President Hinckley publicly expressed uncertainty about Lorenzo Snow's couplet: "As man is, God once was, as God is, Man may become."
I too have a problem with the couplet.
Mormon scripture distinctively refers to God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost as "Eternal God":
D&C 20:28, Alma 11:44, 2 Ne. 9:8, 2 Ne. 26:12, Mosiah 15:3-4, Deut. 33:27, Heb. 9:14, the scriptures that teach the sacramental prayers, and the title page of the Book of Mormon.
Yet Mormon scripture always (I think, see below) refers to others, including exhalted women and men, as "godesses" and "gods":
Psalm 8, Psalm 82 (both Psalm passages have Elohim in the plural, which could, I believe, be translated as angels--a KJV wimp out--gods--which I'd prefer, or Gods--which seems unlikely given that in 82:1 God is judging in the middle of the Elohim, an act which seems to me to construct a hierarchy that doesn't make sense in terms of the Godhead and the "Eternal God" passages above), D&C 76:58, 121:32, 132:17-20, 37, Alma 12:31 (Adam & Eve having an attribute that made them "as Gods"), and Moses 4:11.
D&C 121:32 appears to be particularly helpful in this regard: "According to that which was
ordained in the midst of the
Council of the Eternal
God of all other gods before this
world was, that should be reserved unto the finishing and the end thereof, when every man shall enter into his eternal
presence and into his immortal
rest."
The passages that make things even more interesting are, of course, Abraham 4 and 5 with their frequent references to "Gods" (The Psalm passages may be relevant here too). I think the context supports the tritheistic (but not trinitarian, and certainly not in the "doctrine of the trinity" sense) Godhead of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, as being referenced, but this is also one of the first places I would go to look for a doctrine of Heavenly Mother. (BTW, those who think Heavenly Mother is the Holy Ghost have a problem in John 15, as I understand it. The Paraclete passages there give a masculine article to the Holy Spirit where they could have given a neutral one. Someone who isn't just a dabbler in Greek, please jump in).
I'm comfortable that a notion of Eternal God, as well as Gods, is acceptable in Mormonism, but see it as very problematic for anyone trying to make Mormons into conventional trinitarians.
I don't have a problem with theosis (or deification), and could argue it both from Greek philosophy and from what I would consider non-Hellinized Christian thinkers (at least in this regard) like Augustine and Iraneaus. What I do have a problem with, is the parallelism that Lorenzo Snow's couplet implies (and I think it's clear that LS had something like Anthanasios' quip in mind). In other words, I'm OK with the idea of God becoming man so that men and women can become gods (little "g"), but men and women becoming Gods (big "G") strikes me as problematic on a number of levels (Ironically, I think the big "G" is what trinitarians would have to argue, and that they would also have to argue for a spiritual resurrection to account for passages like 2 Pet. 1:4)
Where all of this lands is:
1. I would argue a notion of Eternal God wherein God always was, is, and will be God, and is material (see D&C 93 where spirit is also considered matter), and consequently never went through a process of theosis.
2. I would argue that there are three Eternal Gods that we worship, and would acknowledge the possibility of something like a Heavenly Mother also being an Eternal God (but possibly not worshipped for reasons that belong in another post).
3. I would argue that we too have an uncreated nature (intelligences), and that through theoisis we can become gods and goddesses. I think this fits nicely with Mormon notions of creation as the organization of matter (and not as creation ex nihlo), and I think process philosophy has promise for this notion as well, in that it would allow me to locate truth in a creation process instead of in an object--and Eternal God could be an object outside of that process.)
So I would say that in one sense, my Mormon thinking allows for men and women to become deity, but in another sense it does not (in the big "G" sense).
As an aside, I think some of what I'm considering touches on Adam's mentioning of a "miracle problem." I'd suggest that despite a few passages in scripture, Mormon's don't treat the Holy Ghost as equally Eternal God. They treat him like Hermes to the Father's Zeus (my use of a Greek example is deliberate), and have built their worship in such a fashion so as to discourage worship of the Holy Spirit. I can see this problem in aesthetic terms as well. In brief, I'm saying I'd expect a languishing of dramatic gifts of the Spirit when we treat the Holy Ghost as less than equal to the other members of the Godhead. I'd also observe that Mormon thinking is very convoluted on notions of the Holy Ghost, as evidenced in the Lectures on Faith (formerly part of the D&C), and ill-defined notions such as the Light of Christ that seemed to get plugged in to paint over incoherence.
I think what I'm ruminating about (and this is very rough, but I wanted to get imput) is compatible with Mormonism, but certainly is not the only direction in which one might attempt to develop Mormon theology.
Pelagius, Solon, Chapel Hill, and others please weigh in. I'm just trying to explore some ideas and don't by any means think I have "the answers."