In this introductory post, I'm going lay out a case for a more Protestant type Trinitarian version of the LDS Godhead in early LDS scripture. For an orthodox Brighamite/LDS member this may seem farfetched, but if they are open-minded and patient enough to examine the evidence as I lay out my case, they will see that my Godhead theory below best fits all of the "puzzle pieces" in the LDS Scriptures.
What I will be explaining is that the original LDS Godhead is much closer to the Orthodox Trinity of the Nicene Creed than previously thought. The first Mormon Trinity can be described as a heterodox or alternative Trinity, but Trinitarian nonetheless. In other words, the early Mormon (LDS) Trinity is very similar to the ideas found in the Nicene Creed. I will argue that regardless of what Joseph Smith was thinking in his mind when he was dictating early LDS scriptures, what is clear is that his theology fits very closely with what I consider to be the understanding of the Godhead among the authors of the New Testament. One begins to see this when one reads for example the late Protestant scholar Michael Heiser on the Two Powers and the Monogene (see the summary here and videos here, here and here), as well as Daniel Boyarin's video here on the subject, and earlier Protestant theologians like Ethan Smith, etc.
To be clear, what I will be presenting below does not fit the current LDS doctrine of the Godhead, which was basically formed by James Talmage in the 1900s. Instead, I will be presenting the position that Joseph Smith was a heterodox or alternative Trinitarian, which aligns with the conclusions of other scholars of early Mormon theology like the non-LDS scholar Clyde D. Ford's article here and Ronald Huggin's article. I will only be adding additional insights to their excellent scholarship on the early Mormon Trinity. What I will be adding is an emphasis on the horticultural or planting metaphors in the New Testament, in order to show that the New Testament is really talking about the propagation of God's divine seed (genus); first with the firstborn divine genus of Christ and then through Christians who receive the divinizing seed of Christ.
First of all, LDS-Christianity aligns with the Nicene Creed in that the Book of Mormon (first published in 1830), just like in the Nicene Creed, emphasizes that Jesus is the One Eternal God. Secondly, when the Nicene Creed describes the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as one divine substance, being, or essence (homoousion), that actually aligns with the original LDS doctrine in The Lectures on Faith (published in 1835 and republished by Smith in 1844): that teach that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one in their shared divine splendorous Fullness; wherein the single monotheistic Deity of the Lectures -- as the one and only supreme being -- is described as an omnipresent fluid substance permeating all things and filling up certain personages with God's divine fulness (as basically Being itself). Thirdly, this Trinitarian Godhead is also corroborated in Joseph Smith's Translation of the Bible, for example see the LDS Book of Moses 1: 3, 6, 32-33. And JST Luke 10:23 discussed here.
The theology of the Lectures on Faith is almost identical to the Eastern Orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, which is briefly explained in the video The Trinity Explained, Monarchy of the Father by Val Orthodox. For we read right off the bat in the 2nd Lecture the following:
2 We here observe that God is the only supreme governor, and independent being, in whom all fulness and perfection dwells; who is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient; without beginning of days or end of life; and that in him every good gift, and every good principle dwells; and that he is the Father of lights ...,
Joseph Smith edited and approved of these Lectures as LDS Doctrine in 1835, and again in 1844, which present a monarchial monotheist Trinitarian doctrine.
In the 5th Lecture, the Father and Son share the same essence, which the 5th Lecture calls the divine "fullness" and this shared essence or fullness is called the Holy Spirit which is described as an outpouring infilling spiritual substance (also called the Mind of the single Deity). In other words, the Father and Son (Jesus) are personages (forms) composed or constituted by one omnipresent divine nature or substance called God's Spirit (or Mind): that grounds the personages of the Godhead as one God. In other words, the one omnipresent divine governing power, the Father of lights, (described in Lecture 2) is an all-filling light, glory, and intelligence (see D&C 88), as well as a "personage of spirit" (Lec. 5) in the form of Father-Jehovah. As we can see, just like in the short video The Trinity Explained, Monarchy of the Father by Val Orthodox, Smith's original Godhead is basically about a monarchial Father God from which proceeds the the Holy Spirit and the Son begotten of the Father.
