95 Theses Revisited

Ian R. Harvey

These 95 theses are intended neither to induce a reformation of the Church nor of her doctrine, but a reformation of perspective. The author seeks a perspective within the Church that encourages him to ritually choose whom he should believe when he worships in the Holy Temple. For the temple dramatization of Eden’s events is not about the truth of what happened there so much as it is about his personal test of moral agency listening to the disparate voices there represented––whether he chooses to believe a God who cannot lie or a liar who cannot tell the truth. Having chosen in his personal conviction to believe an ever righteous God––one who cannot ever vary from that which He has said––the author herein shares a perspective that flows therefrom.[i]

With Apologies to Martin Luther

Out of love for the truth and from desire to elucidate it, an ordinary disciple at the SLC Sunstone Summer Symposium, intends to defend the following statements and to dispute on them in that place. Therefore he asks that those who cannot be present and dispute with him orally shall do so in their absence by letter. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.

* * *

The first and great commandment as delivered to the “first flesh”—the same as also subsequently delivered first to Moses at Sinai—is said to be a trifling thing, not sinful to break, unimportant in fact, and even necessary to disobey, though its penalty is capital: exile, suffering, sorrow then death. I claim that breaking this commandment is primal sin, nothing less that open betrayal of God.

We LDS people imagine numerous inadequate metaphors for the Atonement of Jesus Christ: the mediator of the defaulted loan, the boy who took the schoolmaster’s whippin’, the envied bicycle, the ladder extended into the pit… none of which adequately portrays the reasons for the important torture and ransom symbolism so evident in our sacrament hymns that we covenant to ‘remember’ in our sacrament prayers. We thus do not comprehend the full meaning of Jesus’s Atonement or who did those horrible things to Him. His foe is both nameless and faceless, but dangerous to imagine. How can we fulfill our covenant to remember, if we do not even know at the most fundamental level what happened and why?

We LDS do not fully understand Jesus’s Atonement because we do not understand our first parents’ sin in Eden: Our traditional––and false––interpretation of the “fortunate” Fall places non-scriptural words in God’s mouth, rationalizing why God did not mean what He said when He commanded “Thou shalt not; I forbid it”. We LDS should seriously challenge the heretofore unquestioned belief in statements made by our initially beguiled, later glorious Mother Eve traceable directly to Lucifer’s words heard in the temple, “There is no other way!”

The key rationalization for why God’s “Thou shalt not” is taken by us to mean “Thou shalt!” and why He did not really forbid what he forbade is because Eve tells Lehi and us that they never would have had children if they had remained in the Garden. So Eve’s beguiled opinion completely supersedes God’s statements, leading us to excuse Him by putting words in His mouth. For us it is traditionally obvious that there must have been some other unwritten, undocumented commandment by God that rescinded the one that is actually recorded in Genesis. By rejecting the documented commandment for a delusional one, we also spurn the fact that the known commandment was also twice independently validated through the Prophet Joseph in Moses and Abraham as well as within our temple endowment script. Such rationalizations as these are the philosophies of Satan, mingled with scripture. Jacob, son of Lehi, condemns this behavior.

The LDS temple pre-endowment (contextual portrayal of the world’s creation and the fall of our first parents) is principally contained within our scriptural canon, other than Lucifer’s beguiling words and other than our first parents’ rationalizations. Understanding these statements, unique to the temple, gives us the opportunity to turn about and reject Lucifer’s lies, and learn to accept each of God’s words at face value.

Lucifer’s words are neither sacred nor secret. They should be publicly questioned in our Sunday schools and seminaries. By public questioning, we soon realize the necessity and urgency of disbelieving them; else we hear the ridiculousness within our own rationalizing. Then we should shout them upon the housetops!

I have chosen to disbelieve each of Lucifer’s words. Jesus said there is no truth in him. Why do we institutionally embrace these same words, “there is no other way” in our temples and ennoble them in our conference talks and teaching curricula?

The God I worship is good. He cannot speak in duplicity out of both sides of His mouth. He cannot command one thing while secretly intending, designing, planning or decreeing the exact opposite.

Lucifer lied: eating a forbidden fruit was absolutely not the way Father obtained His knowledge.
1. God never subjected Himself to the will of an evil adversary. He never partook of the fruit of betrayal. God has thus never sinned. He was thus never carnal, sensual or devilish. He never needed personal salvation to restore His innocence or righteousness. He is and was ever Holy from eternity to eternity.
2. As man now is, God never was.
3. As humanity now is, God for us weeps; as God now is, humanity may still become.
4. Father never intended for humanity to gain knowledge from the deceiver.
5. Divine Law controls the process for obtaining divine joy, and that process specifically excludes paying any heed to the adversary. No exceptions.
6. The divinely ordained path to knowledge, truth, light, understanding was lost to humanity because of the Fall. Mortality is not what God desired for us. Exile is not what God desired for us. Subjection to Lucifer is neither what God did to Himself, nor did He intend for us to do that to ourselves either. There was another way!

LDS tradition rationalizes that eating the fruit was inevitable, but that transgression occurred when they must have gone about it at the wrong time or in the wrong way. No! The scriptures do not support this supposition. Our God refers to the event as “sin” when He exiles our parents from the Garden and sets cherubim and flaming sword to guard the way of the tree of life. We should not base our entire theology upon the short experience and limited imagination that confines our current understanding to insisting with Lucifer that, “there is no other way” is a legitimate exception to immutable, irrevocable, incontrovertible divine law.

I believe the word of God that by the fall came suffering, misery, death, woe, not the beguiled modern conflation of scriptural phrases that holds Eve and Adam fell that men might have joy.

Because God had married our parents, commanded them to multiply and replenish, and promised them “joy and rejoicing” in their posterity, I can neither accept Lucifer’s lie, “there is no other way”, nor can I accept Eve’s rationalization that if not for their transgression, they never should have had seed.

I believe Lehi in 2 Nephi 2:21, 26-30 describing the lost state of humanity and the need for redemption because of the transgression of our parents, and not the intervening verses which are accurate representations of what Lehi supposed—having read Eve’s statement—such as when he intimated that without sin there could be no righteousness. These aberrant hypothetical verses are not accurate reflections of God’s truth.

