Apologetics: What Does Mormonism Teach About Jesus?

Now, that we’ve covered Islam, we need to cover what Mormonism teaches about Jesus and the Christmas story. Now, most of us have had at least one encounter with a Mormon, usually in the form of pretending that we’re not home as they ring our doorbells to ask, “Have you heard of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?” Jokes aside, however, as the second largest pseudo-Christian group in the United States (if we’re not counting prosperity gospel/Word-of-Faith/NAR churches) with about 6-7 million adherents, coming in just behind Jehovah’s Witnesses, if we as Christians are to talk to Mormons, we need to know what they think about Jesus. While we as Christians agree with the statement that Jesus is our Lord and Savior, and both Christians and Mormons can agree that Jesus is the Son of God, we need to look at it from all sides. What do the Mormons believe about the Trinity, especially God the Father? What do they believe Jesus accomplished? Who do they think God is? These questions are all pertinent to understand the Mormon idea of salvation.

Overall, the Mormon Christmas story is pretty similar to what we Christians believe, with much of it taken from Luke, though they add some weird embellishments and changes like how the night never got dark somehow, Jesus was born in Jerusalem (which is not Bethlehem and thus, doesn’t fulfill true Scripture), the Nephites who didn’t believe in the words of the prophets dropped dead, and a new star appeared.

Mormons also believe that Jesus is the Son of God, however, this is where things start getting funky and find themselves miles away from Christian doctrine. But before I get into how this is, we first need to understand a few things about what Mormons believe about God and the Trinity. First, they believe in something called henotheism. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s where you worship one specific god out of a whole ton of gods as supreme. For example, if you’re Hindu and you pray to only one god out of the entire pantheon and view him as supreme out of the 30 million other Hindu gods and goddesses, then you’re practicing a form of henotheism.

Mormons do this, but they make it kind of like the Marvel Multiverse. They believe there are a ton of different gods ruling over their assigned planets. The god they worship (who they prefer to call “Heavenly Father” or “Elohim”) just happens to be one of many of these gods who also happens to rule over this particular planet. To top off the strangeness of this, they also believe that he is a created being, a man who ascended and reached godhood by way of obedience to his father, (who I’m guessing was the god of whatever planet Elohim came from) and lives on a planet called Kolob.

No, I am not making this up. You can Google it. The closest thing I can compare this to are the Thor movies and comics, where in the lore the humans worshipped Thor and company as gods, but really, they were just some aliens chilling somewhere else in the galaxy the whole time.

Besides the fact that this view of God makes no sense because it just goes on into infinity trying to figure out who the first true god was, there’s even more that makes it super heretical. According to Brigham Young, Orson Pratt, and other early Mormon leaders, Elohim, being a man, had at least one wife who ascended with him, referred to as the Heavenly Mother (who’s not worshipped and is largely ignored.) Together, they created spirit babies that would later become humans, of which Jesus (who Mormons also call “Jehovah”) was the first born. According to them, Jesus then entered the world not through the Holy Spirit miraculously impregnating the virgin, Mary, but through a sexual union between Elohim and Mary in which Jesus’ spirit-baby-self entered into the newly conceived embryo.

Are y’all still tracking with me? Remember when I said things were going to get funky?

Because of this belief, since Jesus was just the first spirit baby that Elohim had with his wife (or wives), this makes Jesus our brother according to the Mormons. This means that according to them, the only thing special about Jesus was that He was the first born, Elohim said He was the most special, and He just happened to be super-obedient giving us an example of the type of obedience required so we too can become gods over our own planets. Had Elohim wanted to, he could’ve just picked anyone to do what Jesus did on the cross because we’re all just divine, spiritual siblings.

This totally spits in the face of the Bible. In the Bible, what made Jesus different and unique was the fact that He was fully God and fully Man. He was fully a mortal human but was still of the same substance being co-equal with God, thus retaining His divinity. Thus, Jesus was completely unique and could die on the cross for our sins, serving as the permanent atonement for us. No human can claim anything close to that. If Jesus was just our spirit brother, then the punishment would not have sufficed for all of mankind because he would’ve just been human.

As though that wasn’t weird enough, Mormons also don’t believe in the Trinity. They believe in a Triad of gods that work together: Heavenly Father, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost. They’re all united in purpose, working together, but aren’t the same (which also makes this even more blatantly polytheistic than it already is.) That makes it even more clear that in Mormonism, Jesus is not God, and according to Christian theology, is not able to atone for our sins.

This then leads me to why Jesus even bothered coming down to Earth to begin with in Mormonism. According to Mormons, Jesus came down as only part of the salvation plan. According to Mormons, He came down and died for our sins, that we may believe in Him and follow his example, which, on the surface, is a biblical idea until we look at the other three ordinances of salvation.

Yeah, did I mention there’s four ordinances to salvation in Mormonism? The first is you have to believe in Jesus, and then you must repent, be baptized, and undergo the laying on of hands for the Holy Ghost. But that’s the base line for being saved. If you want to be exalted to godhood so you too can rule your own planet of spirit babies, then you have to follow a whole bunch of other ordinances and covenants in the Mormon Temple that Jesus allegedly kept perfectly, making him our example. You can also identify as an unsaved dead person and baptize yourself while pretending to be said dead person so the actual dead person can be saved.

This is an unbiblical idea of salvation, as only repenting of your sins and putting your faith in Christ will save you. Baptism and laying on of hands, while good, is not a necessary part of the salvation process. Baptism is merely an outward declaration of your faith while laying on of hands is an optional part of praying for the newly converted. It’s not what saves you. That’s not even mentioning how unbiblical it is to say that you have to follow XYZ rules and things to become a god over your own planet, or that you can be baptized in the place of a dead person so that person’s soul can be saved.

So, in summary, Mormonism is not a true Christian belief system by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a weird form of polytheism mixed with parts of the Bible taken out of context and turned into a religion that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It doesn’t agree with the Bible on basic facts about the Trinity, distorts who Jesus is, and messes up how you’re saved.

Until next time,

M.J.