Elder Bednar — repentance isn’t a way of getting back on the plan.  Repentance is the plan.

Repentance is the plan.

Repentance is the way.

Repentance is the Way?

Christ was made perfect through suffering.  He repented more than anyone.  In the Atonement, He took on our sins, all of them, and repented of all of them.  Call it the Great Repentance.  “Perfect” can mean both flawless or complete/completed.  Christ was made perfect in both senses.

Hebrews 10 contrasts Christ with the Judaic priests. They have to sacrifice every year, whereas Christ did it once. The argument is that Christ’s sacrifice was obviously more effective. Are you really sin free if you keep sinning and need a new atoning sacrifice every year?

The yearly atoning sacrifice makes sense from the childish view of sin that it’s a question of debits and credits with the sacrifice periodically topping off your account. This forensic view is not totally wrong but it is badly incomplete.

Hebrews 10 talks about how the Mosaic sacrifice was meant to compensate for violations of the law but Christ’s sacrifice makes you holy.  The New Perspective on sin is that it is primarily a state of being. It is who you are. Sins are a reflection of your inward weakness and malice, and pay the price of your existing sins all you wish, if the inside of the vessel is not cleansed, you are still in sin.

Christ pays your debts, to be sure, but only incidentally. He spends freely to do something much more difficult and lasting–to make you the kind of person who is not a debtor.  We might extend Elder Packer’s old (and good!) LDS parable of the debtor in this way:

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Boyd K. Packer’s Parable of the Debtor is good. But I think it could be added upon. I have in mind hybridizing it with Elder Uchtdorf’s story of the man who ate saltines on the cruise.

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Here are a selection of JG posts on the Atonement. Feel free to add more in the comments, or links to elsewhere. Also feel free to discuss any of the posts for which comments are now closed.

The Strange Doctrine of the Double Atonement (in other words, why both Gethsemane and the Cross?)

Unexpected Lessons in Theology from Dead Economists

the Royal Largesse Theory of the Atonement

The Meaningful Choice Theory of the Atonement

After the requisite soul-searching and angst and all that, Nephi cut off Laban’s head, snicker-snack. He probably did not know at the time that he was setting up a type of Christ. (more…)

Now, repentance could not come unto men except there were a punishment, which also was eternal.

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In the grove in the evening, the lion heard a great racket from a father robin and his brood and went to investigate.

“Friend Robin,” the lion said, “why do you make a fuss?”

“Look at this nest, O Lion. All my work on it is ruined.” The nest was a ring of thorns the robin had woven to keep the young away from the edge. But in the middle of the ring at the bottom of the nest there was little. The pine needles and other such stuff the robin put here had mostly fallen away.

“Do not fret, friend Robin,” the lion said. “As I walked here, I saw several empty nests. I will lead you to one. Then it will be as if your mistake never happened.”

“O Lion,” the robin replied, “what a piteous state would be mine if all my work for my brood were meaningless. I cannot bear that they go to another nest as if all my work had never happened.”

“Then you will have your brood sleep in this nest?” the lion asked.

“No,” said the robin, “they would fall. It is not fair to them to suffer for my mistakes.”

“And you see no way for the nest to be repaired?” the lion asked.

“Oh no,” said the robin, “I built it wrong from the start.”

Then the king of beasts took the ring of thorns and placed it on his own head. “Let your brood nest in my mane, walled in by you’ve the ring you made.”

Someone must bear the consequences.

Did he also experience all the small acts of kindness, and service, where people went out of their way to “lift up the hands that hang down, and strengthen the feeble knees”? Did he experience the joy that the lonely feel when one reaches out to them to let them know they matter and are cared about? Did he feel the hope restored when we visit someone who is sick or in prison and cheered their hearts? Did he feel the relief of the overwhelmed when someone paused to share their burden with them? Did he feel the relief we feel when someone forgives us of our screwups and mistakes, or when someone shows us undeserved mercy?

-thus Jon Goff.  Read the whole thing.

It reminded me of the Royal Largesse theory of the atonement.  It gives a Christmas flavor to Easter doctrines.

The fear of change is the fear of death. They are not similar fears; they are the same fear, only manifested in different circumstances. (more…)

What do people collectively want? It’s hard to say. Voting gives you one kind of answer, but voting isn’t nuanced. Voters can only say yes or no to ballot questions as phrased and as they understand them. It’s possible that with more explanation they might feel differently, or with even slightly different phrasing they choose the other option.   Or else they can only select between candidates. Different voting systems give different answers. Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem says that no voting system can ever perfectly capture voter intent. Polls are even more fallible.

That’s where the concept of the General Will comes in. What if someone knew the people well enough to have an intuitive, almost literary, sense of what they wanted? That’s why dictatorships claim to be democracies. They say they’re giving the nation what it really, collectively, wants.

The reason it’s hard to know what voters want is because it’s hard to know what a voter wants. Individuals are something like a collection of people over time. No man can step in the same river twice, the Greek said, because it’s never the same man. The mind is always engaged in editing memory to fit the needs of the present, which it wouldn’t need to do if we were really fully the same throughout, if we always had the same end in view. (more…)

Mormon Christianity has a lot of odd little teachings that don’t seem to add up to anything at first glance.  Resurrected beings have bodies of flesh and blood.  Heaven has three main degrees.  Satan rules over the water.  And Christ atoned twice, first in the Garden, second on the cross. (more…)

The presence of God is eternity. (more…)

Bruce Charlton is thinking deeply about the Atonement. He is working out alternatives to the customary belief that Christ took on the punitive consequences of sin for us and to the customary liberal notion that the atonement was fundamentally an act of symbolic engineering to excise our retrograde belief in sin and guilt. Charlton thinks he’s found one. (more…)

Our Cub Scouts went caroling to an old folks home. The elderly people there were moved. It is remarkable, the power we have to affect each other. (more…)

On the sweetness of Mormon life.

Easter Morning. You take family pictures under the Bradford Pear. Then you take more pictures after you remember to remove the hanging mosquito trap.

You go to church. You take the sacrament. A girl receives the gift of the Holy Ghost.

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