The Treasures We Don’t Have Yet: The Apotheosis Scroll and the Lost Language of the Restoration

Sunstone 2026

Kamron Coleman

Please let me begin with an advisory. The following talk involves a discussion of the three cosmological kingdoms of glory, namely the celestial, terrestrial, and telestial, and the zodiacal ordinances within them. Our age is the zodiacal age of Pisces which falls within the telestial kingdom. The ordinance of Pisces is associated with all things pertaining to reproduction, especially the saltwater-filled womb of the mother, where human life begins, metaphorically speaking, as a little fish. I honor women in this audience, and so I want to warn you that there will be numerous references to this stage of fetal development, and some of my references to the mother’s womb may invoke painful associations. This is not done gratuitously, but thematically. I hope you will understand and be prepared ahead of time.

Several years ago my daughter was in the first grade and my wife, Bethany, was volunteering as a teacher’s helper, when the teacher, Mrs. Chrowl had an announcement to make to the class. Later that school year she would be leaving them for a few months of maternity leave. How best could Mrs. Chrowl, whose pregnancy was beginning to show, help her little group understand what was about to happen? She drew the “Hangman” scaffold on the white board and letter by letter the class started to guess her riddle. In time the class had most of the puzzle solved. The first two words were- “I am.”

The third word was incomplete and began with the letters “h,” and “a,” and then a space, followed by an ending of “-ing” and then two words- “a baby!” completed the sentence.

With just that one missing letter to go, a little girl blurted out the answer-

“You’re HATCHING a baby!”

Gleefully the whole class was screaming in delight. “You’re hatching a baby! She’s hatching a baby!”

Mrs. Chrowl had a heck of a time trying to get the class back on track. They were convinced she was hatching a baby, and they couldn’t be more excited for her.

I fear that our sense of humor about the hatching of Mrs. Chrowl’s baby is how ancient prophets would regard the Saints’ enthusiasm for the three degrees of glory as we have inherited them. The Latter-day Saints think of the celestial, terrestrial, and telestial kingdoms as an exclusively inspired understanding of the state of human souls after death, providing an improved diagram of the afterlife as tiers of rewards for corresponding levels of spiritual accomplishment, but our understanding is detached from the meaning these kingdoms carried for millennia. The celestial, terrestrial, and telestial kingdoms were the three basic divisions of the zodiac, dividing as with a veil, celestial bodies from land animals, and further dividing the land animals from the underwater creatures of the sea. Every age of the zodiac falls into one of these three kingdoms of glory. Ancient scriptures take this forgotten understanding for granted. The ancient worldview wasn’t necessarily a model of physics at an astronomical scale, but the model of the life cycle of the human soul on an eternal scale, and I submit that this understanding is as true today as it was millennia ago.

Our outgoing age, the age of Pisces, the fish, resides in the telestial kingdom of the sea. The ages immediately prior to Pisces, which are Taurus and Aries, the cattle and the sheep, reside on the land, or in the terrestrial kingdom. In this ancient model, Taurus and Aries are directly administered to by the Good Shepherd Orion by night, and are further directly administered to during the day by the Sun, whose course gives life to all of earth’s plants and animals. Pisces, however, is less directly administered to because it is underwater. As anticipated by prophets for centuries before our age, as a school of fish in the kingdom of Pisces, we are underwater travelers in the telestial kingdom where the life-giving sun has gone down.

In a world with a more scientifically sophisticated view of the cosmos why should we care? We shouldn’t care because the ancient understanding will help us get a passenger rocket to the moon, but we should care a lot because the ancient conceptualization of the cosmos is still the basic language of religion and teaches the life cycle of human souls. To dismiss ancient astronomical grammar is to cut the context off from the scriptural voice and to be ignorant about the gospel as taught by every prophet before our day, including and especially Isaiah and Jesus. The Restoration of Joseph Smith is a revitalization of the ancient cosmological worldview, and so if we can’t understand what the ancient prophets meant, our doctrines and temple practices are prone to drifting off, and not without consequence. Like Mrs. Chrowl’s enthusiastic, but mistaken class, even if we are only off by one syllable, we have gotten the wrong idea about the three degrees of glory and have run with it. The terrible implication, of course, is that everything downstream from this misunderstanding may require a fresh look.

