Two Trinities

Two Trinities, One Divine Family

Among the most consistently misunderstood elements of the Restoration is the relationship between the divine names and titles used in scripture and in the discourses of President Brigham Young. The modern conflation of Yahovah (or Jehovah) with Jesus Christ exclusively, the assumption that Elohim always means the same individual being, and the corresponding flattening of the Hebrew divine family into a single triune Godhead — these are post-Adam-God-abandonment errors. Pre-abandonment teaching consistently distinguished two distinct Trinities: the Creation Trinity by which this earth was organized, and the Godhead Trinity with whom we have to do in this dispensation.

The framework below follows President Brigham Young’s teaching, with the relevant primary statements brought together in their proper context.

The Creation Trinity

President Young’s clearest single statement of the framework was given in the Tabernacle on April 9, 1852, immediately following the public Proclamation that Adam is our Father and our God:

“It is true that the earth was organized by three distinct characters, namely, Eloheim, Yahovah, and Michael, these three forming a quorum, as in all heavenly bodies, and in organizing element, perfectly represented in the Deity, as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”
— President Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 1:51 (April 9, 1852)

Three persons. One quorum. Elohim, Yahovah, and Michael. Note the language: this Creation Trinity is “perfectly represented” — typified, mirrored — in the Godhead Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost), but the two are not identical. The Creation Trinity organized this earth before its inhabitation; the Godhead Trinity is the present Deity with whom we have to do.

The genealogy among the three was made explicit by President Young in private Priesthood instruction, and recorded by Joseph F. Smith in his journal entry of 17 June 1871 (then an Apostle, later a Counselor in the First Presidency and President of the Church):

“Elohim, Yahova & Michael, were father, Son and grandson. They made this Earth & Michael became Adam.”
— President Brigham Young, recorded in Joseph F. Smith Journal, 17 June 1871 (cited in The Complete Discourses of Brigham Young, ed. Richard S. Van Wagoner, 5:2856)

The hierarchy is therefore:

  • Elohim — eldest of the three; the Heavenly Great-Grandfather in this genealogy.
  • Yahovah — Elohim’s Son; Michael’s Father; the Heavenly Grandfather. Not Christ.
  • Michael — Yahovah’s Son; Elohim’s grandson; the One who descended to this earth and became Adam, the Father of this human family.

This is the structure that organized this world. President Young taught it openly to the Quorum, recorded it through his clerks, and proclaimed its outline in the public sermon of April 9, 1852. The most explicit single attribution of the framework to Joseph Smith is preserved in the verbatim shorthand transcript of the Quorum of the Twelve meeting of April 4, 1860, in which President Young addressed Orson Pratt and named President Heber C. Kimball and Willard Richards as additional witnesses to the same teaching from the Prophet (the shorthand transcript is available on the April 4, 1860 source page, while the longhand companion record is preserved in Office Journal Book D).

The Godhead Trinity

The Godhead Trinity — with whom we have to do in this dispensation, as the Saints administer the ordinances of the Gospel and receive the Holy Ghost — is a separate quorum, structurally analogous (“perfectly represented”) but not identical:

  • The Father — Adam, formerly Michael, now resurrected and exalted. President Young: “He is our Father and our God, and the only God with whom we have to do” (Journal of Discourses 1:50).
  • The Son — Jesus Christ, begotten of the Father (Adam) and born through Mary; our elder brother, our Redeemer, our Mediator.
  • The Holy Ghost — Joseph Smith, the third distinct personage of the Godhead, who presides over the Holy Spirits and administers witness to those of the human family who love the truth. President Young again: “The Holy Ghost, we believe, is one of the characters that form the Trinity, or the Godhead. Not one person in three, nor three persons in one; but the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are one in essence, as the hearts of three men who are united in all things. He is one of the three characters we believe in, whose office it is to administer to those of the human family who love the truth” (Journal of Discourses 6:95). See The Holy Ghost and the Holy Spirits for the fuller treatment.

That the Father of the Godhead is Adam, and not the Holy Ghost, was set down in plain language by President Young in his discourse of February 19, 1854 — settling, before any of the later confusions arose, the question that some had raised:

“Who did beget him? His Father, and his father is our God, and the Father of our spirits, and he is the framer of the body, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Who is he? He is Father Adam. Michael, the Ancient of Days, has he a father? He has. Has he a mother? He has. Now to say that the Son of God was begotten by the Holy Ghost, is to say the Holy Ghost is God the Father, which is inconsistent, and contrary to all the revelations of God both modern and ancient.”
— President Brigham Young, discourse of February 19, 1854 (The Complete Discourses of Brigham Young, ed. Van Wagoner, 2:763)

The Father of the Godhead Trinity is Adam, who was Michael of the Creation Trinity, who is Elohim’s grandson and Yahovah’s son. The two Trinities share Michael/Adam as the common bridge: he is the third person of the Creation Trinity (the descender), and the first person of the Godhead Trinity (the resurrected Father).

