One God or a Council of Gods? Nicene Christianity and the LDS Godhead

Two missionaries stand at a door and speak of God the Father, of his Son Jesus Christ, of the Holy Ghost, of grace, baptism, resurrection and eternal life. An Orthodox Christian listening from inside recognizes every word. Recognition can leave the impression that only secondary details separate the two faiths.

Latter-day Saints themselves say otherwise, and they say it plainly. Their leaders teach that the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are three separate beings, that the Father and the Son have glorified bodies of flesh and bones, and that the true doctrine of God was lost after the apostles and obscured by the later creeds. Nicene Christians, for their part, confess one God in three persons who share one uncreated nature. Both sides use the word “one”. They mean different things by it.

This article sets the two doctrines side by side, each in its own words, aiming at a comparison a thoughtful member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would recognize as fair.

In brief

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that the Godhead is made up of “three beings”, the Father and the Son with “tangible bodies of flesh and bones” and the Holy Ghost “a personage of spirit”, who are “one in purpose and doctrine.” The Nicene Creed, as the Orthodox Church confesses it, speaks of one God, the Father Almighty, of the Son “of one substance with the Father”, and of the Holy Spirit “who proceeds from the Father.” In Orthodox teaching the Father is the one source of the Son and the Spirit, and the three share a single uncreated nature, so they are one God and not three. The two accounts also differ on creation: Latter-day Saint scripture says that intelligence “was not created or made” and that “the elements are eternal”, while the Fathers taught that God made all things out of nothing. They also differ on divine embodiment and on whether God has always been God. Latter-day Saints answer that the creeds imported Greek philosophy and that the Bible shows three distinct divine persons; these replies are answered below. The conclusion is that the Godhead and the Holy Trinity are two different doctrines of God, not two ways of saying the same thing.

Thesis: The Latter-day Saint Godhead of three separate beings united in purpose, set within a cosmos of uncreated intelligence and eternal element, is a different account of God from the Nicene confession of one uncreated God, the Father, with his Son and his Spirit who share his one nature.

The question in Latter-day Saints’ own words

The Church’s current overview of the Godhead (2023) begins with the first Article of Faith: “We believe in God, the Eternal Father, and in His Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost.” It continues: “These three beings make up the Godhead.” The same page says that Latter-day Saints “acknowledge the Father as the ultimate object of their worship, the Son as Lord and Redeemer, and the Holy Spirit as the messenger and revealer of the Father and the Son.” It then names the difference directly: Latter-day Saints differ from other Christians in “their belief that God and Jesus Christ are glorified, physical beings and that each member of the Godhead is a separate being.”¹

The page also explains why Latter-day Saints believe this. “The true doctrine of the Godhead was lost in the apostasy that followed the Savior’s mortal ministry,” it says, and it “began to be restored” when the fourteen-year-old Joseph Smith received his First Vision. In Joseph Smith’s canonized account, he saw “two Personages” standing above him, one of whom pointed to the other and said, “This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!”² Doctrine and Covenants 130:22 adds the defining statement: “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.”³

The fullest recent statement from a Church leader is Elder Jeffrey R. Holland’s general conference address of October 2007, “The Only True God and Jesus Christ Whom He Hath Sent.” Holland called the Father, Son and Holy Ghost “three divine persons constituting a single Godhead” and said Latter-day Saints believe “They are one in every significant and eternal aspect imaginable except believing Them to be three persons combined in one substance.” He described the creeds that followed the New Testament as having made God “incomprehensible and unknowable,” and he insisted that recognizing three separate beings “is not to be guilty of polytheism.”⁴

Two points of fairness follow at once. First, Latter-day Saints do not describe a pantheon of rival deities. The Church’s essay “Becoming Like God” says they “believe strongly in the fundamental unity of the divine,” and that the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, “though distinct beings, are unified in purpose and doctrine.”⁵ Second, the Book of Mormon itself repeatedly speaks of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost as “one God” (2 Nephi 31:21; Alma 11:44) and has the risen Jesus say that “the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost are one” (3 Nephi 11:27).⁶ Latter-day Saints read these lines as unity of purpose, consistent with Doctrine and Covenants 130. Some outside readers think the Book of Mormon’s earlier language sounds closer to traditional Christianity, a question of development that the site examines in Did Mormon Doctrine of God Change?

