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Mormons are often accused of hiding their history and doctrines from the general populace of the church, as well as its investigators, out of fear that in breaching the subjects they will drive away the masses. One such doctrine that is highly susceptible to this unwarranted criticism is the revelation given by Joseph Smith detailing the plurality of Gods.

Joseph prefaced a sermon delivered on June 16, 1844 in Nauvoo, Illinois as follows:

“I will preach on the plurality of Gods. I have selected this text for that express purpose. I wish to declare I have always and in all congregations when I have preached on the subject of the Deity, it has been the plurality of Gods. It has been preached by the Elders for fifteen years.

“I have always declared God to be a distinct personage, Jesus Christ a separate and distinct personage from God the Father, and that the Holy Ghost was a distinct personage and a Spirit, and these three constitute three distinct personages and three Gods. If this is in accordance with the New Testament, lo and behold! we have three Gods anyhow, and they are plural: and who can contradict it?”

The notion that Latter-day Saints wish to sweep this doctrine under the rug is laughable in all of its aspects. Anyone who has ever entertained the missionaries is aware of this doctrine. It is a doctrine that sets the church apart from all the rest of Christendom and that makes the Church of Jesus Christ unique. Without it the church is no more enlightened than all of the rest of modern apostate Christianity. The doctrine is generally taught in the very first missionary discussion when the missionaries teach the nature of God in the context of Joseph Smith’s first vision:

“…I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me… 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!”

From the very beginning Joseph Smith knew and taught that God, the Father, and his Son, Jesus Christ, were two separate and distinct beings. He saw both of them, together, with Jesus standing on the Father’s right hand. So if they are separate beings and God the Father is God and Jesus Christ is God then there are two Gods.

At Jesus’ baptism three distinct personages manifested themselves. Jesus was physically present in the flesh. God, the Father, spoke from heaven declaring Jesus to be His son. The Holy Ghost descended in the form of a dove. Jesus was not a ventriloquist throwing His voice from the heavens and He was not a magician pulling a dove out of thin air. These were distinct manifestations of three separate entities (Mark 1:10,11; Luke 3:22).

However the creeds of men say:

“They are not three Gods, but one God… And in this Trinity none is afore or after another; none is greater or less than another. But the whole three persons are coeternal, and coequal. So that in all things, as aforesaid, the Unity in Trinity and the Trinity in Unity is to be worshipped.”

“We believe … in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, only begotten, that is, of the substance of the Father; God of God; Light of light; very God of very God; begotten, not made; being of one substance with the Father… .”

Tertullian, who coined the term “Trinity” and was one of the ante-Nicene fathers of the late 2nd and early 3rd centuries A.D., agreed with Joseph Smith and those Nicene and post-Nicene fathers who came after him distorted the true interpretation and meaning of the word. The term “Trinity” was originally coined in response to a false doctrine being circulated by Praxeas (whom Tertullian called a heretic) who taught the Godhead in the same manner in which Athanasius and the council of Nice later taught it. Praxeas taught the sameness of the Father and the Son to which the author of the original definition of the “Trinity” replied:

“My assertion is that the Father is one, and the Son one, and the Spirit one, and that They are distinct from Each Other… Happily the Lord Himself employs this expression of the person of the Paraclete, so as to signify not a division or severance, but a disposition (of mutual relations in the Godhead); for He says, “I will pray the Father, and He shall send you another Comforter…even the Spirit of truth,” thus making the Paraclete distinct from Himself, even as we say that the Son is also distinct from the Father; so that He showed a third degree in the Paraclete, as we believe the second degree is in the Son, by reason of the order observed in the Economy. Besides, does not the very fact that they have the distinct names of Father and Son amount to a declaration that they are distinct in personality?”

