The following was a take-home final for Philosophy 415. Our professor, David Paulsen, had received a letter from a student in an Evangelical theological school asking about the church’s doctrine of Heavenly Mother. Part of our final was to respond to his question. Unfortunately, I no longer have the original inquiry.

One of the most difficult parts of explaining LDS doctrine is figuring out what exactly constitutes formal LDS doctrine in the first place. Not everything that an LDS member or even leader is considered official doctrine, and even then there are different degrees to which statements are given weight when determining doctrine.

Though there are differences of opinion as to the amount of weight that ought to be given to various sources, Blake Ostler gives what could be considered a fairly generally accepted idea when he said, “only the scriptures are binding and must be accepted in all that they say. However, other sources to which Mormons can look to assist them in interpreting the scriptures would include (in order of descending authority) uncanonized revelations given to Joseph Smith or other prophets, statements by Joseph Smith, official statements by the First Presidency, the Lectures on Faith, statements of living prophets and apostles, and the statements of past prophets and apostles.”(1)

I hope to take this into consideration when considering whether we must accept the existence of Heavenly Mother. Given that there are no scriptural statements or direct statements from Joseph Smith on the topic of Heavenly Mother, you are correct in looking next to an official statement from the First Presidency on the matter. Though such a statement is not as doctrinally weighty as the scriptures, I think it can be safely concluded that the statement is indeed doctrinally binding.

Though the 1995 reference to “heavenly parents” is difficult to interpret outside the lines of a Heavenly Mother, I agree that it could possibly hold the interpretation that you suggest, that both God and Jesus are referred to as “Heavenly Parents” and the fact that there is more than one creates a plural. It remains rather ambiguous. Fortunately, we don’t need to rely in the 1995 statement alone because there is another official statement from the First Presidency in 1909 when Joseph F. Smith was president. The relevant portion reads, “All men and women are in the similitude of the universal Father and Mother, and are literally the sons and daughters of Deity.”(2)

The specific reference in this statement makes it difficult to interpret away the existence of a Heavenly Mother of some sort. Lest the statement stand alone, however, other statements have been made by other prophets and apostles, though less doctrinally binding, that provide strong support for the Mormon belief in a feminine deity. For example, the prophet Lorenzo Snow said, “We are the offspring of God. He is our Father, and we have a Mother in the other life as well,”(3) and the apostle George Q. Cannon said, “The Mormons believe that all men were born in the spirit world of the union of the sexes, having a literal father and a literal mother before coming to this world, that the spirits are just the same in appearance as the body, that God is a married Being, has a wife at least, as Jeremiah said the angels were offering incense to the queen of heaven. The Latter-day Saints believe that God is an exalted Man, and that we are the offspring of Him and His wife.”(4)

Though probably near the end of the line in terms of doctrinal authority, many have appealed to the hymn written by Eliza R. Snow – one that the prophet Wilford Woodruff called a revelation.(5) The hymn, called “O My Father” also makes affirmative references to the existence of Heavenly Mother. The prophet Spencer W. Kimball also spoke in support of this hymn when he said, “when we sing that doctrinal hymn and anthem of affection, 'O My Father,' we get a sense of the ultimate in maternal modesty, of the restrained, queenly elegance of our Heavenly Mother, and knowing how profoundly our mortal mothers have shaped us here, do we suppose her influence on us as individuals to be less if we live so as to return there?”(6)

Many other church leaders have argued for the existence of a heavenly mother, simply on the grounds of reason. Brigham Young was quoted in saying that, “Brother Kimball quoted a saying of Joseph the Prophet he would not worship a God who had not a father; and I do not know that he would if he had not a mother; the one would be as absurd as the other.”(7) Similarly, the prophet Joseph Fielding Smith asked, “If we had a Father, which we did, for all of these records speak of him, then does not good common sense tell us that we must have had a mother there also?”(8)

Part of the logical necessity in this idea comes from the common Mormon belief in the foundational property of the family and the idea that our own families will continue in the next life. If men and women will create children in the next life, then it is only logical to assume that we were also created by a man and woman. It is all part of the eternal order of the universe.