I believe and applaud Adam when he twice said, “I will not partake of it”, and not when he rationalized, after partaking and prior to his commanded repentance, “because of my transgression my eyes are opened.” I choose to believe that the Holy Ghost––a divine being with whom Adam was not previously acquainted––opened his eyes to see the possibilities of repentance and salvation from exile: redemption and joy.

I believe Eve when she said, “I was beguiled”, not her beguiled, pre-repentant (the same as Adam) rationalizations that, “it is better to pass through sorrow that we may know good the from the evil”; and that, “Were it not for our transgression we never should have had seed.” Her only affirmation came from her new master, Lucifer, just prior to her (and Adam’s) demonstration of further obedience to him in covering themselves with fig leaves and hiding.

Light never comes to us through sin. Eve’s pre-repentant statement fails the divine truth test. Similarly with Lehi’s aberrant verses in 2 Nephi 2:22-25, he acknowledges having read Eve’s account (1 Nephi 5:11) and he supposes (2 Nephi 2:17) the things he tells us there, doing what each of us naturally wants to do (believe Mother at face value), but unfortunately at the expense of obfuscating the principles of moral agency, creating the image of a manipulative and duplicitous god, and creating a persistent delusion among our people of Garden infertility without mortality. No other scriptural prophet, including those sons to whom Lehi’s sermon was directed and by whom it was transcribed, ever ascribed divine intent or purpose to the Fall, but rather clearly and consistently assigned the cause of the fall to agency exercised in unrighteousness… transgression… sin. It was never, ever, fortunate in any way in the eyes of all the other Book of Mormon prophets.

We LDS have been accused by mainstream Christian brothers and sisters of having been deluded. We are indeed, deluded. However it was not Joseph Smith who deluded us, but the father of lies, of whom it was prophesied, the day of Christ shall not come until the man of sin is revealed, who sits in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be god. Many generations of LDS prophets have believed the man of sin and his lies given to us in our own sacred temples, and have unwittingly assisted in the propagation of those lies.

Saying––with God––that the actions in Eden constituted “sin” casts no aspersion upon the daughters of Eve any more than it does upon the sons of Adam. Both of our first parents exercised their individual agency by blatantly disobeying a direct command from God and by preferentially heeding the command of Lucifer. Rather than bewailing all that our parents have caused us to miss out on––for this is both unknown and unknowable––we must praise and thank them for their subsequent courage to repent and to show us how to do the same—that through repentance we might be saved from sin and death by the atoning, redeeming and saving grace of Jesus Christ—the One offered in ransom trade.

We LDS claim that Jesus Christ is central to the Plan of Salvation. But having also insisted the Fall was necessary to bring about the atonement, we find ourselves creating an Eve-worshiping culture at the expense of self-consistent views of moral agency, at the expense of a truthful God, and at the expense of understanding the true purpose of the Eden portrayal inside our sacred temples. We LDS cannot suddenly claim belief in the grace of Jesus Christ while simultaneously clinging to some formerly favorite doctrines, principally that it was necessary that Adam and Eve and their posterity should become subject to sin precisely so that we might become privileged to work out our own salvation.[ii]

No one to my knowledge has talked about or considered the alternative to the LDS tradition of the Fall, that Lucifer might be lying to us in the temple. Certainly it is a lie when he tells us that this is the way Father obtained His knowledge (see John 5:19-20; Moses 7:29), so why not consider the possibility that “There is no other way!” is also blatantly false? (See 1 Nephi 3:7, D&C 130:20-21.)

Our cultural taboo (reverence for the temple) very effectively prevents this discussion, protecting the status quo of what is for Lucifer and his doctrine, perfect secrecy, rigidly enforced by threat of ostracizing. Considering that our Lord tells us unequivocally that “there is no truth in him”, and that “he was a liar and a murderer from the beginning”, (John 8:44) then trusting the Lord should behoove us to at least look at the possibility that Lucifer is never trustworthy. And not only are his lies not worth the cesspool they are taken from, but our obligation toward them is to shout them “upon the housetops”!

All of our traditional rationalizations (I use those words purposefully) how there was no other way to experience the vicissitudes of mortality or to activate agency or to have children other than by direct disobedience to Father’s commandment fail the divine test of truth given to us in D&C 93:24-25. Hypothetical conjecture of what-if-then or if-not-for-then lies completely outside the boundary of truth (knowledge of things past, present and future), and is certainly of “the spirit of him who was a liar from the beginning.”

All of our traditional (see D&C 93 again, beyond v.25 for why I use that word) rationalizations require us to put non-scriptural words in God’s mouth in describing His (apparently hidden) intent. But Moses 7:31-39 is not ambiguous at all regarding His true feelings or reaction to His children choosing His eternal enemy in preference to Himself. God clearly tells us What I the Lord have spoken I have spoken and I excuse not myself. Yet our tradition requires that we excuse Him–– that we put non-scriptural words in His mouth, like designed, intended, decreed, purposed, pleased they did so. I am afraid this is quite blasphemous as it clearly creates a duplicitous god. No wonder our Christian friends cannot see us as Christian.

The Prophet Joseph sought clarification of the Fall and received D&C 29 as answering revelation. This revelation again clearly assigns the causal[iii] transgressionary actions of our first parents to agency exercised in unrighteousness. It should have caused still-birth for the Garden infertility paradox. But all things spoken by the mouths of the holy prophets must be restored, even Lehi’s delusional ones. The Garden infertility paradox was indeed restored through the Prophet Brigham Young who sought a better story than the dust-of-the-earth creation of man that bothered him so much. He concocted the Adam-God theory that had at its root Lucifer’s Garden infertility doctrine, spawning generations of subsequent prophets teaching Lucifer’s “there is no other way.” The LDS tradition of the Fall should go into the same trash can as did the Adam-God theory. Unfortunately, despite modern injunctions to preferentially follow the living prophet, it appears that living prophets hold their predecessor’s words inordinately influential, even above those of God as cited in primary source scripture. The trash can housing Adam-God apparently has a permanent archive.

