Come, Follow Me February 5-11: 2 Nephi 1-2
In 2024, the Maxwell Institute will offer a weekly series of short essays on the Book of Mormon, in support of the Church-wide Come, Follow Me study curriculum. Each week, the Maxwell Institute blog will feature a post by a member of the Institute faculty exploring an aspect of the week’s reading block. We hope these explorations will enrich your study and teaching of the Book of Mormon throughout the coming year.
Men Are That They Might Have Joy
by Terryl Givens
At dinner one evening, I asked Andrew Teal, a lecturer and Anglican chaplain at Oxford University, about his longstanding interest in and affection for the Latter-day Saints and their teachings. What was the catalyst that first intrigued him? Without a moment’s pause, he responded that it was “hearing the Cappadocian Fathers channeled through Joseph Smith.” The Fathers he alluded to were a group of fourth-century Christian theologians from what is now central Turkey who espoused what has been called “a theology of ascent.” Their teachings emerged from a simple question: why did God create the world and human souls to populate it?
One hundred and fifty years after Christ, Tertullian taught that God “brought forth from nothing this entire mass of our world, with all its array of elements, bodies, spirits, for the glory of His [own] majesty.” Yet his contemporary Origen saw God in radically different terms of selflessness and generosity: “God does not desire to make himself known for his own sake, but because he wishes to bestow upon us the knowledge of himself for the sake of our salvation, in order that those who accept it may become virtuous, and be saved,” and be converted into “friends of God.”[i] In such a view, the world provides the circumstances and experiences for that process to unfold successfully. Irenaeus, in the second century, had seen the Eden story in just this light; Eve and Adam’s choice was an essential step in their educative journey: “[Adam] was a child, and it was necessary that he should grow and so come to his perfection."[ii] And “just as the tongue receives experience of the sweet and bitter by means of tasting,…so also does the mind, receiving through the experience of both the knowledge of what is good, become more tenacious of its preservation by acting in obedience to God."[iii]
In the fourth century, the Cappadocian Fathers, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzus, and Basil of Caesarea, developed this idea further. Basil wrote that “the world was not conceived by chance and without reason, but for a useful end and for the great advantage of all beings, since it is really a school where reasonable souls exercise themselves, the training ground where they learn to know God.”[iv] In other words, a “school for souls.” Gregory of Nyssa read the Song of Solomon as the allegory of God’s passionate love for us and its power to draw us to him. Christ is “the archer of love,” which provokes the soul’s ascent to God.[v] Moses’ trek through the wilderness furthered the analogy. In this light, Gregory Nazianzus added, death sets a boundary to the school term, and the expulsion from Eden is part of the plan “for man’s eternal and blessed life.”[vi]
By the fifth century, however, it was clearly the view of Tertullian that dominated Christian thought. The Cappadocians are read today for their contributions in other areas of theology, but in the West, at least, their teachings about a God who yearns for peers rather than subjects and who orchestrates a creation with that end in mind have largely disappeared. That explains the shock of recognition alluded to by my friend when he heard fourth-century ideas expressed in the teaching and texts of this relatively new religious tradition. And that prehistory gives vibrant context to one of Lehi’s most memorable statements. “Adam fell that men might be; and men are that they might have joy” (2 Ne. 2:25). In fact, Lehi’s entire sermon resonates with the words of those early Fathers. Life provides a necessary “opposition in all things” (v 11), “both things to act and things to be acted upon” (v 13)—in fact, “all things…which are expedient unto man” (27), with one end goal in mind. Leaving a “state of innocence” (v 23) we experience misery that we may know joy, the bondage of sin that we may know the freedom of love, growing in the wise use of agency so that we may “choose liberty and eternal life” (v 27).
[i] Origen, Against Celsus IV.vii, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, 4:500
[ii] Apostolic Preaching, 12.
[iii] Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.39.1 in ANF 1:877.
[iv] Basil the Great, Hexameron 1.5-6 in NPNF2 8:54-55.
[v] Gregory of Nyssa, Homily 5 “Song of Songs” cited in Whitworth, Three Wise Men, 161.
[vi] Nellas, Deification, 65.