In the age of the Internet, it's become a frequent occurrence where a member of The Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints, will run across information on the Internet or elsewhere where they learn about the First Vision versions or other subjects related to the earliest concept of God in the LDS church. This can lead to a faith crisis and confusion among many LDS members. On this website I will attempt to deal with all the hard questions and issues which some Mormon apologists ignore, and instead I will tackle the most difficult issues like Joseph Smith's First Vision versions and Joseph Smith's more Trinitarian sounding Godhead language in the early stages of the development of LDS theology in the early 1830s.
What I will do in this website is solve the puzzle of the LDS Godhead. Over the years many LDS scholars and theologians have tried to make sense of Joseph Smith's teachings on the Godhead and what is found in the LDS Scriptures produced by Joseph Smith from the years of 1829 to 1844. Many LDS members have had questions such as, "Why does Jesus call himself the Father and Son in the Book of Mormon? Why does Mosiah 15:1-5 teach that Jesus is the "Father and the Son" and he is called the Son because he was birthed as a body of Flesh? Why does the first First Vision version of 1832 only mention Jesus appearing to Joseph Smith in the Grove? Why did Joseph Smith not actually teach that God the Father was a separate God from Jesus until the 1840s?
Why did Joseph Smith edit and publish as scripture the The Lectures on Faith (published in 1835), with the Fifth Lecture stating that God the Father is a "personage of spirit" (rather than a body of flesh and bones)? Why does Lecture 5 seem to contradict D&C 130:22? Why did Joseph Smith change Luke 22 in his Bible translation to JST Luke 10:23? These are just a few of the questions that come up that I will address in this website.
The main Godhead question that comes up is: did Joseph Smith think Jesus and the Father were the same person, called Modalism: the doctrine that the Godhead is one person performing three roles like an actor playing a father or son but being the same person? Or was Joseph Smith a type of Trinitarian (as Clyde Ford argues) in the early stages of the development of LDS theology?
Are non-LDS scholars like Dan Vogel and Melodie Charles correct that Joseph Smith was a Modalist early on prior to 1838? Or is non-LDS scholar Ronald V. Huggins correct that Joseph Smith was a Swedenborgian Expansionist? For more details of this perspective see the summarization of this view at this site here.
All of these questions that LDS members often have, will be answered on this website in a way that is pro-LDS yet also pro-Protestant, as we shall see that early Mormonism was basically a Protestant sect in regards to most of its doctrines.
I will be presenting an alternative theory regarding the LDS Godhead that I believe answers all these questions above and resolves all the disjointed pieces of the puzzle so to speak by providing a coherent Godhead theology: that makes sense of all of the LDS Standard Works (from the Bible to the Book of Mormon to even the pre-1900 Doctrine and Covenants that contained the Lectures on Faith as the official LDS doctrine).
In the end, I will demonstrate that rather than Joseph Smith believing that the Father and Son were the same person or one personality (Modalism), I will instead show that it's more likely that Smith always distinguished the Father and Son as two separate persons with different and distinct personalities as separate individuals but that Smith was also a strict monotheist in the beginning stages of Mormonism; and most of Mormon Scripture that Joseph Smith produced was strictly monotheist; and the earliest Mormon Godhead can be best described as a heterodox version of the traditional Catholic and Protestant Trinity. This is easily proven objectively if one simply reads an early edition of the Doctrine and Covenants when the doctrine of that book of scripture was The Lectures on Faith which clearly teach a heterodox Trinity.
This website will also explain that Joseph Smith's later theological innovations in the 1840s did not actually stray too far from his original Trinitarian Godhead of the 1830s. For example, I used to think that the 1835 edition of the 5th Lecture on Faith contradicted Smith's later teachings on the Godhead in the 1840s; but after years of studying biblical scholarship I began to realize that Joseph Smith, either consciously or subconsciously, was producing scriptures that aligned with what many modern Christian scholars today believe the New Testament actually teaches about God. In other words, Smith describing the Father as a personage of spirit in Lecture 5, is something I no longer see as a problem or a contradiction to Smith's later teaching in the 1840s that God the Father has a body, but actually a Book of Mormon believer can actually see it as a kind of "faith promoting" understanding of the New Testament language of the nature of God's pneuma, which I will explain in more detail on this website.
