Sunday Post (Part 1)

Feminine Feminism and the Pearl of Great Price

How the LDS Church Restored the Truth of the Divinity of Women

Almost a century before women were allowed the right to vote in the United States, a revolutionary text had already declared the need for equality between men and women. The documents making up the Pearl of Great Price testified that women play a crucial role in God’s plan for His children.

Though at the time the text was a new idea regarding the importance women, it was simply the restoration of truth lost between the time of Jesus Christ and Joseph Smith. That truth, when carefully studied, reveals that Eve played a critical role in the progression, not damnation, of mankind, that women are equal to men in their potential for Godhood and that God, therefore, created the world with the partnership of His Goddess wife like whom all women can become.

We, as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, refer to the time between the death of Jesus Christ and the restoration of the Church through Joseph Smith as the Great Apostasy. During this time scriptures were altered, corruption thrived in the name of God, and the most simple and important doctrines of Christ’s gospel were lost under the tyranny of unholy holy men. I have pondered upon one particular doctrine that was not only forgotten, but completely turned upside down until it became a truly evil teaching. The doctrine of the fall of Adam and Eve was used as a way to persecute and demean women to the point that one could be drowned or hanged under the name witch.

Despite the many descriptions of remarkable women in the scriptures, woman “has so frequently through the ages been relegated to a secondary position.” Thankfully, the Pearl of Great Price reveals the truth behind Eve, and her role as the “mother of all living.” To begin understanding Eve and her role in God’s Plan of Salvation, one thing needs to be considered. All scripture describing the fall of man is symbolic. The first reference to Eve in Moses 3 is no exception. “And I, the Lord God…took one of [Adam’s] ribs and closed up the flesh in the stead thereof…and the rib which I, the Lord God, had taken from man, made I a woman and brought her unto the man.” 

During the Great Apostasy, the symbolism of this scripture was so skewed that it came to mean the opposite of what the Lord intended it to mean. The symbol of Eve being taken out of the rib of Adam does not mean that she was created in a lesser image than Adam, but that she was the equal counterpart to man, or as Adam describes in the next verse, “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,” meaning they are equal in their abilities to do as the Lord commanded; to multiply and replenish the earth.