The Godhead

Ask a Latter-day Saint about the Trinity and the answer will usually begin by declining the word. The movement teaches that the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are three distinct beings, entirely united in will, purpose and love, and that this unity is what the New Testament means when it says they are one. It calls the arrangement the Godhead. The Nicene formula of one substance in three persons is rejected explicitly, and so is the accompanying claim that God is without body, parts or passions.

The positive teaching is unusually concrete. Doctrine and Covenants 130:22, recorded in 1843, states that the Father has a body of flesh and bone as tangible as a man's, that the Son likewise has one, and that the Holy Ghost is a personage of spirit, which is what allows him to dwell in a person. Joseph Smith's account of the First Vision, in which he described seeing the Father and the Son as two separate personages, is treated as the founding evidence for the distinction rather than as a devotional story.

Several other Latter-day Saint positions follow from this one and are difficult to state without it. Human beings are held to be the literal spirit offspring of God rather than creatures made from nothing, so the difference between divine and human nature is one of degree and exaltation rather than of kind. Prayer is addressed to the Father in the name of the Son, never to Jesus directly. And Latter-day Saint teaching about Heavenly Mother, which the church affirms while saying very little about her, has room to exist at all only because the Godhead is conceived in these terms.

The Godhead is the point at which the question of whether the Latter-day Saint movement is a Christian denomination becomes concrete rather than rhetorical, because it determines whether other churches will recognise its baptisms.

In 2001 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith ruled that Latter-day Saint baptism is not valid for the Catholic Church, on the ground that the words used, though verbally similar to the Trinitarian formula, carry a different meaning, since the Father, Son and Holy Ghost named in them are not the persons of the Trinity as Catholic doctrine understands them. Most mainline Protestant bodies have reached the same conclusion by the same route. A convert to Catholicism from another Protestant church is received without rebaptism; a convert from the Latter-day Saint movement is baptised. That is a reciprocal position, since the movement rebaptises everyone.

Latter-day Saints reply that they worship the Father in the name of Jesus Christ, that the name of Christ is in the name of the church, and that they read the New Testament without the fourth century Greek philosophical vocabulary in which the creeds were framed. Their objection is not to the Bible but to the councils. Critics answer that a term as central as the nature of God cannot be treated as vocabulary, and that a body which denies the creeds has left the definition of Christianity that the creeds established.

Both positions are held in good faith by people who have thought about them for a long time, and the atlas records the disagreement rather than settling it. In practical terms it means the movement is a Christian tradition by its own account, a restoration by its own account, and outside Nicene Christianity by the account of nearly everyone else.