What the Nicene Creed confesses

The Orthodox Church confesses the Creed in the form completed at the Council of Constantinople in 381. In the translation of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers it reads in part: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.” Of the Spirit it says: “the Lord and Giver-of-Life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified.”⁷ The Western addition “and the Son” (the Filioque) was not part of the conciliar text; the Orthodox Church does not recite it, for reasons explained in The Filioque: Why One Phrase Helped Divide East and West.

Notice where the Creed begins. It does not start with an abstract divine substance that is then divided into three. It starts with a person: “one God, the Father.” This is the Orthodox teaching often called the monarchy of the Father. The Father is without origin; the Son is eternally begotten of him; the Spirit eternally proceeds from him. St Gregory of Nazianzus put it this way in his farewell oration at Constantinople: “the three have one Nature — God. And the union is the Father from Whom and to Whom the order of Persons runs its course, not so as to be confounded, but so as to be possessed, without distinction of time, of will, or of power.”⁸

So the Nicene faith is not modalism (the old view that one person wears three masks). The Father is not the Son; the Son is not the Spirit. What the Creed denies is that Father, Son and Spirit are three beings of the same kind standing side by side. The Son and the Spirit possess the one nature of the Father, received from the Father, without beginning. The site’s cornerstone What Is Nicene Christianity? walks through the Creed line by line, and The Biblical Case for the Trinity sets out the scriptural argument.

Three beings or one being?

The difference can be stated in a sentence. Nicene Christianity says three persons, one being. Latter-day Saint teaching says three beings, one purpose. Holland’s phrase “three divine persons constituting a single Godhead” is close to Nicene wording, but the single Godhead he describes is a unity of mind, will, love and mission among separate beings, as he himself explains by excluding “one substance.”

Joseph Smith was more direct. In a sermon of 16 June 1844, reported by Thomas Bullock and published by the Joseph Smith Papers, he said he had always taught that God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost were each “a distinct personage” and that “these 3 constit[ute] 3 distinct personages & 3 Gods.” In the same sermon he read 1 Corinthians 8:5–6 as teaching that there are “Gods many & Ld<s> many but to us— only one & we are to be in subjectn. to that one.”⁹ The sermon survives only in listeners’ notes and is not canonized, and current Church publications speak of “three beings” who “make up the Godhead” rather than of “three Gods.” It is still the clearest statement of the founding prophet’s own view.

The Fathers faced almost exactly this question. In the late fourth century a correspondent named Ablabius asked St Gregory of Nyssa why, if Peter, James and John are three men because they share one human nature, Christians do not speak of three Gods. Gregory set out the problem fairly: “Peter, James, and John, being in one human nature, are called three men.” He then answered that human beings are counted as many because each acts separately, whereas in God “every operation which extends from God to the Creation ... has its origin from the Father, and proceeds through the Son, and is perfected in the Holy Spirit.” The action of the three “is not separate and peculiar,” so “what does come to pass is not three things.”¹⁰

Gregory’s answer is the hinge of the whole comparison. Three human beings can agree perfectly and still be three beings, each with a life of his own. Nicene Christians confess that the Father, Son and Spirit share one life that flows from the Father. A Godhead of three beings who are “one in purpose” is close to the picture Gregory was asked about and declined.

Creator and creation

The second difference runs deeper still: in Latter-day Saint scripture, some realities are as uncreated as God.

