What Mormons Believe about Worshiping Jesus, the Spirit… And Adam?

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

Welcome Back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So today I want to continue a theme. I started last week looking at what Mormons believe about God. And of course I’m not a Mormon, I’m a Catholic and I’m coming at it from a non-Mormon perspective. But nevertheless, I’m trying to be fair to the Mormon beliefs while also being somewhat critical, somewhat challenging and with a view towards what do you say if you find yourself in conversation or in dialogue or in debate with a Mormon.

Specifically, I mean here, LDS Mormons, this is about 95% of Mormons. And so last week, I looked at two major questions. First, the beliefs about the Trinity. Many times Mormons sound like they’re affirming the Trinity because they’ll talk about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But if you delve a little deeper, you find out that they actually deny the Trinity rather than believing in three persons who exist in one essence, that there’s one God with three persons.

Their idea of the Godhead is three Gods. God, the first: the Father; God, the second: Jesus, and God the Third, the Holy Ghost who are working together. God is a common enterprise rather than a common divine essence. And then I looked in the second half of the video at the notion of God, the first, because one of the major striking things about LDS theology is the belief that the Father has a body because he used to be a man on another planet and he had his own God, presumably. And there’s a whole question about his wife, our mother in heaven. And then there’s this question mark about how the virgin birth worked.

If you want to know more about all of that, that’s last week’s video. This week, I want to look at the other two members of the Godhead, but along the way, we’re going to have to look at another figure who’s surprising, Adam.

So we’re going to look at God the second, Jesus, and ask two questions. Number one, should Jesus be worshiped within Mormon theology? And number two, is he Yahweh or Jehovah? And then we’re going to turn to Adam and explore some interesting history in terms of Mormon theology that Brigham Young, the second prophet of Mormonism argued that we shouldn’t be worshiping Jesus and we shouldn’t be worshiping Elohim the heavenly Father, that the real heavenly Father is Adam. This is a fascinating sort of theology I want to unpack and look at what this means in terms of the implications for Mormonism.

I want to stress here, this is something that many non-Mormons get wrong. This thing called the Adam God doctrine is not taught by the LDS church today. You’ll find offshoots of the LDS church that still believe Adam is God.

But the church denies this and condemns this view now, but it was once taught, I think we’ll see in a pretty authoritative way as church teaching. And then the final theological thing to explore is the role of the Holy Spirit, and particularly is he a divine person? Is he a God? That kind of question.

With that said, let’s turn first to Jesus. Do Mormons worship Jesus? As I was preparing for this episode, I was struck by the number of Mormons I found asking this question on Mormon forums saying, “Well, are we supposed to be worshiping Jesus?” That this is not just a question non-Mormons have, but it’s a bit of a confusion within the LDS church today and I think there’s good reason for that.

If you go to the LDS website, it looks like an evangelical church. They’ve got a big thing on their core beliefs and it says giant letters, “All our beliefs center on Jesus Christ.” And if you explore this, you’ll find no reference in their description of their core beliefs to Joseph Smith. No reference to any of the things you would readily identify as the Mormon distinctives. The Book of Mormons mentioned almost in passing as an afterthought and is mischaracterized as a bunch of early Christians coming to the new world, which is not what the book’s about. It’s really fascinating to see the sort of the PR or public facing dimension of the church really stressing, “Yeah, we’re really big on Jesus.”

And I would suggest this is an area where what’s happening on the outward facing side and what’s happening on the inward facing side are too different and maybe even contradictory realities. So this is a tricky question to probe particularly as non LDSs. So this is one of those areas, LDS viewers, listeners, if I am mischaracterizing or if I’m being unfair.

And anyway, please jump in the comments and set the record straight. I welcome the correction. But George Buchanan, I think he was first counselor to the first presidency anyway, one of the top leading members in Mormonism says in 1884, “Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, whom we worship as God.” So very explicitly, we can find references throughout the history of Mormonism to people saying that, yeah, of course, we worship Jesus. Today, if you go to the FAQ again on the public facing side on the church website, they say Mormons more properly referred to as Latter-Day Saints or members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints worship God the Father and his son, Jesus Christ.

Great. Case closed, right? But then you keep reading. What they mean by worship is sort of interesting because they explain, well, how do we worship Jesus?

Well by remembering and referencing him, by exercising faith in him, striving to follow his commandments and partaking of the sacrament by consuming bread and water to symbolize his body and blood every week. But what’s striking here is what is then said next. While latter-day Saints do worship Jesus Christ as explained here, they do not pray to him. That is reserved for God the Father.

That’s an important distinction that when you hear LDS leaders talk about how they worship Jesus, they don’t mean worship in the way you might expect it. They don’t mean that they have any direct relationship with him. They commemorate him, they remember him, they honor his legacy, but they don’t pray to him.

That is very different than what I think non-Mormons mean when we talk about worshiping Jesus. It’s just an area to know where, again, it’s one of those times where it sounds like we have more common ground and then once you delve a little deeper, it’s like, “Oh, no, no. You’re using the same words, but you don’t mean the same things by it.” That’s just good to know. And you’re having these conversations.

There’s a striking comparison if you look at just two figures. The first is M. Russell Ballard, who has been an LDS church apostle since October 10th, 1985. He was asked this exact question about worship and here’s how he approaches it. Okay. So remember the question is, “Do you worship Jesus Christ in your church services?” This is a pretty straightforward question. Here’s how he answers.

Anyone that visits the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is welcome and they would be impressed totally with the devotion and the center of our faith being Jesus Christ, the Son of God. You would hear the name of Jesus Christ mentioned time after time after time. We pray in his name. We teach in his name. We have the communion or the sacrament, we call it all in his name. In remembrance of his atoning sacrifice, we partake of the bread and the water in renewing our covenants we’ve made with him. When the meeting is concluded, we close it in the name of Jesus Christ.

Okay, so again, that’s an interesting answer because on the one hand, it’s clear he’s trying to say yes. On the other hand, when you actually listen to what he’s saying, there’s still no reference to something like sacrificing to him or even talking to him or conversing with him, praying to him.

