Note: Joseph Smith taught that Christian Creeds are lies.
Doctrine and Covenants 123:7 It is an imperative duty that we owe to God, to angels, with whom we shall be brought to stand, and also to ourselves, to our wives and children, who have been made to bow down with grief, sorrow, and care, under the most damning hand of murder, tyranny, and oppression, supported and urged on and upheld by the influence of that spirit which hath so strongly riveted the creeds of the fathers, who have inherited lies, upon the hearts of the children, and filled the world with confusion, and has been growing stronger and stronger, and is now the very mainspring of all corruption, and the whole earth groans under the weight of its iniquity.
Note: Joseph Smith taught that Christian Creeds are an abomination.
The Pearl of Great Price, Joseph Smith - History, verse 19: "I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that: "they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof."
Note: The Mormons reject the Creeds of Christendom as not being from God.
The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Chapter 6, 1987: For a long time the world refused to look upon Mormons as Christians. Indeed most people still think of them as a tertium quid, unique and isolated from all other creatures. There is some justice in this viewpoint if one defines a Christian as one who subscribes to the creeds of Christendom, but the dictionary gives no such definition: for it, a Christian is simply one who believes in Christ, with nothing said about adherence to formulae describing his nature devised three hundred years after his death. The Latter-day Saints do not accept the ecumenical creeds because they were not given by the power of revelation but worked out by committees of experts.
Note: The Mormons reject the Creeds of Christendom as not being Biblical.
Are Mormons Christians?, Robinson, Stephen E., Salt Lake City, Utah: Bookcraft, 1991., Chapter 4: The Latter-day Saints believe, and modern scholarship agrees, that the theology of the councils and creeds represents a radical change from the theology of the New Testament Church, The Latter-day Saints see this change between the first and fourth centuries as part of a great apostasy; scholars refer to it as the Hellenization of Christianity, meaning the modification of the Christian message into forms that would be acceptable in the gentile Greek cultural world. But in that process of modification and adaptation, Christian teaching became Greek teaching, and Christian theology became Greek philosophy. In the LDS view the admixture of Greek elements with the original message of the gospel did not improve it but diluted it.
Note: The Mormons reject the Creeds of Christendom as not being focused on mankind.
LDS Church News, 5/04/96, Care of the Human Body is Sublime Endeavor: In contrast to some earthly creeds, the restored gospel of Jesus Christ places value on the human body and teaches that it and the spirit constitute the soul (See D&C 88:15), that the body and spirit will be unified in the resurrection. Thus, in an eternal sense, Latter-day Saints are striving for physical as well as spiritual perfection.
Mormons and the Holy Trinity
Dan Peterson
Mormontimes.com
16 September 2010
Do Latter-day Saints believe in the Trinity? Virtually everybody who knows anything about Mormonism, believer or not, says no.
But that answer is wrong. Although Latter-day Saints tend to avoid the term "Trinity," some Mormon authorities have used it to describe their belief in a Godhead of three persons. Thus, for example, Brigham Young, speaking of "the Father of us all, and the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ" at the Salt Lake Tabernacle in 1871, asked: "Is he one? Yes. Is his trinity one? Yes."
Similarly, the second chapter of Elder James E. Talmage's authoritative 1890 book on "The Articles of Faith" is titled "God and the Holy Trinity."
Furthermore, uniquely Mormon scriptural texts assert the unity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost at least as strongly as the Bible does. An April 1830 revelation to Joseph Smith, for instance, affirms that they "are one God, infinite and eternal, without end" (Doctrine and Covenants 20:28). The Book of Mormon agrees, declaring (with an interesting singular verb) that "the Father, and … the Son, and … the Holy Ghost … is one God, without end" (2 Nephi 31:21; compare 3 Nephi 28:10).
The impressive testimony of the Three Witnesses to the Book of Mormon, published in the book since 1830, concludes by ascribing "honor … to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, which is one God." "I am in the Father," says the Lord to Joseph Smith in an 1833 revelation, "and the Father in me, and the Father and I are one" (Doctrine and Covenants 93:3).
The question isn't really whether Mormons use the word "Trinity," nor whether they regard the Father, Son and Holy Ghost as "one." They have, and they do. The only real question is how they understand the divine unity.
Mormonism rejects the traditional Trinity of the Nicene Creed, but sees the Father, Son and Holy Ghost as perfectly unified in love and purpose. (Note: Cults will stress purpose over substance) There is not a hair's breadth of difference between them on any matter and certainly not with regard to their loving intention to save as many of the human family as are willing to be saved.
And this is true to the biblical data: It is precisely the same kind of unity that Jesus, in the famous "intercessory" or "high priestly" prayer recounted in John's gospel, sought for his disciples and their eventual converts — and precisely the same kind that he claimed for his Father and himself: He implored "that they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us … that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me" (John 17:21-23).
Fortunately, there are contemporary Christian theologians, both Catholic and Protestant, who are attending more carefully to the biblical roots of Trinitarian doctrine and pruning away the dead branches of outdated Greek metaphysics that have long damaged its health. Many of these identify themselves with what has come to be called the "social model of the Trinity" or, simply, "social Trinitarianism." According to this model, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost are perfectly unified in love and purpose, wholly transparent and open to one another, inseparable but distinct centers of consciousness and personality.
While this isn't quite the Latter-day Saint concept of a Godhead comprising three anthropomorphic beings, it's considerably closer than the model worked out, under the influence of ancient pagan Middle Platonic ideas that have long since dropped out of fashion everywhere but in creedal Christendom, by the delegates to the Council of Nicea. And, anyway, many if not most Christians already believe that one member of the Trinity — the resurrected Son — is embodied, retaining the body that rose from the tomb on the first Easter morning. So the distance between the Latter-day Saints and other Christians on the nature of the Trinity may be growing smaller.