The Name-Title System

The further key to reading the early Brethren without confusion is this: “Elohim,” “Jehovah,” “Yahovah,” “Michael,” “Adam,” “Father,” “God” — these are not unique proper names attached to one being only. They are shared titles of the divine family hierarchy, inherited by every exalted being in turn. Context indicates which person is meant. The same passage may, depending on context, refer to Adam, to Yahovah (Adam’s Father in the Creation Trinity), or even to Christ when He bears the Father’s name by delegation.

The Hebrew Bible itself preserves the principle. As Fred C. Collier traces in detail in The Father and the Son — The Two Gods of the Old Testament, the title “Yahweh” in scripture sometimes refers to the Father (by inherent right) and sometimes to the Son (by authorized delegation per Exodus 23:21, “my name is in him”). The two are not in competition; the Son bears the Father’s name as the Father’s authorized representative. So also “Lord,” “God,” “Most High,” and the rest. The names are titles; the titles are inherited; the persons bearing the titles are distinct.

Reading the early Brethren without this key produces apparent contradictions, which is precisely what has led to a century of confusion. Reading them with the key produces perfect coherence.

The Post-Abandonment Error

After the Adam-God doctrine was set aside in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see the Adam-God page for the historical sequence), the modern LDS Church gradually flattened these distinctions into a single Godhead structure: Elohim came to mean “Heavenly Father” exclusively, and Jehovah came to mean “Jesus Christ” exclusively. The Creation Trinity, with its three distinct persons and its inherited divine genealogy, was effectively dissolved into the Godhead Trinity.

This conflation has consequences. It makes nonsense of President Young’s plain statements. It obscures the meaning of Brigham Young’s identification of Adam as the Father. It presses the Hebrew divine family hierarchy into categories drawn from post-Nicene Christendom. And, most importantly for the Saints, it severs the Restoration’s understanding of the patriarchal genealogy of the Gods — the doctrine that the Father has a Father, and that the chain of exalted progenitors continues upward beyond Him. Joseph Smith taught this principle plainly in his discourse of June 16, 1844:

“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? Whenever did a tree or anything spring into existence without a progenitor? And everything comes in this way. Paul says that which is earthly is in the likeness of that which is heavenly. Hence if Jesus had a Father, can we not believe that He had a Father also? I despise the idea of being scared to death at such a doctrine, for the Bible is full of it.”

“I want you to pay particular attention to what I am saying. Jesus said that the Father wrought precisely in the same way as His Father had done before Him. As the Father had done before? He laid down His life, and took it up the same as His Father had done before.”
— Joseph Smith, June 16, 1844, TPJS 373

Joseph had already set the plurality framework in the same discourse: “Paul says there are Gods many and Lords many.” He then turned to the Hebrew text of Genesis to show that the plurality begins in the Bible’s first sentence:

“Berosheit baurau Eloheim ait aushamayeen vehau auraits, rendered by King James’ translators, ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’ I want to analyze the word Berosheit. Rosh, the head; Sheit, a grammatical termination… Eloheim is from the word Eloi, God, in the singular number; and by adding the word heim, it renders it Gods. It read first, ‘In the beginning the head of the Gods brought forth the Gods,’ or, as others have translated it, ‘The head of the Gods called the Gods together.'”

“The head God organized the heavens and the earth.”

“The heads of the Gods appointed one God for us; and when you take [that] view of the subject, its sets one free to see all the beauty, holiness and perfection of the Gods.”
— Joseph Smith, June 16, 1844, TPJS 371–372

The 1852 Statement Read Correctly

Some have argued, on the basis of Journal of Discourses 1:51 alone, that President Young identified Adam/Michael with the Holy Ghost. This is a misreading. The 1852 statement is a structural analogy: the Creation Trinity (Elohim, Yahovah, Michael) is “perfectly represented” — typified, reflected — in the Godhead Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Ghost), not identified with it. The third person of the Creation Trinity (Michael) corresponds structurally to the third person of the Godhead Trinity (the Holy Ghost) in the sense that both are the third in their quorum — but Michael’s function is to descend and become Adam, the Father of the next generation, whereas the Holy Ghost’s function is to administer to those of the human family who love the truth. Different persons, different roles, structurally analogous quorums.

President Young removed all ambiguity in his February 1854 sermon (above), explicitly identifying Adam/Michael as God the Father — not the Holy Ghost — and explicitly distinguishing the Holy Ghost as a separate person; Michael has both a Father and a Mother of His own. There is no contradiction between the 1852 and 1854 statements when the two-Trinity framework is in place; there is only contradiction when one collapses the framework and forces every divine name to refer to a single person.

