Eternal progression and exaltation

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.

This account of human origin and destiny is among the most distinctive Latter-day Saint teachings and differs markedly from the historic Christian view of an absolute Creator-creature distinction, in which humans are saved to fellowship with God but do not become gods in this sense. It gives Latter-day Saint life its strong emphasis on family, temple ordinances, and eternal marriage, through which exaltation is pursued.

The belief is presented here as Latter-day Saints hold it, noting that it is not shared by the trinitarian Christian traditions. The teaching rests on a broader Latter-day Saint metaphysics in which God the Father is understood to possess a glorified, physical body, a position articulated in Joseph Smith's 1843 revelation recorded as Doctrine and Covenants section 130, and matter itself is held to be eternal and uncreated. This departs sharply from the classical Christian doctrine of divine simplicity, affirmed at the councils of the fourth and fifth centuries, on which God is immaterial, uncreated in an absolute sense, and ontologically distinct in kind, not merely in degree, from any creature; historic Christian theology holds that believers are saved into loving union and glorified fellowship with God but explicitly rules out becoming God in nature, a distinction it regards as fundamental to monotheism itself.