Doctrine and Covenants 93 says, “Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be,” and, a few verses later, “The elements are eternal.”¹¹ In the King Follett discourse of April 1844, as printed by the Church’s Ensign magazine in 1971, Joseph Smith taught that “The intelligence of spirits had no beginning, neither will it have an end,” and that “God never had the power to create the spirit of man at all.”¹² The Church’s essay “Becoming Like God” summarizes the point: Joseph Smith “taught that the material world has eternal roots, fully repudiating the concept of creation ex nihilo,” and “God organized the universe out of existing elements.”⁵

Not every early writer was explicit. Justin Martyr wrote that God made all things “out of unformed matter,” a line the “Becoming Like God” essay quotes. But the writers who took up the question directly said the opposite, because of what it implied about God. Theophilus of Antioch, writing in the second century, objected to philosophers who held that matter was uncreated: if that were so, “God is no longer ... the Creator of all things, nor ... is the monarchy of God established.” The prophets, he wrote, “taught us with one consent that God made all things out of nothing; for nothing was coeval with God.” St Irenaeus wrote that while human beings can only make things “out of matter already existing,” God “called into being the substance of His creation, when previously it had no existence.”¹³

The Old Testament as the Orthodox Church received it, in the Septuagint, includes 2 Maccabees, where a mother urges her son to “recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed” (2 Maccabees 7:28, RSV). Latter-day Saints, whose Bible follows the shorter Protestant canon, do not treat 2 Maccabees as scripture, and the Revised Standard Version’s footnote offers the alternative “God made them out of things that did not exist.”¹⁴ {{debated: Scholars disagree about when creation out of nothing became an explicit doctrine.}} Gerhard May argued that it took definite shape among Christian writers of the second century, partly in debate with Gnostics and Platonists; Markus Bockmuehl has argued that the substance of the idea already appears in pre-Christian Jewish texts.¹⁵ The “Becoming Like God” essay cites May for the second-century setting of the doctrine. The Orthodox reply is that the date a doctrine is spelled out is a different question from whether it is true. The Fathers drew it from Scripture’s confession that God alone is uncreated and “makes all things” and “stretches out the heavens all alone” (Isaiah 44:24, NKJV).

In the Nicene faith, “one God” means the one source of all being. In Latter-day Saint thought, God is supreme, holy and loving, but he works with intelligence and element that he did not bring into existence. It is a coherent picture of the world, but it is not the view of God that the Creed confesses.

Is the Father embodied?

Doctrine and Covenants 130:22 makes bodily existence an attribute of the Father himself. Holland’s 2007 address offers the strongest Latter-day Saint argument for it: “If the idea of an embodied God is repugnant, why are the central doctrines and singularly most distinguishing characteristics of all Christianity the Incarnation, the Atonement, and the physical Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ?”⁴ David Paulsen, a philosopher at Brigham Young University, has argued at length that many early Christians believed in a God with some kind of body.¹⁶

Holland’s question deserves a straight answer, and the Orthodox Church gives one gladly. The body is good. The eternal Son took human flesh from the Virgin, rose in that flesh, ascended in it, and will come again in it. Orthodox Christians paint icons because the invisible God became visible in Christ. What the Church denies is that the divine nature as such is a body, or that the Father has one. The Son became flesh; the Father did not. Jesus says, “God is Spirit” (John 4:24), and John writes, “No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him” (John 1:18). When Philip asks to see the Father, Jesus answers, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).¹⁷ In the Orthodox reading, the Father is seen in the incarnate Son, not in a second body of his own.

Paulsen is right that the question was argued in the early Church. St John Cassian recorded how, in the late fourth century, many Egyptian monks took Genesis to mean that God had a human form. When Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, rejected that view in his Easter letter, most of the elders of the region turned against him. One revered old monk, Sarapion, was persuaded by Photinus, a learned deacon visiting from Cappadocia, who showed from Scripture that the “infinite and incomprehensible and invisible glory” of God could not be “comprised in a human form and likeness,” since its nature is “incorporeal and uncompounded and simple.” At prayer afterward he wept: “They have taken away my God from me, and I have now none to lay hold of; and whom to worship and address I know not.”¹⁸ Holland quoted the monk’s cry in 2007 as an example of what the creeds took away.⁴ Cassian tells the story for a different reason. Abba Isaac explains that the old man had fallen into a long habit of thinking that God should be worshipped “under the limitations of some figure,” and goes on to teach that the mind purified in prayer comes to see Jesus in his glory. The episode shows both that some sincere early Christians pictured God bodily and how the Church judged that view.

