Future Mormon

Key Takeaways

Adam Miller’s Future Mormon: Essays for a Different Christianity reads Mormon theology through a single, inverting move: grace comes first. The essays span systematic theology, close readings of the Book of Mormon, and Mormonism’s unfinished encounter with evolution and deep time. Six threads:

Grace is primal; sin is the suppression of grace. The order of McConkie’s “three pillars” — creation, fall, atonement — is load-bearing. Creation (grace) is what comes first; the fall is a response to it. Sin, at root, is the rejection or suppression of what God has already freely given. “We don’t have to work our way into grace; we have to stop working so hard to pretend we aren’t already in it.”
Obedience can be sin’s most successful strategy. The surprising danger is not disobedience but strict obedience practiced as a way to put God in our debt — to cancel our indebtedness and stay in control. “Religion may be, in some respects, sin’s most successful strategy.” Obedience cannot balance the books, because the books were never a ledger.
The law’s only purpose is love, and only love fulfills it. Obedience is generally better than disobedience, but obedience in itself cannot fulfill the law — “only love can fulfill the law,” and love, unlike obedience, must be freely given and cannot be commanded. The Old Testament economy of obedience (“to obey is better than to sacrifice”) is superseded by a love that is “lawless” the way God’s love is lawless: impartial, enemy-loving, raining on the just and unjust alike.
Grace arrives as loss. Because we cannot receive everything at once, God can only give a few things at a time — so every new grace arrives as the passing-away of some earlier grace. “God can continue to give only by continuing to take.” Redemption does not eliminate suffering; it transforms our relationship to it, so that loss itself becomes a condition of knowledge and favor. The “nevertheless” of 1 Nephi 1 and of Gethsemane is the hinge.
Salvation as “early onset postmortality.” Salvation is read as a present-tense reality, not a future event. Repentance — ordinary, everyday repentance — is the practice of asking for judgment now rather than later: dying to the world and then leaping back to wash the dish and kiss the wife “in the time that remains” (Agamben’s messianic time). The Book of Mormon readings (Lehi driven into the desert toward sacrifice; Jacob unable to see Sherem because he is still shadow-boxing Laman and Lemuel) dramatize how doctrine defended for its own sake can prevent us from meeting actual people.
Mormonism’s unfinished reckoning with evolution and co-eternality. Miller wants Mormons to treat evolution and deep time not as a local twist in God’s top-down management but as indicative of a fundamental truth about a contingent world to which both we and God are given. Co-eternality, rather than freeing us from unchosen conditions, guarantees that there is no unconditioned place. And Mormonism’s “radical materialism” (via Givens) quietly smuggles idealism back in: the work once done by God’s immaterial ideality is now done by the ideality of eternal laws.

A recurring polemic runs underneath all six: salvation “cannot be bought with the currency of obedience” (Uchtdorf) — the grace God is trying to give is “hidden in plain sight,” already given, in the lungs and beneath the feet, while God waits.

Connections

People:

Adam S. Miller — author; Mormon philosopher-theologian writing toward “a different Christianity” centered on grace.
Bruce R. McConkie — his 1981 BYU devotional “The Three Pillars of Eternity” (creation, fall, atonement) is the structural starting point for the grace-first reading.
Terryl Givens — The God Who Weeps is Miller’s chief sparring partner: he resists its claim that the “greatest act of self-revelation” is choosing what to believe, and presses its under-examined Nietzschean problem and its account of Mormon materialism.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf — quoted that “salvation cannot be bought with the currency of obedience; it is purchased by the blood of the Son of God.”
C.S. Lewis — “I want the whole tree out,” invoked on atonement as re-creation.
Charles Darwin — the peacock’s tail and autumn maple leaves serving the organism’s survival rather than human delight, and yet ravishing human vision — the “while,” the “and,” the “but it also” where Miller locates the giftedness of life.
Joseph Smith — the hidden golden plates as a case study in why God would “detour” us through a text twice-removed rather than offer direct evidence.
Craig Harline — Way Below the Angels, his mission memoir, supplies the “just be yourself” / emptiness-before-God passage (flagged below as a book to read).
Giorgio Agamben — The Time That Remains frames the “messianic time” / remnant of time behind “early onset postmortality” (flagged below as a book to read).
Royal Skousen — The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (flagged below as a book to read).

