Mormons, Multiple Gods, and Early Church Fathers

Joseph Smith, the Trinity, and the Book of Mormon

Saying they were very confused about what Christians believe. And so I will throw in The Forgotten Trinity. My book on the Trinity because they think we're modalists. They think their description of the Trinity is just as errant as Joseph Smith's description of the Trinity was in the Book of Mormon because Joseph Smith clearly was a modalist.

He didn't understand it either. So I can understand why they don't understand it if Joseph Smith didn't understand it and that's the extent of their study. We'll throw all those things in, but in listening to them I really, really think that if they would hear the basic issues, which would be this basically.

The Nature of God in Christianity and Mormonism

For example, they quote from Irenaeus, they quote from Athanasius, they quote from early church fathers as if there was early church beliefs like theirs. What they need to understand is that the key issue between Christianity and Mormonism is the nature of God and it is their belief that God was once a man.

That's the issue. Nobody, nobody in the early church believed that God the Father was once a man who lived on another planet. So every citation you come up with, anything you do with Irenaeus or anybody else, they all said there was only one true eternal God.

He had always been God. He had never been anything but God. And you say, well what about Jesus? Well, the gospel is not that men can become gods, but that God became a man in the person of Jesus Christ and that is a unique, absolutely unique event.

That's right.

Polytheism, Monotheism, and the King Follett Discourse

It's not something that has been repeated on literally billions and billions and billions and billions of worlds in billions of universes. So that is the fundamental issue and they sort of make fun of the idea, well polytheism, monotheism.

Look, those are fundamental basic categories and if you can't read the King Follett Kindle Discourse and hear Joseph Smith talking about a plurality of gods, then you're not listening to what he's saying and you're not interpreting him in the context in which he actually lived and the conflicts that defined him over against his opponents at that time.

The Development of Joseph Smith's Theology Over Time

You go back and, you know, I just recently, again, I still try to keep up with stuff. I haven't finished it yet. But I need to get back to it. But I'm about halfway through Bushman's, what's it called, Rough Stone Rolling.

It's Bushman's autobiography, biography of Joseph Smith. And when you look at the opposition that Joseph Smith had, people like E .D. Howe and Mormonism Unveiled, things like that, very, that period of time, they're not talking about the nature of God because Joseph Smith had not yet developed this concept.

He tells no one about a plurality of gods in the First Vision until the middle of the 1830s, more like 1837, 1838, that time period. That is a concept that develops primarily concurrently with the Michael H. Chandler visits and the Book of Abraham, the papyri, and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

And so this is an evolution on the part of Joseph Smith over time.