The deep dive explains the argument. This track makes you able to wield it — rebuild it from memory, meet its hardest objections, and stay clear and calm in a real conversation.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS, or Mormonism) uses the word "Godhead" but means something different from the historic Trinity. In LDS teaching, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are three separate beings who are one only in purpose, will, and love — not one in substance. The Father and Son are held to have physical, glorified bodies, and LDS theology has historically taught that God the Father was once a man and that humans may progress toward godhood. Many Latter-day Saints are sincere and devout, and that sincerity deserves genuine respect. But sincerity is not the question at issue here; who God is, is.
The historic Christian response is that this is, in effect, a form of tritheism (or polytheism) rather than the biblical doctrine of one God. Scripture insists there is only one God and that besides him there is no other (Isaiah 43:10, 44:6). The Trinity affirms three persons sharing one undivided divine being — not three separate gods united by agreement. The difference is not merely verbal; it concerns whether God is one being or several.
So the conversation turns on the nature of God and the source of authority. Christians ask, gently, whether the Bible's strict monotheism and its picture of an eternal, unchanging God who is spirit fit the LDS account — and they do so seeking understanding and friendship, not point-scoring, mindful that these are questions about the deepest things. The LDS Godhead is not the Trinity and not the one God the Bible reveals — a shared name, a different God, and so a different Jesus. What we hold true — one God, eternally Father, Son and Holy Spirit — rests on its own scriptural case; this argument shows the LDS alternative does not hold.
Not more prose — the load-bearing structure, defended bone by bone, then proven from memory. Work top to bottom; the checkpoint at the end asks you to rebuild it with nothing in front of you.
Learn these first — the objections below turn on them, and most weak versions of the argument come from blurring one of them.
LDS theology teaches that the Father, Son and Spirit are three separate beings, one in purpose — and that God the Father is an exalted man ('As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be'), one deity in an eternal chain of progression.
The Bible's monotheism forecloses both moves categorically: 'Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me' (Isaiah 43:10); 'I know not any' other God (44:8); 'from everlasting to everlasting, you are God' (Ps 90:2) — no prior gods, no future gods, no becoming.
Therefore Mormon theology is not a variant reading of the Trinity debate — it stands outside biblical monotheism itself; the Trinity's one-essence claim is precisely what it denies. The LDS Godhead is not the Trinity and not the one God the Bible reveals — a shared name, a different God, and so a different Jesus. What we hold true — one God, eternally Father, Son and Holy Spirit — rests on its own scriptural case; this argument shows the LDS alternative does not hold.
Clarity with kindness: many LDS members have never been shown the Lorenzo Snow couplet beside Isaiah 43-46. Put the two texts on the table and let the contradiction do the work — no heat required.
The key contrast — progression versus eternity.Everything turns on one question: has God always been God? Mormonism's answer is no — deity is achieved, by the Father once and potentially by us. Scripture's answer is the divide: 'from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.' A god who became is, by the Bible's definition, not God at all.
Working only from what the argument has established: what does each piece of evidence rule out, and how far does the inference reach? Reason each line out, then reveal.
Precision check: this premise is a description, and charity requires that we let each side speak in its own words and reckon with its own best texts. The question is not whether Mormons are sincere, or moral, or devout; many plainly are. The question is narrower and sharper: is God one being or several? The descriptive claims are not in dispute: this is the Church’s own self-description, not a hostile caricature.
Joseph Smith’s King Follett discourse: “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens.” And then, to the living: “you have got to learn how to be Gods yourselves…the same as all Gods have done before you.” Doctrine and Covenants 130:22, recorded from Joseph Smith in 1843, states: “The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; the Son also; but the Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of Spirit.” Its most famous summary of eternal progression is the couplet composed by Lorenzo Snow, later the fifth president of the Church, around 1840: “As man now is, God once was: As God now is, man may be.” This is the same teaching Joseph Smith pressed in the King Follett discourse. The couplet is treated as an authoritative summary in Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Lorenzo Snow (2012), ch. 5.
Honest limit: The couplet is also widely quoted with “may become”; Snow’s recorded wording is “may be.” D&C 130:22 reached its present wording between 1843 and 1858. And the Church’s own 2014 essay “Becoming Like God” affirms eternal progression and human exaltation while declining to detail the more speculative aspects of the doctrine, noting that little is taught about God’s once having been a man.
