eleven

FATHER-SON AND HOLY GHOST–MOTHER? THE MORMON-GOD QUESTION

I had learned to call thee Father,

Through thy Spirit from on high;

But until the key of knowledge

Was restored, I knew not why.

In the heavens are parents single?

No; the thoughts makes reason stare!

Truth is reason, truth eternal

Tells me I’ve a mother there.

When I leave this frail existence,

When I lay this mortal by,

Father, Mother, may I meet you

In your royal court on high?

Then, at length, when I’ve completed

All you sent me forth to do,

With your mutual approbation

Let me come and dwell with you.

—Eliza R. Snow, “O My Father”

THE MORMON CONCEPT OF GOD, Mormon philosopher Sterling McMurrin writes,

   

is a radical departure from the position of traditional theism, whether Christian, Jewish, or Islamic, and the failure to recognize the far-reaching implications of this idea is a failure to come to grips with the somewhat distinctive quality of Mormon theology, its essential non-absolutistic character…. The naturalistic disposition of Mormonism is found in the denial of the traditional conception of the supernatural…. Reality is described qualitatively as a single continuum…. Mormonism conceives of God as being in both time and space…. It is perhaps not entirely inaccurate to describe Mormonism as a kind of naturalistic, humanistic theism.¹

THE MORMON GOD has long troubled orthodox Christians for these reasons. There have been numerous Mormon-Gentile standoffs. The first such encounter occurred in 1837, between the Mormon Elder Stephen Post and Oliver Barr of the Christian Connection. Barr, a Binitarian (one who acknowledges the divinity and personhood of Father and Son only), not a Trinitarian, did not believe the Book of Mormon espoused the orthodox formulation. Post defended the faith by affirming the oneness of God in the Book of Mormon and the Bible.² By the time of the next equally famous Christological shouting match between Mormon Apostle B. H. Roberts and Idaho Catholic priest C. Van Der Donckt in the early 1900s, later published as Mormon Doctrine of Deity, the Mormon defense, at least, had changed considerably from an unflinching apology for modalistic unity to a defense of what seems a crude anthropomorphism and polytheism.³ Modern Mormon apologies share more with that of Roberts than that of Post.⁴

The debate over the nature of the Godhead divided Evangelicals and anti-Evangelicals in the antebellum period. As Paul Goodman points out in his book Towards a Christian Republic, Evangelicals tended to be Trinitarians, whereas anti-Evangelicals espoused a wide array of Unitarian alternatives.⁵ Book of Mormon critic Mark Thomas is only partly right when he argues that the Book of Mormon healed “the Gentiles of both their disbelief and Unitarian heresies.”⁶ In fact, it blamed the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity and its philosophical accoutrements for causing widespread disbelief and intense psychological anxiety. Evangelicals were Unitarianism’s most virulent critics and vice versa. Indeed, the Mormon concept of God is perhaps the most contentious issue, second only to polygamy, separating Mormons and mainline Christians.⁷

The current interpretation essentially invents a Christological dichotomy in the early tradition—when none existed—and largely to lend credence to orthodox tendencies within the modern church. O. Kendall White argues in his book Mormon Neo-Orthodoxy: A Crisis Theology that “during the initial period of the formulation of Mormon doctrine, 1830 to 1835, Mormon beliefs differed little from those of American Protestants. Tempered by the perfectionism of the Methodists, the Mormon doctrine of human nature tended toward depravity, while its absolutist and trinitarian concept of God reinforced a notion of the saving grace provided by the death and atonement of Jesus Christ. As prevalent themes in the Book of Mormon, these were apparently beliefs of the earliest Mormons.”⁸ White argues for the existence of two Mormonisms in the early period (1830–1844), an orthodox Protestant variety and a radical anti-Evangelical one. In the same vein, Thomas Alexander and Edgar T. Lyon propound the notion of a “reconstruction” of Mormon doctrine in the later years of Joseph Smith’s life.⁹ This fits well with Shipps’s thesis that Mormonism evolved away from Christianity and that in the early years its core doctrines were essentially Protestant.¹⁰ Although extremely critical of Mormonism in their book Understanding Cults and New Religions, Irving Hexham and Karla Poewe seem to concur that “with the exception of its teachings about the Fall, [the Book of Mormon] is simple and fundamentally orthodox.”¹¹

