3. The Commandment is Given as to An Immortal Being: This is now the situation: The law is broken. The penalty is incurred. The law is inexorable. The law was addressed to one provisionally immortal—had not man sinned his life would have been eternal. The law was not temporal, but eternal. "Not at any time," said the Lord to Joseph Smith and six elders, in Fayette, September, 1830—"not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal; neither Adam your father whom I created. Behold, I gave unto him that he should be an agent unto himself; and I gave unto him commandment, but no temporal commandment gave I unto him, for my commandments are spiritual; they are not natural, nor temporal, neither carnal nor sensual."[A] The Prophet Joseph also said: "All things whatsoever God in his infinite wisdom has seen fit and proper to reveal to us, while we are dwelling in mortality, in regard to our mortal bodies, are revealed to us in the abstract, and independent of affinity with this mortal tabernacle; but are revealed to our spirits precisely as though we had no bodies at all; and those revelations which will save our spirits will save our bodies. God reveals them to us in view of no eternal dissolution of the body, or tabernacle."[B]
[Footnote A: Doc. & Cov., Sec. xxix:34, 35.]
[Footnote B: Sermon of April Conference, 1844—the "King Follett Sermon," "Improvement Era" for January, 1909; published also in "History of the Church," Vol. VI, with notes by the Editor.]
4. The Problem: What, Then, Can Man or God Do? The commandment, then, is given to Adam as to an eternal being, and by violating the law, and doubtless an eternal law, he and the race he shall beget is under an eternal penalty.[A] Under these circumstances what shall man do? Nay, rather, what can he do? What shall God do? Nay, what can he do? Forgive man his transgression out of hand as becomes the true sovereign of the universe? An ancient and, I might say, a time-honored suggestion. Origen the theologian of the third Christian century, and held to be "the greatest Christian mind of the ante-nicene age," at least held forth the possibility of such procedure. For in his views "the remission of sin is made to depend upon arbitrary will, without reference to retributive justice, as is evidenced by his assertion that God might have chosen milder means to save man than he did; e. g., that he might by a sovereign act of his will have made the sacrifices of the Old Testament to suffice for man's sin."[B] "But logic," as Shedd subsequently remarked, "could not stop at this point;" for if the provision for ratifying the broken law is resolved into an optional act on the part of God, it follows that an Atonement might be dispensed with altogether. "For the tribitrary and almighty will that was competent to declare the claims of justice to be satisfied by the finite sacrifice of bulls and goats would be competent also to declare that those claims should receive no satisfaction at all."
[Footnote A: On this particular point the late Elder Orson Pratt wrote: "We believe that all mankind, by the transgression of their first parents, and not by their own sins, were brought under the curse and penalty of that transgression, which consigned them to an eternal banishment from the presence of God, and their bodies to an endless sleep in the dust, never more to rise, and their spirits to endless misery under the power of Satan; and that, in this awful condition, they were utterly lost and fallen and had no power of their own to extricate themselves therefrom" (Pratt's Works, "Remarkable Visions)." Also the Book of Mormon: "Wherefore the first judgment which came upon man [the judgment of death] must needs have remained to an endless duration" (II Nephi ix:7).]
[Footnote B: Shedd, "History of Christian Doctrine," Vol. II, p. 234. He cites Redepenning; Origines II, 409, for his authority.
The views of Origen are all the more surprising from the fact that the Epistle to the Hebrews makes clear the inadequacy of the sacrifices of animals for the satisfaction of the claims of justice for man's transgression of the law (Chs. ix and x). On this point the Prophet Alma is very clear: "Behold. I say unto you, that I do know that Christ shall come among the children of men, to take upon himself the transgressions of his people, and that he shall atone for the sins of the world; for the Lord God hath spoken it; for it is expedient that an Atonement should be made; for according to the great plan of the eternal God, there must be an Atonement made or else all mankind must unavoidably perish; yea, all are hardened; yea, all are fallen and are lost, and must perish except it be through the Atonement which it is expedient should be made; for it is expedient that there should be a great and last sacrifice; yea, not a sacrifice of man, neither of beast, neither of any manner of fowl; for it shall not be a human sacrifice; but it must be an infinite and eternal sacrifice. * * * * And behold, this is the whole meaning of the law; every whit pointing to that great and last sacrifice; and that great and last sacrifice will be the Son of God; yea, infinite and eternal.">[
Abelard (twelfth century) also held that there was "nothing in the Divine nature which necessitates a satisfaction for past transgression antecedently to remission of penalty; like creating out of nothing, redemption may and does take place by a fiat, by which sin is abolished by a word, and the sinner is received into favor. * * * Abelard denies the doctrine of satisfaction and contends that God may remit penalty by a sovereign act of will.[A] Even Augustine, according to Neander, declared that if considered from the point of view of the divine omnipotence" he believed the answer must be in the affirmative; that is, that choice of other means for man's redemption than the Atonement could have been made. "But no other way," Augustine supposed, "would have been so well adapted for man's recovery from his wretched condition," as the one that was adopted in the Atonement of Christ. Not, however, from the "intrinsic nature of the case; not from the daws of the moral government of the world;" but because of the subjective influence that the union of the divine nature with the human—effected in the incarnation and the Atonement by the Christ, would have upon man.[B]
[Footnote A: Shedd, "History of Christian Doctrine," Vol. II, pp. 260, 261.]
[Footnote B: The matter is stated at length in Neander's "History of the Christian Religion and Church," Vol. IV, pp. 497-8. See also Augustine (De Trinitate), Lib. xiii, Ch. x. "This idea of an 'abstract' omnipotence accompanies the history of the doctrine of atonement down from the earliest to the latest times. In the ancient church, Irenaeus (Adv. Haer. III, XX.), Cyril of Jerusalem, Basil, and Ambrose contend for an absolute necessity of Christ's satisfaction; while Athanasius, Augustine, Cyril of Alexandria, Theodoret, and John Damascene assert only a relative necessity. In the mediaeval church, Anselm, and perhaps Hugh St. Victor assert an absolute, while Abelard, Bernard, Lombard, Hales, Bonaventure, and Aquinas (Cont. Gent. IV, liv, lv) concede only a relative necessity. In the seventeenth century, the subject was discussed by Owen, and Twise (the prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly); the former asserting and the latter denying, the absolute necessity of a satisfaction. See Owen's tract, 'On the Nature of Justice'" ("History of Christian Doctrine," Vol. II, p. 302, note).]