As Latter-day Saints only worship one Father God, they are operationally Monotheistic. However, Joseph Smith’s teachings in the King Follett’s funeral sermon, the Pearl of Great Price, and other LDS Church pronouncements on Progressive Godhood are open to accusations of polytheism, or at least henotheism (worship of one G/god among a plurality).
For those unaware of the issue, best as I can explain, Smith & other LDS Church leaders have taught that Father God is an exalted man who, with His wife, became Divine through obedience to Their God Parents. In the same way, through complete obedience to our Father God, working through our Elder Brother Jesus and the Restored Church, the LDS, we can attain to like Godhood also.
I find the “nonsense” of Nicea & Chalcedon more consistent to the Bible & at least as reasonable. I’m not too hung up on Modalist, Nestorian & Monophysite differences. I’m totally in disagreement with Arianism tho I understand how one could view it as consistent with the Bible. Adoptionism has to ignore great chucks of New Testament teaching about Jesus’s innate Divine Sonship.
If you want more debate, you’re going to have to provide precise definitions for Monotheism, Polytheism and Henotheism.
[side note: the phrase “Father God” isn’t used AFAIK among us LDS. We typically use “God the Father” or simply “The Father”.]
[another side note: I find it pretty bad form to bump a thread after it’s only been around for eight hours]
Understand that we LDS accept as official doctrine the four books: The Holy Bible, The Book of Mormon, The Doctrine and Covenants, and The Pearl of Great Price. The King Follett Discourse, while interesting and accepted by most LDS as accurate is not official doctrine.
AFAIK Smith didn’t teach all this. He did teach that John 5:19 is more literal than most interpret the verse, at least in that discourse. He also suggested that this was part of a chain that went back without end. However, I am unaware of anything he said about “God’s wife”.
I wouldn’t be surprised if other LDS leaders speculated in that direction (especially, say, Orson Pratt) but that doesn’t make it doctrine. I think our current leaders are more careful about speculating in public for this very reason.
This is deceptive and just plain wrong. We don’t believe that any of us can be “completely” obeidient. If we could, there’d be little point in repentence. Furthermore, you threw in the concept of Jesus as Elder Brother without elaborating.
We don’t believe in the pantheon of beings accepted in traditional Christianity (hierarchies of angels, etc.) as fundamentally different from us. We are all children of God, and Jesus is His Only Begotten.
Well, I don’t. Shrug. I’m unable to find “homoousia” in the Bible. And I find the concept in direct opposition to the New Testament.
Monotheism- there is One Actual God alone to be worshipped. All other spirits, as close to Divinity as they may be, are still lesser creations of that God.
Polytheism- there a plurality of gods, roughly equal in power & worthiness to be worshipped. (If there is one God behind the gods, He allows us to primarily relate with these other gods.)
Henotheism- There is a plurality of gods as in polytheism, but each person or people group has a main patron deity.
I’ve heard “Heavenly Father” and “Eternal Father” used by LDS folk, I thought “Father God” also, but perhaps not.
Eight hours?- sorry, I lost track of when I last posed. I thought it was longer.
I misspoke RE “complete obedience”, maybe “obedience, repentance & reliance on the saving work of Christ and the ordinances of the LDS Church” would be better phrased.
Is Jesus the Only Begotten of the Father, or the First Begotten? I thought the main difference between Jesus & us in LDS thought was His Eldership, His perfect obedience to the Father, and His Lordship. Essentially, I thought the LDS view is JC is the First Begotten & we are latter-begotten.
The family is yelling at me to get off the computer. More later!
I most definitely heard Father God as the only way to refer to Him.
God’s wife? I also read that God Hisself had sex with Mary to conceive Jesus.
What is it? Is there any one truth on this?
As a lifelong Mormon, I’ve never heard anyone use the term “Father God.”
I also have yet to meet anyone who believes that Jesus was begotten by physical instead of miraculous means. It’s a common accusation by some who try to twist our teachings, though.
Neither do we talk much at all about our Heavenly Mother, although we believe she exists. It’s not something we know much about at all, so we leave it alone. Speculation on the topic really isn’t something I care for, from personal experience.
Yes, that’s what they teach, or at least that’s what they taught 22 years ago when I was a devoutly active member and priesthood holder. IIRC, they say that the definition of “begotten” is that God the Father (Elohim) knocked up Mary by the usual methods. (Never mind that he was married to several "Heavenly Mother"s and Mary was betrothed to Joseph at the time).
