The doctrine of the Mormon god was developed by Joseph Smith, Brigham Young and other Mormon prophets through “revelations” that blatantly contradict the Orthodox teachings of a Triune God of the Bible. The Mormon scriptures Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price reveal a polytheistic system of gods who procreate spirit children clothed in human bodies on different planets.1 This infinite regress of gods are born spirit beings who later become human beings including Elohim the god of this planet. The Mormon belief of God the Father denies that God is spirit and purports that he is an exalted man.
While all spirit children of the “Eternal Father” have a beginning as the offspring of an “Eternal Mother,” they have no end. There exists no first cause for the infinite regress of gods that began as offspring—an obvious contradiction. Mormon Elder Milton Hunter is quoted, “Mormon prophets have continuously taught the sublime truth that God the Eternal Father was once a mortal man who passed through a school of earth life similar to that through which we are now passing. He became God—an exalted being—through obedience to the same eternal Gospel truths that we are given opportunity today to obey.”2 The Mormon doctrine that God the Father is a mere man denies His omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence. If God the Father is a mere man, what does that make Jesus?
According to Mormon teaching Jesus is the Father and the Son. Mosiah 7:27 states, “And because he said unto them that Christ was the God, the Father of all things, and said that he should take upon him the image of man, and it should be the image after the image of God, and that God should come down among the children of men, and take upon him flesh and blood, and go forth upon the face of the earth—” Not only is the Father and Son the same, but the Son was conceived through the blasphemous means of sexual intercourse of the Father with Mary, although it was a virgin birth. If that is not confusing enough, Brigham Young taught that Adam (Eternal Father) and Eve (Eternal Mother) helped to make and organize the world. Young wrote, “He (Adam) 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.”3
The pluralistic Mormon Jesus is 1) God the Father, 2) Adam, and 3) the archangel Michael. However, Jesus is ultimately just another spirit child who is a resurrected and glorified man not the Savior of the world. In fact, salvation is not by grace through faith in Jesus Christ as Mormon propaganda would have us believe, but eternal life is achieved by works. Joseph Smith educated his followers on how to achieve eternal life in his Journal of Discourse.
You have got to learn how to be Gods yourselves; to be kings and priests to God, the same as all Gods have done before you—namely, by going from a small degree to another, from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation, until you are able to sit in glory as doth those who sit enthroned in everlasting power.4
If God the Father is man, and God the Son is man, then what do Mormons believe about God the Holy Spirit?
The Mormon doctrine of the Holy Spirit is perhaps their most egregious display of contradictory theology. On the one hand, Mormons attempt to emulate Orthodox Christianity in describing the Holy Spirit as the third personage of the Godhead as Joseph Smith instructs in Doctrine and Covenants, Section 130:22. “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. Were it not so, the Holy Ghost could not dwell in us.”5 While on the other hand, Elder James Talmage in The Articles of Faith of 1952 denies the immaterial.
Admitting the personality of God, we are compelled to accept the fact of His materiality; indeed, an “immaterial” being, under which meaningless name some have sought to designate the condition of God, cannot exist, for the very expression is a contradiction in terms. If God possesses a form, that form is of necessity of definite proportions and therefore of limited extension in space. It is impossible for Him to occupy at one time more than one space of such limits . . .6
Mormon theology is confronted with the task of supporting its doctrine with Scripture in order to conform with Orthodox Christian teaching, but in the process emerges as a self-contradictory polytheistic anomaly of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. The Mormon god is a plurality of an Adam god, a spirit child called Jesus, an Eternal Father Elohim, the Archangel Michael, and an immaterial material Holy Ghost, neither of which are omniscient, omnipresent, nor omnipotent. The semantic gymnastics of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints fail to affirm Mormonism as a Christian religion, but instead reveals obvious deviations from Orthodox Christian teaching.
1. Ron Rhodes, The Challenge of the Cults and New Religions (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2001), 51.
2. Walter Martin, Kingdom of the Cults (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publisher, 2003), 237.
3. Ibid., 236.
4. Ibid., 236.
5. Ibid., 237.
6. The Official Scriptures of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2008. Doctrine and Covenants [database online], accessed on December 4, 2008 available from http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/130/21-22#21.
7. Walter Martin, Kingdom of the Cults (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publisher, 2003), 242.