(Scripture Reading Exercise.)

THE APPLICATION OF PRINCIPLES—(A) ARBITRARY ACTION EXCLUDED IN MAN'S REDEMPTION.

SPECIAL TEXT: "And thus we see that all mankind were fallen, and they were in the grasp of justice yea the justice of God, which consigned them forever to be cut off from his presence." (Book of Alma xlii:14.)

DISCUSSION.

1. Recapitulation: Let us now begin the application of our principles to the Atonement. But first a brief recapitulation of them.

We have seen in preceding lessons—

That Intelligences, though differing in degree of intelligence are all eternal; and are begotten spirits in a heavenly kingdom; and God is their Father;

That the purpose of God with reference to his spirit-offspring is to bring to pass their eternal life and progress and joy;

That to bring to pass possible progress and happiness to the spirits of men, union of the spirits with earth elements is necessary, hence earth-birth and earth-life are provided for man;

That to get an environment bringing man in contact with sin and suffering and death, all which shall give him the experience essential to his progress—the harmony in the "reign of law" must be broken—there must be violation of law, there must be a fall of man;

That the fall of man did not surprise the purposes of God, but furthered them;

That violations of law, however ignorantly done or designedly planned, and that even for right ends, involves destruction nevertheless of the harmony of things, and relations, and also involves the transgressor in the penalties inseparably connected with law, and without which law would be of no force at all;

That the attributes of God, each complete and perfect, must exist in harmony with each other, no one supplanting another or intruding upon its domain;

That a reign of law subsists throughout the universe as well in the moral and spiritual kingdom as in the physical world;

That any manifestations of mercy, or special providence prompted by love must not violate the harmony subsisting in the attributes of God, or be contrary to the conception of the universal reign of law;

That Love and Mercy, however, must enter into the economy of the earth-order of things; they must get themselves in some way worthily expressed; no divine economy can exist without them, and without such expression; even justice crys aloud for their presence.

To get Love and Mercy adequately expressed in the earth-order of things, and in harmony with law, is the burden and mission of the Christ through the Atonement.

This is the point to which our previous lessons have led us; and now to the working out of the application of our principles.

2. The Commandment Given and Violated.—Effects: The commandment is given, saying: "O. every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."^[A]

[Footnote A: Gen. ii:16, 17.]

We need not speculate upon the nature of the thing forbidden. It is enough to know here that partaking of the thing forbidden by the commandment led to the knowledge of evil, as well as of good—to knowledge that comes of experience; and though, as I have before argued, the transgression so far from surprising the purposes of God was essential to them, yet when law is transgressed, in the nature of things, penalties must follow, else laws are but a mockery and the reign of law a myth.

Adam transgressed the law, as already detailed;^[A] the penalties followed. The nature of those penalties must be found in the events following the "fall" as consequences as well as in the penalty pronounced—"In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." The harmony of things was broken: innocence fled; union with God was severed; God banished man from his presence—spiritual death;^[B] physical death also followed; for as to his body, dust man is, and unto dust shall he return, was the decree of God,^[C] and all the woes that make up the sum of evil in man's earth life followed.

[Footnote A: Lessons VII and VIII.]

[Footnote B: "The task we have set ourselves is to investigate the essential nature of Spiritual Death. And we have found it to consist of a want of communion with God" (Drummond's "Natural Law in the Spiritual World," p. 158). So that spiritual life consists in a union with God; destroy that union—and sinning against God destroys it—and spiritual death ensues. For this doctrine we have the warrant of revelation:

"Adam * * * partook of the forbidden fruit and transgressed the commandment; * * * whereupon I, the Lord God, caused that he should be cast out from the Garden of Eden, from my presence, because of his transgression, wherein he became spiritually dead, which is the first death, even that same death which is the last death, which is spiritual, which shall be pronounced upon the wicked when I shall say, 'Depart ye cursed'" (Doc. & Cov., Sec. xxix:40, 41). "The fall had brought upon all mankind a spiritual death as well as a temporal; that is, they were cut off from the presence of the Lord" (Alma xlii:9).]

