From the book ‘All Things New’ Fiona and Terryl Givens wrote:
One prominent theologian suggested in personal correspondence that Christianity has a “big problem” with its historic use or “legal analogies with criminality” as a model for atonement theology, and she agrees that “healing” might be more apt as a key concept.17 The concept of healing would mark not an innovation but a correction of Calvin’s lamentable analogy of mankind to “a poor criminal with a rope around his neck.”18 It would return us to an earlier Christian emphasis on humanity as wounded and the Atonement as healing, as expressed by the fourth-century church father Gregory of Nazianzus: “What has not been assumed [taken upon Himself] has not been healed” (our emphasis).19 Such an emphasis would also find greater harmony with Restoration teachings.
In the simplest restatement of the Original Plan conceived in premortal councils, Jesus summarized the purpose and end and final result of the entire cosmic project—to be whole, fully realized beings. “Be ye perfect” is a common translation, but we prefer that of the translator Kevin Wuest, which is closer to the reading of the Greek text: “Therefore, as for you, you shall be those who are complete in their character, even as your Father in heaven is complete in his being” (Matthew 5:48). We note two distinctive surprises in Wuest’s rendering. First, he translates the verb as a simple, comforting future tense, not an intimidating command form: you will (in the future) be.20 Second, Wuest renders the Greek teleios as “complete.” Teleios, completeness takes us even closer to that original scene in premortal realms, that commencement of each individual saga, when Heavenly Parents proposed giving us the “privilege to advance like [Themselves] and be exalted with [Them].”21 A telos is an envisioned end, finality, or completion or an intention or process. Teleios therefore signifies the fruition of a seed that has successfully come into bloom. One could see Christ’s words on this occasion, as reassurance: Follow the precepts I have just laid down, and all will be well. You will find yourself a fully realized child of God. Or as Kevin Wuest renders the term teleios, “All is accomplished, their probation, their righteousness, God’s purposes respecting them.” One has “grow[n] into maturity of godliness.”22
As we saw in Wiman’s phrasing, we are “not corrupt, . . . but unfinished.”23 Elsewhere, Wuest writes that in the New Testament, “salvation . . . is growth in Christ-likeness.”24 To be whole, complete, and perfect in character and body alike, all this is implied in the Greek term employed in the Sermon on the Mount. In the Original Story, we are gods in embryo, and healing from life’s wounds restores us to that path or growth. Salvation is growth, process, unfolding of a potential.
We can actually witness the tension between these two versions of Christ’s atoning work—saving from sin versus healing from woundedness—in a textual contrast between two of the most important Bible translations in Christian history and the different ways they translate the Greek term sodzo (“heal” or “save’). Few biblical texts should be more central to our understanding of the Christian message as Jesus taught it than a record of one of the first public sermons delivered by the Apostle Peter. Second in sequence only to his Pentecostal testimony, this two part address occurs before a Jewish crowd and then before a Jewish council. In the third chapter of Acts, in the King James Version, Peter heals a certain lamb from his mothers womb” (Acts 3:2). An audience gathers, and after enacting the central principle of Jesus’s ministry—healing—Peter uses the occasion, and his healed, restored teaching aid, to emphasize that central principle. ~Fiona and Terryl Givens, All Things New – Rethinking Sin, Salvation, and Everything in Between (Meridian, Idaho, 2020), 135-36
