God come down in human form

Today (May 4) is the anniversary of the first endowment ceremonies, administered on the upper floor of Joseph Smith's store in Nauvoo in 1842. The endowment has been for me, as the name says, a gift. I have a taste for liturgical—by which I mean, ceremonial—worship, and the endowment is the most elaborate liturgy Mormonism offers. I enjoyed the sense of familiarity that came with mastering the text in my head and then reliving that same experience over and over as an opportunity for deeper reflection and new understanding. I'm grateful for the way the endowment taught me to think of myself as a priestly person, consecrated to God's service. I loved wearing the robes—read into that what you will. I loved the play of symbol and allusion and the reworking of scriptural texts. I loved the way the ceremony is left wide open to individual interpretation. I loved the intimacy of the dialogue at the veil. In the end, your whole life comes down to that: a private interview—an embrace—with the One who bears scars on his palms and wrists as the signs and tokens of his love for you.

Which brings us in a way to my Book of Mormon reading this week, Mosiah 12-17. The centerpiece of these chapters is Abinadi's teaching on Christ's incarnation, which he connects to Christ's passion. Abinadi's doctrine can be outlined as follows:

• Christ is both the Father and the Son because he is God (the Father) conceived in the flesh (the Son). More simply put, Christ is "God himself . . . come down among the children of men" in "the form of man" (13:34, 15:1-4). The most straightforward reading of these verses is that Abinadi does not understand the Father and the Son, or the Father and Christ, to be different persons. Christ is the one God in mortal flesh. "Son" refers to his flesh, "Father" to his divinity (15:5).
  
  
• As Christ, God "is despised and rejected . . . ; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief" (14:3). He is "stricken," "wounded," "bruised," "oppressed," "afflicted" (14:4-5, 7; also 13:35). He is "mocked, and scourged, and cast out, and disowned by his people" (15:5). Ultimately he is killed. God becomes subject to death so that he can break the bands of death (15:7-8).
  
  
• Having risen from death, the Son—that is, God's flesh—ascends "into heaven, having the bowels of mercy; being filled with compassion towards the children of men; standing betwixt them and justice" (15:9). From the empathy born of his own bodily suffering, the Son "make[s] intercession" for us (15:8). Elsewhere, quoting Isaiah, Abinadi describes the atonement in terms of our being "healed" by Christ (14:5). Like Benjamin, Abinadi sees the atonement as making us children of Christ, or as he puts it, Christ's "seed" (15:10-12).

What does this mean to me?

First, I like the fact that Abinadi's explanation of how Christ is both Father and Son does not match the explanations that the First Presidency and the Twelve gave in their 1916 doctrinal exposition, because it doesn't match the LDS understanding of the Father and the Son as separate persons. You have to "wrest" the Abinadi text—you have to wrest it hard—to reconcile it with the vision of the Godhead that has been orthodox among Latter-day Saints since at least the 1840s. I like that because it illustrates that the LDS tradition is not a consistent whole. No religious tradition is. Inevitably, historical accretion and internal diversity produce inconsistencies and contradictions, which theologians (or, in our tradition, scriptorians) later have to try to reconcile or obscure. That's just how things work. So insisting on treating the tradition as a consistent whole is ultimately futile: there will always be cracks and slippages. An alternative—my preference—is to approach the tradition as a toolbox, from which you pick out what's useful for your particular purpose at a given moment. If Abinadi's explanation of the incarnation and the passion doesn't say anything meaningful to you—fine, ignore it, at least for now. But you can't make it go away (not legitimately, anyway) by claiming that it simply preaches the now orthodox LDS doctrine on the Godhead. Our tradition isn't that tidy. And that untidiness, to my mind, becomes an argument in favor of tolerating—if not embracing—greater doctrinal diversity within the Church.

But let me turn to the heart of the matter, which is what Abinadi's teaching means in my spiritual life. The conventional LDS story about the Father and the Son tells of a God who is an exalted man, who begets and rears us as his spirit children, and who in the premortal council calls one of his spirit children—our Elder Brother—to come to earth to become our Savior. I love that story for a number of reasons I can talk about in a later post. At the same time, I love the very different story that Abinadi tells, a story about an incorporeal God who takes on human form, suffers, dies, and rises again so that by experiencing mortality he can take up into himself qualities of merciful compassion and empathy. In a particularly powerful way, that story tells me that God knows in his flesh everything that I suffer. The more conventional LDS story tells me that too, but Abinadi's version is particularly powerful because it emphasizes the equation between the suffering Christ and God (whereas the more common LDS story emphasizes Christ as the Son of God, meaning a distinct being).

One of my means of spiritual reflection and expression is amateur songwriting. A few years back, when I was feeling rather alone, I wrote a song that expressed what it meant to me to think of God as a being who came to earth in human form, as Jesus, and suffered with us to learn empathy. I was thinking primarily at the time of Alma 7:11-12, but Mosiah 15 teaches the same doctrine:

When I feel I am alone
with my burden, with my pain,
still I know that there is One
who will always understand.
For my God cries, and my God bleeds.
My God knows fear and shame and outrage.
My God's felt helpless, alone, and weary.
Such is the God who walks beside me on my way.

I also learn from Abinadi's teaching—and this next part doesn't have to rely on Abinadi's particular take on the incarnation—that to be Christlike is to experience solidarity with people who are oppressed, afflicted, wounded, despised, rejected, mocked. And I learn that Christ shares my own experiences of being wounded, rejected, "cast out, and disowned by his people." Those last words (from Mosiah 15:5) really struck me this time around, given my excommunication last year.

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One last thought: Today was Ascension Sunday. At the Episcopal church, we sang a hymn that included these words of praise to the risen Christ:

Thou within the veil hast entered,
robed in flesh, our great High Priest . . .

A strikingly apt image both for the day I reflected on Abinadi's teachings about God in human form ascending into heaven with the bowels of mercy to make intercession for us, and for the day I commemorate the anniversary of the endowment.