The Embodied Father in the Book of Mormon

One of the most fundamental doctrines of the Church is that God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost comprise the Godhead as three separate Beings and that the Father has a physical body.  This doctrine is most clearly taught in D&C 130:22 in which we read, “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.”  The First Vision where the Restoration started clearly demonstrated this fact; as President Hinckley observed, “Joseph could see [God the Father] and could hear Him. He was in form like a man, a being of substance.  Beside Him was the resurrected Lord, a separate being, whom He introduced as His Beloved Son and with whom Joseph also spoke.”  The fact that God the Father has a physical body—and that we can ultimately become like Him as His children—is central to the plan of salvation and so it makes sense that this would be one of the very first things that Joseph Smith learned.  Given that, I was led to wonder about how much the Book of Mormon—which was also foundational to the Church--teaches us about God the Father having a body.  Clearly the Book of Mormon doesn’t state as succintly as D&C 130 about the Father’s physical body, but do we nonetheless learn this fundamental truth in it? 

                As I thought about this I realized that we find this truth in the very first chapter.  We read that Lehi “was carried away in a vision even that he saw the heavens open, and he thought he saw God sitting upon his throne, surrounded with numberless concourses of angels in the attitude of singing and praising their God.”  After this “he saw One descending out of the midst of heaven, and he beheld that his luster was above that of the sun at noon-day” (1 Nephi 1:8-9).  While the text does not explicitly say, it seems pretty clear that the “One” descending—who was followed by 12 others—was the Savior and the One who would come down from heaven to the earth.  That would mean that “God” that He saw on a throne was God the Father.  And if we can take that vision literally, then of course the Father must have a body if He could be seen by Lehi sitting on a throne—it takes a physical body to be able to sit.  This vision at the very beginning of the Book of Mormon witnesses that God the Father does indeed have a body. 

                The fact that Jesus as a resurrected being has a physical body is of course much more clearly evidenced in the Book of Mormon.  In his visit to the Nephites Christ invited them in this language: “Arise and come forth unto me, that ye may thrust your hands into my side, and also that ye may feel the prints of the nails in my hands and in my feet, that ye may know that I am the God of Israel.”  The people did go forth and “did see with their eyes and did feel with their hands” and therefore could testify that it was the Savior (3 Nephi 11:14-15).  They had the same witness as Thomas and the apostles in the New Testament and knew without doubt that the resurrected Savior has a physical body.  Numerous passages in the Book of Mormon also teach that the Savior is the Son of God, and that Christ is the Son of God the Father also evidences the fact that God the Father has a body.  For example, Jacob taught that the holy prophets before him “believed in Christ and worshiped the Father in his name” and that Abraham’s “offering up his son Isaac” was “a similitude of God and his Only Begotten Son” (Jacob 4:5).  Surely any reasonable interpretation of what it means to be a “son” allows us to conclude that the Father will be in appearance like the Son.  Therefore if Christ has a body and is the only begotten Son of God the Father, then surely God the Father must likewise have a body.  So while the Book of Mormon is certainly less explicit about the embodiment of the Father than we might state it in a simple doctrinal statement, the consistent and repeated testimony that Christ is the Son of God is a witness that the Father indeed must have a body like His Son.