This is part 2 of this blog series. You can read part 1 here.
Not only did the Council of Nicaea condemn the Arian heresy, but they also recognized the need to codify the church’s Biblical position concerning the nature of Christ. This is what led to the Nicaean Creed, which states; (For the sake of this discussion I have only included the section that deals specifically with the nature of Christ).
“We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, begotten from the Father before all ages, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made; of the same essence as the Father. Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven; he became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary, and was made human.”
It needs to be repeated that the church's creeds and confessions are not inspired Scripture. They are an encapsulation of what Scripture teaches on a given subject. Think about them as a statement of faith. Any creed or confession that lines up with the Bible is correct and any creed or confession that contradicts the Bible is false. Now that we have dealt with some strawmen and laid the Nicene Creed out on the table, let’s analyze it to see if it lines up with the Christ of the Bible or the Christ of the LDS church. Before we proceed I want to remind the reader of the deductive argument that I am aiming for; President Hinckley admitted that the LDS church doesn’t believe in the Christ of the ancient church creeds. The ancient church creeds line up perfectly with the Biblical Jesus. Therefore, the LDS church doesn’t believe in the Biblical Jesus. Let’s walk through the Nicene Creed.
“We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.” In the very first sentence, we already find our first discrepancy between Biblical Christianity and the LDS church. To put it plainly, Mormonism is a polytheistic religion. They don’t believe in the one true God of the Bible but in countless gods. I know that my LDS friends will respond by claiming that they believe that Heavenly Father is our one true God. But the Bible teaches that He is the only true God. The LDS doctrines of eternal progression and exaltation teach that God was once a man on another planet, but he was exalted to godhood and now he has created our universe and populated the earth with his spirit wife, heavenly mother. The LDS church also teaches that if we become worthy of exultation we can also become a god one day, creating our own earth and become heavenly parents.
I get a lot of blowback from my LDS friends when I say this. They claim that I am straw-manning what they believe and that the LDS church doesn’t teach these things. In their defense, there seems to have been a concerted effort on the part of the LDS church over the last 15 to 25 years or so to water down these doctrines, as they so egregiously contradict the clear teachings of Biblical Christianity. In fact, I have had several Latter-Day Saints in recent years tell me that the church doesn’t teach that we can become gods but that one day we will be like God. They then quote Romans 8:17 concerning being joint-heirs with Christ. These are two very different things, and if I accuse my LDS friends of believing the former while they actually believe the latter then I am absolutely guilty of straw-manning. However, I am about to prove that the historical teachings of the LDS church are polytheistic, promise godhood to the worthy, and deny the one eternal God of Scripture.
For starters, let me give a couple of examples to prove that the LDS church has fairly recently watered down this teaching of becoming gods/heavenly parents, as I don’t want to make a baseless assertion. Gospel Principles is a standard work of the LDS Church and has been used as a manual for the home and family for decades. As recently as the 1997 edition in the chapter entitled “Our Father in Heaven” it says, “All good things come from God. Everything that he does is to help his children become like him- a god.” However, in the 2009 edition of Gospel Principles the phrase “a god” was removed. This one small change in wording makes a big change in doctrine. So do faithful Latter-Day Saints become gods after they die, or just become like God?
This wasn’t some strange printer error either. In chapter 38 (“Eternal Marriage”), the 1997 edition reads, “The Lord has said that if we are true and faithful, we will pass by the angels to our exaltation. We will become gods.” However, in the 2009 edition of Gospel Principles, this statement was reworded: "The Lord has said that if we are true and faithful, we will enter into our exaltation. We will become like our Heavenly Father.” To be transparent, there is at least one place in the newer editions of Gospel Principles that still states that people can become gods. However, when the definition of becoming a god is watered down to make people think that we merely become like God, even this becomes fuzzy. Does anyone see the sleight of hand here? If it’s true that we can become gods then why water that truth down? If it’s not true, then why did the LDS Church ever teach that doctrine in the first place?
In reference to becoming Heavenly parents (like God), the 1997 edition (chapter 38) says, “Heavenly Father has given us the law of eternal marriage so we can become like him. We must live this law to be able to have spirit children…We can, at some future time, increase our family by having spirit children.” In the 2009 edition, the last two sentences were removed completely. Just one more reference before I move on. In chapter 36 (“The Family Can Be Eternal”), the first paragraph of the 1997 edition says;
“The first family on earth was established by our Heavenly Father when he gave Eve to Adam in marriage (see Moses 3:21-14). Since then, each of us has been commanded to marry and have children so that through our own experience we can learn to be heavenly parents. President Brigham Young explained that our families are not yet ours. The Lord has committed them to us to see how we will treat them. Only if we are faithful will they be given to us forever. What we do on earth determines whether or not we will be worthy to become heavenly parents.”
