I agree with you fully. With increasing light, new revelation comes, and more and more assumptions, and traditions get supplanted with actual revelation. As the Prophets career progressed, he continued to gain further light and knowledge to replace the philosophies of men which he had learned in his youth.

The one exception I take? Thus saith the Lord. When a revelation is declared, and the primary subject is the point in question, I do not believe later items can take those words back, only extend or clarify its meaning. If it is a secondary subject, that is a different story. By this I mean, if we are using a passing mention in a sermon about doctrine X, to try to prove doctrine Y, that holds less weight as far as I am concerned than a later revelation precisely concerned with doctrine Y.

The prophet lived his life in crescendo. I like it, B. H. Roberts expressed it well.

The Woodruff account is supported by the Clayton account in this matter. That is two votes to one. The Larson amalgamation has that section the Clayton/Woodruff way.

I am suggesting that yes, Joseph Smith did teach that God came to be God – both Woodruff and Clayton clearly have that idea, and that is what the context within the discourse suggests.

Now for a variety of reasons I elaborated on recently over at The Spinozist Mormon, I do not believe an *infinite* *backwards* recursion of Gods is coherent. The scriptures and Joseph Smith clearly describe a Most High God, and I agree. However, whether the Most High is our Heavenly Father, or our Heavenly Father is a few generations removed is subject to question.

Joseph Smith stated in the Sermon on the Plurality of Gods a couple of weeks before he was martyred as follows:

If Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and John discovered that God the Father of Jesus Christ had a Father, you may suppose that He had a Father also. Where was there ever a son without a father? And where was there ever a father without first being a son? Whenever did a tree or anything spring into existence without a progenitor? And everything comes in this way. Paul says that which is earthly is in the likeness of that which is heavenly, Hence if Jesus had a Father, can we not believe that He had a Father also? I despise the idea of being scared to death at such a doctrine, for the Bible is full of it. (TPJS p.373, cf Rev 1:6)

Now this account implies infinite backward recursion, and allows for there always to be some God with first class attributes at any given time. I do not like the idea of IBR, and favor instead a system where there the plan of salvation was bootstrapped on D&C 121:46 principles.

The problem is that Joseph Smith does not appear to have resolved in favor of IBR or a Most High God in his own mind. The evidence is clear he probably had the basic idea as early has 1832, but no settled opinion on several critical aspects.

Now as far as thr scriptural account is concerned phrases like “same unchangeable being” sound like Greek apologetics, phrases that when taken literally end up with a timeless God, without body parts or passions. So how are we to take them? If in terms of personal identity, then we may justly say that all of us are the same being we ever have been. Joseph Smith explicitly disagrees with the doctrine of annihilation in the KFD.

If in terms of principle or character, we might say that God is only able to be God throughout all “eternity” by promoting righteous principles through long suffering, persusasion, and love unfeigned, and that if he didn’t he would cease to be God. So as long as there ever was or ever will be God to any degree of divinity, it is through a foundation of the same unchangable attributes of divine character – in other words we need not fear him being fickle or arbitrary.

If put “eternity” in quotes partly because D&C 19:5 disavows the notion that the words “endless” and “eternal” are always to be taken as is. I read them as names that God has adopted as *ideals* of divine character, inheritance, and administration. Taken too literally they lead to similar problems as the words omniscient and omnipotent.

Now granting the hypothetical possibility that the Most High himself could fall from grace, the next thing to recognize is the word for God, Elohim, used in many places throughout the Old Testament is properly plural according to Joseph Smith, so perhaps we should recognize that in many contexts God, or the Endless and *Eternal* Father, is properly a name for the divine concert, that the Most High God represents by *reverse* divine investiture of authority.

And finally, we should consider the principle of exaltation in the *name* of Jesus Christ, whereby become joint heirs with him, to inherit the all that the Father hath. Now how can more than one heir inherit *all*? Very simple – by becoming a heavenly Father (or Mother) themselves – extending the franchise to their children on the same principles. And thus they represent the Eternal Father to their children by *forward* divine investiture – gods many and lords many, but unto them there is one God, and one Lord Jesus Christ.

That their Father in Heaven represents God (Elohim) – the divine concert, and ultimately the Most High (El Elyon), comparable to the way Jesus Christ represents his Father.

For the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son: That all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father. He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father which hath sent him.

A critical matter of theology, yes. A mistake? I don’t think so. The Bible is full of it. I think the reduction of the principles of Father and Son to two or three individuals destroys the grandest theme of the New Testament. It is not the only way to read the scriptures, but it is certainly an principle worth pursuing. All other roads lead to God as a personal singularity – one whom we are afraid to allow any personality.

Are you asserting that agency is also emergent premortally? As I mentioned, if you go back far enough, knowledge has to approach zero (in a mathmatical sense), though it could really be zero, I don’t think. Anyway, at some time t knowledge would have to be so little that if agency isn’t emergent, unity would have to be either a function of random choices or hyperactive accumen. No?

As for making decisions with less knowledge; since we are always growing in knowledge and perspective we all make decisions and choices and less knowledge and perspective than we may later have (if we continue to learn and progress). That is not an ontological difference. I have made different decisions than my friend who is a single man who spends his life fishing. The differences in our lives are due to our differing decisions. But I could have been a single mane who spend his life fishing (sometimes that sounds good to me). He could have been an attorney who spent his life revelling in life?