However much Mormon theology evolved, especially in the last years of the Mormon prophet’s short life, a more nuanced reading of the Book of Mormon does not support the idea that the Mormon concept of God was ever that of orthodox Christianity—a trinity, in other words. As Melodie Moench Charles has shown, “like the Book of Mormon, Mormonism before 1835 was largely modalistic.”¹² In the Book of Mormon, the Father and the Son are the same person—which is not the orthodox Christian understanding.¹³ The Book of Mormon Christ is not homoousia with the Father but the Father indeed.¹⁴ While some passages lend themselves to an orthodox interpretation, a majority vacillate between two unorthodox poles: Arianism, which holds that Jesus was the first and greatest of all creatures rather than coeternal with the Father, and Sabellianism, which holds that the Son was the same person as the Father.¹⁵

The Book of Mormon even alludes to the heavenly flesh theory (the peculiar preserve of Anabaptists and equivalent to the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation), since the Father of Heaven and Earth is said to come to earth and dwell in a tabernacle of clay.¹⁶ Thomas Muntzer, Melchior Hoffman, Kaspar Schwenkfeld, and Menno Simons are among the more famous Anabaptists to espouse this view.¹⁷ Michael Servetus (1511–1553), the famous martyr to Calvinistic intolerance, propounded his own heavenly flesh theory. According to Servetus, God was the literal father of Jesus and thus Christ’s mortal body homoousia with the Father.¹⁸ Brigham Young arrived at a similar conclusion, defending Jesus as the Son of God rather than the Son of the Holy Ghost (his own take on the orthodox understanding).¹⁹

While much of the Christological discussion in the Book of Mormon has a Trinitarian ring to it, the text clearly favors a Sabellian, or Monophysite/Unitarian, interpretation. The brother of Jared sees the finger of God and then, on account of his great faith, the face of God. The God of the Old Testament, Jehovah, he discovers, is none other than Jesus Christ. As Steven Epperson argues, this is not the orthodox understanding. Jesus and Jehovah are not the same person in Christian theology. It is an “egregious error,” Epperson writes, and “we do violence and disrespect to the person of the Father.”²⁰ Yet, in the Book of Mormon, at least, the Father is spirit and the Son is flesh, and, as Sabellius taught, the two are one person in Jesus Christ.

While the Mormon concept of God certainly evolved, the important point to remember is that it never quite satisfied all the demands of orthodox Christian doctrine, only becoming more heterodox as time passes. Dan Vogel argues: “Although the earliest Mormon concept of God differs from the belief Joseph Smith outlined in his sermons in the 1840s, later Mormon theology does not trace its roots to trinitarianism or any other orthodox creed. Rather Mormon theology consistently rejected orthodox definitions of God, developing in an increasingly heterodox direction.”²¹ George B. Arbaugh argued long ago, in his 1932 book Revelation in Mormonism, that the metamorphosis of the Mormon God proceeded from modalistic unity to a hierarchy of gods of flesh and bone—which, incidentally, comes dangerously close to atheism.²² The real irony, however, is that Mormonism’s unequivocal embrace of materialism largely occurred because Smith went on to defend the unity of God using orthodox-sounding arguments, in an attempt to appease new converts, who, increasingly, came from the Protestant quarter, quite unaware of who he really was or what the church he established was all about. His famous lament only months before he died, in which he accuses the Mormon throngs of not knowing his history (or his theology?), can be seen as a plaintive cry in the wilderness for them to take the time to read the Book of Mormon with the right set of lenses and thus come to see Smith for who he really was: a Christian Mason rather than an eccentric, Bible-believing Christian who started with strong primitivist leanings and went off the deep end.

That said, in some important respects, the church Smith founded was hugely successful because so few seemed to know what he was going on about right to the bitter end. Even now, almost two hundred years since the publication of the Book of Mormon, the most basic and important of questions—the early Mormon understanding of and belief in God—is a quagmire of theological and philosophical ramblings, fundamentalist rant, and historical non sequitur. Ironically, most historians have tried to stay above it all, while Mormon theologians eager to put in their two cents have not been up to the task—asking all the wrong questions, in effect. A few years ago now, at a fireside reading of a version of this essay, Eugene England, one of the distinguished Mormon scholars to attend, made the following observation. “Must we employ so much of the language of the adversary?” Unfortunately, it would seem so! Still, England had a point, especially when one considers that such “Catholic” theological and philosophical minutiae as Sabellianism or Arianism or Pelagianism (all its neo this-and-thats, too) may well be entirely beside the point. Whether the Mormon doctrine of Jesus as Jehovah, for example, should be seen as offensive to Jews and Christians alike because of its apparent lack of theological conformity begs the question. Indeed, Harold Bloom’s intriguing argument for Mormonism as a kind of post-Christian revival of Jewish gnosticism (“The Star Spangled Banner” playing softly in the background) and prediction that Salt Lake City may yet become the religious capital of the West fail to appreciate the very important sense in which Mormonism clearly has a rather large (and literal) bone to pick with gnosticism.²³

The rest of this chapter certainly “employs the language of the adversary,” but simply to demonstrate the degree to which the Mormon God stands outside the pale of orthodox Jewish and Christian thought by standing firmly inside time and space, fashioning the universe out of rock and clay older, it seems, than the Deity. How the Mormon God came to be is a question philosophers are better equipped to handle. More germane to this discussion is how the Jesus-Jehovah doctrine came to be and what it hoped to achieve (other than to befuddle systematic theologians, that is).

