# Cornerstone

Explore the Cornerstone of Mormon Transhumanism—where faith, technology, and human flourishing converge to inspire a bold vision for humanity’s future.

Before ancient masons raised a wall, they set one stone at the corner of the foundation and squared the quoins against it. The Hebrew of Psalm 118:22 calls this stone *rosh pinnah*, "head of the corner." *Pinnah* also names the leaders of a people, so the word carried a social meaning alongside its architectural one. Isaiah 28:16 elaborates the image: God lays in Zion an *ʾeven bōḥan*, a tested stone, and a *pinnat yiqrat*, a precious corner, as a foundation founded twice over. The Septuagint and the New Testament render the idea as *akrogōniaios lithos* and *kephalē gōnias*. Scholars still dispute whether the "head of the corner" sat at the base of a building or at its crown; Joachim Jeremias argued for a capstone. Scripture uses the stone in both senses, as the point from which a structure is aligned and the point at which it is completed.

## The Stone The Builders Rejected

Psalm 118 records a reversal. The builders discard a stone, and God makes it the head of the corner. Isaiah's tested stone belongs to the same pattern, since a stone is tested when its worth is in question. Early Christians read Jesus into both passages.

The Book of Mormon prophet Jacob pressed the image further. He foresaw that the Jews would reject the stone on which they might have built, and that this stone would nevertheless become "the great, and the last, and the only sure foundation" on which they could build (Jacob 4:15–17). He then asked how a people who had refused the foundation could ever build on it. His answer was Zenos's allegory of the olive tree, in which the Lord of the vineyard grafts, prunes, and labors over branches that have gone wild. In Jacob's account, rejecting the cornerstone leaves the way back open, and the work of the vineyard is to bring the builders to it again.

## Living Stones

Paul describes early Christians as "fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God," built on apostles and prophets, "Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone" (Ephesians 2:19–20). The structure he has in mind is a community of people. 1 Peter extends the figure: believers come to Christ as to "a living stone," and they also, "as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house" (1 Peter 2:4–5). Those who rest on the cornerstone become material for the building, and the house grows as they do.

Helaman supplies the conditions under which such a house must stand. He counseled his sons to build on "the rock of our Redeemer," so that when the devil sends forth his mighty winds and his shafts in the whirlwind, they will have no power to drag them down (Helaman 5:12). The verse anticipates the storms of life and describes a foundation made to withstand them.

## Cornerstones in the Restoration

Latter-day Saints have used the laying of cornerstones as an occasion for teaching. On April 6, 1841, the eleventh anniversary of the Church's organization, an estimated ten thousand people gathered in Nauvoo to watch the four cornerstones of the temple set in place, and Joseph Smith blessed them to remain until the whole fabric of the temple was complete. Twelve years later to the day, Brigham Young laid the Salt Lake Temple's cornerstones after the Nauvoo pattern, with a hymn, an address, and a prayer at each corner. He began at the southeast, "because there is the most light," and moved clockwise through the presiding councils of the priesthood, using the ceremony to set out the order of Church government.

The first Salt Lake stones did not hold. When workers later uncovered the buried foundation, they found that the sandstone cornerstones had cracked under the weight of the earth used to rebury them, and the Saints replaced them with stronger stone. The temple was dedicated on April 6, 1893, forty years after the original cornerstones were dedicated.

## A Mormon Transhumanist Reading

Mormon Transhumanists approach the subject of cornerstones through a question every reasoning person eventually meets: what grounds a foundation? In "Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom," Eliezer Yudkowsky concedes that a mind cannot step outside itself to audit its first principles. It must evaluate them with the faculties it already has. He refuses to treat that predicament as a reason to exempt any principle from criticism. A body of belief held on these terms resembles Isaiah's tested stone, laid in trust and proven under load.

The Mormon Transhumanist Association describes faith in similar terms, as trust with no more blindness than a situation requires, practiced actively and creatively. The New God Argument works as a cornerstone in this sense. It holds that if we trust that humanity has a future, we have rational grounds for trusting in a God: a superhumanity, more compassionate than we are, that created our world.

The living stones of 1 Peter carry the Christological side of this reading. Christ sets the line, and those who build on him grow toward his likeness, a process Restoration theology calls exaltation and the wider Christian tradition calls theosis. 

The foundation of the Salt Lake Temple offers a historical parallel. When the original cornerstones failed, the Saints kept the temple's site and lines and cut better stone to carry them. Mormon Transhumanists hold doctrine, science, and technology in the same way, keeping the orientation Christ provides while improving the material that bears it.

## A DIVINE PATTERN

When God answered Job from the whirlwind, he asked who had laid the earth's cornerstone "when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy" (Job 38:4–7). In that account, the foundation of the world is laid before an assembly of witnesses who rejoice in the work. Restoration scripture adds that those present in the premortal council were invited to take part in creation. Mormon Transhumanists read the cornerstone of the earth as the start of a building project that remains under construction, one in which humanity is called to work alongside God.

*See also*: [Christ](/topical-guide/christ), Cornerstone, [Covenant](/topical-guide/covenant), Foundation, [Ordinance](/topical-guide/ordinance), [Restoration](/topical-guide/restoration), [Temple](/topical-guide/temple), [Zion](/topical-guide/zion)