In this episode of A Reasonable Response, Robert Bosley examines the origins and theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly known as Mormonism. Beginning with a historical overview of Joseph Smith and the rise of the movement in 19th-century America, Bosley moves from history to theology—contrasting Mormon teaching about God, Scripture, and salvation with the clear testimony of the Bible.

With care and conviction, he exposes the deep theological differences between Christianity and Mormonism, showing that despite shared language and moral values, the Mormon gospel is not the biblical gospel. Listeners are urged to discern truth from deception and to cling to the revealed Word of God in Christ alone.

God the Father appears in the scriptural record from time to time at very important events, like during the creation of the world as recorded in the Old Testament. This is a problem we're going to have over and over in this video, where they will say something And what they mean by it is something very different from what Christians mean. Welcome to A Reasonable Response. I'm Robert Bosley, and the purpose of this podcast is to give a reasoned response to issues related to the Christian faith from a Reformed Baptist perspective. Each episode contains what we call the breakdown, where I respond to a video related to the topic at hand, and today that topic is Mormonism.

And before we get into the breakdown, we're going to do a little bit of history about where the Mormon Church came from. To begin to understand Mormonism and its doctrines, we really have to begin with the founder of Mormonism, and that's a man by the name of Joseph Smith. And Joseph Smith Jr. Was born in 1805 in Sharon, Vermont, but was raised in western New York in a region that became known as the Burned Over District because of waves of revivalism that had swept through it during the Second Great Awakening. As a young man in his teenage years, he became deeply affected by the competing denominations in the community and sought divine guidance about what church he should join.

In 1820, at the age of 14, he claims to have had an experience of a theophany known by the Mormons as the First Vision. According to later accounts, in this vision, in the woods, God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him, telling him that all the existing churches, all the existing denominations had utterly apostatized from the true gospel and that he should not join any of them, as they were all false. Three years later in 1823, Smith reported having another heavenly visitation, this time by an angel named Moroni. This angel told him about these ancient records inscribed on golden plates hidden in the nearby hillside. These records were supposed to contain the history of a people who had come to the Americas from the ancient Near East.

These were translated by the gift and power of God by Joseph Smith, supposedly in 1827 and became what is known as the Book of Mormon, which was then published in 1830. The LDS regarded it as another testament of Jesus Christ and a scripture that has equal authority to the Old and New Testaments. The early Mormons faced intense opposition driven by skepticism towards Smith and his prophetic claims by the early 1840s. The Mormons had built a city in Illinois, but mounting tensions with the surrounding communities led to Smith being arrested. In 1844, he and his brother Hiram were both murdered by a mob while jailed in Carthage, Illinois.

After Smith's death, the leadership crisis was eventually resolved when his followers accepted Brigham Young as the new leader. And under his direction, the Mormons migrated west, settling in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, where they established their theocracy in what would eventually become the state of Utah. For the breakdown today, we're going to be looking at a video titled, What Mormons Believe About the Godhead, from the official YouTube channel of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The reason we're doing this is because over social media the last couple of weeks, particularly since the tragedy of the attack on the Mormon church a few weeks ago, there has been much said about whether or not Mormons are Christians on social media. When we get to the question of is a group a part of the Christian Church or not, the foundation stone of that is what do they believe about God?

Because ultimately, what you believe about God is the foundation of your entire religion, whatever it is. And so, as we look at this video, from the official LDS page, we can see that clearly based on what they believe about God alone, we cannot consider the LDS to be Christian. So with that in mind, let's look at clip one. Central to the beliefs of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is their concept of God the Father, His Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. Mormons, properly known as Latter-day Saints, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, refer to these beings collectively as the Godhead.

Did you catch that? It was quick and kind of subtle, but what did she say? That these beings, the Mormon conception of the Godhead, is that the Father, Son, and Spirit are not three persons in the one essence or one being of God, but three separate distinct beings that are united, not in nature, but in purpose or in will. From the very outset, this is clearly at odds with the Christian and Biblical conception of who God is. Christians are monotheists.

We believe in only one God. The Mormons do not. Latter-day Saints acknowledge and revere God the Father as the ultimate object of their worship. He is the Supreme Being, the all-knowing and all-powerful Father of all mankind. They even refer to Him often as Heavenly Father, meaning the Father of their spirits.

So she says that the Heavenly Father is the Father of our spirits, but what that means in LDS theology is very different from any Christian idea of God being our Father. We say God is our Father by the fact that He is our Creator and that He is the one who provides for us. He is fatherly in His love and care for His creation. But in LDS theology, human souls are pre-existent. They're really, in a sense, eternal.

God doesn't actually create any person. But because the Father, as she'll explain in another clip, because the Father has a body of flesh and bones, and He is able to procreate with a heavenly Mother, He is able to send children into the world, spirit children into the world through a physical act of procreation. And in that sense, in the LDS conception, he is a literal father to all these children. Again, it's an entirely different conception of who God is. God the Father appears in the scriptural record from time to time at very important events, like during the creation of the world as recorded in the Old Testament.