This entire paragraph was removed from the 2009 edition of Gospel Principles. No wonder my LDS friends (especially the younger generation) go cross-eyed when I tell them about what the LDS church has historically taught concerning exaltation and godhood. My personal opinion is that it seems that these doctrines were watered down so that the LDS church could appear to be more Christian. And it’s impossible to look like a Christian denomination in a Google world when you teach doctrine that is so far from Biblical Christianity. However, Joseph Smith and the early church leaders didn’t live in a Google world. That’s why they were much more open and candid about these things. Ironically, as we are about to see, the church leaders have always been open about these things until about the time that we did start living in a Google world and they lost their echo chamber.
On April 7, 1844, Joseph Smith preached perhaps his most popular sermon, known as the “King Follet Discourse.” Even before I cite this sermon I know that many of my LDS friends are probably rolling their eyes right now because they will say that this sermon was never official LDS doctrine and was never canonized into LDS scripture. But this is a very strange concept for two reasons. First, by the very nature of its belief in living prophets and apostles, as well as continual revelation, the LDS church has never been confined by canon. Second, this is what Joseph Smith, the founding “prophet” of the LDS church taught publically in a sermon that lasted almost two hours. I don’t think that it can get any more official than that. If the founding prophet taught these things as truth, what sense does it make for the church and its members to say, well that’s not official doctrine?
This sermon has been cited countless times over the years in General Conference and the official writings of the church. Even the official church website states, “Since 1844, the Church has continued to teach the core doctrines that Joseph presented in the King Follett discourse and to view the plan of salvation in light of the truths Joseph Smith taught about humankind’s premortal existence, mortal experience, and divine eternal potential.” So I don’t understand the resistance to the teachings of Joseph Smith in this sermon. If he was a true prophet of God by all means follow him. But if he was a false prophet spewing heresy he ought to be rejected. With all of that said I wish to quote a large block of this sermon because it’s that important. Smith said;
“God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens! That is the great secret. If the veil were rent today, and the great God who holds this world in its orbit, and who upholds all worlds and all things by His power, was to make himself visible—I say, if you were to see him today, you would see him like a man in form—like yourselves in all the person, image, and very form as a man; for Adam was created in the very fashion, image and likeness of God, and received instruction from, and walked, talked and conversed with Him, as one man talks and communes with another…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. These ideas are incomprehensible to some, but they are simple. It is the first principle of the Gospel to know for a certainty the Character of God, and to know that we may converse with Him as one man converses with another, and that He was once a man like us; yea, that God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth, the same as Jesus Christ Himself did; and I will show it from the Bible…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.”
If words have any meaning at all then Joseph Smith taught that there were other gods before God, that God was once a man like us on another earth, that he later became God, and that through exaltation we can become a god like him. He reiterated this in Doctrine and Covenants when he said the following in reference to the ordinance of marriage; “Then shall they be gods, because they have no end; therefore shall they be from everlasting to everlasting, because they continue; then shall they be above all, because all things are subject unto them. Then shall they be gods, because they have all power, and the angels are subject unto them.”
Later on, the 5th President of the LDS Church, Lorenzo Snow, coined a now infamous couplet encapsulating the teachings of Joseph Smith. Snow said, “As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be.” I have talked to many LDS who try to distance themselves from Snow’s couplet, stating that it’s being taken out of context, or that the LDS church doesn’t teach that. But Snow and many other church leaders would disagree. Dr. Huggins writes;
“At first, Snow did not share his couplet with anyone besides his sister Eliza, and Brigham Young, with whom he served in England. But in January of 1843, after returning from his mission, Snow mentioned it to the Prophet Joseph Smith, who said to him: “Brother Snow, that is true gospel doctrine, and it is a revelation from God to you.”
In 1892, Snow wrote a poem about exaltation which reads; “This royal path has long been trod By righteous men, each now a God: As Abra’m, Isaac, Jacob, too, First babes, then men—to gods they grew. As man now is, our God once was; As now God is, so man may be,— Which doth unfold man’s destiny.” Huggins also points out that just five days after being elected President of the LDS church that Snow preached a sermon in which he tripled down on the teaching behind his couplet. In that sermon, he made the following statement;
“That exalted position was made manifest to me at a very early day. I had a direct revelation of this. It was most perfect and complete. If there ever was a thing revealed to man perfectly, clearly, so that there could be no doubt or dubiety, this was revealed to me, and it came in these words: “As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be.”
