What Mormons Believe About … God

Everything within quotation marks below is quoted directly from the official website (www.lds.org) of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). For a longer explanation of my methods, and for links to other posts in this series, go: here.

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On the surface, what Mormons teach about God sounds very much like what Christians believe. The Mormons believe in “God the Father” and in “Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” However, as one digs deeper, one finds that Mormons use many of the same words that Christians use, but with radically different meanings.

Particularly and surprisingly, Mormons do not believe in a God at all, as that word is commonly used. In other words, the Mormon church does not believe in the existence of an infinitely perfect incorporeal Diety who has existed forever, who is omnipresent, who is the Creator and the source of everything else that exists.

• A MORTAL MAN: To Mormons, God is a mortal man, not an immaterial spirit. “God has a body that looks like yours.” “The Father and the Son each have a ‘body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s.’”

• A HUMAN BEING: God’s body does not merely resemble the human body, it is a human body, because God is a human being. “There is nothing more fundamental in God’s revelations than the basic premise that we are of the race of Gods. We are of his species. God looks like us. We look like him. He has two arms, two legs, a head.”

• FROM ANOTHER PLANET: “God the Father was once a man on another planet who ‘passed the ordeals we are now passing through.’” In other words, God once lived a mortal life, just as we are living now. “As man now is, God once was.” “He was once a man like us.” “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man.” “God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth.” As an exalted being, “He is a Holy Man.”

• A MORTAL WHO WAS SAVED: As a mortal man, God experienced all of the things we have experienced. He was born. He lived in a physical world. He believed in a savior and received the gift of eternal life. “Long before our God began his creations, he dwelt on a mortal world like ours, one of the creations that his Father had created for him and his brethren. He, with many of his brethren, was obedient to the principles of the eternal gospel. One among these, it is presumed, was a savior for them, and through him they obtained a resurrection and an exaltation on an eternal, celestial world.”

• NOT OMNIPRESENT: As a material being, God is not omnipresent. “Some would have us believe that God is present everywhere. It is not so.” The Mormons sometimes use the word “omnipresent,” but not with the usual meaning. “He is present with all his creations through his influence, through his government, spirit and power, but he himself is a personage of tabernacle.” “God himself is a soul, composed of a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s … he is a resurrected, glorified, exalted, omniscient, omnipotent, and — in spirit, and power, and influence — an omnipresent person …”

• MANY GODS: Our God is the god of this planet. However, there is an infinite number of other gods, also called “exalted beings.” The other gods are the gods of other populated planets. Our God conferred with other gods regarding his plan to create this world. “We know that there was a council of the Gods in which the plan of our Eternal Father was sustained. This plan included the Creation of the earth.”

• HE WAS BORN: God was born; he is the son of his own Father God. His Father God in turn was born of a Father God, and so on. “There never was a time when there were not Gods and worlds, and men were not passing through the same ordeals that we are now passing through. That course has been from all eternity, and it is and will be to all eternity.” “They [our God, and all of his brothers and sisters from his planet] gained the power and godhood of their Father and were made heirs of all that he had, continuing his works and creating worlds of their own for their own posterity — the same as their Father had done before, and his Father, and his Father, and on and on.”

• NOT ETERNAL: Thus, God has not existed eternally as He is now. Rather, he was born, lived a mortal life, and achieved “exaltation.” Having achieved exaltation, God has “eternal life,” just as we can one day be exalted and obtain eternal life. Only in that sense is He eternal. “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.” “Many have tried to penetrate to the First Cause of all things; but … it is not for man, with his limited intelligence, to grasp eternity in his comprehension. … Instead of inquiring after the origin of Gods — instead of trying to explore the depths of eternities … let them seek to know the object of their present existence…”

• NOT THE CREATOR: God “fashioned” the earth from elements which have existed eternally; He did not create the world “ex nihilio” (out of nothing). “God created the earth as an organized sphere; but He certainly did not create, in the sense of bringing into primal existence, the ultimate elements of the materials of which the earth consists, for ‘the elements are eternal.’” Nor did God create life, because “life” (“spirit matter”) also has existed eternally. “So also life is eternal, and not created; but life, or the vital force, may be infused into organized matter, though the details of the process have not been revealed unto man.”

• GAVE BIRTH TO OUR SPIRITS: God is the spirit Father of every human being on earth. We came into existence spiritually in “the spirit world” long before we were born in the physical world. Our spiritual birth occurred as the result of the union of our “heavenly parents.” “Each human being is a beloved son or daughter of heavenly parents.”

• THE HEAVENLY MOTHER: Thus, in addition to God the Father, there is also a heavenly Mother. Mormons say very little about the heavenly Mother, but there are references to her on the LDS website. “All men and women are in the similitude of the universal Father and Mother and are literally the sons and daughters of Deity.” “Along with these concepts is the concept of divine parents, including an exalted Mother who stands beside God the Father.” “But at some distant point in our premortal past, spirit bodies were created for us, and we became, literally, spirit sons and daughters of heavenly parents.”
One Mormon hymn teaches: “In the heavens are parents single? / No, the thought makes reason stare. / Truth is reason: truth eternal / tells me I’ve a mother there.” And in another stanza: “When I leave this frail existence, / When I lay this mortal by, / Father, Mother, may I meet you / In your royal courts on high?”

• NO TRINITY: A Mormon sermon by Marion G. Romney (“first counselor” to the president, the second highest office of the LDS church; a cousin of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney) quotes the Athanasian Creed from the 500s AD: “We worship one God in Trinity … The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God; and yet there are not three Gods, but one God.” Sounds like orthodox Christianity? It is. Romney refers to that creed as a “mystifying confusion,” and lauds “the clear and simple truth concerning God” taught by Joseph Smith as “a great contrast” to our belief in the Trinity.

“Though most people who believe the Bible accept the idea of a Godhead composed of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, Joseph Smith revealed an understanding of the Godhead that differed from the views found in the creeds of his day. … Joseph Smith uniquely taught that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are three distinct personages…” “Some who write anti-Mormon pamphlets insist that the LDS concept of Deity is contrary to what is recognized as traditional Christian doctrine. In this they are quite correct. The traditional view about the Trinity is well over a thousand years old, and time has a way of hallowing ideas, whether or not they are true.”

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