BYU ScholarsArchive

Article Title

How Limited Is Postmortal Progression?

Authors

Terryl L. Givens

Keywords

BYU Studies, progression, Latter-day saint theology, change

Abstract

One way of making sense of Latter-day Saint heterodoxy—its location outside the spectrum of mainstream, historic Christianity—is to envision it as the culmination of early Christian trends that were suppressed or reconfigured in the early centuries of the new faith. In other words, one could see the Restoration as a road of Christian development not taken. After all, holds the great historian Walter Bauer, heresy is merely the orthodoxy that lost out.¹ One scholar of early Christianity observes that the condemnation of Origen, church father of the third century, ensured the supremacy in the Christian tradition of a “theology whose central concerns were human sinfulness, not human potentiality; divine determination, not human freedom and responsibility.”²

Recommended Citation

Givens, Terryl L. (2021) "How Limited Is Postmortal Progression?," BYU Studies Quarterly: Vol. 60: Iss. 3, Article 11.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol60/iss3/11