For Mormons, the LDS temple is the sacred House of The Lord. Yet is it also the secret host of Lucifer and his greatest and oldest lie? As a prototype, the sacred ground that was the temple of Eden was also host to Satan’s presence and delicious lies for the purpose of providing opposition in the test of choice and agency. The test for us today is no different than the one our first parents faced. In the temple we are not only making sacred covenants with God, but—as long as we persist in the traditional practice of believing Satan’s lies spoken in the temple in preference to that which God explicitly commanded—we are also unwittingly making covenant with Lucifer:

Its name: The Lie, as prophesied by Paul—“There is no other way…”

Its sign: betraying God by hearkening to Lucifer’s Lie and partaking.

Its token: the fig apron he uses to mark his newly acquired property.

I am afraid I have let the cat out of the bag by beginning this discussion in public, even among the Christian community. The rules-of-the-game have changed and now the clock is ticking. It will not be long before the more vitriolic elements of Christianity begin to use the truth against us: that our people attend the temple and unwittingly bear Lucifer’s lies back to our homes and into our seminaries and Sunday schools where we teach them in hushed reverence. How soon do you think it will be before we hear chants on the sidewalk outside Temple Square that we attend the secret temple to hear the secret words of Lucifer and to make covenant with him? Their words, however painful, would be true—in spite of all the other sacred and holy things that occur therein. And it unfortunately reinforces the perception of an unwitting, sheep-like people. And it casts a malicious shadow upon the holders of the keys.

Our efforts to find and rationalize fortune in the fall lead us to concoct another imaginary commandment which we say must be obeyed. This is a delusional commandment to disobey the verified first commandment. Only our denial of sin gives us fortune in the Fall. We may be rightly accused of calling good “evil” and evil “good”, subjecting ourselves to the curse of Isaiah: the Garden was a boring and lonely prison, sin was not really sin, the commandment was not really a commandment. We claim death is not a bad thing and so it is with suffering, sorrow and sin, apparently intended to be so by God Himself. Each of these is good because, we claim, each is essential to bring about joy. In doing so we ignore the words of God.

We claim the universality and necessity (if not goodness) of death, being apparently ignorant of what it was Jesus truly came to save us from—contextually both before and after the fact—and discounting His words, that by believing Him we might never die. Why is it that we, the protectorate of the Holy Priesthood, do not lead the world in understanding death and the fullness in truth of Christ having fully and completely overcome the same? To claim the universality of death is to falsely assume that all the rest of Father’s creations are also subject to death, to accept Lucifer’s lie and to deny the power of Christ. It is also to deny the reality of those described by scripture who righteously sought and received the proffered exemption from death: John, the three Nephites and, most relevant, the people of Zion.

“And I, the Lord God, said unto mine Only Begotten: Behold, the man is become as one of us to know good and evil;” (See also 2 Nephi 2:18; Alma 12:31; 42:3.) Is there only one way to come to know good from evil? Only if we choose to believe what Lucifer tells us in the temple. Did God come to discern good and evil by becoming subject to it? Only if we choose to disbelieve that God was Holy from eternity to eternity, and to believe instead that He was once like us, carnal, sensual and devilish and in need of rescue and salvation. Is it not better to believe that our parents came to a knowledge of good and evil by becoming subject to that evil, whereas that is not the path God had intended? There was another way! And that way is lost to us by forfeit!

God gave our first parents promised knowledge “in the very day I created them.” What was that knowledge? Only knowledge of the master they had chosen to serve: “I know thee now. Thou art Lucifer, he who was cast from Father’s presence for rebellion”. Does God want us to know evil by making ourselves subject to that evil? Is that the way God Himself––He being Holy from all eternity to all eternity––did it? No and emphatically No! Job 28 tells us that we forsook and lost the divine method of learning, and with it, the awareness of what life is like in the divinely-intended and designed pattern… …and it was subsequently searched high and low until it was finally revealed again.

Wisdom (light, understanding) never comes from disobedience to God. Knowledge of sin is the knowledge of sin’s master because the sinner is beholden to him. This is what was lost back in the Garden! This is the pattern of divine learning. This is Divine Law. This is what we unswervingly exhort in primary, Sunday school and seminary. But it is exactly the opposite of what we rationalize with respect to the Garden.

Here it is, the paradox: Our experiences tell us that repentant sinners have the deepest gratitude and understanding for the joy of salvation, almost to our own envy. (So we naturally assume that sin leads to understanding of redemption and true joy: therefore somebody has to sin!) But Divine Law, eternal and unchangeable, tells us that this is not how God wanted humanity to learn true wisdom and understanding or to receive light and find eternal joy:
1. Wickedness never was happiness, without exception.
2. Sin never leads to joy, without exception, though repentance does.
3. Blessings are bestowed based on obedience to the laws upon which they are predicated, without exception.
4. The Lord prepares a way that each of His commandments may be obeyed, without exception.
5. Eve did not have any idea what blessings were forfeit with her choice. Of course they could have had seed without disobeying, because God promised that, and He cannot lie.
  1. Eve’s statement in Moses 5:11 was deluded with her hypothetical rationalizing, prior to her repentance. It was only later when she and her husband were taught the Gospel.
  2. Lehi’s supposition (reading Eve and incorrectly supposing she was a reliable source of truth – see D&C 93:24-25) propagated her delusion.

It is in no way better to pass through sorrow in order to know the good from the evil. Moral agency fundamentally gives us this right to be exposed to—and to decide between—good and evil, by decree.

Lucifer also deflected the blame away from himself when he told us that humanity was being taught the doctrines of men mingled with scripture. No, make no mistake. It was Lucifer who lied, “there is no other way!” To be clear, these are the doctrines of Lucifer, mingled with scripture. And they are still being successfully taught and accepted in our sacred temples, and the correlated curricula for our seminaries, Sunday schools, and in our missionary lessons to this day.

Adam and Eve forfeited their lordship over the whole earth when they both chose to obey Lucifer, making him god of this world. Adam and Eve were exiled from the Garden and from before the face of God. Theirs was a prolonged mortal sojourn within the lone and dreary world experiencing life’s probation multiplied with sorrow, sin, toil, travail, suffering and death.

