I’ve been having a lot of conversations with Latter-day Saints on social media this week both pushing back against some of the unfair criticisms against the Church and also trying to explain why orthodox Christians sees the issues that divide us as particularly important. As I’ve done so, I’ve repeatedly receive a variation of this response: “It’s unfair that orthodox Christian are trying to gatekeep us from the fold based on an esoteric philosophical understanding of God.” Or even more pointedly: “You would condemn someone to hell for having the wrong understanding of God, and that’s immoral.”
But I wish that I could help my friends understand that, far from being abstract, the Trinity is the beating heart of the gospel. It means the God who made the universe is the same God who entered history, bore my sin, and now lives in me. And that changes everything
To be clear, salvation is not a theological test. No one is going to be condemned for not fully understanding the nature of God. Indeed, if perfect right theology were required we would all be damned. No, the only thing that is going to matter at the end of the day is whether we have put our saving faith and trust in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior.
But bad theology still matters. It matters for two vital reasons: 1) it prevents people from forming the kind of saving faith and trust that is needed to be saved; AND 2) For those who do already believe in Jesus it interferes with developing a deeper relationship and experiencing the full joy, peace and assurance that God wants us to have.
Denying the Trinity has both of those effects.
Why the Trinity Matters
The Trinity is the linchpin of Christian theology becuase it secures two essential truths that really matter: 1) Jesus was God in every respect before his birth in Bethlehem. He was not a lesser diety, subordinate being, or human being seeking perfection. He was truly God incarnate in every respect: the “image of the invisible God.” (Col 1:15) and the “express image of his person” (Hebrews 1:3). Practically speaking, the Trinity ensures that it’s God Himself who reaches down, enters into creation, and dies for our sins, not a subordinate or someone he delgated for the job but God himself.
But at the same time 2) Jesus’s temptations, his life of devotion to his father in heaven, and his voluntary sacrifice on the cross were real and meaningful. God was not play acting by puting on a temporary mask.
These two truths give the atonement its meaning and purpose. Becuase of them, we know that:
God’s love is eternal. Father, Son, and Spirit have always been in perfect love, and the overflow of that low is what led to our creation and our salvation. that love is what we’re brought into by grace.
Salvation is the work of God: There is no division between the members of the Godhead. There is no room for accusations of cosmic child abuse. Salvation was an act of the full Goadhead from start to finish. The Father planned it, the Son accomplished it, the Spirit applies it.
God Himself is our Savior: Jesus isn’t just a helper or a subordinate—He is God in the flesh, the Lord who came down to rescue us. He is as Isaiah descibed “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”
The Cross has Infinite Worth: Only if Christ is fully God can His death bear the full weight of humanity’s sin.
What happens when we get these Truths Wrong?
Failing to understand that Jesus Christ and the Father are not the same person is at the heart of error of unitarianism and it strips Christ’s life, death, and resurrection of the power they claim. This is also serious error as well. But for the rest of this post I am going to focus on the other error becuase that is the issue that Mormonism struggles with.
Failing to understand that Jesus is truly God can lead to either seeing Jesus as primarily a moral examplar rather than God and Savior, or it can lead to accusations that the Atonement was an act of cosmic child abuse, or it can lead us to draw too many distinctions between the work of the Father and the Son.
One issue that Mormonisms unique version of this error creates is rarely discussed, but it had a big impact on my own faith journey. Mormonisms view of the Godhead makes the Father seem distant and uninvolved in the process of salvation
The Unknown Father
There’s an often repeated LDS teaching from Joseph Fielding Smith:
“The Father has never dealt with man directly and personally since the Fall, and He has never appeared except to introduce and bear record of the Son.”
I had heard this when I joined the Church and didn’t really give it a lot of thought. But when my wife began to attend a Protestant Church and I began to seriously think about the differences between orthodox Chritianity and Latter-day Saint beliefs, it was one that I came back to again and again
If that’s true, then I didn’t really know the God I was worshipping—not the Father, anyway. Other than the opening two chapters of Genesis, the rest of the Bible was almost completey devoid of the words and deeds of the God that I was supposed to be worshiping.
This is extremely odd. The God who created us and allegedly loves us the most did not come down himself to save us. Instead, he delegated the job to his son and our younger brother. He was similarly not personally involved in the creation of the world, delegating that to Jesus as well as others like Adam. The temple portrays this distance with Elohim mostly just receiving reports form Jehovah and Michael about the implementation of his plan.
It also has the problem of making Jesus/Jehoavah a liar. If it was Jesus/Jehovah who said Jesus, a separate person, claimed the things that he does in Isaiah like “I am the Lord, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God” then that is simply false. Jesus/Jehovah certainly knew about at least one other God (the Father) who was in fact higher than him.
Praying to the Unknown God v Trinitarian Fullness
And yet in Mormonism, all prayer is directed to the Father. Indeed, leaders like Bruce R. McConkie strongly emphasized that we DO NOT worship the son at all.
So I was being told to pray to a God who, according to my own church’s teaching, had almost no direct involvement in human history or Scripture. He is the one you must address, yet the one you know the least about. That gap left me confused and restless and it was a turning point for me to consider the Trinity more seriously.
In the Trinity, this gap is closed. Every action of God is the united will and activity of all three members of the Godhead.. The Father is not remote—He is the one who loved the world and gave His Son. The Son is not disconnected—He is the Word made flesh, showing us the Father perfectly. The Spirit is not absent, but is sent from the Father and the Son to fill us up, draw us near, and lead us to cry out “Abba, Father.”
Understanding the Trintiy therefore makes prayer truly personal. We pray to the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit. But we can also cry out to Jesus in praise, and to the Holy Spirit asking to be filled with his presence. And we know that the God we are addressing is not absent, but has revealed Himself and drawn near in love. All three persons are present and fully involved in our every prayer.