Elohim has several wives. They live on planet Kolob and have billions and billions of spirit children (you & I). .Jesus & Lucifer were the eldest of Elohim’s spirit children. One day Elohim called us all together and said: “You are going to get bodies and forget that you lived here with me & your moms. If you obey everything I tell you through the prophets I will send occasionally, you will get to be like me someday. Some of you will screw up, so I will send your big brother Jesus to get tortured and die for you. If you accept his sacrifice, that will cover for your mistakes.”
Lucifer thought this was less than satisfactory because some of us would lose out and not get to be like Heavenly Father some day, so he brought up his own plan. His plan was that we would all be automata with no free will, that our choices would be made for us. That way we would ALL make it and get to be just like dad.
2/3 of us sided with Jesus (whos real name was Jehova) and the other 1/3 sided with Lucifer. We kicked them out of heaven and onto the Earth. They were sentenced to never have bodies. They are the “fallen angels”, demons, devils, etc.
There is more, and I’m sure an active mormon will come along and correct me, but that is the general set up of the “Plan of Salvation”.
Er. Well, I don’t know much about theology and such. But I would pick monotheism almost entirely, though I know that henotheism is also considered applicable. You see, though we do think, in a vague sort of way, that there are other creations out there somewhere, with a whole eternal chain of creation and such, it’s not something we really know anything about. It’s really pretty much irrelevant, when what we really should be concentrating on is stuff like repentance and loving our neighbor and whatnot. While there may indeed be other groups, they aren’t in our universe. We don’t know anything about them. We have nothing much to do with them. And it’s not really official doctrine anyway, as emarkp states–Joseph Smith said a lot of interesting things that we didn’t necessarily understand very well, and so we tend to be hesitant to take them any further than the little information we have. Speculation upon such things generally leads to error and wasted time more than anything else–that’s my opinion, anyway.
The first two are commonly used, the last not. “Father in Heaven” is also common.
Much better. We see Christ and the Atonement as the center of our faith.
Jesus is the Only Begotten of the Father. The rest of us are ordinary people. To us, “Only Begotten” means that Jesus was, in earthly life, the actual son of God (by miraculous means) and both human and divine. By taking upon himself the burden of humanity’s sins and going through the Atonement, he became the Savior of mankind.
The rest of us become ‘spiritually begotten,’ if you want to use the (uncommon) term, by having faith in Christ and being baptized–in more usual terms, by being born again spiritually. Our views are really much more commonly Christian than you seen to realize–you might enjoy reading How wide the divide?, a book that details our beliefs about Jesus Christ and compares them with mainstream Evangelical belief.
Just a very minor nitpick, not particularly applicable to the discussion as it’s progressing:
Henotheism as I understand it involves a sublime indifference to whether are not there are other gods than the one worshipped: some other people may believe in them, but “as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” I.e., there is only one God who is the proper object of worship for the henotheists, though, in contradistinction to monotheists, they may accept the possibility of their being real other gods.
To do a slight twist on traditional definition, we monotheists are atheistic about gods other than the One True God; we hold that they either don’t exist, or are faudulent creations of either deluded humans or demonic figures. Henotheists are more or less agnostic about other gods; maybe they exist and maybe not, but aside from the God we worship, they say, the other gods, if they do exist, do not deserve recognition and worship.
As for the Trinitarian approach, let me address it by saying that it was a typically Greek-philosophy approach to explaining something in Scripture. God’s Spirit is clearly divine; yet as clearly He is an agent who acts to bring people to a God who is Other than He is. There are dozens of New Testament cites, and a few in the Old Testament, in which the Spirit is spoken of in a way that shows Him as being Someone who acts within people to bring them to a God who is not within them. And Jesus not only equated Himself with the Great I AM in passage after passage in John, but is referred to as God and Lord in a couple of Paul’s letters, and as the Lord in almost all of them.
So it sounds tritheist, right? But every relevant passage in Scripture holds out that there is but one God. So we are faced with an issue of how the Father can be God, Jesus Christ can be God, the Holy Spirit can be God, and yet there is but one God.