My theory regarding solving the puzzle of the LDS Godhead, also makes sense of the various versions of the First Vision and even explains why Joseph Smith would have only mentioned seeing Jesus in the 1832 First Vision version, even if he thought (which I think he did) that Jesus and the God Father were two separate personages as early as 1830.
My overall goal is to solve a puzzle so to speak, and show the LDS reader and other Smith-Rigdon Restoration believers, a way to make sense of all the passages about the Godhead in LDS Restoration Scripture, in a way that is as respectful to my Mormon Pioneer heritage; and to be as testimony affirming and faith promoting as possible for those who choose to have faith but also want things to make sense.
This is not an official website of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. All of the content on this website is my own personal perspective as speculative theology and is not meant to call into question or replace the official doctrines of the LDS Church. This is only intended as an intellectual experiment on my part in order to solve these issues and answer questions like the one's above in order to help other LDS Restoration believers. My overall goal is to help others better sustain their loyalty to the their LDS Restoration heritage and find value in LDS Scripture and theology.
For me at least, I have solved all the riddles and seeming contradictions regarding the Godhead as found in all of Joseph Smith's teachings and his scriptural productions. I have formed an understanding of the Godhead that makes sense of all LDS Scripture. I have produced a complete and coherent Godhead theology which is satisfying and fulfilling for me personally after growing up in the LDS Tradition with Mormon Pioneer heritage and developing an interest in studying the Bible ever since my LDS Mission in the 1990s.
With my Godhead theory, I don't have to ignore or discount the original doctrine of the Lectures on Faith that were bound in scripture, before they were removed from the Scripture Canon in 1921; nor do I have to ignore or discount the King Follett Discourse, etc. For I have formed a Godhead theology that makes sense of everything that Joseph Smith said or scripturally produced, thus forming a coherent and consistent LDS Godhead theology.
Another reason for this website is that over the last twenty years I have noticed the LDS Church move in the direction of trying to appear to be more "mainstream Christian." A 2018 CNN article covers this by stating (emphasis added):
Patrick Mason, a religion professor and chair of Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University, said there are a couple of reasons why the church wants to create a clear separation between itself and the word Mormon.
“Mormon is a long-standing nickname for the church and for the movement, but the church leadership has always been concerned that the nickname has obscured the fundamentally Christian nature of the church and the religion,” Mason told CNN. “Especially since they’re so many people who’ve criticized the church and have done so historically for not being Christian or orthodoxly Christian. The church leadership really wants to emphasize the fact that it is a Christian church.”
Mason said the word Mormon has been used to describe not just the members of the church, but it’s also been used more broadly to include members of other splinter groups that broke away from the mainstream church.
“That includes what are now known as the fundamentalists, which are the polygamists,” Mason said. “For more than 100 years, the mainstream LDS church has gone to great pains to distance itself from those who practice polygamy. It doesn’t want to have any confusion there between those two groups.”
In her 2022 article Oh, now I get it, author Jana Riess writes:
During the last four years, the president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has introduced a host of changes that have made the church a little more mainstream, a little less weird.
We now attend church for two hours a week instead of three.
We’ve eliminated quaint outdoor theatrical pageants.
We no longer require young couples who marry in weddings outside the temple to wait an entire year before they can be sealed inside the temple. This means they’re free to have celebrations that involve non-Mormon family members and friends before they engage in smaller, more private temple rituals. ...
... And of course, we don’t talk about becoming gods of our own planets someday, or any of the more esoteric theological teachings of our past. Leaders nowadays rarely exhort us about imminent cataclysms — we don’t speculate openly about how we’re living in the end times, talk about the latest Antichrist who’s arisen in geopolitics or require members to store two years’ worth of food in preparation for the apocalypse.
Mostly we emphasize being good people who love our families, help our communities and strive to do right by Jesus Christ, our savior.
We’re boring, and most Mormons like it that way.