Practical Reading Implications

Once the Two Trinities are in view, several scriptural and doctrinal puzzles resolve themselves:

  • Genesis 18 (Mamre). The Father appears bodily and eats with Abraham. The Protestant reading rejects the very possibility of an embodied Father; the conventional modern Latter-day Saint reading concedes the embodiment but identifies the appearing Yahweh exclusively with the pre-mortal Christ. Read with the Two Trinities key, Genesis 18 records an appearance of the Father in the Godhead sense: Father Adam, an embodied, exalted being who had already passed through His mortal probation. The eating, the foot-washing, the rest under the tree are exactly what one would expect of a resurrected exalted being.
  • Why does Adam “bow to Jehovah”? Because Yahovah, in the Creation-Trinity sense, is Adam’s own Father — the Heavenly Grandfather to us. Adam’s reverence toward Yahovah is the same reverence proper to any son toward his exalted Father. It is not the worship of an inferior being toward a superior; it is the proper hierarchy of a divine family.
  • Why is Christ called “Yahweh” in scripture? Because the Son bears the Father’s name by delegation (Exodus 23:21, “my name is in him”). The same title can refer, depending on context, to Yahovah of the Creation Trinity (Michael’s Father), or to Adam Himself (the Father of the Godhead Trinity), or to Christ as the Son acting in the Father’s name. Reading without the framework collapses these distinct referents into one and produces irreconcilable contradictions; reading with the framework preserves the distinctions and resolves them.
  • Why does Joseph Smith speak of “the head of the Gods” and a Father above the Father? Because the divine genealogy continues upward through the Creation Trinity. Elohim is above Yahovah, and Yahovah is above Michael/Adam. The Restoration teaches that the Father has a Father, who Himself had a Father — a doctrine Fred C. Collier set forth in his own revelations regarding the head God of all (see The Road to Eternal Life, preface) and the principle of D&C 121:32 regarding that which was ordained before the world by the council of the Eternal God of all other gods. The deeper question of whether this chain has a head or terminus is treated in those works, and is not the burden of this introductory page.

The Witness of Tullidge and Snow

Perhaps the most explicit nineteenth-century summary of the Two-Trinity framework, outside President Young’s own discourses, is in Edward W. Tullidge’s Women of Mormondom (1877), a work edited by Eliza R. Snow and reportedly approved by President Young as missionary material.1 In a passage on Adam, Tullidge writes:

“Adam is our Father and God. He is the God ‘of the Earth.’ So says Brigham Young. Adam is the great archangel of this creation. He is Michael. He is the Ancient of Days. He is the father of our elder brother, Jesus Christ — the father of him who shall also come as Messiah to reign. He is the father of the spirits as well as the tabernacles of the sons and daughters of man. Adam! … Michael is one of the grand mystical names in the works of creations, redemptions, and resurrections. Jehovah is the second and the higher name. Eloheim — signifying the Gods — is the first name of the celestial trinity. Michael was a celestial, resurrected being, of another world.”
— Edward W. Tullidge, Women of Mormondom (1877), reproduced in President Brigham Young’s Doctrine on Deity, Appendix D

The order Tullidge gives — Elohim first, Jehovah second, Michael third — is exactly the Creation-Trinity order President Young set forth in Journal of Discourses 1:51 and confirmed in the Joseph F. Smith journal entry of 1871. The book’s storied background and association with some of the greatest luminaries of the Restoration establishes its teachings on this point as an important corroborative witness to the framework as taught by President Young and preserved by his associates.

Further Study

The fuller corpus of President Young’s statements on the Two Trinities is gathered, with full primary-source citations and witness lists, in:

  • President Brigham Young’s Doctrine on Deity Vol. 1 (Collier’s Publishing Co., 1999), especially Appendix C (the principal recorded discourses with witness lists) and Appendix D (the corroborative testimony of President Young’s associates in the Priesthood).
  • The Father and the Son — The Two Gods of the Old Testament (1995) — for the Hebrew/Christian application of the Name-Title System: how the Father and the Son both bear “Yahweh” without contradiction, and how the title is delegated in Exodus 23:21.
  • The Trinity and the Holy Spirits — for the doctrine of the Godhead as Joseph Smith taught it; the identity of Joseph Smith as the Holy Ghost; the presiding relationship of Joseph Smith to the Holy Spirits; and the harmonization of Joseph Smith’s early and late teachings regarding the nature of God and Spirit.

For the doctrinal exposition of Adam-God itself, see the Adam-God page. For the Hebrew/scholarly evidence layer, see the Nature of Deity page. For the witness for our Mother in Heaven who stands by the side of Her Divine Husband, see the Heavenly Mother page.

Notes

  1. Claudia L. Bushman, “Edward W. Tullidge and The Women of Mormondom,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 33, no. 4 (Winter 2000), Dialogue Journal archive; Edward W. Tullidge, The Women of Mormondom (New York, 1877), front matter. The reported approval as missionary material rests chiefly on the Bancroft Library copy of Women of Mormondom, which contains a front-matter inscription reading: “The night before he died[,] Brigham Young said he would like a 1000 [copies] of this book distribute[d] at the east[.]” Because the inscription gives no source, date, or identified writer, it should be treated as noteworthy but uncertain-provenance evidence rather than as an independently verified deathbed statement by President Young; nevertheless, Eliza R. Snow’s heavy involvement in the book places the statement within a historically plausible setting. ↩