So it is sort of an interesting answer where if you listen very carefully, you get a different answer than if you just take the initial impression that he doesn’t. Well, for one thing, he doesn’t just directly say yes. He just says you’d be impressed by how often Jesus gets mentioned, et cetera.

Well, that doesn’t really answer the question, “Do you worship him?” Nevertheless, it seems to point towards a yes answer. Now, I mentioned that he’s been an LDS Church apostle since October 10th, 1985. He becomes an apostle upon the death of his predecessor, Bruce R. McConkie, who is I think a pretty reputable, well-known Mormon theologian who also served as an LDS apostle. Now, here’s how Bruce McConkie looks at the same question.

Let us set forth those doctrines and concepts that a gracious God has given to us in this day and which must be understood in order to gain eternal life. They are one, we worship the Father and Him only, and no one else.

We do not worship the sun and we do not worship the Holy Ghost. I know perfectly well what the scriptures say about worshiping Christ and Jehovah, that they are speaking in an entirely different sense, the sense of standing in awe and being reverentially grateful to him who has redeemed us. Worship in the true and saving sense is reserved for God, the first, the creator.

Okay. So that is an even clearer answer saying seemingly the opposite, that no, we don’t worship Jesus. In fact, he argues that to have eternal life, you need to get this right. And so you’ve got two back-to-back LDS apostles saying apparently opposite things about whether we worship Jesus Christ, but I think it can be harmonized if you realize that Ballard doesn’t mean it.

That’s maybe a too blunt of way to say it. That Ballard is trying to impress non-Mormons, about if you came to a Mormon service, you’d be really impressed by how often Jesus gets mentioned. Whereas McConkie speaking to a Mormon audience is saying, “Make no mistake. Your eternal salvation hinges on the fact that you don’t worship Jesus.” That’s an important difference. And so this is, again, one of those areas where the outward facing and the inward facing teaching are, we’ll say there’s at least a difference of emphasis and it often seems like directly opposite things are being said to Mormons compared to non-Mormons.

That’s the first thing I’d say. The second thing related to that is McConkie’s view doesn’t sit well with scripture or the Book of Mormon itself. In the Book of Mormon in Nephi 3, there’s a line, 11:17, “Hosanna, blessed be the name of the most high God, and they did fall down at the feet of Jesus and did worship him.” They’re not just commemorating him, they’re not just standing in reverential awe at his memory. They’re directly offering him worship. That’s the thing that modern LDS sources say not to do seemingly. And this is also of course what the Bible teaches.

In Acts 7, you find the stoning of Stephen, he’s one of the first seven deacons, and he’s being martyred. And as he’s being martyred, he sees Jesus in glory at the right hand of the Father, and he says, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.”

This is an obvious parallel to Jesus on the cross, commanding his own spirit to the Father. He is praying to Jesus in the same way that Jesus prayed to the Father. And then as he kneels down, he cries out with the loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” Which again parallels Jesus’s line from the cross. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” And so you have Stephen approaching Jesus prayerfully. Now, we don’t need to get into the whole distinction between prayer and worship, but here, it’s relevant that we find this prayer to Jesus in the same way that Jesus had prayed to the Father.

That seems pretty clear from the biblical evidence and yet it’s the kind of thing that would be prohibited in an LDS church according to their own sources. That’s the first thing I wanted to explore.

Then you get this reference to Jesus or Jehovah or this is… Jehovah’s a mistranslation of Yahweh. At the time, Y and J were… It doesn’t matter the whole history of it, but there was some confusion about the Y and J sound. There’s some confusion about the W and V sound. This is why. So W, V and U have a weird history and there’s a whole linguistic history. That’s all I’m going to say. But Jehovah is a poor translation of the Hebrew that’s better translated Yahweh.

The LDSs church still teaches that Jesus was the great Jehovah of the Old Testament, that when you see these references to Lord in all capital letters, that is the translation of the Hebrew word Yahweh. And the argument that they’re making is that is Jesus. Before he’s known as Jesus, he’s known as Jehovah or Yahweh and that he establishes Heavenly Father’s everlasting gospel on earth.

When you see those references, whereas Christians would say, this is a Trinitarian reference, this is referencing God who is Father, Son and Spirit. And so sometimes, it’s just undifferentiated God to refer to God in his divine essence. Other times, it might reference one particular person of the Trinity, but that’s what the reference is for Yahweh. The Mormon view is that Yahweh is Jesus. President Joseph Fielding Smith argued that all revelations. So he was one of the prophets. He’s the nephew of Joseph Smith, I believe he’s the sixth LDS president or prophet, but I may be misremembering.

He says, “All revelation since the fall has come through Jesus Christ who is the Jehovah of the Old Testament.” The Father Elohim has never dealt with man directly and personally since the fall. And he has never appeared except to introduce and bear record of the Son. This is a really fascinating theology.

You’ve got Heavenly Father, Elohim, the Hebrew word there just means like God, but it’s got the plurals. It’s like an amplified sense of God. Then you’ve got the Son, God the Son, God the Second, who is Yahweh or Jehovah, if it’s Jesus. And then you have the Holy Ghost. And so you have this contrast, this distinction between Yahweh and Elohim, which is really fascinating if you read the Old Testament in which it’s clearly the same God. For instance, in Deuteronomy 5:6, “I’m the Lord, dear God, I am Yahweh Elohim who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”

That Yahweh and Elohim very clearly in the Old Testament, do not refer to two different gods who are in a Father-Son relationship or anything like that. But nevertheless, this is some Mormon claim that yes, they do.

What makes this even stranger, remember the last question about how we shouldn’t pray to Jesus is that if you believe that Jesus is Yahweh, well, the Old Testament is full of all these admonitions to pray to and worship, Yahweh. So for instance, Psalm 95:3-7, “For the Lord, Yahweh is a great God and a great king above all Gods.” Goes on to say, “Oh, come let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord, Yahweh our maker, for he is our God.”

