What Do Mormons Believe about the Trinity, the Father… And His Wife?

You’re listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I have almost inadvertently been doing a series lately on Mormonism. Two weeks ago, I asked the question, “How should we respond to Mormon missionaries?” The nutshell version of that is that you want to respond compassionately, gently and also be clear both where we agree and where we disagree. You can find out more in that video if you want, and then, last week, I looked at one of the major issues dividing Mormons and Catholics particularly, which is the notion of the Great Apostasy. A nutshell version is the Catholic claim is that Jesus Christ established the church. That church is still with us. It is the Catholic Church. The Mormon claim, Jesus Christ established a church, that church was overcome by what’s called the Great Apostasy, and then, in the 19th Century and what’s called The Restoration, Joseph Smith was led by God to restore the Church. If you want to find out more about that, there’s an 80-minute video I did on that.

This week, Jack in our video department said, “Okay, but after seeing those two videos, I still don’t know what Mormons believe,” so I thought I’d get a little more into the nuts and bolts of Mormon theology and particularly doing a compare-and-contrast with Catholic and, on this point, also Orthodox and Protestant theology. I think Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants are all going to be on one side, and Mormons are all going to be on the other side.

When I say Mormon here, I do mean LDS particularly. About 95% or so of Mormons are in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or LDS, but because Mormon is a better known term, I’m going to use those two interchangeably except in a handful of cases where it makes sense to actually distinguish that. That’s not going to happen this time, but next week when I do the second part of the What Do Mormons Believe About God, there are going to be a couple of issues in which the LDS, non-LDS thing becomes really important. For the most part, by Mormon, I actually mean LDS Mormon.

That’s the first caveat. Second one is I realize I’m not a Mormon and, as a Catholic, when people say, “Here’s what the Catholic Church really believes,” overwhelmingly those videos are false, and they’re skewed and distorted. I’m not trying to play gotcha. I’m not trying to say here’s the secret beliefs of Mormonism, but I am trying to say, hey, there are these times where Mormons will say something that sounds totally orthodox, sounds exactly like what you’d hear in a Catholic Church or a Protestant church about the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. If you dive a little deeper, you realize that there actually are much bigger differences than they first appear, and so it can be helpful as a non-Mormon to say, “Okay, this is what you’re hearing, and you’re hearing it through these Protestant Orthodox Catholic ears.” Here’s what that actually means comparing and contrasting. Hopefully, it’s welcome as a gentle criticism, but also from an outsider’s perspective.

That said, by all means, LDS viewers and listeners, if I get anything wrong, if I even inadvertently skew something, I invite the correction. I apologize in advance for any mistakes that I’m making. I’ve done my best to use official LDS resources and/or to look to the writings of those considered to be prophets. With that said, I also want to do a little bit of an equipping to say, practically, how can we have these conversations?

One of the most important things to consider in that is the role of scripture, so what is the Mormon view of the bible? The LDS website is pretty clear on this subject, that Mormons believe and revere the Bible, but they don’t believe it to be inerrant. They don’t believe it to be free of error in other words. They quote Joseph Smith who said he believes in the Bible as it is read when it came from the pen of the original writers, Joseph Smith being the founder of Mormonism, the first prophet.

You have the original Bible that is inspired Word of God without error, but then you have the Bible as it comes to us today. According to the LDS, as it was compiled, organized, translated and transcribed, many errors entered the text, and they point out that, well, this explains why there’s conflicting translations of the Bible.

Now, I would suggest, from a non-Mormon perspective, that there’s a more innocuous explanation of this, that the Bible is in Hebrew and in Greek and so, as you’re translating that into English, you’re going to find conflicting ways of interpreting the same Greek and Hebrew words without having to suggest that the Bible is in error. Nevertheless, this is the inherent problem with translation. Unless you believe in a divinely inspired translation, you’re always going to have the, well, how do we translate a word? Take the Greek word logos. We translate it as word. The word is a little more complicated than that in Greek. You get that idea, but they’re going to say, well, this proves the Bible is not without error.

Many people have also been curious about references by biblical prophets to books or scriptural passages that are not currently in the Bible. That’s the other important thing. They believe there are lost books that were divinely inspired scripture, but have been lost completely. That’s the first thing. They don’t believe the Bible is without error. This is going to be a really important point, but we’re going to get back to why in a second.

Notice, in addition to that, that the LDS also have the Book of Mormon, a book called Doctrines and Covenants, which is an ongoing work of revelation, and a book called the Pearl of Great Price, as well as the words of modern prophets and apostles. You may remember a second ago I said I’m going to refer to official LDS resources and the writings and statements of people considered prophets. That’s what’s going on here. That’s an important kind of detail to understand.

The last thing is that, as I alluded to, they believe in what’s called an open scriptural canon, meaning, the process of scripture being written is not done yet, it’s still ongoing, and so God could give another entire book. They’ve got those four books. You got the Bible and the other three. They could have a fifth or a sixth or a seventh any day now. That’s just an important thing to understand for a couple of reasons. Number one, your LDS friend might be appealing to scriptures that you don’t have in your Bible because we don’t consider them to be scripture. Number two, when you’re appealing to the Old and New Testament, there’s a little bit, to put it bluntly, of a double standard.

You find this in Islam as well because Islam makes a similar claim. The original Bible was good, but then they would say the Jews and the Christians corrupted it, and so anything that sounds like it supports Mormonism or Islam, they can point to and say, hey, look, this supports our religion, but when you point to another verse and say, “Well, clearly that’s out of context. Look at this other one. This points away from your religion,” they can say, “Well, that’s just a corruption. It may be a mistake in the transmission process, so just know that that’s where you’re going going in.

