What Is Life For? — Rescue or Apprenticeship
Both sides agree you needed saving. They disagree about what you were being saved for, and the whole shape of a life follows from which answer you hold.
The Question Underneath Every Other Question
Ask a Latter-day Saint and an Evangelical why God saves people and you will get answers close enough to sound identical. Grace, the cross, an empty tomb, a debt no one could pay. That agreement is real and it is not small.
Now ask a different question. Why are you HERE in the first place? Why did God put a spirit in a body, on a planet, with seventy or eighty years of frustration attached to it?
The two faiths separate at that question, and what they say afterward about the body, about suffering, about family and work and heaven, is decided there.
The Answer Given Across the Street
What follows is the Protestant answer as a thoughtful Protestant would state it. Anything less would be a waste of both our time.
God, needing nothing, created you out of nothing for His own glory. The Westminster catechism opens with it: man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. Sin severed the relationship, Christ restored it, and mortality is the interval in which you either accept that or refuse it. Death fixes the outcome permanently. What follows is unending fellowship with God, in His presence, worshipping.
Notice the structure of it. Life is a DECISION POINT. The purpose of your seventy years is to arrive at the right verdict about Christ before the clock stops, and the rest is aftermath.
The better teachers within that tradition have pushed back hard on the harp-and-cloud picture, and they were right to. They will tell you the resurrection is bodily, that the creeds have always said so, and that the new earth will have work and culture and craft in it. They are not wrong about any of that.
One wall stays standing in every version of the account, though. You were made from nothing, so the distance between you and God is a difference of kind and not of degree, and no amount of grace can ever close it. You may be pardoned, adopted, perfected in holiness, seated at the feast. You will never be anything but a creature at the table. Growth, in the sense of becoming more than you now are, ends the day you die.
Where That Account Runs Out
Several things sit awkwardly inside that account, and honest people in the tradition feel every one of them.
Start with the body. If salvation is a verdict rendered on a soul, why does God go to the enormous trouble of raising the flesh? A resurrection that restores a body with nothing for the body to do is a courtesy, not a doctrine, and Paul does not write about it that way.
Then suffering. If mortality exists so that you can say yes to Christ, then the leukaemia, the widowhood, and the forty years of caring for a disabled child are all noise around the signal. None of it can be for anything, because nothing about you is being built. Every pastor who has stood at a graveside knows how thin that gets.
Last, the eternity itself. Endless praise, offered by beings who are finished, who cannot grow or learn or build or beget anything. Ask a room of believers to describe what they will actually be doing in ten thousand years, and then watch the silence.
Restored doctrine answers them together, in one sentence. You were never being rescued from a wreck. You are being RAISED, the way a father raises a child, toward what He already is.
Progression — The Command Nobody Takes Literally
Start where the New Testament starts, with a command that most of Christendom has spent centuries softening.
“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.”
The Greek is teleios, complete or finished, brought to its intended end. And the standard given is not a high one relative to men. It is the Father. Would God set a target that no grace He possesses could ever bring anyone to?
Paul says the ministry exists for exactly this purpose — that the Saints come “unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:11–13). Peter is blunter still, promising that through the divine promises we become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:3–4). Partakers of the nature. Not spectators of it.
John says we do not yet know what we shall be, then tells us anyway: “when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). And Paul takes the family language further than any adoption metaphor can carry it.
“The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ.”
An heir is not a favoured servant. An heir receives what the Father has, and a joint-heir receives it on the same terms as the Son. Hebrews calls Him the Father of spirits and says the chastening is administered so that we may be “partakers of his holiness” (Hebrews 12:9–10).
Read those passages with the ex nihilo wall removed and they stop being poetry. They become a description of a program, and the program has a graduation in it.
Embodiment — Why God Wanted You in a Body
The gap between the two accounts is widest on this doctrine, and what settles it is a decision the risen Christ made about His own body.
He could have appeared as a glorious spirit. The disciples assumed He had, and He corrected them on the spot.
“Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.”
He then ate broiled fish in front of them, kept the wounds long enough for Thomas to put a hand in them, and ascended in that body with the promise that He would return in the same manner (Acts 1:9–11). He has it still. Two thousand years later the Son of God is an embodied being, permanently, by choice.
Why would He keep it if the body were incidental to the plan?
Paul treats the resurrected body as an upgrade rather than a restoration, sown in corruption and raised in incorruption, sown in weakness and raised in power (1 Corinthians 15:42–44). He calls the whole creation groaning for the redemption of our body, not for escape from it (Romans 8:22–23). He says the Saviour will “change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body” (Philippians 3:20–21). Job, long before any of them, expected to see God in his flesh (Job 19:25–26).
The Restoration supplies the reason the New Testament assumes but never spells out. The body is not the prison the Greeks thought it was. It is equipment, and joy is not available without it.
“For man is spirit. The elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy; and when separated, man cannot receive a fulness of joy.”
That is why the war in heaven was worth fighting and why Abraham 3:26 says those who kept their first estate would be “added upon.” A third of the host lost the chance at a body permanently, and scripture treats that as the catastrophe of their existence.
Empowerment — What the Heirs Are Handed
Take the inheritance language at face value for a moment and ask the practical question. What are the redeemed given to do?