In some respects, that question proves no great hurdle since Christian Masons share this view. It is there, for example, as plain as day in Oliver’s The Book of the Lodge, which characterizes “the Angel Lord of the Covenant—Jehovah—the Messiah, or Christ as types of His presence on the same mountain to work out human salvation by His death upon the cross.”²⁴ Elsewhere, Oliver explains that Christian Masonry is “a cosmopolitan institution, comprehending all mankind in one fold under one Shepherd, and embracing them in the universal scheme of unlimited redemption” (p. 12). Oliver, an ordained Anglican clergyman, certainly knew his Christian theology; he was not the sort of Christian who seems not to know the difference between their (god)head and their hypostasis, likely to fall prey to the Sabellian heresy (the Father and Son merely modes of the one God) out of sheer ignorance. It makes far more sense to suspect that Oliver knew what he was doing by conflating the God of the Old Testament and Christ of the New in the person of Jehovah.

The Mormon prophet may not have been quite the ignoramus Alexander Campbell and other contemporaries thought, either. The Book of Mormon makes no bones about it: the God of the Old Testament is the preexistent Christ; Jesus is the person of the Father, donning a “tabernacle of clay” as the Book of Mormon prophet Abinadi explains. The Mormon God as an apology for Christian Masonry has important ramifications for the sons and daughters of God, too, spiritual beings like Jesus their older brother (and Masonry, too) who cannot be saved without similar mortal coils. Before coming to this earth, their moral worth and thus religious and racial status is determined in a grand council—an utterly Masonic affair in which Jesus proves himself the best of all possible Masonic sons, head and shoulders above his archenemy and the spiritual source of all apostate Masonry, Satan himself. That Lucifer and his angels are cast out of heaven into outer darkness, never, ever, to receive bodies, is a dream come true for the believing gnostic.

The growing interest in Mormonism as a throwback to Jewish or Christian gnosticism has been fueled to some degree by apologists for the faith who hope to show that Mormonism—especially its radical Christology—is essentially that of the first and earliest Christianity. One can hardly blame Mormon apologists for finding it rather exciting, if not simply ironic, that their tradition should seem to have so much in common with the Greek Orthodox Church or that the Roman Catholic wing of the Christian tradition and its Protestant acolytes have had their backs to the wall for some time now, thanks to the higher critics. These days, the believing Mormon intellectual is likely to find a friend in most things German—past and present. Mormon feminists such as Linda P. Wilcox no doubt derive some pleasure when they ask Christian critics to consider that “the idea of a Heavenly Mother or a female counterpart to the male father-god is not unknown in Christianity. Recently discovered Gnostic texts from the first century after Christ reveal doctrinal teachings about a divine mother as well as father. There is also a body of writings which identifies the divine mother as the Holy Spirit, the third member of the Trinity, which then becomes a family group—the Father, Mother, and Son.”²⁵ If only the Mormon belief in a trinity of father, mother, and son—or quaternity of father, mother, son, and holy ghost—appeared somewhere in its own scriptures! Other than the Mormon hymn “O My Father,” which contains a pericope in honor of a heavenly mother figure, the only other evidence for God the Mother seems to be a lot of fairly reliable hearsay evidence (pp. 64–77). In the temple Endowment ceremony, for example, the men and women seated in the pews are not favored with a Masonic theatrical reenactment presided over by the Father and Mother and Holy Ghost.

Christian critics have made great sport of this, accusing Mormonism of gross anthropomorphism that goes well beyond the bounds of good taste—particularly the idea Young made famous, that God the Father had sexual intercourse with the non-Virgin Mary. Being such a prolific husband, that Young fashioned God in his own image is the sort of polemic that can easily backfire—and has. But surely the orthodox Christian understanding of God as devoid of “body, parts and passions” can be seen as rather unsavory, too? That said, most of this may well be beside the point. Mormon feminists have lobbied hard for God the Mother as an intercessor on par with Mary in the Catholic faith without considering how this great parenthesis in Mormonism’s heaven and in its scriptures may be intentional—a necessary evil. Smith’s willingness to include women, as we will continue to see, set him apart from the Masonic mainstream. To include women as equal participants in the Masonic ritual and offer to make them priests of Melchizedek after the order of the Son of God was as far as it could go, lest Mormonism prove to offer men little beyond what they already had. In short, the Mormon God can be seen as the pitch to men of Masonic temperament perhaps fearful that Mormonism threatened to erode their already diminishing sense of veto power. Indeed, the evolution of the Mormon God from unity to multiplicity and Smith’s constant and creative attempts to preserve unity and justice in the process seem more or less in agreement with the essentially patriarchal notion that ultimately father knows best and is most qualified to run the affairs of church and state above and below.

