The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Vol. 9: Approaching Zion by Hugh Nibley

Author:Hugh Nibley [Nibley, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Publisher: Deseret Book Company
Published: 2009-11-13T07:00:00+00:00

11

Three Degrees of Righteousness from the Old Testament

I was told that there were supposed to be three talks, and naturally I immediately thought of everything falling into three in the gospel and tradition. In the Old Testament there is the idea of the three degrees, which may rightly be designated as telestial, terrestrial, and celestial. For example, the ancient Gnostics, the early Christians, always talked about the pneumatic, the psychic, and the hylic types of human beings. The pneumatic is the spiritual, the psychic is the mixture of the two (body and spirit), and the hylic are those that are grossly and purely physical.1 But this actually reflects the early Jewish teachings of the neshamah, which is the highest of the spirit; the ruakh, which is in between; and the nefesh, which is the lower spirit in this world.2 We are taught in the Kabbalah a great deal about the three Adams. There is the celestial Adam, who was Michael before he came here; the terrestrial Adam, who was in Eden; and the telestial Adam, after he had fallen, who was down low.3 The Kabbalah also tells about Jacob’s ladder.4 Joseph Smith taught that it represented the three stages of initiation in the temple, the three degrees of glory, which are designated as telestial, that is, the lowest order; and then astronomical, or dealing with the physical world, which is higher up still; and then finally the world which is beyond.5 Particularly interesting is the designation in some of the newly discovered apocalyptic writings about the upper or hidden world, the Eden, and the lowest world.6 The only way you can translate it is to use Joseph Smith’s word, which is telestial (from the Greek telos), which means farthest removed, as distant as you can get, what the Arabs call the aqsa. Joseph Smith coined that word, and he couldn’t have used a better one—the telestial, the farthest away of all the worlds. I will talk on the economies of the church in the Old Testament and elsewhere.

In every dispensation, the restoration of the gospel has brought with it a special way of life, not just an economy in the old sense. Oikonomia is the whole administration of everything we do, the way we do everything.7 And it is made very clear in every dispensation: “I give not unto you that ye shall live after the manner of the world” (D&C 95:13). Whenever the gospel has been on earth, a peculiar order of things has been prescribed, and it has always been the same. This is because it is the celestial order—the order of Enoch, the eternal, the only order that God has found acceptable. So when we say that we believe in the same organization that existed in the primitive church (half of our Articles of Faith deal with the physical things of this world, with the church as an institution—and those are the only Articles of Faith that ever offended anybody; if you go through all the anti-Mormon

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