Part Three: The Theology

LDS doctrine is not a single unified system in the way that Reformed or Catholic theology has been systematized. It developed through incremental revelation, is not fully consistent across its own history, and contains significant areas of official uncertainty and informal variation. What follows represents the mainstream of current LDS teaching as understood from its Standard Works, General Conference addresses, and Gospel Topics Essays.

Section 16: The Nature of God — The Embodied, Progressive Deity

LDS theology teaches that God the Father, whom Latter-day Saints call "Heavenly Father," is an embodied being. Doctrine and Covenants 130:22 states this explicitly: "The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man's." He inhabits a location in space near a star called Kolob (from the Book of Abraham). He was once a man on another world, who through obedience and progression achieved exaltation and became God. The Lorenzo Snow couplet, which has been part of LDS culture for over 150 years, states: "As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be."

This teaching has significant implications for the doctrine of creation. If God was once a man who progressed to godhood, then he did not create matter from nothing (ex nihilo). LDS theology explicitly rejects creation ex nihilo: matter is eternal, and God organized pre-existing matter into worlds. This puts LDS cosmology in direct conflict with the classical theistic understanding of creation, which holds that God brought everything into existence from nothing, and therefore that his existence is categorically different from everything he created.

"God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth."

— John 4:24

"He is before all things, and in him all things hold together."

— Colossians 1:17

ERROR IDENTIFIED: John 4:24 states that God is spirit. Not that God has a spirit or is spiritual — that God is spirit. A being with a body of flesh and bones is not spirit. John's statement is not compatible with D&C 130:22 in any interpretive framework that takes both texts seriously. Colossians 1:17 — "he is before all things" — requires that the Son (and by implication the Father) precede the universe causally and ontologically, not merely temporally. A being who was once a man on another world did not precede all things. He is a created being, however advanced. The God of classical Christian theology is the uncreated ground of all being. The God of LDS theology is a highly advanced created being. These are not the same being with different descriptions. They are different categories of existence.