Governing and Populating Worlds

Latter-day Saint theology teaches that faithful members who achieve exaltation will have the opportunity to create and govern worlds in eternity. Spencer W. Kimball, a former president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, explained this teaching explicitly in multiple addresses.¹²

The Purpose of Education

Kimball taught that both secular and spiritual knowledge are necessary for this future creative work. He stated, “Desirable as is secular knowledge, one is not truly educated unless he has the spiritual with the secular.”³ According to Kimball, the accumulated secular knowledge would be essential for creating and furnishing worlds, but only spiritual knowledge, including “the mysteries of God” and “hidden treasures of knowledge,” would enable Latter-day Saints to reach the position where they could use that knowledge in creation and exaltation.⁴

In a more concise formulation, Kimball declared, “We educate ourselves in the secular field and in the spiritual field so that we may one day create worlds, people and govern them.”⁵

Mortality as Preparation

Joseph Fielding Smith, another former church president, described mortal life as preparation for this eternal destiny. He taught that celestial glory could never come without a period in mortality, explaining that mortality is a school to gain experiences, training, joys, and sufferings.⁶

Smith connected faithful obedience to this future creative role:

We are in school, the mortal school, to gain the experiences, the training, the joys, and the sufferings that we partake of, that we might be educated in all these things and be prepared, if we are faithful and true to the commandments of the Lord, to become sons and daughters of God, joint heirs with Jesus Christ; and in His presence to go on to a fulness and a continuation of the seeds forever, and perhaps through our faithfulness to have the opportunity of building worlds and peopling them.⁷

This teaching represents a significant departure from traditional Christian doctrine about the afterlife and the nature of God. Rather than viewing eternal life as eternal communion with an unchanging God, Mormon theology presents a progression toward godhood itself, including the creative powers currently attributed to God alone.

References

Spencer W. Kimball, Conference Report of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, October 1968 (Salt Lake City, UT: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1968), 131.
Spencer W. Kimball, The Teachings of Spencer W. Kimball, ed. Edward L. Kimball (Salt Lake City, UT: Bookcraft, 1982), 386.
Kimball, Conference Report, October 1968, 131. “Desirable as is secular knowledge, one is not truly educated unless he has the spiritual with the secular. The secular knowledge is to be desired; the spiritual knowledge is an absolute necessity.”
Ibid. “We shall need all of the accumulated secular knowledge in order to create worlds and to furnish them, but only through the ‘mysteries of God’ and these hidden treasures of knowledge may we arrive at the place and condition where we may use that knowledge in creation and exaltation.”
Joseph Fielding Smith, “Adam’s Role in Bringing Us Mortality,” General Conference, October 1976, reprinted in Liahona, January 2006.
Ibid. “That great blessing of celestial glory could never have come to us without a period of time in mortality, and so we came here in this mortal world. We are in school, the mortal school, to gain the experiences, the training, the joys, and the sufferings that we partake of, that we might be educated in all these things and be prepared, if we are faithful and true to the commandments of the Lord, to become sons and daughters of God, joint heirs with Jesus Christ; and in His presence to go on to a fulness and a continuation of the seeds forever, and perhaps through our faithfulness to have the opportunity of building worlds and peopling them.”