Theosis is an interesting idea

I've always found the notion of theosis (or, more linguistically correctly apotheosis) to be one of the more intriguing ideas of religion. One of very few ideas that has any merit whatsoever.

I'm curious about the LDS traditions, though. As I understand it, LDS is a restorationist group - they believe that at some point in the early history of Christianity, the "true" teachings were lost, and that they have uniquely restored this "true" faith. Does the LDS church indicate exactly when this is supposed to have happened?

I ask, because during those early years, there was a very significant group of people who, like Christians, claimed to have originated their beliefs in Jewish scripture, but had recently uncovered a new kind of revelation. These were the Gnostics. By the middle of the second century, Gnostic groups stretched from Gaul to Mesopotamia.

A particularly significant group of Gnostics, with respect to early Christianity, were the Marcionites. Marcion originally joined the Christian community in Rome around 138 CE, but a few years later adopted gnostic ideas. He was expelled from the church as a heretic in 144 CE. He compiled a "canon" of documents that included an early version of the Gospel of Luke and ten of the Pauline epistles which he claimed supported his doctrines. This was probably quite instrumental in triggering the church to adopt its own canon of four gospels and thirteen Pauline epistles, and then to later supplement it with other apostolic letters, an extended version of Luke, and the creation of Acts.

I bring this all up because a central notion in gnosticism, generally, and specifically the Marcionite beliefs is the idea that humans (at least some of them) have a piece of divinity within them, and the point of revelation is to teach them how to reunite that piece of divinity with its source - their god. This is quite similar to apotheosis - instead of man achieving some exalted state, and becoming "like god", man is already part god, and must seek to re-connect.

The gnostics explained how this all came about - the specific details varied a bit from group to group and over time, but the general idea was that somehow, something went "wrong" in the divine world, which resulted in the creation of our world - an evil world, ruled by an evil god (the Demiurge). But as a side-effect of this wrongness, parts of the higher-level, "true" god, were trapped within the world. The role of the savior is to reveal to humans how to reconnect with the divine.

Groups like the Marcionites took this to mean that the god identified in Jewish scripture, Yahweh, was this evil Demiurge. This isn't much of a stretch - an eight-year-old reading the old testament can easily recognize that the god it talks about isn't "nice". But then the Marcionites added that Jesus was sent by a higher god, the "true" god, to help recover the missing parts.

There are a lot of different places where these ideas crop up, and I'll probably throw in a few more later, but let's see where this one takes us.

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