Mormonism—Suffering, Agency, and Redemption: Mormonism and Transhumanism

Abstract

In one sense, Mormonism begins, as every Christian tradition does, in Palestine in the first century with the life, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In another sense, Mormonism begins in America in 1830 with the publication of the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith’s prophetic inauguration of what Paul called “the fullness of times,” a time when God would “gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in him” (Ephesians 1:10). Mormonism, as a Christianity, is both very early and very late. Mormonism embraces the Bible’s prophets, psalms, gospels, and epistles, but it is suspicious of the Platonisms that have since come to color Christian self-understanding. Skeptical of that syncretism, it sidesteps Trinitarian creeds and understands itself as a clean recovery of Jesus’s own ancient Christianity. But Mormonism is also very late, and its enthusiastic reboot of the earliest Christian tradition is itself profoundly contemporary, American, democratic, humanistic, and sympathetic to modernity’s implicit materialism.