Holy Week Good Friday

Woefully arrayed,
My blood, man,
For thee ran,
It may not be nay’d:
My body blue and wan,
Woefully arrayed:

Time spent at the foot of the cross is better than time spent thinking about theories of the atonement. I admit that. Yet thinking about the atonement can sometimes get you to the cross.

In conference Brother Didn’tCatchHisName talked about trying to explain why Christ needed to suffer for our sins even though God loves us to a woman from Asia who grew up away from the background assumptions of Christendom. He challenged our children to ask us why.

Let me tell you what I am going to tell my kids when they ask. I have three theories. There are lots of worthwhile other theories out there, , but these are the two theories you and I have come up with that as far as I can tell are original, at least in this way of looking at them, plus a way of explaining the ransom theory of the atonement.

Understanding these theories will enhance your understanding of the atonement, but in no way does your salvation depend on it.

1. We can’t make meaningful choices without consequences. This is the most elegant and logical of the theories, but also the in some ways the most abstract. I will explain at the end the way it has stopped being abstract for me.

Here’s the argument in short. God wants us to be agents and in fact we are agents. That is our inmost nature. The point of agency is that we do things. In other words, we make meaningful choices, which means choices that have consequences.

It may not be obvious to you right away, but if you spend time thinking it through, you will get that a decision has to have impacts to be meaningful. Its meaningless if it has no impact on you or anyone else. You will also get that making all your choices meaningless would be terrifying. That was Satan’s plan, in fact. We often think that he wanted to regiment us so that we always had to make the right choice, but in reality he mostly just wanted to make our choices meaningless—we would get the same outcome no matter what. Satan’s plan would be hellish for agents like us.

So now lets think about the atonement. You sin and there are consequences for you and for other people. We want to be saved anyway. We want the damage we did to be reversed. But we also want our choices for sin and for righteousness to be meaningful, and they wouldn’t be meaningful if God just waved all the consequences away. That’s where Christ comes in. He suffered all the consequences of our bad choices to the full so that we could repent, escape the consequences, but still have meaningful choices. In fact, the consequences of our choices are the most meaningful possible because they are done to our Savior.

In a profound way, this theory ties in to the dilemma that Adam and Eve faced in the Garden.  Eat and sin, or remain pristine but nothing happens and they never have increase.

2 Nephi 2 has a lot of bearing on this theory.

Bruce Charlton once said this theory left him cold. Too abstract. (Though he later expounded it well). Let me explain how it has ceased to be abstract for me.

This theory starts to matter more for you when it calls your attention to your fundamental identify as an agent. You were meant to do things, you were meant to change yourself and the world, there are things that act and things that are acted upon and you are a thing that acts. There is no end—I mean this literally—there is no end to the results that will ripple from what you do.

It also starts to matter more when you realize we are of God’s kind and God’s family. Our choices are divine. Of course they can’t just be waved away, and we wouldn’t want them to be.

I recently read one of Bruce Charlton’s notions that you don’t understand an idea until you understand it simply.

In practice; genuine understanding can only be reached when the situation has been made sufficiently simple to be clear; graspable in a single act of comprehension and not by some chain of reasoning.

Here’s the simple version: As a literal son or daughter of God, you need your choices to have the most profound consequences, but neither you nor anyone you know other than Christ can bear that level of consequences.

This idea (I think) led to the very first parable fable I ever wrote. It makes a lot more sense than anything you just read. The Lion and the Robin.

You can read up on the theory in these posts–

You Want Justice, You Need Justice
We Approach Significance with Halting Feet : Bruce Charlton’s exposition, pretty awesome.
Damnation is Inevitable
No Repentance without Punishment 

2. Ransom theory. This is the theory that we see all over the scriptures (its kinda what happened in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe). We have sold ourselves into slavery to Satan, Christ is offering himself as a ransom to Satan to set us free, Satan hates Jesus so much, or maybe he thinks he can actually defeat Jesus, so he takes the deal.

What’s missing is an explanation for why Christ can’t just take us back. Captives get liberated by force all the time. What’s Satan gonna do?

What this theory needs is more on what actually keeps us under Satan’s thumb unless Satan agrees to let us go. Why does Jesus have to bribe Satan to free us? Or put another way, why does Jesus have to put himself into captivity to Satan in order to let us out?

What follows is not going to be brilliant, you are warned. I feel my own thoughts still being hazy.

One explanation is that God has promised Satan control over the wicked, so God has to keep his end of the deal. My gut says this is question begging. God does not have to make that deal with Satan, or if he does, God can just make the deal include, “unless they repent.” Problem solved.  There may be a deeper explanation here about the kinds of choices we make that put us in Satan’s power.  2 Nephi 2 suggests there is.  I don’t know what it is though.

Let’s take a different tack that could make sense out of ransom theory. One of the common assumptions we make is that God can’t just change us on the inside arbitrarily without destroying us. Because we are agents and free, God only has limited ability to alter our spirits. Hence the whole apparatus of mortal experience, trials, choice under conditions of temptation, and so on.

So when we let Satan in through sin, he now has a hook in us. We are weak so we don’t have the power to end the hook on our own, we need God’s help, but Satan is inside us in a way that God can’t just reach from the outside without destroying us also. Think of the tender wheat and the tares.

Could we say that Satan has enough control that we can’t ourselves let God in unless Satan himself lets God in to the area of us that Satan controls? In a sense we might say that Satan the spirit is intermingled with us, dwelling within us, the same way the Holy Ghost does? Maybe.

Of course Satan is not a deal keeper. Perhaps God has a way to enforce the deal. But the version I like better is that the Atonement literally consisted of Christ “entering in” to the sins and misery of each one of us. Probably because Satan wanted him to so Christ could feel our suffering and Satan’s power. Satan may have thought it would break him.  The deal was our liberation and letting Christ join us in our captivity was exactly what Satan wanted, he thought.

The Interpenetration of the Atonement

the simple version: the scriptures say over and over again that Christ had to ransom us from our captivity to Satan, which means Satan had some kind of hold on us that Christ couldn’t just order to be broken.

3. Royal Largesse theory. This theory is for those people who understand very well why a loving God wouldn’t just wave His hand and forgive our sins—because sin is disgusting and we have done horrible, blasphemous things against the living God—but have a harder time understanding why his Son’s suffering would change his mind. This is a mindset that is rare in the modern world but I think pretty valuable.

Just before His death, Christ taught these famous lines, “Inasmuch ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto me.” What if that were literal? Alma 7:11-12 suggests that it is.

If Christ in his atonement took on the total experience of each human soul, then every thing we do to encourage or heal or succor relieves Christ’s burdens.

God can forgive our offenses against Him and his children as royal largesse for the small boons we did His Son.

This is the theory that emotionally appeals to me the best, perhaps because of an experience I had at the end of my mission. Perhaps because of that, I think it needs more intellectual work.

The short version: God forgives us, because even in our wickedness we have done kindnesses to his son. We are the harlot Rahab. The atonement, where Christ chose to descend below all things, was what put Christ in a position where we could do him kindnesses.

The original Royal Largesse post.

4. Repenting Through Christ: Repenting through Christ, Bruce Charlton has a theory that is really worth your time.

By Gaudenzio Ferrari – This file has been extracted from another file, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29809334