This audience does not need an explanation of “the Great Apostasy,” but in brief, it is the belief that after the death of the original Twelve Apostles, the Church of Jesus Christ lost its priesthood authority and fell into a long apostasy. That story is central to the Church’s claim of the Restoration of apostolic authority eighteen centuries later. I have sometimes asked faithful members who accept that view whether, knowing what they know about the Great Apostasy and the loss of authority, they still would have been Christians in the year 200. For some, it is a difficult question. Apostasy or no apostasy, I suppose I would have been a Christian, because my identity as a disciple of Christ does not depend on ecclesiastical claims to exclusive authority. I have already wrestled with, and chosen to remain in the Restoration Church whether its authority claims are true or not, now that it has reached its own 200-year milestone.

I believe something both marvelous and beautiful never emerged intact from the womb of Mormonism. Something happened amongst us. Something descended into the world, and then that something was buried in the dark while a fine marble mausoleum was erected over the top of its body. I count myself among this society of believers not because I worship the mausoleum above ground, but because I am a digger of the dirt beneath it. I want to know and honor that body. And that miscarried fetus, I think, is not merely a doctrine, or even moral authority, but a language system—a scriptural language of stars and bodies and ascension and divine human possibility that once could set the soul on fire and now, too often, lies deep under the managerial dust of correlation and culture.

Like every mystery tradition before it—including Christianity itself—the Apotheosis Scroll unrolls within a semi-historical drama, a stage set for initiatic ascent through celestial, terrestrial, and telestial kingdoms that house zodiacal ordinances. Each of the zodiacal constellations is administered to by the sun in sequence. In the mysteries of godliness the sun is the eternal God that I worship as Jesus Christ. These kingdoms and their ordinances were spoken of long before Joseph Smith gave them fresh voice in Sections 76 and 88 of the Doctrine and Covenants. The ancients knew the celestial, terrestrial, and telestial kingdoms as Heaven, Earth, and Sea, whose spiritual characteristics were determined by their relationship to the sun.

Many ancient mystery traditions begin in a celestial Garden of Eden: an anthropological golden age in which initiates stand in God’s presence before catastrophe casts them into the world. Temple initiation preserved a symbolic memory of humanity’s pre-fall life in the celestial zodiacal kingdoms, especially Cancer and Leo, which signify marriage and enthronement. After the expulsion from this celestial Eden, the oral traditions and scriptures of the terrestrial ages of Taurus and Aries taught initiates to find the long road home by retracing the fall in reverse. Through ritual performance, they learned to cross back through the veil—represented by washing and anointing by the Two Olive Tree Witnesses, the constellation Gemini, standing in that veil. And then the initiate was invited by them to partake of the Tree of Life, the Milky Way, before reentering God’s kingdom through the celestial ordinances of marriage in Cancer and enthronement in Leo. Even before there was a formal Latter-day temple, these ordinances were being restored in proper sequence.

At the dawn of the common era, the world stood on the threshold of the outgoing zodiacal ages of Taurus and then Aries, dating from roughly 4,320 BC to 0 AD. Around year zero, all of humanity was sinking together toward Pisces, the underworld telestial kingdom of fish and other sea creatures of the dark and the deep, far from the celestial dwelling place of our Heavenly Parents. In the blood and upheaval of a new age’s labor, Roman Palestine came forth into a world of dimmed glory, a world where communion with the gods had grown thin and where the Lord, who was the Sun by day and Orion by night, could not directly administer because the age was underwater.

The Apotheosis Scroll is created to be an initiatory experience like temple worship was in ancient times. But the Apotheosis Scroll does not unroll in that first and heavenly Eden. Like the New Testament, it reframes temple initiation to acknowledge that the initiates reside in a lesser kingdom of glory. The New Testament is a temple initiation allegory that correctly indicated humanity’s transversal from the terrestrial to telestial kingdoms of the zodiac. The age of Pisces was inaugurated when the God who is the Sun by day and Orion by night was incarnated in the flesh as Jesus and resurrected as the rising sun of the dawning age. Because of the condescension of God two thousand years ago—because a divine being descended from heaven into the world—it draws the viewer into first-century Judea. The scene is not humanity poised in the garden before expulsion, but the LORD God himself entering the world in the person of Jesus of Nazareth at the very moment of terrestrial and telestial transition.