The Church’s own Gospel Topics entry on the Godhead describes God the Father, His Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost as “three separate beings” who are “one in purpose and doctrine.” The Father and the Son “have tangible bodies of flesh and bones, and the Holy Ghost is a personage of spirit.” This is not a fringe reading; it is catechesis. The dispute is genuinely theological, not merely verbal: both sides agree they disagree, and the LDS Church openly distinguishes its teaching from the creeds.
Two further doctrines complete the picture, and they are the most distinctive of all. The first is what Latter-day Saints call eternal progression or exaltation — the conviction that God was once a man who progressed to godhood, and that the faithful may follow the same path. The second is a corollary: a genuine plurality of gods. The Book of Abraham, part of the LDS canon, narrates creation in the plural — “they, that is the Gods, organized and formed the heavens and the earth” (Abraham 4:1).
Honest limit: Critics of the LDS view describe the result, in technical terms, as a form of social tritheism tending toward henotheism: three divine persons who are numerically three beings, set within a wider order of gods, with worship directed to the Father. This is a critic’s characterization, and LDS thinkers contest it — many prefer to speak of one Godhead united in purpose and will, and resist the “tritheism” and “henotheism” labels as importing categories foreign to their own self-understanding.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints uses the word Godhead, and it confesses the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. To an outsider that can sound Trinitarian.
It is not — and Latter-day Saints are the first to say so. Against the LDS account stands the Nicene confession, shared by Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox, and the historic Protestant traditions alike: there is one God — numerically one divine being, one undivided essence — who exists eternally as three coequal, coeternal persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The persons are really distinct (the Father is not the Son), but they are not three beings; they share, wholly and without division, the one being of God. Two features of this God are load-bearing for the argument with Mormonism. He is numerically one; and he is immutable and eternally God — he did not become God, and there was never a God before him. The LDS Godhead, by contrast, affirms three beings and a God who progressed to deity. The two pictures cannot both be right.
Precision check: the LDS doctrine of the Godhead is not a variant within the Trinity debate but a departure from the biblical monotheism the Trinity was formulated to protect. This argument does not by itself prove the Trinity; it shows the LDS alternative does not hold. It does not settle every disputed verse — the exegesis of Psalm 82 and John 17 remains a live conversation — and it says nothing about the sincerity, the morality, or the devotion of the Latter-day Saints who hold the doctrine.
The decisive biblical material is Isaiah’s great monotheism oracles. They do not merely assert that Israel should worship one God; they make a sweeping claim about reality. “Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me” (Isaiah 43:10). “I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god” (44:6). And, most pointedly: “Is there a God besides me? There is no Rock; I know not any” (44:8). The phrase “before me no god was formed” uses a verb of origination and excludes precisely a God who existed prior to Yahweh — the predecessor-deity that eternal progression requires. “Nor shall there be any after me” excludes the exalted gods that exaltation promises. And “I know not any” functions as the strongest possible denial — Yahweh disclaiming knowledge of any rival — rather than, on its face, the report of a literal divine inventory.
The decisive weight sits in the surrounding language: the origination verb “formed,” which rules out a God prior to Yahweh; Isaiah 44:24, where Yahweh is the one “who alone stretched out the heavens, who spread out the earth by myself” — not in concert with a council of separate deities; and the address to “all the ends of the earth” (45:22), which extends the claim past Israel to reality as such.
To this the rest of Scripture adds the immutability and spirituality of God: “I the LORD do not change” (Malachi 3:6); “from everlasting to everlasting you are God” (Psalm 90:2); “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind” (Numbers 23:19); “I am God and not a man” (Hosea 11:9); “God is spirit” (John 4:24). Numbers 23:19 and Hosea 11:9 state the Creator/creature line LDS theology erases. Where historic Christianity confesses (with John 4:24) that “God is spirit,” LDS revelation locates the Father in a glorified physical body.
Honest limit: The Son is a different case: the eternal Son took a complete human nature to himself without ceasing to be God, and was raised bodily — “a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39). What Scripture denies is not the Son’s risen humanity but that the Father, or the divine nature as such, is embodied.
