To read more from Daniel, visit his blog: Sic Et Non.

The proximate source for this meme is “10 Favorite C.S. Lewis Quotes to Ponder This Christmas” (https://www.familyofhis.com/angies-corner/christmas-2017).

The quotation from C. S. Lewis in the image above is a close paraphrase of similar statements that have often been neglected but that are widely distributed across ancient Christianity.  It is well known that Latter-day Saints teach a doctrine of “exaltation” or human deification.  And I want to suggest here, in line with Brother Lewis, that the doctrine of exaltation is intimately related to the event commemorated at Christmas — and also that it was present, if not yet articulated, from the earliest days of the Restoration.

For example, 2 Nephi 32:2-3 seems to suggest an implicit doctrine of human deification in the Book of Mormon — a text from which, critics have alleged, the supposedly Nauvoo-period teaching of human exaltation is wholly absent:

Do ye not remember that I said unto you that after ye had received the Holy Ghost ye could speak with the tongue of angels? And now, how could ye speak with the tongue of angels save it were by the Holy Ghost?

Angels speak by the power of the Holy Ghost; wherefore, they speak the words of Christ.

A far clearer passage in that respect,, though, is 3 Nephi 28:10, where the Nephite disciples are promised that “ye shall be even as I am, and I am even as the Father; and the Father and I are one.”

I see this as a close analogy to the transitive property of equivalence known from mathematics — according to which, if a = b and b = c, it necessarily follows that a = c.   Thus, if the disciples will be like the Son, and the Son is like the Father, the disciples will be like the Father.

And there can be no disputation about the fact that a doctrine of human deification is present in the written account of Joseph Smith’s and Sidney Rigdon’s vision of the three degrees of glory in February 1832, less than two years after the founding of the Church and more than twelve years prior to 7 April 1844, when Joseph gave his famous King Follet Discourse in Nauvoo:

They are they into whose hands the Father has given all things—They are they who are priests and kings, who have received of his fulness, and of his glory; and are priests of the Most High, after the order of Melchizedek, which was after the order of Enoch, which was after the order of the Only Begotten Son.

Wherefore, as it is written, they are gods, even the sons of God—Wherefore, all things are theirs, whether life or death, or things present, or things to come, all are theirs and they are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.  And they shall overcome all things.  (Doctrine and Covenants 76:55-60)

The Star over Bethlehem, from the Christmas 1898 cover of “Harper’s Magazine” (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)