The cause of the Fall was not our perception of some need on God’s part, nor His secret decree, will or intent that His own commandment, thou shalt not partake of it; I forbid it! should be disobeyed. There was not some mysterious secondary law in Eden requiring mortality to enable fertility, superseding God’s promise to them in multiplying and replenishing the earth, that our parents should receive joy and rejoicing in their posterity. There is no scripture in our canon that describes either the wisdom of Eve in partaking, nor of God’s pleasure in the good fortune they did so.

The comprehension of opposites is not the same as facing opposition. Lucifer attempted to distract our parents away from discerning that he, himself was the opposition; that he was the source of temptation; that following him constituted betrayal and primal sin. That which is forbidden in the fruit is exactly the heeding of the adversary in preference to God. What an effective distracting device of Lucifer, to try to get us to believe that the “fruit” is necessary to discern good/evil, virtue/vice, light/dark, health/sickness, pleasure/pain. The way was already given for such discernment. Our parents each demonstrated that discerning ability prior to their individual disobedient acts, as we learn in the temple.

Satan’s apron is no symbol of his power and priesthoods. It is a symbol of treachery—a covering for shame—as are the aprons he commanded to be donned by his newly acquired property.

There was another way.
1. God did not intend for our parents to fall.
2. Every other world He created manifested His own holy (unfallen) attributes of perfect loyalty: truth, justice and peace.
3. And so He wept along with all the heavens of His vast creation portfolio that we would not choose Him, our Father, and that we would instead choose a path of betrayal leading away from love, kindness and goodness.

There is one who dares to molest and make afraid! But the angels at Bethlehem told the shepherds keeping watch that Holy Night, to Fear Not… for unto you is born this day in the City of David, a Savior, which is Christ, the Lord.

May I not drop the fig leaves of shame and worship Him in the temple with shouts of Hosanna, while waving the palm fronds of praise?

The “Three Pillars of Eternity” as a metaphor is broken, based on false suppositions, suggesting God designed and planned all to be this way independent of the agency of man. This is why the Creation, Fall and Atonement are “pillars”: fixed, determinate, absolute, tangible, self-existent. The idea supposes backwards that each one had to be, since atonement is presumed essential for each of Father’s creations everywhere within the vast universe even as a similar event must have been for Father Himself.^[iv] Atonement is thus necessary for any process of exaltation, so the Fall was necessary to create the need for the Atonement. In other words, it all had to be this way. And we then proceed to quote Lucifer to justify that perspective, “there is no other way.”

The temple pre-endowment highlights the only thing worthy of being called a pillar: the Love of God as manifest in…

…what He intended—agency

…what He allowed—justice

…and the rescue He offered as a contingency—mercy

The Planned: The whole purpose of the creation, both of the earth and of our physical bodies, is to give us––God’s children––the ability to act upon our choices and to experience all aspects of the consequences, growing and maturing from the challenges arising therefrom. This is Father’s way of teaching us, and eventually of exalting us into His fullness of joy.

It is easy to visualize the Garden as the first Temple on the earth for our parents, in the same context as it is for us today: Father Adam and Mother Eve had been made Lords over the whole earth, and all things on the face thereof were made for their benefit. We can further imagine how they and their posterity were intended to come and go from the world at-large to the Garden Temple as often as they wished. God had, after all, promised to return and bring them further light and understanding. The world in God’s intention would not be for them to see as “lone and dreary” because it was intended to be the laboratory of life: to bring challenge and opportunity, mystery and learning, growth and understanding. The difference between this intended life versus the exiled life our parents actually chose and experienced within their perceived “lone and dreary” world (same world, different perspectives) is in the work, disappointment, pain, mistakes and failures intended to be among the teaching tools in the one, versus the multiplied travail (fruitless toil), sorrow, suffering and sin that were actually experienced in the other.

The Allowed: An important factor related to the principles of moral agency (often neglected in our failure-averse culture) is the notion that the possibility of failure is an evidence of the love of God. That is, there can be no true success without a legitimate opportunity to fail. Every success we achieve or attempt––every step we make in maturation and growth––comes at the explicit cost or implicit availability of failure as a legitimate option. And in almost all cases failure does not connote sin, but such failure––unlike sin––indeed represents a valuable learning opportunity.

Exaltation cannot be a legitimate path for us unless we also have damnation (self-destruction) available as a valid alternative. This is the foundational principle of opposition upon which we can legitimately claim that God never intended for our first parents to disobey Him: He placed them before the two trees––the one proffering death set there in opposition to the one promising life––and let them make a choice, either to their eternal happiness and joy or to their utter destruction. He neither manipulated nor intervened. He allowed them to make their own choices and––because He spoke it––they must justly suffer the consequences thereof and become completely subject to their chosen new master, experiencing all the death, suffering, sorrow and sin that that malicious being intended…

The Contingent…except that mercy still has both a place and an opportunity. The place of mercy is perhaps the greatest manifestation of God’s love for us––that He did not wish to see us suffer under the lash of the one who had made himself adversary, and be destroyed. Father was willing to allow another to take our place. The opportunity for mercy lay in the fact that Lucifer was cast down from the heavens by his brother, and Lucifer hated that brother above all else combined. Lucifer was more than willing to accept in ransom the One in exchange for his legitimate ownership of the entire human race, who had each betrayed God in sin. He would have the opportunity to maliciously torture the One in Gethsemane, engulfing Him in a barrage of torments from physiological to emotional and psychological, each of infinite magnitude, and all with the intent that Jesus should relent and prefer Lucifer’s death to this unlimited suffering. If, perchance, he succeeded, then he would be the master of his hated brother and us too. All would be lost.

This new perspective helps me realize that each time I attend the temple endowment, the Garden scene presents me with what amounts to a ‘do-over’ opportunity to exercise my own moral agency, in which I too stand before two opposing trees and must decide whether I personally will believe God and choose Life, or believe Lucifer and choose death. I choose Him, my Father. I choose Life. And I seek the promised blessings that flow from that choice.

The Gospel is that all men and women are fallen from the presence of God, through free exercise of our individual moral agency; that a just God cannot tolerate sin in the least degree, and Justice must be served, meaning that the consequences of our sins must be assumed, either by ourselves, or by an intermediary proxy, the Savior, Jesus Christ. Whether the one or the other, is our own choice too. (Moses 6:59-62; D&C 76:40-43; 3 Nephi 27:13-20.) The Gospel of Salvation is therefore not the same as the Great Plan of Happiness, but is a mere contingent subset thereof.