Beneath the proof-texts lies a question of pure reason that the contingency and cosmological arguments sharpen. If God was once a man who progressed to deity, then he was exalted by some prior god, who was exalted by a prior god, in an infinite regress — and the King Follett teaching (“all Gods … before you”) gives no stopping point for such a chain, set within eternally existing matter and law that God organizes rather than creates from nothing. The difficulty is not aesthetic. Such a chain explains nothing: the system of exaltation, the matter, and the laws all simply exist, unexplained, with every god a member of the system and none its ground. An infinite regress of dependent gods is a series of items each of which needs explaining, with the explanation forever deferred. And here Scripture and reason converge on the same verdict: “before me no god was formed” is exactly the denial that God is a member of any such chain. A God who became God is, by the Bible’s own definition — and by the logic of ultimate explanation — not God at all.
Honest limit: The Latter-day Saint may retort that the Christian, too, posits one eternal, uncaused being and calls it mysterious — so why is one brute fact respectable and an eternal chain not? The reply is that the two are not symmetrical. A self-existent, necessary being is not one more contingent item in a series; it is the terminus that any explanation of contingent things requires — the conclusion that the cosmological arguments reach on independent grounds.
The earliest layer of LDS scripture — the Book of Mormon, published in 1830 — teaches what looks like classical monotheism. Amulek is asked plainly, “Is there more than one God?” and answers, “No” (Alma 11:28–29). The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are called “one Eternal God” (Alma 11:44). Other passages speak of God as “unchangeable from all eternity to all eternity” (Moroni 8:18; cf. Mosiah 3:5). The doctrines of a God who was once a man and of a plurality of gods are products of Joseph Smith’s later Nauvoo period, not of the 1830 text. The question is not creed versus prophet; it is the later sermon versus the earlier scripture.
Honest limit: Its one-God language is no ally of the Trinity either — Amulek calls the Son “the very Eternal Father” (Alma 11:38–39); the point is only that it knows nothing of many gods or of a God who was once a man. Latter-day Saint scholars reply that “one God” in these texts can be read as oneness of purpose, and that the Book of Mormon’s “one God” language reflects an earlier stage of progressive revelation — a possible internal harmonization. But the tension is real and is felt within the tradition.
The strongest LDS case is not really exegesis of single words; it is the cumulative force of the narrative scenes. At Jesus’ baptism, the Son stands in the water, the Spirit descends as a dove, and the Father speaks from heaven (Matthew 3:16–17) — three, in three places, at once. In Gethsemane the Son prays to the Father, his will distinct from the Father’s (Luke 22:42). Stephen, dying, sees “the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:55–56) — two figures, side by side. The Latter-day Saint says, on the face of it: I am simply reading what the text shows. It is the creeds that import a Greek metaphysics of “one substance” that the biblical writers never used.
This is the objection to take most seriously, and the honest reply is that the scenes prove distinction, which the Trinity affirms every bit as firmly as Mormonism does. The baptism and Gethsemane refute modalism — the idea that Father, Son, and Spirit are mere masks — not Trinitarianism; the Son prays to the Father in Gethsemane—real address to one who is really other, the incarnate Son’s human will yielded to the Father’s (Luke 22:42). What the scenes cannot do, by themselves, is settle the question of essence: three persons acting distinctly is equally compatible with three beings and with three persons of one being. To decide between those, one must read the scenes together with the statements — “the LORD is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4); “the Word was God” (John 1:1); the single “name” (singular) of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit at baptism (Matthew 28:19). The Trinity is the reading that keeps both the distinction and the oneness; tritheism keeps the scenes and drops the oneness texts. John 17:21–22 is sometimes pressed here — Jesus prays that believers may “be one” as he and the Father are one — but the comparison must be completed carefully, or it backfires. The oneness believers are invited into is participation by grace: creatures drawn into communion, not absorbed into the divine essence. The Father-Son oneness in the same Gospel is categorically different in kind: the Son shares in creation (“all things were made through him,” John 1:3), speaks the divine “I AM” (John 8:58), and receives the worship due to God alone (John 5:23; 20:28). Believer-unity is participation in the life of God; the Son’s unity is the very deity that life participates in. So 17:21 does not flatten the Father and the Son into the same category as glorified believers — and that is precisely why it gives no purchase to a reading on which exaltation makes the faithful gods of the same kind.
