If it was up to you to decide which doctrines and cultural practices were essential and which ones could be done away with, what would make your short list?
Church Essentials
60 thoughts on “Church Essentials”
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You didn’t. Jeff Milner did. I was answering him.
I guess the first discussion memory I have isn’t so much about the pre-Godhood life of God so much as teaching that God is our father and as such we can become Gods like him—only implying, admittedly very weakly, that God was once a child like us.
That’s a primary song
“Jesus once was a little child, a little child like me..”
Yes, Jeff, but that really wasn’t the part I was talking about. In any case, you already have my concession.
The earliest I remember talking about becoming just like our Father in Heaven was around Discussion 5 or 6. Doesn’t matter.
Mary, I truly do appreciate what you’ve said in comment 53. However, I do think there’s a difference between saying “God himself was once as we are now” and saying that Jesus was once a child, or a mortal.
The difference lies in the ways Jesus was different from others during his mortal life. If the New Testament is accurate, he totally abstained from eating and drinking for 40 days, which no ordinary person can do. Likewise, he had to choose to die—to yield up his spirit voluntarily, according to the teachings of many Prophets. So while he was mortal in the sense of being able to die, he was more than merely mortal in some other ways.
ltbugaf
I know. I was just thinking of the Primary song.
Follow-up on comment 17: I was reading the same scripture the other day and realized that it never says Adam-Ondi-Ahman (a.k.a. Spring Hill) is the place where Adam appeared anciently; it only says it’s where Adam will appear at a future time.
So maybe it’s like the New Jerusalem, rather than the old. Or like the Cumorah where Joseph received the plates, rather than the one (different, in my personal view) from which Mormon retrieved them.
Orson Pratt supposedly interpreted the name to mean “Valley of God, where Adam dwelt”. (Journal of Discourses, 18:343)
I don’t think that undoes the possibility that Adam dwelt in a place called Adam-ondi-Ahman, and that the location in Missouri is a second or new Adam-ondi-Ahman—just like Jesus preached in a place called Jerusalem and a place prophesied to be built in North America will be a New Jerusalem.