To make this whole story stranger, Joseph Smith personally gave what he claimed was a translation or a re-translation of the scripture. You would think that the LDS position would be like, “Well, our prophet had special inspiration to do a divinely inspired translation,” but in fact, for about a hundred years, the LDS church didn’t publish Joseph Smith’s translation of the Bible. They didn’t think it was real or accurate because his wife Emma and his son had the copy, and Emma and the son, Joseph the Third, weren’t LDS Mormons.

Remember, earlier I said about 95% of Mormons are LDS. That wasn’t true of Emma Smith and it wasn’t true of Joseph Smith the Third, Joseph Smith Jr.’s son. They were part of the RLDS. Basically, long story short, when Joseph Smith died, he hadn’t left any provisions to figure out who his successor would be. Here, again, the comparison to Islam is pretty apt. This is where the Shia-Sunn division comes in Islam. You have the blood relative line just like you have the Shia-Sunn line that goes with blood relatives, and then you have the charismatic leader line. In the case of Mormonism, that’s Brigham Young. In the case of Islam, it’s Sunni. I’m oversimplifying both Islam and Mormonism there, but just to give you a general sense of why do you have different Mormon denominations? That’s why.

With that said, as you know what the playing field is, let’s turn to an important, but maybe unhelpful question, which is are Mormons Christian? Now, I hope you can see why that question is important. There are a lot of practical implications for it like do we baptize a Mormon convert or not? It’s also a question that I think risks generating more heat than light. If I’m having a conversation with a Mormon missionary, my first question is not are you guys Christian? My first question or my first assertion isn’t I don’t think you guys are Christian because I find that largely unhelpful. It’s better to get into the nuts and bolts of, “You believe this about God. We don’t. Here’s why that matters,” rather than debating the label because this is an area that can be a sensitive one. LDS Mormons are very emphatic that they consider themselves Christian, and they dislike the fact that basically nobody else does consider them Christian.

From the LDS gospel topic essays are Mormons Christian, they argue, well, in recent decades, some have claimed The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is not a Christian Church. Now, I would stress here that is not new to recent decades. This has been an ongoing problem since the beginning of Mormonism. It was called American Mohammedan, which was the old awkward 19th Century way of describing Islam. It was recognized not just as a different church or a different denomination, but is an entirely different religion really from the lifetime of Joseph Smith.

Nevertheless, they’re going to say, in recent decades, this controversy has risen, and the most often used reasons are the following. Number one, the LDS don’t accept the creeds, confessions and formulations of post-New Testament Christianity. They don’t accept the Nicene Creed. They don’t accept the Athanasian Creed, et cetera. That by itself is not a make-or-break issue. There are plenty of Christians who don’t accept Later Creeds.

Second, The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints does not descend through the historical line of traditional Christianity. That is, they’re not Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox or Protestant. Again, this is not a make-or-break issue of whether or not you’re Christian. Pentecostals would say the same thing about themselves. Nondenominational Christians might say the same thing about themselves. That’s not where the issue lies.

Third, Latter-day Saints do not believe the scripture consists of the Holy Bible alone, but have an expanded canon that includes the Book of Mormon, Doctrines and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price. Now, all of these are important issues in their own right. None of these are disqualifying, so this essay is written in response to really three bad arguments raised against Mormonism, meaning, someone could have the wrong Bible and still be a Christian. You can have too many or too few books. Catholics and Protestants, there’s seven books that divide us. Catholics and Orthodox, we might not always agree on which books are in the Bible, so that can’t be the standard for why someone is or isn’t a Christian. I mean, think about the Early Church before the New Testament is completely formed and before it’s completely clear which books are and aren’t in. You can’t just take the standard, “Well, they get the Bible wrong. Therefore, they’re not Christian.”

I wanted to say, at the outset, a lot of the arguments against LDS Mormonism in terms of whether or not they’re Christian are actually bad arguments, and we should be cautious of those arguments. On the other hand, there are better arguments about why Mormons aren’t Christian that are really important, and the pivotal one involves baptism. I’ll get to that. I want to give one more bit of explanation from the LDS’ side because they really downplay the differences. They’ll say, “Whatever the doctrinal differences that exist, the roles Latter-day Saints subscribe to members of the Godhead, largely correspondent the views of others in the Christian world.”

Now, I think you’re going to see that is a very misleading, maybe even outright false claim. Latter-day Saints believe that God is omnipotent, omniscient and all-loving, and they pray to Him in the name of Jesus Christ. We’re going to also see a little more nuance on that that may make you question whether that claim is really true, but we’ll get to that. As I said, I think there’s a better argument against Mormons being Christian, and it’s specifically they’re not baptized in a Trinitarian way because they don’t believe in the Trinity.

The catechism is really clear, and this is clear also in scripture particularly in places like Acts 2 when Peter preaches the Pentecost sermon and they say, “What must we do to be saved?” Peter tells them to get baptized. They do, and they’re added to the church that day. That is pretty clear from the end of Acts chapter two. Well, the catechism in 12:13 says that baptism is the basis of the whole Christian life and the gateway to life in the spirit and the door through which gives access to the other sacraments. It’s in baptism that we are born again of water an the Spirit and become members of the Church of Jesus Christ.