The New Testament is remarkably concrete about this, and the answers are almost never preached. Jesus tells the faithful servant he is made ruler over ten cities (Luke 19:17) and the good servant in the parable of the talents is made ruler over many things (Matthew 25:21). Paul asks the Corinthians, as though they should have known it already, whether they are aware that the Saints will judge the world, and then adds something stranger: “Know ye not that we shall judge angels?” (1 Corinthians 6:2–3).
John records promises that no creature-forever theology can absorb.
“To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne.”
Read the comparison in that verse slowly. The overcomer is seated with Christ in the same way Christ is seated with the Father. Add Revelation 2:26–27, where authority over nations is handed to the faithful, and Revelation 21:7, where he that overcometh “shall inherit all things.”
Then there is the promise given while He was still walking around Galilee: “He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do” (John 14:12). Christ delegated authority in mortality too, ordaining the Twelve and putting keys in their hands (John 15:16; Matthew 16:19).
A God whose plan is merely to pardon does not hand out thrones, cities, nations, judgment seats over angels, and His own power. A Father training heirs does exactly that, and Moses 1:39 names it as His entire work and glory.
The Two Answers Side by Side
| The question | Evangelical answer | Restored answer |
|---|---|---|
| Where you came from | Created out of nothing at conception | A begotten spirit child of God, already in existence and already known |
| Why mortality exists | A window in which to accept or refuse Christ | A schooling: a body, agency, and experience God cannot give any other way |
| What the body is for | Raised, affirmed in the creeds, but given no eternal assignment | The point of the estate; a fulness of joy is impossible without it |
| What suffering does | Sanctifies the saved; largely the wreckage of the Fall | Builds the character exaltation requires; the curriculum, not the accident |
| Growth after death | Finished at death; glorification is instantaneous and complete | Continues; the spirit world is a place of labour, teaching, and repentance |
| What heaven is | Unending worship in the presence of God | Family, creation, dominion, and increase, in the presence of God |
| What you finally are | A pardoned creature, eternally distinct in kind from God | A joint-heir who receives what the Father has, subordinate to Him forever |
“That Is Blasphemy”
This is the point at which the conversation usually stops being calm. Men becoming gods sounds like the serpent’s line in the garden, and the objection deserves an answer rather than a shrug.
The answer is that Jesus faced the identical charge and settled it by quoting the Psalms. Accused of blasphemy for making Himself the Son of God, He replied: “Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?” (John 10:31–36, citing Psalm 82:6). He did not soften the psalm. He used it as a defence.
And the doctrine is not a frontier invention from Nauvoo. Irenaeus, Clement, Athanasius, and Augustine all taught some form of it, in language far bolder than anything a bishop would risk today. That history has its own page here, and it is worth an hour.
What the restored doctrine never says is worth stating plainly. Nothing in it involves rebellion, a rival throne, or promotion past the Father. Exalted heirs remain His sons and daughters forever and worship Him forever. A father who raises his children to adulthood has not been overthrown by them. He has SUCCEEDED.
The Verdict
Two accounts of why you exist, both claiming the same New Testament. One of them has to leave verses on the floor.
Which one is straining? “Be ye therefore perfect” has to become hyperbole. “Partakers of the divine nature” has to be drained to a metaphor about morals. “Joint-heirs with Christ” has to mean something less than heirs, thrones must become figures of speech, judging angels must become a rhetorical flourish, and the risen Lord’s decision to keep His flesh and bones forever has to be an unexplained detail. That is a great deal of scripture requiring management.
Read the same verses as a Father describing what He intends to do with His children and none of them need managing. They simply mean what they say.
The difference shows up in ordinary life long before it shows up in eternity. If mortality is only a decision point, then your work, your marriage, your body, and your griefs are scenery around one transaction. If mortality is an apprenticeship, then the sick child you sat up with and the job you did honestly when nobody checked are the CURRICULUM, and none of it is wasted.
One gospel tells you that you were rescued. The restored gospel tells you why you were worth raising. Both need the Atonement of Jesus Christ absolutely, and only one of them explains what the Atonement is for.
Related
Follow the Argument Further
- Deification in the Early Fathers — Irenaeus, Athanasius, and the doctrine Protestantism abandoned
- Salvation Is a Process, Not an Event — why a single transaction cannot carry the New Testament
- Creation Ex Nihilo Destroys Free Will — the wall that makes the other answer necessary
- Resurrected Bodies Are More Powerful Than Spirits — embodiment as an upgrade
- Three Kingdoms of Glory — what Paul saw and what the creeds flattened
- Gods in Regression — the infinite-regress objection answered
- Pre-Existence — What the Bible Actually Says — where the apprenticeship began
Citation Traps
- Isaiah 43:10 as a bar on exaltation — “before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me” is spoken against the idols of Babylon in a chapter about rival deities, and it is the same Isaiah who calls Israel God’s sons and daughters four verses earlier.
- Psalm 82:6 dismissed as sarcasm — Christ used it as His defence against a blasphemy charge in John 10. A sarcastic verse makes no defence at all.
- 2 Peter 1:4 flattened to “moral character” — the promise is participation in the divine nature, and the early Fathers read it exactly that way for four centuries.
- Bodily resurrection affirmed and then unused — ask what the resurrected body is for. A doctrine that assigns it no purpose is being carried, not believed.