The solution which the Nicene Fathers identified is to describe God as having a single Godhead (ousia) in which there are three Persons (’[symbol]upostaseV[/symbol]) – translated into Latin as substantia and personae, and that borrowed into English as “substance” and “persons” respectively. So God the Father, Jesus Christ His Son, and the Holy Spirit are distinct Persons sharing a single Godhead.
As for the two natures in Christ, here’s a direct modern English rendering (borrowed from the Book of Common Prayer) of Acta V of the Council of Chalcedon, defining that:
Well. we’ve had more activity here, I see! Glad that dangermom’s joined in! And that Poly’s given some input on “homoousia” (a term I find quite consistent with the teachings on the relationship between the Father & the Son in John 1 and Hebrews 1:2).
GoodEgg - You did NOT just go there! :eek:
OK- while most-to-all LDS folk hold to the standard teaching about JC’s conception & find such speculation on the mechanics distasteful- Brigham Young did indeed say somthing to that effect. I think the usual LDS take is that “hey, Brigham said a lot of things we don’t regard as authoritative” (I’m surprised no one’s brought up his “Adam-God” quote".)
BMax- LDS people would differ with the tone of that account & may note that some aspects of that is more Mormon lore & speculaton than absolute doctrine, but that AFAIK does represent what many believe. Of course they put it in a more dignified manner. They were really offended by the film version of Ed Decker’s THE GOD MAKERS which had a cartoon version of that. In retrospect, I can’t really blame them.
Yes, you’re right. I didn’t put the Plan of Salvation in the reverential tone that most active mormons use. I never was good at that.
22 years ago in my ward in Provo, Utah most of Brigham Young’s teachings were considered gospel. There were sunday school lesson plans published on the plan of salvation, which leads me to believe that at that time it was definitely gospel according to the general authorities and central to the church’s gospel. I understand that in the 70s and 80s there was an effort by the general authorities to distance the church from some of its earlier teachings that many consider outside of mainstream christianity - African races=mark of Cain, Poygamy, Adam-god, blood atonement, etc.
Don’t get me wrong; the LDS church does a lot of good in the world: famine/disaster relief and other charity work, indoctrinating children with morals. I will never put down an organization for doing that kind of thing. That doesn’t mean that I have to believe in talking snakes, people living to be 900, or immortal extraterrestrial supermen as the origin of life on this planet.
No he didn’t. People continue to claim it, but it’s not true.
We talk about things that many LDS believe but which aren’t actually church teachings as “folk doctrine”. BMax rattled off quite the list of folk doctrine.
Considering how Anti-Mormons love to spin those quotes, I’m surprised myself.
This debate ended in the first post. I see no need for it to continue.
One interesting thing about the LDS Church is that we have a lay priesthood/leadership, and we teach each other the gospel. That means that there’s very little training in teaching–there’s a teaching manual, but mostly we learn by doing it. I’ve spent the past few years in callings where I was required to teach the younger children and then the teenagers periodically, and now I teach the 14-yo girls every week. They handed me a book of lessons and told me to have fun, and now that I’m used to it, I enjoy it, though I was pretty terrified at first.
So there are no trained priests teaching the lessons or sermons–it’s just the other people in the ward. I think this is a great system; it kind of allows everyone to move forward together, each giving what we have to the effort. Everyone, sooner or later, has to be prepared to teach others, and as we know, there’s no better way of learning something than having to teach it!
One big drawback (or backhanded advantage, depending on how you look at it), however, is that a lot of people will just say any old thing they happen to think. It’s a perfect system for spreading urban legends and folk doctrine and generally spicing up a boring lesson, and Bmax has provided a great example of someone who was taught entirely too much folk doctrine. The Church has spent a lot of the past 15 years or so emphasizing the importance of sticking to scripture and solid doctrine, and not going off on bizarro tangents, so it is getting a bit better I think, but on the whole it’s quite important to pay attention to what is taught and whether it is true to actual scripture (see, we all have to learn critical thinking eventually).
So, when teaching my girls in class, I try to emphasize the importance of checking on weird-sounding stuff and seeing whether it really adds up. The lesson for today has given me a perfect opportunity to do that again, so I’m looking forward to that.