Justice is that the devil owns us in our state of betrayal and sin, and has all power over us… Justice therefore relates to ownership based on which master we have selected, not to punishment and whether it is fair or not. Punishment is never fair under lash of the one who was a liar and a murderer from the beginning. This is why we need a mediator so desperately, and why the mediation came in the form of a ransom payment by our Lord.

So God’s mercy must intercede to rescue us from the clutches of an evil adversary, Lucifer, who would have us be as miserable as he is. To pay the price of Lucifer’s ransom, God prepared for the contingency[v] of man’s fall from the foundations of the world, to offer His beloved Son Jesus, who willingly subjected Himself to mortality and every attempt of Lucifer to prevent Him being the worthy lamb. You see, if Lucifer could get Jesus to obey him, then Lucifer would own us… … and Jesus too. But Jesus was ever loyal to God and consummated the Gospel first through the Atonement, wherein he willfully subjected himself to the brutal torture of the amassed sins of all humanity. He bore the entire burden and weight of their combined consequences and effects. He was physically capable of this because His divinity prevented his dying until He so willed it.

Again at the courts and under the scourge, and finally under the nails at Golgotha, the brutal and merciless physical torture that would kill all others was unable to subdue the One who only had at His disposal––by ransom agreement––His will and divine ability to choose to live. Praise be to our Lord, Jesus the Christ, that He was perfectly obedient to the Father––that He chose to suffer and live so that we might be freed. Praise be to Him that when the finishing time came He died under His own terms and was so positioned to later break the bands of death for all. When the atoning ransom of all Hell was paid in full, he still lived. Then he suffered himself to be crucified so that Lucifer’s chains of death could be broken, when the Christ would take His body back up and unlock the doors for us, to choose eternal life.

We must purge the image of a vengeful God who punishes based on our perception of His need to deliver punishment (with the accompanying false assumption that a just punishment is proportional to the crime). And we must replace that image with a God who justly respects the ownership resulting from our choices: Which master have we chosen to follow? Ours is not a God of this hurts me more than it hurts you. Ours is a God of I love you enough to allow you to experience the natural consequences of your own choices, even if your choices have naturally led you to utter failure and even to self-destruction.

Without the Savior, we are as filthy rags before a just God because of our betrayal of Him, having chosen instead to believe Lucifer’s words at the test of the two trees, or at an equivalent test of moral agency. We chose to become carnal, sensual and devilish. (D&C 20:18-20; Alma 42; Moses 6:48-51) Without Jesus we are doomed precisely because the punishment of the master we chose is the farthest extremity of injustice! We must be snatched and delivered from the clutches of the adversary by His ransom. (Mosiah 27:24-31; 2 Ne 9:10-13; 2 Ne 11:5) This helps us more fully appreciate that we have been washed in His blood, born again through the water (baptism) and the spirit (receipt of the Holy Ghost) and then carry this knowledge with us gratefully so that both our sacrament worship and our temple experiences should be deeply personal as a result.

I view the world through a different lens now: Always believe God; always disbelieve Lucifer. Does not that simple perspective give us each the view of sin and the depth of gratitude for Jesus’s rescue that is more in line with what we all agree we should be seeking, in understanding what He did for us during His Atonement?

Innocent is what we are prior to making a moral choice. It is neutral and passive. Innocence is not how we become like God. God gave us agency precisely so we could move away from innocence in choosing to become like Him and then act according to that choice. But such a choice is not a choice at all if there does not also exist a legitimate opposing alternative with its own set of consequences.

Righteous is what we are having faced a moral choice and having chosen consistent with the commandments of God. It is what we seek in order to become like Him. This is the path of joy. This is what we consistently teach in all contexts other than the traditional view of the Fall, in which we exclusively and ridiculously say that disobedience leads to joy and righteousness.

Wicked is what we are when we choose contrary to the commandment of God. This is the path of sin. Wickedness never was happiness. Sin does not give rise to joy. Ever.

I claim that innocence is the starting point for the test of moral agency, and that God never expected or intended or decreed for us (our parents first) to remain in a state of innocence. Many seem to think that disobedience (with repentance) is a necessary step in the path to righteousness. I suggest the scriptures consistently say otherwise, despite our experience and intuition, and that agency was supposed to produce righteousness as the expected first step away from innocence. D&C 93:38-39 validates this: Every spirit of man was innocent in the beginning; and God having redeemed man from the fall, men became again, in their infant state, innocent before God. Note that “infant” state is that neutral, passive state waiting for the opportunity to face the test of moral agency. We were innocent at first. But having chosen badly we needed to be redeemed. Redemption was a “re-set”. We have been reclaimed by the Savior. Now you and I go to the temple again for a “do-over”. You and I face the same two trees that our first parents faced, each with its own advocate, one lying and one telling the truth. Whom should we believe? No one can tell us. This is, after all, our own choice. Our very own test of moral agency. Will we be ditto-heads and rationalize why we should believe the same beguiling lies that our first parents believed? Or will we think for ourselves, for once?

And that wicked one cometh and taketh away light and truth, through disobedience, from the children of men, and because of the tradition of their fathers. There are many vociferous defenders of the traditional LDS Fall interpretation, some of who claim that without it, we would be no different than the rest of the evangelical world. I have suggested a number of reasons why coming together with the Christian world on the Fall (not intended by God) and the Atonement (Father allowing Jesus to offer Himself a ransom to Lucifer, to exchange ownership of us back to God) would be good and useful things, making us truly “Christian”, and with our modern revelation still providing great differentiation while debunking such notions as original sin, infant baptism, ridicule and subjugation of Eve’s daughters, and other such horrors.

“But I have commanded you to bring up your children in light and truth.” I claim scriptural basis that there is no exception to the Divine Law of God providing blessings predicated strictly upon obedience. I claim there is no scriptural basis for any suggestion that we should sin to know righteousness, to know evil by making ourselves subject to it, or to come to God by serving Lucifer.