When humanity passed into the zodiacal kingdom of Pisces, we became fishes in the telestial deep. The age to come—our age—would be an age of catastrophe, when direct communion with the LORD God is darkened, and we, the initiates, must learn to climb out of hell with webbed feet. Jesus sent his disciples to cast their nets for us, to gather us up and make us the lambs of Aries beneath the watch of the Good Shepherd in the sky, the constellation Orion. If we heard the Shepherd’s voice and followed him, and him alone through the narrow gate at the edge of the terrestrial world, we might taste the fruit of the Milky Way’s Tree of Life and rise as lions into the celestial kingdom of heaven, where Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother are co-regents enthroned in Leo and Cancer. As their children, we would recognize our royal heritage and be invited not only to bow before their throne, but to claim our celestial inheritance despite the unexalted age in which our current life is taking place.

In this vision, the celestial, terrestrial, and telestial realms were not afterlife provinces for disembodied spirits, but successive kingdoms in which human beings live embodied human lives, each within the zodiacal order of another incarnation, but characterized by our recognition or blindness to our true eternal nature. Some incarnations lift us upward; others—like this life as creatures of the sea—carry us downward. Yet in the end, all humankind will ascend together into celestial glory when those kingdoms return, and it is from this glory that we will resume our descent. An initiate’s understanding of this cycle was achieved by ritualistic performance of these ordinances. By performance, recognition could be quickened, and a terrestrial, and even a telestial soul could be celestialized in the flesh, no matter the age the initiate occupied.

The center of my argument is this: the Restoration is best understood not as a simple return to New Testament church structure, but as the partial reemergence of a much older mystery tradition in which the embodied human soul, the temple, and the heavens mirror one another. In that worldview, the basic unit of religion is not the institution. It is the soul in co-creative communion with the Eternal Father and Eternal Mother. The church can help facilitate that recognition, but it does not originate it. At its best, the church embodies divine communion thousands of times over. At its worst, it blocks access to the very mystery it was built to mediate.

What follows from this is radical, and I mean radical in the old sense: it goes to the root. The scriptures, read in this older language, are not mainly about escaping the body, escaping the earth, or waiting in heaven for a reunion of family members after death. They are about the terrestrial soul mirroring the cosmos, and only to a lesser degree are they about the places a disembodied soul might travel to. They are about ontological change, in the body, on pace with the one eternal round of the cosmos itself. They are about becoming. They are about ascent and descent through knowledge, sacrifice, embodiment, and recognition. The aim of initiation was to awaken a person to the fact that the image in heaven and the image on earth belong to one another. They are phases, and not a destination. The celestial twin and the terrestrial self are not strangers, but dual aspects of a soul in communion with eternity.

The zodiacal constellations take turns rising just above the horizon, and then they sink back below the horizon as the earth rotates, and each is administered to by the sun in their proper order and each in their hour. The zodiacal ordinances are always in motion in one eternal round, rising and falling in their path around the equator like a kiddie roller coaster at the amusement park. A king today will be a servant tomorrow. A mother in Cancer might be barren in Virgo. That is why I read scripture the way I do. The gospel humbles the exalted and lifts up the lowly in the soul’s endless education, so that no one can say, “I am above you.”  The aim of initiation is not dominion but knowledge. The Christian mystery, at its most dangerous and beautiful, teaches not merely that Christ is divine, but that theosis is democratized through Christ. He appears to show the path of ascent as well as to embody the holiness of a god descending back into the world and becoming a naked and humiliated foot-washer after his exaltation as a king riding in triumph through the gate of the city on the back of an ass. The most magnificent aspect of the mystery of ascension is its equally important mystery of descent. What the gospels and the mystery are really saying is that the king sinks the lowest and suffers the most. It asks, “Are you sure about your ambition? There are no red velvet chairs in this kingdom of glory.”