And so there are all these references to serving him and Him alone, which is strange because the Mormon answer is no. If you want to be saved, you remember McConkie’s line, don’t do that. Serve Elohim, serve his Father, don’t serve Yahweh, don’t worship Yahweh. That worship shouldn’t be addressed to him. That’s, I don’t know, it seems like a pretty big difference in our theology.

Now, I want to step back and unpack more traditional or historic Mormon theology. I am mentioning it this way because this is really important. This is the thing I mentioned before about Adam being worshiped as God, that before you had this distinction where there was the idea that Yahweh was Jesus, there was the idea that maybe Yahweh was Adam and that Adam is our real God. This is coming from the second prophet.

You remember Joseph Smith dies and there’s a crisis in terms of who is going to succeed him. And Brigham Young is the LDS answer to that question, and that’s the answer that’s won out for most Mormons. But Brigham Young has a lot of really wild theological ideas. Ones that he’s claiming he’s getting from Joseph Smith, and there’s some controversy as to whether he is or isn’t.

At the heart of that, one of the big ones is this idea called the Adam God doctrine. And so he preaches it in the tabernacle on April 9th, 1852 and he proclaims. “Now hear it oh, inhabitants of the Earth, Jew and Gentile Saint and sinner, when our Father Adam came into the Garden of Eden, he came into it with a celestial body like a heavenly body and brought Eve, one of his wives with him.”

So you’ll notice already Brigham Young’s depiction of Adam is very different than the depiction in Genesis. It’s not that God created Adam and Eve, it’s that Adam arrives here with a glorified body and he’s got a bunch of wives and he’s bringing one of his wives with him. He helped to make and organize this world. He is Michael, the Archangel, the ancient of days about whom holy men have written and spoken.

He is our Father and our God and the only God with whom we have to do. That’s very clear. He’s not just saying he’s a God, where you could say, well, maybe he means that differently than other people mean God. No, no. He’s saying he is our God and the only God with whom we have to do. And then he says, “Every man upon the earth professing Christians or non-pro professing must hear it and will know it sooner or later.” That he does not treat this as near theological speculation, but as like a message to be proclaimed to all nations to the end of the world.

That idea is the original articulation of the Adam God doctrine. Now, there are clearly elements of that at least that Brigham Young has inherited from Joseph Smith, the founding prophet. So remember this reference to ancient of days. Ancient of days, is coming from Daniel 7 in which Daniel sees a vision in the clouds of heaven.

“There came one like a Son of Man and he came to the ancient of days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and kingdom that all people’s nations and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.”

So the Son of Man, this is seemingly the Messiah or Jesus is being presented to the ancient of days, which is seemingly the Father. That is not how Joseph Smith interprets it. He claims the ancient of days is actually Adam. So in an 1839 talk, Joseph Smith says that the priesthood was first given to Adam. He obtained the first presidency and held the keys of it from generation to generation. He obtained it in the creation before the world was formed, he had dominion given him over every living creature.

He is Michael, the archangel spoken of in the scriptures. Saint Michael, the archangel is actually just Adam. But then he says, “Daniel 7 speaks of the ancient of days.” He means the oldest man, our Father, Adam. Michael. So according to this view, the Son of Man isn’t going to forward the Father in heaven. He’s going before Adam. Well, Brigham Young would say, “No, no, it’s both. He’s going before the Father in heaven and Adam because they’re actually the same person that our Father in heaven is really just Adam.” Which is a really fascinating theology.

Joseph Smith, because I want to the Son of Man, this is Jesus, stands before him, that’s Adam or Michael, and there’s given him glory and dominion. Adam delivers up his stewardship to Christ, that which was delivered to him as holding the keys of the universe, but retains his standing as head of the human family.

Notice even Joseph Smith’s theology, there’s a clear sense in which Adam has the keys to the universe. He has some seemingly divine power over the entire universe. Smith does not articulate this in an explicitly Adam God way, but on numerous occasions, Brigham Young claims to have been taught by Joseph Smith that Adam was actually the God of this world and the only God with whom we are to have business. There’s a big scholarly and theological question, “Did Joseph Smith teach this doctrine or did Brigham Young invent it?”

And Mormons tend to say Brigham Young probably came up with this himself because it’s much easier to wave away Brigham young than it is to wave away Joseph Smith, the founder of the religion. Nevertheless, I’m going to turn back to Brigham Young’s presentation on this idea. He claims that when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, their bodies became mortal from these effects and therefore their offspring were mortal.

But he says, “When the Virgin Mary conceived the child, Jesus, the Father had begotten him in his own likeness. He was not begotten by the Holy Ghost.” Again, if you remember from last week, there’s this idea in Mormonism that maybe the Father impregnated of the Virgin Mary, not in a miraculous way, he just physically got her pregnant. And that is what Brigham Young is arguing here, but specifically about Adam. That Adam Impregnates Mary. And the difference there, you might say, “Well, isn’t Adam the Father of everyone?”

As I understand it, and this is one of those areas where I would welcome correction on well-informed Mormons. Brigham Young’s distinction seems to be yes in his mortal fallen body. Adam is the Father of the whole human race, but he’s going to have a resurrected glorified body, and there, he impregnates the Virgin Mary. It is really strange, I would say even blasphemous theology, but this is what he’s arguing for.

Brigham Young then goes on to say, “It is true that the earth was organized by three distinct characters, namely Elohim, Yahweh, Jehovah and Michael.” These three forming a quorum as in all heavenly bodies and an organizing element perfectly represented in the deity is Father, Son and Holy Ghost. So he is quite explicitly arguing for a Godhead different not only from the Christian Trinity, but also different from the Godhead believed in by Mormons today. So you have, this is the best I understand his argument, Elohim, who is like the grandfather. Then you have Yahweh, then you have Michael, who’s also Adam, who’s also our Heavenly Father, and Jesus is the Son of Michael, Adam, heavenly Father.

He’s seemingly the grandson of Elohim, the relationship to Yahweh or Jehovah. He’s not at this point very well-defined or understood within Brigham Young’s own theology. He hasn’t really given a clear role to Jehovah or given a clear understanding of what’s he doing in this whole story, what’s his relationship to the others?