Has God always been God?

Nicene Christians confess that God is God without beginning; even the Son is “begotten of his Father before all worlds.” The King Follett discourse contains Joseph Smith’s best-known statement on the other side: “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens!”¹² Care is needed here, and the Church itself urges it. The Joseph Smith Papers note that the sermon was recorded by Willard Richards, Wilford Woodruff, Thomas Bullock and William Clayton, and that because none recorded it stenographically, “none of the accounts provides a complete record.” The first published version (Times and Seasons, 15 August 1844) combined Bullock’s and Clayton’s reports.¹⁹ The “Becoming Like God” essay calls the discourse Joseph Smith’s “most detailed known discussion of divine nature and exaltation,” but adds that “the surviving sermon text is not canonized and should not be treated as a doctrinal standard in and of itself.”⁵

The essay also quotes Lorenzo Snow’s couplet, “As man now is, God once was: As God now is, man may be,” and says: “Little has been revealed about the first half of this couplet, and consequently little is taught.”⁵ So it is unfair to claim that Latter-day Saints today hold a detailed doctrine of the Father’s mortal past. It is accurate to say that their founding prophet taught that God was once as we are, that later leaders repeated the idea, and that current official teaching keeps it with marked reserve. The Orthodox objection does not depend on the details. Any account in which the Father became God, rather than eternally being God, differs from the Creed.

Heavenly Parents

The Church’s essay “Mother in Heaven” teaches that all human beings “are beloved spirit children of heavenly parents, a Heavenly Father and a Heavenly Mother,” and calls this “a cherished and distinctive belief among Latter-day Saints.” It notes that there is “no record of a formal revelation to Joseph Smith on this doctrine,” that “our present knowledge about a Mother in Heaven is limited,” and that “Latter-day Saints direct their worship to Heavenly Father, in the name of Christ, and do not pray to Heavenly Mother.” It also says that “men and women cannot be exalted without each other.”²⁰

Orthodox Christians also call God Father, but human beings are creatures who become his children by adoption through the Son, who alone is Son by nature (John 1:12–13; Galatians 4:4–7). There is no divine couple and no pre-existent spirit offspring in the Nicene account.

Exaltation and theosis

Doctrine and Covenants 76:58 says of the faithful, “they are gods, even the sons of God,” and 132:20 says that those who keep the covenant of eternal marriage “shall ... be gods, because they have all power.”²¹ The Orthodox Church also speaks of deification (theosis): human beings are called to become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). The resemblance in words is real, and the Church’s essay notes that deification “remains a central tenet of Eastern Orthodoxy.”⁵

The meaning differs because the doctrine of God differs. In Orthodox teaching, a saint becomes by grace what God is by nature, sharing in God’s uncreated life and glory (his energies) but never in his essence, and never ceasing to be a creature. Salvation is healing and union with the one God, not promotion to the same kind of being. See the site’s explanation of what theosis is.

The strongest Latter-day Saint objections

“The creeds replaced the Bible with Greek philosophy”

This is the central Latter-day Saint charge, and it has scholarly allies. Holland cited Harper’s Bible Dictionary to the effect that “the formal doctrine of the Trinity as it was defined by the great church councils of the fourth and fifth centuries is not to be found in the [New Testament].”⁴ The “Becoming Like God” essay links creation out of nothing to “the incursion of new philosophical ideas in the second century.”⁵

Part of this should be granted: the Creed uses terms such as “substance” that do not appear in the New Testament. Historians such as Lewis Ayres have shown that “Nicene” theology was itself worked out over decades of argument, not handed down ready-made in 325.²²

Three replies follow. First, using a non-biblical word to guard a biblical claim is not the same as adding a new claim. Arius’s party also argued in philosophical terms; the question at Nicaea was which account fitted the Scriptures that call the Son the one “through whom are all things” (1 Corinthians 8:6). Second, some of what Latter-day Saints reject is Western Protestant wording rather than the Nicene Creed. The phrase “without body, parts, or passions” comes from Protestant confessions such as the seventeenth-century Westminster Confession (2.1), not from the Creed.²³ The “Becoming Like God” essay itself names the Westminster Confession as the background of Joseph Smith’s first hearers. Third, the Orthodox Church does not teach that God is “unknowable” in the sense Holland feared. It teaches that God’s essence is beyond comprehension while God himself is truly known, in Christ, through the Spirit, in prayer and the sacraments.

