A Comparative Theological Analysis:
“Are Mormons Christian?” Series
Introduction
The question of God’s nature stands at the very heart of Christian theology. How one understands the being, attributes, and character of the divine shapes every subsequent doctrinal formulation, from soteriology to eschatology, from ecclesiology to ethics. For nearly two millennia, the Christian church has wrestled with the profound mystery of the Godhead, articulating with increasing precision what Scripture reveals about the One who is both transcendent and immanent, both wholly other and intimately near. The ecumenical councils of the fourth and fifth centuries, particularly Nicaea (325 AD) and Constantinople (381 AD), established boundaries of orthodox belief that have been affirmed across Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant communions ever since.
Into this centuries-old theological consensus, the emergence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the nineteenth century introduced claims about God’s nature that represent not merely variations within Christian thought but fundamental departures from it. The theological innovations of Joseph Smith and his successors—particularly regarding the corporeality of God, the doctrine of eternal progression, and the rejection of Trinitarian monotheism—constitute what many theologians have identified as a different religion altogether, one that employs Christian vocabulary while investing it with radically different meaning.
This article undertakes a careful comparative analysis of Latter-day Saint (LDS) theology concerning the nature of God alongside orthodox Christian doctrine. While approaching this subject with scholarly rigor and appropriate respect for sincere religious conviction, the analysis will demonstrate that LDS teaching on these matters cannot be reconciled with historic Christianity and, indeed, represents a departure so fundamental as to place it outside the boundaries of Christian faith as that faith has been understood throughout church history.
I. Introduction to Latter-day Saint Theology on the Nature of God
The theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints regarding God’s nature developed progressively through the prophetic career of Joseph Smith (1805–1844) and was further elaborated by subsequent church presidents, particularly Brigham Young and Lorenzo Snow. While early Mormon teaching showed some continuity with Protestant Christianity, by the end of Smith’s life, the movement had articulated a radically distinct understanding of deity.
The capstone of Smith’s theological development came in his King Follett Discourse, delivered in April 1844, just weeks before his death. In this sermon, Smith declared that God the Father was once a mortal man who lived on an earth, died, was resurrected, and through a process of eternal progression attained his current divine status. This teaching fundamentally redefined the Creator-creature distinction that lies at the heart of biblical theism.
LDS scripture and authoritative teaching present four distinctive claims about God that set Mormon theology apart from historic Christianity:
- God the Father possesses a physical body of flesh and bones. Doctrine and Covenants 130:22 states that “the Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s.” This is understood not as metaphor but as literal reality—God exists in glorified physical form.
- God the Father was once a mortal man who progressed to godhood. The couplet attributed to Lorenzo Snow captures this doctrine: “As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may become.” Faithful Latter-day Saints may themselves achieve “exaltation” and become gods.
- The Godhead consists of three separate and distinct beings. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are three gods united in purpose but separate in substance, identity, and even location. This constitutes a form of tritheism, not trinitarianism.
- There exists a Heavenly Mother as divine consort to God the Father. LDS teaching affirms “heavenly parents,” with human spirits being the literal offspring of the Father and a divine Mother. This doctrine has been taught since Brigham Young and was affirmed in “The Family: A Proclamation to the World“ (1995).
II. Overview of Orthodox Christian Doctrine on the Nature of God
Orthodox Christian theology regarding God’s nature developed through centuries of careful biblical exegesis, philosophical reflection, and conciliar definition. While the terminology and precision of theological formulation evolved, the church has consistently understood itself to be articulating what Scripture teaches rather than innovating new doctrine.
The Incorporeality and Spirituality of God
From the earliest period of the church, Christian teachers affirmed that God is spirit, without physical body or material composition. Jesus Himself declared, “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24). The Apostle Paul describes the Father as “the King of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God” (1 Timothy 1:17) and identifies Christ as “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). These affirmations are not peripheral but central to biblical revelation.
The Old Testament prophets emphasized God’s transcendence over all physical and material categories. Isaiah records the divine question: “To whom then will you liken God, or what likeness compare with him?” (Isaiah 40:18). The prophet answers that God is incomparably above all creation—“He sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers” (Isaiah 40:22). Solomon acknowledged at the Temple’s dedication that “heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain” God (1 Kings 8:27).
