"The Godmakers" Film

The strong relationship between early Christian teachings and LDS doctrine on the divine potential of human beings was explored in a recent master's thesis by a Roman Catholic Dominican monk, Father Jordan Vajda, at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2003, after publication of his thesis, he took the missionary discussions and became LDS, but he was a faithful Catholic when he wrote his thesis...The work in question is Jordan Vajda, OP, "Partakers of the Divine Nature": A Comparative Analysis of the Patristic and Mormon Doctrines of Divinization, master's thesis, Graduate Theological Union at the University of California, Berkeley, 1998, published under the same title as Occasional Paper No. 3 by the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (Provo, Utah, 2002).

Father Vajda was a faithful Catholic who, at the time of his writing, saw Catholicism as a viable dispensation of original Christianity that can be consistent with early Christian teachings. He did not agree with the LDS view on the Trinity at that time, but recognized that there are significant parallels between early Christian doctrines on "becoming a god" and what we claim to be the restored doctrine of exaltation, and correctly pointed out the fallacies of our critics who charge us with being non-Christian for having such truly Christian doctrines....evangelical critics would do well to consider how far they have departed from early Christianity and to investigate the Restoration found in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.


Referring to the critics who published the lurid anti-Mormon film, "The Godmakers," Father Vajda's conclusion contains this interesting passage:

Yet what was meant to be a term of ridicule ["godmakers"] has turned out to be a term of approbation (proof), for the witness of the Greek Fathers of the Church, described in chapter two, is that they also believed that salvation meant "becoming a god." It seems that if one's soteriology cannot accommodate a doctrine of human divinization, then it has at least implicitly, if not explicitly, rejected the heritage of the early Christian church and departed from the faith of first millennium Christianity.... And the supreme irony is that such persons should probably investigate the claims of the LDS Church, which proclaims that within itself is to be found the "restoration of all things."

Now that Father Vajda has become Brother Vajda, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, critics will use that as an excuse to ignore the scholarly work that he published as a Catholic. However, the fact that he eventually converted after examining the LDS position ought to weigh heavily in the thinking of those who are sincerely seeking truth. This was a brave step that required, of course, abandoning his career plans as a Catholic priest and going back to school. He went into medical school instead.

Partakers of the Divine Nature by Jordan Vajda