Cultish: The Mormon Multiverse, Pt. 2

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The Mormon Multiverse and Exaltation Dilemmas

In the first episode, we started talking about the Mormon Multiverse, which I just love that title. I can't get over it, Aaron, but I'm so thankful again to have my dear brother here with me, still flying solo.

Jerry is out on his adventures, so I'm hoping he is having a great time. And sorry about that, not having video in that last episode. That is my bad, but this one, we're definitely recording this time.

And you know what? Man, I'm just so stoked from that last episode. I don't even know where to begin in this one, but let's start off with God never sinning or possibly God sinning. That's where we left off, right, Aaron?

Yes. All right. Let's continue that conversation. And I just want to throw you guys a website as well. You made a website. Can you tell them about it? Godneversinned .com. Very good. Very good. So let's continue the conversation and let's go into some more interesting things about the Mormon Multiverse.

Go ahead, brother. Yeah. So if you have a Mormon Multiverse where there is a family tree of the genealogy of the gods, where each God is a domain specific cosmic regional deity over a particular subset of spirit children.

So I kind of hone this language down. You have to be specific when you talk with Latter-day Saints because like a more general set of language can be easily redefined. Anyway, so I've tried to hone it down.

But when you start chasing out the details of Mormon exaltation, you start realizing that some really interesting implications come out of this. So I call them exaltation dilemmas. If you have polytheism, what is then entailed by the Mormon flavor or form of polytheism?

So I've tried to gather up maybe 20 or 30 of these and maybe we'll just do a few. But one dilemma that I've tried to help discuss with Mormons is whether or not we will remain dependent on Heavenly Father forever.

Okay. So what I'm trying to do here is tap into the conscience of people who are made in the image of God, who have the law of God written on their hearts. I think reflexively and conscientiously, Latter-day Saints know deep down that it's wrong to say that we will become independent of God ever.

We are dependent creatures. I think reflexively, like theologically, I think Latter-day Saints might end up saying that we can become independent, but sort of reflexively, they want to maintain this Christian idea that we'll always be dependent on Heavenly Father.

And families are forever, right? Right. Yeah. The problem here, though, is if you try to retain somewhat of a Christian semblance of heaven and you say, okay, we will forever remain dependent on Heavenly Father, then in the Mormon multiverse, you have to extrapolate that backward on the Heavenly Father.

And we also have this God-given intuition, this impulse, this law written on our hearts that we ought not say that Heavenly Father is dependent on someone else. So Latter-day Saints reflexively want to say that Heavenly Father is independent, that He is not dependent on a previous generation of deities.

So it's just a dilemma, though, because what's true of one becomes true of the other. Christians don't suffer from this dilemma because we have a God who is infinitely independent and self-sufficient.

He has never received a gift. Paul says at the end of Romans, quoting from the Old Testament, who has ever given Him a gift that He might be repaid? Who has ever been His counselor? Isaiah says, who has ever taken God by the hand and taught Him the path of justice?

Right. There's something very unique and special about God because He's never been informed. He's never been tutored or counseled or taught. He's never read a book. He's never been given a Christmas gift and said, wow, that's interesting.

Thank you. I never had that before. He's not downstream. He's not a hand-me-down deity. He's not drinking from the well of a previous generation of the gods. God is the transcendent source of everything good, true, and beautiful.

And we as Christians can say that Heaven for us is not a kind of maturation event where we learn to become independent of God. Rather, we grow in our sense of dependence on God, whereas Latter-day Saints have to sort of pick one or the other.

So how does that work too? If we're going to take an eternal progression of gods and Elohim had a father who then had a father, then had a father, then had a father spiritually, who is then also a God.

So God essentially would be always learning, right? That means the God before Elohim would be more of a God and have more knowledge than Elohim and the God before Him would have more than Him and more than Him, more than Him.

How does that work? Is that an exaltation issue? It is. It's a great question. I do have to help provide some background. Yeah, please. In Latter-day Saint theology, there are simply different views.

Latter-day Saints tend to assume that they have a somewhat uniform, cohesive theology and that we Protestants suffer from a diversity of ideas about these things. Well, in actuality on these basic things, Protestants don't have any diversity.

Whether God is learning, whether God ever learned as God, we don't suffer from any diversity on these issues. There's one God. We have the basics of the Trinity as a part of our unity. But among Latter-day Saints, there's actually a couple different views on this issue.

One you could say is championed by Brigham Young. And in Brigham Young's view, all the gods are always progressing in all of their attributes. That the only alternative to progressing is diminishing. So for him, the only way that a god could remain a god is that if he grows in his power and in his knowledge.