The biblical language describing God’s “hands,” “eyes,” “face,” and other anthropomorphic features has been consistently understood throughout church history as accommodated language—God stooping to human categories to communicate truth about His character and actions. As John of Damascus wrote in the eighth century, such language teaches us about God’s activities and attributes, not His physical composition. God acts with power (symbolized by “hands”), perceives all things (“eyes”), and relates personally to His creatures (“face”), but these terms do not describe divine anatomy.
The Eternality and Immutability of God
Scripture affirms with unambiguous clarity that God is eternal, without beginning or end, and unchanging in His essential nature. The Psalmist declares, “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God” (Psalm 90:2). Through Malachi, the Lord proclaims, “I the Lord do not change” (Malachi 3:6). The New Testament echoes these affirmations: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8).
The theological significance of divine eternality cannot be overstated. God does not exist within time as a creature moving from past to present to future; He is the Lord of time itself, the one “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty” (Revelation 1:8). This eternality is not mere longevity—existence stretching backward and forward indefinitely—but rather a qualitatively different mode of being. God’s existence is necessary, self-sufficient, and underived. He is, in the language of classical theism, the ens realissimum, the most real being, upon whom all contingent reality depends.
The Doctrine of the Trinity
The Christian doctrine of the Trinity represents the church’s effort to faithfully articulate what Scripture reveals about God’s triune nature: that the one true God exists eternally as three distinct persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—who share one divine essence. This doctrine was formally defined at the Council of Nicaea (325 AD) and Constantinople (381 AD) in response to Arianism and other heresies, but it represents the crystallization of beliefs held from the apostolic period.
The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed confesses belief in “one God, the Father Almighty,” in “one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God… true God from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father,” and in “the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and Son is together worshiped and glorified.” The key term “consubstantial” (Greek: homoousios) affirms that Father, Son, and Spirit share the same divine nature—they are not three gods but one God in three persons.
This Trinitarian monotheism preserves both the biblical emphasis on God’s oneness (“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one,” Deuteronomy 6:4) and the divine plurality revealed throughout Scripture. When Jesus commands baptism “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19), He uses the singular “name” for the three persons, indicating their unity of being. The apostolic benediction similarly joins the three persons in a single doxological formula (2 Corinthians 13:14).
III. Comparative Analysis: Fundamental Incompatibilities
Having surveyed both LDS and orthodox Christian teaching on the nature of God, we must now undertake a direct comparison of these theological systems. What emerges is not a picture of minor disagreements or alternative emphases within a shared framework, but rather two fundamentally different conceptions of ultimate reality. The differences are not merely philosophical refinements but touch the very identity of the God who is worshiped.
The Question of God’s Corporeality
The LDS affirmation that God possesses a physical body of flesh and bones represents perhaps the most immediately striking departure from historic Christianity. This is not a matter of Christians failing to appreciate divine immanence or the reality of the Incarnation; rather, it concerns the very nature of divinity itself.
When Christians confess that the eternal Son assumed human nature in the Incarnation, they affirm something extraordinary: that the Second Person of the Trinity, who shares fully in the incorporeal divine essence, took upon Himself a complete human nature—body and soul—without ceasing to be what He eternally was. The Incarnation is thus a mystery of addition, not transformation. The Son did not exchange His divine nature for a human one; He united a human nature to His divine person.
LDS theology makes a fundamentally different claim: that corporeality belongs to the very nature of godhood. The Father Himself, according to Smith and subsequent LDS teaching, exists in glorified physical form. This means that physicality is not something God graciously assumed for our salvation but something essential to divine existence. The philosophical and theological implications are profound. A corporeal being, by definition, is spatially located; a body exists somewhere rather than everywhere. The biblical doctrine of divine omnipresence becomes philosophically incoherent if God is understood to possess a physical body.