With that said, we don’t accept Mormon baptisms as Trinitarian baptism. The Catholic Church actually pronounced on this issue particularly as regards to LDS in the year 2001. At the time they did that, Father Ladaria, now-Cardinal Ladaria, wrote an essay that as a member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, explaining why. He explained, in the 20th Century, the Catholic Church became more aware of the Trinitarian errors that Justice Smith had taught and that he used these traditional terms, but nevertheless meant something different by them. It created this situation in which the words Mormons were saying were right. The words seemed totally unobjectionable, but the meaning of the words had been changed so much that, as Ladaria explains, there became this twofold disagreement on the Catholic side, that Catholics who didn’t have much exposure to Mormonism would just say, “Okay. Great. It looks like you had a Trinitarian baptism. We don’t need to rebaptize you.”

This is an important point. Scripture is very clear there’s one baptism for the forgiveness of sins, and so the church historically has always said, “Well, if you had a valid baptism, we’re not going to baptize you because we want to acknowledge that God has already done a work in your life in baptism, that even if that baptism wasn’t by a Catholic priest or a Catholic deacon, even if it wasn’t by a Catholic at all, even if you were becoming Methodist or something, like, “Fine. That’s okay. It’s still a Trinitarian baptism. We accept you as a brother or sister in Christ, and we welcome you into the fullness of faith, but we’re not going to baptize you as if that first baptism didn’t happen.” It’s an important bit of sacramental theology, and it’s an important way of not doing what’s called Anabaptism or rebaptism.

The question became, on the one side, you had Catholics saying, “Okay. Well, yeah, do the same thing to a Mormon that you would to a Protestant or to an Orthodox,” which is you don’t rebaptize them. However, Catholics who knew Mormon theology better or were more immersed in the Mormon world would say, “Hang on guys. This is a much bigger divide than you realize. They actually don’t believe in the Trinity,” and we’ll get into whether or not that’s true in a second here, but Ladaria explains, “The formula used by the Mormons might seem at first sight to be a Trinitarian formula. However, there’s not in fact a fundamental doctrinal agreement. There’s not a true invocation of the Trinity because the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, according to the LDS, are not the three persons in which subsist the one Godhead, but three gods who form one divinity.

This is an important claim that Christianity is monotheistic. Following Judaism, we believe there is one God. There’s no other God besides God. Mormonism, Ladaria is saying is not monotheistic. It’s tritheistic. It’s polytheistic, believes there are three gods who form one divinity. In fact, as we’re going to see, there are a lot more than three gods. That’s a really important claim. We don’t just disagree with this or that wording, this or that doctrinal practice. We actually disagree with how many gods there are.

Ladaria goes on to say, “The words Father, Son and Holy Spirit, for Mormon, have a totally different meaning than they do for Christians.” These differences are so great that it’s not even a case of heresy, that instead the teachings of Mormons have a completely different matrix. We don’t even want to say this is a Christian heresy. We wanted to say this is just a different religion. If you said Krishna and Brahma, we wouldn’t say, “Oh, you’re a Christian heretic.” Take again the example of Islam. Muslims believe Jesus Christ is a prophet. They follow Jesus in that sense, but we don’t consider Islam a Christian heresy. We consider it a totally different religion because the differences are big enough that it’s not even a difference within the family at that point. That’s an important difference. It’s an important understanding.

With that, I want to add one last point from Ladaria that I think is important, and then I want to turn to looking to Mormon sources, because I’m looking at the Catholic side of the equation right now. Ladaria is clear that this does not indicate a judgment on those who are LDS members. The point of this is not to say, “Aha, you guys aren’t Christian. Therefore, you’re all going to hell. You’re bad people,” et cetera. That’s not what we’re trying to do here. They’re important theological and pastoral and practical questions about how we consider Mormons, especially Mormon converts to Catholicism.

Additionally, Ladaria points out that Catholics and Mormons actually can work together on a lot of issues. If you think about things like traditional marriage, we often find ourselves shoulder to shoulders. We don’t want to just demonize or tear down or anything else Mormons, but we do want to be honest about that the differences might be bigger than they first appear. With that, I want to turn back to the LDS’ side of the equation.

Remember that gospel topic that says, “Whatever the difference is, the views on God had largely correspond between LDS and other Christians?” That’s the Mormon claim. However, in that same essay, they also claim that the melding of Early Christian theology with Greek philosophy was a grave error. Now, what do they mean by that? This is probably a reference to the Trinity. Why do I say that? Because the next line says, “Chief among the doctrines lost in this process was the nature of the Godhead, the true nature of God, the Father, His Son Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost was restored through the prophet Joseph Smith.” The LDS claims on the one hand, “Hey, we basically believe the same thing,” and on the other hand, “You guys don’t actually believe what we believe about the Godhead,” and we would say, “Yeah, we agree with you on the second one. We have major differences on the Godhead so much so that we probably shouldn’t be called the same religion at all.”

With that, let’s turn to the biggest issue I’ve already kind of teed up, “Do Mormons believe in the Trinity?” and the answer is no. You don’t have to just take that from the Catholic side. Like Ladaria, the LDS side is pretty open and honest about that. In an essay called Do Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Believe in The Trinity found on the LDS website, it says, “No, we don’t believe in the traditional concept of the Trinity.” We believe the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are three separate beings who are one in purpose. That three separate beings is really important because it’s saying there are three different gods. You don’t have a single omnipotent, infinite God. You have three different gods who are working together.

President Gordon Hinckley, in a 2006 talk called In These Three I Believe, talks about the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, but says they’re distinct beings, but they’re one in purpose and effort. That is sometimes called Social Trinitarianism or tritheism, the notion that there are three gods who work together. That’s very different than saying there’s one God in three persons.