Concepts:

Grace — the load-bearing concept of the whole book: original, primal, already-given, and impossible to earn or repay.
Obedience — reframed as a potential strategy for avoiding grace (indebting God), not the currency of salvation.
Atonement — God’s grace manifest as re-creation, not merely a back-up plan after obedience fails (“Christ doesn’t make up the difference; He makes all the difference”).
Repentance — the everyday practice of “early onset postmortality”: stepping into the law’s embrace and asking for judgment now.
Agency — examined through co-eternality: the wish to be uncreated/self-determining, and Miller’s counter that the only unconditional thing is the imposition of unchosen conditions.
Evolution — Mormon theology’s unfinished work of taking biological evolution and deep geological time as truths about a contingent world.
Faith — not a choice about what to believe but “a choice about how we respond to beliefs we did not choose” — actions as lagging indicators of belief.
The Book of Mormon — the source text for the Lehi-in-the-desert and Jacob-and-Sherem essays, and for the meditation on its receding “historicity.”

Books:

The God Who Weeps — the Givens book Miller argues against throughout the grace and materiality essays.
The Next Mormons — companion volume in Kyle’s Mormon-studies shelf (Jana Riess’s sociology of retention; both also cite Craig Harline’s Way Below the Angels).
The Crucible of Doubt — the Givens’ faith-and-doubt counterpart to Miller’s grace-and-obedience reframing.

Highlights

Every generation must start again. Every generation must work out their own salvation. Every generation must live its own lives and think its own thoughts and receive its own revelations. And, if Mormonism continues to matter, it will be because they, rather than leaving, were willing to be Mormon all over again. Like our grandparents, like our parents, and like us, they will have to rethink the whole tradition, from top to bottom, right from the beginning, and make it their own in order to embody Christ anew in this passing world.
In a 1981 Brigham Young University devotional, Bruce R. McConkie delivered an address entitled, “The Three Pillars of Eternity.”1 These three pillars, he claims, ought to structure our understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and each of the pillars must be understood in relation to the others. “The three pillars of eternity, the three events, preeminent and transcendent above all others, are the creation, the fall, and the atonement. These three are the foundations upon which all things rest. Without any one of them all things would lose their purpose and meaning, and the plans and designs of Deity would come to naught.”
God’s creative work is the most fundamental expression of his grace, of his willingness to freely give what cannot be earned or deserved.
Grace is original. Grace is what comes first, and it is sin that then comes in response. Or, creation is what comes first, and it is the fall that then comes in response. Sin, at root, is a rejection of what God, by way of creation, has given as a grace.
Grace is primal and sin is a suppression of what has already been given. We don’t have to work our way into grace; we have to stop working so hard to pretend we aren’t already in it.
Why would we suppress God’s grace? Because it scares us. What God gives is beyond our control, much of it is difficult to receive, and a lot of it fails to line up with what we thought we wanted. More, because we’re incapable of receiving, all at once, everything that God wants to give, God can only give a few things at a time. And because God can only give a few things at a time, all of God’s giving also arrives as the passing away of what was previously given. That is, all of God’s giving arrives as a kind of taking. Every new grace arrives as the loss of some part of the grace that preceded it. Given the brevity of our attention and the narrowness of our affections, God can continue to give only by continuing to take. Thus, every grace feels, upon arrival, like both an imposition and a loss. And, thus, we shrink from emptying the cup of God’s grace.