So for him, God is still learning. This is a position that subsequent Latter-day Saint leaders came to reject. So Joseph Fielding Smith, who was an influence on a Mormon apostle named Bruce McConkie, they taught that Heavenly Father was not learning.

And in fact, Bruce McConkie, LDS apostle, gave a very famous speech at BYU called the Seven Deadly Heresies, where he says it's a heresy to believe that Heavenly Father is still growing in knowledge and power.

So when you go to the street, it's just a roll of the dice, really. I mean, you know, whether the Latter-day Saint believes that God is still growing in his attributes or whether he has maxed out in his attributes.

So among Latter-day Saints, though, you'll get this idea that salvation ultimately, in the fullest sense, is eternal progression and to cease progressing is a form of damnation. So that's why they would say even the second and third levels of heaven are a form of damnation, because you cease to progress in the fullest of ways.

Well, even Latter-day Saints who champion this principle end up saying that, well, maybe God is not progressing internally with respect to his attributes. Maybe he achieves a kind of maxed out God status, but then he continues to progress in what you might call eternal increase.

It's the divine MLM, where he has more and more and more beings under him who achieve glory and Godhood. And he helps beings who help beings who help beings. So it's like this pyramid scheme, just being facetious, but yeah, where there's more glorious deification happening beneath him.

And that increases a sort of external glory, but his internal attributes are not being improved upon. But like I said, there's different Latter-day Saint views on this. And some of these exaltation dilemmas are particular to one of those views.

Intelligence, Spirit Conception, and the Mormon View of Human Origins

Okay. So this has got me thinking about eschatology here. The belief of the end times, as biblical Christians would say, use the Bible to try to create these beliefs, not create them ourselves, but find them through scripture.

But within regards to Mormonism and eternal progression and having spirit children and not diminishing, I think a form of eschatology almost lends itself to the fact that according to LDS theology, children will stop being begotten by Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother.

That there will be a point in time that the consummation of things ends the plan of salvation, that there won't be any more procreation in the pre-existence. Maybe this is an appropriate time to bring up the dilemma of whether or not there are a finite supply of intelligences in Mormonism or an infinite supply.

So what are intelligences? I got into a conversation with an LDS man last Thursday, and I was telling Aaron about it afterwards. And he said, intelligences are like wisps. That's like the best he could put it, but help me understand what an intelligence is.

So I apologize for the nuance. There are different LDS views on this. This is the Mormon multiverse, guys. That's where we're at. Someone should write a book on the different LDS theologies. There is no one LDS theology.

Whenever a Mormon says, we believe, he typically just means I believe and some people I know believe. So Brigham Young believed that intelligence was a substance out of which new persons were conceived via the union of Heavenly Father and one of his wives.

So in the heavenly realm, there are gods conceiving new people into existence from the substance, which is called intelligence. Orson Pratt believed that intelligence was a collection of particles, individual particles, each of which is like its own individuality and that individuals are kind of a coalescing of these particles into collective beings.

That's my paraphrase on it. So just to help understand here, so we have Brigham Young who was holding to the flesh and bone that's achieved by Elohim by being obedient to the gospel ordinances and principles, whatever earth he was on before, looking at it through the King Follett discourse.

So through a body of flesh and bone, he's able to conceive with one of his wives to grab from this intelligence soup, which turns it into a spiritual offspring. And you have your, as an ego, an identity, a person, an individual, you have your beginning as a person is at the conception event in Brigham's view.

In the pre-existence. Yeah. So you had a genuine beginning in some sense. In Orson Pratt's view, it's a little bit idiosyncratic. Joseph Smith does not seem to have distinguished between spirits and intelligences.

And Joseph Smith seems to have believed that you did not have a beginning, you were genuinely co-eternal with all the other gods, all the other intelligences, all the other persons. So in Joseph Smith's view, you are uncreated.

There was no spirit conception event where you had a personal beginning. So I mentioned in the first episode podcast with you and I that there was a kind of a reconstruction era in the late 1800s, early 1900s with respect to Mormon theology.

And this is when they kind of choose to get rid of the lectures on faith. They choose to reinterpret the Book of Mormon. There's a statement called the First Presidency Statement on the Father and the Son.

It was, I think, penned in large part by James Talmadge. And that's where he tries to redefine what it means for Jesus to be the eternal father. And where they really arrive at a naming convention for Elohim equals Father and Jehovah equals Son.