Now, the Trinitarian idea for those who aren’t familiar with it is probably pretty confusing because it makes this distinction between a person, who you are, and in essence, what you are. The idea is that there is one, infinite, undivided, divine essence, but within that divine essence, within God, there’s a tripersonal relationship, Father, Son, and Spirit. There’s three who’s corresponding to one what? That’s very unusual. It’s not what we would normally get here on earth, but that’s actually one of the things we would point to as saying that’s probably a sign that this is true because it isn’t like paganism which had a bunch of different gods, and it isn’t just like simple monotheism like you’d have in Islam where there’s just one God, one person.

All of those are super easy to understand. You don’t need philosophy. You don’t need to do any real theology. You don’t need really revelation for that. What you need revelation for is, if the inner life of God is so radically other than our life on earth, then you look at that and say, “Oh, okay, that makes sense. Of course, God’s ways are higher than my ways, and so it’s not really surprising that I can’t just say, ‘Here’s my life,’ and blow it up a little bit and get to God.” No. No. There’s actually an infinite chasm between the life of man and the life of God, and so His inner life is going to look very different than my inner life. You can have a bunch of Trinitarian analogies, but none of them are going to fully do justice to the inner life of God.

Anyway, the point there is not at this point to really give a full-fledged defense of the Trinity. It’s just to say we believe very different things. We believe in one God. Mormons will sometimes say that, but they don’t. They believe in three different beings who are one God in name only. Joseph Smith was actually very clear about this. He gave a talk on March 9th, 1841, which was recorded by William Clayton, one of his followers, in which he says, “These personages according to Abraham’s record are called God the First, the Creator, God the Second, the Redeemer, and God the Third, the Witness or Testator.”

Now, that is not actually found in the Book of Abraham and the Book of Mormon. Smith is citing a source that he wrote or translated, and it’s not actually in there. Nevertheless, that’s not really the point. The point is he’s claiming pretty explicitly there that there are three gods. You’ve got God the First. This is someone who’s called Heavenly Father, the Creator. God the Second, this is Jesus Christ. This is the Son of God. This is the redeemer, and God the Third, this is the Holy Spirit, the Witness or the Testator, so God the First, God the Second, God the Third.

In this part one of the video, I’m only going to really look at God the First and his wives. I’m not going to look at God the Second and God the Third or Adam who has sometimes historically been worshiped in Mormonism. We’ll get into all of that really fascinating stuff in the second video, which will be next week. For now, I want to look at God the First, Heavenly Father, and ask does God the Father have a body, and does God the Father have his own God? Fascinatingly, Joseph Smith is going to say yes to those questions.

Remember that Are Mormons Christians essay? There’s a fascinating, almost throwaway line in there. Remember how I say that, or they say rather, that Joseph Smith restored true understanding of the Godhead? One of the critical things is they say LDS hold the God the Father is an embodied being. Now, they’re going to claim Early Christians believe that, too. That’s not really true. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in the Early Church who could even plausibly be said to believe that. You’ll find plenty of language that sounds like, “The hand of God,” but the people are saying that, just as the people saying that today, don’t think God literally has a hand.

Nevertheless, you’ll find plenty of what’s called anthropomorphic language. They’ll even talk about the wings of God. He’ll comfort you under His wings. He’ll hide you under His wings. We don’t think God really has wings just like, if we talk about the arm of the law, we don’t think the law really has an arm. This is metaphorical, anthropomorphic language. Nevertheless, they’re going to point to that and say, “Aha, maybe the Early Christians agree with us.”

As you saw last week, the best LDS arguments for the apostasy is it happens basically right after the apostles die because the earliest Christians are so profoundly Catholic in their theology that it is not plausible to also say they thought God the Father had a body. We’ll get into, I guess, all of that.

Doctrines and Covenants, this is, remember, one of the Mormon scriptures, in chapter 130, verse 22, has a great one-line summary of the Mormon view of the Godhead. The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s. The son also, but the Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but as a personage of spirit. Where it not so, the Holy Ghost could not dwell in us. The first God, God the Father, He is the one who is the object of worship. He’s got a body. The second God, Jesus, also has a body. No controversy there. Well, there’s plenty of controversy, but not on that point. The third, the Holy Spirit doesn’t have a body, and the argument is he can’t have a body or else he couldn’t dwell in us. We’ll get into whether that’s right or not.

Brigham Young actually makes fun of the idea of the Father not having a body, and he compares the Christian God to the devil. Brigham Young is the second prophet of Mormonism. As I said, you got this big split after the death of Joseph Smith. Brigham Young is the one who wins most of the followers, the LDS trace from the Brigham Young Line. BYU in Utah is named after him. That’s the BY, Brigham Young, and so he’s a major deal, and a lot of the most controversial claims in Mormonism actually don’t come from Joseph Smith. They come more I would argue from Brigham Young. He’s, I think, much harder for Mormon apologists to defend because he says some wild stuff.

We’ll get into all that, but for now, one of the things he says is, at the time, there’s a lot of anti-Mormon persecution. Most Americans overwhelmingly are Protestant, and they’re really horrified by Mormonism. In the state of Missouri, they actually passed the Mormon Extermination Order, and so there’s a really bad-blooded relationship on both sides, between Mormons and Christians, and between Mormons and the federal and state governments. The Mormons, or at least Brigham Young’s band of Mormons, go out to Utah which is at the time not a state, and so they form basically their own country there, Deseret. They have a really complicated relationship with the federal government, with the United States, and so there’s a lot of bad blood, and a lot of blame on both sides frankly.

In the context, you find a more decisively anti-Christian theology coming from Brigham Young in the context of this hostility. One of the things he says, he actually quotes Joseph Nobles, one of the other Mormons, as having told the Methodist priest after hearing him describe his God, but the God they, meaning, Methodists, other Christians worshiped was the Mormon’s devil, a being without a body. Whereas our God has body parts and passions.