Kyle: Someone who can’t endure persecution can’t endure the glory of the Celestial Kingdom (Joseph Smith)
But, in the end, there is nowhere to hide from God’s grace. It gives itself relentlessly. It gives itself in life and it gives itself in death. It gives itself in what we want and in what we do not want. And the more we think we can earn and, thus, control, what is given, the more futile our idolatrous schemes will show themselves to be.
Potential strategies for avoiding grace span the whole of human behavior, but we should note, in particular, one surprising approach to sin: strict obedience. One strategy for suppressing the truth and avoiding God’s grace is to put God in your debt. Here, the more obedient I become, the less I figure I’ll be indebted to God, the less grace I’ll need, and the more in control I’ll become. Obedience, as a strategy for avoiding God’s grace, is, of course, highly ironic.
Religion, practiced as a way of indebting God to us—as a way of canceling God’s grace and our own indebtedness—can be a powerful means of suppressing the truth. Religion may be, in some respects, sin’s most successful strategy.
Our lives are a gift, the law is itself a gift, and fulfilling the law brings more gifts. None of it can be earned and none of it can be repaid. Obedience cannot balance the books.
The point of the law is love. And while obedience is generally better than disobedience, obedience in itself cannot fulfill the law. Only love can fulfill the law.

Kyle: Old Testament law was obedience; “to obey is better than to sacrifice.” Christ superseded the law to emphasize, instead, the centrality of love.
Obedience to the law, valorized on its own terms, becomes an obstacle to fulfilling the law’s purpose in love.
The law cannot be fulfilled by way of obedience. It can only be fulfilled by a love that, unlike obedience, must be freely given and cannot be commanded or compelled.
But, too, God’s grace is manifest not only in his work of creation but in his commitment to the work of re-creation. That is, God’s grace is manifest in atonement.