THE BOOK OF MORMON (1830) and the Lectures on Faith (1835) were subsumed, so the argument goes, by the Doctrine and Covenants (1835–1844), the Book of Abraham (1842), and the King Follett Discourse (1844).²⁶ Smith allegedly “reversed his position on the absolute nature of God.” (p. 91 n. 2). This was not Smith’s understanding, however.²⁷ In June 1844 he told the Saints: “I have always and in all congregations when I preached on the subject of … Deity it has been the plurality of Gods” (p. 370). The strong reaction to the King Follett Discourse, as Van Hale points out, “creates the impression that Joseph Smith shocked the Saints with a startling revelation of new doctrine, previously unknown to the members.”²⁸ Such concepts as “men can become gods, there exist many gods, the gods exist one above the other, and God was once as man is now,” Hale comments, appear no less than forty-five times in the early Mormon literature before April 1844 and developed in a linear sequence. Robert Paul notes that Smith’s cosmology was “surprisingly self-consistent and coherent.”²⁹ Early references to the plurality of worlds idea, according to Paul, implied other forms of Mormon pluralism merely stated more clearly and forcefully later on. The astronomical pluralism in the Book of Moses—published the same year as the Book of Mormon—Paul argues, “carried over into Joseph [Smith’s] increasingly sophisticated [polytheistic] theology” (p. 27).

However, the suggestion that Smith’s ideas did not evolve to some degree goes too far the other way. After all, other astronomical pluralists, Christian³⁰ and anti-Christian,³¹ did not assume that many worlds implied many gods. Indeed, the belief that God had populated other worlds was widely held among Deists and Newtonians. Neither sanctioned polytheism, and, in fact, most who held this view were Christian Neoplatonists and Arians. J. Frederick Voros Jr. contends that Smith’s “views on doctrine changed over time” and that “the King Follett Discourse, which expands the frontiers of Mormon doctrine far beyond Book of Mormon teachings, is obviously a dramatic example: the one, changeless God of the Book of Mormon becomes a plurality of exalted persons in King Follett.”³² He is uneasy, however, about what he perhaps rightly calls “a false dichotomy between the Book of Mormon and the King Follett Discourse” (p. 18). One can find in Smith’s revelations and sermons on the Godhead, for example, a Neoplatonist-like chant to unity amid diversity.

Christian Neoplatonism traces its origins to Plotinus, the third-century Egyptian philosopher. Plotinus, a monist, conceived of reality as a vast hierarchical structure with grades descending from the One. Beneath the One was the second hypostasis, Mind or Thought; and below Mind, the third hypostasis, Soul. All that existed, Plotinus averred, was essentially an “overflow” of the One.³³ Once again, we proceed directly to Origen, a contemporary of Plotinus who attempted to harmonize Christianity and Neoplatonism. Origen hypothesized that God was a being of perfect goodness and power who brought into existence a world of spiritual beings coeternal with himself. This plurality required a mediator, the Son, the first in the chain of emanations, making him a “secondary God” but God all the same and the express image of the Father. Origen also believed the Spirit was a divine person, sharing, albeit derivatively, all the characteristics of the Father. The plurality of spiritual beings, coeternal with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, were thus gods in embryo.³⁴

Two Platonist revivals preceded the nineteenth century: that of the Medici Florentine Academy in the sixteenth century and that of the Cambridge Platonists in the seventeenth century—which precipitated a Christian Neoplatonic tradition in England and America. The most influential American Neoplatonist was Jonathan Edwards. As Douglas Elwood, the Edwardsian scholar, explains, Edwards’s “great overarching concern was to reconstruct the framework of historic Calvinism along Neoplatonic lines.”³⁵ The triune God of Edwards was one in thought. “We don’t suppose that the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost … have three distinct understandings,” he observed. “We never supposed that [the] Father generated the Son by understanding the Son, but that God generated the Son by understanding his own essence…. And so of the Holy Ghost.”³⁶ Edwards even believed that humanity first resided in the Father: “Here is both the emanation and rumination. The refulgence shines upon and into the creature, and is reflected back to the luminary. The beams of glory come from God, are something of God, and are reflected back again to their original. So that the whole is of God, and in God, and to God; and he is the beginning and the middle and the end” (cited on p. 61).

