Mormon's God
The following is taken from the monumental work titled The Incarnate Christ and His Critics: A Biblical Defense, authored byRobert M. Bowman, Jr. & J. Ed Komoszewski, published by Kregel Academic, Grand Rapids, MI, 2024, Chapter 1: Critics of the Incarnate Christ, pp. 56-58. All emphasis will be mine.
MORMON’S GOD: WHAT LATTER-DAY SAINTS SAY ABOUT JESUS
The members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints prefer to be called Latter-day Saints but are still commonly known as Mormons. The LDS Church is one of many organized groups or sects using the name Latter-day Saints, and the terms Mormon and Mormonism remain more generally familiar outside the religion. In this book, we will normally though not exclusively use the term Latter-day Saints (LDS).
Joseph Smith Jr. (commonly called simply “Joseph” in LDS idiom) founded the LDS Church in 1830 in upstate New York.66 He had just published The Book of Mormon, a book about an Israelite civilization living in the ancient Americas that he claimed to have translated the previous year from gold plates temporarily entrusted to him by an angel.67 At the time, Joseph’s theology appeared to be roughly comparable to that of the Methodists, though with strong restorationist elements. Over the next fourteen years, however, his theology underwent at least two rather dramatic shifts, ending in an overt polytheistic worldview. Along the way Joseph produced nearly all of the other extrabiblical texts (found in scripture collections called Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price) that the LDS Church regards as part of its “standard works” (an expanded, hypothetically open canon of Scripture). Latter-day Saints view Joseph Smith as the founding prophet of the Restoration, and their doctrine is a synthesis and development of his revelations and teachings.
The Book of Mormon contains what appear to be explicitly Trinitarian confessions, such as the following:
And now, behold, this is the doctrine of Christ, and the only and true doctrine of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, which is one God, without end. Amen. (2 Nephi 31:21; see also Alma 11:44; Mormon 7:7)68
The Book of Mormon teaches that Jesus Christ was God himself and that he existed as an anthropomorphic spirit in heaven prior to coming in a body of flesh on earth (cf. 1 Nephi 11:9–12). Indeed, in places the Book of Mormon identifies Jesus Christ as both the Father and the Son (e.g., Mosiah 15:1–5; Mormon 9:12; Ether 3:14). In a way, the LDS view of Jesus is that he is the God revealed in the Book of Mormon, whose main author was supposedly an ancient prophet of Israelite descent named Mormon. This is what we mean by referring to Jesus in LDS teaching as Mormon’s God.
Ironically, Joseph’s theology, including his doctrine of Christ, began changing almost immediately after he published the Book of Mormon. In 1833, he issued a revelation in which, reflecting on the Johannine prologue (John 1:1–18), he asserted that all human beings were in essence uncreated beings:
Ye were also in the beginning with the Father. . . . Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be. . . . For man is spirit. The elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy. (Doctrine and Covenants [D&C] 93:23, 29, 33)
In 1835 the LDS catechetical text known as Lectures on Faith, prepared under Joseph’s supervision, described the Father and the Son as “two personages,” with the Father “a personage of spirit” and the Son “a personage of tabernacle” (V.2). By 1843, Joseph had concluded that both the Father and the Son were beings with physical bodies: “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 is a personage of Spirit” (D&C 130:22). In a famous sermon the following year, Joseph brought this new idea of the Father as an embodied being of flesh and bones together with his idea of human beings as preexistent spirits.
God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens! That is the great secret. . . . In order to understand the subject of the dead, for consolation of those who mourn for the loss of their friends, it is necessary we should understand the character and being of God and how He came to be so; for I am going to tell you how God came to be God. We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea, and take away the veil, so that you may see. . . . Here, then, is eternal life—to know the only wise and true God; and you have got to learn how to be gods yourselves, and to be kings and priests to God, the same as all gods have done before you, namely, by going from one small degree to another, and from a small capacity to a great one; from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation, until you attain to the resurrection of the dead, and are able to dwell in everlasting burnings, and to sit in glory, as do those who sit enthroned in everlasting power.69
Based on Joseph Smith’s revelations and teachings, the LDS Church views Jesus Christ as the first of God’s billions of spirit children, which include all people who will ever live on the earth, for whom Jesus is their elder brother in the spirit realm. Christ is also the “only begotten Son” in the sense that his human body was literally derived from the immortal, exalted body of God the Father as well as the mortal body of his mother Mary. Ezra Taft Benson, one of the presidents of the LDS Church, put it this way:
I am bold to say to you . . . Jesus Christ is the Son of God in the most literal sense. The body in which He performed His mission in the flesh was sired by that same Holy Being we worship as God, our Eternal Father. He was not the son of Joseph, nor was He begotten by the Holy Ghost. He is the Son of the Eternal Father!70
The LDS curriculum manual Gospel Principles explains:
Thus, God the Father became the literal Father of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the only person on earth to be born of a mortal mother and an immortal Father. That is why He is called the Only Begotten Son. He inherited divine powers from His Father. From His mother He inherited mortality and was subject to hunger, thirst, fatigue, pain, and death.71
Probably the leading LDS academic theologian of the past few decades has been Robert L. Millet, who began teaching at Brigham Young University in 1983. One of his most recent works on Christology is a book entitled The Atoning One. According to Millet, Jesus “was God” (John 1:1) in some sense, yet he did “not receive the fullness of the glory and power of the Father until after he was resurrected.”72
According to Millet, the New Testament “clearly teaches that Jehovah or Jesus the Son is subordinate to God the Father.” Millet fills two pages with bullet points citing texts mostly from the New Testament in support of this statement. These texts state that the Father is greater than Christ (John 14:28), that Jesus came in his Father’s name (John 5:43) to do the Father’s will (John 6:38), that the Father raised Jesus from the dead (1 Peter 1:21), that Christ is the mediator between God and man (1 Tim. 2:5–6), that Christ glorifies the Father (John 17:1, 4), and so on. This means that while Latter-day Saints affirm that Christ is God, “in the ultimate and final sense of the word” the Father alone is the “one true and living God.”73
66. On Joseph Smith, see especially Dan Vogel, Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2004), and Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, with the assistance of Jed Woodworth (New York: Knopf, 2005). Vogel is a former Latter-day Saint and now agnostic, while Bushman is a renowned LDS historian.
