What was I before I was born?

There is one question that outlives all the others. It is not «does God exist?» — that one gets debated and put off. It is this one, smaller and harder to escape: what was I before I was born?

Almost everybody has asked it, almost always in silence, and almost always at night.

The usual answer of Christian theology is that there was nothing. God created the soul out of nothing — creatio ex nihilo — at the moment the body was formed. Before that, you were nothing. Not an idea, not a plan, not a spirit. Nothing.

It is a coherent answer. It is also an answer that leaves questions unanswered — and it is about those that I wrote chapter 6 of the second volume.

The claim

We lived before we were born here. Man is not a creature that begins to exist at physical birth — he is an eternal being who came into this world for a necessary experience.

LeGrand Richards, A Marvelous Work and a Wonder

I write in the book that this doctrine is «one of the most original, most consoling and most contested» of my church. I notice the word in the middle: consoling. It is not an accident.

A doctrine is not true because it consoles. But when a doctrine consoles and has a foundation in the text, it is worth looking twice before throwing it out.

The first passage: the verb matters

Then the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.

Jeremiah 1:4-5

You have to read it slowly, because everything is in the verb.

God does not say to Jeremiah «before you were conceived, I knew that you would exist». That would be foreknowledge — and foreknowledge does not require the object to exist. God says «I knew thee».

To know someone is a relationship. And a relationship requires somebody on the other side.

Mormon theology generalises this principle: what God said to Jeremiah is true of every human being. It is not an exception granted to a prophet — it is a description of how things are.

The second passage: a question that presupposes a place

One may reply that Jeremiah 1:5 is figurative language, and that is a legitimate answer. But the book of Job raises the same problem again, and by another road.

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? […] when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

Job 38:4-7

Why the form of the question matters

God answers Job out of the whirlwind with a series of rhetorical questions. A rhetorical question works because the answer is obvious — and the obvious answer here is «I was nowhere».

But notice what the question takes for granted in order to be asked at all. «Where wast thou» only makes sense if there were, in principle, somewhere to be. God does not ask a stone where it was.

And there is the second half: the «sons of God» who shouted for joy when the earth was created therefore existed before the earth existed. Mormon theology identifies those sons with the pre-mortal spirits of human beings.

Two passages do not make a doctrine. They make a serious question — and that is what I am asking be granted.

What this resolves: the problem of evil

Here the doctrine stops being a curiosity and starts having consequences.

The oldest objection against God is this one: if He is omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good, why did He create a world with suffering, injustice and evil?

The Mormon answer is that evil was not created by God — it was chosen by a being who possessed agency, exactly as evil is chosen by human beings who possess agency.

This is in Abraham 3:22-27, in the Pearl of Great Price, and it has echoes in other texts any Christian will recognise: Lucifer as one of the «sons of the morning» in Isaiah 14:12, and the third part of the stars drawn by the dragon in Revelation 12:4.

I write the consequence in the book, and it is the part I find hardest to rebut:

The same agency that made Lucifer's rebellion possible is what makes genuine growth, virtue and love possible. A universe without agency would be a universe without Lucifer — but also without real virtue, genuine love or authentic moral development.

Notice what this does to the original question. It stops being «why did God allow evil?» and becomes «would a world where nobody could choose have been worth having?». That is a different question, and it has a different answer.

Foreordination, and what it is not

If souls existed before, one implication follows at once: some may have been appointed to missions before they were born.

And God saw these souls that they were good […] and he said unto me: Abraham, thou art one of them; thou wast chosen before thou wast born.

Abraham 3:22-23

And this is not an isolated text from my own tradition. Jeremiah was sanctified and ordained a prophet before he was born — it is the same passage we began with. And Paul writes of himself that he was «separated from my mother's womb» (Galatians 1:15).

Three things this changes, and that you feel on your skin

None of this is seminary curiosity. It changes concrete things.

1. What a child who dies at birth is. If the soul begins at birth, a life that lasted minutes is a life that barely happened. If the spirit already existed, it is a return — and a return is an entirely different thing from a waste.

2. The question of inequality at the starting line. One is born healthy and rich, another born ill and with nothing, and neither of them chose. In a theology where the soul begins at birth, that inequality is attributed directly to God and there is no answer. In a theology where mortal life is one chapter in the middle of a longer story, the question changes shape. It does not disappear — but it changes.

3. What a person is. Someone who existed before me and who will continue after me is not a product of my time nor a part of my household. He is a being with a biography of his own, older than mine. That has consequences for how you treat whoever is in front of you.

The honesty this demands

I wrote that this is one of the most contested doctrines, and the book deals with the objections — it does not hide them in an appendix.

The most serious is this: Jeremiah 1:5 and Job 38:7 can be read in other ways, and indeed they can. A text that supports two readings proves neither of them on its own.

What I do in the book is set the two side by side, with the rest of what scripture says on the matter, and let the reader decide which weighs more. Anyone looking for a book that tells him he is already right will be disappointed. Anyone looking for the arguments on both sides, with the references, will find them.

Where this goes on

Pre-mortal existence is the first of three questions, and the volume takes them in order, a chapter each:

1. Where does man come from? — the life before this one, the council in heaven, the origin of agency.

2. Why is he here? — what mortality is for, and why it had to hurt.

3. Where is he going? — the three kingdoms of glory, and why «heaven or hell» is a simplification scripture does not make.

They are the three questions everyone asks sooner or later, and that hardly any theology answers all three of with the same care.

My church has an answer to each one. That answer is debatable — but it is not vague, and it is not a dodge. That is what makes it worth debating.

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This piece develops chapter 6 of In Defence of the Truth — Volume 2. The highlighted passages are quotations from the book. The twelve chapters deal with Articles of Faith 4 to 13: faith and repentance, baptism, the Holy Ghost, spiritual gifts, continuing revelation, the Plan of Salvation, Zion and the Millennium, religious liberty and obedience to civil authority.