Moreover, the LDS position cannot account for the clear biblical testimony to God’s incorporeality. When Jesus says “God is spirit,” He is not describing one divine person over against another; He is revealing the nature of the God of Israel, the one true God whom the Samaritan woman sought to worship. The entire biblical portrait of God as transcending material categories—as “dwelling in unapproachable light” (1 Timothy 6:16), as the one “whom no one has ever seen or can see”—coheres with this fundamental affirmation.
The Doctrine of Eternal Progression: A Finite God
The LDS doctrine that God the Father was once a mortal man who progressed to godhood represents the most radical departure from biblical theism in Mormon theology. This teaching does not merely adjust or reinterpret traditional Christian doctrine; it replaces it with an entirely different metaphysical framework.
In biblical theism, the distinction between Creator and creature is absolute and eternal. God alone is self-existent, necessary, and underived; all else depends upon Him for existence. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1)—God precedes and produces all created reality. He is not one being among many but the source and sustainer of all being. “From him and through him and to him are all things” (Romans 11:36).
The LDS doctrine of eternal progression inverts this relationship. God becomes a being who once stood on the creature side of the Creator-creature distinction and somehow crossed over. But this raises insurmountable philosophical and theological problems. If God the Father was once a man on another earth, who was the god of that earth? And who was the god before that god? LDS theology implies an infinite regress of gods, each having attained divinity through progression—a regress that can never arrive at an ultimate, self-existent source of all reality.
Scripture explicitly excludes such a view. Through Isaiah, the Lord declares: “Before me no god was formed, nor will there be one after me” (Isaiah 43:10). The Hebrew construction is emphatic—there was no god formed before Yahweh, and none will be formed after Him. This directly contradicts the LDS teaching that the Father was once formed or progressed into godhood and that faithful Latter-day Saints may similarly progress to divine status. The Lord continues: “I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me. I, I am the Lord, and besides me there is no savior” (Isaiah 43:10–11).
Tritheism Versus Trinitarianism
The LDS understanding of the Godhead as three separate beings constitutes a form of tritheism—belief in three gods—rather than the trinitarian monotheism of historic Christianity. While LDS apologists sometimes argue that their view is closer to the New Testament than later creedal formulations, this claim does not withstand scrutiny.
The biblical testimony to divine unity is unambiguous. The Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4 was foundational for Israelite faith and remains central to Christian theology: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” This is not merely a denial of polytheism in general; it is an affirmation about the essential unity of Israel’s God. Isaiah records Yahweh’s categorical statement: “I am the Lord, and there is no other, besides me there is no God” (Isaiah 45:5). The prophet continues: “I am the Lord, and there is no other” (v. 6), “there is no other god besides me” (v. 21), and “I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me” (46:9).
If the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three separate divine beings, as LDS theology teaches, then Christianity is simply another polytheistic religion, distinguished from Greco-Roman paganism only by the number of gods worshiped (three versus many) rather than by a fundamentally different understanding of ultimate reality. But this is precisely what the early church denied in its confrontation with both paganism and heresy. The Council of Constantinople (381 AD) condemned tritheism along with other deviations from orthodoxy.
The Trinitarian formulation preserves both the full deity of each divine person and the unity of the divine essence. Father, Son, and Spirit are not three gods who happen to cooperate; they are one God who exists eternally in three personal distinctions. This is a mystery, to be sure, but it is the mystery that Scripture presents, not an invention of later philosophy imposed upon the Bible.
The Doctrine of Heavenly Mother
The LDS teaching that God the Father has a divine consort, a Heavenly Mother, introduces an element absent from biblical revelation and explicitly rejected by the early church when confronting similar ideas in Gnosticism and paganism.
Scripture nowhere hints at the existence of such a being. The consistent biblical testimony is that Yahweh alone is God, and no divine consort appears alongside Him. Indeed, the Old Testament prophets specifically contrast the worship of the true God with Canaanite religion, which did feature divine pairs and a goddess figure (Asherah). The reforms of Josiah explicitly removed such elements from Israelite worship (2 Kings 23).