In any case, we’re not to pray to Elohim, we’re not to pray to Yahweh. We’re just to pray to Adam. Now that it’s very clearly directly in contrast to modern Mormon theology where you still don’t pray to Elohim, but you do pray exclusively to Yahweh. These can’t both be right obviously. There’s just a 180 degree contradiction here. You might wonder, well, how in the world does the LDS church handle this doctrine? Because it’s clearly wrong. If you read scripture, you see that Adam is not depicted as the God of this world. You have to do a lot of monkeying around to make this idea work, and you have to ignore a whole lot of scripture.

As I said, this is not something the LDS Church teaches today. It is quite opposed to what the LDS Church teaches today. How do they handle it? Well, I’d say largely I’ve seen four strategies. Mormon sources of youth, both the church and other Mormon apologists. The first and most obvious one is just to ignore it, downplay it, hope it goes away. If you try to look on the church website for anything on the Adam God doctrine, they have really extensive stuff on all sorts of issues, and they’re just really silent about the fact that this guy who they praise as a prophet on their website was teaching a very different vision of God and believing in different gods than they believe in today.

It’s just ignore it, hope it goes away. That’s the first. And then demonize anyone who brings it up as being anti-Mormon or et cetera. The second strategy is to claim that this was misrepresented. “Oh, this stuff is just being taken out of context.”

And the third is to say it was never really doctrine. That even though it’s called the Adam God doctrine, it should be called the Adam God theory. Brigham Young is just speculating here. And then the fourth strategy is to argue that only cultists still believe in the Adam God doctrine. Now, of these four, I agree with the fourth one that well, not about the offshoots of Mormonism necessarily being cultists, although plenty of them are clearly cultists, but it is clearly not the teaching today.

I stress this because this is an area where non-Mormons, I think air and really undermine the argument. Because if you’re saying, “Aha, I know what you guys really believe.” You really believe the Adam God doctrine, most LDS have never even heard of this because of the first thing, because this is largely ignored and undermining and swept under the rug by their church.

And so you are going to blow all your credibility as a Christian and you’re accusing them of secretly holding these heretical beliefs. I think there’s a better way of handling it. We’ll get into what that better way is. But I want to be clear again, this is not something currently believed. This is something that was believed in the past. With that said, Joseph Fielding Smith, he takes that earlier position of, “Oh, maybe it was just a mistake. We’re misunderstanding what was said.”

He argues in doctrines of salvation that in all probability that Sermon of Brigham Young’s was erroneously transcribed. Now, we’ll see that that’s not… He’s lying here. There’s not really another way around it. He knows this isn’t true because he knows way too many people who were present for it, and there are multiple people including other Mormon presidents who were there for it.

Besides that, this was not a single… Even though there’s one very famous Adam God sermon, this is not something he only said once. There are repeated references to this over years. And so I think Joseph Fielding Smith is just pretty clearly not telling the truth. Spencer Kimball in October of 1976 describes this as something which was alleged to have been taught by some of the general authorities of past generations.

He’s vague about who was alleged to have taught it and who allegedly taught it and he describes it as the Adam God theory, and he denounces it and calls it false doctrine. Now, he doesn’t just squarely say, “Brigham Young taught this as doctrine and he was wrong to teach it.” That would be an honest direct argument to say, “Yes, I know he claimed this was doctrine. He was wrong about that.”

Instead, he again is evasive about it. He doesn’t tell the truth about it. He says it was alleged to have been taught and he claims it’s just a theory, but that is not how the evidence looks. Wilfred Woodruff, who was I believe the fourth LDS president was there at the talk and in his journal, he writes about it and this is his recollection of what was said, “Adam is Michael or God and all the God that we have anything to do with. They eat of this fruit and form the first tabernacle that was formed. And when the Virgin Mary was begotten with child, it was by the Father and in no other way. In no other way, only as we are begotten.”

Everything you just heard, that the only God were to worship is Adam, who is also Michael and our God, and that he physically impregnated the Virgin Mary. All of that is right there just in this brief summary that Woodruff gives. So if you’re going to claim this is transcribed poorly, you have to both say that the stenographer who was there and numerous people who wrote about it in their diaries because there was actually pretty impressive note-taking. We have I think four different sources of people who were there that day.

As you might imagine, if you are going to church and suddenly the guy you regard as a prophet gets up and announces that you’ve been worshiping the wrong God and that you actually should be worshiping Adam, I don’t know the sort of thing you might put in your diary that day. That’s exactly what we find. We find multiple people attesting basically verbatim or extremely close accounts of what was said.

But again, this also wasn’t the only time he said it. That was April 9th, 1852. Jump forward to a conference that he gave on October 8th, 1854. And Brigham Young just really goes for it. He describes, he imagines this happened. He says, “Elohim looked around upon the eternity of matter.” So you’ll remember God didn’t actually create the heavens and the earth in Mormon theology. He just organizes heavens and earth that already exists. There’s just matter that’s in a chaotic form.

“And said to his associates, those whom he was pleased to call upon at that time for his counselors.” So he says, “Jehovah Michael, see that eternal matter on all sides, this sway in that way, we’ve already created worlds upon world. Should we create another world?” “Yes.” “Go and organize the elements yonder in space.” Not empty space for there’s no such thing. So you’ve got Elohim talking now to Yehovah Michael or Jehovah Michael. So now it’s not two different gods, he’s treating it as one God.

And so in two years, he’s changed his view from having… Well, we’ll get into all this in a second, but notice so in this creation, he’s not really omnipotent. He has to wait for the right timing. So he says, once in a while, earthquakes and the extensive destruction of combustible matter by fire will come nine, making empty space for perhaps a millionth part of a second.

“Jehovah Michael go and create a world.” So he’s got this very narrow window of time in which he can create a world because there’s empty space in the matter because of earthquakes and combustible matter. It’s a little confusing. It doesn’t matter. So Elohim sends Yahweh, Michael or Jehovah Michael and he goes and does what he’s told. Okay? Then Michael or Adam goes down to the new made world and stays there.

