From Sin II, Fiona and Terryl Givens, a previous post: “The wounds do not simply go away.”6 The biblical scholar David Bentley Hart argues that this view of sin is in fact truer to Paul’s original language in Romans: “Paul speaks of . . . but never as an inherited contagion, a disease with which all are born; . . . but never as an inherited condition of criminal culpability.”7 Simply put: as Julian sensed, woundedness is the collateral damage that is essential to our learning process along the path to life eternal. Woundedness is essential and inevitable in the Great Plan’s unfolding. Continuing. . .
It is through our necessary experience of the bitter that we may learn to prize the sweetness of what is good and pure and beautiful—the sweetness that is in Christ. Sin, which in the book of Moses is associated with “the bitter,” is what we taste so that we may learn to recognize and avoid it and cleave to the sweetness of Christ and his precepts. The whole point of our participation in sin is to learn, to experience, and to be personally, empirically educated in the beauty of Christ’s way. By our immersion in a world of choice and consequences, we learn that certain choices we make and, as often, consequences we suffer at the hands of others, take us to a place that is “contrary to the nature of happiness” (Alma 41:11).
Five centuries after Julian of Norwich, a French philosopher returned to Julian’s question, intuiting more fully what she sensed: “Wouldn’t it have been simpler for God to have created a perfect world? . . . The new-born baby is profoundly incomplete, but it is exactly because of this that he can go so much farther than a young animal, for liberty is tied to “unperfectness.” From his unperfected state, free agency. Is not this that helps us to understand why God made this unperfected world?8
Mortality is that school in which we learn to exercise our agency wisely and magnanimously. It is inescapable that in this learning process we will both incur and inflict pain. As Francine Bennion reminded us, “we were willing to know hunger. Like Christ in the desert, we did not ask God to let us try falling or know hunger or being bruised only on condition that he catch us before we touch ground and save us from real hurt. We were willing to know hurt.”9
At the same time, even as we are given the liberty to act for ourselves, to choose—that liberty is generally untutored, compromised, or otherwise mitigated. As Hart notes, unimpaired moral agency “is a manifest falsehood”. There is no such thing as perfect freedom in this life, or perfect understanding, and it is sheer nonsense to suggest that we possess limitless or unqualified liberty. Therefore we are incapable of contracting a limitless or unqualified guilt. There are always extenuating circumstances” (his emphasis).10 Heavenly parents anticipate the wounds incident to the learning process. Understanding the inescapability of that educative design invites us to reconsider the label so drenched in connotations of the vile, the evil, the malicious.
A little history of usage may be helpful in reinforcing this view. . . . ~Fiona and Terryl Givens, All Things New (Meridian, ID: Faith Matters, 2020). 106-107 (continued)