[Footnote C: Gen. iii:19. The several sentences of this chapter pronounced upon man and woman should be included as penalties affixed to the commandment, "Thou shalt not eat of it," as well as "Thou shalt surely die."]

3. The Commandment is Given as to An Immortal Being: This is now the situation: The law is broken. The penalty is incurred. The law is inexorable. The law was addressed to one provisionally immortal—had not man sinned his life would have been eternal. The law was not temporal, but eternal. "Not at any time," said the Lord to Joseph Smith and six elders, in Fayette, September, 1830—"not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal; neither Adam your father whom I created. Behold, I gave unto him that he should be an agent unto himself; and I gave unto him commandment, but no temporal commandment gave I unto him, for my commandments are spiritual; they are not natural, nor temporal, neither carnal nor sensual."^[A] The Prophet Joseph also said: "All things whatsoever God in his infinite wisdom has seen fit and proper to reveal to us, while we are dwelling in mortality, in regard to our mortal bodies, are revealed to us in the abstract, and independent of affinity with this mortal tabernacle; but are revealed to our spirits precisely as though we had no bodies at all; and those revelations which will save our spirits will save our bodies. God reveals them to us in view of no eternal dissolution of the body, or tabernacle."^[B]

[Footnote A: Doc. & Cov., Sec. xxix:34, 35.]

[Footnote B: Sermon of April Conference, 1844—the "King Follett Sermon," "Improvement Era" for January, 1909; published also in "History of the Church," Vol. VI, with notes by the Editor.]

4. The Problem: What, Then, Can Man or God Do? The commandment, then, is given to Adam as to an eternal being, and by violating the law, and doubtless an eternal law, he and the race he shall beget is under an eternal penalty.^[A] Under these circumstances what shall man do? Nay, rather, what can he do? What shall God do? Nay, what can he do? Forgive man his transgression out of hand as becomes the true sovereign of the universe? An ancient and, I might say, a time-honored suggestion. Origen the theologian of the third Christian century, and held to be "the greatest Christian mind of the ante-nicene age," at least held forth the possibility of such procedure. For in his views "the remission of sin is made to depend upon arbitrary will, without reference to retributive justice, as is evidenced by his assertion that God might have chosen milder means to save man than he did; e. g., that he might by a sovereign act of his will have made the sacrifices of the Old Testament to suffice for man's sin."^[B] "But logic," as Shedd subsequently remarked, "could not stop at this point;" for if the provision for ratifying the broken law is resolved into an optional act on the part of God, it follows that an Atonement might be dispensed with altogether. "For the tribitrary and almighty will that was competent to declare the claims of justice to be satisfied by the finite sacrifice of bulls and goats would be competent also to declare that those claims should receive no satisfaction at all."

[Footnote A: On this particular point the late Elder Orson Pratt wrote: "We believe that all mankind, by the transgression of their first parents, and not by their own sins, were brought under the curse and penalty of that transgression, which consigned them to an eternal banishment from the presence of God, and their bodies to an endless sleep in the dust, never more to rise, and their spirits to endless misery under the power of Satan; and that, in this awful condition, they were utterly lost and fallen and had no power of their own to extricate themselves therefrom" (Pratt's Works, "Remarkable Visions)." Also the Book of Mormon: "Wherefore the first judgment which came upon man [the judgment of death] must needs have remained to an endless duration" (II Nephi ix:7).]

[Footnote B: Shedd, "History of Christian Doctrine," Vol. II, p. 234. He cites Redepenning; Origines II, 409, for his authority.