67. On Joseph’s angelic visits and translation of the Book of Mormon, see Robert M. Bowman Jr., Jesus’ Resurrection and Joseph’s Visions: Examining the Foundations of Christianity and Mormonism (Tampa, FL: DeWard, 2020), 155–222, 266–83.
68. Quotations from the Book of Mormon are taken from the Book of Mormon Study Text, ed. Robert M. Bowman Jr. (Cedar Springs, MI: Institute for Religious Research, 2018), online at https://mit.irr.org/. This is the only critical edition of the Book of Mormon text produced by a non-LDS scholar. For a comparable LDS work, see The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text, ed. Royal Skousen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
69. Joseph Smith, History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Period I, History of Joseph Smith, by Himself, introduction and notes by B. H. Roberts (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1902), 6:305, 306.
70. Ezra Taft Benson, “Five Marks of the Divinity of Jesus Christ,” Ensign, December 2001.
71. Gospel Principles (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2009), 53.
72. Robert L. Millet, The Atoning One (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 2018), 34.
73. Millet, The Atoning One, 135–38.
Here are some of the Mormon texts mentioned by these two Evangelical scholars:
21 And now, behold, my beloved brethren, this is the way; and there is none other way nor name given under heaven whereby man can be saved in the kingdom of God. And now, behold, this is the doctrine of Christ, and the only and true doctrine of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, which is one God, without end. Amen. 2 Nephi 31 (https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/2-ne/31?lang=eng)
44 Now, this restoration shall come to all, both old and young, both bond and free, both male and female, both the wicked and the righteous; and even there shall not so much as a hair of their heads be lost; but every thing shall be restored to its perfect frame, as it is now, or in the body, and shall be brought and be arraigned before the bar of Christ the Son, and God the Father, and the Holy Spirit, which is one Eternal God, to be judged according to their works, whether they be good or whether they be evil. Alma 11 (https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/alma/11?lang=eng)
7 And he hath brought to pass the redemption of the world, whereby he that is found guiltless before him at the judgment day hath it given unto him to dwell in the presence of God in his kingdom, to sing ceaseless praises with the choirs above, unto the Father, and unto the Son, and unto the Holy Ghost, which are one God, in a state of happiness which hath no end. Mormon 7 (https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/morm/7?lang=eng)
12 Behold, he created Adam, and by Adam came the fall of man. And because of the fall of man came Jesus Christ, even the Father and the Son; and because of Jesus Christ came the redemption of man. Mormon 9 (https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/morm/9?lang=eng)
14 Behold, I am he who was prepared from the foundation of the world to redeem my people. Behold, I am Jesus Christ. I am the Father and the Son. In me shall all mankind have life, and that eternally, even they who shall believe on my name; and they shall become my sons and my daughters.
15 And never have I showed myself unto man whom I have created, for never has man believed in me as thou hast. Seest thou that ye are created after mine own image? Yea, even all men were created in the beginning after mine own image.
16 Behold, this body, which ye now behold, is the body of my spirit; and man have I created after the body of my spirit; and even as I appear unto thee to be in the spirit will I appear unto my people in the flesh. Ether 3 (https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/ether/3?lang=eng)
Chapter 15
How Christ is both the Father and the Son—He will make intercession and bear the transgressions of His people—They and all the holy prophets are His seed—He brings to pass the Resurrection—Little children have eternal life. About 148 B.C.
1 And now Abinadi said unto them: I would that ye should understand that God himself shall come down among the children of men, and shall redeem his people.
2 And because he dwelleth in flesh he shall be called the Son of God, and having subjected the flesh to the will of the Father, being the Father and the Son—
3 The Father, because he was conceived by the power of God; and the Son, because of the flesh; thus becoming the Father and Son—
5 And thus the flesh becoming subject to the Spirit, or the Son to the Father, being one God, suffereth temptation, and yieldeth not to the temptation, but suffereth himself to be mocked, and scourged, and cast out, and disowned by his people.
6 And after all this, after working many mighty miracles among the children of men, he shall be led, yea, even as Isaiah said, as a sheep before the shearer is dumb, so he opened not his mouth.
7 Yea, even so he shall be led, crucified, and slain, the flesh becoming subject even unto death, the will of the Son being swallowed up in the will of the Father.
8 And thus God breaketh the bands of death, having gained the victory over death; giving the Son power to make intercession for the children of men—
9 Having ascended into heaven, having the bowels of mercy; being filled with compassion towards the children of men; standing betwixt them and justice; having broken the bands of death, taken upon himself their iniquity and their transgressions, having redeemed them, and satisfied the demands of justice.
10 And now I say unto you, who shall declare his generation? Behold, I say unto you, that when his soul has been made an offering for sin he shall see his seed. And now what say ye? And who shall be his seed? Mosiah (https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/mosiah/15?lang=eng)
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