The aim of human life is not dominion, but experience. Knowledge, real self-knowledge at the astronomical scale produces compassion. Compassion has the potential to bring the soul peace when the endless grind of this cycle seems too crushing. As Jesus Christ taught, true peace is found by stepping off the ride—by overcoming the world rather than ruling over others within it. This is why, in ancient times, the most adept initiates of the mysteries of godliness knew to refuse the crown when it was offered, recognizing no sovereign but the Prince of Peace. Real peace was symbolized as rising, in the body, above the plane of the ecliptic and all the zodiacal ordinances therein, to become a circumpolar star in the vault of the night sky. For example, the Big Dipper is made of stars that circumambulate the pole high above the plane of the ecliptic and the zodiacal constellations. The pole star of any given age is even higher than the stars of the Big Dipper, and there is one higher still, a starless point called the North Celestial Pole, around which even the pole stars revolve, the very location where the angel with a sword has fixed the rotation of the heavens with a nail in the most sure place. An initiate could not attain to this exalted state by their ties to any earthly royal lineage or familial inheritance, but only by adoption into the family of God.

Joseph Smith seems to have glimpsed this when he sought the keys of Elijah, who could minister to all the ordinances below him—even the anointing of kings and queens in the celestial kingdom—because Elijah had ascended into the vault of heaven, beyond the zodiacal wheel, in a chariot of God. Astronomically speaking, Elijah’s chariot is the Big Dipper. Those of you who are already familiar with my work will recognize the Big Dipper as “the thigh of the cow” in Bossy, the celestial pole cow constellation. The cup of the Big Dipper is the chariot’s basket. In Elijah’s day, the basket of the Big Dipper chariot was void of stars, but it was nonetheless the location of the pole, a distinction our pole star, Polaris, holds today. In the seat of the Big Dipper chariot sat the heavenly Ark of the Covenant, the celestial twin of the ark that rested in the earthly tabernacle. When Elijah rode in that chariot, and more like a shaman than an astronaut, he was sitting in the celestial counterpart to the Jerusalem temple’s mercy seat, the Mercy Seat of the temple of the cosmos. And so, higher than being crowned a king or queen is to follow Elijah, even to follow Christ, embodied and unafraid, through the terrors and pleasures of the flesh and beyond every kingdom of glory into holy stillness: to be like the pole star, seemingly immovable, except to circle, nearly imperceptibly, at the feet of the Most High, the North Celestial Pole, the nail in the most sure place in the shoulder of Bossy, the celestial pole cow constellation, around which even the pole stars revolve.

I believe Elijah’s ascent in the Big Dipper chariot is the key to understanding the adoption sealings performed in the months before Joseph and Hyrum Smith were murdered in 1844. In heaven’s astronomical economy, adoption into the family of God stands higher than marriage between a man and a woman in Cancer and their symbolic enthronement in Leo. That may seem counterintuitive, but adoption’s supremacy over marriage is revealed in the original language of prophetic authority- the language of the stars. As an ordinance of heaven modeled by the constellations, marriage was first established by God’s original commandment to Adam and Eve- to be one and by that union to bring forth children together. But the celestial ordinances did not end there, it pointed further and higher toward the destination God ultimately intended for them —their adoption into the family of God. As revealed among the prophets, Elijah is most closely associated with ascension into the holy state of adoption into God’s family. He embodied spiritual fatherhood when Elisha, his successor, cried, “My father, my father!” as Elijah ascended into heaven in the chariot (2 Kings 2:12). Before this, Elijah lived with the widow of Zarephath and her fatherless son (1 Kings 17). Their relationship was celibate and spiritual. By miraculously providing food for this nontraditional family during drought and later restoring the boy to life, Elijah acted as protector and provider for an orphan in a sanctified, exalted household. If understood, this prophetic celestial economy could profoundly reshape current narratives about polygamy, including the prevailing tendency to project polygamous definitions onto every rumored sealing to Joseph Smith.