I think this is just worth pointing out, that modern-day Mormonism really downplays the differences between Mormonism and Christianity and will say, yeah, yeah, we’re all one Christian family. Historically, Mormonism has been pretty decisively like, “No.” It’s hard to say we all believe in the same thing if you’re calling our God the devil because we don’t believe God the Father has a body. That’s just an important, again, frame for it, that there’s a much more, I almost want to say, PC attitude like, “Let’s just downplay it and maybe sugarcoat things,” whereas Brigham Young was really amplifying, “No. No. This is a major difference. We think your God is the devil because He doesn’t have a body and the devil doesn’t have a body.”

Now, you might notice Brigham Young’s argument there doesn’t make a lot of sense because, even in Mormon theology, the Holy Spirit doesn’t have a body, and that wouldn’t make the Holy Spirit the devil, but that’s neither here nor there. That is to say that one of the biggest differences that either a Mormon or a non-Mormon Christian would say, this question of whether God the Father has a body or not, is a huge one. It’s a really big one for a lot of reasons theologically.

The clearest presentation of this idea originally comes in the Journal of Discourses, which is the writings of early Mormon leaders. It’s a talk called Character and Being of God, but it is better known as the King Follett speech because this King Follett discourse is at the funeral of a guy by the name of, you guessed it, King Follett, who died in a well. I think he fell down a well. At his funeral, this is the last major conference Joseph Smith ever gave, Smith preaches basically a funeral oration and he talks about the nature of God.

One of the things he says is that we’ve imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity, and Joseph Smith denies this. He says, “I’ll refute that idea, and we’ll take away and do away the veil so that you may see.” Smith is explicitly going to deny that God the Father is God from all eternity. This is going to be another major difference in how we understand God. He says, “God himself was once as we are now and is an exalted man and sits enthroned in yonder heavens. That is the great secret.” He claims that, “If the veil was rent today and we could see the great God who upholds this world, if we were to seem Him today, we would see him like a man in form and that we would see him like yourselves in all the person, image and very form as a man,” and he makes the argument, after all, Adam is formed in the image and likeness of God.

Now, this is an important argument. If you’re going to talk to a Mormon about this, you think God has a body and we don’t, you should expect this argument to be made. Well, don’t you know Genesis says that man is made in the image and likeness of God? That’s a good argument on the surface, but you should know that both Jews and Christians have always understood that not to mean that God literally has a body.

The sense we’re made in the image and likeness of God is at the spiritual level, the rational, intellect, the ability to will, the capacity for relationship and all of this because, if you look at the context of Genesis, you have the creation of the material world. You’ve got plants and animals and all this, and then you have the creation of man. What makes man different is not just he looks more like God or something. No. No. No, that’s not it at all. What makes man different is that he has an intellect and will. He has an immortal soul, that all of that is pointing to something divine in a different way.

We would understand the image and likeness of God not to mean a physical image but to mean spiritually. We image God in a different way. Otherwise, we’d have said, “Well, some of us look more like God than others.” Are men more in the image of God than women or all of this? That’s not we would say what Genesis is talking about, and it’s not how Genesis was ever understood by Jewish or Christian sources.

Nevertheless, this is how Justice Smith understands it and he’s going to use that as a proof text for this is how we know God had a body. He then says that God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth the same as Jesus Christ himself did. He claims to be able to prove this from the Bible, which is really fascinating, that God the Father doesn’t just have a body, he used to be a guy and he’s an exalted man. In fact, he’s basically still a guy. He’s just like a man in glory.

The way Smith tries to prove this from scriptures is that Jesus says, as the Father has power in Himself even so as His Son has power, and Smith says, “Well, what kind of power does the Son have? He has the power to rise from the dead,” and so Smith reasons, “Therefore, the Father must have also risen from the dead.”

Now, I want to just pause on that and say that argument doesn’t follow logically. The fact that the Son having divine power can rise from the dead doesn’t mean the Father, since He also has divine power, must have also risen from the dead. That doesn’t follow at all, right? If you say this glass is bulletproof and so is that glass, it doesn’t tell you that the glass was actually shot by a bullet. It talks about the capacity. The Father has the capacity to rise from the dead. That doesn’t actually prove He ever had a bodily form or that He rose from the dead, but Smith’s argument is that God the Father, A, is a man, B, lived on another planet and, C, died and rose from the dead on that another planet. All of that, he’s getting really off of two Bible verses.

I mentioned I’m trying to use official LDS sources and the like. The Mormons don’t believe every single thing a prophet says is scripture or is inspired or their like, and we’ll get it more into that in next week’s episode, but they do stress, the LDS website, that this is something that they consider a core doctrine that is taught here since 1844. The church has continued to teach the core doctrines that Joseph presented in the King Follett Discourse and, to view the plan of salvation in light of the truth, Joseph Smith taught about humankind’s premortal existence, mortal existence in divine eternal potential.

Now, I didn’t even get into that part, but that’s going to be the other half of this, that as we are, He once was, that is we were men and women, God used to be like that, as He is, we shall be, meaning, just as God was like an alien on a different planet who was a man, he died and rose from the dead and then became a God. Well, that’s also going to happen to all of us. That’s the argument. That raises a bunch of questions because you’ll notice in that that God used to not be God. He used to used to be just a man. He lived on another planet and seemingly had his own God and then was able to rise from the dead and the like.

