# Blood

From covenant to resurrection to emulated spirit, blood bridges Mormon scripture, atonement theology, and transhumanist science. Explore its layered meaning.

## **Scriptural Significance**

Blood is among the most theologically freighted words in scripture. In the Hebrew Bible, blood is life itself: “the life of every creature is its blood” (Leviticus 17:14). This identification of blood with life underwrites an entire sacrificial economy—from Abel’s offering to the Passover lamb—in which the shedding of blood becomes a ritual acknowledgment of mortal contingency and covenant obligation. The New Testament inherits and transforms this grammar: the blood of Christ is the blood of a new covenant (Luke 22:20), the mechanism by which sin is remitted and humanity reconciled to God.

The Book of Mormon extends the covenantal weight of blood into the New World context, affirming that Christ’s atoning blood cleanses those who covenant with him (Mosiah 3:11; 3 Nephi 27:19). The Doctrine and Covenants speaks of the “blood of this generation” and of prophets whose “blood cries from the ground” (D&C 135:7)—language borrowed from Genesis 4:10—to signal an accounting that history cannot permanently defer. In Revelation, the imagery crescendos: blood as judgment, blood as cleansing, a rider on a white horse whose robe is “dipped in blood” (Revelation 19:13).

What does blood *do* in these texts? In function, it marks the threshold between life and death, self and covenant, mortal economy and divine economy. It is the substance that makes the cost of love visible.

## **Theological and Symbolic Significance**

Across religious traditions, blood carries at least three interlocking symbolic registers. First, it is the sign of *vitality*—blood flowing is life; blood absent is death. Second, it is the sign of *kinship*—“blood relations,” “the blood of Israel,” “kindred of the same blood.” Third, it is the sign of *sacrifice and covenant*—blood shed in witness to a binding commitment, whether between humans or between humanity and the divine.

In Mormon theology these three registers are compounded by the doctrine of physical embodiment as sacred. God is not a disembodied abstraction; Godhood is physical and glorified, the body a temple of spirit. This means the biological substance of blood is not a crude or merely symbolic prop to be discarded by mature theology. It is, rather, a pointer to something real: the material basis of mortal life, and a boundary marker that the resurrection is understood to cross.

Mormon tradition also preserves the striking typological reading that Christ’s blood—shed at Gethsemane and Calvary—is continuous with the sacrificial blood of the Aaronic dispensation but discontinuous with the economy of perpetual sacrifice that preceded it. In this reading, the atonement does not merely repeat the pattern of sacrifice; it fulfills and thereby transforms it.

## **Prophetic Significance**

Prophetically, blood appears in Mormon scripture as both warning and promise. The Lord’s “voice of blood” cries from the earth against injustice (D&C 87:7; Moses 7:36-37). Enoch, witnessing the violence of his era, sees the earth herself weeping because she is “pained”—drenched, as it were, in the blood of her children. The millennial promise, conversely, is a world where this crying stops: the lamb lies down with the lion, and the shedding of blood gives way to a different economy of life.

This prophetic arc may be read as a moral demand, not merely a cosmological prediction. The blood shed by oppression and war is a standing indictment that our civilization has not yet learned to share power, abundance, or care. Prophecy, in the Mormon Transhumanist sense, is forth-telling: it names a trajectory and asks what work we’re willing to do to bend it. The trajectory here bends toward life preserved, suffering reduced, and death overcome.

## **Blood and the Resurrection: The Mormon Theological Pivot**

Here is where the tradition offers its most conceptually unusual and transhumanistically generative claim. Joseph Smith taught that immortal, resurrected bodies would have “spirit in their bodies, and not blood.” Brigham Young elaborated:

> The blood he spilled upon Mount Calvary he did not receive again into his veins. That was poured out, and when he was resurrected, another element took the place of the blood. It will be so with every person who receives a resurrection; the blood will not be resurrected with the body, being designed only to sustain the life of the present organization. When that is dissolved, and we again obtain our bodies by the power of the resurrection, that which we now call the life of the body, and which is formed from the food we eat and the water we drink will be supplanted by another element; for flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.

This is a remarkable claim. It does not spiritualize the body away—Mormon theology insists on embodied resurrection, flesh and bone—but it identifies blood specifically as a feature of *mortal* organization, not immortal. Jesus changed, Paul tells us, from mortal “flesh and blood” to immortal “flesh and bone” (1 Corinthians 15:50; Luke 24:39). Blood is, in this framework, the life-support mechanism of a provisional body: necessary now, but not the final word.

