Rob Bowman on the Trinity Part 4

View Point on Mormonism, the program that examines the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from a Biblical perspective. View Point on Mormonism is sponsored by Mormonism Research Ministry. Since 1979, Mormonism Research Ministry has been dedicated to equipping the body of Christ with answers regarding the Christian faith in a manner that expresses gentleness and respect. And now, your host for today's View Point on Mormonism. Welcome to this edition of View Point on Mormonism. I'm your host, Bill McKeever, founder and director of Mormonism Research Ministry.

With me today is my good friend, Dr. Rob Bowman. Rob has written a number of articles dealing with the subject of the Trinity. He received his Ph.D. in Biblical studies at the South African Theological Seminary, and for ten years, he was the executive director of the Institute for Religious Research. And Rob, you had mentioned in an earlier show, and I want to mention it again, you have a number of articles on the subject of the Trinity. And you have a number of articles that are still on the IRR.org website, so if people wanted to get more information on this and other topics, they can go there and get that as well, correct?

That is correct. The reason why I wanted to have Rob on the show was because, as I said, he's written a number of articles and spoken on this subject numerous times, dealing with this very important doctrine of the Trinity. And in light of the fact that there was an article posted on the Deseret News and the Church News section by Dr. Daniel Peterson, and Dr. Daniel Peterson is the professor of Islamic studies and Arabic at Brigham Young University. He's also an established Mormon apologist, and he's discussed a number of issues dealing with Mormon theology. But he wrote an article called Defending the Faith, Where the Disagreement Lies. And as I mentioned earlier, this is posted on April 19, 2018. It's not a brand new article, but it's not even a brand new subject with Dr. Peterson.

That's for sure. And as you said, Rob, this article encapsulates a lot of things that he has written about on this topic in times past. And I think that's good for our listeners, because sometimes they can get a little bit too wordy and a little bit too heady and sometimes very confusing when it's on the radio.

But let me just go through this. This is what Dr. Peterson says in the opening lines of his piece. Both outsiders and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints themselves commonly say Mormons reject the doctrine. But then he goes on to say, but this isn't quite true, and it's important to be precise about where the actual disagreement lies. And then he gives five points for what he calls the mainstream Trinitarian understanding through these five points. Point number five, there is one God and only one God.

That's what I want to talk about today. In his piece, he cites Joseph Smith, a famous sermon that Joseph Smith gave towards the end of his life on June 16, 1844. It was called The Sermon in the Grove.

This is what Dr. Peterson writes, Rob. He says, I have always, he said on June 16, 1844, less than two weeks before his assignment, he said, I have always been a Christian. assassination, quote, declared God to be a distinct personage, Jesus Christ a separate and distinct personage from God the Father, and that the Holy Ghost was a distinct personage and a spirit. And these three constitute three distinct personages and three gods. And he's citing this from the History of the Church, Volume 6, page 74.

I was amazed, well, I probably shouldn't have been amazed, but I was surprised that Dr. Peterson threw this quotation in there, because certainly I was thinking about it as I'm reading all of the other things he had to say. But just a few paragraphs earlier, Rob, he says Latter-day Saint scripture declares there is one and only one God, and certainly the Book of Mormon does do that. But he gives the impression that they believe that there is one and only one God, because he says after listing those five points, and the fifth point is there is one God and only one God, both mainstream Christians and Latter-day Saints accept all five statements. This is where it can be very confusing to most Christians that are engaging their LDS counterparts. What about the statement where Joseph Smith says, and these three constitute three distinct personages and three gods? What would that mean to someone like Dr. Peterson?

Well, there's a really big question there, because there's a lot underneath this statement that needs to be unpacked. Joseph Smith was in this particular sermon arguing that God the Father himself had a divine Father who came before him and was his God before he was God. And so what Joseph is doing here is he is teasing out one of the implications of his idea that he advanced in the King Follett discourse, that gods are beings like us who ascend or become exalted to godhood in a process that is open to us as well. And God the Father himself, according to Joseph in the King Follett discourse, was once a man like us, and he became a god. He hasn't always been God, but he became a god.

And the implication, of course, is that the same thing would be true of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. But Joseph goes further and says that it's also true of you. You can become gods. You're supposed to become gods.

That's what you're here for, to make progress toward this exaltation to godhood, like all the gods that came before you. The implication of that is that there are other gods even besides the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And Joseph begins teasing out that implication in this sermon at the Grove where he says the Father has a god that's above him. And the implication, of course, is there's no ceiling. Apparently there's gods all the way up or all the way down, however you want to look at it.