It raises this question, okay, then, well, do Mormons believe that God actually created the heavens and the earth from nothing? The answer is no, they don’t. The LDSs on that same article I was talking about says Joseph, that’s Joseph Smith, also taught that a core part of each person is coeternal with God, comparing this divine core to a ring without beginning or end. The essence of who you are was not actually made by God. That divine core is as eternal as God is. He didn’t make that, and Smith puts it like this in the King Follett Discourse. He says, “In the beginning, the head of the gods called the Council the of the Gods, and they came together and concocted a plan to create the world and people it.

Now, notice it’s not actually God creating in a monotheistic sort of way. There’s a Council of Gods working together, and he says, “Well, when we begin to learn this way, we begin to learn the only true God and what kind of a being we’ve got to worship. In technical terms, this is what’s called monolatry, the worship of one god or monolatry, that it’s not actually monotheism. We don’t believe there’s one god. They believe that there’s a bunch of gods. We only worship one of them.

Smith goes on to say, “I ask all who hear me why the learned men who are preaching salvation say that God created the heavens and the earth that had nothing?” and he answers his own rhetorical question. That’s because Christians, he doesn’t say Christians, but he says, “The answer is they’re unlearned in the things of God and have not the gift of the Holy Ghost.” If you believe that God created the heavens and the earth out of nothing,” Smith says, “this proves you don’t have the Holy Ghost.”

Okay. That seems like a much bigger difference than the LDS website makes it out to be. He then gets into the Hebrew word, so he’s trying to do etymology of Hebrew, and he’s not actually doing it very accurately, but he claims that the Hebrew word doesn’t mean to create out of nothing, it means to organize, so God isn’t the creator of the world, He organizes the world, He organizes a preexisting kind of matter in the same way that you might organize materials and build a ship. God takes all this chaos and He forms order out of it, but He’s not actually the creator in the sense that Christians understand what’s called creation ex nihilo, that there was nothing and then God spoke, and then the universe came into being.

That is not the Mormon claim. They deny this. He stresses here that element by which he means something like matter had an existence from the time He had, meaning God had, and the pure principles of element are principles which can never be destroyed. They can be organized and reorganized, but cannot be destroyed, and element or matter has no beginning and has no end. He then says… Oh, sorry, no, excuse me, this is Joseph Fielding Smith. This is his, I believe, nephew who goes on to become a prophet and president in Mormonism. He says, “The doctrine has prevailed, that matter was created out of nothing, but the Lord declares that the elements are eternal. Matter always did and, therefore, always will exist, and the spirits of men as well as their bodies were created out of matter.”

Notice that that it’s not just that you have this divine core. Your body and your soul are made from matter, and God didn’t make any of that. We discovered in this revelation that the intelligent part of man was not created, but always existed. There’s a pretty emphatic denial of God as creator in the sense Christianity understands it and, I don’t know, that seems like a big deal.

Brigham Young, the, again, second prophet, similarly says that he believes in the eternity of worlds, saints, angels, kingdoms, and gods in eternity without a beginning. He says, “I believe the gods never had a beginning, neither the formation of matter ends without end. It will endure in one eternal round swimming in space, basking, living and moving in the midst of eternity. All the creations are in the midst of eternity, and that is one eternity, so they move in one eternal round.”

Now, you’ll notice there that the LDS claim to believe in an omnipotent, omniscient God is just clearly false. There’s an infinite number of gods who aren’t all powerful, who can’t create matter or destroy it. They can just rearrange matter as they find it. They didn’t make you. They didn’t make your mortal soul. They didn’t make all of this stuff.

With that, I want to look at the theologically deep waters of what are the implications of this for Mormonism, atheism, and the demiurge. Now, I’ll look at this in two ways. First, I want to cite David Bentley Hart. I’m going to look at David Bentley Hart and Trent Horn, which is a funny combination if you know who those two people are. David Bentley Hart is not actually talking about Mormonism. He’s talking about new atheism and how the new atheists argue against a false vision of God and of theism.

Okay. With that, if you don’t mind getting into a slightly theologically deeper waters, I want to explore what this means for the ideas of Mormonism and its relationship to both atheism and what’s called the idea of the demiurge. If you’ve never heard that, don’t worry. I’ll explain it. I want to look at a couple of sources. I want to look at LDS sources, David Bentley Hart and Trent Horn, which is a funny trifecta if you know anything about those three.

In a nutshell, the Mormon views of creation we could say are as follows. God was not God from all eternity. God is just our term for an exalted man, or a group of three exalted men, or two exalted and one yet-to-be-exalted man. Second, God did not create the angels or the spirits. Remember, all of that stuff is preexisting. Third, He didn’t create the matter that forms your body. Fourth, He didn’t create your soul. How do we know that? Because your soul or spirit is actually just matter, and He doesn’t create that. He rearranges some of the parts to give you a body, but the actual body and soul aren’t just creations of God. He’s just putting pieces together the way you might with a puzzle. If you do that, you don’t say you created the puzzle probably.

That’s an important framework, and so one argument here is that Mormons are actually atheists, and I’ll let Trent kind of give that argument. This is Trent Horn, my friend and colleague at Catholic Answers, and here’s his argument.

First, Mormonism rejects the existence of God. Now, Mormons, of course, say God exists, but we have to define the word God. If God is just a super being in the sky or the universe, then the new atheist had a point in comparing God to the flying spaghetti monster. If God were a being, you could always ask, well, what created God? Why does God exist? If God has no explanation, why does the universe need one? Instead, God just is being itself. God is the infinite, undivided, eternal, all-powerful act of being. This means, for example, God is simple. He’s not composed of parts. God doesn’t think or react. All of His temporal life exists in one eternal now.

