Let Him Who is Filthy, Be Filthy Still
The tragic vision of Mormon Christianity has four dimensions.
The first tragedy is that growth can only come through suffering and death.
The second tragedy is that free will means people can choose with finality to reject God and damn themselves.
The third tragedy is the tragedy that those we love can only grow through suffering and death and sometimes choose not to grow. Love holds us hostage to them, and it has to, or else it wouldn’t be love.
The fourth tragedy is that people miss out on growth that they are capable of, because they refuse to take the steps that would get them there. And perhaps nothing can be done about this.
That fourth tragedy deserves a little explanation.
Here is one model for how it could work. Agency is character-forming, because every choice creates feedback. That which is acted upon acts on the agent. That’s part of the first tragedy. God can’t just tell us or make us be better. We have to act and experience and be changed by our experience. Experiences build on each other.
We are all familiar with the idea that some people can and probably will reject God with finality in something or other, damning themselves to a lesser kingdom in the process. These people have experienced all the growth that they are capable of, and that’s it. They have exhausted the limits of who they are.
But since growth builds on itself, some people may be damned even if they are theoretically capable of more, simply because they won’t take the intermediate steps to get there. Imagine some pre-existence spirit. This spirit has a lot of potential. On earth, this incarnated spirit would learn grace through suffering and experience and grow into exaltation. But the spirit refuses to be born. If the spirit’s refusal is final, and if spirits cannot be fleshed against their will, that’s it. The spirit is damned.
Or imagine that in the afterlife you cling to one little sin. If you would let go of insisting on it, even for a little while, you would have growth and experience, even to the point where eventually you would first desire to get rid of that sin and ultimately come back to that sin and let it go for good. But since you insist on the sin . . . .
Whoever is unjust, let him be unjust still. Whoever is righteous, let him be righteous still. Whoever is filthy, let him be filthy still.
It’s easy to see how one little sin could hold us back when the sin is a refusal to grow. Refusing to be born, refusing to marry, refusing to love, refusing whatever challenges God may assign us in the hereafter, those are all sins that could easily prevent growth one was otherwise capable of. Other sins seem more like the kind that we could grow around.
But we may not be as able to grow around sins in the afterlife. Conditions are different there.
It sounds strange to say, but there is a valid point of view from which exaltation isn’t about becoming godlike. Becoming godlike is a means to an end. Consider God, for example, whose purpose is not being all-powerful but whose purpose is to raise children to join Him in eternal life. Exaltation means participating in the divine community as a peer.
In other words, exaltation means full communion. That is probably what judgement means and is too. Judgement is when we meet God—when we are introduced into His community, and He into ours.
What happens when a member of the community openly defies the norms of that community? The community breaks. There is no choice about it. Either one of two things happen. The community either does nothing, which de facto accepts the new norm, so the community breaks with its past. Or else the community effectively expels the defiant member, or the defiant member expels himself. Defying the norms is different from breaking the norms, of course. A member of a community could openly break the norms without defying them, if they admit wrongdoing and ask forgiveness. Or a member of the community could break the norms secretly.
In the hereafter, some of those options for sin are not available. We can’t hide our sins from God. We can’t hide our sins from each other. We can’t insist that the divine community change its norms to accommodate us. Consider the following:
Insisting on sin means breaking communion with God and the exalted.
No one can remain in the community of the exalted who hasn’t rejected each and every sin. Rejection doesn’t mean having fully overcome it. It could be an admission that the sin is a sin and a determination to overcome it though it takes aeons of time. That would be enough to allow the unit of meaning to not be sinful and not contrary to participation in the community.
On the other hand, the sinner who in the future would grow to a desire to overcome his sin and then would overcome it, but who doesn’t will to end it now, cannot be in communion.
The thing is, the sinner may need that communion. We all know, even in trivial things, that without our friends coaxing us, there are things we never would have done and liked. Like the song says, sometimes we’ll walk the line for other people when we wouldn’t walk it for ourselves.
Perhaps the defiant sinner can be put in another community where he can grow to that desire. But perhaps not. Perhaps he is so constituted that it is only in the company of the people he cannot now be in company with that he would grow. Such a person would be damned, and it could be said of them without qualification that this life was the time to prepare to meet God.
The only alternative would be something like re-incarnation. Even then, I have the intuition that the reincarnation would not allow them to retain or eventually recover the loves and friendships of their past life. If your past life weren’t cut off, you would end up being just a highwayman again.
So the original life must ended, judged, damned. It is gone.
The important insight of this line of thought is probably not anything it says about post-mortal life. The important insight is that the possibility of private vice may be one of the most important aspects of mortality. The ability to associate with each other on a basis other than sin may be what makes it possible for us to break out of our sin.