Psalm 82:6 says, “I said, you are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you.” And in John 10:34–36, Jesus himself quotes that very verse to defend his own claim to deity. Deification is not a Mormon invention smuggled into Scripture; it is in Scripture, on the lips of Christ. Moreover, the early church fathers spoke this way too. Athanasius wrote that the Word “became man that we might be made god” — theosis, the deification of the believer, is ancient orthodoxy, not heresy.
Concede freely: deification language is biblical, and historic Christianity has its own rich doctrine of theosis. The fathers were not embarrassed by 2 Peter 1:4. Scripture and the fathers really do speak of believers becoming “partakers of the divine nature” — glorified creatures drawn by grace into the life of God — but not the LDS claim that humans become Gods of the same kind, or that God the Father was once a man. The patristic and the LDS doctrines share a word and almost nothing else. Athanasius, in the very treatise where he speaks of our becoming “god,” insists relentlessly on the absolute divide between the uncreated Creator and everything created. The believer is deified by grace, as a glorified creature who never crosses into being God by nature; we are made “partakers,” not partners of the same species. Crucially, no church father ever taught that God the Father was once a man who progressed to deity — that is the claim with no patristic parallel, and it is the heart of the King Follett doctrine. As for Psalm 82 itself, read to its end it is the worst possible proof-text: the “gods” — whether corrupt human judges or rebel heavenly powers — are condemned: “like men you shall die” (82:7). It is a demotion scene. And Jesus’ use of it in John 10 is an a fortiori argument about the elasticity of a word, deployed while he claims something categorically higher (“I and the Father are one,” 10:30) — which is why his hearers again sought to arrest him (10:39).
Isaiah’s context is polemic against Babylonian idols. “There is no god besides me” means there is no rival worthy of Israel’s worship — no carved Marduk that can save — not a metaphysical headcount ruling out exalted beings on other worlds. The same idiom appears where the sense is plainly comparative: Babylon says in her heart, “I am, and there is no one besides me” (Isaiah 47:8), without claiming to be the only city on earth. To wield Isaiah against eternal progression, the critic is reading a worship-polemic as if it were systematic theology.
The polemical setting is real — concede it. But the language is engineered to outrun the loophole. Isaiah does not say “no god for you”; he says none was formed, a verb about origins, ruling out a deity prior to Yahweh. He has Yahweh disclaim knowledge of any other god: “I know not any” (44:8), the strongest possible denial that any rival exists, not merely that none is worth worshiping. And he addresses the claim to “all the ends of the earth” (45:22), not to Israel alone. The Babylon parallel (47:8) actually tells against the objection: Isaiah deliberately puts Yahweh’s “there is none besides me” and Babylon’s arrogant echo of it side by side — and the whole point is that what is blasphemous self-deception in Babylon’s mouth is sober truth in Yahweh’s. And the idiom is not left to stand alone in Yahweh’s case, as it is in Babylon’s: Isaiah fences it on every side with origins (“formed,” 43:10), sole creation (44:24), and universal address (45:22) — which is exactly what Babylon’s boast lacks. The text is built to exclude every conceivable rival, in every direction of time.
Each of these gets its strongest form first, then the reply — and the hardest objection of all is flagged below.
The one that matters most: that the texts show three beings — the baptism, Gethsemane, Stephen’s vision. The deep dive answers it at length — take it with you, not just the replies below.
Strongest form
The Bible calls humans gods, and Jesus cites it approvingly. Deification is biblical — you just stopped reading it.
Reply
Read Psalm 82 to its end: the 'gods' — unjust judges or rebel spiritual rulers — are condemned to DIE like men; it is a demotion scene, the worst possible proof-text for exaltation. Jesus' use in John 10 is an a-fortiori argument about the word's flexibility — made while claiming for himself something categorically more ('I and the Father are one'), which is why they again sought to arrest him (10:39).
Strongest form
Theosis is ancient orthodoxy. Mormonism restored what the creeds buried.
Reply
Patristic theosis and LDS exaltation share a word and almost nothing else. Athanasius — in the very treatise — insists on the absolute Creator/creature divide: we become 'partakers of the divine nature' by grace, glorified creatures forever, never beings of the same species as God, never creators of worlds, and GOD NEVER WAS A MAN who progressed. The fathers' doctrine requires the very Creator/creature line the King Follett sermon erases — cite them and you cite the prosecution.
