Mormon Grace

I think the Mormons may have a unique solution to the millenia-old debate of faiths versus works. I just don’t think most of us know it yet ;)

Context: The Return to Grace

A few weeks ago, spiritual discussion in the mormon world was focused on one phrase in a sermon from the early part of the Book of Mormon: “for we know that it is by grace we are saved, after all we can do.” Most of the discussion centered on just five words: “after all we can do.”

It came up as part of the weekly lesson in the church-wide curriculum, and throughout mormondom I presume that the majority of Sunday School teachers and fireside podcasters tried to do something like what I observed my Sunday School teacher do: attempt to make amends for the way that this verse was misused for decades to deny the atonement of the Savior.

This phenomenon is reflective of the most dramatic convulsion in mormon theology that I’ve witnessed in my lifetime: the return to the doctrine of grace. In the middle part of the twentieth century, that verse was widely used to support the mormon church’s attempt to reject salvation by faith alone.

Growing up, I was taught to interpret it roughly as follows: God saves us, but only after we’ve saved ourselves by “keeping the commandments”. The phrase “keeping the commandments” was a little vague, but under the hood I understood it as a set of outward performances: paying tithing, attending church, not smoking or drinking, not having sex outside of marriage, not stealing, and saying yes when asked to perform an assignment. If you messed up on any of these, you went to your bishop, did penance, got the record adjusted, and then you hoped God didn’t audit it all too carefully. Yes, God saved you. But you had to be living right first. You had to do “all you can do”, and then God would come in to make up the difference.

The reason for this focus, as I absorbed it, was an underlying anxiety which can be stated fairly simply as follows: if we say people are saved by faith alone, they may stop feeling pressure to do good works. And if they stop feeling like their soul is in danger when they don’t do good works, they may stop doing those good works entirely.

I was taught that this is what separated us (in a positive way) from the Evangelicals, those shiftless bums who proclaimed their belief once on a Sunday in their youth and then wasted away the rest of their lives sinning and drinking caffeinated beverages. Tsk. 

Some of those Evangelicals, by the way, got the message loud and clear, and used it as a chance to reflect back to us our rejection of Christ’s grace. They pointed out (accurately) that we looked pretty foolish when we were trying to pretend that we were making it on our own.

Now, this doesn’t mean that the entire church had rejected grace. Derek Knox makes a good argument in this Beyond the Block podcast that the original understanding of the verse would have been a grace-centering one. And a firm grasp on the meaning of the atonement of Christ can be found throughout our history if you look for it. But based on my personal experiences, I can say that such understanding was not always readily available to the average member.

In my mid-teens, I started to encounter emissaries of the shift that was already in motion: the shift back to grace. My seminary teacher taught me that I was like a child before God, no more capable of earning my salvation than an infant is capable of feeding itself. David A. Bednar began delivering sermons on the “enabling power” of the atonement - grace that was required to give us the strength to keep the commandments, rather than the kind that was given out as a reward for compliance. Slowly, one talk at a time, one lesson at a time, one book at a time (i.e. “Believing Christ” by Stephen Robinson), I saw my church bending back towards grace. 

One dramatic example was a talk by Brad Wilcox titled “His Grace is Sufficient”, which told us what we should have known all along: our works do nothing to save us. Even more pointedly, five years ago Dieter F. Uchtdorf gave an address entitled “The Gift of Grace,” where he directly addressed the “after all we can do” phrase. In his talk, he converted it from meaning that God saves us only after our full efforts are expended to meaning that we are saved in the process of believing in Christ. No mean feat! I recommend the talk.

So all this is partly just to say: the church is coming back to grace, and thank God for it! It’s been long enough trying to save ourselves and bury the impossibility of it all in quarts of jello salad.

But although I’m grateful for the return, I think there may be some profit in trying to imagine why we turned away from grace in the first place. Beyond the simple anxiety I explained above, I think there may be a deeper truth waiting for us, and some wisdom buried in the foolishness.

A Note on Faith

Before we get into the next section, I just want to pause for a second and criticize the New Testament (lol). You see, I think Paul makes a mistake, or at least I frequently make a mistake in my reading of Paul. The mistake is to conflate faith and grace. For instance, in Romans 1:17, Paul says that “the just shall live by faith.” I think this is technically true, but I also think it’s misleading. Faith is not what gives us life: grace is. I suppose faith is a trigger for grace, in which case I agree with Paul. But faith is also a result of grace, so it seems a little silly to frame it as a fundamental source.

I also think claiming that faith saves us is just as defeatist as claiming that our works save us. Anyone who’s honest about their faith will have to admit that it waxes and wanes and that even at its best it’s rarely at mountain-moving levels. Most days my faith is well shy of being able to fit a camel through the eye of the needle, so I’m grateful that it’s not my faith that’s going to try and get my rich-straight-white-male self into heaven. That’s a job that only Christ and his grace can do.