Okay. Now there’s a lot there, and I understand if you say none of that made sense to me. Fine. Fair enough. Take what you can from that. The point there is that, technically speaking, Mormonism could be considered a form of atheism. Now, again, I don’t want to say this to just be like needlessly provocative or something. If the Mormon claim is that all there are material creatures and that these material creatures existed forever and weren’t created by God, an atheist could believe all of that, right? If they want to call one of the powerful material beings God and still say there’s only matter, so this is a form of materialism. Notice, materialism not in the sense of greed, materialism in the sense that everything that exists is just matter.

That’s the first point. The second is that none of these material beings is actually created from nothing. They don’t create time. They don’t create space. They don’t create matter. They just rearrange things in time and space as they find it. That’s really an important divergence, and it’s important for a couple of reasons, first, because it actually puts, strangely enough, the Mormons on the side of atheists. I point this out, again, not to be pejorative, not to be derogatory, but because there’s really important implications for this. Every argument you would use against an atheist in terms of why theism has to be true, so think about Aquinas’ Five Ways, the Argument from Contingency, that sort of thing.

If those things are true, they don’t just refute atheism, they also refute Mormonism, but the second thing is that, in the opposite direction, strangely enough, the Mormon claim falls prey not only to the Christian critiques of atheism, but also to the atheist critiques of Christianity. That’s Trent’s point, that if you take Joseph Smith’s view, there’s no reason to believe in Smith’s god any more than there is to believe in the flying spaghetti monster. There are sound reasons to believe in a god who creates all space and time and everything contingent in the universe, but once you deny that, then there’s no reason to believe in the guy you’re calling God, that He exists any more than anybody else.

We don’t actually have any kind of explanation of the universe’s existence in the Mormon schema. In other words, why are there X number of souls, X number of spirits? Why is there all of this stuff that exists? Christianity has an answer to that, because it’s the will of God. It’s a one-line version. There’s a better way of understanding that, but Mormonism, it doesn’t appear to me actually has an answer to that at all. God just happens to exist. The three gods who make the one Godhead, and then also all the other spiritual beings just happen to exist. That sounds a lot more like atheism than it does like Christianity, but at the same time, you’ve got these theistic sounding claims that atheism would just ridicule saying, “Well, that seems ridiculous. You’re just positing the existence of these invisible beings.”

That’s the problem we run into, that Mormonism both falls prey to Christian critiques of atheism and the atheist critiques of Christianity. The reason, if you want to get into even more technical waters, is because Mormons don’t believe that God is God. They believe in a divine demiurge. They don’t use the language of demiurge. They use the language of God, but what they’re describing is what has historically been known as a demiurge. If you’re familiar with things like Platonism and gnosticism, it’s much closer to that idea than it is to the ideas of Judaism or Christianity or even most of the pagan religions.

David Bentley Hart describes this… Oh, sorry, real quick with the LDS gospel principles, I want to point out that they are arguing we used to live with heavenly Father. There’s the notion of eternal preexistence and that the plan is that we separate from God, come to earth and then prove ourselves, and then we get to have an exalted life like God has. This is the plan of what’s called exaltation. God didn’t create you, but he helps you have a body. Even though He didn’t make any of the matter that made your body, didn’t make your soul, He helps put them together, and then you get to prove yourself and earn your way to heaven, and then you have this exalted life/.

As David Bentley Hart explains in The Experience of God, Being, Consciousness, Bliss, this is what’s called a demiurge. Now, Hart, I want to point out here is, or Bentley Hart, I don’t know who would’ve shortened that, is not responding to Mormonism particularly. He’s just describing. He’s actually describing the problems with new atheism misunderstanding Christianity and saying they misunderstand the whole idea of God, but the new atheist misunderstanding of God is the same one as the Mormon misunderstanding of God. The things he’s saying are applicable. He says, “The God with whom most modern, popular atheism usually concerns itself, is one we might call a demiurge,” a Greek term that originally meant a kind of public technician or artisan, according to him, a particular kind of divine world maker or cosmic craftsmen, and he gives the example of Plato’s Timaeus in which the demiurge is a benevolent intermediary between the realm of eternal forms and the realm of mutability.

The demiurge looks to the ideal universe, the eternal paradigm of the cosmos, and then fashions lower reality and is close to conformity to the higher as the intractable resources of material nature allow. He is, therefore, not the source of the existence of all things, but rather only the intelligent designer and causal agent of the world with space and time, working upon materials that lie outside and below Him under the guidance of divine principles that lie outside and above Him. He is an immensely wise and powerful being, but he’s also finite, independent upon a larger reality of which he’s only a part.

That it seems to me as a pretty good understanding of the Mormon theology here, namely, you can’t really argue that things like morality and justice and everything else have their origin and the inherent nature of God. If God is just an immortal being, he can’t be the origin of any of those things. The moral principles governing the world, governing the universe, they don’t make sense to have their origin in God. It does seem that, in this case, God the Father has a God above him, but also has all these moral principles and moral laws above Him that are maybe independent of God entirely.

This is why I say that the Mormon theology falls victim both to atheist attacks on Christianity and Christian attacks on atheism because it shares the weaknesses highlighted by both sides. Although atheists are arguing against the caricature of Christianity, that caricature is a close approximation of what Mormons actually believe, just not a close approximation of what Christians believe, that if you believe that God is the eternal uncreated cause of all things, that is a good rebuttal again both to Mormonism and atheism. I don’t want to belabor the point anymore. That’s the basic idea.

