We are going on vacation, I thought I’d share something of ‘extra substance’ for you to think about and/or share with others while I’m gone for the next 3-4 weeks. For me in what follows, there is a lot more clarity to many doctrines, teachings, issues that otherwise leave me puzzled or totally lacking in my own understanding. (Take your time with this: It’s long, but there is a real possibility for us all to come to deeper understanding / appreciation and Faith in the Lord’s plan and purposes . . . Kent
Continuing from Adam S. Miller and his book by the above title ‘Original Grace’ (previous post): . . . . . . [Note (p50) means page 50 of Adam S. Miller’s book ‘Original Grace’. . . . An Experiment in Restoration Thinking]
(p50) God’s Law—> Justice —>Model 1 The Logic of Original Sin —>Model 2 the Logic of Original Grace
(p51) The first model of justice is defined by the logic of original sin. Here, the aim of justice is to return whatever is deserved. The object that executes this aim is a simple logic of quid pro quo—this for that, good for good, evil for evil. The job for justice is to balance the scales and reinforce this status quo. Justice is accomplished when rewards have been returned for good and punishment have been returned for evil.
JUSTICE: MODEL 1 THE LOGIC OF ORIGINAL SIN: The Aim of Justice: Return Whatever Is Deserved—–> The Logic of Justice: Good for Good and Evil for Evil —–> The Product of Justice: Rewards and Punishments—->Suffering is Experienced as a Just Punishment—-> God’s Law is Experienced as an Accusation—-> The Material Order and the Moral Order Are Tightly Interlaced—>Justice Positions Grace as an Exception to the Rule of Law
Concretely, these punishments take the form of suffering. And because suffering is required for justice, sinners tend to experience God’s law as an accusation, and they experience their suffering as an evil they deserve.
In this model, the material order of things is tightly interlaced with the moral order of things. Natural consequences have a moral charge, suffering can be deserved, and you can judge someone’s moral worth on the basis of what they do or do not deserve to suffer.
(52) This model of justice results, as well, in a familiar take on Grace. If the law’s moral obligation is to return evil for evil, then any attempt to break this cycle and return, instead, good for evil will find itself at cross-purposes with the demands of God’s law. In this model, justice and grace inevitably find themselves on opposite sides of God’s law.
Our second model of justice is defined by the logic of original grace. Here, the aim of justice is to give whatever good is needed. The logic that executes this aim is always the same, regardless of what is deserved: give what is good. Return good for good and good for evil. Rather than maintaining the status quo, the role of justice is to continually redeem the world from all evil, empowering everyone to be more just. Justice is accomplished when evil things become good, good things become better, and better things become best.
Concretely, justice is a moral response to the material fact of suffering. By giving whatever good is needed, justice relieves suffering, heals wounds, and empowers people to actively do good as moral agents. Here, sinners actively experience God’s law, not as a passively received accusation but as an active call to exercise agency and give whatever good is needed.
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In the light of logic of original sin, sinners experience God’s law as an accusation and their suffering as an evil they deserve.
In this model, the moral order of things is not the same as the material order of things, and the moral order operates, instead, according to its own divine imperatives. Natural consequences have no moral charge, suffering cannot be deserved, and you cannot judge someone’s moral worth on the basis of what they do or do not suffer. Rather, the moral (53) order is a divine response to a material order, a response that, in every case, unilaterally opts for whatever good is needed.
(53) Finally, this model of justice results in an unusual account of grace: it treats the logic of grace as the key to fulfilling God’s law. The demands of justice coincide with the logic of grace. In this model, justice and grace are on the same side of God’s law. ~Adam S. Miller, Original Grace (Salt Lake City: Desert Book, BYU Maxwell Institute, 2022) p.51-53 (continued)
Now with JUSTICE: MODEL 2…..THE LOGIC OF ORIGINAL GRACE —-> The Aim of Justice: Give Whatever Good Is Needed —-> The Logic of Justice: Good for Good and Good for Evil —-> The Product of Justice: Grace —-> Suffering is Experienced as a Natural Fact —-> God’s Law Is Experienced as an Enabling Power —-> The Material Order and the Moral Order Are Uncoupled —-> Justice Positions Grace as the Fulfillment of God’s Law
Did my father love me?