But I digress! Let’s return to one reason that I think may have understandably led my mormon forefathers to get so wound up in works that they left both faith and grace behind them.

A Uniquely Mormon Contribution

One of my absolute favorite parts of my religion is the doctrine of the immortal body. It shows up in multiple places in our faith, but one of the ones I go back to most frequently is this radical line from Joseph Smith: “And the spirit and the body are the soul of man. And the resurrection from the dead is the redemption of the soul.”

Whoa! The body is part of the soul? The body is coming back as part of the redeemed soul? An equal partner with the spirit? It’s a bold claim. And if that’s not enough, here’s an even more insane statement: “The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s.”

God has a body. It’s a contradiction in terms to most of the Christian world. The philosophy of separation and antagonism between mind and body is not only baked into Christianity but also the English language: self-control, mind over matter, pleasures of the flesh, inner beauty, the real me.

What Joseph is teaching in these verses is that the attempt to split ourselves apart into a “disembodied logic center” temporarily shackled to a “meaty appetite sack” reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of our eternal nature as children of God. When God tells us he has a body, that says something even more powerful about us than it does about him. It tells us that we are not meant to escape the body: we are meant to recognize it as part of us. When we degrade and diminish the body, we are not trying to control a parasitic infection: we are trying to cut ourselves in half. When we ignore it, we ignore something with just as much divine potential and wisdom as our minds. We ignore fully half of our divine destiny.

In this context, the question of faith and works suddenly becomes almost meaningless. I may have a picture of myself as a faithful, believing person: but that picture is not me. The real me includes what I’m actually doing with my body. If the actions of my body don’t line up with my beliefs, then those beliefs aren’t really mine. I may wish I believed those things! I may be working to believe those things! I may be praying to believe those things! But if I’m not doing them, then in some very real way I don’t believe them.

In the standard view of the world that we’ve inherited, the soul is kind of like a little dude who sits in our heads and tries to steer the body around. But the body is a weird, demented, broken beast with its own agenda. The little dude yells at it, pleads with it, cajoles it, whips it, digs in the spurs: sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. As long as the little dude has the right intentions, the ultimate actions of the body aren’t so relevant.

But that’s not the way it actually is. The little dude up in our heads isn’t our soul: he’s our ego. He’s our imperfect, self-flattering view of ourselves, the one that thinks it’s already perfect. The one that blames everything else for when things don’t go well, and that isn’t afraid to throw its own body under the bus. 

The ego is the one who’s terrified of being called out. The one who trembles at the idea of not being good enough. The one that dies every time we admit to ourselves that we’ve sinned.

But, thank God, the ego is also the one that gets resurrected again, every time. When we kill our ego, God’s grace gives us back a better one. A slightly more aware one, one that acts a little bit better than the last one. One that is able to get more of its esteem from things that are actually true, that are actually lived out in the body.

So the shift to works is actually a really powerful recognition of truth: there is no fundamental difference between faith and works. The difference between them is purely illusory.

Now, here’s where I think we went wrong: I think we pulled a Paul and conflated grace with faith. We thought that faith saved us: since faith and works were basically the same, we then thought that works saved us. We should have instantly seen how ridiculous that was! We should have come to God and confided in him: 

“Lord, I know you only save us through faith, and I know my faith is manifest in my works. I’m sorry, Lord: my works are works of wickedness as much as they are works of good. I can’t do it.”

And He would have bound up our broken hearts. He would have strengthened our feeble knees. He would have lifted up our hands as they hung down. He would have said:

“Of course you can’t do it. I did it. I already did it. Show me your wicked works. Give me your false vision of yourself as God, and let me crucify it. Here, here is my grace. Take as much as you can carry. You are a little better already. Come back as soon as you can.”

But we didn’t do that. We panicked. We thought: our works save us, but my works are awful! Quick, a loophole! Find a loophole! Maybe there is a subset of works that I can do, something that I can succeed at! Maybe that subset will be enough!

So instead of acknowledging how broken our works were, and taking them to God, I think we fled for comfort to a list of works that we thought we could accomplish. 

We knew we didn’t love our neighbor, but we thought maybe we could donate ten percent of our income with perfect consistency. 

We knew we couldn’t stop ourselves from avoiding our feelings with distractions, but we thought maybe we could get it done with sugary confections instead of alcohol. 

We knew we couldn’t fully love our spouses without fear or judgement, but we thought maybe that would be excused if we managed to only have sex exclusively with them.

Faith without works isn’t dead: faith without works is a contradiction in terms. But both faith and works are dead without grace.

So as the church bends back towards grace, I hope we don’t forget works. Our works do not save us: they convict us. But if we trust in grace, we do not have to fear the conviction. We can be grateful for it. Because only when our imperfection is revealed is God’s grace made manifest. 

Only when we die can we live :)