Sixty years later, in his 1958 work “Mormon Doctrine”, former member of the Quorum of the Twelve, Bruce R. McConkie wrote;
“That exaltation which the saints of all ages have so devoutly sought is godhood itself. Godhood is to have the character, possess the attributes, and enjoy the perfections which the Father has. It is to do what he does, have the powers resident in him, and live as he lives, having eternal increase. It is to know him in the full and complete sense, and no one can fully know God except another exalted personage who is like him in all respects. Those attaining the supreme height are sons of God…They are gods.”
Ironically, immediately following this statement, McConkie went on to cite a large excerpt from “The King Follet Discourse.” And even as recently as the Fall General Conference of 1994, the 15th President of the LDS church, Gordon B. Hinckley said;
“The whole design of the gospel is to lead us, onward and upward to greater achievement, even, eventually, to godhood. This great possibility was enunciated by the Prophet Joseph Smith in the King Follett sermon . . . and emphasized by President Lorenzo Snow. It is this grand and incomparable concept: As God now is, man may become!”
I must move on as this chapter is getting longer than I intended. But I wanted to provide sufficient evidence to prove that it is no tin foil hat conspiracy to say that up until the last two or three decades, the LDS church had been very open about their doctrine of God once being a man and our opportunity to become gods as he did. This flies squarely in the face of what the Bible teaches about there being one eternal God. Let’s take a moment to analyze the Biblical teaching and its compatibility with the Nicene Creed concerning the one true God who created everything.
Scientists have concluded that everything in existence falls into one of four categories; time, space, matter, and energy. We find all four of these in Genesis 1:1. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” This means that God brought everything into existence; time (beginning), space (heaven), matter (earth), and energy (created, “let there be light”). Before any of these things existed, God was. There has never been a time when God was not. This removes any possibility that any gods existed before God, or that there will be any gods after God, as Joseph Smith taught. In fact, God’s covenant name, Yahwah (Jehovah) means the “eternal or self-existent one.” Even God’s name dismisses any possibility that he was the offspring of another god, or that He was once a human on another planet that He didn’t create, or that He later became a god.
Many Scriptures clearly highlight this truth. I Kings 8:60, “That all the people of the earth may know that the LORD is God, and that there is none else.” Deuteronomy 4:35, “Unto thee it was shown, that thou mightest know that the LORD he is God; there is none else beside him”… (39) “Know therefore this day, and consider it in thine heart, that the LORD he is God in heaven above, and upon the earth beneath: there is none else. Isaiah 43:10, “Ye are my witnesses, saith the LORD, and my servant whom I have chosen: that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am he: before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me.” Isaiah 44:6, “Thus saith the LORD the King of Israel, and his redeemer the LORD of hosts; I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God.”... (9) “For I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me.” Psalm 90:2, “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.” There are dozens more that could be listed from both the Old and New Testaments, but I’m sure that the reader gets the gist.
It’s basic Judaism and Christianity 101 that there is only one true God. There always has been and always will be. He is eternal and immaterial. The Old Testament prophets, the New Testament Apostles, and the Christian church of the first 1829 years wouldn’t have a clue what Joseph Smith was talking about. That’s because the LDS church worships a different God than Christians do. God is the eternal creator of all things, not a glorified man who is just further along the progression trail than we are. The good news of Christianity is not that men may become gods, but that God became a man in order to die for sinners. So the Nicene score after one sentence is Biblical Christianity- 1, Mormonism- 0. Not only do Mormons side with Arius by teaching that Christ isn’t eternal, they even teach that God the Father isn’t eternal. Even Arius would have scoffed at such an idea.
More to come...
References used:
1. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/king-follett-discourse?lang=eng
2. Ronald V. Huggins 2006. “Lorenzo Snow’s Couplet: ‘As Man Now Is, God Once Was; as God Now Is, Man May Be’: ‘No Functioning Place in Present-Day Mormon Doctrine?’ A Response to Richard Mouw.” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 49 (3): 549–68.
3. LeRoi C. Snow, “Devotion to Divine Inspiration," Improvement Era (June 1919)
4. Lorenzo Snow, “Unchangable Love of God” (Sept. 18, 1898) in Collected Discourses 5.453
5. Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine 2nd Edition (Deseret Book Company, Salt Lake City, UT, 1979) 321
6. Gordon B. Hinckley, “Don’t Drop the Ball”, October, 1994
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