes either through consent or force. If what I have suggested above is true, then God’s authority comes from the fact that we consented to it. If we toss this idea aside, the only alternative we are left with is that he usurped authority over us by force—unless we accept the idea that God created us, or our consciousness, out of either nothing or out of himself. In either case, we run into the inevitable conclusion that it is God, not we, who is responsible for our sins.

I see no other reasonable alternative: God’s authority, and the authority he granted Joseph Smith through divine messengers, actually originated with us. In other words, the authority he gives us comes from us in the first place.If this seems like circular thinking, look at it through an analogy: The president of the United States has authority, and that authority comes from the citizens of the country. He can use that authority to appoint individuals to perform certain functions that are legally binding upon all citizens, whether they agree with the actions and decisions of those appointees or not. It is similar with God. We granted him authority over us. He is therefore free, limited only by his perfect grasp of moral parameters, to use that authority to appoint servants to carry out his purpose, which is to save our souls, and sometimes we may not like the way that authority is exercised. In the case of the US president, we can get rid of him after four years if we do not like how he and his appointees exercise the authority we granted him. In the case of God, there is no such termination clause. But we knew that when we signed on as his children. 

If, however, my interpretation of our relationship with God is inaccurate, then we must toss out the King Follett discourse, other statements by Joseph about the eternal nature of spirits, and the assumption that we have always been sentient, self-aware beings. In that case, we would be just what mainstream Christians claim we are—creations of a God who can exercise arbitrary authority over us because he created our consciousness. Thus, the ramifications of our view of premortality are enormous. In other words, this is a question we really need to settle.