A Brief Interlude on The Word Pneuma:
In the New Testament, the word pneuma in the original Greek is often the translated into the English word "spirit." Instead of typing out the word pneuma, I will instead type out "nooma" for ease of reading, for nooma is how you pronounce the Greek word pneuma. The word nooma literally means wind or breath, but in the New Testament the word nooma signifies an invisible omnipresent fluid material substance, which like the wind can flow anywhere and like a liquid can be literally poured into a person. This is explained explained in the Mind Matters podcast episode here.
I cover the word nooma in more detail in my post here. In brief, nooma is the fluid material energy through which God emanates and infuses nature and humanity with divine power, intelligence and luminous glory. To learn more about the meaning of nooma I recommend this video here.
It is through God's fluid nooma that Christ pours his divine immortal genes into his disciples, making it so they can resurrect from the dead into a new kind of body, a noomatic body.
Modern biblical scholarship has shown that what Paul means by "Christ in you" is that God's spirit (nooma), containing the mind of Christ and the donated divine seed/gene of Christ, literally fills up or is poured into one's body, as a kind of liquid substance or spirit-matter or material spirit: literally filling up a person and saturating them in the divine fluid substance; and this same noomatic substance fills up and sustains or grounds the existence of all of the Cosmos and forms all the Divine Beings in the heavens in Jehovah's Divine Family; so that when Paul says Christians will become "holy ones" (saints) and shine like the stars, he is referring to them sharing in the same divine substance that Christ is composed of: as Christians are adopted into the Divine Family of divine beings (including angels: meaning messengers) that are composed of this same noomatic substance. This gives more meaning to the union of the Father and Son in the Nicene Creed, explaining how they are two distinct persons yet the same being or substance.
To understand all of the references to Christ as light and Christians being told to shine like stars in the New Testament, see the article "So Shall Your Seed Be" by David A. Burnett. As Burnett explains that for Paul the planetary bodies and the stars in the sky are composed of nooma and so are the Divine Beings in God's Divine Council or Heavenly Family. So the concept of deification or theosis, for Paul means that the Christian receives the noomatic nature of Christ; which is meant to literally convey the idea that the same noomatic substance that sustains and fuels the stars in the skies to make them shine, also makes the Sons of God in the heavens shine with glory, and will likewise make Christians with future resurrected noomatic bodies also shine with glory. This is why Paul tells his divinized holy ones that they will be so exalted that they will even judge angels! This is all because Christians were implanted with the nooma of Christ that contains the divine seed/gene so that Christians literally "partake of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4).
The book Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul: Material Spirit by Troel Engberg-Pedersen, explains this concept of the nooma and Paul's theology in more detail. In brief, Engberg-Pedersen argues that the Apostle Paul utilized a lot of the philosophy of Stoicism in describing what it means to have "Christ in you" or "to be in Christ." For example, the essay Life and Death in the Body of Christ by Eric Studt, S.J. explains the following on page 3-5:
According to the Stoic cosmology, pneuma (spirit) and nous (mind) are two words for the same reality.[9] The same pneuma [nooma] that exists in Christ, then, animates believers and gives them access to the divine mind. This last point is essential: believers have a sharing with the risen Christ in the one divine pneuma.
[nooma] [10]. ....
... If we are to take the Stoic reading of Paul’s use of pneuma seriously, we see that “the body of Christ” is not a metaphor in Paul, but a physical entity. Since pneuma is a bodily substance, the body of Christ is likewise a real body made up of a single substance.[12] ...
... Paul describes the transformation that the body will undergo at Christ’s coming. Paul’s contrasts two kinds of bodies in 15:45: “‘The first man, Adam, became a living being’; the last Adam [i.e., Christ] became a life-giving pneuma.”[13] The first Adam is representative of the human being without God’s pneuma. A few verses later, Paul explains why the distinction between the two kinds of bodies is important: “Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven” (49). The pericope continues with: “For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will all be changed” (52). The transformation will be from perishability to imperishability, from mortality to immortality. The triumph of the pneumatic, heavenly Adam over the fleshly Adam is the triumph of life over death, the triumph of the divine pneuma over the anthropological pneuma of the flesh. It is not the triumph of pneuma over body, but of one kind of body over another (53).[14]
Note that this explains the LDS Lectures on Faith, where in the 5th and 7th Lecture, Joseph Smith explains that the Father and Son are united by the same Divine Spirit or Mind; and the same Divine Spirit or Mind as divine fulness also joins Christians to the Godhead so that they partake of the divine nature.