Kyle: “I want the whole tree out.” (C.S. Lewis)
Love doesn’t bear witness to the priority of the law, the law bears witness to the priority of love. The law is given for the sake of love—and only love, uncompelled by the law, can fulfill that law.
A perfect love is lawless in the way that God’s love is lawless: a perfect love loves its enemies. Like God’s love, this love isn’t partial or divided or intermittent. It doesn’t play favorites. God’s love is, rather, impartial: it is whole or complete or perfect (teleios). It doesn’t cease to give itself. It doesn’t circumscribe its field. This love is like the sun: it shines on the evil and on the good. This love is like the rain: it rains on the just and unjust.
My thesis is that Lehi is headed into the desert. I suggest that, like the prophets before him and, even, like Jesus after him, Lehi heard the voice of the Lord and then, having heard it, “immediately the spirit driveth him into the wilderness” (Mark 1:12). And now, having gone off into the desert, I think Lehi aims to offer sacrifice.
Lehi is spent and, thus spent, he reaches a critical threshold. In this sense, this first of Lehi’s two consecutive visions in 1 Nephi 1 feels preparatory. It harrows the ground of Lehi’s soul. It readies his heart and mind for the planting of the word. In stark contrast to the detail, definition, and articulation of Lehi’s second vision (vv. 8–15), this first vision is raw and inarticulate. Where the second vision is rich with symbols, thrones, heavenly choirs, divine messengers, shouts of praise, and prophetic books, this first vision feels primal and elemental.
As a result, Lehi only has two options. He can either willingly sacrifice his home, his people, his wealth, and his land, or he can cling to them and see them destroyed. The only question, here, is whether the world’s consumption unfolds as a sacrifice or as a judgment.
Clearly, from our late perspective, “the one” is Christ and “the twelve” are his apostles. But it’s not entirely clear, especially early on, how developed Lehi’s own understanding of “a messiah” is. In some respects, Lehi’s Christology appears at this point (perhaps unsurprisingly) relatively vague and undeveloped.
But we can note, at least, that the imposition of such detours seems consonant with a much larger pattern. Take, for instance, the case of the Book of Mormon itself. Why go to the trouble of giving Joseph Smith the golden plates, have him translate that text with a method that hardly touches them, and then make the plates themselves disappear? Why force contemporary readers to detour through the text alone when solid evidence and a more direct connection seems possible? Why would God go out of his way to hide evidence and make his own (world-historically pivotal) message more obscure and less credible?
Why give us a text, at least twice removed from God himself, rather than give us some kind of direct interaction with God? Is this a game or a test? Is God just testing us to see if we’ll believe things that we don’t have good evidence for? If this is the case, then what’s God testing for, credulity? Is credulity the measure of a life, the litmus test for salvation? In effect, is God saying: “You’re welcome to join me in eternal bliss, but only if you’re willing to believe (in exactly the right way) things that I intentionally and unnecessarily made it really hard to understand and believe?”
We might represent the verse’s structure like this: (1) having been born of goodly parents, therefore I was taught somewhat in all the learning of my father. (2) and having seen many afflictions in the course of my days, nevertheless (a) having been highly favored of the Lord in all my days, (b) yea having had a great knowledge of the goodness and the mysteries of God, therefore I make a record of my proceedings in my days.
“Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke 22:42). Even given the fact that suffering and affliction condition the possibility of life and agency and love, nevertheless there is favor and goodness and knowledge. The nevertheless marks how favor and goodness and knowledge are all dependent upon the experience of suffering even as they are not reducible to it. The word marks how favor and goodness and knowledge aren’t something detachable from loss and affliction but are, rather, dependent on a certain way of holding oneself in relationship to that suffering.
God’s redemption doesn’t involve an elimination of all suffering but a transformation of our relationship to that suffering such that the suffering itself becomes a condition of knowledge and favor.
This is the divine mystery: freeing us entirely from loss and suffering—from the necessity of sacrificing everything—wouldn’t free us from the troubles of life. It would only (and disastrously) free us from life itself.
In this sense, the aim of the gospel isn’t simply to give us what we think we want. Rather, its aim is to show us that what we thought we wanted isn’t what God, in all his goodness and wisdom and mercy, is actually trying to give.
Throughout, Jacob appears more interested in defending a certain kind of Christian doctrine than with enacting a certain kind of Christian behavior. He seems invested in and sharply limited by a certain pattern of speaking and thinking. To be sure, Sherem does the same with Jacob. But where this is predictable in Sherem’s case, it feels tragic in Jacob’s because the doctrine that Jacob is defending does itself maintain that Christian behavior is more important than any Christian ideas.
Sherem’s deathbed preaching appears to be massively successful in a way that Jacob’s own preaching was not.
When Jacob looks at Sherem, why can’t he see him? I think the answer is straightforward. When Jacob looks at Sherem all he can see is Laman and Lemuel. He can’t engage with Sherem because, throughout their encounter, he’s too busy shadow-boxing his brothers.
This is where Jacob and Sherem find themselves: hamstrung by flattery. They are compelled by their wounds to repeat complementary scenes, scenes that bind them together as a pair of prefabricated images but prevent them from connecting as people. Sherem doesn’t address Jacob, he addresses only a “law-breaker.” And Jacob doesn’t address Sherem, he addresses only a “Christ-denier.” Though adversarial, these roles collude to reinforce the mutual exclusion of the actual people attached to them.
But the sign came and Sherem did repent. He did confess Christ. And then something happens to Jacob. For the first time in decades, Jacob can see his own brothers more clearly. He can see Laman and Lemuel, not as players in his story but as flesh and blood people. For the first time in decades, Jacob can read in their anger the wound that compelled them to repeat their own primal scene. Then, for the first time in decades, Jacob dares to hope that his brothers aren’t lost forever. This is the doctrine of Christ.
Royal Skousen’s critical edition of the text, The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text,

Kyle: #books-to-read
This is what salvation—not as a future event but as a present tense reality—looks like. To experience salvation is to experience early onset postmortality.
Having one’s calling and election made sure just models in dramatic fashion what ordinary repentance, forgiveness, and life in Christ were meant to look like all along. Repentance—regular, average, everyday repentance—is the practice of early onset postmortality. When you repent, you confess your disobedience. You embrace the law and stop running from it. You step into rather than away from its embrace. Repenting, you submit a request for a speedy verdict and ask for judgment now rather than later.

Kyle: New creature in Christ
In The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, Giorgio Agamben reads Paul’s letter as an extended commentary on this messianic secret and the grace that attends early onset postmortality. The model for what Agamben calls messianic time is that peculiar time—that remnant of time that remains—following the accomplishment of the messianic event but preceding the end of time.

