This post was an experiment in whether concentrating on the issues in my previous post would enable me to better put forth a discussion of the atonement. Your input and thoughts are greatly appreciated.

First to give context, I recently read a blog post about a “Reductio ad Hitlerum” film put on by BBC regarding the problem of Evil [1]. At the same time, I was listening to the Book of Job on my commute to work, slowly working my way through the Old Testament for the first time. As I dealt with these two items simultaneously, it renewed my interest in the way the church has dealt with the problem of suffering and evil. It is my opinion that the Church uses its particular theological tenants regarding the Atonement and the way things are as our own theodicy, and that this theodicy is strong.

Now perhaps theodicy is the wrong word, some may argue, but here I am taking theodicy to simply mean a defense of God’s goodness and justice in the face of the existence of evil [2]. And again, perhaps atonement is the wrong word, as this can sometimes be construed to mean everything between the act in Gethsemane and the entirety of the Plan of Salvation. [3] For my purposes here I am going to initially begin by framing the problem in the whole of the plan and hopefully drill down to examine the event in Gethsemane in context of that plan.
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Today I went back and read a few old posts, and a few things became apparent.
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As it is the current tradition of the Church to publish the majority of it’s texts online, The Church has now done so with Preach My Gospel, the current Guide to Missionary Work in the Church. As this Manual will shape the thoughts and feelings of missionaries and converts for years to come, and thus, arguably, the majority of the future leadership of the church, I’d like to take the opportunity to examine the definition of the atonement as given in this important text.
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In his Principles of Psychology, William James has a chapter exploring the nature of habits.

Point One: Habits are physical. If a substance can be shaped or manipulated and then hold its new configuration, it is capable of developing a habit. For example, “everyone knows how a garment, after having been worn a certain time, clings to the shape of the body better than when it was new; there has been a change in the tissue, and this change is a new habit.” Similarly, “when a bar of iron becomes magnetic or crystalline through the action of certain outward causes” it has developed a habit. The structure of these materials resists change, which is why the developement of a habit takes time. However, “when the structure has yielded, the same inertia becomes a condition of its comparative permanence in the new form.” (more…)

A while back, Jacob brougt up the idea of posting something devotional on sundays. It being conference weekend and all, I thought I’d make an effort. This is what I did between sessions.

On this blog there have been many stories or parables discussed. We have, of course, argued the intent of Packer’s Mediator. We have discussed “the parable of the bicycle”, and Geoff J has graced us with his own piano player parable,and another financial parable. In discussing the atonement in a recent thread, Blake brought up the idea of using the story of a Bishop who has a great capacity for empathy as a parable of the Atonement. Heck, I even once tried to compare the atonement to an eagle teaching her children to fly. (Sorry If I missed any.)
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Boyd K Packer is often maligned for his parable of the atonement he put for in his 1977 conference talk entitled the mediator.
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One of the conundrums for me has been in resolving how the effects of the atonement were efficacious before the cause of those effects had even occurred.
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Ok, I am studying what the church has taught about Gethsemane, and it is pretty interesting to me, so I thought I would post it here and also ask for a little help.
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In 2003, Dr. Cky J. Carrigan presented this survey for our edification and perusal. First, let me say I do not find anything in what I have skimmed from this article malicious, and actually was thoroughly impressed at the effort Dr. Carrigan put into it.

I thought I would post Dr. Carrigan’s conclusions here for our discussion.
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I walked right into it by using the word fair in the same sentence as judgment. It was a rookie mistake. (more…)

I’ve been threatening for quite some time to post an atonement theory. Blake Ostler has written a good one of his own and has thrown out the challenge to the rest of us to come up with a better one if we can. As it turns out, coming up with a coherent theory of atonement is really quite difficult. We have discussed his theory and others here for months and no one has come up with a theory that answers the questions we have have discussed about the atonement. Jacob wrote an excellent paper on the atonement (it was published in the Spring 2006 issues of Dialogue) in which he critiqued some of the theories out there but ended up demurring when it came to answering many of the tough questions a theory should answer. Mark Butler has talked about a theory but has never written it down in a single and concise form that can be adequately engaged. So this post is my preliminary and very rough whack at an atonement theory.

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Moggett started using an excellent term in some of her posts over at FPR: “The Christ Event”. The Christ Event, as I understand it, is a name for the events in the life of Jesus between the last supper (or perhaps the triumphal entry into Jerusalem…) and the resurrection, including the Garden of Gethsemane and the cross. I think this is a very useful term to be used in conjunction with the broader term atonement. Making such a delineation may not be all that important in some settings, but when we are trying to discuss atonement theories such added precision becomes a necessity. (more…)

By now you should know that penal-substitution is not a transsexual operation, but a theory which attempts to explain the meaning of the atonement. In the previous thread, Matt started up a defense of the penal-substitution theory, so I am putting up this post as a place to discuss it in more detail. (more…)

Not too long ago here at the Thang we were arguing about Blake Ostler’s atonement theory. In the course of that discussion, more than one person made a statement to the effect that some particular question was the central question of atonement theory, or, on one occasion, that a given theory did not really qualify as such unless it resolved a certain problem.

