ABSTRACT
Joseph Smith taught that God is perfect. To Joseph Smith, however, God consistently revealed himself as a concrete person, dynamic, passible, relational, and, in some respects, as continuously self-surpassing; or, as the idea is more commonly expressed in LDS discourse, as "eternally progressing". Conventional Christian theology has long been opposed to the idea that God is a dynamic being. According to a great many Christian theologians, God is static and immutable. Joseph's teaching that even God eternally progresses starkly contradicts the conventional notion of divine perfection. Process theologians reject many of the fundamental assumptions of conventional Christian theology—most notably that God is timeless and, hence, metaphysically immutable and impassible—while acknowledging that God is constant in his loving concern for the welfare of human agents. Process theism is, more specifically, "a product of theorizing that takes the categories of becoming, change, and time as foundational for metaphysics".