So let’s step back. The cosmology I have been describing emerged through my study of a sculpture of the angel with a sword. Once I knew the sculpture well, I began to see that this motif appears elsewhere in scripture and embodies the cosmology of the adoption of couples, families, broken families, and individuals- people of all kinds, into the family of God under the wax seal of the everlasting covenant, because God is no respecter of persons but invites everyone to enter into the divine presence and receive the heavenly gift. As with all of the ordinances, the reason for performance of the celestial ordinance of adoption was not to create something out of nothing, but to remind the initiate of what their eternal soul already knows, and has known for eons. The angel with a sword at the center of this mystery is Mithras, the Romanized name of an ancient divinity known as the covenant-maker and friend. By day, Mithras drives the chariot that carries the sun across the sky. By night, this angel appears as the constellation Orion: the LORD God who planted the Garden of Eden in the Hebrew tradition and who also appears as the angel of the Lord in the Book of Mormon. The figure stands at the center of both ancient cosmological worship and Joseph Smith’s Restoration project.

The sculpture of the angel with a sword is an astronomical scene carved in stone: Orion seated astride Taurus, plunging his sword to the hilt into the joints and marrow of the bull’s shoulder, while other celestial figures gather around the wound at the scene’s center. This central image of Roman mystery temples, known to modern researchers as the Mithraic tauroctony, was the grand repository of Roman astronomical knowledge. Elisha’s adoption by Elijah prefigured Augustus’s adoption by Julius Caesar through the same astronomical logic—a theme widely understood and used in antiquity, preserved in Roman Mithraism, and revitalized in Joseph Smith’s temple cosmology.

The sculpture of the angel with a sword, which was repeated with exacting detail from temple to temple, was meant to exploit the viewer’s familiarity with the ancient bull sacrifice motif, and then to spin off of it in a shocking new way. Most commentators on the motif seem to have missed the irony because the scene is almost always mischaracterized as a typically pagan bull sacrifice. But it is not a scene depicting what to do to cattle in a pagan temple. It is actually an analog of the cosmos while it doubles as a cross-section of the right hemisphere of the human brain. The initiate’s lower brain is the sacrifice, and literalism is left on the altar. The sculpture is not sacrificial in the pagan sense, but initiatory in a theological sense. It says the opposite of what most researchers say it says. To paraphrase Isaiah and Psalms, it says: “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of well-fed beasts. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, and a broken and contrite heart.”

Mithraism, which was the mystery of the Roman military, and known colloquially as the mysteries of godliness, was deployed to syncretize conquered cultures and assimilate recruited soldiers. This mystery was exceedingly sophisticated, sincere, and pluralistic, and it was based on Zoroastrian cosmology. Zoroastrianism is regarded as the parent religion to the Abrahamic faiths, and left its fingerprints all over the New Testament gospels. Not incidentally, there are many echoes of Zoroastrianism in Joseph Smith’s revelations. Because most of us are no longer fluent in the astronomical motifs that shaped ancient religion, we have failed to recognize Orion’s, or the LORD God’s representation across scripture, and for two centuries the Latter-day Saints have not made the connection that the Mithraic tauroctony is the very scene described in Sections 4, 11, and 12 of the Doctrine and Covenants, the so-called “missionary sections,” that talk about a “field that is white and already to harvest,” and which were produced very early on in the Restoration. As a result of our illiteracy to the astronomy of the Restoration, which includes a Zoroastrian contribution of Roman provenance, many in our society know the angel only through a distorted and misrepresented trope: the sword-bearing messenger associated with commanding polygamy. But prior to the institutionalization of polygamy, the angel is none other than the LORD God and the sword is his Word.

Until recently, the Latter-day Saints had a long-held aversion to the cross of the crucifixion as a symbol of our faith. Similarly, Christians, if they were aware of it at all, have spent most of their history recoiling from the Mithraic tauroctony scene as a quintessentially pagan image. I argue that because there is a deliberate Roman contribution and provenance to aspects of New Testament Christianity, the Mithraic tauroctony is, in fact, one of the earliest and most profound representations of the Second Coming of Christ, who certain influential Zoroastrians recognized as the saoshyant messiah. Moreover, the Roman Mithraic tauroctony scene is found in Hebrews and expounded on in Alma, and depicts the Lord driving his Word deep into a softened heart. What we are seeing in the Mithraic tauroctony is, I propose, the testimony of the Magi. It is what happened when the Magi spoke for themselves. The Zoroastrian Magi make a brief appearance in association with the nativity in Matthew and then they seem to disappear, but this may have simply been a brilliant magician’s misdirection. I think their testimony of Jesus Christ endures today, although completely misunderstood, in art that was less susceptible to corruption than the written word and the institution entrusted to preserve it.