When you get focused on some specific problem it is easy to start thinking this way, but I don’t really buy into it. (more…)

Over in Jacob’s last thread one of the 5 or 6 topics we discussed was the issue of righteous societies vs. less righteous societies. I commented that righteous societies didn’t necessarily generate more righteous individuals because there is nothing very commendable about choosing the right just because everyone else is doing it. Ethical choices motivated by peer pressure are not very impressive. That led me to this idea I have wanted to discuss for some time though: I think that the scriptures describe at least two scales upon which righteousness (which I’ll define as “conduct in accordance with virtue or morality”) should be judged. There appears to me to be an absolute scale (measuring one’s conduct against God) and a relative scale (measuring one’s conduct against one’s circumstances). (more…)

Sometimes people do unimaginable things to other people. When I hear of a horrific crime against an innocent child, my first reaction is sadness. The nightly news makes me cry routinely. My second reaction is anger. My sense of justice cries out for retribution on the criminal. Saddam Hussein provides a good example because his atrocities are already part of the public consciousness to some extent. (more…)

My post on Blake Ostler’s views on LDS soteriology quickly ballooned to more than 100 comments and revealed that there are a lot of differing soteriologies among us. In this post I will describe the various things I think scriptures mean when they use the term “salvation”. (more…)

Chapter 6 in Blake Ostler’s new book is titled “Soteriology in LDS Thought”. For those of you not familiar with the term Soteriology, it is basically the study of salvation. As the article in Wikipedia puts it: “A particular stance on what constitutes salvation is thus known as a soteriology.” This chapter is a little unusual because it seems to be directed to non-Mormons in many ways and is largely focused on fending off accusations that Mormonism “preaches salvation by works and that it focuses on works to the exclusion of grace.” (189) Ostler goes about disputing this accusation by defining salvation in LDS thought and asserting that in LDS thought a low form salvation is possible without any work another than confessing Jesus as the Christ, and that only higher levels of “salvation” including exaltation are contingent on our works. (more…)

Sterling McMurrin was on to something when he said:

Indeed, since Mormonism is essentially Pelagian in its theology, exhibiting, as already has been pointed out, a quite remarkable similarity to the Pelagian doctrines of the fourth and fifth centuries, it is subject to the same criticism an condemnation from orthodoxy that made Pelagianism the most celebrated heresy in Christian history. But Mormonism outdoes its fifth-century cousin by its denial of the orthodox doctrine of creation, and it thereby produces a basic problem for its own theology in its relation to Christian orthodoxy, the problem of why the doctrine of the salvation of man should involve the traditional pattern of atonement through Christ. (Theological Foundations, pg. 82)

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As part of this week’s whirlwind series on the atonement I skipped ahead in the reading of Blake Ostler’s Exploring Mormon Thought - The Problems of Theism and the Love of God to chapters six and seven which cover soteriology and the atonement. Blake proposes what he calls “The Compassion Theory of Atonement”. Here are the basic components (not necessarily in the right order): (more…)

As the second installment in this pre-Easter series on the atonement I decided it would be useful to give and overview of many of the popular traditional views on the atonement of Christ. Just a little Web searching turned up some very useful information. I’ll give some brief info on them and comment on the possible connections to Mormonism. (more…)

Do any of you really understand the atonement? I don’t think I do. Sure, I have the pithy one-liners about the atonement memorized just like ya’ll do but I can’t say I really get it. As we approach Easter 2006 I thought I’d post on the atonement this week to see if we can help each other understand this whole concept a little better. (more…)

I took a class with Stephen Robinson at BYU in the early nineties. I got the feeling I annoyed him a bit. I suspect I might annoy him even more now (if he spends much time on the Web) since my post on why his parable of the bicycle is wrong now shows up as the #4 Google result for the search term “Parable of the Bicycle”. After bashing the parable of the bicycle I felt obligated to try to find a better explanation of what the atonement does for us so I concocted and presented my own parable and called it the parable of the mortgage. The problem was that I was not really satisfied with my alternative either. (more…)

In my last post I brought up the point that we as a church spend nearly all of our energy helping people (both non-members and inactive members) become active members of the church. That is a worthy effort, to be sure. My concern is that I hear very little talk about the gap between being an “active” Latter Day Saint and a Celestial-natured person worthy of exaltation. So the question of this post is whether there really is a gap between being (and remaining) Active and being Exalted. (more…)

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After recently bashing the Parable of the Bicycle I figured it was only fair that I expose myself to some bashing in return. Here is an attempt at another analogy that I am formulating basically on the fly. (more…)

Not surprisingly, my comments on the flaws of the now-famous “Parable of the Bicycle” started a discussion of the atonement and what it does or does not do for us. The primary point I was trying to make in that post was that while the atonement frees us from a permanent death and from paying for all of our own sins ourselves, it does not change our natures for us. Only one thing changes our natures and that is our repentance. Our repentance (or changing for the better) is as much enabled by our free agency as it is by the Atonement. (A short discussion of this point was also going on over at Nine Moons). So if ongoing repentance and change is required for us to become like God it seems that the obvious next point should be that it will take a lot more time than this single mortal probation to accomplish that Herculean task. I have my preference on how I think we are given sufficient time to in the eternities, but that is not the point I want to discuss here. I want to focus on how much of exaltation is a result of our works throughout the eternity and how much of it comes from the atonement. (more…)

In the comments of my last post there was some discussion of faith vs. works. Mormons have always been accused of being too works-focused by other Christians. They like to say things like: “Sorry guys, your works don’t save, Jesus does. Works are how we serve Jesus; they are pathetically puny compared to the gift of the atonement, which cannot be earned.” Interestingly, some Mormons like to say these very same things. (more…)

After hearing my assertion that God isn’t much concerned with mortal life and death, a blogger called danithew brought Jacob’s discourse in 2 Nep. 9 to my attention. The discourse by Jacob is very relevant to an examination of the proper view of human life and death. (more…)