From their book “The Christ Who Heals” Fiona and Terryl Givens write:
It is true that some Book of Mormon phrases reflect a dour appraisal of human character, especially the words of King Benjamin that “the natural man is an enemy to God, . . . and will be forever and ever, unless he . . . putteth off the natural man.”11 The expression “natural man” is, of course, Pauline. As Paul employs the term (in 1 Corinthians 2:12-15), it has reference to an acquired worldliness; it is not a statement about human ontology, inherited nature, or inate attributes. In his triple parallelism, the apostle contrasts “the spirit of the world” with the spirit that is “of God“; what “man’s wisdom teacheth” with what “the Holy Ghost teacheth and the natural man” with him “that is spiritual.” The “spirit of the world,” “man’s wisdom,” and the “natural man,” then, all refer to something we pick up as mortal baggage. They are not an attribute of our original nature.
As an entire school of scholarship concedes Paul has been misread on this point for centuries by multitudes of theologians and laity, and the toll has been terrible.12 The mid-six-century Christian rejection of Origen’s beautiful doctrines of human nature and potential, writes one religious historian, resulted in supremacy “of a Christian theology whose central concerns were human sinfulness, not human potentiality; divine determination, not human freedom and responsibility. . . . Christianity was . . . poorer for their suppression.”13 This is precisely our point, that Joseph’s divinely appointed task was to rescue Christianity from such a dismal preoccupation with sinfulness, total depravity, inherited guilt, and kindred “abominations.”
The former Bishop of Stockholm and Dean of Harvard Divinity School, Krister Stendahl, urged a healthy corrective to the Christian preoccupation with sinfulness, describing it as a misreading of Paul:
The point where Paul’s experience intersects with his . . . understanding of the faith, furthermore, is not “sin” with its correlate “forgiveness.” It is rather that
when Paul speaks of his weakness that we feel his deeply personal pain. Once more we find something suprisingly
different from the Christian language that most of us take for granted: It seems that Paul never felt guilt in the face
of his weakness—pain, yes, but not guilt. It is not in the drama of saving Paul the sinner, but it is the drama
of Paul’s coming to grips with what he calls his “weakness” that we find the most experiential level of Paul’s theology. 14
“Pain, . . . not guilt.” As another theologian characterizes recent scholarship on Paul: “The primary question being answered in these Pauline texts is not Martin Luther’s anguished ‘How may I, a sinner, find a gracious God.”’15 For N.T. Wright as well, “the story is less about sinful individuals being rescued from judgment for guilt . . . and more about God’s fulfillment of his purposes for all creation through Israel.”16 Western Christianity’s fixation on the plagued “conscience” is development Stendahl traces to Augustine three centuries after Paul, and then to the reformers a thousand years later.17
In this regard, Brigham Young showed considerable prescience in reading Paul. His remarks on the natural man are one of the most important doctrinal pronouncements ever made and are worth quoting in full: “It is fully proved in all the revelations that God has ever given to mankind that they naturally love and admire righteousness, justice and truth more than they do evil. It is, however, universally received by professors of religion as a Scriptural doctrine that man is naturally opposed to God. Paul says in his epistle to the Corinthians, “But the natural man receiveth not the things of God,” but I say it is the unnatural “man that receiveth not the things of God,” The natural man is of God. We are natural sons and daughters of our natural parents and spiritually we are the natural children of the Father of light and natural heirs to his kingdom; and when we do evil we do it in opposition to the promptings to the Spirit of Truth that is within us. Man, the noblest work of God, was his creation designed for an endless duration, for which the love of all good was incorporated in his nature. It was never designed that he should do and love evil. When our first parents fell from their paradisiacal state, they were brought in contact with influences and powers of evil that are unnatural and stand in opposition to an endless life. So far as mankind yield to these influences, they are so far removed from a natural to an unnatural state—from life to death.18 ~ Fiona and Terryl Givens, The Christ who Heals (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2017), 66-69