Except that we don’t call ourselves Mormon anymore. We’re members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (We’re so boring, in fact, we’ve put time and thought into insisting in our official style guide that the definite article that begins the denomination’s name be capitalized.
I have noticed the same thing and others have as well, for example see the podcast Mormonism Embracing Evangelicalism? w/ Rebecca Bibliotheca, where they explain how the Mormon Church seems to be wanting to sound and appear more like Protestant/Evangelical churches.
So this confirms what I have been noticing myself: an attempt to to fit in with Orthodox Christianity which believes in the Trinitarian doctrine and being saved by grace.
I think this transition to become more mainstream Christian may also be because the LDS Church leaders want to join the cultural community of other Christians as a united front against the rise of politically Far-Leftist ideologies which reject Conservative Christian values.
When I grew up LDS in the 1990s, this attempt to appear more mainstream Christian was not the case. For example, we were proud to call ourselves "Mormon." We often pointed out how we were different from other types of Christians in many ways. In 1998, in referring to the Christ of mainstream Christendom, LDS Church President Gordon Hinkley said "The traditional Christ of whom they speak is not the Christ of whom I speak." When I was a child, mass produced Book of Mormons had pictures in the inside cover and on one page there was a picture of Jesus and on the opposite side of the page was a picture of Joseph Smith. LDS scholars were at risk of being disciplined and even excommunicated for saying anything critical of Joseph Smith. All of that has changed in the last twenty years (as of 2025). Now, you even have a former LDS institute director Anthony Sweat painting images of Joseph Smith using a hat and seer stone and a painting called Purgatory showing Emma standing over him in defiance of the revelation on plural marriage in D&C 132, which Smith holds in his hands with his head held down as he's slumped over as if in submission to Emma. I see this as a major shift and change in visual representation, from the virile and commanding Joseph Smith in images I grew up with to a softer, submissive, version of Smith as if he had sinned and is seeking forgiveness from Emma. This imagery aligns with the new point of view of a growing number of LDS members today who think that polygamy was never inspired nor moral.
Attending a Deseret Bookstore I began to notice in the late 2010s that all of the imagery had changed. For example, the masculine paintings by Arnold Friberg of Nephite warriors looking like Viking warriors which I grew up with in the 1990s, was gone and replaced with more mainstream Christian art. Friberg's paintings were nowhere to be seen and regulated to small baseball card size packets. The hyper masculine images of Joseph Smith and Viking-looking Nephites from my youth has clearly been scrubbed and in its place now I see a more hyper focus on Jesus, which has taken center stage.
One of the most distinguishing features of LDS Christianity up until just recently, was that those who convert to the LDS Church were thought to be the literal blood of Ephraim, in particular those of Scandinavian, German and British decent. This was taught in early Mormonism with Sunday School Lessons by the Genealogy Society teaching about the "hardy Vikings." All this has been downplayed and mostly ignored in recent years: and now which tribe you are from is interpreted culturally and is taught more as meaning one is only adopted "spiritually" into the tribe of Ephraim.
Former LDS President Nelson had declared that using the term "Mormon" is basically an unholy act. The use of the word grace exploded in LDS Conference Talks in the 2010s and teachings on grace in general has been taught in ways never heard of when I was an LDS youth. The emphasis on Christ has increased in the LDS Church in just the last ten years. The new hymnals in 2025 are all Christ focused like in any other Protestant sect. Google maps now shows LDS Churches with a cross rather than an icon of Moroni as was used previously.
Many members do not realize it but for anyone who has been inactive for a time and attended other Christian churches other than the LDS Church, they would see that there has been major changes in the LDS Church in the last 20 years. Almost every major thing that distinguished the LDS Church from other mainline Christian churches, has been dissipating and is far less potent than before. The LDS Church is no longer affiliated with the Boy Scouts of America and has not replaced that program with anything truly comparable. The three hour block meetings have been reduced to two hours which mirrors a typical Sunday service in other Christian churches. Even the LDS temple endowment has been stripped of many of its more unique Nauvoo era rituals and ideas that were largely based in Freemasonry and ideas based on plural marriage when it used to be practiced in temples before the 1900s; all of which has been removed or modified and streamlined to fit a more traditional mainstream monogamy-focused more traditional Christian theology. A Deseret New article points out that a 2011 poll show most LDS members believe that polygamy is an immoral practice (despite many LDS members having ancestors who practiced polygamy).
