Heavenly Father

A body of flesh and bones

An official and historical doctrine of the Mormon church is that Heavenly Father has a body of flesh and bones.

"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. Were it not so, the Holy Ghost could not dwell in us." -D&C 130:22 [1]

The early Mormon church held to this belief, with it's very origination being found on the lips of Joseph Smith,

"...the earliest latter-day discussion of divine embodiment is best understood as a rejection of traditional doctrine concerning God and the metaphysics that makes that doctrine possible and perhaps even necessary. Joseph Smith's most clear statement of God's embodiment comes as part of a denail of Nicean trinitarianism: 'That which is without body, parts, and passions is nothing. There is no other God in heaven but that God who has flesh and bones.'" (James E. Faulconer, Element: the Journal of the Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology, vol. 1, issue 1, spring 2005, p. 4).

The literal father of our spirits

"You are a literal child of God, spiritually begotten in the premortal life," (True to the Faith, p. 74). God is literally our father in heaven, having conceived us all through physical relations with our Mother in heaven.

God was once a man...

Church history and much of contemporary LDS belief teaches that the Father was once a man. It is held that he was once a man like us. God has thus not always been God, and because he was once a man, he now has a body of flesh and bones. This belief is found in Joseph Smith's teachings, noting that,

[F]or I am going to tell you how God came to be God. We have imagined that God was God from all eternity. [That he was not is an idea] incomprehensible to some. But it is the simple and first principle of the gospel-to know for a certainty the character of God, that we may converse with him as one man with another. God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth the same as Jesus Christ himself did," [2]