We’re told this very explicitly that Jehovah Michael is Adam. This is what he’s teaching in October 8th, 1854. You’ll notice now Yahweh and Michael-Adam, have collapsed into one person. So Yahweh, Michael-Adam, heavenly Father, this is all one guy whose Father is Elohim. So Elohim is our grandfather, and then Adam, Yahweh, Michael is our Father, our heavenly Father. And then Jesus is our brother. He’s the Son of Yahweh. He’s the grandson of Elohim.

Brigham Young goes on to say, “Do you suppose he,” Michael-Yahweh-Adam, “went there alone?” Then he says, “Moses made the Bible to say that his wife was taken out of his side, made of one of his rips.” But Young denies this. He says, “Adam was made of the dust of the earth. Was he made of the dust of this earth? No, but of the dust of the earth where upon he was born in the flesh. That is the way he was made.”

So Adam is actually a space alien. He comes from a different planet and he was made from the dust of the earth on that planet, not on our planet. So when Genesis talks about him being made of the dust, it actually meant he was made on the dust of a different planet. And then once he, as we’re going to see lived, died, was resurrected, glorified, then comes to earth, which is very obviously different from the account you get in Genesis, which has no aliens for better or for worse.

And so then young says, “Adam is the Father of our spirits. He obeyed his master and Lord Elohim and probably many of his wives did the same.” So he’s a polygamist. “And they lived and died upon an earth and then were resurrected again to immortality and eternal life.” Did he resurrect himself? No, you can’t resurrect yourself. And so Adam therefore was resurrected by someone who had been resurrected. So Elohim has already died and was resurrected. So he’s able to resurrect Adam, who’s then able to resurrect Jesus. That’s the theology.

Now, you’ll notice something I said last time. This creates an infinite regress. If you need to have been resurrected by someone else in order to resurrect someone else, well then where does this whole chain start? Because if no one… I mean he just said, “No being who has not been resurrected possesses the keys of the power of resurrection.”

You cannot resurrect yourself. Someone else has to bring you up. But who gets up there first then? Because it seems like the answer is nobody could ever get up there first. No one can bring themselves up. They have to be raised up by another and that includes Gods. So it creates serious, logical and theological problems. But my point here is just that understand what’s claimed here, that Adam is not being formed from the dust of the earth, even metaphorically, that he’s rather being formed from the dust of the earth of a different planet where he lives dies, is resurrected by Elohim, and then he comes to this planet where he is Yahweh, and then he gets Mary pregnant, and has Jesus.

That contrasts, I think it’s fair to say, pretty markedly with the account we see in Genesis which says the Lord God, Yahweh, Elohim, one guy for man Adam is what man is there, of dust in the ground.

You have Yahweh, Elohim, and Adam but it’s not that Elohim is the Father in Yahweh, Adam is the son, Yahweh-Elohim is the God and Adam is his creation. Sure we can talk about Adam as a Son of God in that sense. Luke does, but he’s not literally the Son in the sense of a physical begetting because he is described as being formed from the dust of the earth. He’s the creation of God. He is not the God of this universe. He’s not the God of this world. He’s not a God. He’s a guy and he’s a guy who screws things up. But that’s anyway, the Adam God doctrine.

That gets to the last question on this particular issue. Was it really a doctrine? Was this taught as doctrine? And now here, I want to acknowledge my own limits as a non-Mormon. I can say, “Here’s where I think the evidence points.” But a Mormon might say, “No, we treat doctrine very differently. And so I’d come to a different answer.” Fair enough. I will just say, here’s what I see with the evidence, and you can make your own conclusion.

The LDS church is actually fairly clear on how doctrine forms. And so I like this because as a Catholic people are regularly saying, “Oh, well there’s this one line, the Pope said in an airplane interview. Is this church teaching?” And it’s like, that’s not really how church teaching works. The LDS newsroom says, “Not every statement made by a church leader past or present necessarily constitutes doctrine. A single statement made by a single leader on a single occasion often represents personal, though well-considered opinion but it’s not meant to be officially binding for the whole church.”

So that is a totally reasonable, totally coherent idea. And then they explained with divine inspiration, the first presidency, that’s the prophet and his two counselors and the quorum of the 12 apostles, that’s the second-highest governing body counseled together to establish doctrine that is consistently proclaimed in official church publications. There’s a promulgation. Just in the same way that not everything the president says is an executive order or is a law. There’s an actual process you go through to make something church teaching, at least as of now, as of 2023.

And then they say, “This doctrine resides in the four standard works of scripture: The Bible Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price, as well as official declarations and proclamations and the articles of faith.” Then they stress, “Isolated statements are often taken out of context, leaving their original meaning distorted.”

Now, I think you’ve seen that’s not true here. This is not an isolated statement being taken out of context. This is a repeated theme. Brigham Young repeatedly taught that Adam is our God and the only God we have to worship. But nevertheless, I want to be fair and say there’s a question about, because it wasn’t prominently gated through these official channels in that way. So here’s where I think there’s an important historical question. You don’t always have the quorum set up and the way that you have it set up today.

Some of this is like an evolution over time. And so the important 19th century question is how was doctrine promulgated at the time of Brigham Young? We’re going to get into that. But there’s one more resource we need to know about which is not even mentioned in the last, which is the Journal of Discourses. The LDS topics in question section on the website says, “The Journal of Discourses includes interesting and insightful teachings, but early church leaders, however, by itself it is not an authoritative source of church doctrine.”

So this going to be important because a lot of everything you just heard that first Adam God doctrine is from volume one of Journal of Discourses, but it was still published. And so there’s this question of what’s the authority level, what’s the status of Journal of Discourses? The modern LDS church is saying not very high. It’s interesting historically, but by itself it’s not authoritative. Okay, fair enough, but you should know that’s not how they used to describe it. So the first presidency wrote a letter, this is the prophet and his two counselors wrote a letter that is appended to the beginning of the first volume of Journal of Discourses, in which they praise Elder George D. Watt who was the one who had taken down the notes.