## **Figurative and Allegorical Dimensions**

Allegorically, blood as mortal life-support maps onto any system that sustains present organization at the cost of fragility and eventual failure. The circulatory system—brilliant, ancient, evolved—is also vulnerable: it clots, it fails, it carries disease, it bleeds out. To depend entirely on blood is to depend on a mechanism calibrated for a mortal lifespan.

The allegorical inverse is equally suggestive. If blood represents the mortal economy of life, then whatever “supplants” it in resurrected existence represents a post-scarcity, post-fragility organization of the self—one that no longer requires the constant expenditure of oxygen and glucose and clotting factors just to persist. This is not magic; it is, in Mormon terms, a different *kind* of physical body, one that has been transformed through processes we are perhaps only beginning to understand.

## **Scientific and Technological Relevance**

Blood is, biologically, an extraordinarily complex tissue. It carries oxygen and nutrients, mediates immune response, regulates temperature, repairs wounds, and serves as a communication network for hormones and signaling molecules. It is, in a real sense, the body’s primary internal infrastructure.

Current and emerging biotechnology engages blood at multiple levels:

- **Regenerative medicine:** Stem cells derived from blood are already used in therapies for cancers and immune disorders. Advances in induced pluripotency allow blood cells to be reprogrammed into other cell types, suggesting blood as a renewable source of therapeutic material.
- **Synthetic biology:** Researchers are developing artificial blood substitutes, engineered oxygen carriers, and lab-grown red blood cells. The prospect of blood “on demand,” free from donation constraints or infectious risk, is no longer science fiction.
- **Nanotechnology:** Robert Freitas and others have proposed “respirocytes”—hypothetical nanoscale devices that could replace or supplement red blood cells with far greater efficiency. More immediately, microscale and nanoscale devices circulating in the bloodstream for drug delivery, diagnostics, and tissue repair are actively in development. Blood becomes, in these scenarios, not merely a biological fluid but a *medium*—an infrastructure through which engineered agents move and act.
- **Diagnostics and biomarkers:** “Liquid biopsy”—the analysis of circulating DNA, RNA, proteins, and exosomes in blood—is transforming cancer detection and monitoring. Blood increasingly functions as an archive of the body’s entire history, readable with sufficient technology.
- **Gene therapy:** Many gene-editing interventions are delivered systemically via the bloodstream. Blood is thus both the target and the vehicle of some of the most consequential biotechnological interventions now underway.
- **Longevity research:** Interest in parabiosis—the transfer of “young blood” components to older organisms—has generated significant research into whether specific blood factors contribute to aging. Whether or not young blood transfusion proves therapeutic, the research has illuminated mechanisms of systemic aging at the molecular level.
## **Relevance to Mormon Transhumanism**

For Mormon Transhumanists, blood sits at the intersection of every major theme in the tradition. It is the substance of mortal life and the substance that resurrection, in prophetic imagination, transcends. It is the medium through which covenant was marked in ancient sacrifice, and it is now the medium through which nanotechnology, synthetic biology, and regenerative medicine are beginning to transform the body from the inside out.

The Brigham Young passage quoted above is not primarily a statement about the biochemistry of resurrection, but about transformation: that the organization which sustains us now is provisional, and that a more durable organization awaits. Mormon Transhumanism reads that promise as practical obligation. We are not waiting for miraculous blood to spontaneously supplant our mortal blood. We are working—through medicine, through biotechnology, through rigorous science—to understand what it would mean to sustain life more robustly, to repair and regenerate rather than merely deteriorate.

The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper (partaking of the bread and water as emblems of Christ’s body and blood) invites a similar reflection. We covenant to remember him and to take his name upon us—to, in some genuine sense, become what he is. That becoming is not merely spiritual; Mormon theology insists it is physical. The question blood raises, then, is a practical one: what does it mean to participate, with full moral and technical seriousness, in the transformation of mortal into immortal life? What work do we do to extend the covenant from symbol into substance?

The answer is not settled. But the question is worth asking with everything we have.

*See also:* Resurrection, Transfiguration, Atonement, Covenant, Synthetic Biology, Nanotechnology, Regenerative Medicine, Immortality, Body.