Kyle: #books-to-read
We cannot meaningfully approach questions about the Book of Mormon’s historicity without a clear account of the complex temporality proper to its messianic work. The Book of Mormon recedes from us at a speed so great that the light of its historicity, while always on its way, cannot reach us.)
Passing through the messianic gate of time’s innermost disjointedness, you see that the past was made for the sake of the present, not the present for the sake of the past. In other words, you repent. Repentance is only possible if time is complex and the past persists unfinished, kept alive beyond itself by a remnant of time that no amount of pride or sinful pretension to self-possession could smother.
Order your coffin, lay the length of it and let your life end, die to this world, leave it behind—and then remember that you’ve forgotten to wash a dish or kiss your wife or sweep the porch or read to your child. Then leap from your coffin and return in earnest to the work of washing and kissing and sweeping and reading, sure and fearless in the time that remains.
The God Who Weeps is a different kind of book.
In most situations, faith is not a choice about what to believe but a choice about how we respond to beliefs we did not choose.

Kyle: Actions are lagging indicators of belief
Though this common sense belief in God’s reality can be a blessing, it can also be a hurdle to practicing faith. It can lull us into thinking that the hard work of being faithful is done when, in fact, we haven’t even started.
Weeps claims that “the greatest act of self-revelation occurs when we choose what we will believe, in that space of freedom that exists between knowing that a thing is, and knowing that a thing is not.”4 I’m hesitant to agree. It seems to me that the greatest act of revelation comes when we faithfully care for what God, unchosen, has given. Faith, on this account, is still a choice, but it’s a choice of a different kind.
God does not save us from our hungers by satisfying them. God saves us from the tyranny of our desires by saving us from the impossible work of satisfying them. God may be what we desire, but God’s arrival does not quench this desire. It gives it. And in giving it, God means to show us how living life depends on caring for rather than being done with desire. Rather than trying to simply satisfy desire, we must be faithful to life by being faithful to the unquenchable persistence of the desires that animate us as alive.
You must, of course, decide for yourself, but I endorse Nietzsche’s sharp critique of our Christian tendency to devalue the present world by anchoring it’s true meaning and substance in another. The irony, in this respect, is that Weeps is well aware of the Nietzschean critique and it, too, wants to agree with Nietzsche: “Nietzsche was right when he said Christians had a tendency to turn away from this life in contempt, to dream of other-worldly delights rather than resolve this-worldly problems.”13 But a sensitivity to this Nietzschean problem never shows up in any of the book’s many celebrations of our doctrine of a pre-world as an essential supplement to this world’s poverty.
But I’d like to see us take one step more. I’d like to see us explore—carefully and charitably and experimentally—what it might mean for Mormons to see evolution not just as a local twist in God’s top-down management of a wholly rational real, but as indicative of a fundamental truth about the contingent world to which both we and God find ourselves given.
Darwin was sure that even those spectacles of nature that overwhelm us by their beauty, from the peacock’s tail to the fragrance of an English rose, serve not man’s purposes but their own, which is survival and reproducibility. If anything in nature could be found that had been “created for beauty in the eyes of man” rather than the good of its possessor, it would be “absolutely fatal” to his theory. In other words, maple leaves in autumn do not suddenly transform into stained glass pendants, illuminated by a setting sun, in order to satisfy a human longing for beauty. Their scarlet, ochre, and golden colors emerge as chlorophyll production shuts down, in preparation for sacrificing the leaves that are vulnerable to winter cold, and ensuring the survival of the tree. But the tree survives, while our vision is ravished. The peacock’s display attracts a hen, and it nourishes the human eye. The flower’s fragrance entices the pollinator, but it also intoxicates the gardener. In that “while,” in that “and,” in that “but it also,” we find the giftedness of life.
Generations of theologians are jealous of our day. On no merit of our own, we’ve inherited the task of probing the theological implications of the planet-sized shift in our self-understanding imposed by the latter-day revelations of biological evolution and deep geological time. We have a lot of work to do.
A doctrine of co-eternality figures large here as the answer to how we’re free. If we are free, it must be because we are uncreated, our agency always already given only by ourselves to ourselves. Our ability to act must not be acted upon. Freedom is a form of self-possessed, self-informed, self-determining autonomy.
Rather than safely positioning us (and God) beyond the reach of any unchosen conditions, co-eternality guarantees that there is no such unconditioned place. Co-eternality guarantees that the only thing unconditional is the unconditional imposition of always already existing and unchosen conditions.
In Mormonism, Givens says, “dualism is rewritten as two-tiered monism (spirit as more refined matter), and laws are themselves as eternal as God.”1 Thus, we get from Joseph Smith a “radical materialism” and this “fundamental claim of a thoroughgoing materialism gave indelible definition to the Mormon theological landscape.”
It’s true that, consistent with a radical materialism, Mormonism’s God now gets to be material. God the Father gets a body. Even spirits get to be material. But the philosophical vacuum created by God’s materiality, by his loss of immaterial ideality, is immediately filled by the ideality of these eternal laws. We’ve moved some pieces around, but idealism’s basic structure remains intact. All the work traditionally done by God’s own ideal immateriality is now being done by the ideality of these immaterial laws.
Classically, we have access to what is material by way of our five bodily senses, and these senses receive information about things that are (1) particular, (2) composite, and (3) subject to change. On the other hand, we have access to what is ideal by way of the mind, and the mind receives information about things that are (1) general, (2) simple, and (3) unchanging.
“Salvation is a natural consequence of compliance with law, just as God’s own standing is the natural and inevitable consequence of his compliance with law—which eventual compliance is made possible by the gift of Christ’s atonement.”
President Uchtdorf claims that “salvation cannot be bought with the currency of obedience; it is purchased by the blood of the Son of God.”
But a “special theory” of grace is incomplete because it doesn’t go far enough. It leaves intact the impression that God’s original plan really was for people to bootstrap themselves into righteousness by way of obedience and that then, when this fails, God steps in with his grace as the key to our salvation.