“The Bible clearly shows three distinct persons”

Holland pointed to the baptism of Jesus, the Transfiguration, the death of Stephen and the prayer of John 17. Nicene Christians agree with every one of these texts: the Father, the Son and the Spirit are really distinct. The Creed was written to say so against those who blurred them. The question is not whether they are three but what kind of three. Scripture that distinguishes the persons must be read together with Scripture that insists, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one!” (Deuteronomy 6:4) and “Besides Me there is no God” (Isaiah 44:6).¹⁷ The Creed is how the Church has held both sets of texts together.

“Unity of love is a richer unity than unity of substance”

Some Latter-day Saint philosophers present the Godhead as a kind of “social” unity. Blake Ostler’s publisher describes his view that the Father and Son “were actually distinct individuals” and that “what made them one was their indwelling love.”²⁴ Jesus’ prayer “that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You” (John 17:21) is often cited, since disciples are to be one in the same way.

Love is indeed the life of the Trinity. But John 17:21 says the disciples are to be one “in Us”: their unity depends on being taken into the life that Father and Son already share. Gregory of Nyssa’s argument applies here. Human persons, however loving, are many beings with many separate acts. If the Father, Son and Spirit were united only by love among separate beings, the unity of God would be the same kind as the unity of a good family, only perfect. The Creed confesses something more: the Son is “very God of very God,” with the Father’s own life.

“Paul himself says there are gods many”

Joseph Smith appealed to 1 Corinthians 8:5. The full sentence reads: “For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as there are many gods and many lords), yet for us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we for Him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things” (1 Corinthians 8:5–6, NKJV).¹⁷ Paul’s “so-called gods” are the gods of the Corinthians’ pagan neighbors, whose food offerings he is discussing. His positive confession, “one God, the Father ... and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things,” is the seed of the Creed’s first two articles.

Is this comparison fair?

Latter-day Saints sincerely regard themselves as Christians. They worship Jesus Christ as Savior and Redeemer; Holland testified that “only by relying wholly upon His merits, mercy, and everlasting grace can we gain eternal life.”⁴ Many live lives of real devotion and service. Nothing in this article questions that sincerity, and conversations between Latter-day Saints and other Christians, such as the dialogue published by Craig Blomberg and Stephen Robinson in 1997, have shown that patient listening corrects caricatures on both sides.²⁵

The disagreement is about the doctrine of God, and both sides agree that it is real; the site’s guide Mormonism vs. Nicene Christianity sets it out in table form. The Church’s own Godhead page says its members differ from other Christians on this point, and Holland said the critics’ recognition of the difference was “accurate.” The Orthodox Church judges by the Creed: whoever does not confess one God, the Father, with the Son and the Spirit of one substance with him, is not confessing the Nicene faith. That is a judgment about doctrine. The judgment of hearts belongs to God.

What we can say confidently

• {{very-strong: Official Latter-day Saint teaching describes the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost as three separate beings, one in purpose and doctrine, with the Father and the Son having tangible bodies of flesh and bones.}}
• The Nicene Creed, as the Orthodox Church confesses it without the Filioque, teaches one God, the Father, with the Son eternally begotten and the Spirit proceeding from the Father, sharing one nature.
• Latter-day Saint scripture teaches that intelligence was not created and that the elements are eternal; second-century Fathers such as Theophilus and Irenaeus taught that God made all things from nothing.
• {{strong: Joseph Smith taught in 1844 that God was once as we are now and spoke of “3 Gods”; these sermons survive in incomplete reports and are not canonized.}}
• The Church teaches Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother as the parents of human spirits, while directing worship and prayer to the Father in the name of Christ.
• Exaltation and theosis use similar language but rest on different doctrines of God and creation.