That's a very late, that's not Mormonism. That's really mid -19th century Mormonism. That's a later development, which is an attempt to sort of repair the damage that Brigham Young did with his Adam God doctrine.

A lot of weird confusion going on about who's Adam, who's Elohim, who's Jehovah. And James Talmadge is rejecting Adam God and trying to synthesize all of the Mormon standard works. And so this is where you get in part due also to B .H. Roberts.

So the big three Mormon intellectuals that helped in this era of Mormon theologizing were B .H. Roberts, John Witzow, and James Talmadge. And at this time is where you get this view that you have intelligences who are eternal identities, persons.

Well, then that aspect of it was already taught by Joseph Smith. But what they're doing is they're attaching this idea that at spirit conception, which is something you're going to get more explicitly, at least as a concept from Brigham Young, they're kind of trying to put those two ideas together.

So that's where they're saying, okay, when Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother conceived you, it's not that you had your beginning. It's that your spirit body was added on. You kind of had an upgrade.

And so you went from intelligence to having a spirit body. Okay. And then in the next stage of that is a spirit body getting a body of flesh and bones. This is where you get sort of a modern summary of Mormon theology is the B .H. Roberts, James Talmadge model of intelligence, spirit, and then flesh and bones.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's spirit, spirit, children, and then you enter into mortal probation with blood and everything. And then obedient to the gospel ordinances and principles, or we receive an exalted body.

And that's after the consummation of all things, right? Like in the end, you get that glorified body of flesh and bones so you can have your own. So you could beget spirit babies. Yeah. So you can beget spirit babies.

Okay. But sort of the explicit idea of, I think some Mormon theologians call it, I think it's vivaporous spirit birth. That's really a Brigham thing. And I mean, some Mormon theologians get grumpy with Brigham Young for extrapolating or kind of extending what Joseph Smith taught.

And so modern Mormon theology, whether people really realize it or not, it's sort of the result of trying to repair all the damage that Brigham Young did and synthesizing all of Mormon scriptures. So back to your question though, about intelligences, if you take, I don't know if they, I don't know if it's called the mixing up terms, is it tripartite?

Yeah. Yeah. Tripartite. I think there's tripartite and bipartite. In the Christian vocabulary, that's referring to the question of whether your body, soul, and spirit are just a dual substance being. I might be getting the word wrong the way B .H. Roberts have used, but the word differently used, maybe it's triadic or tripartite.

In that scheme, it's referring to intelligence and then spirit body and then body of flesh and bones and so forth. So if you take the view that the intelligences are eternal, that they're not created and they never had a beginning, you have this really interesting discussion about whether or not the supply of intelligences, which are already persons, is infinite or finite.

If it's finite, then at some point when all the gods are sort of drawing from this pool of intelligences. That was going to be my question. Is it just one big pool that all gods draw from, or does each god get their own pool?

Right. Right. So if it's finite, then at some point you run out of gods to foster and to exaltation. And if it's infinite, then you end up having these intelligences who never get a chance. They're always in the back of the line, if you will.

They're always at some point in the line and there's an infinite sort of series ahead of them. And so you have these intelligences that just sort of sit there in the pool of intelligences who never get adopted.

And it's interesting because you talk about what does it mean to be a child of God? If it's true that our intelligences, as standard Mormonism teaches, are eternal, then in what sense are you really the child of God?

Because Mormons get really excited to say, I'm a literal child of God. Well, are you a child of God? Because if your intelligence, if your fundamental self was always what it was, it's really not even made in the image of God.

It wasn't even made. It wasn't begotten. It wasn't conceived. It's organized and added to and upgraded. But you, as you, as the you, you, you, the fundamental self, you are not made in the image of God in that scheme.

Your spirit body was, and other extended parts of you are in the image of God in some sense, but in the Christian view, the whole integrated self is in the image of God. And it's way better. The whole fundamental personality of the human self is imaging by reflection the character and being of God by design, by purpose, by essence.

In some analogous way, we're meant to be the embodied representatives of God on earth. And that's a holistic statement. It's not as though our bodies are in the image of God, but our spirits aren't. It's not as though the soul or the self or the fundamental ego is not an image of God.

No, I, I, as I, I am in the image of God. Mormonism in that B .H. Roberts sense can't actually say that. They use the language for it, but they can't actually say that. Yeah. I mean, it just kind of raises, they're so proud to be in the image of God, but it's like, well, I actually think that's more true of us than it is for you.