One thing about Mormons is we tend to always want to know everything. There’s lots of stuff we don’t know much about, and as a group, we always want to know the explanations of everything we don’t understand. The idea of having to wait and come to a fuller understanding later on is not something we’ve been very good at accepting. Unfortunately, this has usually led to people extending what they ‘know’ until they’ve made up a bunch of stuff, which they then teach to others. This speculation, as I’ve said above, has usually led to errors–sometimes quite serious ones–and generally been pretty damaging. Which is why I’ve got such a personal bugbear about speculation, and why I always lose my temper about it.
One interesting thing about the LDS Church is that we have a lay priesthood/leadership, and we teach each other the gospel. That means that there’s very little training in teaching–there’s a teaching manual, but mostly we learn by doing it. I’ve spent the past few years in callings where I was required to teach the younger children and then the teenagers periodically, and now I teach the 14-yo girls every week. They handed me a book of lessons and told me to have fun, and now that I’m used to it, I enjoy it, though I was pretty terrified at first.
So there are no trained priests teaching the lessons or sermons–it’s just the other people in the ward. I think this is a great system; it kind of allows everyone to move forward together, each giving what we have to the effort. Everyone, sooner or later, has to be prepared to teach others, and as we know, there’s no better way of learning something than having to teach it!
One big drawback (or backhanded advantage, depending on how you look at it), however, is that a lot of people will just say any old thing they happen to think. It’s a perfect system for spreading urban legends and folk doctrine and generally spicing up a boring lesson, and Bmax has provided a great example of someone who was taught entirely too much folk doctrine. The Church has spent a lot of the past 15 years or so emphasizing the importance of sticking to scripture and solid doctrine, and not going off on bizarro tangents, so it is getting a bit better I think, but on the whole it’s quite important to pay attention to what is taught and whether it is true to actual scripture (see, we all have to learn critical thinking eventually).
So, when teaching my girls in class, I try to emphasize the importance of checking on weird-sounding stuff and seeing whether it really adds up. The lesson for today has given me a perfect opportunity to do that again, so I’m looking forward to that.
One thing about Mormons is we tend to always want to know everything. There’s lots of stuff we don’t know much about, and as a group, we always want to know the explanations of everything we don’t understand. The idea of having to wait and come to a fuller understanding later on is not something we’ve been very good at accepting. Unfortunately, this has usually led to people extending what they ‘know’ until they’ve made up a bunch of stuff, which they then teach to others. This speculation, as I’ve said above, has usually led to errors–sometimes quite serious ones–and generally been pretty damaging. Which is why I’ve got such a personal bugbear about speculation, and why I always lose my temper about it.
Thank you for correcting me on that and thank you to emarkp for bringing me back on track with the OP.
I stand by my statement that I was taught re: the Plan of Salvation being central to the church’s doctrine, that the purpose of life is eternal progression, to become a God. Although there are an unlimited number of universes, each created and ruled by a God, they do not concern us. We need only worship our heavenly father, Elohim through his son Jesus Christ.
Certainly the Plan of Salvation is central to our doctrine. In fact, it’s thePrimary theme for this year (translation: children ages 3-11 are learning about that this year). It’s just that your version was not quite accurate.
The Atonement is central. The Plan of Salvation is what the Atonement provides for. And what precisely it means “to become a God” is speculation, but it is official doctrine that deification is the end result.
Rank speculation. You may have been taught this, but I doubt it was out of any official manual.
Brigham Young and other early church leaders, and even more recent ones like Bruce R. McConkie, came about as close as you can get to saying so without actually using the words “God had sexual intercourse with Mary.” McConkie’s book Mormon Doctrine says:
and the second paragraph of the topic “Son of God” says:
Brigham Young in particular:
This is all secondary to the matter of whether it is official church doctrine; I don’t believe it can honestly be said to be official doctrine – the Journal of Discourses and Mormon Doctrine are not canonized scripture. But even if you disagree with the interpretation that the above quotes refer to God actually having sexual relations with Mary, what FriarTed said was that “Brigham Young did indeed say something to that effect.”
Personally, I don’t understand what the problem with God having sex with Mary is. Brigham Young said they were married; it’s not like it was adultery or fornication, and Mormonism doesn’t have a doctrine that sex is a disgusting or repugnant act.
I’m familiar with all those quotes. None of them say what you claim they say. Even today, we are capable of artificial insemination–where a child can have a father without there ever having been sexual relations. The key point is that Jesus had no mortal father, but God the Father is Jesus’ literal father.
It’s not an issue of something that’s disgusting. It’s a rejection of claims that are stronger than necessary.
