All that said it’s hard not to delve into the ontological questions. If only because being aware of the range of interpretations helps keep us out of pits of unconsciously assuming some ontology without being aware of it. I’ll admit that while Orson Pratt’s ontology is ultimately a bit crazy (not to mention philosophically naive) there are elements I like. I think the basic flat ontology has a lot going for it. I like the idea that there’s got to be something fundamentally material about how the divine unity functions. I think the idea of God’s power arising from persuasion has a lot to offer. That is we might do well to think of God in terms of a radically advanced technology built upon norms in matter that can be affected by persuasion.

The question of when Jesus is God in premarital life really ends up being a question of what we mean by that. If we aren’t taking the questions as the requirement for some fundamental unity the way the neoplatonic inspired Augustine and others take it, then what are we talking about? Clearly we’re not talking the god of the philosophers determined by absolutism and ontological necessity. Once we’re clear on that then I think the problem shifts a great deal. Effectively we’re asking what actions and powers are divine and which aren’t. Which again is a radically different way of thinking about it and leads naturally into Brigham Young’s whole “theology is anthropology” approach rather than Pratt’s. Really we’re asking what Jesus has to do in pre-mortality. There I think Mormon theology typically just treats him as a master foreman. That might be blasphemous to our more Augustine inspired friends. But I think it suggests we don’t need ontology to account for Jesus’ divinity in the pre-mortal life.

Significant, I think. But then, perhaps I’m too easily impressed. ;-D

That said, I don’t think you’re quite able to avoid an ontological link between God and those God invests — as the oneness Christ declares hints — at least not in the context of the Mormon rejection of the mystery of the incarnation. I’ll admit I’ve never devoted a great deal of thought to this, but a being investing its own power/grace/investiture/perfection into ontologically separate entities would be an incarnation-style mystery.

Of course, I’m your rather old school metaphysical leveler when it comes to this issue.

There’s a danger of course in going too far down an Anselm-like rat hole. Instead of getting to “a great than which can not be conceived” we end up thinking, what would be greater for Jesus to overcome? How about mental psychopathy making him want to become a serial killer but instead he is the greatest person of charity and peace ever? But such reasonings ultimately don’t achieve much.

Still the idea that Jesus could do great things because he had great biology (i.e. he was biologically inclined to be charitable) really does undermine his achievements. I recognize that Brigham Young and others with this doctrine saw it somewhat more narrowly at times more tied to specific abilities. Still the ability to overcome death seems untied to his mortal body. If it was some power he was given by the Father I confess I don’t see why it had to be given at birth rather than later. I understand the emphasis in Brigham Young (who in many ways was a strong physicalist) to understand all of this more naturally. I just don’t think it’s necessary even in a physicalist paradigm for it to be due to the biology of birth. Surely a divine being like God, even if conceived more in terms of the technology from absolute knowledge, could add in all the parts he needed a person to have at any time.

I do think though you raise a really good question. How on earth do we make sense of the breaking of the gates of hell (meaning the spirit world). It’s surprising that such a key doctrine has so little revealed about it. And most of that is fairly recent with D&C 138. I should add as an aside, that I see D&C 138 as arguably one of the most significant revelations in the entire D&C. My impression from reading D&C 138 that Jesus’ most important task was simply organizing the church in the spirit world in a manner perhaps analogous to what he does in Bountiful in 3 Nephi. That’s why he had to do it. He had the priesthood keys for resurrection and he had the authority to organize things in a different form than they had taken before. I’m not sure we need any biological speculation if that’s the key thing he did. i.e. while I’m really partial to a lot Brigham Young taught, I think the biology speculations of Jesus in the early Utah period make very little sense.

Good point, Clark. My sense of the fullness is that it primarily has to do not with what Jesus possesses, but with his unity with the father (and the spirit). So the possession of a physical body, even though we stress it as important for a number of reasons, is not really that big of a deal (there we go talking about the body as a thing to be possessed again). If Jesus is in perfect unity with the other members of the godhead, then each one possesses all the power that the other two possess, but the fact that he possesses all that the other two have is not the source of his divinity, but merely an incident of it. It is his perfect unity with the father that is his divine nature. (Maybe this also explains why the Holy Ghost does not need to be a physical being.) But that’s more my intuitive sense than something I’ve really spent a lot of time thinking about.

I think i see what your saying, here, Clark, but I think you may be reading that a bit too narrowly. Remember, the entire vision of Jesus’ mortal life and resurrection (from Jesus’ birth to his baptism to his death and resurrection to his visit to Nephi’s descendants) is all preceded by the question “Knowest thou the condescension of God?” and is presumably given in answer to that question, since Nephi flubs it when he’s first asked.

So the Spirit apparently either (1) thought that Jesus’ birth was part of the condescension of God or (2) thought that the condescension of God could not be properly understood without an understanding of Jesus’ birth. Maybe that difference is only semantic. I’m not sure that the declaration “Look and behold the condescension of God!” is not meant to refer to what Nephi has just described and is still seeing (Jesus’ birth and his “going forth among the children of men”). I can see a case to be made that it precedes a vision of the condescension, but I can also see a case to be made that it is meant, with the question “knowest thou the condescension of God?” to bookend what has just preceded.

But in any case, identifying the single moment of the baptism as “the” condescension of God seems too narrow to be supported by the text, to me.

I will add, also, that christian’s thought that perhaps the birth represents Jesus emptying himself of his divine aspect, and the baptism represents Jesus receiving again that divinity resonates with me.

I think the condescension is at all times, but I find it interesting that verse announces the condescension and then shows Jesus’ baptism. I think the process of bringing God to earth takes place over the whole period. That is the fruit is the symbol and what Nephi sees are how the love of God is manifest.