Cause, uh, I can thank God for creating me, not just upgrading me, but for giving me my very, uh, Paul quotes, a pagan poet in act 17 in him, we live and move and have our being. So I, I can thank God for my very existence.

I was brought into being by a loving and free act of omnipotent creator who is goodness himself. You can't say that if you are eternal and you're co-eternal with God and you're fundamentally uncreated, you can't give God credit for that.

You can't relate to him as your fundamental creator of the self. You can't actually say your intelligence was made in his image. Uh, it just starts to collapse.

The Trinity, Eternal Law, and the Euthyphro Dilemma

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The awesome merch back to the show. Yeah. Yeah. It, it posits the fact that if God has to do this, then there is a law outside of God that is guiding him that he must abide to. And like you said, there's no creature creator distinction.

There's only a form of upgrading and organizing within the LDS worldview. Whereas as Christians, we go, well, God out of his good, mere pleasure, created us to glorify him and enjoy him forever out of nothing that we did or no plan that he ought to follow, but by just his nature wanted to create us.

And that's an amazing gift for us as Christians to be able to behold that we're created in the image of God to glorify him, enjoy him forever. We're fallen creatures. And though we don't deserve God's grace, he died for us on the cross so that we could know him and know him forever.

Literally that's a, that's actually an amazing thing. Yeah. Yeah. Can continue continuing on. What are some more dilemmas within a eternal progression here? You just touched on one. I'll set it up by saying that Mormons think very ill of the Nicene creed and the way this gets expressed.

Well, first of all, Joseph Smith said that the Trinity was a monster, three headed monster. Yeah. By the way, this is, I would heartily discourage my Christian friends from using a three headed monster analogy for the Trinity.

That is, that is, that is an atrocious way to give analogy to the Trinity. Please don't do that. There are much more historic and biblical ways of, of depicting the Trinity with helpful language that doesn't resort to pagan blasphemy, blasphemous images.

Yeah. Or depictions. So a lot, a very common way that Latter-day Saints will decry the Trinity is to say that our God is without body parts or passions. And I think that what that connotes for the average Latter-day Saint is that our God is not personal.

He's too abstract. He's something more like just an idea, or they'll speak of them as being kind of like a gas or an abstraction. So they, when they think about our God, they think of someone who's ultimately impersonal, doesn't, isn't actually loving, cannot relate.

And it's interesting because when you really zoom out to the Mormon multiverse, pick great title for a book, by the way. Yeah. When you zoom out to the Mormon multiverse, you have all these gods who are abiding by and submitting to this eternal law.

And this eternal law is not sourced in any ultimate transcendent deity. Right. So to your point, you have this sort of, you might even call it a platonic form or this, this, this idea or governing principle.

Sub apriori. Yes. It's the apriori of apriori. It's over all the things and all the things have to conform to it. And it's not personal. If I could just use this language that they Mormons use against us, it's this eternal law is without body parts or passions.

Now, if you say your God is the thing that ultimately governs the reality you're in, your God is the ultimate reality that governs the reality. And if that's true, the real God of Mormonism is an eternal law that is abstract.

It's platonic. It's impersonal. Eternal law cannot love you. Eternal law doesn't send a son to die for you. Eternal law doesn't have goodness in himself that is toward you. Eternal law isn't thinking about you.

Eternal law is this, this, this uncreated book, if you will, if I could just use a metaphor, it's just the brute facts of how the universe works that the gods are mediating or instrumenting or implementing, but the gods don't know who to give credit for, for the eternal law.

It's not, it's not sourced in a personal God. Whereas for Christians, we are exempt from this terrible dilemma where we, we, we, we accidentally find ourselves with an abstract divine law deity, if you want to call it that.

There's an ancient dilemma called the euthyphro dilemma, where the question is posed, are the gods good because they conform to an external, external standard of goodness, or do they sort of by fiat create arbitrarily in an external standard of goodness.

Both options are terrible because in the one you have gods that are submitting to a higher law. So why even call them gods? Right. And in the other, like goodness becomes arbitrary because God just waves his hand and, and it just arbitrarily creates the standard of goodness.

For the Christian, we cut through and we split the horns of this dilemma because goodness is, is sourced in the very character and being of God himself from who he is grounded in his very character. The law that God issues is a reflection of his very character and being his essence.

I had an atheist friend who once looked at me and he said, Aaron, when you say God is good, you're really just saying that God is God. And I smiled and I said, exactly like God is not good because he conforms to an external standard of goodness.

