Toward the other end of his short life, which ended with his "martyrdom" at the hands of an Illinois lynch mob in 1844, Smith began to formulate the most infamous theological ideas in Mormonism. These are many and various (they include the covenant of "celestial plural marriage," for example), but for sheer heresy nothing outdoes Smith's pronouncement that God did not create man from nothing, since God and man are eternal and coexistent spiritual entities. God is himself a perfected form of man, Smith taught; in fact, God used to be human, and after long ages of exaltation in the afterlife, men can become gods. As Givens observes, "It would be hard to conceive an idea ... more outrageous to Christian dogma, and more hostile to the very cosmology underlying a conventionally theistic universe."
Smith's theological vision, Givens notes, violates the traditional Judeo-Christian distinction between everyday experience and the sacred or transcendent sphere. If God, angels and human beings "are all of one species, one race, one great family," in the words of early Mormon philosopher Parley P. Pratt -- and if these entities appeared numerous times, in tangible, physical form, to a backwoods boy in 19th-century America -- then "the sacred distance at the heart of Western religious experience comes near to collapsing."
This particular sacrilege against conventional dogma is both the source of Mormonism's unique appeal and what makes it such a threat to older, more established denominations: If miracles and divine visitations came routinely to the Hebrews of the Old Testament, Smith demanded, why shouldn't they come to us? In recent decades, many evangelical Protestants and some Roman Catholics have warmed to the possibility of modern-day miracles and personal communication with the deity (over and above inherently private and subjective religious experiences, like visions and prayer). To some Mormons, this is evidence that their restored gospel is working its magic.
)?