I’m forty-five years old now with grown children of my own, and still my question rings me like a bell. I doubt its force will ever fade. In this sense, people are like trees: the heartwood at our core doesn’t change just because time keeps adding new rings. Beneath all those added months and years and decades of my passing life, at the center of my heart and mind still stands a small boy, alive as he’s ever been, his voice loud and clear as it’s ever been, who still wants to know: does his father love him?
(54) My investment in this question must be obvious. Haven’t all my goals and ambitions been thinly veiled attempts—mediocre in execution—to win my father’s love? (And what, clearly, is this very book but one last attempt to do the same?)
My father shouldered heavy burdens when I was small. His time was divided by more demands than hours in a day. If he worked early or late, I could go days without seeing him. And then, when I did see him, he was often tired and stressed. If he asked me to weed the garden or shine his shoes or mow the lawn and I didn’t do these jobs right (“if you do it right, it will only take ten minutes,” he’d always say), I could expect him to be angry. I’ve always been afraid to make him angry.
These kinds of father-son dynamics are, of course, too ordinary to bear comment—except that these dynamics happen to be my own. And, regardless, such dynamics are no gauge of my father’s goodness.
But such truths don’t stop small boys from wondering or misunderstanding. They don’t stop small boys from trying to discern, through a scrim of half-understood words and complicated feelings, whether they are loved. They don’t stop small boys from trying to divine in symptoms of suffering—both the Father’s and the son’s—whether they deserve to be loved, as though pain or fear or anger were, at any given moment, some dependable measure of the good they merited. And, certainly, such truths don’t stop small boys from hatching elaborate strategies—often unconscious, subterranean, decades-long, life defining strategies—to win that love, to claim it and secure it and hold it fast.
Which is to say that such truths don’t stop small boys—or even the men they become from confusing the inevitable troubles and (55) suffering of mortality with judgments of whether they, as a result, are worthy of the love they need. Such truths don’t stop small boys from getting trapped inside the logic of original sin.
We know, as Peter frames it, that “Christ hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit” (1 Peter 3:18). This is the baseline from which all atonement theories work: Christ suffered for us, the just for the unjust, and this somehow brings us to God.
But what does it mean to suffer for someone else? What does it mean to suffer vicariously? And why would Christ’s suffering help reconcile us to God?
In relation to our two models of justice, we have two different readings of what it means to suffer vicariously for someone else. These models diverge both in terms of this suffering’s purpose and in its nature. Broadly, we might say: where the logic of original sin sees Christ’s vicarious suffering as suffering in place of us, the logic of original grace sees Christ’s vicarious suffering as suffering with us.
Atonement—-> Christ Suffers For Us —-> Model 1, The Logic of Original Sin—-> Christ Suffers in Place of Us Model 2, The Logic of Original Grace—->Christ Suffers with us
In the model framed by the logic of original sin, Christ suffers in our place because this suffering, truly deserved by us, is required for (56) justice. Here, God’s law requires sinners to be punished—that is, it requires sinners to receive evil in return for evil—and saves us vicariously suffering this punishment. Christ can suffer in our place because he’s just and blameless and has no debt of his own. Once the requisite punishment is suffered by Christ, the demands of justice have been satisfied. The scales have been balanced. And once Christ has canceled our debt to justice with his own suffering, we can be reconciled to a just God.
This is a familiar way of telling the story of Christ’s atonement—-though I hope that, despite its familiarity, some parts of this story are beginning to sound strange. Notice several key features of this atonement story as told against the backdrop of original sin.
First, notice the nature of the problem solved by Christ’s vicarious suffering. The problem Christ’s atonement solves is that the logic of God’s own justice is not compatible with the logic of God’s own grace. One of them must give way to the other. While justice is about what good or evil someone deserves, grace is about the good that, regardless, everyone needs. According to this theory, the purpose of Christ’s atonement is to reconcile these competing logics. Through a vicarious act of suffering, Christ satisfies the law’s global demand for punishment while simultaneously creating a loophole for the local extension of grace. Thus, while Christ’s suffering indirectly addresses the problem of our sinfulness by unlocking the possibility of forgiveness, his atonement is primarily aimed at bridging an impasse internal to God’s own nature: the incompatibility of God’s justice with God’s grace. Christ mediates justice and grace.