Moreover, the LDS doctrine implies that gender and sexuality belong to the very nature of godhood—that God is male not merely in terms of revelatory language but in His essential being, and that He required a female counterpart for divine procreation. This conception stands in tension with the biblical understanding that God transcends creaturely categories, including gender. When Genesis declares that humanity is created “in the image of God” and immediately adds “male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27), it suggests that both male and female together reflect the divine image, not that God Himself is gendered.
IV. Implications for Faith and Practice
The theological differences examined above are not merely academic disputes of interest only to professional theologians. They have profound implications for faith and practice, for how believers understand their relationship to God, and for the nature of salvation itself.
If God is a being who once was human and progressed to divinity, then the chasm between Creator and creature that defines biblical religion has been erased. Human beings are not dependent creatures brought into existence by the gracious will of an infinite God; they are beings of the same species as God, differing only in degree of progression. The radical otherness of God—the mysterium tremendum that Rudolf Otto identified as fundamental to religious experience—dissipates. We do not stand before the Holy One in awe and wonder; we stand before an advanced version of ourselves.
This reconception transforms the meaning of salvation. In biblical Christianity, salvation is rescue—the gracious act of the infinite God reaching down to save finite, sinful creatures who could never save themselves. “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). Salvation bridges the infinite qualitative distinction between God and humanity through divine initiative and grace.
In LDS theology, by contrast, salvation (particularly exaltation) is essentially progression—moving along a continuum that humans and gods both occupy, advancing through obedience, temple ordinances, and covenant faithfulness toward eventual divine status. The LDS conception is fundamentally synergistic, with human effort playing a decisive role in determining eternal destiny. This represents not a variation of Christian soteriology but a different soteriology altogether.
Furthermore, worship itself takes on a different character depending on one’s doctrine of God. To worship the God of biblical theism—infinite, eternal, self-existent, and triune—is to acknowledge absolute dependence on One who is wholly other, to bow before majesty that exceeds all creaturely comprehension. To worship the God of LDS theology—a being who once was human, who has a body, who exists alongside other gods and a divine consort—is something qualitatively different. The object of worship determines the nature of the worship.
V. Conclusion
This comparative analysis has demonstrated that the Latter-day Saint understanding of God’s nature differs from orthodox Christian theology not merely in emphasis or nuance but in fundamental substance. The LDS doctrines of divine corporeality, eternal progression, tritheism, and Heavenly Mother each individually represent significant departures from historic Christianity; taken together, they constitute a religious worldview that, despite its use of Christian terminology, affirms a different God than the one revealed in Scripture and confessed by the church throughout its history.
This is not a judgment rendered lightly or with any desire to offend. Many Latter-day Saints are sincere, devout, and morally admirable people whose faith genuinely shapes their lives. The analysis presented here concerns theological content, not personal character or spiritual sincerity. Nevertheless, theological integrity requires honest acknowledgment of where fundamental differences lie.
The systematic study of God’s nature over the past two millennia has not been an exercise in human speculation but a careful effort to articulate faithfully what Scripture reveals. The ecumenical creeds that emerged from the councils of Nicaea and Constantinople represent not philosophical impositions upon biblical faith but clarifications of biblical teaching in response to challenges that would have distorted it. When the church confessed God as incorporeal, eternal, and triune, it was saying “yes” to Scripture and “no” to alternatives that, however sincerely held, departed from apostolic teaching.
The LDS movement arose in a context of American religious experimentation and claimed fresh revelation that superseded the teachings of historic Christianity. In assessing these claims, believers must measure them against “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). By that standard, the LDS doctrine of God cannot be reconciled with the Christian faith. It represents not a restoration of primitive Christianity but an innovation that departs from it at the most fundamental level—the understanding of who God is.
For Christians committed to biblical authority and the theological heritage of the church, this conclusion carries both intellectual and pastoral implications. Intellectually, it means recognizing that dialogue with LDS thought, while valuable for mutual understanding, is not an intramural Christian conversation but an interfaith encounter. Pastorally, it means approaching Latter-day Saints with the same combination of truthfulness and love that should characterize all Christian witness—firm in conviction, winsome in manner, and hopeful that the God who has revealed Himself in Scripture and supremely in Jesus Christ will draw all who seek Him into saving knowledge of the truth.