Heavenly Father

Joseph's vision of the Father and the Son - 1820
Joseph’s vision of the Father and the Son – 1820

See also:

Deification, Divinization, Theosis

God is an exalted man

Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother

How God lost his body

Jesus reveals the Father

Teachings about God

The nature of God

The Nicene Creed erased the anthropomorphic nature of God

Thomas Jefferson on the Trinity

From LDS.org: Scholars have long acknowledged that the view of God held by the earliest Christians changed dramatically over the course of centuries. Early Christian views of God were more personal, more anthropomorphic, and less abstract than those that emerged later during Christianity’s creedal stage. The key ideological shift that began in the second century, after the loss of apostolic authority, resulted from a conceptual merger of Christian doctrine with Greek philosophy.

Latter-day Saints believe the melding of early Christian theology with Greek philosophy was a grave error. Chief among the doctrines lost in this process was the nature of the Godhead. Latter-day Saints hold that God the Father is an embodied being with the attributes ascribed by the earliest Christians. That belief is consistent with the early Christian views of God, yet it differs from the later creeds.

We are all literally children of God, spiritually begotten in the premortal life. As His children, we can be assured that we have divine, eternal potential and that He will help us in our sincere efforts to reach that potential.

A True and Living God

The God of Joseph Smith is the same God known to the ancient prophets; he is not the God of the philosophers nor is he the God of the creeds of Christendom. Joseph Smith was not a teacher of speculative theology, he was a personal witness of the God of heaven. That God who stood face-to-face with his prophets in times past stood in like manner before Joseph Smith and spoke to him as one man speaks to another. He was and is a knowable God, not a God hidden in a shroud of mystery. He is not a spirit essence but rather an exalted, resurrected, and glorified man. Indeed, Man of Holiness is his name. He is the Father of our spirits, we are his children born in heavenly realms where we once lived with him, and thus we rightfully call him our Father in Heaven. His work and glory is to bring to pass our immortality and eternal life. Ours is a divine destiny. Our spirits and our bodies were created in his image and likeness, and in the resurrection they will be inseparably united that we might experience both a fulness of joy and the fulness of all that our Eternal Father has.

Such was the testimony and doctrine of the Prophet Joseph Smith. Such is the message that we seek to echo to the ends of the earth. (Joseph Fielding McConkie, Sons and Daughters of God: The Loss and Restoration of Our Divine Inheritance, Bookcraft, 1994, p. 205)