Continuing from my thesis at the Phases and Strategies of God, what the original priesthood restoration was as I see it is a restoration of what I shall call Abraformity: which means to form your life and purpose in pursuit of what Abraham accomplished, a life of scientific and philosophical understanding, and raising up a righteous seed through your priesthood power (see Abraham 2:11). This was in fact a restoration indeed because in the first century, as I explained on my website here, Roman domination of the Jews had led to a protest theology and a kind of psychological warfare where first century Christians were not to imitate the zealots who used violence to oppose Rome; but were to become what Paul Middleton calls voluntary martyrs, and what some theologians have described as a cruciform mentality. This was the heart of Pauline theology and the gospel of Mark, a mentality of willfully losing your mortal life to gain an immortal life (see Phil. 1:21). Due to this martyr-centrism, there were Antifamilial Tendencies in Ancient Christianity, and thus there was not an emphasis on building a family and having a wife and generating income through a career and focusing on retirement; nor generating a people that would last for generations, as was the focus of Abraham. For in Paul's mind, all mortal existence was going to be annihilated very soon with the imminent return of Christ. I choose to believe that God utilized Paul's mistake in order to generate an urgency and inspire the early Christians to preach a transvaluation of all pagan values based on Might Makes Right through their willingness to bravely die as martyrs for their theological philosophy of love and compassion; in opposition to the Roman ideal of Might Makes Right. The Christians won the battle of ideas and so the cruciform mentality was a very important and a useful strategy during that first century phase of God's People.
What Joseph Smith did was inaugurate the restitution of all things which was a synthesis of the Old and New Testament strategies and phases combined; which is why he wanted to publish The Book of Mormon and New Testament as one book. The early Christians had succeeded in creating a transvaluation of all morality up to that time by implementing a Zion Ideal with a belief in the intrinsic worth of a person as a soul or a child of God. However, while the cruciform mentality was useful in the first century as a strategy during the phase of God's People being oppressed by a foreign ruler, as the cruciform ideal filtered through the fallible minds of Greek Gentile converts who saw the flesh world as evil compared to the pure Platonic Forms in heaven -- and was filtered through the Desert Fathers and the monastic traditions of men like Augustine -- cruciformity was no longer about protesting the first century Roman government and pagan ideology of the first century; but became an antibody, anti-Life, ascetic mentality of bodily denials; so that it became necessary for a prophet to rise up like unto Moses and move the Christianity away from body despising ideologies and toward affirming bodily life in the new centuries of American democracy. I thus see Joseph Smith providing a fraternal order and pro-body theology during Nauvoo, that would affirm the body and organic life and the family unit; while restoring a more healthy sexuality, affirming reproduction, and the joys of the flesh as good and holy through a restoration of Abraformity.
This is what the original priesthood and freemasonic temple ritual was, a practical theological ritual order for restoring Abraformity.
Cruciformity to Abraformity to Modernity
What does all this mean for the modern Catholic and Protestant Christian and Mormon-Christian? For me this means that a modern Christianity is a synthesis of cruciformity and abraformity through either postmarriage relationships or serial monogamy or state sanctioned monogamous marriage, whatever one chooses. The first century model of the cruciform lifestyle is really an impractical lifestyle today as there's no Roman government to crucify you for declaring Jesus is Lord instead of saying Caesar is Lord.
I believe every Christian is endowed with the power to engage in midrash just as Paul and Joseph did. So to be Abraform in modern times need not include polygamy like Abraham practiced, nor polyamory, but simply can mean the mentality of ascending the ladders of life toward enthronement, while building a family and focusing on the future of your children's children, and building a healthy Peoplehood, a culture based on the ideal of Zion.