Smith’s other 1830 publication, the Book of Moses,³⁷ is an Arian defense of the unity of God. It can be seen as a unitarian argument rather than the first intrusion of polytheism into Mormonism, as some scholars maintain. After seeing a vision of the world from beginning to end, Moses discovers that creation is the work of the Father by the Son (Moses 1:30–32). It is not the Father who is Creator, but the Son (Moses 1:33, 35).³⁸ The Son is also separate from the Father, something more than the power of God but not a divine person in his own right—not yet, that is (Moses 2:26–27).

The Book of Moses largely addresses the issues of evil and suffering and the God of love. If God created all things, does it not follow that he also created evil? But how is it that a supremely good being should be said to create evil? Augustine attempted to resolve this problem by defining evil as privation of good, in the same way that darkness is merely the absence of light.³⁹ The Book of Moses, however, asserts that Jesus and Lucifer were brothers who competed for the position of Son of God in a preexistence (Moses 4:1–4). Lucifer proposes that God should compel his children to be righteous. In exchange for carrying out this mission on earth, Lucifer asks to be equal with God. Jesus makes no such demands. His is the chosen plan, and he will become the Father’s cosmological subcontractor and the future Messiah (Moses 3:5). That Lucifer’s request to be equal to the Father is deemed “sinful” may be a rebuke directed at women as well as men—a none-too-subtle reminder to the Fanny Stenhouses of the faith that, in matters of home and church governance, the Father, as it were, has no equals. (That Lucifer had a radical, Evangelical-feminist agenda, that he spoke on behalf of and thus his angels were largely women, may not be outside the realm of exegetical possibility.)

In fact, an argument similar to this appears in the Scottish Rite and its defense in the higher degrees of the necessity of both good and evil in the interest of the freedom of the will. In short, good cannot exist without evil: without the devil, God would not be God. The black-and-white tile floor of the lodge symbolizes this dualistic cosmic drama between the Deity and his opposite over the souls of humankind, free agents in the whole affair and thus the final arbiters in their own salvation (though not without the aid of prevenient grace). It is not a fair fight in the end, for good will certainly triumph, in large measure because of the efforts of a mediator (Jesus Christ). This may sound orthodox, but it seems more than likely a Masonic variation on a Manichaean/gnostic theme. “For it must needs be,” the Book of Mormon says, “that there is an opposition in all things … wherefore, the Lord God gave unto man, that he should act for himself. Wherefore, man could not act for himself, save it should be that he were enticed by the one or the other.”⁴⁰ In his famous Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Albert Pike defends just such an argument at length. The lesson of the Scottish Trinitarian, or Twenty-sixth Degree, is that “the Infinite and Benevolence of God give ample assurance that Evil will ultimately be dethroned, and the Good, the True, and the Beautiful reign triumphant and eternal. It teaches, as it feels and knows, that Evil and pain, and Sorrow exist as part of a wise and beneficent plan, all the parts of which work together under God’s eye to a result which shall be perfection.”⁴¹ In this degree, the necessity of baptism and what is called “the fraternal supper” of bread and wine are also expounded, the latter in remembrance of the blood Christ shed for the remission of sins (pp. 538–540).

In orthodox Christian teaching, only the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, along with the devil and his angels, are preexistent beings. The preexistence of human souls who will come to earth and inhabit bodies of flesh and blood is a Neoplatonic teaching, quite inconsistent with orthodox Christianity and yet in keeping with the teachings of the Scottish Rite. This should not come as any great surprise since the Scottish Rite is Neoplatonic through and through. Among other things, the Knight of the Brazen Serpent, or Twenty-fifth Degree, teaches “the pre-existence of souls, as pure and celestial substances, before their union with our bodies, to put on and animate which they descend from Heaven” (p. 440).

The logic employed here is similar to that in Mormon scripture: that it seems ludicrous to suppose “the soul should exist after the body, if it had not existed before it, and if its nature was not independent of that of the body.” In the Seventeenth Degree, or Knight of the East and West, “the Word is not only the Creator, but occupies the place of the Supreme Being…. God gives to man the Soul or Intelligence, which exists before the body, and which he unites with the body emanating from the Deity of all spiritual beings” (p. 251). The Logos is also said to be the “Chief of Intelligence,” or Adam Kadmon (similar to one of the names on the Smith family tracing board, as it happens).