Kyle: “Christ doesn’t make up the difference. He makes ALL the difference.”
“Glory” is one name for God’s grace as it continually brews out of these massive, creative networks of divinely enabled agents.

Kyle: Moses 1:39 - “For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.” Does more salvation enable more grace?
If God’s grace is already given, then what is the problem? Why do I feel so far from grace? Why am I so disappointed, frustrated, and angry? I often feel this way because, dependably, I don’t want what God is giving. I don’t want the kind of world that’s on offer. And, quite often, I don’t want to be the kind of thing God has given me to be. I actively resist the grace God is giving. I don’t want to be what I am. I don’t want to be weak and ordinary and small and dying. I don’t want to be less than the dust of the earth. I don’t want to discover, as Moses did, that I am nothing. Having seen God’s glory, God withdrew and Moses says, “for this cause I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed” (Moses 1:10). I don’t want to suppose this. I want to suppose something else altogether. I want to be something special, something different, something powerful, something exceptional.
Craig Harline gives an excellent description of this kind of redemption in his mission memoir, Way Below the Angels: The Pretty Clearly Troubled But Not Even Close to Tragic Confessions of a Real Life Mormon Missionary.

Kyle: #books-to-read
Recounting the experience, Harline says: Maybe this was the sort of emptiness that mystics said you had to feel before you could really feel God—thus that you had to clear out all the clutter inside, including your notions of who you thought God was and how He worked, and only then were you in a state to let real God in. Or maybe the emptiness was all there was, rather than just some sort of lead-up to being filled by God.
If the thought/feeling Just be yourself really was coming from God, then it had to be referring to the yourself I eventually would become, my true still-dormant self, not the yourself I was right now. But I was disturbingly getting the distinct feeling from the thought/feeling that oh yes it was trying to tell me something along the disappointing lines of being content with who I was right then. I should just be my own self, not my special self.
Obedience is not the currency of salvation. These prizes are not the grace that God is trying to give. The grace that God is trying to give is much more general and much more obvious. It’s hidden in plain sight. It’s on display right now, in my lungs and beneath my feet and in the earth’s hard crust. It’s already given. And God is waiting.

Key Takeaways

Connections

Highlights

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