In their book “All Things New,” Rethinking Sin, Salvation and Everything in Between, Fiona and Terryl Givens wrote under the chapter title:
A New Language
Rewriting “The traditions of the Fathers”
Does the decay of belief among educated people in the West precede the decay of language used to define and explore belief, or do we find the fire of belief fading in us only because the words are sodden with overuse and imprecision, and will not burn?1 ~Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014),124
What we believe to be true of our deepest nature, and what we believe to be true of God’s nature has real world consequences. How we understand God and the quality of Their love, conditions our own ability to receive and reciprocate love. Conceptions of sin and worthiness profoundly impact every relationship into which we enter. Confidence— or lack of confidence—in the destiny toward which Heavenly Parents are guiding us cannot help but determine our levels of joy or anxiety. How we understand the words like proving and testing infuses our lives with a sense of adventure or of dread, of beauty or scrupulosity. If we recognize the previously outlined revisions, omissions, and intrusions into the Great Plan of Happiness to be some of the “traditions of the fathers which are incorrect,” then how do these traditions continue to inform our lives as aspiring disciples committed to the restored Church and gospel?
While we have not inherited the explicit claims those creeds articulate, we have inherited the vocabulary that was shaped in the Reformation and post-Reformation centuries. What one hears when the word sin is spoken, what we envision by the term God, or what it means to be saved, or saved by grace, has already been determined by centuries of usage. Reclaiming those terms for a new dispensation is an act of imaginative resistance,
The restoration is a process, not an event, and it is still incomplete. We know this for a number of reasons. The Book of Mormon itself refers to that Nephite record as intended to recapture “much of my gospel” (1 Nephi 13:34). Doctrinal restoration is progressive. In 1895, after dramatic changes to the nature of temple sealing (by family rather than into prophetic dynasties), Elder Marriner Merrill said, “Perhaps the Lord has not revealed everything to [the presidency of the church] yet, but He will reveal line upon line, as He did to the Prophet over a year ago. . . . So other things may be revealed by and by.”2 Five years later, Lorenzo Snow remarked that “seventy years ago this church was organized with six members. We commenced, so to speak, as an infant. We had our prejudices to combat. Our ignorance troubled us in regard to what the Lord intended to do and what He wanted us to do. . . .We advanced to boyhood, and still we undoubtedly made some mistakes, which . . . generally arise from a . . . lack of experience, . . . we have not yet arrived at perfection. There are many things for us to do yet.”3 In our own day President Nelson has reaffirmed Restoration as a work in progress.4 Part of that ongoing work may be reshaping our vocabulary to more fully and accurately reflect Joseph’s revelatory insights.
In such a spirit, we offer here what we hope may provide basis for an ongoing conversation about the language of the Restoration. I (Terryl) realized many years ago that when an evangelical asked if I had been saved, we weren’t even speaking the same language. What do Latter-day Saints mean by salvation? Asking what we believe we are being saved from and for entails a reconsideration of the Fall, heaven, and sin. Sin presumes the necessity of repentance and the possibility of forgiveness, which is predicated on the Atonement of Jesus Christ. If we understand salvation and the Atonement in fresh ways, the grace will have a different complexion as well. A theory of grace conditions our definitions of obedience and worthiness, so those terms will need reexamination. In Christian thought, the entirety of the story generally ends at judgement. Since the Saints espouse a different story with a different beginning and end, our conception of judgement shifts accordingly. Here are a few caveats about what this sketch is and is not: We are neither offering dogmatic definitions nor offering comprehensive treatment. We are trying to model and inspire fresh ways of thinking through the religious vocabulary that pervades our wounded world and particularly our Church that is still emerging from the wilderness. Language bears within itself the power to hurt or to heal, to obfuscate or to clarify, to instill with despair or to expand with hope. As Robert MacFarlane taught us, “Language is fundamental to the possibility of re-wonderment, for language does not just register experience, it produces it” (our emphasis).5 Our language shapes our mind and heart, our Church culture, our world. Our religious language conditions all of our experience and negates or makes possible our encounter with what is most holy. These tentative efforts in the direction of a new vocabulary worthy of a God-given dispensation in which all things are made new are intended to prompt healing, clarity, and hope. ~Fiona and Terryl Givens, All Things New (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book. 2020), 77-79
References:
- Christian Wiman, My Gright Abyss (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2014), 124
- Marriner W. Merrill, “Temple Work,” in The Deseret Weekly (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1895), 51:610
- Lorenzo Snow, “First Day,” in Seventieth Annual Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret News 1900),1.
- DAllin H. Oaks, “The Great Plan of Happiness,” Ensign 23, no.11 (November 1993): 72-75.
