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On a recent episode of “Relatable,” Allie Beth Stuckey sat down with Latter-day Saints podcaster Jacob Hansen to dive into all things Mormonism vs. Christianity. Allie asked all the toughest questions that illuminated both the crossovers and the differentiations between her evangelical Christian faith and the faith of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
In one of the spiciest segments of this 90-minute debate, Allie and Hansen tackled the crucial theological question: Are God, humans, angels, and even Satan all the same “type” of being?
In Allie’s perspective, this question isn’t about semantics. Our answer determines how we view God, Jesus, our great enemy, and what it means to be made in God’s image — all things that have eternal implications.
“There seems to be a little bit of a different origin story, though, that both Jesus and Satan were created in eternity past … that Satan and Jesus were brothers, [and] that we also — all of humankind — are brothers and sisters of Satan and Jesus. Is that correct?” Allie asks.
“I would say that Jesus and Satan are brother and sister in the same way that you and Nancy Pelosi are sisters,” Hansen jests.
“In Job 1, it says that the sons of God approached God and Satan was among them, right? So, okay, Satan is one of the sons of God, and Jesus is called the Son of God. So isn’t there some sense in which there’s some relationship there?” he continues.
But Allie interprets Scripture differently.
“How do you square that with the origin story that we read in Scripture that Satan was a fallen angel? … Jesus even says that he saw Satan fall like lightning from the sky, that he led his own army of rebellious angels who were demons in hell. And we don’t read that he was this being that was a brother to Jesus,” she counters.
“[Christians] would view angels as a totally different species from human beings, as some totally different creature. We don’t hold to that sort of view. We believe that angels are also the same species as human beings,” Hansen says.
“Scripture says that angels long to see what we see, that they long to know what we know. And so there does seem to be a distinction there,” Allie disputes.
Hansen concedes that there is certainly a difference between humans and angels, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are different beings entirely. “Perhaps they’re pre-embodied beings or they’re post-embodied beings that are no longer embodied,” he says, “but we don’t make this distinction that there’s all these different sort of species of creatures that are out there. … We are all children of God.”
And that includes Jesus in the Mormon faith. Hansen points to Christ’s words in John 20, when he tells his disciples, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God,” as evidence that Jesus is a created being just like humans.
Similarly, there’s nothing in Scripture, he argues, to suggest that angels “are of a different genus” than humans, making Satan (a fallen angel) a brother, in essence, to both human beings and Jesus.
“You’re kind of almost equating humans to God or that we can ascend to god-like status, and is that a belief that the LDS church has?” Allie follows up.
To hear Hansen’s answer, watch the episode above.
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