How We Know What We Know About the Godhead

A few weeks ago I was in a Sunday School class about the nature of the Godhead, when one of the class members said that it is obvious from the New Testament that the Godhead is as we Mormons believe it is: the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost as three distinct beings, the Father and Son having glorified physical bodies, and the Holy Ghost being a personage of spirit. This is not an uncommon position among Mormons, but it rubbed me the wrong way and the more I thought about about it, I understood why: because it’s not true.

To be clear, I’m not talking about the Mormon doctrine of the Godhead—that’s true. What I’m talking about is the notion that this doctrine is obvious from reading the Bible, or more specifically, the New Testament. This notion, I fear, makes us Mormons a little haughty when we are dealing with other Christians, who accept the doctrine of the Trinity. When we are dealing with other Christians we need to recognize that if their beliefs about God were obviously wrong, they wouldn’t have survived for over a thousand years. The rest of the Christian world isn’t full of a bunch of dunces.

Of course, there are some passages in the New Testament that seem to indicate that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are separate beings, supporting the Mormon view. Principal among these is Christ’s baptism (Matthew 3:13–17), when Christ is in the river, the Father’s voice is heard from heaven, and the Holy Ghost descends in the form of a dove. Three distinct manifestations. Then there is the martyrdom of Stephen, when he sees “the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God” (Acts 7:55–56). If you only take these scriptures, and some others that indicate the same thing, it seems pretty obvious that Mormons are right.

But many other scripture passages muddy the waters. Take, for example, the multiple times that Jesus said that those who had seen him had seen the Father (John 12:44–45; 14:8–10). Or the times when Jesus said that he and the Father are one (John 10:30). Taken as a whole, the New Testament doesn’t present a very clear picture of the nature of God.

So, is it really surprising that when the early Catholic Church authorities were trying to make sense of these passages that they landed on the doctrine of the Trinity? Or, in other words, the Catholic Church didn’t force the doctrine of the Trinity onto its adherents because it is obviously wrong, but because there is no better doctrine, going exclusively off of the New Testament, that is obviously right.

And the only reason that the Mormon doctrine of the Godhead is obvious to us is because we have the benefit of modern revelation that spells it out very clearly. Of course, there is Joseph Smith’s First Vision, when he saw “two Personages,” one of whom referred to the other as his son (Joseph Smith—History 1:17). But even then, there is some evidence that Joseph still didn’t fully understand the nature of the Godhead from this experience. The clearest explication of our doctrine comes from Doctrine and Covenants 130:22, which Joseph received in 1843, more than two decades later: “The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; the Son also; but the Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of Spirit. Were it not so, the Holy Ghost could not dwell in us.”

All of this is to say that Mormons should not be haughty when we deal with fellow Christians who believe in the Trinity. Instead, we should be grateful for modern revelation that has clarified this point of doctrine. Because without it, we would have no greater insight into the nature of God than they have.