Strongest form
The context is Babylonian idol-polemic — there are no rival gods FOR ISRAEL. Isaiah was not legislating about exalted beings on other worlds. The same idiom is Babylon’s boast — ‘I am, and there is no one besides me’ (47:8) — which claims no census.
Reply
The language outruns the loophole on purpose: not 'no gods for you' but none FORMED — a verb of origination — before or after, 'I know not any' (44:8) — the strongest possible denial that any rival exists; 'I am God and there is none else' (45:22) addressed to the ENDS OF THE EARTH. And the idiom is not left to stand alone in Yahweh’s case, as it is in Babylon’s: Isaiah fences it on every side with origins (“formed,” 43:10), sole creation (44:24), and universal address (45:22)—which is exactly what Babylon’s boast lacks. The text is built to exclude every conceivable rival, in every direction of time. And the Father-once-a-man claim needs a god formed BEFORE YHWH — the exact thing 43:10 names first.
Strongest form
1 Nephi 13 says a great and abominable church stripped the original gospel. Quoting the surviving text against restored truth assumes what is in dispute.
Reply
The corruption claim is empirically testable — and fails: the Dead Sea Scrolls give us Isaiah a millennium before the medieval copies, and 43-46 reads the same; thousands of NT manuscripts show no monotheism-inserting redaction — no 'plain and precious' alternative text exists in any archive, in any language. Meanwhile the Book of Mormon ITSELF reads far more like classical monotheism (Alma 11:28–29; Moroni 8:18) — the god-progression doctrine post-dates it. LDS thinkers harmonize the two, so press it as a question: the later sermon or the earlier scripture?
Strongest form
Three figures, three locations, one praying to another — every theophany is tritheist on its face. Mormons read the scenes; you read Athens.
Reply
The scenes show DISTINCTION — which the Trinity requires as much as Mormonism does; they cannot adjudicate essence, which is why you must read the scenes WITH the statements: the LORD is one; I am God and there is none else; the Word WAS God; one Name (singular) at baptism. Tritheism keeps the scenes and drops the oneness texts; the Trinity is the reading that keeps both the distinction and the oneness. John 17:21–22 must be completed carefully: believers are one by participation, by grace; the Father-Son oneness differs in kind — the Son made all things (John 1:3), speaks the I AM (8:58), receives the honour due to God (5:23; 20:28). So it gives no purchase to exaltation into gods of the same kind.
Strongest form
You accept one brute eternal being; we accept an eternal chain of beings. Neither is provable; mocking ours while asserting yours is special pleading.
Reply
The alternatives are not symmetric. An infinite regress of progressing gods — each exalted by a predecessor — never grounds anything: matter, law, and the exaltation-system itself exist eternally UNEXPLAINED, with every god inside the system and none its source (LDS doctrine concedes God organises pre-existing matter, not creation from nothing). One self-existent necessary being is not one more item in such a chain — it is the terminus that explanation requires, the conclusion the contingency and Kalam arguments argue for independently. And scripture, which both sides claim, votes: before me no god was FORMED.
The descriptive claims are not in dispute: LDS theology really does teach three separate divine beings, a Father with a physical body, eternal progression, and a plurality of gods — this is the Church’s own self-description, not a hostile caricature (Gospel Topics; D&C 130:22; the King Follett discourse; the 2014 essay “Becoming Like God”). The decisive weight sits on Isaiah’s monotheism oracles and the immutability and spirituality of God, which are strong. What the argument does NOT do is prove the Trinity by itself, or settle every disputed verse — the exegesis of Psalm 82 and John 17 remains a live conversation.
A fairness most defenders skip: A charitable treatment lets the best Latter-day Saint reading stand at full height first: serious LDS thinkers offer their own readings of Psalm 82, John 17, and the narrative scenes, and they contest the “tritheism” and “henotheism” labels as importing categories foreign to their own self-understanding. And the Christian owes a concession of his own — as the philosopher Dale Tuggy notes in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the “social” family of Trinitarian models shows that the line between a robust distinction of persons and tritheism is itself philosophically delicate, a point pressed against Trinitarians as well.
