Only by Love Unfeigned
By Patrick Q. Mason
In a world where human beings are actually free, the only source of power that can be enduringly maintained is the power of love.
What if love was God’s only power?
Or to put a bit more finely, what if love was the only source of God’s power?
We often imagine God as a Superman who doesn’t have a kryptonite. God is faster than fast, stronger than strong, and yes, God can read your mind. This is the Being we envision with the traditional theological “omnis”: omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. God has all power, knows everything, and is (or can be) everywhere. Most Abrahamic theologies up the ante even further, saying that God is the Creator, the “ground of being,” the “unmoved mover,” the one who existed from all eternity and upon whom our existence depends.
But what if the physicists are right, that matter can neither be created nor destroyed? What if even the “nothing” at the time of the Big Bang was in fact “something” that already existed?[1] What if what we call “creation” was better understood as the organization of existent energies and forces that we are only now in the earliest stages of comprehending? What if God is better understood less as the prime mover than as the prime organizer?
Most people believe in some kind of perpetual existence after our mortal death, whether that be reincarnation, paradise, or some other form of “eternal life.” But what our eternal existence stretches not only forward but backward? What if the essential, irreducible core of what makes us human is something akin to matter and can therefore neither be created nor destroyed? What would that mean—not just for you and me but also for God?
I invite you to join me in thinking along with Latter-day Saint perspectives on these questions. I say “thinking along with” deliberately. You don’t need to believe in gold plates or the Book of Mormon, nor fully accept the cosmology I will present. But thinking along with Latter-day Saint (popularly known as “Mormon”) cosmology can help think about the nature of God’s power in a world where humans exercise real moral freedom. The revelations of Joseph Smith, the nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint prophet, peered not just into eternity’s future but also its past. By gazing backward into the misty origins of time, Latter-day Saint cosmology changes the narrative about where humans come from, who God is, and the character of God’s relationship to us. All of it points to a God of love.
Joseph Smith’s revelations describe a time before the creation of the earth when human spirits existed “also in the beginning with God.”[2] Instead of creating other intelligent beings ex nihilo, or out of nothing as traditional Abrahamic theologies posit, a self-existent God was surrounded by a multitude of other self-existent beings that Smith called “intelligences.” The nature of these intelligences is largely undetermined, except that they possessed some degree of agency. God was “greater”—more intelligent, more advanced, more perfected in personality and character—than these other intelligences. Yet at the most fundamental level, all intelligent beings were similar to God in one crucial respect—”they existed before, they shall have no end, they shall exist after, for they are…eternal.”[3]
The implications of this cosmology are staggering. If human souls are truly co-eternal with God, then we are genuinely free. As self-existing personalities, we shoulder ultimate responsibility for who we are and what we become. Of course, this freedom is not without constraints. Each soul chooses and acts within a universe populated with other free souls who are also choosing and acting, and all these persons are constantly bumping up against and influencing one another. Rather than a libertarian paradise of wholly autonomous individuals, the universe described in Smith’s revelations is a dense web of profound interconnectivity and interdependence. To exist, in any meaningful way, is to be in relationship with others.
According to Latter-day Saint theology, humans were born from these premortal intelligences. Because we are self-existent beings, co-eternal with God, the difference between us and God is one of magnitude rather than kind. We saw in God the type of being we wanted to become. God owed us nothing. But out of pure love, God gathered the premortal intelligences together as a family. God called us daughters and sons, then outlined a plan by which we could each gain what we desired—namely, to become like God. Jesus would be our teacher, exemplar, advocate, savior, and redeemer. A perfect God, consisting of both the divine masculine and feminine united in eternal and equal partnership, covenanted to work ceaselessly to “bring to pass the immortality and eternal life” of each one of us.[4] We are bound to a God who works eternally on our behalf, motivated by nothing more than love. God’s glory is bound up in ours.
To reiterate, the essence of each one of us existed eternally. God did not bring us into being. Instead, God called us into relationship. We perceived God’s character—distinguished by perfect righteousness, compassion, faithfulness, mercy, justice, and love. These qualities combined to make God inherently and completely trustworthy. On these grounds our premortal spirits (or “intelligences”) were drawn to God. This is the crucial point: God’s power and influence in a universe of uncreated, co-eternal beings was and is wholly predicated on God’s character. The chief feature of that character is everlasting, all-consuming, perfect love.
Any durable power or influence over independent moral beings requires their assent and participation. A free and intelligent mind must ultimately agree to obey and yield. Granted, temporary assent might be obtained through intimidation, manipulation, or even chemical alteration. But influence obtained by any of these coercive methods is fleeting. It cannot last forever.
