I don’t mean to suggest that grace is harsh. My point is rather that we turn it into something harsh, into something frightening….

I take that back. What else is real honesty but ‘facing up’ to truth? (It just sounded kind of harsh to me, as though we are stupid if we don’t get how to do that yet (see how I can get defensive with even little things?). I think this is the stuff of mortality, and we only learn it by experience and lots of trial, error, and tests of faith.

This is profound. I would tweak it a bit because I don’t really picture Christ pounding on the door, and feel like our role is more to simply let that grace in rather than ‘face up’ to this truth (my experience with grace has been much more gentle…I still feel the invitation is more with Him waiting and us needing to learn to choose to trust that grace more fully). But I am coming to know and understand that I really have been my worst enemy with regard to finding His grace, and coming to understand that in the last little while has been nothing short of life-changing.

FWIW, for me, it took some concrete tools to help me have this breakthrough in my life. I knew I had some unhealthy emotional coping skills and had sought therapy. But interestingly what has had the most impact in my life was feeling impressed to share the stories of addicts and their loved ones on my site. THOSE are people (those who find recovery) who really understand grace! They moved me in a way that made me want to understand grace more, and so I decided to use the tools that helped them…to work my own 12 step program (I am reading a variety of 12-step materials to try to get the principles more into my mind and heart). And so now I am one to say 12 steps are not just for addicts! (Or, better said, we are all addicts in some way — we all hold tightly to patterns of thought and behavior that hurt us and keep God’s grace at bay…which to me is the message of your post.)

So interestingly, it’s the principles in the 12 steps that have opened this truth up to me and allowed me to reengage all that the gospel teaches with new eyes — because for the first time I am able to really start looking honestly and concretely at the barriers to His grace that I’ve been holding onto since I was a child. But for the first time, I’m not as afraid of myself and my weakness. I used to think He was as frustrated with me as I was. Now I am coming to know a completely different Being. (Which is why for me the pounding door analogy doesn’t work.) It’s a whole different kind of work to be honest about how I tend to push God away without being afraid of such honesty, and to really trust Him to care for me if I will let Him, starting right now, where I am, not ‘someday,’ when I have it all figured out and feel ‘worthy’ to ask for His help!.

It has also helped me to come to understand how “natural” it is to fight God in this way. Being human (part of “the natural man”) means that we develop coping mechanisms — sometimes before we’re old enough to be accountable for anything, before we even know what we are doing — that take root and take over until we are at a point where we can let go of those defense, being-acted-upon response patterns (as you note, the self-deception), and let Him in. I imagine it’s going to take me another 40 years to really learn let this become a part of who I am, but I think I’ve tasted what you are talking about here and it is truly sweeter than all that is sweet.

“And so, perhaps, with God. I have gradually come to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted. Was it my own frantic need that slammed it in my face? The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can’t give it: you are like the drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.” -from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/questionofgod/ownwords/grief.html

That’s more or less what I’m saying. I’d quibble with the word “accepted,” because I think acceptation is foreign to the question (at least in that direction; certainly there’s a business here of us accepting God!).

I’m not exactly saying that sin is privatio gratium. (Indeed, I don’t think there can be such a thing as a “lack of grace”!) I’m saying, rather, that sin is a certain relationship to grace, one of two major sorts. Sin is a way of being, one that suppresses grace. What we come to see in conversion or repentance, then, is that it’s this way of being that makes us miserable—not a set of past actions that, inherently evil, have some kind of ontological reality.

That said, I think you’re right that it’s the scriptural and cultural language of talking about “sins,” etc., that in part leads us astray. But even here we’re doing a good bit of obfuscation. What does it mean to talk about a sin rather than, say, sinfulness? Quite simply: a sin is something we have done in order to suppress grace….

But it seems you go beyond this point to argue that the concept of “sin” serves a valuable function in that it allows us to reject God into our lives because we want to be left alone. In other words, you attribute a kind of motive to this concept of sin. But wouldn’t you allow for the possibility that the reason people believe sin is a “thing” is because the language of the scriptures lend themselves to that reading? “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” (Isaiah 1:18). I’m not quoting scripture to argue against understanding sin as a lack of grace, but merely to suggest that its likely few people deliberately use the concept of “sin as a thing” because they have discovered it is useful as a means to keep God at a distance. Rather, they do so because they think this is what the scriptures are saying. If we say we are baptized for the “remission of sins” I can’t blame anyone for believing sins are things that can make one impure or need washing away. Indeed, the language of “washing sins” seems to reify the idea of sin as a stain or an immoral act. That being said, I’m interested in looking at these issues from a different perspective and seeing how they play out.

Also, let me say that I like the language of “createdness” and we should bring that back into discourse for many of the same reasons that you give.

