Affliction
Suffering is not a single event but a whole accounting of human days—illness, loss, persecution, grief, and the slow costs of living in a world still under repair.
Affliction names the full weight of human suffering: illness, loss, persecution, grief, and the accumulated cost of living in a world that is not yet what it should be. In religious traditions broadly, affliction has rarely been treated as mere misfortune. It has been treated as data—evidence about the nature of reality, of God, of what human beings are for. The question is not whether to acknowledge suffering but what to make of it, and what to do.
Mormon theology inherits a rich tradition here, from Job’s unanswered protest to Paul’s strange rejoicing, and sharpens it into something more active. Affliction is not incidental to the human project; it is close to its center. And for Mormon Transhumanism, the implications run outward from theology directly into the practical work of medicine, technology, and the long effort to heal what is broken.
Where misfortune is only luck, pain breeds passivity; where it is treated as information, suffering demands interpretation and a practical response.
Filling Up What Is Lacking
Paul’s letter to the Colossians contains one of the most provocative claims in the New Testament: “I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church” (Colossians 1:24). The claim is startling. Christ’s atonement is not, in Paul’s framing, exhaustively complete -- or rather, its completion requires ongoing human participation. Suffering undertaken for others, in solidarity and love, extends the work of Christ rather than merely invoking it.
This is not a license for masochism. It is a claim about structure: atonement is participatory. No one receives it passively. Disciples are called to join the work, including the costly parts. The afflictions of Christ are, in some sense, the afflictions that remain in the world -- every instance of unrelieved suffering, every injustice not yet repaired. The theological demand is to enter that space, not to retreat from it.
Liberty Jail and the Pedagogy of Endurance
In the cold confines of Liberty Jail, revelation comes not as distance from pain but as a promise that God’s knowledge of suffering is thorough enough to sustain a people.
When Joseph Smith was imprisoned in Liberty Jail in the winter of 1838--1839, he wrote some of the most luminous passages in Latter-day Saint scripture. The context was extreme: cold, filth, false accusation, separation from family, and the near-destruction of the community he had built. From within that suffering, Joseph received revelation that described not a God distant from pain but one who had “descended below” all things in order to “comprehend all things” -- and who promised that the same descent could become the basis of an “everlasting dominion” that flows from relationship, not force.
The implication is that affliction, navigated rightly, produces a kind of knowledge that comfort cannot. This is not mere stoicism. It is a claim that God’s own nature was formed, in part, through something like suffering -- and that human beings develop toward Godhood along the same axis. The pedagogy is severe, but it is real.
The Prophetic Refusal to Accept Affliction as Final
At the same time, the prophetic tradition refuses to sacralize affliction as such. Jesus healed the sick. He raised the dead. He told his disciples to do the same (Matthew 10:7--8). The prophets of Israel did not tell the oppressed to find peace in their oppression; they told the powerful to stop. Affliction may teach, but it is not the destination. The vision of Zion is explicitly one from which suffering has been removed -- not by ignoring it, but by the hard work of those who refused to accept it as permanent.
This is the prophetic tension that Mormon Transhumanism inhabits: affliction is real and sometimes formative, but it is not sacred. It is something to be entered, endured, learned from, and then -- to the extent that intelligence and compassion make it possible -- overcome.
The Technical Work of Overcoming
Here, the Transhumanist commitment becomes not supplementary but central. Medicine, biotechnology, cognitive enhancement, and eventually more radical interventions are not distractions from the religious life; they are its extension into the physical world. To heal the sick is to do what Jesus commanded. To work on the defeat of death is to take seriously what resurrection promises. To reduce the burden of mental illness, chronic pain, or genetic disease is to fill up, in some small measure, what is still lacking in the afflictions of Christ.
Power over bodies can also become a new source of harm, so the moral question is not novelty but mercy—whether relief reaches those with the least leverage to demand it.
The caution is that technology pursued without compassion produces its own afflictions. History offers no shortage of examples: enhancement for the few that deepens the suffering of the many, efficiency gained at the cost of dignity, cures weaponized as tools of control. The test of any technology is whether it reduces affliction in fact -- not in theory, not in a press release -- for real people, including those with the least power to demand it. That test is, at bottom, a moral one, rooted in the same tradition that sent Paul to the Colossians and Joseph Smith to Liberty Jail.