Exaltation — Becoming Like God
The capstone doctrine of the plan — what joint-heirship with Christ actually means
Most Christians are surprised to learn this. Paul said it plainly. Scripture supports it. LDS doctrine takes it seriously.
The doctrine of exaltation — that God's children may one day inherit all that the Father has, becoming like Him in glory, nature, and eternal capacity — is the most extraordinary claim in Latter-day Saint theology. It is also the most carefully grounded in scripture. The surprise is not that LDS doctrine teaches it. The surprise is that Christianity largely stopped teaching what Paul, Peter, and Christ clearly said.
This page does not ask you to accept it on our authority. It asks you to read what the texts actually say.
What Exaltation Actually Is
Exaltation is not the same thing as salvation, and that distinction matters. Salvation — in the broad sense — refers to resurrection and deliverance from spiritual death. Nearly all of God's children will be saved in that sense. Exaltation is the highest degree of glory in the celestial kingdom, reserved for those who enter into the new and everlasting covenant, receive all the ordinances of the gospel, and remain faithful to the end.
What does exaltation mean? It means inheriting all that God has. It means continuing the family unit in eternity. It means becoming, through Christ and by His grace, the kind of being God is — not a different God, not a rival to the Father, but a being of the same divine nature, received as a gift from Him through covenant.
The clearest doctrinal statement on this comes from Doctrine and Covenants 132:
“Then shall they be gods, because they have no end; therefore shall they be from everlasting to everlasting, because they continue; then shall they be above all, because all things are subject unto them. Then shall they be gods, because they have all power, and the angels are subject unto them.”
That is not hedged. That is not metaphor. That is the doctrine stated plainly by revelation. And it is not unique to the Doctrine and Covenants.
What Scripture Says
Paul's letter to the Romans contains a sentence that most Protestant readers pass over without fully reckoning with what it claims:
“And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.”
Joint-heirs with Christ. Christ is the heir of all things — Hebrews 1:2 says so explicitly. If we are joint-heirs with Him, we inherit what He inherits. That is not a metaphor for a comfortable afterlife. That is an enormous claim about human destiny.
Peter makes the same point with different language:
“Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature.”
Partakers of the divine nature. That phrase does not mean you get to live near God. It means you receive His nature as your own. The ancient church fathers — Athanasius, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria — understood this doctrine and taught it openly. They called it theosis: the process by which the human being becomes what God is. The Eastern Orthodox Church still teaches it. It did not originate with Joseph Smith.
The Old Testament contains its own witness. Psalm 82 opens with God standing in the divine assembly and pronouncing:
“I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.”
Jesus quoted this psalm directly in John 10:34 when He was accused of blasphemy for claiming to be the Son of God. His point was that scripture itself called human beings “gods” — and scripture cannot be broken. This is not a peripheral verse. It is a verse Jesus chose to defend His own divine identity.
Joint-Heirs With Christ — What That Means
The standard Protestant answer to Romans 8:17 is that “joint-heir” means we get to be with Christ in heaven — not that we receive what He receives. This reading requires you to empty the word “heir” of its legal and relational meaning. An heir inherits. That is what the word means.
Consider what Christ Himself inherited. Hebrews 1:2 says the Father “hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things.” All things. If we are joint-heirs with Christ, we are joint-heirs of all things. That is the plain meaning of the text, and it is exactly what LDS doctrine teaches.
This is not a claim that we become equal to the Father or that we displace God. The Father remains the Father. What LDS doctrine claims is that the Father's purpose — the entire point of the plan of salvation — is to bring His children home in the fullest possible sense. Not as servants. Not as subjects. As heirs.
Christ's great intercessory prayer in John 17 says it this way:
“And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.”
The Path to Exaltation
Exaltation is not automatically granted. Paul was clear: “if so be that we suffer with him.” There is a condition. The path to exaltation runs through covenant, ordinance, and faithfulness.
The Doctrine and Covenants describes those who will receive exaltation in the celestial kingdom:
“They are they who received the testimony of Jesus, and believed on his name and were baptized after the manner of his burial, rising in newness of life… They are they who are priests and kings, who have received of his fulness, and of his glory; and are priests of the Most High, after the order of Melchizedek… Wherefore, as it is written, they are gods, even the sons of God.”
The path includes: faith in Christ, repentance, baptism by proper authority, receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost, receiving temple ordinances (including eternal marriage), and enduring faithfully to the end. None of these elements are additions to the gospel. All of them appear in the New Testament. LDS doctrine treats them with the seriousness the text demands.
Related Doctrines on the Path
- Baptism — The gate into the covenant; required for salvation (John 3:5)
- Holy Ghost — The sanctifying power that transforms nature over a lifetime
- Eternal Marriage — Required for the highest degree of the celestial kingdom (D&C 131:1–4)
- Faithfulness — The condition Paul attaches: “if so be that we suffer with him”
Why This Doctrine Is Scripturally Grounded, Not Novel
The most common Protestant objection is that the doctrine of becoming like God is a pagan intrusion or a Joseph Smith invention. Neither charge survives historical scrutiny.
Irenaeus of Lyon, writing in the second century, taught: “If the Word became a man, it was so men may become gods.” Athanasius of Alexandria, the great defender of Nicene orthodoxy, wrote: “God became man so that man might become God.” These are not fringe theologians. Athanasius is called “the father of orthodoxy.” He taught theosis.
What happened is that Western Christianity — particularly after Augustine — moved away from this understanding and toward a more transactional view of salvation: sin is punished, Christ pays the debt, the believer is forgiven. That framework is true as far as it goes. But it stops well short of what Paul, Peter, and the early church fathers understood salvation to be: a transformation of human nature into divine nature through union with Christ.
LDS doctrine does not innovate. It restores. The doctrine of exaltation is not a departure from ancient Christianity. It is a return to it.
The Difference Between Immortality and Eternal Life
The Prophet Joseph Smith taught that God's work and glory is “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39). Those are two different things listed in one sentence.
Immortality is universal. All of God's children will be resurrected. Death is conquered for everyone through Christ's atoning sacrifice. That is the gift of immortality, and it is unconditional.
Eternal life is different. Eternal life is God's life — the kind of life God lives. It is not merely living forever. It is living as He lives: in covenant relationship, in continuing creation, in the fullness of His nature and capacity and joy. Jesus defined it precisely in John 17:3: “This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” To know God — in the Hebrew sense, the deepest personal intimacy — is eternal life.
This is what exaltation is. It is eternal life in the fullest sense. Not survival. Not existence. A life of divine quality, received through covenant, made possible only through Jesus Christ, lived in the presence of the Father.
No other Christian tradition offers this. Not because other traditions are dishonest — but because the plain meaning of scripture was buried under centuries of philosophy, creeds, and systematic theology that smoothed the sharpest edges of what God actually said He intends for His children.
LDS doctrine does not smooth those edges. It restores them. And then it asks you to read Paul again, with fresh eyes, and see if he didn't mean exactly what he said.