The Doctrine & Covenants vs. the Bible

I ended the last chapter on a question I couldn’t put down. The keystone — the Book of Mormon — teaches one unchangeable God. So where did the other doctrine come from? The God who was once a man, the plurality of Gods, the promise that you might become one yourself: none of that is in the keystone, and none of it is in the Bible. It came from somewhere. This chapter is about where.

And I want to do it the fair way — with dates. Because this isn’t a matter of interpretation you and I could argue in circles. It’s a matter of record, and the record is your own.

A shift you can put on a calendar

The Book of Mormon was published in 1830. Everything we read from it last chapter — one God, “unchangeable from all eternity to all eternity” — was in print and settled by then.

The new teaching arrives later, and you can date it almost to the day:

• April 2, 1843 — at Ramus, Illinois, Joseph Smith gives the instruction now printed as Doctrine and Covenants section 130. Verse 22 says the Father has a body of flesh and bones.
• July 12, 1843 — the revelation now printed as section 132 is recorded at Nauvoo. It speaks of men becoming gods.
• April 7, 1844 — at the April general conference in Nauvoo, in memory of a member named King Follett who had died, Joseph Smith preaches the sermon in which he says God himself was once a man.

Thirteen or fourteen years separate the keystone from this teaching. I’m not making an accusation by pointing that out — I’m just asking you to hold the timeline in view while we look at each piece. A doctrine that appears in the 1840s and contradicts a book from 1830 is not “the same gospel it always was.” It’s a change, and a change has to be examined on its own terms.

God with a body

Start with the most concrete claim. Jesus, talking to a woman at a well, tells her what God is:

Now let me be fair, because there’s a real Latter-day Saint answer here and you deserve to see it stated at full strength. The response goes: “spirit” in John 4:24 describes how God is worshiped, not that He is bodiless — and the risen Christ himself proved a glorified being can have flesh, saying “a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have” (Luke 24:39Luke 24:39 (KJV) — Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.). So, the harmonization runs, God is spirit and has a body.

I’d only ask you to notice what that costs. It requires reading “God is a Spirit” as not meaning God is a spirit. And it puts you crosswise with your own keystone, which called God “unchangeable” and “the very Eternal Father of heaven and of earth” — language that fits a God who is spirit far better than a God with a tangible body of bone. The Bible and the Book of Mormon lean the same way here. Section 130 leans the other.

God who was once a man

Here is the sentence that changes everything downstream:

I want to be scrupulously honest about what this quotation is, because if I’m not, you’ll rightly distrust me. The King Follett discourse is not canonized scripture. It’s a funeral sermon, taken down in longhand by four scribes — Willard Richards, Wilford Woodruff, Thomas Bullock, and William Clayton — and reconstructed afterward from their notes. You know this, and I’d lose you if I dressed it up as a revelation in your standard works. It isn’t one.

But notice: I’m quoting it from your Church’s own Ensign, which reprinted it in 1971 and called it “one of the classics of Church literature.” It is not a stray remark the Church has disowned. It is taught, printed, and honored. So it’s fair to lay it beside your Bible.

And your Bible could not answer it more directly:

Psalm 90:2Psalm 90:2 (KJV) — Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. — “even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.” Not from manhood to godhood. From everlasting. And Isaiah 43:10Isaiah 43:10 (KJV) — Ye are my witnesses, saith the LORD, and my servant whom I have chosen: that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am he: before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me. — God says, “before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me.” If God was once a man who became God, then there was a God formed, and the sentence God speaks about Himself in Isaiah is false. You can’t hold both.

Men who become Gods

The same logic runs forward as well as back. If God climbed to godhood, the path is open behind Him — and section 132 opens it:

The revelation is explicit a few verses earlier, too: the sealed “shall pass by the angels, and the gods, which are set there, to their exaltation and glory in all things” (D&C 132:19).

Let me steel-man this the way an honest neighbor should. Your Church doesn’t frame this as arrogance — it frames it as the doctrine of exaltation, God’s loving purpose that His children grow up to be like Him. The official Gospel Topics essay “Becoming Like God” grounds it in the New Testament language of being “joint-heirs with Christ,” children who inherit what the Father has. I don’t doubt the tenderness in that hope. A parent wanting children to grow up is a beautiful picture.

But hold it against Isaiah. God says He knows of no other God — not one before, not one to come, not one being formed in some celestial nursery. “I know not any.” A doctrine that ends in the child becoming a God with all power, angels subject to him, is what Isaiah’s God rules out in the plainest words He ever uses about Himself. And once again — this is the part I most want you to feel — your own Book of Mormon rules it out too. “Unchangeable from all eternity to all eternity” leaves no room for a God still climbing, or a man on his way up.

The priesthood question the Bible calls closed

There’s one more place the seam shows, and it’s quieter, so I’ll be brief and careful. Sections 84 and 107 build the restored priesthood into ranked offices — Aaronic and Melchizedek, deacon to high priest — an authority conferred by ordination and passed from man to man by the laying on of hands. I’ll represent that fairly: the whole system rests on the idea that priesthood must be transferred to living successors to continue. I know the teaching is that this is Christ’s own authority, delegated — not a replacement for him.

The book of Hebrews takes up that exact idea — and argues it was settled in Christ. The old priests, it says, were many “because they were not suffered to continue by reason of death: But this man, because he continueth ever, hath an unchangeable priesthood” (Hebrews 7:23-25Hebrews 7:23-25 (KJV) — And they truly were many priests, because they were not suffered to continue by reason of death: But this man, because he continueth ever, hath an unchangeable priesthood. Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.). The word behind “unchangeable” is aparabatos — lexicons gloss it as unchangeable, not passing away, untransferable; the sense the writer presses is a priesthood that never passes to a successor. The very thing that forced the old priesthood to be handed down — death — is abolished in a priest who never dies. So there’s no line of successors to ordain, because the office never falls vacant.

And what does the Bible give ordinary believers instead? Not a ladder of offices, but this: “ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people” (1 Peter 2:91 Peter 2:9 (KJV) — But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light:). Peter hands every believer the priesthood that section 84 restricts to ordained men. I’m not asking you to throw anything out on one paragraph. I’m asking you to see that on priesthood, as on God Himself, the later revelation moves in a direction the Bible had already closed.

Where this leaves us

Step back and look at what we’ve actually done these last two chapters. We put three books your Church calls the word of God on the same table — the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants — and asked them the deepest question there is: what is God? Two of them answered the same way. One God. Unchangeable. From everlasting. The third, arriving in the 1840s, answered differently.

Two of your three canons agree with each other. The question is what to do with the third.

I don’t say that to corner you. I say it because every date and quotation above is one you can verify tonight in your own scriptures. The next chapter follows this seam into the history: how the teaching changed, who changed it, and what the Church itself has said about it since.

Your friend, Brock