Do Mormons Believe that Jesus Is God?

The Mormons / Latter-Day-SaintsSee all 27 articles in this series

Yes. Latter-day Saints, often called Mormons, believe that Jesus Christ is God, the Son of God the Father and the Jehovah of the Old Testament. They part from other churches over the Trinity of the ancient creeds, and teach that the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are three separate beings, one in purpose but not in substance.

So much turns on that one word, “one”. On the night before he died, Jesus prayed for his disciples, “That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee” (John 17:21). Latter-day Saints and other Christians read that prayer with the same love for the one who prayed it, and they hear the word “one” differently when they speak of God.

Jesus Christ is at the center of Latter-day Saint faith, and the church’s full name, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, says so. Members end their prayers and sermons in his name, and each week they take the sacrament, their equivalent of communion, in remembrance of his sacrifice. They accept what the New Testament says about him: his miraculous birth, his teaching, his death on the cross and his bodily resurrection.

The first of the church’s Articles of Faith, written by its founder Joseph Smith, reads: “We believe in God, the Eternal Father, and in His Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost.” The sentence names three, and the way Latter-day Saints understand those three is where they part from Catholic, Orthodox and most Protestant churches.

In Latter-day Saint teaching Jesus is fully divine. He is the Only Begotten Son of the Father, and before his birth he was Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament who spoke with Adam, Abraham and Moses and gave the law. That teaching places him as God long before Bethlehem. Latter-day Saints do not regard him as a lesser being, even though they believe he is a separate being from the Father.

Latter-day Saints accept the Bible and three further books of scripture: the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price. All of them call Jesus God.

The title page of the Book of Mormon states that one purpose of the book is “the convincing of the Jew and Gentile that Jesus is the Christ, the Eternal God, manifesting himself unto all nations.” In the book of Mosiah, King Benjamin repeats an angel’s message that “the Lord Omnipotent who reigneth, who was, and is from all eternity to all eternity, shall come down from heaven among the children of men, and shall dwell in a tabernacle of clay,” and that “he shall be called Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Father of heaven and earth, the Creator of all things from the beginning; and his mother shall be called Mary” (Mosiah 3:5, 8). The prophet Amulek teaches that the sacrifice to come “must be an infinite and eternal sacrifice” (Alma 34:10). When the risen Christ appears to people in the Americas, he says, “Behold, I am Jesus Christ, whom the prophets testified shall come into the world,” and tells them he is “the God of Israel, and the God of the whole earth” (3 Nephi 11:10, 14).

The Doctrine and Covenants, a collection of revelations to Joseph Smith, often opens with Christ declaring who he is: “I am Alpha and Omega, Christ the Lord; yea, even I am he, the beginning and the end, the Redeemer of the world” (D&C 19:1), and “Listen to the voice of Jesus Christ, your Redeemer, the Great I Am, whose arm of mercy hath atoned for your sins” (D&C 29:1). It calls him the Advocate with the Father (D&C 45:3), the Only Begotten Son and the Firstborn. In section 76, Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon record a vision: “That he lives! For we saw him, even on the right hand of God; and we heard the voice bearing record that he is the Only Begotten of the Father—That by him, and through him, and of him, the worlds are and were created” (D&C 76:22–24).

The Pearl of Great Price has God saying of the worlds, “by the Son I created them, which is mine Only Begotten” (Moses 1:33). The book of Abraham describes “the Gods” organizing and forming the heavens and the earth (Abraham 4:1), which Latter-day Saints understand to include the Father and the Son.

Latter-day Saints use the word Godhead for the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and they teach that these are three separate beings. The Father and the Son have bodies. The Doctrine and Covenants says: “The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; the Son also; but the Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of Spirit” (D&C 130:22). The three are united: in the church’s words, they “are one in purpose and doctrine.”

Latter-day Saints find the three shown separately at the baptism of Jesus, when the Son stands in the water, the Spirit descends like a dove and the Father speaks from heaven (Matthew 3:16–17). They also point to the First Vision, in which Joseph Smith, at 14, reported seeing two beings, God the Father and Jesus Christ.

The doctrine of the Trinity, held by Catholic, Orthodox and most Protestant churches, teaches one God who exists eternally as three co-equal persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Nicene Creed says the Son is “of one substance” with the Father (in Greek, homoousios). The persons are distinct in their relations to one another: the Father begets, the Son is begotten, and the Spirit proceeds. But they are not three beings; they are one being. In this teaching the divine nature is spirit and has no body. The Son took a human body when he became man, and he rose and ascended in that body.

Latter-day Saints believe the true doctrine of the Godhead was lost in a falling away after the apostles died, and that the creeds written by later church councils, beginning with the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, took in ideas from Greek philosophy. They believe the truth was restored through Joseph Smith. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, an apostle of the church, put the difference this way in 2007: “We believe They are one in every significant and eternal aspect imaginable except believing Them to be three persons combined in one substance, a Trinitarian notion never set forth in the scriptures because it is not true.” Trinitarian churches see the creeds as faithful summaries of what the Bible teaches, set out by the councils to guard against error.

The belief that the Father has a body shapes how Latter-day Saints read Genesis 1:27, which says God created humankind “in his own image.” For them the image includes the human body, and the faithful can receive glorified bodies in the resurrection and become like God. Trinitarian churches, holding that the Father has no body, usually locate the image of God in the soul: in reason, moral sense and the capacity to know God.