Sin. We can lead the world in theologizing, simply clarifying faith by substituting the word “allegiance”; clarifying “sin” by substituting “betrayal”; and by substituting the word “loyalty” instead of the all-encompassing and unattainable “perfection”. Repentance, then, is when we discard false suppositions and actively work to conform our perspective in alignment with that of God. It is why our first parents still needed to repent—because they were still rationalizing—at the time they were being quoted in Moses 5:10-11.

The cause of the Fall is scripturally documented by all prophetic accounts––but Lehi’s anomalous one––to be the direct result of agency exercised in unrighteousness.
1. There was not some mysterious Law in Eden requiring mortality to enable fertility, superseding the spoken, documented commandment of God, thou shalt not partake of it; I forbid it!
2. There is no mysterious technical difficulty preventing God from being able to fulfill His promise of joy and rejoicing in their posterity (even inside the Garden) as our God married our parents.
3. There is no scripture in our canon that describes either the wisdom of Eve in partaking, nor of the pleasure of God in the good fortune they did so.

Death separates body from spirit and prevents the possibility of joy. It is not a good thing, neither desirable nor planned by God. Neither is it a universal thing, for disciples and societies sought and received exemption from its awful grasp. And Jesus came to save us from the same. This life was prolonged for us to be a probationary second chance.

I choose to believe God at face value. Always.

Our God is ever Holy from eternity to eternity, the very perfect exemplar for our Savior.
1. He can only be truthful.
2. What He speaks, He means without excuse. And it must be so.
3. He never doth vary from that which he said. This is Divine Law.

Jesus commanded us to be perfect and we can do so through His power over a lifetime. Primal sin is found in betrayal [vi] of God by preferring to hearken to the voice of His adversary. Perfection day-to-day is found in perfect loyalty to God, never entertaining Satan’s voice. This is the level of perfection that allowed Jesus to be the spotless lamb worthy of a ransom to that evil being who otherwise owned us.

Each of God’s commandments comprises eternal irrevocable Law – without exception.
1. Every Law has associated blessings for which bestowal is contingent upon obedience.
2. God is bound by His own Divine Law
3. Our parents were capable (fertile) and authorized to procreate as soon as they were wed under the authority and promise of God Himself that they should receive joy and rejoicing in their posterity.

Moral Agency is activated as soon as we are placed before the two trees.
1. One must face temptation in order to have agency tested. One must turn away to succeed.
2. God’s knowledge, wisdom, light and understanding proceed to us from our obedience.
3. Knowledge of one’s new master proceeds from disobedience.
4. Who will we choose as our God? Will we choose Him?
5. Or will we choose the one who had made himself God’s enemy?
6. By choosing the One or the other, we place ourselves on a path to become like the One or the other. He or he becomes our Master and owner.
Mortality is not the only way to fertility or to knowledge of good and evil or to opportunities for growth, challenge and development. We have no basis with which to say that this plan that we are living in, is better in any way than the plan God originally laid out for us. Our contemporary experience is not better. It is not more purposeful nor is it either more challenging or fulfilling. We cannot say that some imagined life we think that God planned for us is inferior in any way to the one we are now experiencing.

God told Adam and Eve that he had created this beautiful world for them and made them Lords “over the whole of it.”
1. Our Parents were never confined to the Garden. The vast and exciting world was ever at their disposal! It only became “lone and dreary” upon their exile and inability to return to the Garden and to the presence of God.
2. Outside the Garden there was life in abundance and evidence of the cycle of life, death and evolution over the eons. Only inside the Garden was there no death. The earth at-large was to be the laboratory of life, full of opportunities for challenge, education, learning, growing, failure, mistakes, stumbling, getting back up, striving, improving, doing, discerning, maturing, fruitful work, innovation, transformation, making and learning from mistakes; moreover there was opportunity for experiencing pain, disappointment, regressing, sickness and healing. In all of this, there is no sin, and therefore no consciousness for ‘perfection’.
3. The Garden Temple was the place for our parents to return to commune with God, gain from Him light, wisdom and understanding; and to bring their children to face the test of moral agency as they themselves would have already done. Here is the only opportunity for treachery, disloyalty and betrayal—sin. Otherwise, this was the place to commune and partake of the Tree of Life and find joy in the presence of Father, Mother and our Brother!
4. The graduation from this ultimate experiential learning transforms to direct exaltation, or the same joy of Godly creation.

Once we understand our relationships with—and the perspective of—our Divine Creator, then we will understand that privation is the province of the deceiver. We will become more concerned with alleviating suffering, sorrow, sin and death in this world.

We will increasingly reject the god of this world, who has purchased armies and navies, oppressors and tyrants. We will do everything within our circle of influence to oppose and deny the one who reigns with blood and horror on this earth. We will be more capable of discerning spirits, attitudes and motivations; more willing to reject those based in money-grubbing, glory-grabbing, power-mongering, controlling, pleasure-seeking and all exclusive forms of self-interest.

Our lives will be less focused on enduring, distraction and entertainment and more focused on caring, giving, and stewardship. When we realize that sin, suffering and sorrow are not the way God intended for us to live our lives or experience our agency, then we cease to pursue incessant distracting entertainment or lives of passivity. We then live our lives realizing that we must not be simply good, and that we must be good for something.[vii] We recognize the probation we are subject to, that we must leave this earth and its great variety of inhabitants in a better condition than we found it/them in.

Our works will be less focused on worthiness and reward and more focused on discipleship, obligation and stewardship. Less passive entitlement; more active free will and determined effort. Less me, more us. Less gratifying want, more fulfilling need. Less wanton consumption, more willful conservation. Less striving to be entertained, more serving to demonstrate gratitude.

When we understand that even the trees have spirits, that the beasts of God’s creations are for mutual benefit and God’s glory (not merely for our dominance), then our behaviors and attitudes will change: we disciples will be more inclined to concern ourselves with the quality of life not only for humans but even for the beasts we harvest for food. We will have a fuller appreciation for the forest canopy as well as the sea floor, for the edge of the skies and extremities of the poles. Every beast should receive our compassion and love, with our knowing that they, too, are jewels in the eyes of our common creator. As disciples become stewards our air will be cleaner, our water purer, our earth more cherished, and people more joyful. Our seas will be recognized and treated as the fountains of our very lives. Our attitudes will reflect our realization that we are not aliens upon this planet but stewards. We share a common DNA connection with all inhabitants of this earth.