Thanks for these (crucial) questions. Let me take them one at a time.

(1) I am indeed saying that it’s wrong to assume a dilemma in the first place. More exactly, I’m saying that the dilemma is something imaginary, something we imagine/create precisely in order not to deal with grace. We set up the dilemma in a way that makes grace a divine response to a human predicament so that we can put grace off for a while longer. But repentance isn’t a grace-bringing solution to the dilemma; repentance is a rejection of our imaginary dilemma, a refusal to sustain any longer the self-deception we employ to keep grace at a distance.

(2) I’m not at all sure I understand this question. Where do I draw this distinction? Or what do I say that implies that I draw it? I don’t think I have a problem with the idea that relationship is related to who we are or what we do. So I’m a bit confused here.

(3) This is your most important question, but I’ll answer it in response to your comment on the next post, since you say quite a bit more about it there.

(4) I myself was a bit nervous about using “createdness” for the very reasons you articulate. But here’s what I’ve got in mind: I’m referring here not to our ontological createdness, our having originally come into existence at all, but to our relational createdness, our having originally come into relationship. Though we are radically independent of God at the ontological level, on Joseph Smith’s account, I don’t know that there’s any intelligible sense in which we can say that we are radically independent of God at the relational level. All we’ve ever meaningfully done, we’ve done in response to God’s call to us. This is what I hear in Joseph’s claim in the KFD: “God himself, finding he was in the midst of spirits and glory, because he was more intelligent, saw proper to institute laws whereby the rest could have a privilege to advance like himself. The relationship we have with God places us in a situation to advance in knowledge.” Whatever our ontological independence amounts to, it doesn’t trump our relational dependence. And that relational dependence grounds our agency, as I’ll try to explain in response to you on the other thread.

Second, I’m not certain the distinction between becoming, acting, and relationship, provides additional clarity here (at least so far in the series. I’m interested in hearing more on this point). It would seem that often in Mormon discourse these things are interconnected. Oaks, as one example, argues that “Desires dictate our priorities, priorities shape our choices, and choices determine our actions. The desires we act on determine our changing, our achieving, and our becoming.” How is relationship not related to who we are or what we do?

Third, while I seriously dislike the common understanding of Del Parson’s Jesus, or the a wandering salesman who gives up very easily and moves to the next door when we won’t answer (and what “natural man” answers the door anyway?), I see this as illustrative of the extremely strong value we give to human choice within Mormonism. The idea is that God is powerless to save unless man acts. Even the way you have articulated sin seem to me to resonate with this idea that sin is a choice. “Sin is a question of suppressing God’s truth, of transforming Him into something other than what He is, of denying our createdness before Him. Sin is, in a word, already a rejection of grace.” Mormon discourse, in my mind, often couches sin as choice, and teaches that the way out of sin is to exercise the very agency that got us into the mess in the first place. Are you saying that the way out of the dilemma (however you define it) is human decision? Paul, it seems to me, suggests this is problematic: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. . . . I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.” (Romans 7:15, 19).

Finally, I noticed that you chose the adjective createdness. What do you mean by this adjective? Traditionally, this gestures at the Creator-creature distinction common within traditional Christianity, and suggests that God did in fact create our very being. When you use this within the Mormon context, especially from Joseph Smith’s sermons that man is uncreated and eternal, what sort of meaning do you assign to this phrase? How does this influence the notion of grace?

Kim and I are reading along in the book and we’re enjoying your posts. We’re wondering, though, if you can show the third way of understanding sin (essentially that sin is a rejection of grace and so grace precedes sin, if I’ve understood you right) a bit more clearly in scripture. I do see what you’re seeing in the Romans passages, but only because I’ve read Adam Miller’s work on Romans.

You just described me perfectly. Thanks for writing this, it makes a lot of things much more clearer for me.

I used to give Yancey’s book to everyone I could get to take it, but as I said, I gave it up a few years ago. I was causing more harm than good. Anyway, I admire you for what you are trying to do and wish you the best. I will continue to read what you have to say, but will stay out of this.

As for Adam and Eve, specifically, that’s a more complex story—involving worn paths leading up to the dead end of Eden’s closed entrance, commandments concerning prayer and sacrifice, the sudden visitation of angels, the bestowal of priesthood keys, and the reorientation of human life. That’s all a crucial story as well, but it’s not the story I meant to tell. I meant to talk about our rejection of grace….

Everyone gets sent to their room metaphorically when they are born into mortality. And every one is welcomed back into God’s presence without doing one thing at all. The resurrection of all persons is a free gift. We only have a dilemma when we start trying to quantify sin and decide what it that makes a particular action sinful for one person but perhaps not for another. The way has been provided for us to escape the effects of sin and that is repentance. Grace may be sufficient, but faith and repentance are necessary as is enduring to the end. .