What remains disputed

• The exact wording of the King Follett discourse and the 16 June 1844 sermon cannot be recovered.
• How much of Joseph Smith’s later teaching on God’s past current Latter-day Saints hold; official sources say little is revealed or taught about it.
• When creation out of nothing became explicit in Jewish and Christian thought (May and Bockmuehl disagree).
• How widespread belief in a bodily God was among early Christians, and how to read Tertullian and the Egyptian monks on the question.
• How Latter-day Saint thinkers best describe divine unity: as unity of purpose, as “social” unity of love, or in other ways.

Conclusion

The Latter-day Saint Godhead and the Holy Trinity are not two vocabularies for one doctrine. One describes three separate divine beings, perfectly united in purpose, within an uncreated cosmos of intelligence and element. The other confesses one God, the Father, who eternally begets his Son and brings forth his Spirit, and who with them creates everything else out of nothing.

For Orthodox Christians this is not a quarrel about technical terms. It touches prayer. We do not stand before a supreme member of a divine kind, however good. We stand before the one source of all being, who needed nothing and made us anyway, and who sent his own Son, sharing his own life, to take our flesh and heal it. Because the Son is God from God, he can give us God. Because we remain creatures, every gift is grace. Latter-day Saints who love Jesus Christ are invited to read the Fathers who loved him too, and to ask, as they did, who he must be if he is to save us.

Notes

1. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Godhead,” Topics and Questions (2023), quoting Articles of Faith 1:1.
2. Same page; Joseph Smith—History 1:17, Pearl of Great Price, churchofjesuschrist.org.
3. Doctrine and Covenants 130:22, churchofjesuschrist.org.
4. Jeffrey R. Holland, “The Only True God and Jesus Christ Whom He Hath Sent,” general conference, October 2007. Holland’s quotation of Harper’s Bible Dictionary (ed. Paul J. Achtemeier, 1985, p. 1099) and of the monk’s cry (via Owen Chadwick, Western Asceticism, 1958) are cited from his talk.
5. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Becoming Like God,” Gospel Topics Essays.
6. 2 Nephi 31:21; Alma 11:44; 3 Nephi 11:27, 36, Book of Mormon, churchofjesuschrist.org.
7. “The Holy Creed Which the 150 Holy Fathers Set Forth,” Council of Constantinople (381), trans. Henry R. Percival, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series (NPNF2), vol. 14 (1900), New Advent.
8. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 42.15, trans. C. G. Browne and J. E. Swallow, NPNF2 vol. 7 (1894), New Advent.
9. “Discourse, 16 June 1844–A, as Reported by Thomas Bullock,” p. [1], The Joseph Smith Papers, josephsmithpapers.org. Square brackets, as in “constit[ute],” are the Papers editors’ expansions; angle brackets, as in “Ld<s>,” mark a letter Bullock himself inserted; the other abbreviations, such as “subjectn.,” are Bullock’s own.
10. Gregory of Nyssa, On “Not Three Gods”: To Ablabius, trans. H. A. Wilson, NPNF2 vol. 5 (1893), New Advent.
11. Doctrine and Covenants 93:29, 33, churchofjesuschrist.org.
12. “The King Follett Sermon,” Ensign, April 1971 and May 1971 (from History of the Church 6:302–17), part 1 and part 2.
13. Justin Martyr, First Apology 10, trans. Marcus Dods and George Reith, ANF vol. 1 (1885), New Advent; Theophilus of Antioch, To Autolycus 2.4 and 2.10, trans. Marcus Dods, Ante-Nicene Fathers (ANF) vol. 2 (1885), New Advent; Irenaeus, Against Heresies 2.10.4, trans. A. Roberts and W. Rambaut, ANF vol. 1 (1885), New Advent.
14. 2 Maccabees 7:28, Revised Standard Version, with its footnote, Bible Gateway.
15. Gerhard May, Creatio ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of “Creation out of Nothing” in Early Christian Thought, trans. A. S. Worrall (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994); Markus Bockmuehl, “Creatio ex nihilo in Palestinian Judaism and Early Christianity,” Scottish Journal of Theology 65, no. 3 (2012): 253–70, doi:10.1017/S0036930612000105.
16. David L. Paulsen, “The Doctrine of Divine Embodiment: Restoration, Judeo-Christian, and Philosophical Perspectives,” BYU Studies 35, no. 4 (1995–96): 6–94, ScholarsArchive.
17. Scripture quotations are from the New King James Version (NKJV), copyright 1982 Thomas Nelson: John 4:24; 1:18; 14:9; 17:21; Deuteronomy 6:4; Isaiah 44:6, 24; 1 Corinthians 8:5–6.
18. John Cassian, Conferences 10.2–6, trans. C. S. Gibson, NPNF2 vol. 11 (1894), New Advent.
19. The Joseph Smith Papers, “Accounts of the ‘King Follett Sermon’.”
20. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Mother in Heaven,” Gospel Topics Essays.
21. Doctrine and Covenants 76:58, churchofjesuschrist.org; 132:20, churchofjesuschrist.org.
22. Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
23. Westminster Confession of Faith 2.1, Orthodox Presbyterian Church text.
24. Blake T. Ostler, Exploring Mormon Thought, vol. 3, Of God and Gods (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2008); the quoted words are from the publisher’s description.
25. Craig L. Blomberg and Stephen E. Robinson, How Wide the Divide? A Mormon and an Evangelical in Conversation (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997).