So Mormons have kind of accidentally ended up with a God without body parts or passions. Whereas Christians have an infinitely good God who is rich in his tri-personal being. Yeah. Amen. Who is, who has relations, father, son, and Holy spirit, begetting, you might say, proceeding, spirating those old Trinitarian terms, God who loves creation and then acts out of the free infinite depth of his rich personal being.

Whereas the gods of Mormonism are these pitiful, exalted supermen who are trying to obey this impersonal law called eternal law. That's a, that's amazing. Correct me if I'm saying heresy too. It's like, when I think of the Trinity, I think about even God's law, where a testimony is built on two to three independent lines of testimony.

It's like the father bears witness to the son, the son bears witness to the father, the Holy spirit bears witness that there's two to three independent lines of testimony and personal intimate relationship like in John one with God himself, you know, self-sustaining everything comes from him within Christianity.

And it seems like with regards to Mormonism is they actually, like you said, stumbled upon creating the false religions that Jesus Christ conquered in Colossians too. Like it's those false religions that found the ultimate meeting in Christ, even through philosophy through the Greeks, right?

Like an act 17, where he says to the unknown God statue that you have created, well, this is who he is because philosophically mentally Christianity is the supreme standard of all thought processes in existence.

Like there's no, there's no way around it. Anyone who tries to reason outside of the biblical truth and the biblical God ultimately gets reduced to absurdity in their own reasoning. It seems like Mormonism recreated religions that Christ had already destroyed, right?

Like the Greeks and their gods, like you said, they created that dilemma where it's like, well, is there just a law above them? There's no other God above those gods, but Jesus Christ in the incarnation gave meaning and proof to the fact that there is gave meaning to life.

And he gave meaning to death in the incarnation, which is absolutely amazing. Is that kind of what you're, what you're talking about a little bit? I think so. I mean, one problem that Mormonism has is it really doesn't know what to do with the very nature of scripture because they don't have an ultimate self-attesting, self-authenticating being.

So the whole idea of God speaking words that are self-authenticating and self-evidencing and are, you know, why is this so? Because God said so. Christians are much more comfortable with that because there's nothing beneath or above God's word.

There's nothing deeper when you bump up against the foundation of God's self-revealing authority. You don't have to go deeper and say, okay, but, but why should I believe you? When God speaks, he provides a lot of confirmatory, I might call it secondary or corroborating evidences, but God's revelation of himself is that at the foundation of it all and Christians prioritize the verbal expressions, the very, the very nature of inspiration and of scripture is that God with omnipotence inspires humans in a way that superintends the human will to retain human personality, but to speak the very mind of God in words that don't, I like to push this hardest, when God speaks, his words retain their authority in an enduring fashion.

They're durable and perpetual. Hebrews says the word of God is living and active. All of it is fulfilled. All of it remains relevant. Paul says all scripture is God-breathed. It remains profitable for training, for rebuke, for righteousness, whereas in Mormonism, you have these polytheistic deities who speak words that seem to kind of lose their power over time.

They need sort of fresh, you know, sort of infusions of revelation. They, you know, the words of the prophets every six months sort of have to be re-upped or you'll get a lot of discussion in Mormonism about that's not official, that's only policy or that's not relevant to my salvation or that when he said that he was just an apostle or he was just speaking as a man or, you know, that was relevant.

It's very odd because for Christians, I mean, Mormons are really confused because they're like, you guys have the Bible, but like you need something new now. Like it's kind of a dead book. It's kind of lost its luster.

It's sort of, it's useful, it's inspiring, but it's not as active and as relevant as something fresh would be. But for Christians, the word of God remains fresh. Why do we believe that? Because the very nature of the word of God is an extension of the very being of God.

The nature of inspiration and the nature of the revealed words of scripture are what they are because God is not a liar, are what they are because God does not change. So we can stand on an apostolic foundation.

Jesus comes, he's God's ultimate mic drop. He gives us foundational apostles and prophets who speak foundational words, which give us a foundational deposit upon which the church can stand. We're not continuing to build a foundation.

The foundation has been laid. Amen. We don't, you don't keep a side note. This is, I read this morning. We're not building a tower of Babel here. Yeah, exactly. The foundation upon, you know, really just a side note is this morning I was reading about the new LDS temples and they're using a modular construction strategy such that they no longer have a cornerstone.

Oh, what? And so they no longer need the prior, they would kind of have a ceremony that would dedicate the temple where they did something with the cornerstone. Um, and they, but they don't have any, they don't, they no longer use cornerstones and they're using this sort of like easy modular, uh, reproducible strategy for quickly eco-friendly for climate change.