“So it is either the Father or the Son, and the day is not the same as the night; nor is the Father the same as the Son, in such a way that Both of them should be One, and One or the Other should be Both,—an opinion which the most conceited “Monarchians” maintain. He Himself, they say, made Himself a Son to Himself. Now a Father makes a Son, and a Son makes a Father; and they who thus become reciprocally related out of each other to each other cannot in any way by themselves simply become so related to themselves, that the Father can make Himself a Son to Himself, and the Son render Himself a Father to Himself… Now all this must be the device of the devil—this excluding and severing one from the other—since by including both together in one under pretence of the Monarchy, he causes neither to be held and acknowledged, so that He is not the Father, since indeed He has not the Son; neither is He the Son, since in like manner He has not the Father: for while He is the Father, He will not be the Son…

“It will be your duty, however, to adduce your proofs out of the Scriptures as plainly as we do, when we prove that He made His Word a Son to Himself. For if He calls Him Son, and if the Son is none other than He who has proceeded from the Father Himself, and if the Word has proceeded from the Father Himself, He will then be the Son, and not Himself from whom He proceeded. For the Father Himself did not proceed from Himself. Now, you who say that the Father is the same as the Son, do really make the same Person both to have sent forth from Himself (and at the same time to have gone out from Himself as) that Being which is God.”

The Bible tells us that these Divine Beings are neither one in substance (material) nor coequal. It is clear that God, the Father, is ultimately in charge for he sent Jesus Christ to Earth to redeem mankind and Jesus followed the order.

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through Him might be saved” (John 3:16,17).

There are several great truths in this verse, two of which debunk the claims of the Athanasian and Nicene Creeds. 1) Jesus is not coequal with God the Father inasmuch as God the Father “sent” His son to the Earth, and 2) Jesus Christ and God the Father are two separate and distinct personages as shown in the very act of “begetting”. These two principles are later born out once more when Jesus declares, “I go unto the Father: for my Father is greater than I” (John 14:28). Again, Jesus is not going unto Himself and He sets a distinct hierarchy of the Gods.

There are some Protestant faiths, or at least the clergy of these faiths, that do understand the separate nature of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost as evidenced by the following in “Morning Star,” a weekly newsletter of Wycliffe College, by Alan L. Hayes, director of the Toronto School of Theology:

“It seems to me preferable for a number of reasons to say clearly that YHWH is (at least in his appearances to human beings) Christ himself — that is, not God the Father, but God the Son.

“The pre-eminent reason for saying so is that, when we pray to God, we do so ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ Our trinitarian theology affirms that the only access which any human being can have to God the Father is through the Son. ‘No one knows the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.’ If the Father appeared and spoke to Moses in the burning bush; if he communicated directly to the prophets; if he was worshipped by Israel without the necessity of a mediator, then the Church’s doctrine of the Trinity is mistaken. …

“The idea of Christ’s divinity [as it related to Monarchism and the modern Orthodox conception of the Trinity] and the doctrine of the Trinity were added in later centuries by the ascetic Greek philosophers who by then had taken control of the Church” [brackets mine].

Just as Jesus was sent by the Father the third member of the Godhead is sent by Jesus Christ, through permission of the Father, again setting up a divine hierarchy, “But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me” (John 15:26).

But what of the scriptures that say they are one?

“I and my Father are one” (John 10:30).

“For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one” (1 John 5:7).

Besides the fact that 1 John 5:7 in the original Greek, as well as in the Latin Vulgate, only says, “That there are three witnessing,” and excludes the remainder of the verse that was later introduced by a Trinitarian believing monk, the scriptures must agree in harmony of doctrine if they are to be believed. One verse cannot cancel out another and so it is necessary to discover what this “oneness” signifies since the scriptures are clear that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are distinct and separate individuals.

The best explanation of this “oneness” comes from the Bible and from John himself as he details Jesus’ prayer for His disciples:

“Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; that they all may be one; as thou, Father art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one” (John 17:20-23).

Due to the length of this article and the use of both Modern and Early Semitic Script the remainder of this post may be downloaded in PDf format by clicking below. The PDF also includes source notes.

Plurality of Gods PDF