The views of Origen are all the more surprising from the fact that the Epistle to the Hebrews makes clear the inadequacy of the sacrifices of animals for the satisfaction of the claims of justice for man's transgression of the law (Chs. ix and x). On this point the Prophet Alma is very clear: "Behold. I say unto you, that I do know that Christ shall come among the children of men, to take upon himself the transgressions of his people, and that he shall atone for the sins of the world; for the Lord God hath spoken it; for it is expedient that an Atonement should be made; for according to the great plan of the eternal God, there must be an Atonement made or else all mankind must unavoidably perish; yea, all are hardened; yea, all are fallen and are lost, and must perish except it be through the Atonement which it is expedient should be made; for it is expedient that there should be a great and last sacrifice; yea, not a sacrifice of man, neither of beast, neither of any manner of fowl; for it shall not be a human sacrifice; but it must be an infinite and eternal sacrifice. * * * * And behold, this is the whole meaning of the law; every whit pointing to that great and last sacrifice; and that great and last sacrifice will be the Son of God; yea, infinite and eternal."]

Abelard (twelfth century) also held that there was "nothing in the Divine nature which necessitates a satisfaction for past transgression antecedently to remission of penalty; like creating out of nothing, redemption may and does take place by a fiat, by which sin is abolished by a word, and the sinner is received into favor. * * * Abelard denies the doctrine of satisfaction and contends that God may remit penalty by a sovereign act of will.^[A] Even Augustine, according to Neander, declared that if considered from the point of view of the divine omnipotence" he believed the answer must be in the affirmative; that is, that choice of other means for man's redemption than the Atonement could have been made. "But no other way," Augustine supposed, "would have been so well adapted for man's recovery from his wretched condition," as the one that was adopted in the Atonement of Christ. Not, however, from the "intrinsic nature of the case; not from the daws of the moral government of the world;" but because of the subjective influence that the union of the divine nature with the human—effected in the incarnation and the Atonement by the Christ, would have upon man.^[B]

[Footnote A: Shedd, "History of Christian Doctrine," Vol. II, pp. 260, 261.]

[Footnote B: The matter is stated at length in Neander's "History of the Christian Religion and Church," Vol. IV, pp. 497-8. See also Augustine (De Trinitate), Lib. xiii, Ch. x. "This idea of an 'abstract' omnipotence accompanies the history of the doctrine of atonement down from the earliest to the latest times. In the ancient church, Irenaeus (Adv. Haer. III, XX.), Cyril of Jerusalem, Basil, and Ambrose contend for an absolute necessity of Christ's satisfaction; while Athanasius, Augustine, Cyril of Alexandria, Theodoret, and John Damascene assert only a relative necessity. In the mediaeval church, Anselm, and perhaps Hugh St. Victor assert an absolute, while Abelard, Bernard, Lombard, Hales, Bonaventure, and Aquinas (Cont. Gent. IV, liv, lv) concede only a relative necessity. In the seventeenth century, the subject was discussed by Owen, and Twise (the prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly); the former asserting and the latter denying, the absolute necessity of a satisfaction. See Owen's tract, 'On the Nature of Justice'" ("History of Christian Doctrine," Vol. II, p. 302, note).]

It should be remembered, however, that the doctrine of the "reign of law," in the moral government of the world, excludes arbitrary action—action independent of law—even though beneficent; and if that were not true, then God must act in harmony with his own attributes. Mercy must not be at variance with Justice. Even God's Omnipotence must keep step with the attributes of Truth and Wisdom. Satisfaction for violated law, satisfaction to divine justice is a claim that may no more be set aside than the pleadings of Mercy. A way shall be found out of these difficulties, but it must not be by "a schism in the Deity, and an intestine conflict between the divine attributes."^[A]

[Footnote A: Shedd's "History of Christian Doctrine," p. 300.]

It can be readily understood that not even God's Omnipotence could make it possible for him to act contrary to Truth and Justice.^[A] It ought to be no more difficult to understand that God's Omnipotence could not permit him to set aside a satisfaction to Justice as an arbitrary concession to Mercy. Mere power has not the right to nullify law. Not even Omnipotence has the light to abolish Justice. Might in Deity is not more fundamental than Right. God we must conclude will act in harmony with all his attributes, else confusion in the moral government of the world.

[Footnote A: See closing paragraphs Lesson XII.]

These reflections lead to the inevitable conclusion that there must be a satisfaction made to justice before there can be redemption for man. But how?