In the Book of Moses, the Son is the “Only Begotten” of the Father (Moses 4:1), the Arian understanding, and not, as the Westminster Confession says, “eternally begotten.”⁴² The passages that refer to him as “the same which was from the beginning” can be read in connection with the passage “Beloved and Chosen from the beginning” (Moses 4:2). A slight departure from the modalistic concept of God in the Book of Mormon, the Book of Moses does not endorse polytheism per se. Rather, it is an Arian defense of the unity of God and a thinly veiled Neoplatonic theodicy. Again, the Scottish Rite seems a near-perfect fit, for the Scottish Trinitarian is also instructed in the mystery of a “Son, or first Man Adam-Kadmon,” the offspring of the Supreme Being “who commenced the contest with the Powers of Evil, but, losing part of his panoply, of his Light, his Son and many souls born of the Light, who were devoured by the darkness, God sent to his assistance the living Spirit, or the Son of the First Man … or Jesus Christ.”⁴³ Indeed, in the Scottish Rite is something like the progressive doctrine of the Trinity that Smith would spring on the Saints late in the game, as we will see.

In May 1833, having just completed a first draft of his Inspired Version, Smith received another revelation, now LDS Doctrine and Covenants 93, a more blatant Neoplatonic utterance. It states that humanity preexisted “individually” with the Father.⁴⁴ “At the first organization in heaven,” Smith later wrote, “we were all present and saw the Saviour chosen, and appointed, and the plan of salvation made and we sanctioned it.”⁴⁵ “The Father and I are one,” it says, “the Father because he [the Father] gave me [the Son] of his fullness, and the Son because I was in the world and made flesh my tabernacle, and dwelt among the sons of men.” This is a Sabellian argument (93:3–4). Yet the Son is also “the Firstborn” of the Father, an Arian argument (93:21). In the final verses, a Neoplatonic argument appears: “Ye were also in the beginning with the Father; that which is Spirit, even the Spirit of truth…. For man is spirit. The elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably, receive a fullness of joy. The elements are the tabernacle of God; yea, man is the tabernacle of God” (93:23, 33, 35).

Smith’s radical ideas concerning an individual preexistence and multiplicity of gods gave impetus to much discussion and dissension. Not all early Mormon converts could grasp them. Some even found them troubling. Joseph Lee Robinson, an early convert, summed up the problem when he wrote: “Some elders said that the prophet Joseph Smith should have said that our spirits existed eternally with God, the question then arose, How is God the Father of our spirits?”⁴⁶ Orson Pratt explored the problems associated with the notion of an individual preexistence in depth. In an 1853 work entitled The Seer that expands on ideas in two of his earlier works, “The Absurdities of Immaterialism” and “The First Great Cause,” Pratt carved a middle road between immaterialist absolutism,⁴⁷ on the one hand, and materialist finitism, on the other. He speculates that the elements—atoms—existed independently, necessarily, and eternally; God merely organized them into countless spirit bodies. In response to Robinson and other Evangelical Mormons, Pratt argued in favor of the human soul as eternally begotten in an evolutionary sense.

Once again, the Scottish Rite seems to unlock the mystery. In the Knight of the Sun, the Twenty-eighth Degree, the “universal soul,” Pike explains, “was of extreme antiquity … the Universe, in its totality and in its parts … filled with intelligences, that might be regarded as so many emanations from the sovereign and universal intelligence.” The soul “was the vehicle, and, as it were, the envelop of the intelligence that attached itself to it, and could repose nowhere else. Without a soul there could be no intelligence.”⁴⁸ The context here is important to keep in mind: it concerns the planets as living souls and having intelligence; the Mormon understanding represents a creative departure rather than mere duplication (as we have seen over and over).

The year 1835 marks another Christological development, enshrined in a missionary pamphlet that Smith approved for the instruction and edification of Mormon missionaries, the Lectures on Faith. Boyd Kirkland argues that the Lectures on Faith “emphasized the complete separateness of the Father and the Son,” a development, in his view.⁴⁹ Likewise, Blake Ostler notes that pluralism in Mormon Christology appeared about the same time as the Lectures on Faith. As early as 1835—but not earlier, one assumes—“the persons of the Trinity were distinguished,” Ostler writes, and “the ultimate basis of reality was defined in pluralistic terms.”⁵⁰ By the early 1840s, however, the Lectures on Faith had been rendered essentially obsolete in many other details, or so the argument goes.⁵¹ Smith’s 1843 teaching that “the Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s” abnegated the Lectures on Faith.⁵² Consequently, several attempts have been made to distance Smith from the treatise.⁵³