He took shorthand and then reproduced the sermons and they say, “Elder Watt now proposes to publish a journal of these reports in England for the benefit of the saints at large to obtain means, to enable him to sustain his highly useful position of reporter.”

And then Brigham Young, Hebrew Kimball, Willard Richards sign it. So they endorse The Journal of Discourses Volume one. No, the Journal of Discourse is Volume one is where we find the Adam God doctrine promulgated, which is why it is absolutely ridiculous, I would say to say, “Oh, well we don’t know if they got the transcription right and everything else.” Because they’re literally praising him.

Brigham Young is one of three people praising how good of a reporter he is and really encouraging the publication of this journal that has Brigham Young’s sermon. If he’s flipping through the pages of this and saying, “Hang on a second, I didn’t say worship Adam. I said, worship God the Father.” Obviously he’s not going to say, “You did such a great job.” And then leave it uncorrected. So it really defies belief to think that Journal of Discourses is unreliable in its presentation, when it was praised in this volume by Brigham Young for its accuracy.

Still, nevertheless, it’s not an official church organ in the same Doctrine and Covenants or something. It would be. And because Journal of Discourse isn’t really around now, I think many Mormons aren’t even familiar with, this was a quasi official thing being published by church leaders who were taking accounts of what was said in the tabernacle so that they could then share it with people outside of Utah.

President George Buchanan. In Volume A of journal discourses says that it ranks as one of the standard works of the church. He seems to treat it in a really high way and he claims that every right-minded Saint will certainly welcome with joy every number, that’s every issue as it comes forth from the press. Seem to have at least a quasi official, if not official status before and now it’s being treated as a mere a historical curio.

I just give that as a little bit of historical background to Journal of Discourses because that’s where a lot of this stuff is coming from. In any case, in Journal of Discourses, this is again Volume one, Brigham Young in this really controversial sermon, he actually fascinatingly addresses the fact that an individual LDS leader of any rank could be an error. He says a bishop, a high priest, a president of any stake or quorum, any who are elders in Israel or any individual saint from the first to the last of them can fall into error and let them fall into error and let it once become manifest.

So he’s acknowledging everybody. Now, that seemingly includes him. Everybody can fall into theological error. But then he says, “This fault, the elders of Israel do not fall into in this tabernacle. Although they may in private houses and neighborhoods.” So Young’s vision of authority is very different than the modern LDS website. Young’s vision is, “Yes, in my private capacity, if I’m going to visiting you in your home, I might say something wrong but when I’m preaching in the tabernacle in this official capacity, I’m protected from error.” That is what he’s claiming. And then he stresses, “When a man is capable of correcting you and of giving you light and true doctrine,” notice doctrine, “do not get up an altercation but submit to be taught like little children and strive with all your might to understand.”

In this speech, this is not like some other speech where I’m just sewing them all together, in the speech in which he teaches the Adam God doctrine, he claims that he’s protected from error divinely because he’s in the Tabernacle. So he does not treat this as just mere speculation that could be wrong. He explicitly calls it doctrine. He goes on to say, “Jesus, our elder brother was begotten in the flesh by the same character that was in the Garden of Eden, Adam, and who is our Father in heaven.” Then he says, “Now, let all who may hear these doctrines pause before they make light of them or treat them with indifference for they will prove their salvation or damnation.”

Not only is this a doctrine according to Brigham Young, this is a damnable thing to get wrong, that you’ll be saved or damned based on whether or not you accept that Adam is the physical Father of Jesus and is the only God with whom we’re to have business.

That’s what he says. He is clearly not presenting this as a mere matter of theological opinion or… I’ve got some questions. Maybe it could be X, y, Z. No, at the time when he first presents the doctrine, he is quite emphatic that this is a make or break salvific doctrine. Later when enough pushback happens, he hedges that a little bit and says, “I don’t care if you believe it or not, but it’s still true.”

Well, that’s different than what he originally says. What he originally says is that you’ll be saved or damned based on whether you believe in this doctrine. The other reason I would argue that it seems like an official doctrine is what’s called the lecture at the veil. In what’s called a temple endowment, there’s this whole ritual process and it’s changed over the years. But back in 1877, Brigham Young’s secretary L. John Nuttle records this 30 minute talk that was given called the Lecture At the Veil.

So those who were joining the temple would go through this process. As a non-Mormon, this is an area where I’m very vague on what that process looks like either in the past or today, but it’s clear from the written record that there is this moment where they would stop and indoctrinate. They would teach you these doctrines that Adam was an immortal being when he came to this earth. He had lived on an earth similar to ours. He had received the priesthood and the Keyser of and faithful in all things and gained his resurrection and in exultation and was crowned with glory and mortality and eternal lives and was numbered with the gods for such, he became through faithfulness and had begotten all the spirits that were to come to this earth.

We’re not just the physical children of Adam, we’re also his spiritual children that he begot all of us spiritually. Eve, our common mother, who’s the mother of all living bore those spirits in the celestial world.

Now, this is a small thing but the Adam Eve stuff, it doesn’t match the biblical evidence. Brigham Young’s claim you’ll remember was that Adam actually had a bunch of wives and Eve comes with him. And so there’s a big deal made of the fact that Eve means mother of the living. And so, okay, all the living beings were from Eve and that’s why she came to this planet. But in the Genesis account, when he meets her in the garden, he names her woman because she’s taken from the side of man and he renames her from woman to mother in Genesis 3:20 after the fall, it’s not that she’s already the mother of the living and in fact he says when he renames her, “You will become the mother of the living.” And she doesn’t have any kids until Genesis 4. The idea that she was already the mother of all the living and that’s why she came to this planet just really gets the whole story all screwed up.

In any case, it goes on to say, “Father Adam’s oldest son, Jesus’ Savior, who’s the heir of the family, is Father Adam’s first begotten in the spirit world, who according to the flesh is the only-begotten as it is written in his divinity. He having gone back into the spirit world and came in the spirit to Mary and she conceived. Where Adam and Eve got through with their work in this earth, they did not lay their bodies down in the dust, but returned to the spirit world from whence they came.”

