Thoughts on The Book of Mormon from a Nineteenth Century Perspective: The Atonement Complicated and Uncomplicated

Jesus Christ descends to the Americas in 3 Nephi. The New World is tied to the Old. 

Linking Europe and the Americas to Jerusalem and the Mediterranean world was part of Millennialism, which movement I will address when I reach the Book of Ether. 

For now, 3 Nephi is notable not only for a restatement of the Sermon of the Mount but for what it doesn't include.

In the early nineteenth century, Reverend Alexander Campbell stated about Joseph Smith:

"He decides all the great controversies--infant baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the atonement, transubstantiation, fasting, penance, church government, religious experience, the call to the ministry, the general resurrection, eternal punishment, who may baptize, and even the question of free masonry, republican government, and the rights of man." (in Harrison 184)

The passage is correct (though it lacks the caustic bite that surely must have entered the reverend's voice when discussing Joseph Smith; the passage's context is a complaint). However, what I find most impressive is when Joseph Smith goes "off-script." 

For instance, Joseph Smith lays out a logical, step-by-step argument against infant baptism which argument is not out of sync with other theologies of the time.

Regarding the Atonement, however, his writings and The Book of Mormon evince a remarkable (and blessed) lack of worry about how exactly it occurs (there is little obsession with counting drops of blood). 

I haven't finished--but Page's

points about Gnosticism are spot-on.

A great many of the theologies running through America's beginnings (and earlier) come down to the nature of God, how exactly God operates. When people started blaming the Enlightenment for things, they usually focused on the movement's secular attitudes. But utterly unnecessary and daft religious ideas like Creationism also arose from the Enlightenment. The need to bring God down to a human level and explain His works/deeds as if they belong in some type of self-help book have resulted in astonishing levels of cognitive dissonance. 

The impulse goes back further than the Enlightenment, of course. Check out Gnosticism, which was not as feminist, edgy, or "enlightened" as some modern theologians want to claim. Once the premise "God couldn't possibly like physical matter!" is accepted, the conclusions to that premise get stranger and stranger and stranger. 

 

But I am straying into the issue of who or what God is, an issue I will address in a different post. 

 

The Atonement specifically focuses on the problem of why God would create sin or encourage sin or make sin possible.

 

If sin is a given, then once He forgives, why would any propitiation (even being sorry) be necessary, especially if He already knows who is saved? And, anyway, why would the elect even be able to sin? They might have tendencies towards sin (though some Calvinists debated this possibility), but they do not have the nature to sin because God would never do that to one of his elect. 

 

Congregationalists spent an unreal amount of time trying to figure out the problem of the above bolded statement (and arguing with each other about it)--that is, was sin something a person did or something a person thought or something a person might do but didn't or something that a person didn't do because that person was one of the elect? And if the person was one of the elect, was that person's behavior not sin because that person was already granted grace? Or because that person was created not to be that way? Was sin the product of choice or the product of inclination/nature and if the latter, where did that inclination come from?

 

It seems to be a nature-nurture debate, which I get. From a religious angle, however, I don't get it. I have tried (I'm still trying to parse Jonathan Edwards). But I don't understand how decent people can get up in the morning and think, "The problem isn't me correcting my faults or trying not to be a jerk today. The problem is what other people are going around thinking about their fault-ridden selves." 

 

In sum, I don't understand the compulsion to "fix" other people. I don't mean "other" people who are doing actively destructive things--like holding up banks--but "other" people whom a story about God or Utopia or Good has identified as failing. 

 

I understand the desire to spread "good news." I understand the desire to state what is going on in the world. And I understand the desire to comment on what is going on in the world. And I'm writing as someone who is literally paid to tell other people how to write better. But I still don't understand the (social media) desire to move from belief or concepts to slamming people's characters, from "here's my position/here's the craft/here's possible ways to transform yourself or your work(s)" to determining that the existence of a trait or idea in another must be eradicated. I understand the desire to help people be better; I don't understand the desire to "help" a person by turning that person into someone else or making them out to be someone else.

 

Back to the Congregationalists (who greatly impacted American theologies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the impact of arguing against Congregationalism) and their desire to "fix" sinful others: 

 

In fact, some Congregationalists argued against that desire. Accepting the providence of God meant full acceptance, including the inability to change anyone for the better. However, as the First Great Awakening approached and missionary work increased among Protestants generally, the attitudes of more proactive (extroverted) leaders took hold. Some of them softened Calvinist doctrines and adopted more Methodist ideas (Congregationalism was conflicted from the beginning by American versus Old World ideals). Some of them honestly saw missionary work as an extension of service--to educate and heal and support abolition because they were called by God. 

 

But some of the die-hards on the topic of election clung to the idea that people needed to be told stuff even if what they were being told was that some of them were doomed. They argued over ideas presented earlier in this post: how exactly God could ever let his elect be exposed to sin or the desire to sin or the possible damnation of personal sin or the expectation that anyone could get over sin. If Grace is working, then why is this happening to us?...seems to be the mantra.

 

Either these Congregationalists had a mind-blowingly extreme view of what constitutes sin or they believed they were damned anyway. Or they compartmentalized their lives, so theology existed separately from day-to-day actions. Or (since some of them were paid to deliver sermons) they were discussing the problem of evil in a way that other people found comprehensible/comforting, despite how odd/discomforting we moderns find it. 

Joseph Smith skips all of it. He was fundamentally an active, physical guy. Any theory that somehow dismisses sin *or* regulates it to a metaphysical discourse wouldn't have made much sense to him. He seems to have spent little time worrying about the Ransom theory of the Atonement versus the Governmental theory versus the Christus Victor theory (which last I tend towards myself and Joseph Smith seems to have utilized: the primary purpose of the Atonement is that Christ conquered--was victorious--over death, which implies a need to be victorious over sin). For Joseph Smith, the Atonement happened in order to allow us to do stuff, to move towards something, to be saved (as George MacDonald would state) not in our sins but from our sins, FOR something. (See Helaman 5:11.)

 

But, as referenced in earlier posts, to maintain this perspective, it helps to reject original sin while also proposing that the purpose of life IS for us to mess up.

 

That is, God wants us to experience risk. Knowing that us + risk would result in us doing very dumb things, he provided an Atonement, which makes it possible for us to keep exploring and risking and trying and experimenting rather than turning into, say, Gollum, going round and round and round without stop (hollowness). Grace while we do stuff, not grace + what we do.

 

Joseph Smith was not, ultimately, a man to shy from risk. He was also not a man who thought that constantly calculating the cost of sin was terribly useful. His primary response to messing up/sin was harrowing but it was the harrowing of a man who feels that he has disappointed/let-down a loving God, not that of a man who believes he is too low or "other" to be contemplated. 

 

He and Saint Paul (and George MacDonald) would agree.