Latter Day Saint

Latter-day Saint theology departs from the other Abrahamic traditions at a specific and well-documented point: the Godhead. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that God the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost are three distinct beings, unified in purpose, will and glory but not, as in mainstream Christian Trinitarian doctrine, sharing a single substance; God the Father and the resurrected Jesus Christ are both held to possess glorified, physical bodies, a claim that sets Latter-day Saint theology apart from every other tradition recorded on this deity's own entry.

Alongside the Godhead sits the doctrine of eternal progression, the teaching that faithful mortals may, through the atonement of Jesus Christ and the ordinances of the restored gospel, be exalted after this life into the kind of divine life God the Father lives; the Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, edited by Terryl Givens and Philip Barlow, documents both the doctrine's nineteenth-century development under Joseph Smith and the significant nuance later Latter-day Saint leaders have applied to it. That doctrine is genuinely distinctive among the Abrahamic traditions catalogued in this atlas, none of which holds an equivalent teaching about the ordinary relationship between mortal humanity and the divine nature, and it is why this entry records mortal entry into the sacred differently from every one of its Abrahamic peers rather than defaulting to the same closed reading the others share.

The Latter-day Saint doctrine of the Godhead and of eternal progression is attested in the movement's own scripture and in the discourses of its early leaders, and its documented history runs directly from Joseph Smith's earliest visionary accounts through to the church's current teaching. The Doctrine and Covenants, a compiled record of revelations Joseph Smith and his successors reported receiving, together with the Pearl of Great Price, sets out the doctrine of three distinct personages in the Godhead in terms the mainstream Christian creeds the movement arose alongside do not use; the Book of Mormon, read alongside the King James Bible, is presented by the church as an additional testament of Jesus Christ rather than a replacement for the Bible.

The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, edited by Terryl Givens and Philip Barlow, is the leading academic reference for how this doctrine developed historically, from Joseph Smith's early revelations through the King Follett discourse and its teaching on the nature of God and humanity's relationship to it, to the more cautious framing later church leadership has applied to some of the doctrine's more expansive nineteenth-century statements. The church's own 2024 statistical report documents a living, global membership still organised around temple worship and these same doctrines, which is why this entry records the tradition as an actively practised faith rather than a historical one.