	Latter-day Saint Godhead	Trinity
How many beings	Three separate divine beings	One God in three persons
Bodies	Father and Son have glorified bodies of flesh and bones; the Holy Ghost is a personage of spirit	The divine nature has no body; the Son took a human body at the Incarnation
Substance	Not one substance; three individuals	Three persons sharing one undivided divine substance
What “one God” means	Perfect unity of purpose, mind, will and doctrine	One divine being, together with unity of will
Passages often cited	Matthew 3:16–17; John 17; the First Vision	Matthew 28:19; John 1:1; John 10:30
Origin of the doctrine	Original Christian truth, lost and restored through Joseph Smith	Biblical revelation, defined by the early councils

Latter-day Saints believe Jesus created the heavens and the earth, acting under the direction of the Father. The Book of Mormon calls him “the Father of heaven and earth, the Creator of all things from the beginning” (Mosiah 3:8), and the Doctrine and Covenants says that “by him, and through him, and of him, the worlds are and were created” (D&C 76:24). In their teaching the Father is the head who plans, and the Son is the divine agent who carries out the plan. Trinitarian churches describe creation as the undivided work of all three persons.

They believe Jesus was both divine and human. He was God, the Son of the Father, before his birth; he was born of Mary, lived a sinless mortal life, suffered and died. Latter-day Saints do not use the formula of the Council of Chalcedon (451), which describes two natures, divine and human, united in one person. They see Christ as an eternal, distinct divine being who took on mortal life. At his resurrection his spirit and his perfected body were reunited, never to be separated again.

His role as Savior is central. Latter-day Saints teach that his Atonement, which includes his suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane and his death on the cross, makes forgiveness of sins possible through faith in him, repentance and obedience to the principles and ordinances of the gospel. This overcomes spiritual death, which is separation from God. His resurrection overcomes physical death, and because of it everyone who has lived will be resurrected with an immortal body. He is the Advocate who pleads for those who believe in him (D&C 45:3), and Latter-day Saints hold, with Acts 4:12, that “there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.”

Latter-day Saints pray to God the Father in the name of Jesus Christ. The church describes the Father as “the ultimate object of their worship.” Jesus is loved, followed and honored as Savior and Lord, and his divinity is fully affirmed, but formal prayer is addressed to the Father through the Son. The Holy Ghost is honored as a messenger who bears witness to the truth, and is not usually addressed in prayer.

For Latter-day Saints the oneness of God means the complete unity of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost in purpose, mind, will and doctrine, rather than a single divine substance. They read Jesus’ prayer for his disciples, “That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us” (John 17:21), as describing that kind of unity, one that believers can share by bringing their will into line with God’s. The Latter-day Saint writer Bruce R. McConkie, later an apostle, defined monotheism in these terms in his book Mormon Doctrine: “Monotheism is the doctrine or belief that there is but one God. If this is properly interpreted to mean that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—each of whom is a separate and distinct godly personage—are one God, meaning one Godhead, then true saints are monotheists.”

Latter-day Saints reject the charge of polytheism, which usually means the worship of many independent gods; their worship goes to one God, the Father, through Christ. Joseph Smith did preach a “plurality of Gods,” most fully in a sermon of 16 June 1844, in which he appealed to Paul: “For though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or in earth, (as there be gods many, and lords many,) But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him” (1 Corinthians 8:5–6). Latter-day Saints understand the phrase to refer to a united council of divine beings and to the exaltation of faithful people, not to other gods whom people on earth worship. Some scholars describe this position as monolatry, the worship of one God without denying that other divine beings exist, or as henotheism.

They agree on a great deal. Both believe Jesus is the Son of God and divine. Both believe he is the Creator and the Savior, whose atoning sacrifice and resurrection overcome sin and death. Both believe in his virgin birth, his sinless life, his miracles, his crucifixion and his bodily resurrection, and both accept the New Testament as scripture.

The disagreements concern the nature of God. Catholic, Orthodox and most Protestant churches confess one God, a single divine being in three persons, and hold that the Son is equal to the Father and of the same substance. Latter-day Saints believe in three distinct beings united in purpose, with the Father as supreme and the Son working under his direction. Both say Jesus is fully God and fully man, but they mean different things by it, because one side believes God the Father has a body and the other does not. The two traditions often use the same words, such as God and Son of God, while meaning different things by them.

These differences go back to the foundations of the Latter-day Saint church: Joseph Smith’s First Vision, in which he said he saw the Father and the Son as two distinct beings, and the scriptures that came through him. Latter-day Saints believe those revelations restored truths about God that were lost or obscured in the centuries after Jesus. Other churches hold that the creeds preserved those truths. Both still turn to the prayer Jesus prayed on the night before he died: “That they all may be one” (John 17:21).

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• Mormonism and Christianity: the main differences
• Do Mormons believe in Jesus Christ?
• What does the Bible say about the Holy Trinity?
• Bible verses about Jesus being God
• What Do Mormons Believe? Latter-day Saint Teaching in Their Own Words

More from this seriesThe Mormons / Latter-Day-SaintsSee all 27 articles