All of that is from the Lecture At the Veil. All of that was not just some private musing was part of the actual Temple Endowment service. And so it seems to again treat it as something greater than a single sermon or anything like that, which is why it’s utterly false when people who lived during this time say, “Oh, well, maybe he was misquoted. Maybe it was mis-transcribed.”

Because they are secretly practicing something very differently than what they’re saying publicly. But that leaves us with one final problem, we’ll call it the idolatry problem. As I said on that last bit, to what degree it’s considered, church doctrine is a historical question. And as a non-Mormon, as a person who’s not very well versed on the history of doctrinal promulgation in the 19th century, I can simply say it looks like it was official doctrine, but maybe there’s some out.

I don’t think that out gets Mormons very far because of the idolatry problem. Let’s say for a moment that everything that the LDS apologists say is true. That Brigham Young was only teaching his private opinion. This is not an area where a private opinion can get this wrong. Do you see what I mean? If you say, “I think the cherubim are above the seraphim.” Some else says, “I think the seraphim are above the cherubim.” There’s a private theological squabble, and one of you may be right, one of you may be wrong.

Who knows? Doesn’t matter. This is not like that. This is someone who is worshiping a false God. By his own testimony, he’s worshiping a different God than Christians worship, and he’s worshiping a different God than modern Mormons worship. And that’s a problem within Mormon theology itself, that by their own standards, by their own definitions, Brigham Young is thus an idolater and a false prophet.

In the LDS Old Testament student manual, I definitely misspelled the manual there, it says, “The first two commandments in the decalogue, the 10 Commandments forbade the sin of idolatry. Thus, the Lord announced the error in sin of having false gods tangible or intangible as objects of worship.” In other words, it’s not just making a physical idol. This is not a rule about prohibiting church decoration. And on that point, look, I actually agree with everything they’re saying right here.

That the point of the first and second commandment or first commandment on the Catholic list, but it’s just a difference of numbering, is that this is not about, again, it’s not about images being the problem, it’s about offering worship to anyone other than God. It goes on to say, “It is very important to understand that the worship of a false God that is intangible is just as evil and just as disastrous to the idolater as it’s the worship of a graven image.”

Then they go on to really stress by quoting from Fellows Bible Encyclopedia to say idolatry was the most heinous offense against the Mosaic law, which is most particular in defining the acts which constitute the crime in severe in apportioning the punishment. Punishment, the law ordered that if an individual committed idolatry, he should be stoned to death. That if a town was guilty of this sin, its inhabitants and cattle should be slain, and it spoils burnt together with the town itself.

By the standards that the LDS present, Brigham Young in promoting the teaching of worship to someone who isn’t the true God, Adam is an idolater and should have been stoned. At the very least, I think we can say clearly not a true prophet. Clearly not someone who’s reliable and reputable.

Imagine, just take a Christian example. If St. Paul, even in one of the non-canonical writings said, “I think we should worship Baal. I think Baal’s the only one I’m going to worship now on.” You wouldn’t say, “Well, that wasn’t in the inspired part of scripture, so we can ignore it.”

No, that thing totally invalidates everything else because this means that every time a doctrine is being promulgated and promoted, it’s by a guy who is an idolater, who’s worshiping a false God, who doesn’t have any idea who the true God is and who thinks that God has told him that Adam is the real God. So he’s both an idolater and apparently unable to differentiate between the voice of God and his own musings or between the voice of God and the voice of the devil.

All that’s to say, however you square this, whether you consider this official church teaching or not, it seems at the very least to invalidate Brigham Young’s claim to be a true prophet. Or conversely, you could say you accept this doctrine as some of the more radical fringe elements that have broken off from the LDS do. Say, “I think Brigham Young got it right and all the later prophets are false prophets.” But there’s no way they can both be true prophets because they’re saying opposite things, not just about how to honor and serve God. They’re saying opposite things about even who God is.

They don’t worship the same God, and you only have to read their own testimonies to know that. Again, I want to go back to something Brigham Young said. Remember he said, “Let all who may hear these doctrines pause before they make light of them or treat them with indifference for they’ll prove their salvation or damnation.”

If Brigham Young is right, all the later LDS prophets, at least after about the fourth or fifth from Woodruff on, are going to hell if Brigham Young is right. If Brigham Young is wrong, he’s a false prophet teaching false doctrine. Neither of these works for the modern LDS system where they say all of the prophets are prophets and they hold Brigham Young and these others up to be emulated and admired. But here, they’re teaching diametrically opposed things and issuing what should be understood as mutual condemnations and damnations of each other.

We’ll leave that alone. The last God I want to explore is the Holy Ghost or the Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit God, and particularly is the Holy Spirit a person? And so here we’re going to see another major shift historically within Mormon theology. To understand this, you now have to know about something else. All these resources, I’m sorry, you’ve just got to know, there’s something called Lectures on Theology or Lectures on Faith.

The LDS Church history section of their website says, “The extent of Joseph Smith’s involvement in the production of the lectures, if any, is unknown.” Now, this is a lie. If any is a lie. Because we have Joseph Smith’s own journal in January 1835 in which he talks about helping to prepare these lectures on theology for publication in the book of Doctrine and Covenants. The idea that maybe he wasn’t involved at all, we have his own testimony that he was.

Now, it’s true nevertheless. We don’t know exactly. There was a committee of three people who were working on it. One of them was considered a living prophet and so the idea that he’s not going to have a lot of sway over the editorial process seems naive. Obviously, this is reflecting his vision, his theology, even if he didn’t literally write every word because he’s writing it with two other people. It’s a group project. Let’s go.

In any case, LDS church history on the website acknowledges the inclusion of the letters in the Doctrine and Covenants in 1835 strongly suggests that Joseph Smith approved of the content of the lectures. Again, he didn’t just approve, he helped write them. But nevertheless, this was unanimously passed. Remember that whole thing about how doctrine is promulgated. This went through the actual process. It was unanimously approved for inclusion in Doctrine and Covenants, which is one of the words considered to be inspired.