And so, I want to press this audience hard. Joseph Smith saw something that could not be directly transmitted to his successors, whether by description, the laying on of hands, church governmental structure, or by anointings. Because we do not know this language, because we are only vaguely aware of the mystery of the angel with a sword, if at all, we do not know him. His vision was non-transferable. He saw humans as gods living their eternal lives in physical spheres corresponding to astronomical ordinances. Those are not the instincts of a merely managerial religion. Those are the remnants of a mystery system we do not yet understand. 

One of the places this becomes clearest is marriage. Strip away the institutional slogans and what emerges in the original mystery is not a heaven crowded by bureaucratically approved households, but a symbolic and actual participation in divine co-creativity. The marriage of man and woman is important because marriage dramatizes the reconciliation of cosmic principles—spirit and matter, Father and Mother, sun and moon, heaven and earth. The highest ordinance is not domination. It is union. It is not acquisition. It is mutuality. It is not the celestial harem logic of a fallen angel imitating the covenant maker and friend. It is an image of wholeness. And when that symbolic structure is violated by lust for control, accumulation, dominion, or hierarchy, the ordinance is emptied of glory.

My work on the Apotheosis Scroll has persuaded me that scripture was never meant to be read as flat prose about institutional compliance, nor as a primitive science manual, nor as the sentimental diary of a pious civilization. Scripture was written in an initiatory tongue. It was written by people who looked into the heavens and did not see decorative lights but ordinances, correspondences, processions, catastrophes, enthronements, and paths of return. Astronomy did not ornament theology. It supplied the doctrine. The stars were not the wallpaper behind revelation. They were its architecture. Once that language was forgotten, literalism rushed in like mold into a flooded house. And once literalism took the sanctuary, religion became flatter, safer, more teachable, and less capable of inducing awe, and it even became an abomination.

And this is where I become severe, because I think correlation has done what all administrative priesthoods are tempted to do: it has mistaken management for revelation, curation for truth, and a smooth public voice for the voice of God. Correlation domesticates apocalypse, and then presents the result as safety. But religion worthy of the name is not safe. True religion doesn’t coddle. It should stagger the imagination. It should wound the heart. It should humble the intellect and then set it on fire.

All of this returns, for me, to Christ. But I do not mean the correlated Christ of uplift rhetoric, nor the abstract devotional Christ whose principal function is to quiet the room. I mean the dangerous Christ—the terrifying Christ of transformation, descent, catastrophe, and transfiguration. The one who enters the age of spiritual night as the firstborn of the telestial age. The first fetus in the watery womb of Pisces to escape abortion for an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. The first candidate in the age of Pisces to avoid the Roman practice of infant exposure. The one who descends first to symbolically embody in just one person the torture and bloodshed of millions. The one who opens a path through death and hell, and calls his disciples not merely to admire him but to follow him first into the underworld and then into ontological change.

The Christian mystery is not that one divine being briefly visited a fallen world so that we could remain essentially unchanged while thinking reverent thoughts about him. The mystery is that reality itself is ordered toward apotheosis; that through Christ humankind may glow in the darkness; that through Christ the creature may become co-creative; that through Christ the image buried in the darkness of the flesh may awaken to its celestial counterpart, and so that the celestial may honor the courage found only in hell.

We inherited the telestial kingdom. We are the citizens of the afterlife we thought was reserved for the bad people- the people who didn’t measure up. This kingdom is our afterlife and the natural progression of the lives we lived before, exactly as the prophets and the movement of the cosmos promised. What now? If the Restoration means anything, perhaps it means this: that nothing need remain withheld forever; that the mysteries of God are not exhausted; that the human being, even in the underworld, is more divine than we have dared believe; and that the angel with the sword may yet be guarding not the treasure we have, but the treasure we don’t have yet.