If ripping off the mask of mortality makes it harder to grow, why would God do it? Most of us have sins that we probably won’t abandon until then.
Filed under: Deseret Review | Tags: afterlife, agency, all things before my face, choice and accountability, judgment, LDS, Mormon, Mormonism, Responsibility and meaning, sociality
Bruce Charlton
June 22, 2015
Very thought provoking.
Some random observations.
I don’t think that this mortal life can have been intended for us to become perfectly free of sin – things just aren’t set up that way. And some people don’t seem to have much ‘will’, while others will to give up a sin – fifty times a day… Clearly, we are supposed to know that we are sinners, and that sin is indeed sin. That is the really critical thing.
Self-righteousness (a type of pride) may be the deepest problem of all – together with spite (delight in the misfortunes of others). They might be among the very worst things.
Reincarnation. I presume it is rare. It would always be voluntary – and perhaps even actively volunteered-for. Perhaps two types – the second chance you refer to; and the return to help-out type – as prophets etc.
It could be that ‘bad company’ is the best thing for some people – indeed, that almost *must* be the case, since it is how God places so many mortals.
Anonforthis
June 23, 2015
@BC, Mormonism has its own version of justification and sanctification.
There can be brief intervals when a person is totally cleansed from sin (“burned clean” in a sense) by the Holy Ghost, so that they may abide the presence of the Savior or even of the Father, though in most instances it is the very presence (a “visitation”) of the Holy Ghost. The scriptures usually describe it as the Holy Ghost “falling” on someone.
Moses was often in such a condition in the presence of the Lord in the tabernacle, and on the mountain.
Peter, James and John were in such a condition on the mount of transfiguration.
Joseph Smith was in such a condition during his first vision.
Joseph, Oliver, and Sidney were in such a condition in some of their visions as recorded in the D&C.
One of the teachings (perhaps even a tenet, it has been preached multiple times at general conference) of Mormonism is that no blessings are reserved for the leaders that are not available to the rank and file.
Although it is not presently publicly taught, it is clear from the records (and quoted in books that are still in print by Deseret Book) that Joseph Smith taught/encouraged church members to seek to make their calling and election sure.
I was at a fireside where a speaker was speaking of Christ as the Second Comforter. Part of his talk was how to progress to overcome sin, sin by sin, and at some point one qualifies for the Second Comforter. And then at some subsequent step, after further progression, one can be introduced to the Father. He did not state as much, but I received a witness that the speaker had met the Savior.
What God wants for us, and what is possible, even in this life, is far beyond what most of us settle for.
Bruce Charlton
June 24, 2015
@Anon – Thanks for the comment.
I don’t suppose we disagree about ‘What God wants for us, and what is possible, even in this life, is far beyond what most of us settle for’ – because there is always something we should be working on and always more that we can do; and most people settle for much less than this.
But the fact that most people settle for so much less, and that there are so many distractions and corruptions, and that our will power is so feeble etc… all these (seemingly) show that either God was a poor designer of either human beings or the world of both – since everybody fails and most people fail very badly; or (and this is the correct answer I think) mortal life (for most people, most of the time) is not about achieving perfection, nor even about getting close to perfection – but about experiencing things we need to experience – some good and many bad.
We are supposed to experience the temptation to many sins, and we are supposed to resist them; we are supposed to feel the urge and need to do many goods, and we are supposed to do them. But the actuality of life seems to suggest that these experiences are so important that they are worth the very high risk (almost, in practice, the inevitability) that we will often fail to resist sin and fail to do good.
This is why I feel that the one thing we can and should insist upon (for ourselves, at any rate) is repentance.
Anybody can repent at any time (and should) – whereas whether a particular person can in practice always resist sin and always do good is debateable – indeed probably only Jesus Christ ever actually did this.
So (it seems to me) we should not (or not *always*) build our understanding of the world around the continual striving for ‘perfection’ – or else Christianity will be seen as impossible; and honest and insightful people will be highly at risk of misery, despair, terror and so on.
My feeling is that Christianity is meant to be joyful, expansive, creative, care-free (at least at times); and that the struggle for perfection in our brief mortal lives tends to degenerate into negativity, over-conscientiousness, over-planning, life-as-recipes, and minute-ultra-correctness of observation – which seriously interferes with this desired positive/ creative attitude.
In a nutshell, if a child or a simple person can’t do it; it is not necessary to Christians – and children and simple people typically cannot get anywhere near perfection of conduct.
But children can, and do, typically repent their weakness, impulsiveness, susceptibility to temptations, limited intelligence, lack of foresight… and so on.
They know (enough of ) what is right – but they *cannot* do it – not *always*.