This is a problem we're going to have over and over in this video, where they will say something and what they mean by it is something very different from what Christians mean. She just talked about the creation of the world. Mormons don't believe in creation in the sense that Christians do. They do not believe that God created matter. They don't believe God is capable of creating matter.

Everything that exists has always existed. When they say create, they really mean rearranged or reformed. He simply shaped what was already there. So again, When you're listening to this video and you're hearing them use the same words, or when you're interacting with the Mormon missionaries at your door and they're using your vocabulary, don't assume they mean what you mean by that as a Christian, because most of the time They don't. In the New Testament, for instance, when introducing his son Jesus Christ at the Savior's baptism.

And lo, a voice from heaven saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Latter-day Saints believe God is a loving Father to all his children and wants them to have all that he has. For this reason, he provided a plan of happiness and a Savior to help his children learn of him and become more like him. It's fascinating that she calls it a plan of happiness, whereas most evangelicals and Christians would simply say plan of salvation. And she does mention that God sent his son to be the savior.

And there's truth that our salvation should lead to our joy, a little bit more complex than mere happiness, but notice the emphasis. This is part and parcel with Mormon doctrine. There's not a big emphasis on sin. There's not a big emphasis on the biblical necessity of redemption. It's a very different faith.

Latter-day Saints pray to and worship the Father in the name of His Son Jesus Christ, the Lord, Savior, and Redeemer of all his children. Jesus Christ, God's Son, was born in a manger, lived among the children of God, and taught his gospel of salvation. Jesus also suffered for the sins of mankind, was crucified, and rose from the grave as a resurrected and glorified being. He is the great example for all of God's children." This is a vast oversimplification of the gospel from anyone's perspective, really, but especially from the Mormon perspective. Again, you also saw at the end there that Jesus was raised as a glorified being.

We would say He's raised in a glorified body, but He is still the second person of the one essence, one being of God. Even as a distinct person, he has a body that's now a glorified body. In Mormon theology, the gospel that Jesus taught and the gospel that the apostles taught and was lost and then supposedly restored by Joseph Smith is not a gospel of free grace. It's not a gospel of if you repent of your sins and trust in Jesus, you'll have the free and full forgiveness of your sins. It's a message that God will forgive your sins by His grace after all you can do.

That's official language from the LDS Church. In other words, fundamentally, your salvation is up to your works, and then God just gives you a little nudge to cross the finish line. Together, the three members of the Godhead are one in many ways. But don't confuse the Godhead with concepts of the Trinity found in other Christian faiths, as there are key differences which, for Latter-day Saints, are very important to understand. It can also be confusing at times when, in Scripture, they are sometimes referred to as one God, or when it says, the Father and Son are one.

For Latter-day saints, this means they are all united in their thoughts, desires, knowledge, power, and purpose to love, guide, and save all of God's children. I'm thankful to see that from the official LDS YouTube channel, they openly admit that they do not believe in the historic doctrine of the Trinity. That's good that they're that honest. And if you note in the video there are three persons shown here. Two of them are more solid, one is more faded, and this reflects the LDS view that the Father and the Son both have a physical body, while the Spirit, for whatever reason, only has a spiritual body.

This idea that the Father also has a physical body, that alone separates the LDS from any traditional, historic, or biblical Christian faith. Joseph Smith, a man whom God selected as his prophet to restore the Church of Jesus Christ to the earth, revealed that God the Father and his son Jesus Christ are separate individual beings. Joseph saw God the Father and Jesus in a personal visit from them in 1820. In Joseph's words, When the light rested upon me, I saw two personages whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name, and said, pointing to the other, This is my beloved Son, hear him.

This is yet another example of God the Father introducing His beloved Son. This scene that she described is what is called the first vision mentioned at the beginning when we gave the history of Mormonism. And This is again a clear indication that their theology proper, their view about who God is, is not a Christian theology. If you look throughout the visions in even the New Testament where someone sees Christ, The Father is not standing with him, let alone as a separate person, let alone as a separate being in a physical body. From beginning to end, their view of God is not a Christian understanding of God.

Joseph later recorded a revelation that he received describing their 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. Were it not so, the Holy Ghost could not dwell in us." So Joseph's perspective that the Father has a body of flesh and bones, just as the Son has a body of flesh and bones, is built ultimately out of his misunderstanding of 1 Corinthians 1550 where the apostle Paul writes, Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. That is why the phrasing in Mormon theology is flesh and bones, not flesh and blood. For whatever reason, flesh got retained, but since blood can't inherit the kingdom of God, the Father has a body of flesh and bones, just as the Son does.

Now this ultimately goes back to the fact that in LDS theology, God the Father is an exalted man. He is a man who lived on another planet and who was exalted to Godhood through obedience to his world's God and became God over this world as a result. In the end, LDS theology makes God in our image. It is not Christian theology. Jesus Christ is often referred to as the Son of God, also called the First Born.

Latter-day Saints believe he was the first spirit child created of heavenly parents and is the eldest brother to all of God's children. This alone is more than enough to utterly separate the Mormons from Christianity. To say that Jesus is a creation of his heavenly parents and is the spirit brother of all the rest of the inhabitants of the earth is so far removed from the biblical Jesus it's hard to even put it into words. They also believe through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ made in Gethsemane and upon the cross, he became the Redeemer of all of God's children, literally the Savior of the world. We could literally stop and respond to just about every other sentence in this video.