(57) ATONEMENT: Model 1, The LOGIC of ORIGINAL SIN: God’s Logic of Justice: VS. God’s Logic for Grace ^ CHRIST
Atonement mediates the real opposition between God’s justice and God’s grace
Second, notice that in this theory of Atonement, Christ’s vicarious sufferings vindicates the idea that suffering can be deserved as punishment. While justice proves flexible in terms of who must suffer—because a vicarious intervention is possible—it remains implacable that someone must suffer. Christ’s atonement opens a loophole for Grace but, in the process, doubles down on the idea that justice is about judging what good or evil people deserve. As a result, Christ’s atonement mediates this impasse between justice and grace outside the moral order as defined by the demands of justice. Grace is a hard-won exception to the moral demands of justice, not a moral imperative required by justice. Christ’s atonement confirms the idea that, without rare and exceptional acts of divine meditation, justice and grace are incompatible.
Third, notice that this theory of atonement does not challenge but rather confirms our default tendency to identify the natural consequences of the material order with the just punishments required by moral order. Suffering really can be deserved, and thus suffering should be interpreted, at least some of the time, as an accusation with moral weight, as a valid judgment about what good I do or do not deserve. Insofar as I’m willing to repent, Christ’s atonement may commute this just accusation by suffering the required punishment in (58) my place, but the law itself remains in force as a mechanism of punishment and accusation. Christ’s suffering resets my relation to that law by giving me a fresh start and maybe even a boost, but nothing fundamental has changed in terms of how the law operates. As a sinner, I experience the law as an accusation, but even this saving gesture confirms that I was right to have experienced the law in this way.
Our second theory of atonement, grounded in a different model of justice, understands Christ’s vicarious suffering along different lines. This theory, framed by the logic of original grace, starts from the same set of facts outlined in 1 Peter 1:18—Christ suffered for us, the just for the unjust, and so brings us to God—but connects the dots in a different way.
If suffering cannot be deserved, then there is no need for Christ to vicariously suffer that punishment for us. Against the backdrop of original grace, Christ doesn’t suffer in our place to meet the law’s demand for punishment. Rather, Christ suffers with us to meet the demands for compassion and grace. In both cases, Christ’s vicarious suffering fulfills the demands of the law. But whereas in the first case justice demands the evil we deserve, in the second case justice demands the good we need.
Thus, in line with the first demand for what’s needed, Christ fulfills God’s law by suffering with us in order to heal our wounds and redeem our suffering. He suffers with us to succor his people according to their infirmities” (Alma 7:12). He goes forward among us, “suffering pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind” so “that the word might be fulfilled which saith he will take upon him the pains and sicknesses of his people” (Alma 7:11). Indeed, he even suffers “according to the flesh that he might take upon him the sins of his people” (Alma 7:13). And he does all this, regardless of what we (59) deserve, to fulfill the law’s demand that we “bear one another’s burdens” and “mourn with those that mourn” and “comfort those that stand in need of comfort” (Mosiah 18:8-9).
Notice how, in relation to the logic of original grace, Christ’s solves a fundamentally different problem than the previous scenario. Instead of suffering punishment to reconcile God’s justice with God’s grace, Christ’s vicarious suffering now works to reconcile us to the root logic shared by both God’s justice and God’s grace. Christ’s atonement directly addresses a problem internal to my own nature as a sinner, not a problem internal to God’s nature. He bridges a gap caused by my rebellion against justice and grace, not a gap between God’s justice and God’s grace.
If Christ’s vicarious suffering bridges the gap caused by my rebellion, then what is the nature of my rebellion? Where did I go wrong?
Beyond the specifics of any particular sins, I went wrong by refusing to obey God’s law and refusing to submit to the law logic of grace. I went wrong by refusing to return good for evil. I went wrong by refusing to love my enemies. I went wrong by repurposing God’s law as a weapon for dividing the world into winners who deserved good and losers who didn’t. I went wrong by trying to divine in the symptoms of all this suffering whether people deserved to be loved. And, certainly, I went wrong by hatching endless, fearful schemes—elaborate, angry, ego-driven, self-centered, decades long, life defining schemes—for winning love.
I went wrong, in the first place, by buying into the logic of original sin. And following through on that wrongheaded logic, I sinned again and again.
To Save me from such sins, Christ must save me from the logic of original sin.
(60) To this end, notice how, in the second model, Christ’s vicarious suffering is perfectly positioned to save me from this trap of disproving me from the logic of original sin. Christ not only “suffered for sins,” he also suffered as “the just for the unjust” (1 Peter 3:18). His suffering saves me from sin—and from the deeper logic of sin—because his suffering is blameless. He’s just. He’s innocent. He’s a lamb without blemish and without spot (1 Peter 1:19). He willingly suffers for the sake of justice—and yet he does not deserve to suffer.
