Question:
Answer:
The answer is no. In 2001, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) issued a statement on The Question of the Validity of Baptism Conferred in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The CDF decreed that although Mormons use the trinitarian formula, their invocation of the Trinity is essentially different than that of Christians, since for Mormons “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit . . . are not the three persons in which subsists the one Godhead, but three gods who form one divinity.” In other words, for Mormons the three persons of the Trinity are not considered to be one in being but rather are different beings.
The official website for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) states this explicitly in its article “What Latter-Day Saints Believe About Jesus Christ”:
We feel that the sheer preponderance of references in the Bible would lead an uninformed reader to the understanding that God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost are separate beings” (churchofjesuschrist.org, emphasis added).
If the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are “separate beings,” then they all cannot possibly be identical to the one divine being, as the Christian faith professes. On this view, the formula “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” takes on an essentially different meaning than what Christians intend to profess when this formula is uttered in baptism. Rather than baptizing in the name of three persons in one God, it’s a baptism in the name of three distinct gods.
The CDF statement goes on to specify that the term divinity within Mormonism has only a functional role and fails to convey any “substantial content.” The reason for this is that divinity, according to Mormonism, “originates when the three gods decided to unite and form the divinity to bring about human salvation.” This is essentially different than understanding divine being as that which is pure existence itself, subsisting of itself without beginning or end.
The bottom line is that Mormons have an essentially different understanding of the Godhead. Given that this excludes them from baptizing with the same intention as that of the Church, it follows that their baptism cannot possibly be valid.