These passages can be interpreted in different ways. Yet by viewing them through the clarifying lens of revelations received by Joseph Smith, Latter-day Saints see these scriptures as straightforward expressions of humanity’s divine nature and potential. Many other Christians read the same passages far more metaphorically because they experience the Bible through the lens of doctrinal interpretations that developed over time after the period described in the New Testament.
R. Scott Clark
R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.
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So, Dr. Clark, are you turning Mormon on us?
Uh, no.
Eastern Orthodoxy has a similar bizarre doctrine, of theosis; I don’t know, though, how much of that is from interpreting Scriptures thus, or just their church fathers’ teachings…
Classic Garden of Eden variety. Become God through your own means. Apart from God’s own provision through His own word. Amazing that this is only obvious for those who receive the gospel of Christ through faith. Truly it is, ‘we believe to understand’. All else would be varieties of works, varieties of human will, varieties of docetic possibilities. Thanks be to God through our Lord Jesus Christ.