Joseph Smith had this flash of insight while languishing in an underground dungeon in the ironically named town of Liberty, Missouri, in the winter of 1838-39. In a fourteen-by-fourteen-foot prison cell with a low ceiling, raw earth floor, and dirty straw for beds, Smith and his imprisoned companions were fed food so filthy they almost preferred to starve. Their families were in the process of being violently expelled from the state after the governor had issued an “extermination order” against the Mormons. As the long winter turned to spring, Smith wrote a letter to the Saints. It contained words of lamentation, reminiscent of the ancient Hebrew prophets, as well as the voice of divine assurance and comfort.
The epistle’s most memorable passage is a sublime meditation on the nature of human versus godly power—a constructive counterpoint to Smith’s own yearnings for a divine sword of vengeance to fall upon his enemies. The letter offered a devastating diagnosis of human nature: “We have learned by sad experience, that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion.” In contrast to this dim view of the human condition came a brief but poignant observation about the true nature of “authority” and “dominion” both in heaven and on earth: “No power or influence can or ought to be maintained…only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned; by kindness, and pure knowledge.”[5]
This letter, which Latter-day Saints accept as scripture (similar to Paul’s epistles in the New Testament), does not simply offer wise counsel about how authority should ideally be exercised. More substantially, it is a meditation on how power in the universe actually works. It is not merely that power ought not be maintained through “unrighteous dominion,” but more significantly that it cannot. To put it simply, there is no such thing as enduring coercive power. Not for humans. Not for God. Neither in heaven nor on earth. Enduring influence, for both deity and mere mortals, can be established only through love because, at its core, enduring influence over eternal beings can be built only through trust.
Hard-bitten modern society tends to discount the strength of love, seeing it as the stuff of Hallmark cards, impractically suited for the “real world” where force is considered the only language that is understood. But the power of love—God’s power—is anything but fragile. Power is ultimately based on assent; if people remove their assent, the power fails. Those who exert the greatest influence, whether they are leaders of families or nations or worlds unnumbered, are those who engender the greatest trust.
Divine power is indomitable because it is based on persuasion, not compulsion; truth, not deception; compassion, not coercion; selflessness, not avarice; gentleness, meekness, and kindness, not violence. God’s power is predicated on “love unfeigned.” Or, to put it in its purest and simplest form, “God is love.”[6] One needn’t accept the details of Latter-day Saint cosmology to believe that humans have genuine freedom. In this context, it is only a God of love who can exercise enduring power over us. God’s relationship with morally free agents must be based on trust engendered by love. God earns our loyalty, assent, and obedience not because of any power to destroy—we are excellent at doing that to ourselves. Rather, we are drawn to God because we perceive, however dimly, the divine contours of voluntary, infinite, and eternal love beyond anything that we can humanly muster.
Of course God is powerful; what good is a God who isn’t? The real question is what the nature of God’s power is, especially when it comes to humans with moral freedom. The only way to authentic and enduring power is through the type of “love unfeigned” that makes us want—even crave—to be in eternal relationship with an amipotent God.
Bio: Patrick Mason is a professor of religious studies and history at Utah State University, where he holds the Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture. He is the author of several books, including, with David Pulsipher, Proclaim Peace: The Restoration’s Answer to an Age of Conflict.
OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE
Patrick Mason explores divine power by asking what changes when we begin with love when thinking about God. Drawing from his Latter-day Saint background, he argues that a loving God cannot control free creatures. A key strength of this theology is its rejection of creation from nothing. Doing so supports the view that humans and other beings act freely, not under God’s creative control. I appreciate Patrick’s claim that control isn’t just undesirable—it’s incompatible with goodness. This shifts the question to the nature of God’s power in relation to human freedom. An amipotent God offers the possibility of real, eternal relationship.
For more on Oord’s view of creation from nothing, see this article.
* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.
[1]. For an accessible explanation of the physics, see Alastair Wilson, “How could the Big Bang arise from nothing?” The Conversation, 3 January 2022, https://theconversation.com/how-could-the-
big-bang-arise-from-nothing-171986.
[2]. Doctrine and Covenants 93:29. This section draws on Patrick Q. Mason and J. David Pulsipher, Proclaim Peace: The Restoration’s Answer to an Age of Conflict (Provo: Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship and Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2021), chapter 1.
[3]. Abraham 3:16-19, Pearl of Great Price. This cosmology was most fully developed by Joseph Smith in a sermon given shortly before his death in 1844. For existing firsthand accounts of that sermon, see https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/site/accounts-of-the-king-follett-sermon.
[4]. Moses 1:39, Pearl of Great Price.
[5]. Doctrine and Covenants 121:39-42.
[6]. 1 John 4:8.