In any event, the Lectures on Faith do not depart in any radical sense from the Book of Mormon and the Book of Moses. The characterization of the Father as “a spirit” in the Lectures on Faith is a facet of an earlier revelation that calls the Father “that which is Spirit, even the Spirit of truth.”⁵⁴ The Book of Mormon (Mosiah 3:5) and Doctrine and Covenants 93:4 term the Son a tabernacle of clay and flesh, respectively; the Father, by implication, is ethereal in nature. The Lectures on Faith also emphasize the oneness of God in no less than four of the seven chapters.⁵⁵ The immutability argument is repeated again and again in defense of the proposition that a God who does not change evokes faith. The concluding chapters, five through seven, contain references to the unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, “the great matchless, governing, and supreme power over all things, by whom all things were created and made … possess[ing] the same mind, the same wisdom, glory, power and fullness—filling all in all” (pp. 44, 48–49; see also pp. 62–63).⁵⁶ Not unlike the Book of Mormon, the Lectures on Faith imply that the Father is “spirit” and the Son “the flesh of God.”⁵⁷

In this case, the Christian Masonic agenda underlying nearly everything in the Book of Mormon provides the simplest explanation. The God of the Old Testament and of Judaic Masonry was Jesus, a spirit. He is the Father until he comes into the world and is clothed in flesh, a tangible body making him the Son. Father and Son are one and the same supreme Christian Masonic Knight foretold in scripture. Here, the message to women might be that the righteous men and women of the church, like the godhead, possess the same mind, the same wisdom, glory, power, and fullness, and so there is no fear of a male dictatorship. That the third member of the trinity, the Holy Ghost, is added to the mix may be meant to be seen as a female principle rather than of the female gender. Whether a female is among their number or not, that Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are meant to set the standard for governance of church and home seems clear.

In 1839 Smith officially denounced creation ex nihilo. “The Spirit of Man is not a created being; it existed from Eternity and will exist to eternity. Anything created cannot be eternal, and earth, water &c—all these had their existence in an elementary state from eternity.”⁵⁸ Ostler, who has published extensively on the subject of the Mormon God, admits that Smith’s ideas seem to be drawn from Christian Neoplatonism but notes that “ironically, both [the early Christian] apologists and Joseph Smith adopted identical statements to affirm diametrically opposed views.”⁵⁹ A host of scholars maintain that “between 1838 and 1844, Smith introduced the notion of an infinite lineal hierarchy of Gods.”⁶⁰ The Book of Abraham played an important role. The Father is said to “dwell in the midst of them all [the intelligences],” ruling both “in the heavens above, and in the earth beneath” (Abraham 3:18–19). The Father is supreme, at the center of things, a divine monism from which the cosmological plethora spilled out. Easily mistaken for mere polytheism, Smith’s literal translation of the Hebrew noun for God, elohim, as plural and, along with other Hebrew words with pluralistic connotations around this time, once again merely shores up his argument for the Son as the Father, the God of the Old Testament and of Judaic Masonry.⁶¹

The King Follett Discourse is often characterized, at least by LDS Mormons, as Smith’s greatest sermon.⁶² Ostler explains: “Joseph Smith’s concept of man culminated in April of 1844. In the King Follett Discourse, he presented a view of man unique to the Christian world and rarely matched in the history of thought for its positive characterization of man.”⁶³ The King Follett Discourse is anything but unique. Its basic premise, that humans can become like God, is as old as time itself, looking back to the anthropomorphism of bygone days.

In 1841 the biblical passage that says Christ did “all things that he had seen the Father do” caused Smith to speculate that “the Father took life unto himself precisely as Jesus did.”⁶⁴ In 1843 Smith received two revelations to confirm this, the first, in April, now LDS Doctrine and Covenants 130, reads: “The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s”; the second, in May, now LDS Doctrine and Covenants 131, makes the bold assertion that there “is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter.”⁶⁵ Brooke suggests that the second should be interpreted as an occult notion and thus consistent with Neoplatonism.⁶⁶ Ostler is surely right, however, to detect in the Mormon understanding of the Deity a Neoplatonism of flesh and bone—which is no Neoplatonism at all. Mormonism veers far from the Scottish Rite, too, which speaks eloquently of the soul returning to the God who gave it, the “restoration of all things” a purely spiritual reunion of man and his maker—of God man and man of God.

There may be a simpler explanation more germane to the Book of Mormon and the notion of Christ as the Father or God of the Old Testament: it could be a defense of Christian Masonry as the ancient and true priesthood order. To be sure, it is tempting to see Smith’s 1840 revelations as simply conflating the sacred and the secular,⁶⁷ immolating God’s transcendence in his immanence,⁶⁸ and thus verging on pantheism if not atheism.⁶⁹ Was Mormonism suddenly in danger of collapsing into materialism? With matter, not mind as the fundamental principle, was Mormon theology indistinguishable from anthropology, too? Certainly, but neither of these was really the question. That humans could now become gods because God the Father had once been a human being may have had more to do with filling a vacuum in heaven that Smith’s defense of Christian Masonry (Jesus as Jehovah) had created.⁷⁰ The real danger, however, seems to be the specter of a dead-level equality in heaven.