So what Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon did in composing and editing the 5th Lecture, is they intuited this concept of the material nooma as a divine substance unifying the Father and Son as their shared nature and splendor (glory); as they are one being as the one Deity as one Godhead as one shared divine nature called Mind or Spirit in Lecture 5.
When Jesus asks in the New Testament for God (the Father) to make Christians one with him as he is one with the Father, Lecture 5 and 7 explain this as basically Christians being filled with the same noomatic "fulness" that unites the Father-Jehovah and Jesus; which aligns with the Eastern Orthodox Christian doctrine of theosis or deification.
The Lectures and the Nicene Creed
So the LDS doctrine of the Lectures on Faith match the Nicene Creed, but just go into more detail explaining how Jesus and the Father-Jehovah are one divine substance. The Lectures, like the Nicene Creed, also emphasize the distinct personhood of the Son from the Father, by describing the Godhead as two personages that basically look exactly alike but are separate and distinct in that one is a "personage spirit" (the Father) and the other, Jesus, is a "personage of tabernacle/flesh." This aligns with Michael Heiser's biblical scholarship on how Jehovah appeared in the spiritual form of a man in the Old Testament and that same "bodily imagery" is the image of the future earthborn Jesus (which I discuss in more detail here).
I put together the following illustration to help visualize the ideas about the Godhead in the 2nd and 5th Lectures on Faith:
The images of Jesus are from here
Note that in the illustration above, on the bottom right side of the visual, I refer to "Christians as the sperma/seed of God," which I explain in another blog post titled: How God's "Seed" (Sperma) Produces A New Holy Species like a Bright Garden of Glowing Fruit.
Smith and Rigdon also intuited that Jesus and the Father-Jehovah are of the same kind or gene, in that the Son is a duplicate image (as the exact mirror image of the Father). Michael Heiser would go on to later explain what Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon were intuiting a century later in the 2000s, by arguing that Jesus is the Unique Gene or Monogene of Father-Jehovah. Meaning that some Jews had hypothesized that there were Two Powers in Heaven and that the invisible God had personified himself in theophanies in Old Testament times by appearing in the image of a human-like form as Father-Jehovah on earth, and this form was the chosen form of God (see podcast 98 – Dr. Michael Heiser on Old Testament binitarianism and the November 2009 video How the New Testament Writers Communicated OT Theology with a Focus on Jesus by Michael Heiser).
Michael Heiser basically explains that Father-Jehovah appeared in this human-like form in Old Testament times as the First Power (what I interpret as the form of Father-Jehovah as the genus/gene of God in a pre-Jesus, human-like form). Then in the New Testament, Jesus was the Second Power manifest in human form as the only "unique genus/gene" of Father-Jehovah as the monogene (which I explain in more detail here).
So that while there were Two Powers there was only one God: in that the Father-Jehovah was "species unique” (as Heiser puts it), as in a "one of a kind/genus" in the Divine Council of Divine Beings.
What I will be arguing in detail below is that Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon intuited all of this early on in the 1830s and published these ideas in their own way in the Book of Moses in 1830 and in the Lectures on Faith in 1835.
So that what I will be demonstrating on this site is that a careful study of the original LDS Godhead is actually a very creative and clever way of explaining the Trinitarian doctrine of the Nicene Creed; so that the original LDS Trinity is closer to traditional orthodox Nicene Christianity than previously thought. For me this means that LDS Christians are in fact theologically traditional Nicene Christians when it comes to the actual original doctrine of the Lectures on Faith and the Godhead theology presented in the Mormon Scriptures that Joseph Smith had personally edited and published just before he died in 1844. In other words, despite what Joseph Smith had been speculating on regarding the Godhead in the 1840s, what he actually published as canonized Scripture in 1844 (just before he died) had remained strictly monotheist Trinitarian doctrine; for he did not publish D&C 132 or the Book of Abraham as scripture in the canon; but instead, in 1844 Smith republished the 1835 D&C section 101 on "monogamy only" and republished the Lectures on Faith as the official doctrine on the Godhead that was made official and authoritative Church doctrine and even bound it in Scripture as Canonized Doctrine for the whole LDS Church.
