The body is not a prison

PROVO, Utah — The body is depraved. It is the center of sin. It is a prison.

At least that is how the body was viewed by some philosophers and Protestants, according to Benjamin Park, a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh, who spoke at the Mormon Scholars Foundation Summer Seminar on July 2 at BYU.

Park said Parley Pratt helped articulate the Mormons' "radically optimistic" view of the body. This view developed as doctrines were revealed by Joseph Smith and then explained by Pratt.

Mainstream 19th century Christians "always separated the soul from its corporeal body," Park said. The soul was the "immaterial human spirit," the body "a temporary shelter." Joseph Smith taught both spirit and body must be joined together to be a soul.

Pratt contemplated the nature of death while in Liberty Jail. He wrote about how matter was eternal in scope — an idea later declared by Joseph Smith, who took it even further than Pratt: "(T)he spirit is a substance; that it is material, but that it is more pure ... and refined matter than the body."

This meant the body wasn't "made up of temporary, vulgar element," Park said.

The preexistent body

Joseph Smith taught that the spirit was "in the beginning with the Father" (Doctrine and Covenants 93:29). The body was a way for spirits to grow. It wasn't a prison; it was, according to Park, a "receptacle of power."

Pratt saw Christ's embodiment as the example and model. "Here was an end of mysticism," Pratt wrote about Christ's physical resurrection. "Here was material salvation."

To Pratt, true salvation wasn't the suppression of the body, but the refining and perfecting of the body.

Park said that even as late as 1840, Pratt still saw a difference between a resurrected body and the Father's body — that the Father did not have flesh and bones like the Son. But in January 1841, Joseph Smith declared, "There is no God in heaven but that God who has flesh and bones."

Before long Pratt declared that believing in a non-corporeal, body-less deity was "one of the foundational errors of modern times." It was, as Joseph Smith declared in the "King Follett Discourse," a key to becoming like Heavenly Father — who in his glory possessed a perfected physical body.

E-mail: mdegroote@desnews.com