The Godhead and the Doctrine of Eternal Progression

Latter-day Saint theology departs from the other Abrahamic traditions at a specific and well-documented point: the Godhead. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that God the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost are three distinct beings, unified in purpose, will and glory but not, as in mainstream Christian Trinitarian doctrine, sharing a single substance; God the Father and the resurrected Jesus Christ are both held to possess glorified, physical bodies, a claim that sets Latter-day Saint theology apart from every other tradition recorded on this deity's own entry.

Alongside the Godhead sits the doctrine of eternal progression, the teaching that faithful mortals may, through the atonement of Jesus Christ and the ordinances of the restored gospel, be exalted after this life into the kind of divine life God the Father lives; the Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, edited by Terryl Givens and Philip Barlow, documents both the doctrine's nineteenth-century development under Joseph Smith and the significant nuance later Latter-day Saint leaders have applied to it. That doctrine is genuinely distinctive among the Abrahamic traditions catalogued in this atlas, none of which holds an equivalent teaching about the ordinary relationship between mortal humanity and the divine nature, and it is why this entry records mortal entry into the sacred differently from every one of its Abrahamic peers rather than defaulting to the same closed reading the others share.