That is why I keep returning to astronomy, even when people hear that word and immediately assume pseudoscience. I am not arguing that scripture is secretly an astronomy textbook. I am arguing something stranger and, to me, more beautiful: that ancient religious people encoded ontological teachings in celestial drama because the heavens provided the most stable and participatory symbolic order they knew. Everyone had access to it. No one owned it. The stars gave them recurrence, orientation, pattern, procession, ascent, catastrophe, return. Most importantly, the cosmos was authoritative. It was the language of God. It was the voice of God, and everyone could hear it. The cosmos gave them a theater vast enough to stage the soul. The temple was not greater than the things it signified. When later readers forgot that grammar, the text and the temple did not become neutral. They became false idols available for colonization by flatter methods—literalism, bureaucratic reduction, ideological capture, devotional sentimentality severed from cosmology. We inherited the husk and called it the kernel.

So I want to press us here. Correlation has patted us on the head and pushed knowledge off to the afterlife. It said satisfaction with being spoken to like a child is obedience to God. But the mysteries taught us that this is the afterlife, and that God lived a mortal life in hell, and that there is no difference between God’s story and ours. I think many of us were taught to be sheep and never lions. We forgot that, like Jesus Christ himself, we are celestial beings living in the telestial kingdom. And I think that diminishment is one of the great sins of modern religion.

Once you see this, scripture becomes more alive and more dangerous. It stops behaving like a laminated instruction card. It becomes a battleground of witnesses, a curated site of holy rivalry, a chorus in which agreement is less important than generative friction. I think that is one reason the best scriptural passages still unsettle us. They are not fully digested by the systems that preserve them.

And because this symposium includes people who have suffered under Mormon sexual and marital theology, let me be careful and fierce at the same time. I am not interested in rescuing abusive systems by giving them prettier metaphors. I am not interested in baptizing domination as mystery, nor in laundering hierarchy through symbolism. If marriage is to remain a meaningful religious sign at all, it must be purified of ownership, coercion, accumulation, and celestial predation. Marriage only means something if it refers to reciprocity, mutual enthronement, co-creation, honesty, fidelity, and wholeness. Otherwise, it is not a sacrament. It is meanness wearing temple clothes. We should have the courage to say so. We should have the courage to strip false glory from any theology that demands women disappear in order for men to feel eternal, and we must give up the delusion that priesthood authority can survive institutionalized adultery.

For me, the stakes are Christological all the way down. The reason this matters is not that I want to be spiritually interesting. It matters because if Christ is what the churches and the scriptures at their best insist he is—if he is not merely teacher, mascot, or moral influence, but the revelation of what reality is doing with matter: suffering, embodiment, and glory, and not statically, but cyclically—then a diminished anthropology is a theological blasphemy. Christ does not descend into flesh to teach us that flesh is incidental. He does not rise to teach us that bodies are disposable. He does not open the way in order to remain the lone exception to it. The point is not admiration at a safe distance. The point is participation. The point is the transfiguration of telestial bodies into celestial bodies. And by that I don’t mean spiritual bodies in heaven, but physical bodies that recognize their celestial counterpart and are enlivened by real relationship.

So let me end by telling you what I think is at stake. Not whether Mormonism can add converts or retain members. Not whether all the historical knots can be untied to everyone’s satisfaction. Not whether a given institution deserves indefinite loyalty. The deeper question is whether human beings are in fact made for apocalypse in the original sense—for unveiling. Whether the self is meant to remain closed, defended, and certain, or whether it is meant to be opened by truth, pierced by beauty, broken by love, and reordered by glory. I think the old traditions, however compromised, still carry fragments of this commandment.

I think the angel with the sword still stands at the threshold. But he doesn’t stand there to keep us out. I think he stands there to prevent our return under false pretenses. He bars the way to sentimentality. He bars the way to domination masquerading as holiness. He bars the way to cowardice disguised as orthodoxy, and to emptiness disguised as emancipation. He bars the way to every counterfeit god that asks for our diminishment in exchange for belonging. But for those willing to be remade—for those willing to endure mystery without reducing it, to face history without worshipping a model of it, to seek Christ without using him, to become rather than merely affiliate, and to die to the person they used to be—I think the sword is not only judgment. I think it is primarily revelation. I think it still turns every way because truth still exceeds us from every side. And I think the work before us is not to inherit a transactional system more skillfully, but to become pierced enough, purified enough, strange enough, and resurrected enough to recognize the living God amongst us, a God who hasn’t retired after a job well done, but one who wouldn’t miss living in hell with his friends even for the world.