Later, they’re going to say, “Oh, well. We didn’t consider this part of the book inspired.” That was not what was being taught at the time. Nevertheless, it was promulgated in this official channel clearly with Joseph Smith’s consent and approval. And then it gets unapproved later on the LDS website. Again, the publication of the Lectures on Faith and the Doctrine and Covenants elevated its status among church members.

In the early 20th century however, church leaders became increasingly concerned about some of the statements in the Lectures on Faith, and then ultimately the Lectures on Faith were dropped from the Doctrine and Covenants. So they actually removed them from their scriptures because they were worried about the theological content of them, theological content that again, Joseph Smith had been totally okay with, that he had helped write, helped draft, and then saw that it was unanimously approved by the church.

What is that theological content? Well, one of the pivotal points is what’s called lecture five, in which it says, there are two personages who constitute the great matchless governing and supreme power over all things. They’re the Father and the son, the Father being a personage of spirit, glory and power, possessing all perfection and fullness. The Son is a personage of tabernacle made or fashioned like under man. You’ve got originally a very clear theology.

You have the Father who’s a spirit, you’ve got the Son who has a body and then in addition to that, you have a common divine mind which mind is the Holy Spirit that bears record of the Father and the son. Just to be sure, we’re really clear, in the Q&A section after the lecture, it says, how many personages are there in the Godhead? And the answer is two. The Father and the Son.

The Holy Spirit is not a person of the Godhead. And then it says, “How do you prove there are two personages in the Godhead by the scriptures?” Then it gives you some scriptures to cite. Do the Father and the Son possess the same mind? They do. And then some more scriptures. What is this mind? The Holy Spirit.

Let’s recap. The Godhead, according to Joseph Smith, according to the 1835 Lectures on Faith, there’s two persons, God, the Father who is a spirit, not embodied, and God the Son, Jesus Christ, who’s a personage of flesh or tabernacle. Then you have the Holy Spirit who is not at this point a person, it is the divine mind shared by the Father and the Son. That’s 1835. Well, later Joseph Smith teaches something radically different in Doctrine and Covenants, 130:22 which we’ve already seen. He now says, “The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s.”

So now he’s not a person of spirit. He’s embodied. The Son also. But the Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of spirit. Now, you’ve got two major shifts. This is now 1843. So eight years later, God, the Father has gone from being a spirit to embodied, the Son, same thing. He’s good. And the Holy Spirit has gone from being the divine mind to being a third person of the Godhead. Now, a personage of Spirit.

Those are two… Those books can’t be right. Joseph Smith in 1835 believes in a very different God than Joseph Smith in 1843. He’s a Binitarian or social Binitarian before he becomes a social Trinitarian and none of this stuff worked. None of this stuff matches up.

There’s one last line I want to unpack here, then 130:22. So after saying that the Holy Spirit or the Holy Ghost is a personage of spirit, it says, “Were it not so, the Holy Ghost could not dwell in us.”

That’s the argument. Yeah, the Father has a body. Yeah, the Son has a body. The spirit doesn’t have a body and can’t be embodied because he dwells in our hearts. Well, that just doesn’t make a lot of sense for a couple of reasons. One, the whole Mormon schema is that you are originally a spirit person. You become embodied, then you die and get resurrected and you have these glorified bodies. And so if this is right, then having a body is actually a hindrance. So it does seem to go against the whole Mormon schema. Nevertheless, just the line that were it not so the Holy Ghost cannot dwell in us, it doesn’t make sense because Ephesians 3:17 talks about Christ dwelling in your hearts through faith.

John 14:23. Jesus says, “If any man loves me, you’ll keep my word, my Father will love him. We will come to him and make our home with him.” So the Father and the Son who in Mormon theology are both embodied, can dwell in your heart. The idea of the Holy Spirit can’t be embodied because he needs to dwell in us just doesn’t make any sense. I know this is a lot. So let me just give a brief summary and final thought.

That within Mormonism, I would argue, you find some major contradictions about whether we’re to worship Jesus Christ, about whether Adam is our true God, about whether Jesus is Yahweh in the Bible, about whether the Holy Spirit is a person or just a divine mind, about whether there are two or three persons in the Godhead that you can see earlier Mormon leaders contradicting one another.

Sometimes in Joseph Smith’s case contradicting himself all over the place. And I would suggest a basic biblical principle here. In the book of Deuteronomy says, “The prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, who speaks the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die.” And then raises a question. “But if you say in your heart, how may we know the word which the Lord has not spoken?”

Deuteronomy gives a clear example. God says, “When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word which the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously, you need not be afraid of him.” When you find people claiming to be prophets who are contradicting themselves and one another and teaching things that later church leaders in the same church are saying, “That was actually false doctrine.” That is really good evidence that those were false teachers that you don’t need to be listening to or following.

So I would give that gist as maybe encouragement. The point here isn’t, again, Mormonism contradicts Christianity. Mormonism contradicts the Trinity. Mormonism contradicts Catholicism. All of that is true. That’s not the point. The point is Mormonism contradicts itself and is thus self invalidate that later prophets contradict earlier prophets, later leaders contradict earlier leaders on things that can’t change.

One of the things that Mormons are big on is progressive revelation. It’s possible for God to call you to one thing in the past and another thing in the future and that is totally fine. There’s nothing logically wrong with that. The Jews had to keep kosher. We don’t have to keep kosher today. No contradiction there. But if you say, “Adam is our God.” And then say, “It’s actually false doctrine to believe Adam is our God,” that’s not the thing that can evolve or change over time.

That’s the thing. You either get right or wrong. And in this case, the LDS have a consistent pattern of getting these things wrong.

For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. I hope you like and enjoy. Next week and what I think will be last week we cover Mormon related topics, I want to look at the history of polygamy or plural marriage within Mormonism because this is another area where I think you see a pattern of not only reversals, but of actual lying from the prophets. It’s a pretty fascinating story. So I hope you’ll tune in for that. Again, I hope you like share, comment, review, and all that jazz. God bless you.

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