Radio Free Mormon: 275: GenCon Digest–Sunday Afternoon Session

Thank you so much for suffering through General Conference so we don’t have to! I enjoyed your summations, they are excellent and far, far, far more engaging than General Conference was.

As a sidebar, regarding your assertion that THE biggest problem that Christianity has is the question, “Why did Jesus have to die?” I certainly understand the dilemma from the perspective of modern Mormon Theology which skews toward a Universalist stance that fixates on God’s love over God’s justice to the point of imbalance. Mormonism has a long history of skewing WAY over to God’s judgment side – hence the vengeful Jesus of 3 Nephi 11 that was brought up repeatedly in General Conference that Spencer W. Kimball and Bruce R. McConkie were so fond of – or WAY over to the God’s love side that dominates current Mormon thought and theology and has resulted in strong denunciations of the works of Kimball and McConkie.

However, historic, mainstream Biblical theology doesn’t suffer from this imbalance because mainstream, historical Christianity has always presented a balanced theology that stresses both God’s love and God’s justice equally. One needs to only consider the work of the late Billy Graham who always stressed both in his presentation of the gospel and whose works you hear no one denouncing in the modern Christian Church. But perhaps, the best, vernacular summation of this traditional view is from Presbyterian Pastor, Timothy Keller who wrote:

“When someone really wrongs you, a debt is established that has to be paid by someone. It can happen at an economic level. What if a friend of yours accidentally smashes a lamp in your apartment? One of two things can happen as a result. Either you can make him pay—“That will be $100, please”—or you can say, “I forgive you, that’s okay.” But in the latter case what happens to that $100? You have to pay it yourself, or you have to lose $100 worth of light and get used to a darker room. Either your friend pays the cost for what was done or you absorb the cost. This works at levels beyond the economic, too. When someone robs you of an opportunity, robs you of happiness, of reputation, or takes away something else that you’ll never get back, that creates a sense of debt. Justice has been violated—this person owes you. Once you sense that debt, again there are only two things you can do.”

“One thing you can do is to try to make that person pay: You can try to destroy their opportunities or ruin their reputation; you can hope they suffer, or you can actually see to it. But there’s a big problem with that. As you’re making them pay off the debt, as you’re making them suffer because of what they did to you, you’re becoming like them. You’re becoming harder, colder; you’re becoming like the perpetrator. Evil wins. What else can you do? The alternative is to forgive. But there’s nothing easy about real forgiveness. When you want to harbor vengeful thoughts, when you want so much to carry out vengeful actions but you refuse them in an effort to forgive, it hurts. When you refrain, when you forgive, it’s agony. Why? Instead of making the other person suffer, you’re absorbing the cost yourself. You aren’t trying to get your reputation back by tearing their reputation down. You are forgiving them and it is costing you. That’s what forgiveness is. True forgiveness always entails suffering.”

“So the debt of wrong doesn’t vanish: Either they pay or you pay. But here’s the irony. Only if you pay that price of forgiveness, only if you absorb the debt, is there any chance of righting the wrong. If you confront somebody with what they’ve done wrong while you’ve got vengeance in your heart, they probably won’t listen to you. They’ll sense that you are not seeking justice but revenge, and they’ll reject anything you say. You’ll just perpetuate the cycle of retaliation, retaliation, retaliation. Only if you have refrained from vengeance and paid the cost of forgiveness will you have any hope of getting them to listen to you, of seeing their own error. And even if they do not listen to you at first, your forgiveness breaks the cycle of further reprisals. If we know that forgiveness always entails suffering for the forgiver and that the only hope of rectifying and righting wrongs comes by paying the cost of suffering, then it should not surprise us when God says, “The only way I can forgive the sins of the human race is to suffer—either you will have to pay the penalty for sin or I will.” Sin always entails a penalty. Guilt can’t be dealt with unless someone pays.”

“The only way God can pardon us and not judge us is to go to the cross and absorb it into himself. “I must suffer,” Jesus said.”
~ Tim Keller (“King’s Cross”, Penguin Group, NY, p. 87-88)

I hope this helps, and thank you again for all the time and effort that you put into these General Conference summations. They were fantastic.

I interpreted what Elder Corbitt said is we should not criticize the church and church leaders in order to rationalize our children choosing to lifestyles inconsistent with church policy. In a larger picture parents should not define themselves by the choices their children make, nor should parents feel obligated to defend the choices their children make.

I appreciate the Church amplifies the parent / child discord with its emphasis on eternal families. This doctrine is both encouraging and discouraging. The discouragement arises from the observation one makes of their own family dysfunction and the recognition that by the “church standard” their family will be divided in the eternities. This is difficult and heartbreaking.

Is it true? Are families divided in the next life unless all family members are “Celestial” by the LDS church standard?

I don’t believe that. I do believe there are many mansions in heaven and fortunately that means we won’t be forced to live with all our family members in the same house! But we also won’t be divided as if there will be some Berlin Wall keeping family members separated.