Exaltation

In Restoration teaching, exaltation is the raising of human beings into the kind of life God lives, and scripture describes it as reached through humility and shared with others. Mormon transhumanists count technology among the means of that raising and judge it by whether it lifts others along with its users.

To exalt is to lift up or raise high. The English word comes through Latin exaltare, from ex, "out" or "up," and altus, "high." The Hebrew Bible uses rum, "to be high," and the New Testament hypsoō, "to lift up," both for the honor God gives and for the raising of the lowly. In most Christian usage exaltation means the praise offered to God or the glory given to Christ after his ascension, and the thought that human beings might share that glory can sound like the pride that built Babel. Latter-day Saints use the word for the highest state of salvation, in which men and women become like God and continue God's work. The scriptures that support the doctrine also set the conditions under which exaltation comes.

Lifted Up

The New Testament joins exaltation to the cross, so that the way up passes through the lowest point.

Interpreters of the Gospel of John have long noticed a double meaning in the verb hypsoō. "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me," Jesus says, and the evangelist adds, "This he said, signifying what death he should die" (John 12:32-33). The lifting is at once the raising of a body on a cross and the raising of the Son to glory, and the Aramaic word Jesus likely used may have carried the same ambiguity. Paul's hymn in Philippians follows the same descent and ascent. Christ "humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him" (Philippians 2:8-9). The Greek verb there is a stronger compound, hyperypsoō, "to lift beyond." Jesus states the pattern as a rule that applies to everyone: "whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted" (Luke 14:11). Exaltation in these texts is received after descent and service, and that condition governs the larger promise the scriptures go on to make.

Gods and Joint-Heirs

Restoration teaching reads the scriptural promises of divine likeness literally, as embodied and continuing life with God.

A psalm has God address the members of a divine council: "Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High" (Psalm 82:6), a line Jesus later quoted to critics who charged him with blasphemy. Paul calls the children of God "heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together" (Romans 8:17). It has long been recognized that early Christian writers taught deification, or theosis, summed up in the fourth-century saying that God became human so that humans might become divine, and Eastern Orthodox churches teach it still.

Less often noticed is how much further the Restoration carries the idea. Orthodox theology holds that the saints share in God's energies and never in God's essence. Latter-day Saints teach instead that God and humanity are of one kind, that God has a glorified body, and that the exalted continue to create and to bear posterity. A revelation of 1832 promises that the saints "shall be filled with his glory, and receive their inheritance and be made equal with him" (D&C 88:107). A later revelation says of those sealed in the new and everlasting covenant, "Then shall they be gods, because they have no end; therefore shall they be from everlasting to everlasting, because they continue" (D&C 132:20). Exaltation on this account is a life lived in bodies and in relationship, with no fixed limit to its growth.

Exaltation by Means

Mormon transhumanists count science and technology among the means God has ordained for exaltation, and the scriptural pattern of descent supplies the measure for using them.

Some Mormon transhumanists press the claim further, arguing that humanity's own prospect of becoming godlike makes it more probable that godlike beings already exist. Medicine that slows aging, interfaces that join brains to computers, and artificial intelligence that extends what a mind can know are, on this reading, early and partial forms of the capacities scripture attributes to the exalted. Yet these capacities can be pursued as the self-exaltation that Jesus warned would end in abasement. A widely read history of the future describes the coming century as humanity's attempt to upgrade itself into gods, and warns that the upgrades may gather in a small elite while most people lose their economic and political worth. Godlike power held by people who have not learned to descend and serve would reverse the order the scriptures teach, claiming the exaltation without the descent that precedes it in John, Philippians, and Luke. The test for any technology offered as a means of exaltation is whether it raises its users by making them more able to lift others, drawing all people upward as the lifted Christ promised to do, or sets a few above the rest.