Cheryl

Or otherwise, can ye imagine yourselves brought before the tribunal of God with your souls filled with guilt and remorse, having a remembrance of all your guilt, yea, a perfect remembrance of all your wickedness, yea, a remembrance that ye have set at defiance the commandments of God?

I say unto you, can ye look up to God at that day with a pure heart and clean hands? I say unto you, can you look up, having the image of God engraven upon your countenances?

What Alma describes sounds truly terrifying, even to the faithful—perhaps even more so to the faithful.

I think Robert makes a good case for remembering our own sins, as in Alma’s case. But Stewart mentions “blotted out from our permanent record.” See Acts 3: 19; Alma 7: 13; D&C 109: 34.

Sorry, this is very hastilly written.

I think these verses in Alma 36 are particularly relevant, where Alma remembers his sins as part of the conversion process, but then after he is converted he says he remembers the pains of his sins no more (v. 19). But then he says “yea I was harrowed up by the memory of my sins no more.” I’m inclined to take this as saying that “the memory of [his] sins” is referring to the pain of his sins, but I think it could also be read to mean the memory of his sins was simply far from his mind.

Douglas #12, I very much agree with the idea that God experiences emotion (there are two articles in recent Dialogue issues dealing with this idea, “The Theology of Desire” is in the title…). I tend to think of forgiveness as requiring hard emotional work also. But there’s another sense in which it takes more work to harbor a grudge, and the act of forgiveness seems to be described as more of a surrendering that I’m not sure is aptly described as work. Since I was just looking at Alma 36, I guess I’m inclined to think sort of in terms of it getting worse before it gets better. That is, in Alma’s conversion it seems he becomes painfully aware of his sins before he is healed/converted. When we harbor a grudge, I think we have to painfully look at ourselves as harboring that grudge. But if we never hold a grudge in the first place, I think forgiveness might be easy—like water off a duck’s back they say, right? I think this is related to the “my yoke is easy” vs. “take up your cross” tension. In many ways, following Christ is more demanding than anything else, and yet, paradoxically, it is so much easier than any other path….

nhilton #13, I think you’re right about the need to forgive ourselves. I like how Stephen Robinson makes this point in his Believing Christ book—if we really believe Christ, we will believe that we can really be forgiven. I think this is intimately related to the conversion process itself: seeing suffering reminds me of my new-found, God-given desire to give myself completely to others in love and service.

stewart #14, well put!

I think the same holds true for the sinner. If we don’t forget our sins, knowing that Christ has atoned for them, we are forever tormented. This is what I think happens to those who refuse to allow the atonement to work in their lives: eternal torment.

Almost sounds like an oxymoron, like “holding on to nothing.” But you’ve helped to make it make sense. God cannot (okay, maybe he can) actually forget anything—and the record of the act is still somewhere. Perhaps he actively keeps those records locked away?

Todd Wood, #8: I wonder if there’s some part of the Atonement that can help me forget my sins. There are many things I’d like to not be reminded of for eternity, even if only once in a while.

Douglas, thanks for the SWK manual reference. Thinking about how we use various related phrases today, “forgive and forget,” “forget it,” “never mind,” etc. certainly helps in thinking about all this. I think the sense of “forget” that SWK is using is in fact very similar to the “remembereth no more” of John 16:21.

Todd, this is a great sentiment, thank you very much. I think this may be what Mosiah 4:12 is getting at, at least indirectly:

And behold, I say unto you that if ye do this ye shall always rejoice, and be filled with the love of God, and always retain a remission of your sins.

I will always remember my sin. And rejoice throughout eternity that God will not bring them up against me.

Thanks for this post, I think it opens up interesting possibilities to consider how different aspects of memory are portrayed in scriptures, to consider the memory of God, and also to think about how memory functions institutionally and most importantly in our spiritual lives. The last lesson I presented in EQ was on Forgiveness. We are all familiar with the phrase “forgive and forget” which occurs in the lesson several times. When I asked the men what the phrase means there were several answers but the most comfortable one seemed to be that we do not forget, we do the emotional work necessary so that we no longer hold on to resentment and anger that was our response to the sin in the first place. And in this we touch on the other vector of your post the role that memory plays in our emotional lives.

robf: not harboring remembrance seems phenomenologically different from disregarding or ignoring something. The former carries with it the idea that I am no longer doing something. The latter two don’t seem to me to have that connotation.

I think this is basically what Jim F. is getting, though I (obviously) need to think harder about this (since I’m not sure I’ve really articulated a meaningful distinction here…).

Also, I often forget people’s names. But oftentimes I remember the name later (“in the stairway” as I guess the French say, see the penultimate paragraph here). If God remembers my sins no more, then I don’t think there is any danger of God remembering them in the future. In this sense, perhaps Paul “only” forgets what is behind, because at some point in the future it might be helpful for him to remember a mistake he learned from in his past, whereas God “remembers no more” because he doesn’t really need to learn from our past mistakes in the same sense that we should learn from our own mistakes. I wonder, however, if there’s any basis for this thinking in the Greek words or Hebrew allusions in the passages in Hebrews and Philippians I linked to above (I somehow doubt it, which is why I’m posting this thought now before I learn that it can’t be defended!).

I think that is an accurate description of what the distinction mean with regard to my remembering no more. Does it also apply to God?