A core doctrine of the Catholic and Protestant Trinitarian Creed is that Jesus is one person with two natures—being fully divine and fully human—without these natures being mixed, changed, or divided. Jesus is thus the Son of God and eternally one with the Father in his divinity; this "hypostatic union" applies to the incarnate Son, who is God the Son with a human nature as one person. This supernatural union allows the one person of Christ to act as both God and man, with God the Father remaining distinct from the Son in the Nicene Trinity. In this website on the original LDS Trinity, we will see that early LDS doctrine came to the same conclusions by teaching that the Son (Christ) was also fully human and fully divine, as a distinct person from the Father, with Christ having a human nature and divine nature (being at one with the Father in substance/fulness yet being his own separate person, being human as well as divine); as the Lectures make it clear that the Father and Son share the same fulness, Spirit/Mind (or omnipresent Spirit/Being) and are the exact image of each other. So that their union as one God and being, is due to them sharing the same divine fulness or divine substance, as well as being the exact image of each other.
I interpret the meaning of Jesus being described as the exact image of the Father in the Fifth Lecture as meaning Jesus is an exact duplicate copy of the Father's divine genome. Note that this concept of the heavenly genome of the Father being duplicated and imprinted into the human born Jesus (making Jesus a twin duplicate of the Father's divine genome) is not specifically taught in LDS Scripture or in the teachings of the LDS prophets and apostles, but is my own interpretation; which I think best fits all the data on the LDS Godhead. In other words, my "Twin Gene Theory" if you will, is not directly stated in for example the Lectures on Faith or Book of Mormon, but in my view it is clearly implied in all of LDS Scripture.
But regardless of whether or not my "twin genome" or a duplicate genome interpretation is accurate or not, what will become clear on this website is that the original Godhead in the LDS Church aligns with the Nicene Creed on the Father and Son sharing the same divine substance. So that even if one disagrees with my Twin Gene Theory, I do not think one can ignore or reject the clear evidence that the original doctrine of the LDS Lectures on Faith clearly teach that the Father and Son are the same divine substance: which is explained in the language of their shared being as one omnipresent mind as a divine fullness emanating from the one divine nature or being of the monotheist Supreme Being: which fullness fills all in all as an omnipresent divine substance, so that the personages of the Father and Son are said to be constituted by the same Divine Substance that is described as the omnipresent Divine Mind or Divine Fullness.
What I have done is added to the language that Sidney Rigdon and Joseph Smith used in the Lectures on Faith and combined those ideas with Michael Heiser's scholarship on the Two Powers and Jesus as the unique gene or monogene. So that not only are the Father and Son two separate and distinct personages, but there being only one deity or supreme being, because they share the same divine fulness (nooma); but I have added my own current opinion that Jesus is an expanded duplicate copy of the Father's divine genome as the monogene. I will explain this in more detail below in this post. But again, even if I am incorrect about this duplicate genome theory, the main idea of this website is that the original LDS Godhead matches the Nicene Creed more closely than previous thought.
So to put it succinctly, when one reads the original LDS Scriptures and the original doctrine and "catechism" of the the Lectures on Faith, they will see that the Father and Son share the same substance called the Mind (Spirit) or fullness of the one Deity, which aligns with the Nicene Creed.
What is unique about the original LDS Trinity is that Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon, in my opinion solved the riddle of why Yahweh/Jehovah in the Old Testament is presented as an anthropomorphic (human-like bodily) personage. There were various theories regarding the appearance of Jehovah in bodily form in Christian circles back then and today. The unique contributions of Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon, is that Smith, beginning with his dictation of the Book of Mormon, formulated a point of view that combined all of the Trinitarian theologies of the day and Smith and Rigdon then together clarified things further after their reading and contemplative study of the Old Testament in 1831; and in doing so they anticipated the Two Powers theory which would later be covered by theologians like Michael Heiser.