It's, it does not remind me of Solomon's temple does not remind me of even Herod's temple. I mean, it's just, um, it, it, it's, it's, it's rich irony that they're doing this without a cornerstone. Now there's a lot you could pull out from there in a metaphoric way.

Um, but for Christians, the Holy Spirit inspired word of God being given as a gift to spirit and dwelled Christians is a durable foundation until the very return of Christ. Whereas for Mormons, the very nature of inspiration, it can't be as robust or active.

It's more like milk on the shelf that has an expert expiration dates, more like the tiles of a roof that need to be replaced. They keep having to replace things and change things up line upon line, precept upon precept, except there's always more coming in.

And it kind of makes sense too. If you think about it, they believe that ontologically they are God, right? In embryo is Spencer W. Kimball puts it in the miracle of forgiveness. That means even their own words are authoritative.

And as on such a same level, I mean, as a Christian, we think in absolutes. So I think even philosophically we take things, try to, we try to get it to the logical end of their thought process. So if an LDS person is a God in embryo and ontologically, they are part of this intelligence soup, which is God.

Uh, then even their own words are inspired, you know, and that kind of has to create some level of confusion within themselves because they are what Elohim is in the long run. Hopefully they are, if they're obedient to the gospel ordinances and principles enough, does that make sense?

Kind of what I'm saying? They can't really have an in spur and inspiration above themselves. When ontologically they really are the standard. There's no, there's no, there's no transcendent truth teller.

There's sort of a super advanced truth teller that needs corroboration and confirmation. But, um, if I would need to kind of think about that, cause I, if I understand the spirit of your point, um, if we think of ourselves as embryonic deities, that probably has a downstream effect on our epistemology and the confidence we have in our own ability.

And I like to reason, I like to ask Mormons, do you believe your feelings are infallible? How do you know this is true? I feel it to be true. Uh, how did you come to believe that? Well, I have an internal testimony that it's the case.

Um, do you think you could be wrong? No, I can't be wrong. How do you know that? Because I know if every fiber of my being, um, in my own words, it's kind of an emotional epiphany. And it's like, well, do you trust your emotional epiphany to be finally authoritative?

And this is, it's interesting. You know, I wonder if, if that is connected somehow, it's connected to the embryonic deity. Yeah. I'm just thinking off the cuff here, you know, like that's, that's when it makes sense to go, go back to the foundational statement too.

So we, as Christians, in terms of a solar script Torah and the way God laid upon us, the foundation, the apostles prophets to what we have now, what we build it upon the LDS personal go, well, yeah, that's why you have 47 ,000 different denominations.

We hear it all the time on our YouTube comments for apology of Utah. Uh, so how, how do we, how do we get around that? How are we supposed to think about that? Yeah. It's interesting, Paul in Romans, sorry, in Ephesians and Ephesians four, he says that Christ has gifted.

The church has given the church apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers, evangelists. Why? Well, he goes on to talk about equipping the saints for the work of ministry and helping the body of Christ become more mature as we conform to his image, to his character.

Um, so it's interesting. Paul is gifting the church with men who will help, you know, in Ephesians two, he specifies that the prophets and apostles are the other foundational offices. And then in Ephesians four, he's got the larger list, but it's the pastors, teachers, teachers, and evangelists who build upon the foundation, right?

So in Paul's own view, we have something foundational, and then we have an ongoing need for maturation unity, um, sanctification. So we're already spring-loaded in scripture to anticipate some forms of diversity, division, need for growth, um, need for maturity, but, um, that, that, so you might think objectively in terms of denominations or local churches or different hierarchies of polity and, and leadership, but really the, the substantial spiritual unity of Christians goes deeper than these superficial structures.

It has more to do with the organic spiritual unity we have in Christ maturing. So when I think about the worst forms of disunity in Christianity, I'm not really thinking about denominations. I'm even thinking about a local church where you've got this just maybe tragic relational breaks of relationship.

Envy, strife, bitterness, jealousy, things like that. Yeah. So I think we should think more in terms of that and it's counterintuitive, but when you have Christians who say, I have different views on Calvinism and Arminianism or different views of eschatology and at different points in Christian history, we say, you know, for the sake of peace, we're going to fellowship over here.

You're going to fellowship over there. Well, it might not seem like intuitive to you, but I actually get along pretty well Christians across the denominational picket fences. I want to know what he talks about having brick walls and picket fences, Christian local churches and denominations between genuine Christians are picket fences and we have very good neighborly relationships and we have a substantial shared spiritual union.