In LDS theology, the atonement begins in the Garden of Gethsemane with Jesus' suffering beginning as He contemplates the cross, seen in the blood coming out as he sweats in his prayers. Nowhere in Scripture do we see anything about atonement being made in the garden. Yes, He is pained, he is reflecting on what's to come, he's in prayer. But the atonement is always tied to the cross, is on the cross that the sacrifice was made. Jesus' life absolutely matters.

The Garden of Gethsemane absolutely matters, but the Atonement itself, the sacrifice that appeases the judgment of God, occurred on the cross. Besides the many descriptions and names of Jesus Christ referred to in Scripture, Latter-day Saints also believe Jesus is the only way back to God the Father. Jesus sayeth unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father but by me. Again, we have to understand what they mean by this.

When the Mormons say that Jesus is the only way back to the Father, they don't necessarily mean that He is the way that you get to the Father through personal faith in Him. Mormon views of the afterlife and of the atonement are very different from the Christian idea. In Mormonism, there are three levels of glory. There's the celestial, terrestrial, and telestial. And the telestial is the lowest state of glory, and pretty much everyone who goes there would be the bad people of life, the most wicked, those who do not hear the gospel, those who never repent, they still make it into the lowest level of what basically is the Mormon conception of heaven.

After they go through a period of suffering in what's called spirit prison or basically Mormon purgatory, They suffer further sins for a time, but then enter into the lowest state of heaven, the telestial glory. It's only those who are apostate Mormons, those who received the supposed truth of LDS doctrine then reject it, who go to hell with the devil and his angels. And even there, they, because they're further along in their progression toward Godhood, they actually rule in hell over the devil. It's a very, very different view about sin, about the atonement, about the afterlife, and none of it is Christian. Now let's talk about the third member of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit.

Also sometimes referred to as the Holy Ghost, he is, well, a spirit. He does not have a physical body, but his spiritual influence can be felt by all of God's children. This attribute allows him to work in perfect unity with Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ, fulfilling several roles to help God's children live righteously and receive the blessings of the gospel. For instance, The Holy Ghost witnesses of the reality of the Father and the mission of the Son. And in the New Testament, the Apostle Paul describes other feelings associated with the Holy Ghost.

Love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith. The Holy Ghost also reveals and teaches the truth of all things." As mentioned earlier, notice the language used about the Spirit, that He has a spiritual body. Well, again, in Mormonism, spiritual things are still material. It's not immaterial. They're still stuff.

It's just spiritual stuff. Now, how exactly that works, I don't understand or I don't know exactly how they even define it. But it's, again, not what Christians mean when we talk about what is spiritual. We think of spiritual as being immaterial without a body. And note the work that they assign to the Spirit to create feelings in people and to empower to do good works.

There is an element of truth to that, but again the Mormon gospel is that you are saved by grace after all you can do. God the Father, his Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost make up the Godhead. They are three distinct beings with unique and important roles, but together they operate in perfect unity and harmony. God the Father loves all of It's interesting that she keeps emphasizing this idea of going back to live with the Heavenly Father, when in reality that's not the ultimate goal for Mormonism. The ultimate goal, assuming you go through and you get the blessings of the priesthood and you have a temple marriage and all these things, The ultimate goal is actually for the most faithful Mormons to be exalted along this law of progression, as they call it, to become gods of other worlds where they will then take their...

This is only for the men... Where they will then take their spirit wives and propagate more spirit children on this new world. The faithful LDS women, they don't get to be gods over their own planets, they get to be the heavenly mothers of these spirit children on other planets. And so it's nothing like the Christian idea of you go to be with God and enjoy Him forever. The ultimate goal of Mormonism is that you will become a God and do all these things on your own planet.

And even Christ in LDS theology, he is still in the midst of this progression so that ultimately he will become the father on a new world. I've said it over and over again, I'll say it one more time, there is no sense in which this theology is Christian theology. So in summary, what more is there to say? It's painfully clear that on just this doctrine alone, the doctrine of who God is, the Mormons are not Christian. Just because you put the name Jesus Christ in the title of your church, doesn't mean you're actually following Jesus Christ.

I could make an idol and name it Jesus and say I'm following Jesus but that doesn't actually make me Christian and that's what the LDS have done. They have made a false God, taken the name of the true God and therefore are saying that they are Christians when in fact they desperately need the gospel. They need the real gospel of grace of the eternal unchanging God who sent his son into the world to live a life of perfect obedience to his law, who died in the place of all who would ever believe. If they trust in him, they will have their sins forgiven and not go and be god of their own planet, but they will go and enjoy the face of their Creator God forever. Well, that's all the time we have for today.

If you would like to connect with me personally, I'm on X at R. Bosley 1689. And if you would like to learn more about church and family life, you can do so at churchandfamilylife.com. And speaking of Church and Family Life, we'd love to have you join us at our national conference coming next May in Ridgecrest, North Carolina. Thanks.

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