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.
• The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version (for 2 Maccabees).
• Council of Constantinople (381). The Creed. Trans. Henry R. Percival. NPNF2 vol. 14. 1900.
• Justin Martyr. First Apology. Trans. Marcus Dods and George Reith. ANF vol. 1. 1885.
• Theophilus of Antioch. To Autolycus. Trans. Marcus Dods. ANF vol. 2. 1885.
• Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies. Trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut. ANF vol. 1. 1885.
• Westminster Confession of Faith.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 42. Trans. Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow. NPNF2 vol. 7. 1894.
• Gregory of Nyssa. On “Not Three Gods”: To Ablabius. Trans. H. A. Wilson. NPNF2 vol. 5. 1893.
• John Cassian. Conferences. Trans. C. S. Gibson. NPNF2 vol. 11. 1894.

Other scholarship (including scholars who disagree)

• Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Blomberg, Craig L., and Stephen E. Robinson. How Wide the Divide? A Mormon and an Evangelical in Conversation. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997.
• Bockmuehl, Markus. “Creatio ex nihilo in Palestinian Judaism and Early Christianity.” Scottish Journal of Theology 65, no. 3 (2012): 253–70.
• May, Gerhard. Creatio ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of “Creation out of Nothing” in Early Christian Thought. Trans. A. S. Worrall. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994.

Latter-day Saint sources

• The Book of Mormon; The Doctrine and Covenants (sections 76, 93, 130, 132); The Pearl of Great Price (Joseph Smith—History; Articles of Faith). Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
• The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Godhead.” Topics and Questions, 2023.
• The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Becoming Like God.” Gospel Topics Essays.
• The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Mother in Heaven.” Gospel Topics Essays.
• Holland, Jeffrey R. “The Only True God and Jesus Christ Whom He Hath Sent.” General conference, October 2007.
• “The King Follett Sermon.” Ensign, April and May 1971.
• The Joseph Smith Papers. “Accounts of the ‘King Follett Sermon’” and “Discourse, 16 June 1844–A, as Reported by Thomas Bullock.”
• Givens, Terryl L. Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
• Ostler, Blake T. Exploring Mormon Thought, vol. 3, Of God and Gods. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2008.
• Paulsen, David L. “The Doctrine of Divine Embodiment: Restoration, Judeo-Christian, and Philosophical Perspectives.” BYU Studies 35, no. 4 (1995–96): 6–94.