This leads to the second part of your question concerning the implications of belief in such a being as Heavenly Mother. I don’t think there is a full explanation that can be given to the first part of the question concerning the relationship between Heavenly Mother and the Trinity. I personally don’t see a problem if we can place Heavenly Mother outside the Trinity altogether. Though she is certainly concerned and occupied with the affairs of Her children, I don’t think we necessarily must assume that she is a part of the patriarchal triumvirate that represents the governing force in the universe. Her will might simply be “represented” by God the Father in the Trinity. The details as to the structure of the Trinity, however, is something that we simply don’t know enough to make any conclusive statements on.

The other part of the question asks how the doctrine of a Heavenly Mother would affect the idea of spirit birth. There is an obvious connection between the two in that one of the few things we would assume as to the roles played by Heavenly Mother is that she is the spirit mother of all spirit beings. You suggest hesitancy with this idea because it implies that Jesus is not co-eternal with God the Father.

I would say that the concept of spirit birth does not limit the concept of eternality because it does not mark the beginning of existence. What exactly is comprised in a “spirit birth” is not well known further than that it brings about the existence of a “spirit body”, but even still the individual still existed in some form before the creation of the spirit sense. In this sense, Jesus is sempiternal with God, as are each one of us.

In fact, even the spirit birth of God the Father does not limit his eternality, and this is a part of the LDS concept of who God is. Joseph Smith taught that, “If Abraham reasoned thus—If Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and John discovered that God the Father of Jesus Christ had a Father, you may suppose that He had a Father also. Where was there ever a son without a father? And where was there ever a father without first being a son?” (9)

As we understand it, God works in much the same way as we will work in the next life. It is all an eternal process. In The Articles of Faith, a work by apostle James Talmage that holds significant doctrinal weight in the church, Talmage explains that, “we are to understand that only resurrected and glorified beings can become parents of spirit offspring. Only such exalted souls have reached maturity in the appointed course of eternal life; and the spirits born to them in the eternal worlds will pass in due sequence through the several stages or estates by which the glorified parents have attained exaltation.” (10)

It would seem as if this eternal order explains both our understanding of spirit birth and our understanding of Heavenly Mother. Though existing eternally, we are brought up into a spiritual body in a birth process through a father and mother. It is in such a way that we will continue to procreate in the next world and is the same way that we were brought about into this one.

To conclude, I think it would be very difficult to say that we don’t need to accept the existence of Heavenly Mother. Unless the many church leaders who have spoken on the topic have been mistaken and unless our conception of eternal progression is also off the mark, it seems as if Heavenly Mother is a necessary doctrine. In that light, considering the Mormon position on the matter, it would actually be more the case that in terms of LDS theology, the lack of the existence of Heavenly Mother would really be the thing that to throw a monkey wrench into the works.

Dec. 14, 2003

Notes

1. Blake Ostler, “Bridging the Gulf” Farms Review of Books Vol. 11, Number 2 1999
2. James R. Clark, comp., Messages of the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 6 vols. (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1965-75), 4: 203
3 . Teachings of Lorenzo Snow, p.191, emphasis in original
4 . April 15, 1884, Salt Lake Herald. Gospel Truth, Vol. 1, p.129)
5 . Woodruff, Wilford. The Discourses of Wilford Woodruff, ed. G. Homer Durham. Salt Lake City, 1968. p. 62.
6 . Spencer W. Kimball, Ensign, May 1978, p.6.
7 . Journal of Discourses Volume, vol. 9, page 286
8 . Joseph Fielding Smith, Answers to Gospel Questions, Vol. 3, p.144
9 . Teachings of the prophet Joseph Smith p. 373
10. James E. Talmage, Articles of Faith [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1981], 426