There's no beginning to this that we can see. There could be a grandfather god and a great grandfather god and so on and so on. Well, this is a doctrine that has sometimes been called the doctrine of eternal progression. There's huge theological implications here that go way beyond what Dr. Peterson actually acknowledges in this article. He makes it sound like the difference between Orthodox Christianity and its doctrine of the Trinity and the LDS doctrine is we disagree on whether the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one being or are one in purpose. And that's the big conclusion that he drives to at the very end.

But it's a much bigger deal than that. It's a question of what does it mean to be God? What is a god? And is that a category that you could potentially join if you just do what you're supposed to do and follow the rules of the church and eventually become exalted?

Can you become part of that circle of the gods? The Mormon answer is yes and the Christian answer is no. And so we're dealing with not just a different definition of the Trinity. We're dealing with a different worldview.

It's as radical a difference in belief systems as you could possibly imagine. And we should mention that the King Follett discourse that you were talking about was a funeral sermon that Joseph Smith gave for a man whose name was King Follett. Many times you hear King Follett you think of the title king and that wasn't the case.

His name was King, yeah. Right. And you can find this in the teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith as well as the Journal of Discourses. Let's get on with Peterson's statements here. We're getting towards the end of it where he says, so how is it that mainstream Christians and Latter-day Saints both accept the five propositions that ground the traditional Christian doctrine of the Trinity, yet Latter-day Saints reject that traditional doctrine? That sounds like a self-refuting statement, but anyway he goes on to say clearly the difference comes down to exactly what each group understands when it asserts, as both groups do, that there is one and only one God. But then he finishes it out by saying this, Joseph Smith's use of the phrase three gods, quote unquote, in his statement from June 1844 that we just looked at, is important here he says. Latter-day Saints and mainstream Christians use the term one, quote unquote, in dramatically different ways. Mormons insist on perfect divine unity in mind and will, traditional Trinitarianism. Drawing a concept from ancient Greek philosophy adds to that a unity of substance. In an important sense, there is truly only one God, but Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are distinct individuals, and Joseph was therefore not afraid in another sense to term them three gods. This makes my head hurt, and I'm sure a lot of Christians reading this, it's going to have the same effect on them. Could you try to explain this? Well, that just means you're paying attention. Well, thank you.

You should. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like a huge contradiction, because normally when we say that there is only one God, we mean there is only one singular God. And as Dr. Peterson has admitted here, by citing Joseph Smith and his Sermon in the Grove from June 16, 1844, that these three constitute three gods. So they're saying there's one God, but at the same time they're saying three gods, and they say we're confusing? Well, apparently what Peterson is arguing is that there is a sense in which there is only one God, and there is another sense in which there are three gods. The term God here apparently changes meaning or significance, depending on whether you say there's one God or three gods. That's the best construction I can put on what he's saying, that he's admitting that both kinds of statements are in the Mormon authoritative statements, because this statement in the Sermon in the Grove is clearly an authoritative statement from the founding prophet Joseph Smith, his last public discourse before he died, you know, they can't throw it out. So to his credit, Peterson doesn't throw it out, but he doesn't explain the backstory theologically of what Joseph is doing in the sermon, which I tried to explain a little bit here.

Let me just make this point. God in Mormonism is not the supreme, absolute creator of all that exists, other than himself. Rather, God in Mormon theology, in the Mormon worldview, is a kind of being, a category of being that has arrived at a certain level of completion or fullness of glory and power and knowledge that you can also reach if you follow the right path. In Mormonism, God is an open category into which beings can join and which there are already an unknown number of beings, not just three, but we also, to be honest, you'd have to include Heavenly Mother, she's a god, and then there might be other gods besides those. And so really, Mormonism has a plurality of gods concept that is an open category of deity into which you can join. Now in traditional Christianity, as well as in Judaism and Islam, by the way, God is a closed category of one and only one member or being that is properly termed God, and he has always been God. He cannot be anything other than God. He exists necessarily and eternally as the only true God, and he makes everything else out of nothing. That's basic monotheism as taught in traditional Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and that concept of God is rejected by Mormonism.

So when Mormons say we believe in one God, they don't mean one the same way we do, and they don't mean God the same way we do. We've been talking with Rob Bowman. If you want to read more of what Rob has written on this and other subjects, I encourage you strongly to go to robertbowman.net. And tomorrow we're going to complete this series on this topic looking at an article written by Dr. Daniel Peterson titled, Defending the Faith Where the Disagreement Lies. Thank you for listening. If you would like more information regarding Mormonism Research Ministry, we encourage you to visit our website at www.mrm.org where you can request our free newsletter, Mormonism Researched. You will join us again as we look at another viewpoint on Mormonism.