“Intelligence” is one of those wonderfully ambiguous words in the scriptures. Consider two uses of the word: section 88 (also called “The Olive Branch”) and the Book of Abraham. In section 88, intelligence is identified with the light of truth that emanates forth from God and fills the immensity of space. There is definitely a neo-platonic feel to this image. At the very least, it associates intelligence with the influence of God and seems to conceptualize it in essentially creaturely terms. Intelligence is the glory of God in a very literal sense. It is part of the light of glory that he sheds forth. <\/p>\n
In contrast, in the Book of Abraham, God shows Abraham the intelligences that were organized before the world was. Here (as well as in section 93) we have a view of intelligences as eternal, individuated souls much closer to the co-eternal spirits that Joseph taught about in the King Follett Discourse. If anything, these intelligences seem to resemble Cartesian egos — ethereally thinking and choosing persons. Of course, it is this view of the soul that is most often used to illustrate the radically different concept of God offered by Mormon theology, with theomorphic humanity and anthropomorphic deity, both existing in some sense at the same metaphysical level.<\/p>\n
There is a tendency for those discussing Mormon theology from a philosophical perspective (a vanishingly small group to be sure) to speak as though the scriptures were considerably less equivocal than they are. Indeed, some LDS theologians have gone so far as to argue that Mormon theology consists of a wholesale rejection of platonic notions of God. The ambiguity of the very term often invoked by such claims, however, suggests that on this point the scriptures are considerably more complicated than the philosophers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“Intelligence” is one of those wonderfully ambiguous words in the scriptures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2620\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}