SPIRIT BABIES & AFTERLIFE WORSHIP?

Aaron Shafovaloff of Mormonism Research Ministry had a recorded exchange with Bob Vukich a little over a year ago on the subject of Aaron's pet project "Was God Once Perhaps a Sinner?" In it, he defends the "otherliness" of God (and consequently the impossibility of God being a man or man being a god) by appealing to the trishagion (i.e. "Holy, Holy, Holy") found in liturgical prayers and various scripture (at 16:37). To Shafovaloff, the Thrice Holy defines God's unique, unchanging, transcendent nature. In a pristine example of his mature approach to Mormonism, he writes on his YouTube account, "If your spirit-kids try to worship you in the after-life, spank them. May only the Most High be worshiped! [sic]" He has offered criticisms elsewhere on the change in the Gospel Principles book regarding "Exaltation." The prior edition read, "Those who receive exaltation in the celestial kingdom through faith in Jesus Christ will...have their righteous family members with them and will be able to have spirit children also. These spirit children will have the same relationship to them as we do to our Heavenly Father. They will be an eternal family." The new one reads, "They will be united eternally with their righteous family members and will be able to have eternal increase." While I am cautious regarding doctrine of reproduction in the pre-mortal and post-mortal existence [1], I also embrace it for its allusions to the ancient Israelite concept of a fertility goddess [2]. But for the Shaf, being a god and possibly (I stress this for a reason, seeing that I somewhat doubt this to be the case) [3] being worshipped in the afterlife is a big no-no because "Holy, Holy, Holy is the LORD of hosts" (Isaiah 6:3) or "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty, who was and is and is to come" (Revelation 4:8). Unfortunately for him, the rabbis disagree:

Indeed, the rabbinic tradition sometimes went to the extreme of anthropomorphism: Not only did it make the notion of man's likeness to God as physical and detailed as possible (it included circumcision among the distinguishing marks of the Deity), but it took the likeness as proof of the potential perfection of man and taught that Adam before the fall and the righteous in the world to come realized this perfection and were rightly, therefore, to be worshipped by the angels: We read in Baba Batra 75b, "Rabba said R. Johanan, 'The righteous are destined to be called by the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, for it is said, "Everyone who is called by my name, him have I created, formed and made that he should also share my glory.""...R. Elazar said, 'The trishagion [i.e. Holy, Holy, Holy] will be said before the righteous as it is said before the Holy One, blessed be He.' In a later passage in the Tanhuma and in the condensation of Bereshit Rabbati this potential divinity and predicted worship are presented as the direct consequences of man's being in the image of God. So it is in the Latin life of Adam (13ff.), where, after Adam's creation, the angels are ordered to "worship the image of God" [4].

Would worship of another being besides the High God destroy monotheism? Yehezkel Kaufmann doesn't think so:

Even the worship of other supernatural beings...cannot be considered in necessary contradiction to monotheism...The One is not necessarily “jealous” in a cultic sense. There is room in monotheism for the worship of lower divine beings—with the understanding that they belong to the suit of the One. Thus Christianity knows the worship of saints and intercessors, as does Islam...Israelite monotheism tended toward cultic exclusivism and was crystallized in this form in the Bible. But during the pre-exilic period Israel was still moving from the basic monotheistic idea to its extreme cultic consequence [5].

Baruch Halpern provides an excellent hypothetical exchange with an undergrad regarding the definition of monotheism:

"How do we differ from pagans?" "We have only one God." "Do Catholics believe in saints, Jews and Muslims in angels, Protestants in devils?" "That is different," comes the response! "Do angels not live forever, enjoy supernatural powers, exist in a dimension different from that inhabited by mortals?" "Still different!" ...[T]he difference between monotheism and polytheism in the student's mind is the difference between God and god - between two ways of spelling the same word... [6].

In short,

No ancient monotheist was a modern monotheist. Divinity expressed itself along a gradient, and the High God...hardly stood alone. Lesser divinities filled in the gap, cosmic and metaphysical, between humans and God...Antiquity's universe, by comparison, was filled with gods...While not every ancient polytheist was a monotheist, all ancient monotheists were, by our measure, polytheists [7].

UPDATE: Allen Hansen has a must-read blog post touching on this very same subject.


1. For my reasons, see Blake T. Ostler, "The Idea of Pre-Existence in the Development of Mormon Thought," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 15:1 (1982).

2. See William G. Dever, Did God Have a Wife?: Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel (Eerdmans, 2005); Judith M. Hadley, The Cult of Asherah in Ancient Israel and Judah: Evidence for a Hebrew Goddess (Cambridge University Press, 2000); John Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (Sheffield Academic Press, 2000); Kevin L. Barney, "How to Worship Our Mother in Heaven (Without Getting Excommunicated)," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 41:4 (2008).

3. Those who are sealed and faithful "shall pass by the angels, and the gods, which are set there, to their exaltation and glory in all things, as hath been sealed upon their heads, which glory shall be a fulness and a continuation of the seeds forever and ever" (D&C 132:19; emphasis mine). I'm not big on speculating about future reproductive capabilities or the relationship with the children who are produced by it. The point of the post is to demonstrate that Shafovaloff's criticisms fail to take into account more ancient sources.

4. Morton Smith, "The Image of God: Notes on the Hellenization of Judaism, with Especial Reference to Goodenough's Work on Jewish Symbols," in Studies in the Cult of Yahweh, Vol. 1: Studies in Historical Method, Ancient Israel, Ancient Judaism, ed. Shaye J.D. Cohen (Brill, 1996): pgs. 120-121. Smith notes Paul's awareness of deification by means of the divine image and divine name. Paul's focus was on Christ's image and name, something I discuss in the posts "Image and Sonship" and "Taking on the Name: The Creation of Creators." See Daniel Boyarin's discussion of the worship of Metatron (the deified Enoch) and other Logos-like entities in his Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004): pgs. 120-125. For more on the subject of Metatron, see Daniel Abrams, "The Boundaries of Divine Ontology: The Inclusion and Exclusion of Metatron in the Godhead," Harvard Theological Review 87:3 (1994).

5. Quoted in Baruch Halpern, "'Brisker Pipes than Poetry': The Development of Israelite Monotheism," in From Gods to God: The Dynamics of Iron Age Cosmologies (Mohr Siebeck Tubingen, 2006): pg. 19.

6. Ibid.: pg. 16.

7. Paula Fredriksen, "Gods and the One God," Bible Review (Feb. 2003): pg. 49.