The uniqueness of Joseph Smith's Trinity (as expressed in the Book of Mormon and the Lectures on Faith), is that Smith identities the personage of Jehovah in the Old Testament as the exact mirror image of the personage of the future earthborn Jesus himself; but because Jesus had not been born yet in Old Testament times, in Smith's scriptures he dictated, during the Old Testament times Smith basically explains that the Father-Jehovah (as the one Deity/Supreme Being), being all-knowing, omnisciently foresaw the future form of the not yet born earthborn Jesus, and then the one Deity of Lecture 2 formed for himself a bodily image or "personage of spirit" composed of noomatic-spirit (the divine substance) as the bodily form God appears as in the Old Testament; so that when God appeared in a human-like bodily form in the Old Testament, it was a noomatic form that looked exactly like the not yet born Jesus of Nazareth.
Joseph's scriptures then explain that Father-Jehovah then basically chose to duplicate his divine image by forming the earthborn body of Jesus as the exact image of the Father-Jehovah. This is what the Fifth Lecture clearly teaches. The Lectures on Faith also indirectly teach that the omnipresent Supreme Being, the Deity of Lecture 2, formed for himself a "personage of spirit/nooma" (or a spiritual body), which was formed based on the Deity foreseeing the future body of the earthborn Jesus; and thus the Deity formed for himself a personage or body of heavenly material or nooma based on the DNA structure of the future earthborn Jesus. The Lectures do not go into detail explaining what kind of body the Father's "personage of spirit" was made of, or if it had an actual DNA structure or genome. This added idea of the body of the Father (in which the Deity dwelled) having an actual divine genome produced by heavenly material or nooma is my own theory.
If I am correct, this makes a lot of sense of all of LDS Scripture and the New Testament as well. For if the personage of spirit of the Father did indeed contain a kind of supernatural noomatic divine DNA or genome (as a divine genus), then Jesus is not only the same God as the Father (and not a second God) because they share the same Divine Substance (the nooma); but Jesus is also not a second God because he is not a created creature but is an exact duplicate copy of the Father's divine genome and thus he is the exact same God genomically as the Father's exact image stamped/imprinted into human form; as if the Father stamped his genome as if into wax by replicating his noomatic form into a body of human flesh (a physical human form) which was Jesus (born of Mary), who was the only duplicated Gene/Kind of Jehovah; which is why Michael Heiser explains that Jesus is the Monogene (Unique Gene).
Regardless of my genomic hypothesis, what is clear is that Joseph Smith's solution to the anthropomorphic (human-like) appearances of Father-Jehovah in the Old Testament, was to argue in his scriptures he produced, that Father-Jehovah and Christ are the exact same image, a lookalike of one another because they are the same prototype personage (see Lecture 7): in that one is a "personage of spirit" and the other is a "personage of tabernacle/flesh." Hence, just as the Nicene Creed explains, Jesus is fully God and fully human in the Lectures on Faith in that the Lectures explain that basically Jesus is a duplicate as "the express/exact image of Father-Jehovah; and Jesus shares the same Mind (Spirit/Nooma) of God the Father so that they are one divine substance (homoousion); while Jesus is also a distinct person in the Godhead, being his own person (fully human) as the earthborn son of Mary with his own unique life experiences and personality as the second person in the Trinity.
We can thus see that Joseph Smith did not depart from the Nicene Trinity in any heretical way within the original scripture-bound doctrines of "1844 Mormonism." Smith only added layers of theology to explain the imagery of the Father and Son while maintaining the core homoousion doctrine of the Nicene Creed. So that the theology and scripture that Joseph Smith produced by 1835 can be better interpreted as Joseph Smith not departing from traditional Protestantism or the Nicene Trinity, but contributing additional theological clarifications that solved certain questions and problems discussed in Protestant circles. So that original LDS theology did not largely depart from traditional Orthodox Protestant Theology and the Nicene Creed.