Our earth is wondering when she will be cleansed. Perhaps both our earth and our God will appreciate us––the earth’s inhabitants and presumed lords––finally taking responsibility for doing some of that cleansing ourselves, and not idly sitting around thinking that it’s somebody else’s job.

Worship is the confidence to know who God is, what He is like and what is our relationship to Him––to realize that without the grace extended through His gift of the Only Begotten Son, we were all doomed to unimaginable suffering. And to realize that that suffering was born by the Messiah in ransom for each of us.

Salvation is not the same as Exaltation. Salvation is the action of individually accepting the Lord’s grace and mercy, grasping His outstretched pierced hand and following the Gospel as the means to Happiness. Baptism thus returns us to innocence before God. Now, facing our own test of moral agency, we choose to believe, obey and follow God and to reject Lucifer and each of his lies. Having so chosen, we are on the path of righteousness and discipleship through priesthood work, which path is the path of joy. Exaltation is not an endpoint. It is neither entitlement nor controlling power but ongoing love, service, creation and joy; guardian to Moral Agency.

Proper relationships were defined by the Savior—the greatest shall be the least and the least shall be the greatest. As such, we should at most venerate but never adore or worship anyone but the Lord and our Holy God. The obligation of Christ’s disciples is to thoughtfully and prayerfully follow the prophets to Christ, as they teach the pure doctrine of Christ within the Spirit of Truth.

The Church is in the world but not of the world: a welcoming light—not a citadel—on a hill.

As we come to properly understand our relationship to our Father and our Savior we will not be so lazy in our cultural speech, saying, “In the name of thy son” when addressing a congregation in a talk or a testimony, or when addressing a child in a father’s blessing.

What perspectives change at the institutional level when moral agency is implemented as the primary governing principle informing policy making?
1. There will be far less concern for whether music in sacrament meetings is by brass, string or percussion—or whether it is already sanctioned in the hymnal—and far more concern for whether it is beautiful, lovely, of good report and praiseworthy.
2. There will be far less concern for how we have traditionally done things and far more concern for how the Spirit would like things done.
3. Obedience will be focused on agency rather than policy. The Church will be less inclined to exclude or purge and more inclined to welcome.
4. There will be far less evidence of an anonymous, controlling, hierarchical, corporate-style administrative culture and a greater focus on an open, loving culture of brotherhood and sisterhood based on moral agency and guided by scriptural authority.
5. There will be far fewer “White Bibles” and Church Handbooks of Instruction, with addenda ad infinitum, and far greater reliance on the sacred canon of scripture.
6. Loyalty will be measured toward the Father and the Son, with whom personal relationships will be welcome.
7. Conformity will be less important than sincerity. Conviction will eclipse worthiness as key teaching concepts. Love will conquer all. We will speak more of abiding, progressing, and advancing as individuals and as communities, and speak less of simply enduring.
8. Light, wisdom and understanding will be freely dispensed to all who believe. The holders of the keys will be able to focus on the message of salvation—the doctrine of Christ.
9. We will be more inclined to celebrate personal revelation and more likely to listen to more people because we will also be more discerning of light arising from many disparate sources.
10. We will be less quarrelsome with Christian brothers and sisters and more ecumenical in spirit. This will be the age of ecumenism as all the forces of evil will be uniting against the disciples of Christ.

I believe in the Holders of the Keys
1. The Gospel was restored through the Prophet Joseph.
2. The scriptures that came to us through Him were revealed by the power of the Holy Ghost.
3. The Church, through its anointed leaders, is the protectorate of the priesthood of God, or the authorized power through which His saving ordinances may be administered. The Church is no greater than its leaders, nor are the leaders greater than the Church.
4. The Gospel : The Church :: a pearl of great price : its ornate protective box.

“The Gospel is true” is not the same as “the Church is true”. We must each work to circumscribe all truth into one great whole. Church culture, tradition, handbooks, manuals and policies are not among the protectorates of eternal truth and should never displace the doctrine of Christ. We must seek truth both within the Gospel and without the Church, and be ever vigilant for continuity and light wherever these may be found.

I believe that God allows each of us, including church leaders, to exercise agency, make personal choices of belief, and to experience the consequences of those beliefs.
1. God prefers not to be a micromanager of His people or His church, and historically He does so only angrily when they ask Him to.
2. When church leaders make contradictory statements, God does not micromanage or correct them, even if those statements cast Him in a bad light. He gave us the scriptures by which we might measure our own words and He excuses not Himself.
3. When we accept that our leaders are imperfect human beings doing their best to do the will of God, then we appreciate that they are not infallible. Not everything that tumbles from their mouths is the mind and will of God. Let us let them continue to be human. Not to be contrary, but God will allow leaders to lead us astray, for their beliefs and choices represent their own individual agency. The scriptures manifest prophetic opinions, mistakes and suppositions as well as revelations.

There will be those who tell me that I am being too self-important to think that I know more than the leaders of the Church. On the topics I have elaborated, the prophets claim insufficient revelation. Their suppositions are hypothetical and rest on non-scriptural tradition tracing to Lucifer. I have chosen to believe God at face value rather than Eve and Lucifer at face value. So if I know more than others then it is only because I sought to ask different questions based on proper assumptions, and I found answers in the scriptures where others who asked improperly founded questions came to stupor with only silence from the heavens and incertitude amid the scriptures. Their subsequent suppositions and rationalizations for why Lucifer should be believed in this one, outstanding, isolated and exceptional case in Eden and in our modern temples, do not withstand the muster of our own scriptural definition of truth. Every disciple has the ability to apply that test.

Martin Luther opposed false doctrine by wielding scriptural primacy over human authority. I, too, seek for primary-source scriptures to give insight when humans superimpose their own interpretations or attempt putting words in God’s mouth. If I want to know what God decreed with respect to how His blessings are bestowed, I hold to the decrees of God in preference to what even contradicting prophets have supposed must really have been the case. If I wish to know the intentions of God, I seek to primary sources and believe them even in preference to rationalizing created by the human imagination or delusions tracing to Satan. If I want to know whether God was pleased or not, the answers are plainly in view without having to resort to a false narrative entirely based on Lucifer’s worldview.

