Mormonism

Mormonism, formally the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is the religious movement founded on Joseph Smith’s claim to have received a new volume of scripture, the Book of Mormon, and to speak as a modern prophet restoring lost truth. Central to its teaching is that God is himself an exalted, once-mortal man who attained godhood, and that other beings may progress toward the same exaltation.¹ Because it denies the Trinity, denies God’s eternal, self-existent deity, and adds scripture alongside a closed biblical canon, evangelical scholars across traditions have judged it to stand outside historic Christian orthodoxy.²

Historical Origin

Mormonism traces its founding scripture to Joseph Smith’s own account of an angelic visitation. Augustus H. Strong, quoting Washington Gladden’s retelling, summarized the story Smith himself told: “An angel appeared to Smith and told him where he would find this book; he went to the spot designated and found in a stone box a volume six inches thick, composed of thin gold plates, eight inches by seven, held together by three gold rings; these plates were covered with writing, in the ‘Reformed Egyptian tongue’; with this book were the ‘Urim and Thummim,’ a pair of supernatural spectacles, by means of which he was able to read and translate this ‘Reformed Egyptian’ language.”³ Strong set this origin story against the New Testament’s own textual history: the Christian documents “were not found, like the Book of Mormon, in a cave, or in the custody of angels.”⁴ Strong also quotes James Martineau’s description of “the Mormon prophet” as one “well up with the history of both worlds, and commissioned to get ready the second promised land.”⁵

Core Tenets

The Doctrine of God

Mormonism’s central departure from historic Christian theism is its account of God’s own nature. Strong summarized the teaching directly: “The Mormons teach that God is a man; that he has numerous wives by whom he peoples space with an infinite number of spirits. Christ was a favorite son by a favorite wife, but birth as man was the only way he could come into the enjoyment of real life. These spirits are all the sons of God, but they can realize and enjoy their sonship only through birth. They are about every one of us pleading to be born. Hence, polygamy.”¹ On this account, God is an exalted being who was himself once a mortal man rather than the eternal, uncreated Creator of historic Christian confession, and other beings, having been born as spirit children of God, may in turn progress toward the same exaltation. Strong classed this teaching alongside Emanuel Swedenborg’s own view that “God exists in the shape of a man,” calling both “an anthropomorphism of which the making of idols is only a grosser and more barbarous form.”¹

An Additional, Self-Authenticating Scripture

Mormonism holds the Book of Mormon to be scripture alongside the Bible, recovered rather than newly composed. Michael J. Kruger observes that Mormonism’s account of how believers come to recognize that book’s authority runs structurally parallel to, yet is finally distinct from, the Reformed doctrine of Scripture’s self-attestation: “seeing the Spirit’s work as the grounds for the canon’s authority is similar to the Mormon understanding of how the Book of Mormon is authenticated via a ‘burning in the bosom.’”⁶ Kruger’s own point is a caution against collapsing the two: a bare inward feeling, considered on its own, cannot distinguish the Reformed testimonium from a Mormon appeal to the same kind of subjective confirmation. Even so, Kruger notes, Mormonism’s own claim to Christian identity does not settle the canon question in its favor: “even though Mormons claim to be followers of Christ, we would not accept their canon.”²

Confessional and Biblical Response

The Second London Baptist Confession opens its doctrine of God by confessing that “the Lord our God is but one only living and true God; whose subsistence is in and of himself, infinite in being and perfection.”⁷ God’s subsistence “in and of himself,” his aseity, is precisely what Mormonism’s doctrine of an exalted, once-mortal God denies: a God who was once a man and became God through mortal progression is neither eternal nor self-existent but contingent, the kind of being Scripture itself rules out. The LORD says through Isaiah, “Before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me” (Isa. 43:10), and again, “I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God” (Isa. 44:6). The Psalmist confesses that God has no beginning to progress from: “before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God” (Ps. 90:2). Malachi grounds God’s faithfulness in his very changelessness, “I am the LORD, I change not” (Mal. 3:6), against a deity whose own nature is said to have once been mortal and to have advanced to godhood.

On canon, the same confession lists the books of the Old and New Testaments as those “given by the inspiration of God, to be the rule of faith and life.”⁸ Scripture likewise warns against testing every claimed revelation only by its felt effect on the heart: “believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God” (1 John 4:1), a text Strong applies by name to Mormonism alongside Spiritualism and Swedenborgianism.⁹ The confession’s closed canon and this call to test the spirits together answer Mormonism’s claim to possess a further, self-authenticating volume of revelation alongside the Bible.

Related Doctrines

References

Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book Designed for the Use of Theological Students, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1907), 251. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 3. ↩ ↩²
Washington Gladden, quoted in Strong, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 141. ↩
Strong, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 141. ↩
James Martineau, quoted in Strong, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 141. ↩
Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 3, “My Sheep Hear My Voice.” ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 2. ↩
Strong, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 32. ↩