So in the spirit of this ongoing attempt to streamline the LDS Church to become more aligned with other Christians in order to form a united front against anti-Christian ideologies, this website is also offering a way to further aid in that ongoing growth and development of the LDS Church aligning more with the traditional Christian churches. For I provide a way to think of the LDS Godhead which is much more inline with mainstream Christianity; as well as a way to interpret LDS Scripture wherein one is saved by grace alone through the merits of Christ as the Book of Mormon itself teaches. So what this website does is basically present a kind of Protestant version of Mormonism, which is what the earliest Mormon Scripture taught: a more Protestant theology.
This does not mean that if someone is a member of the Brighamite LDS Church, they have to change their mind and adopt a more Protestant version of Mormonism. This website is designed so that someone can remain an active LDS member while they just absorb the content of this website as a curiosity and just pick and choose what they want to apply or use in their own Mormon beliefs and practice. For example, such a member may continue to go through the motions of being an active LDS member but by understanding the original Mormon Godhead and the original doctrine of grace, perhaps they experience less shame and guilt or scrupleosity.
This site is also meant to be useful for those who were raised Mormon or spent many years as a Mormon and are seeking to adapt to non-mormon Christian communities; for this site will help them adapt to the Orthodox Creeds of traditional Christianity by showing how the LDS Scriptures they are most familiar with, actually teach something very similar to what most Protestant Churches' teach about the Godhead and Grace, etc.
Going back to the LDS Church trying to appear more like a mainstream Christian Church. Some of the major criticisms from other Christians of the current "Brighamite" LDS Godhead, are resolved with my Godhead theory on this website. For example, many Christians disagree that Jesus and Satan are brothers which is taught in some versions of LDS theology in the Brighamite sect. In my view, this is actually not necessary to believe in even as a Mormon, since the "spirit birth" idea is not actually scriptural nor was it taught by Joseph Smith. So the criticism coming from other Christians that LDS theology teaches that Jesus is a literal son of another God, i.e. he was literally birthed as a spirit baby, can be disclaimed as not found in LDS Scripture nor in the teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith. So that criticism by other Christians can be easily resolved by arguing it was not official LDS doctrine to begin with.
As to the criticism from other Christians that LDS theology rejects the belief in an ultimate Supreme Being, and instead teaches a plurality of Gods as a regression of endless Gods with no beginning or end; with my Godhead theory, there is a first God over all other gods, similar to what the Protestant Christian theologian Michael Heiser teaches. So that in my Godhead theory, there is not an endless regression of Gods but instead one original first God.
The reason a restoration of the original monotheistic LDS Godhead is important, is because Brighamite Mormons will always have difficulty fitting into traditional Orthodox Christianity with this concept of there not being a Supreme Being (after removing the second Lecture on Faith from the original LDS Canon in 1921). For example, in the video link here (posted by the Eastern Orthodox Christian named Jimbob on October 2, 2025), Jimbob does a good job critiquing the incoherence of the concept of the Brighamite Father God whose status of divinity is explained by the Mormon in the video as a mere position or office; and that there are other grandfather Gods above that God; and that the Gods were once humans. Jimbob rightfully shows there this Theology of an infinite regress of endless transitioning humans-to-Gods leads to there being the idea that there was a time when there was no God, only mankind or eternal matter or lesser intelligences, and thus no Supreme Being! In other words, if all the LDS deities progressed to earn the status and office of a deity after first being humans, then there's essentially no Supreme Being, no original Deity that grounds all of existence. In this website I will be arguing that original Mormonism did not teach this idea of a regressive infinite chain of grandfather Gods, but instead there was in fact one Supreme Being or a first God.
