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.

Think about your relationship to your own history.  You could reject that history entirely.  You would embrace a principle of radical discontinuity.  Or you could embrace that history entirely.  You would reject any discontinuity at all.

If you refuse to change at all, you are rejecting being alive.  Life is an arrow in time, which means change and dynamism.

But if you refuse to embrace your past at all, you are rejecting any meaning in your being alive.  If you act like the past has never been, then you have no way of making sense of what you do now.  Because what you do now will soon be the past and by your own principles should be ignored as if it had never been.

You must have growth within continuity.  We call that repentance.

Repentance cannot be just a rejection of your past behavior.  It must be an improvement on it.  Like as The Great Divorce, you must discover what you were really looking for.  Like in Berger’s City of Earthly Desire, you must work through your past, understand it, make some meaning of it.

Then God remembers your sin no more, because it is no longer sin.  What He does recall with perfect clarity is your story of growth and grace and overcoming, of which what once was your sin is a part.

Repentance is the path to greatness. That is the path we have to choose.

We could also say it is our path to glory or goodness or heaven. All true. We were meant for greatness but we are not yet great. We are too illformed as yet. So we must change.

We can imagine someone who doesn’t need to be change to be great. They only need to develop further who they are inwardly. Christ was like that, I think. We are partly like that too. We were meant for greatness, the seeds are already there, we are just unfolding them. But for us it also means changing who we are. We have contradictions inside us.

Where we are, and where we have to go to get to our destination explains why ‘strait is the gate and narrow the way.’ We will all wander. But if we wish to arrive at greatness, eventually we are going to have to choose a path that leads there. “Why can’t I be saved in my sins?” is morphologically the same question as “why can’t I go to Paris without having to go to France?” (more…)

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…)

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…)

The temple presents the Garden of Eden experience as a basic archetype that underlies human life. The temple–prepare to be shocked–is right. (more…)

Just as we have parts that exist in space, we have parts that exist over time. We are the sum of our temporal parts, even though not every one of those parts is essential for our identity. Conversely, none of our temporal parts is the whole of who we are. As four dimensional wholes, we are never simply the person who exists at a single point in time.

All the temporal parts of a person (or object) carry the same ontological weight

Think of heaven as the place where the ontological equality of temporal parts becomes absolutely real.

–Stephen Webb

I’ve believed that for awhile. I thought I was the only one, so its comforting to see that this is path others have made.

But I’m not sure about his notion that we can continue to act at any point in time, rewriting the past, as it were. This past doesn’t look rewritten.

On the sweetness of Mormon life. (more…)