There’s another implication to all of this. I want to shift now away from the high-minded demiurge stuff into the strange nitty-gritty of the Virgin Birth. Now, here, I want to be really cautious because this is something I think a lot of Christians get wrong about Mormonism and trying to dig up dirt, and I’m not going to do that. I want to be cautious and say Mormons do not endorse as official church teaching the following, but it does seem to follow that, if you say God is bodily and that God is the literal Father of Jesus Christ, the obvious suggestion of that is that the Virgin Birth wasn’t actually a virgin birth. It’s a virgin birth in name only. This is something that numerous LDS theologians and prophets have pointed to, but which the Church today points away from, or at least is more ambivalent on.

I’ll start at the beginning. In the Book of Mormon, Mary is clearly described as a virgin, Alma 7, verse 10 is a prophecy of Christ. It says, “He shall be born of Mary at Jerusalem.” Now, that’s wrong. He wasn’t born in Jerusalem, but that’s neither here nor there. It says, “Which is the land of our forefathers, she being a virgin, a precious and chosen vessel.” Originally, Joseph Smith’s view was that Mary was a virgin. That’s an important detail. It’s in the later theology of Joseph Smith that you get this clear idea that God the Father has a body. That is not as clear in the Book of Mormon.

Heber Kimball in the Gospel Commission speech that he gave in 1860, Heber Kimball is also in the first presidency later on. As you can tell, this is 20 years roughly after Joseph Smith. He says, “I was naturally begotten, so was my Father and also my savior Jesus Christ. According to the scriptures, He’s the first begotten of His Father in the flesh, and there was nothing unnatural about it.” He’s denying the miraculous nature of the Virgin Birth. He’s instead arguing seemingly that God the Father came from heaven to Bethlehem, or Jerusalem or Nazareth or somewhere, and impregnated the Virgin Mary.

I don’t want to be disrespectful to the Mormon idea, but I do find this idea disrespectful to the Virgin Mary. It looks much more like something like Greek pagan mythology where Zeus would come down from heaven and find some nice Greek women and have his way with them. Mary is, in the scriptural evidence, married to Joseph at the time, and she’s certainly not married to God the Father. Later, Mormon theologians would actually argue that this is okay because she’s His daughter. He made her, so He can have His way with her. Now, I think that idea is repugnant, and I think most Mormons today would say that idea is repugnant. I mean, that would logically seem to justify things like incest, but that is nevertheless an idea that exists within Mormonism.

Again, Church teaching is a little vaguer on the subject. LDS Gospel Principles just says, “God the Father became the literal father of Jesus Christ.” How He became the literal father is unclear. Now, you’ll notice the Son of God is not the Son of God from all eternity in this view. He’s not God from all eternity, but then neither is the Father, but there is this kind of, “Well, what do you mean by He became the literal father?” Again, there seems to be an implication that perhaps the Father physically impregnated Mary through extramarital sexual intercourse. That is not explicitly taught, but again seems to be both the logical implication of the bodily nature of the Father and the vague references to the literal beginning of Jesus. All of that I wanted to say is a big area of potential disagreement.

Now, if you’re having a conversation with a Mormon missionary, don’t assume what their view is on this issue, but as you talk to them about the bodily nature of the Father, it’s worth asking what their particular view is and how they harmonize that both with scripture and their own theology because if He’s spiritually beginning Him… Basically, you know what, just try to make sense of all that with the individual you’re talking to and don’t assume that every Mormon believes the same thing on that point.

Okay. With that said, now as we’re talking about women the Father is involved with, we need to also look to the notion of our divine mother or a mother goddess. This is known as mother in heaven, and the LDS position is that all of us are beloved children of heavenly parents, the heavenly father and a heavenly mother. Joseph Smith doesn’t seem to have explicitly taught on this, but, later, LDS women claimed that he had personally taught them that there was a divine mother in heaven and, subsequently, church leaders have affirmed the existence of this heavenly mother.

Nevertheless, LDS direct their worship to Heavenly Father in the name of Christ and do not pray to heavenly mother. There is a belief that there is a mother in heaven, but we’re not to pray to her. This is one more goddess within the pantheon of Mormonism, but it’s more complicated because we’re not to direct worship or even prayer in the direction of heavenly mother.

Now, that is actually a good segue for the next God to consider, which is Jesus Christ, God the Second. Should we worship Jesus Christ? We’re going to look at that next week. Next week, as we explore these things, we’re going to ask is Jesus Christ to be worshiped? Is He Yahweh or Jehovah in the Old Testament? When you see references to Yahweh, when you see references in some bad translations to Jehovah, who is that talking about? Christians would say, “The Trinity.” Mormons would say, “Jesus.” Then we’re going to look at Adam. Is Adam to be worshiped, and is Adam Yahweh or Jehovah? Brigham Young originally said, “Yeah, he’s actually the one we worship, and he’s the Jehovah of the Old Testament.”

It’s going to be a strange position because LDS today say you’re not to worship Jesus, or maybe you are. We’ll get into this kind of a confusing answer, but you’re not to pray to Jesus just like you’re not to pray to heavenly mother, and then, historically, Mormons believed you were to worship Adam, that he was the only god of the universe, but now it’s more complicated, and then we’ll get into God the Third, the Holy Spirit. Is the Holy Spirit a person? Joseph Smith originally said, “No.” He later said, “Yes,” so we’ll unpack that.

All of that will be next week. I hope you’ll tune in for that. In the meantime, I look forward to hearing your feedback. What do you think of this treatment of Mormonism? Was this fair and, yeah, what do you think of the Mormon Pantheon vis-a-vis what Christians believe about the Trinity?

For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.

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