In the original LDS Church doctrine on the Godhead, the first God, as an independent omnipresent supreme power, did not need not have a wife or an earthly body based on my reconstruction of the original LDS Godhead. For the original Doctrine of the Lectures on Faith make it clear that the first Deity, through which all other holy beings come into existence, is an omnipresent supreme being.
Asto the LDS teaching that Jehovah as a personage of glory, had a body and a wife, there is sufficient non-LDS biblical scholarship on Jehovah's body in the Old Testament / Hebrew Bible, where Jehovah did in fact have a wife or consort. This biblical scholarship can be used to defend LDS theology from the authority of the Bible itself. For example, following are books and articles by non-LDS academic biblical scholars (who hold the consensus view among biblical scholars), that the God Jehovah of the Old Testament had a body (which aligns with LDS theology on Jehovah's embodiment):
- The Embodied God: Seeing the Divine in Luke-Acts and the Early Church by Brittany E. Wilson. Wilson challenges the prevalent view of a disembodied God by arguing that early Jews and Christians often envisioned God as having a visible form prior to Jesus being born on earth.
Furthermore, the LDS doctrine that men can become like God can be defended with an appeal to the doctrine of theosis (or deification) as taught in the Eastern Orthodox Church (one of the largest Christian denominations which is currently growing in popularity among mainstream Christians).
Now if the LDS member is content with their view of the the Godhead as taught by the current LDS leaders, that is fine and I'm not advocating they change their mind if they don't want to or their current beliefs work for them. But it's worth mentioning that with my Godhead theology in this website, the LDS member can form a view of God much more in line with traditional mainstream Christianity so that they are less at odds with their Christian neighbors theologically.
Other Book of Mormon churches have already gone down this route, so what this website does is provide a way for LDS members, and even future LDS leaders, to embrace a similar view on the Godhead as the one explained on this website, in order to better fit in with mainstream Christianity.
This website also shows LDS members that the Lectures on Faith were the original LDS doctrine bound in scripture with Joseph Smith even re-canonizing them just before he died in 1844, so that LDS members can realize that if their Top Leaders ever decided to put them back into the LDS Canon of Scripture, they'd have a more coherent theology, which aligns better with mainstream Christianity.
Furthermore, since Joseph Smith himself never attempted to canonize what later became D&C 132 (the polygamy revelation), then if the LDS Church ever did decide to re-canonize the Lectures on Faith and the 1835 edition of D&C 101 on monogamy, the LDS Church could simply remove D&C 132 from the cannon; and they would have authoritative support for this: given the fact that Joseph Smith did not canonize or publicly publish D&C 132; instead, he did re-canonize the 1835 D&C 101 and the Lectures on Faith just before he died in 1844. The LDS Church could thus very easily align itself even further with the mainstream Christian community by returning to the original theological doctrines bound in the original LDS Scripture Cannon. I think the LDS Church has already been slowly moving in this direction ever since the Church's abandonment of plural marriage in the early 1900s.
Whether or not the LDS Church ever decides to go down this road (discussed above), this website and the Godhead theology herein, can provide a way for LDS members to align their thinking more with other Christians who focus on there being only one God and their emphasis on the practice of monogamy.
Note that this does not mean disparaging anyone's Mormon Pioneer ancestors who practiced plural marriage (polygyny), but instead seeing those early polygamist Mormons as engaged in a social experiment of creating a tribal identity and birthing the main body of the LDS membership; just as the polygamist Abraham began the process of generating the Jewish people. But just as this originally ethnic religion, evolved through the Pauline gospel into a form of apocalyptic Judaism called Christianity and became a more universal faith transcending tribe and ethnicity; so too, "Mormonism" can be thought of as beginning as a more tribal religion through the practice of mostly European LDS members practicing polygamy, but has now become a more universalist faith expanding into all countries, ethnicities and nationalities. So that the LDS Church could further evolve and expand by returning to its original Trinitarian monotheistic beginnings.
See the Table of Contents to the right of the main page of this website to continue reading about my LDS Godhead theory. Note that each link under the Table of Contents are presented as chapters. Or click here to go to Part 1 of my Godhead Theory.