Because I believe in the primacy of God’s commandment and the sin of disobeying that commandment, I believe President Packer when he said, “We are free to ignore the commandments, but when the revelations speak in such blunt terms, such as ‘thou shalt not,’ we had better pay attention”, but he contradicts himself and loses my confidence when he rationalizes sin, “The Fall came by transgression of a law, but there was no sin connected with it. There is a difference between transgression and sin. Both always bring consequences. While it may not be sin to step off a roof, in doing so, you become subject to the law of gravity and consequences will follow…. The fall of man was made from the presence of God to this mortal life.”[viii]

Because temptation (not the disobedient action—sin) is necessary and sufficient to activate agency, I believe Elder Oaks when he says, “we progress by making choices, by which we are tested to show that we will keep God’s commandments (see Abraham 3:25). To be tested, we must have the agency to choose between alternatives. To provide alternatives on which to exercise our agency, we must have opposition”; but not when he says in self-contradiction, “Opposition was necessary in the Garden of Eden. If Adam and Eve had not made the choice that introduced mortality, Lehi taught, ‘they would have remained in a state of innocence, … doing no good, for they knew no sin’ (2 Nephi 2:23).”

I believe President Nelson when he says “Divine Law always works”, and when he says, “Another unchanging principle is that of divine or moral law. Transgression of moral law brings retribution; obedience to it brings blessings “immutable and unchangeable” (D&C 104:2). Blessings are always predicated upon obedience to law. So the Church teaches us to embrace the right and to renounce the wrong—that we might have joy.”, but not when he says, in contradiction to himself, “We and all mankind are forever blessed because of Eve’s great courage and wisdom. By partaking of the fruit first, she did what needed to be done. Adam was wise enough to do likewise. Accordingly, we could speak of the fall of Adam in terms of a mortal creation, because ‘Adam fell that men might be.’”

I believe the Prophet Joseph when through him is revealed the decree of God that He is angry because of the disobedience that began with our first parents, and not that there was some other mysterious decree wherein God lied, having contradicted His own spoken word.

If it comes to believing Jesus’s testimony of His adversary as quoted by John or believing Lucifer’s statements, even though quoted inside the temple, then I reject each and every one of Lucifer’s statements. Since Adam’s and Eve’s rationalizing statements contradict the stated will of God, then I only believe God. If it comes to believing God’s words that by Adam’s fall came death, misery and woe, or our modern conflation of Lehi’s supposition, Adam (and Eve) fell… that men might have joy, then I believe God. If it comes to believe Joseph Smith’s quote that “Adam did not commit sin in eating the fruits for God had decreed that he should eat and fall”; or to believe God when He commanded them not to partake and further forbade that act; and that He referred to it as “sin” when He exiled our parents, then I only believe God.

Change is at-hand, in fact prophesied. Change is necessary to hasten the Lord’s work and prepare for His coming. Does change in belief come from within or from above? Is it a matter of revelation and keys or a matter of agency and choice?

There is no black mark upon our church for being the prophesied protectorate of Lucifer’s great lie. If anything, it underscores the fact that ours are the sacred temples of God; that the centrality of preparations for the coming of the Lord are finding nexus within the restored Church of Jesus Christ.

The Gospel is restored on the earth, and the saving ordinances are made available to us through the Holy Priesthood, of which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is foremost the authorized administrator, guardian and protectorate. I so testify in the name of my Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, Amen.

* * *

Since then your serene majesties and your lordships seek a simple answer, I will give it in this manner, plain and unvarnished: Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the scriptures or clear reason, for I do not trust in the Pope or in the councils alone, since it is well known that they often err and contradict themselves, I am bound to the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything.^[ix]

––Martin Luther, 1483-1546

To repress these very sharp arguments of the laity by force alone, and not to resolve them by giving reasons, is to expose the church and the pope to the ridicule of their enemies and to make Christians unhappy.

––Martin Luther, Thesis #90

Notes

[i] It is said of Martin Luther that his theses are quite repetitive. Whereas Martin Luther used 95 restatements of essentially a single message: the church should not be selling indulgences; so in my case I use 95 theses to restate and repeat essentially one single message: the church should not be in the business of endorsing or advocating belief in Lucifer’s words in preference to believing God’s words at face value as heard spoken in our temple’s dramatic portrayal of Eden.

[ii] See typical rationalization of the “need” to fall so that we could be privileged to work out our own salvation in Beverly Campbell’s 2003 Deseret Book publication, Eve and the Choice Made in Eden, p.30

[iii] Our official doctrine claims that they must Fall because God (must have) decreed that they should. But the scriptures are clear that the cause of the Fall is disobedience. God’s intent or decree had nothing to do with it. We have the record of Him weeping and angry after the fact in Moses 7.

[iv] We ignore the Savior’s testimony of His Father’s eternally righteous nature in John 5:19-20 when we insist with Elder Lorenzo Snow that, “As man is, God once was…” We likewise ignore Enoch’s expansive vision witnessing the holiness of our weeping God, from eternity to eternity. (Moses 7:29) I see it as a false justification to boast how wonderful and hopeful it is for the human state to think that God once traveled this same sinful path Himself, later repenting. We have created for ourselves a false, anthropomorphic god, and with the accompanying mystery, a state of blasphemy.

[v] In the temple we hear Father and Son contemplate the beauty of their creations and the core nature of the contingent agency they intend to bestow, when Father says, we will plant therein the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. If they partake of the fruit thereof, then we shall provide a savior for them.

[vi] Rebel : treachery : betrayal :: disobey God : hearken to Lucifer : deliver someone innocent (Jesus) up to (Lucifer’s) malice. But really, aren’t they all one and the same in the final analysis, since every sin of disobedience places us into Satan’s grasp? Which therefore necessitates Jesus’s ransom suffering under Satan’s fierce lash, in order to set us free?

[vii] Apologies to Thoreau.

[viii] Boyd K. Packer, “The Great Plan of Happiness and Personal Revelation,” Things of the Soul [1996], pp. 45-60

[ix] Joan Acocella, A Critic at Large, How Martin Luther Changed the World Five hundred years after he started the Reformation, his ideas and his ornery personality remain as potent as ever. October 30, 2017 Issue, The New Yorker