Section 17: The Godhead — Three Separate Beings

LDS theology explicitly rejects the Christian Trinity. The Articles of Faith state: "We believe in God, the Eternal Father, and in His Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost." This sounds Trinitarian. It is not. LDS theology holds that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three completely separate beings, each with a distinct physical body (except the Holy Spirit, who is a spirit personage without a body so that he can dwell within people). They are unified in purpose and will, but they are not one God in any ontological sense.

This position is called tritheism in classical theological terminology: the belief in three gods. LDS leaders have sometimes resisted this label, insisting that they worship the Father above all, with the Son as mediator — a kind of functional monotheism in practice. But the doctrinal content is that three separate divine beings exist, each with independent existence, and that humans can eventually join their company as additional gods.

"I and the Father are one."

— John 10:30

"Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father."

— John 14:9

ERROR IDENTIFIED: The Council of Nicaea (325 AD) was not a political imposition of Greek philosophy onto simple biblical faith. It was the church's precise answer to exactly the heresy LDS theology revives: the claim that the Father and Son are separate beings of different rank. The Nicene Creed arose specifically to define what the New Testament's language actually means when Jesus says "I and the Father are one" — and it concluded that the oneness is ontological, not merely functional. The LDS position requires John 10:30, John 14:9, John 1:1, Colossians 1:15–17, and Hebrews 1:3 to mean something other than what they plainly say. It requires seventeen centuries of Christian biblical scholarship to be fundamentally wrong about what the New Testament teaches about the nature of Christ. That is the weight of the claim.