The bounded verdict: The honest verdict is not that the LDS position is absurd, but that it cannot be squared with Isaiah’s monotheism or with the immutability of God — and that, on its own deepest commitment, a God who progressed cannot be the uncreated ground of all things. The LDS doctrine of the Godhead is not a variant within the Trinity debate but a departure from the biblical monotheism the Trinity was formulated to protect: not the Trinity, and not the one God the Bible reveals — a shared name, a different God, and so a different Jesus. It establishes nothing about the sincerity, the morality, or the devotion of the Latter-day Saints who hold it; many plainly are sincere and devout.
Close the sections above. This is the retrieval that turns reading into knowing — and it is how this argument reaches Bronze · Understand on your shelf. Opening accordions no longer counts; showing you can rebuild the structure does.
Knowledge you can't retrieve under pressure isn't yours yet. These drills make you generate the argument, not recognise it — harder now, on purpose, so it holds in a real conversation.
Scroll the sections away and generate it from memory — recalling is what builds durable memory; re-reading only feels like it does. Pick your level; the bar rises as you go. Scored out of 10, graded for accuracy first. An 8+ at level 2 or 3 is one half of Silver.
Twelve cards drawn from the premises, objections, concessions, and sources above. Answer out loud before you flip — the effort of recall is the whole point; a card you merely recognise hasn't stuck. Each card is graded: type the key idea, flip, mark it. Three correct recalls and a card rests; it comes back on Today when it is due.
Start here: draft your reply, then reveal a model answer to compare. This is the worked example — Drill 4 then makes you do it cold across the whole objection set.
"Then Isaiah is the obstacle, not the creeds. Hear it as written: BEFORE me no god was formed — so the Father had no predecessor, no era when he was a progressing man under an earlier god. NOR SHALL THERE BE ANY AFTER ME — so no exalted humans joining the species. 'I know not any' — the strongest possible denial that any rival exists. From everlasting to everlasting, YOU ARE GOD — not became. A God who became God is not the God Isaiah knows. And here is the gentle surprise: your own first book of scripture has Amulek answer ‘No’ to ‘Is there more than one God?’ (Alma 11:28–29) and calls God ‘unchangeable from all eternity’ (Moroni 8:18); the progression doctrine arrived later, in Nauvoo. I am not asking you to trust my creed over your prophet. I am asking you to let Isaiah — and your own first book — speak before the sermon does."
The other half of Silver. Draft a reply from memory, reveal the certified answer, and rate yourself honestly. Clear all four with a “nailed it” and you can field them in the wild — not just recognise them on the page.
Mastery isn't a feeling — it's three levels, each earned by showing you can do the thing, then proven again over time. Don't trust the warm glow of having read it; prove it cold.
Gold can slip back to Silver if you stop turning up for the spaced reviews — real mastery is perishable, which is why it's worth something. The dashboard brings this one back when it's due.
Rate yourself — then see whether your Explain It Back score backs it up. Felt-confidence and shown-confidence are not the same thing, and the gap is worth knowing before a real conversation.
Everything above rehearsed objections the page showed you. Here is the real test of mastery: an objection we deliberately did not drill. Reason it out cold from what the argument established, then reveal how it actually handles it. An honest “nailed it” is the first half of Gold.
The risen Christ really does have flesh and bones — concede it freely, and the reason is precisely the incarnation, not a model of deity as such. The eternal Son took a complete human nature to himself without ceasing to be God, and was raised bodily (Luke 24:39); that body is his assumed humanity, the created nature he made his own, not the divine nature turned into matter. What Scripture denies is not the Son’s risen humanity but that the Father, or the divine nature as such, is embodied: “God is spirit” (John 4:24); he is the one who “alone stretched out the heavens” (Isaiah 44:24), who is “from everlasting to everlasting” (Psalm 90:2) and “does not change” (Malachi 3:6). And that is the deeper problem for the King Follett picture: an embodied Father who was once a man is a being inside the world of matter and time — exactly the predecessor-having, progressing God that “before me no god was formed” rules out. So the Son’s body is no warrant for the Father’s. The Creator/creature line is never crossed: the incarnation is God graciously taking up our nature, not evidence that deity itself is flesh — and a God who had to become God is, by the Bible’s own definition, not God at all.
Two more Trinity arguments remain in this track — Answering Modalism is next.
Apologia Daily — defending the faith with gentleness and respect.