Degrees of Glory
Latter-day Saint scripture describes salvation as graded rather than binary. The vision recorded in Doctrine and Covenants 76 distinguishes celestial, terrestrial, and telestial glories, extending Paul’s comparison of resurrected bodies to the sun, moon, and stars, “for one star differeth from another star in glory” (1 Corinthians 15:40-41). Joseph Smith taught that the celestial glory itself contains three degrees (D&C 131:1), and that those who receive the white stone would learn of “things pertaining to a higher order of kingdoms” (D&C 130:10-11). The categories open upward rather than closing.
Read as a ranking of rewards, the doctrine sorts people into better and worse afterlives. Read alongside the scriptures on law, it describes something else. Degrees of glory name conditions that differ in what their inhabitants can sustain.
Glory as What a Being Can Abide
Doctrine and Covenants 88 supplies the mechanism. All kingdoms have a law given, and “unto every law there are certain bounds also and conditions.” The consequence follows plainly: “he who is not able to abide the law of a celestial kingdom cannot abide a celestial glory” (D&C 88:22, 38). Inability, not demerit, does the work. Moroni makes the same point from the other direction, warning that a person unprepared for the presence of a holy God would be more miserable there than in hell (Mormon 9:4). On this reading, separation among glories respects differing desires and capacities instead of distributing graded punishment.
Innumerable Glories, Innumerable Desires
The vision undercuts any tidy taxonomy. Even the telestial glory “surpasses all understanding,” its inhabitants “as innumerable as the stars in the firmament,” and one differs from another in glory as one star differs from another (D&C 76:89, 98, 109). Three names cover indefinitely many conditions. If joy consists in the fulfillment of desire, then plural glories correspond to plural desires, and the doctrine rewards the cultivation of desire rather than mere compliance. The promise that those quickened by a portion of a glory shall receive of the same “even a fulness” (D&C 88:29-31) suggests movement within and perhaps between conditions.
Kingdoms Yet to Be Made
The earth itself abides a law, dies, and is quickened again (D&C 88:25-26), so worlds advance as their inhabitants do. Mormon Transhumanists take that as a clarion call to continue the work of creation: terraforming, space settlement, and computed environments are early work toward worlds without number. As the cost of creating and sustaining environments falls, the enduring question is not one of capacity but control. Scarce launch capacity and scarce computation will likely ease; power resting on a single substrate or a single operator of an engineered world’s physics need not, and whoever held it would stand as a god over its inhabitants. That prospect argues for distributing such capacity widely. The present labor is to enlarge desire and ability together, so that more beings can abide more glory