Christ’s willingness to innocently suffer with us emphatically demonstrates—once and for all, for time and all eternity, in solidarity with all of creation—the original truth about justice: that suffering is not a punishment. Suffering is just a fact. God himself suffers and willingly suffers with us (see Moses 7:29). And the demands of justice can only be met when, liberated from the logic of original sin, we too learn how to greet all suffering the way God does: with grace.
By liberating me from the logic of original sin, Christ not only relieves my suffering, he also redeems my suffering. He relieves suffering by sharing the yoke of that suffering with me, by vicariously suffering whatever I may be suffering. He relieves my suffering by sharing that yoke of suffering with me, by vicariously suffering whatever I am suffering, be it pain, or sickness, or sin, or death. In Christ I am never alone. In Christ, I’m never abandoned.
But more than this, by liberating me from the logic of original sin, Christ also relieves my suffering, he also redeems my suffering. He relieves by sharing the yoke of that suffering, be it pain or sickness or sin or death. In Christ I am never alone. In Christ I am never abandoned.
But more than this, by liberating me from the logic of original sin, Christ also redeems my suffering. He relieves my suffering by changing the quality of that suffering. In addition to no longer suffering alone, I no longer experience my suffering as an accusation. I no longer experience my suffering as an evil I deserve—an evil required in the name of justice, by God’s own law. I no longer experience my suffering as plain and painful evidence, in addition to the suffering itself, of God’s judgment and rejection.
By suffering all things as someone who could not deserve to suffer, Christ refutes—with his own body, with his own flesh and (61) blood—sin’s warped interpretation of my suffering. His vicarious atonement strips suffering of its negative moral charge, refutes my mistaken reading that suffering is a divine accusation and reinstall God’s law to its rightful place as the measure for every needed grace. Christ’s vicarious atonement reveals my suffering to be not a punishment but an occasion wherein “all things,” even the most difficult and painful things, can “work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28; emphasis added).
The result is that, in light of Christ’s willingness to suffer with us, the quality of my suffering fundamentally changes. My burden of suffering gets de-stigmatized. Instead of experiencing my suffering as a deserved evil—as a dismissal of my value in God’s eyes—Christ reveals that suffering as an enduring call for all the Good I still undeniably need. In this way, Christ’s atonement saves me from sin by saving me form the logic of original sin. By suffering with me, he redeems my suffering and invites me into the presence of God’s grace. By suffering with me, the just with the unjust, Christ catalyzes my conversion. He ushers me into a new life in Christ. He converts me from someone trapped in the logic of original sin to someone who trusts—by way of faith and repentance and covenants—in the logic of God’s original grace.
Atonement: Model 2
The LOGIC of ORIGINAL GRACE:
The Logic of Original Sin CHRIST God’s Logic for Grace
Justice vs. Grace ——–> Justice = Grace
(62) Notice, now, one final consequence of this second theory of atonement. By liberating me from the logic of original sin, Christ redeems not only me but the whole of creation. Once the chains of accusation are broken and the link between what’s suffered and what’s deserved is shattered, creation itself is restored to a state of innocence. Creation is restored to a state of grace. Suffering isn’t an obscure sign of what evil I deserve but a natural fact of that, in light of fulfillment of God’s law, is now heard simply as a call for more goodness and grace.
Here, Christ’s atonement decouples the material order from the moral order, and in this way, he saves them both. Decoupled from the moral order, the material order is innocent. Decoupled from the material order the moral order no longer needs to justify suffering as a punishment required by God’s law. Rather, the moral order is set free to act according to its own divine imperatives and fulfill that law.
It’s normal for small boys to be afraid. It’s normal for small boys to wonder what must be done to win their father’s love. And in exactly these ways, it’s normal for small boys to be wrong.
You’ll never convince me, in any world or by any means, that my father was ever waiting to see if I might, eventually, deserve his love. You’ll never convince me that he was, for any reason, in the name of justice, retribution, or even God’s law—withholding some needed good from me. My father, I know, loved me.
~ Adam S. Miller, Original Grace (Salt Lake City: BYU Maxwell Institute, Deseret Book 2 2022), p.51-62
