Latter-day Saints affirm eternal progression (that human beings are the spirit children of God who existed before birth, are here to gain a body and be tested, and may progress eternally), culminating in exaltation, the highest destiny of the redeemed, in which they become like God and inherit his glory, life, and creative capacities in eternal families. The teaching includes the conviction that God was once as humanity is and that faithful men and women may, through Christ, come to share the divine nature to the fullest degree.
The doctrine is traced to Joseph Smith's King Follett discourse, delivered in Nauvoo, Illinois, in April 1844 shortly before his death, and was later crystallised in a couplet attributed to the church's fifth president, Lorenzo Snow: "As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become." Even within the church the teaching has been handled with some caution in recent public statements: asked about it in a 1997 Time magazine interview, church president Gordon B. Hinckley responded that he was not sure it was often taught and that he did not know much about it, a response that drew notice precisely because the doctrine had long been treated as an authentic, if rarely elaborated, part of Latter-day Saint theology.