Although God the Father is said to be a former human being,⁷¹ and the faithful are to aspire to be future gods just like him, in no sense will they ever become his equal.⁷² One wonders whether the women of the church got their backs up here, for buried between the lines of this theological double-talk was more than a hint of patriarchal absolutism. Although women were to aspire to become priests just like their husbands, they should not assume to be equal to men. One thing is clear. No one quite knew what to make of any of this. A demographic shift in the church only made matters worse, a bevy of British converts from the radical Christian quarter who might indeed assume that their prophet had simply become an atheist without realizing it and was going to drag them down with him.

Acutely aware of the fact that his King Follett sermon failed to resolve the issue or satisfy his British-Mormon audience, Smith made another attempt in June, just days before his death, suggesting that God the Father only seemed supreme because he was the only member of the great pantheon with whom humanity had any dealings.⁷³ Even the Deity did not operate in a vacuum, nor was he allowed to behave as he pleased without catching hell. Smith also speculated that the unity of the Godhead was a matter of consensus or agreement—a view he supported using the Greek (p. 372). His contention that God the Father had a Father was perhaps the most ingenious, mysterious, and possibly unintentionally misleading of all his apologies for Christian Masonry: “If Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and John discovered that God the Father of Jesus Christ had a Father, you may suppose that He had a Father also. Where was there ever a son without a father? And where was there ever a father without first being a son? Whenever did a tree or anything spring into existence without a progenitor? And everything comes in this way…. Hence, if Jesus had a Father, can we not believe that He had a Father also?” (p. 373). Moreover, he made his case in terms new converts could not dispute: the authorized version of the Bible, as originally translated, taught that God the Father had a Father.⁷⁴ Revelation 1:6 was his proof text. It reads: “And hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father.” Smith declared unequivocally that the passage was “altogether correct in the translation” (p. 370). His sudden change of heart and unshakable faith in the original translation of the Bible is telling.

In 1833 Smith had seen fit to correct this same passage, probably because it contradicted his argument in the Book of Mormon for Jesus as the Father and thus God of the Old Testament. Adding another Father above the Father (or rather Father-Son) can be seen as a retreat of sorts into Trinitarianism rather than more brazen polytheism.⁷⁵ The Scottish Rite suggests as much, positing a purely spiritual essence above God the Father and his Son, what Pike calls the “Supreme Cause and God of Gods.”⁷⁶ Whatever Smith may have meant by this—a pantheon of God-the-Fathers reaching into infinity or something numerically in keeping with the Christian understanding of the three persons of the Trinity—it was a chink in the armor of the early Mormon defense of Christian Masonry as having the blessing of heaven, of reaching all the way back to a grand (Masonic) council in heaven where it was decided that Jesus would be Father and then Son to Jewish and then Christian Masonry.⁷⁷

More important, though, if seen as a thinly veiled defense of male veto power, whether the Holy Ghost may indeed be God the Mother seems unimportant (although it is in the Scottish Rite, too, as the necessity of a male and female principle in the creation of the world)⁷⁸ when one ponders the likely gender of Lucifer’s followers—lobbyists for an equal rights amendment to the divine rule of heaven that gets struck down, one-third of the heavenly hosts going down with it. Mother in heaven undoubtedly marched in lockstep with Father and Son (as was her place), trampling underfoot a demonic-inspired, Evangelical-feminist–like campaign for equality per se. The Father-above-the-Father idea as a thinly veiled discussion of patriarchal governance (of church and state) seems altogether amenable to a political interpretation: a petition of sorts to Congress, to the Supreme Court, to the president, perhaps, to take matters in hand and haul state legislatures on the carpet for their patriarchal abuses of power and infringements against the civil rights and liberties enshrined in the Constitution. The extermination order issued by the governor of Missouri and the failure of the federal government to intercede to protect the Mormons from the mob are cases in point. Only days after the God of Mormondom leaped from the pot and into the fire, according to Christian critics, Smith fell to his death from a two-story jail window after being mortally wounded by vigilantes—Governor Ford of Illinois failing to come to the rescue. That the King Follett sermons coincide with Smith’s presidential campaign also suggests that they were in the nature of a stump speech and a defense not of polytheism in heaven or on earth—nothing so democratic as that—but rather more veiled jeremiad that the federal government assert itself, exercise its patriarchal prerogative, and defend the Saints (as among America’s last and greatest admirers of the Republican-Masonic vision of the founding fathers) against an encroaching Evangelical liberalism that threatened to tear at the fabric of both home and homeland.