Many modern Christian teachers and theologians claim a doctrine of salvation by grace that disregards any effort on the part of the person to be saved. The discussion often involves the concept of faith without works being dead and yet any works that do happen to come about as a result of our faith have no bearing on our salvation.
Latter-day Saints do hold to doctrines of grace. There is no action or series of actions we can perform on our own that will save us from our sins without the atonement of Jesus Christ. Salvation is therefore only by his grace and its accompanying virtue of mercy. The acts of making and keeping covenants with ordinances to confirm them are gifts of God's love. Faith in Jesus Christ saves us. Our willingness to enter into a covenant relationship with the Father and the Son is the evidence of our faith.
If God tells us, or even commands us to do something, what is the effect? Consider the following example. We have been given an abundance of food or at least consumable material that we can put in our mouths. Some of it produces excellent results for the health of our body and some of it is not really even good for us.
The sensory taste system that produces our likes and dislikes can fool us regarding these choices. The food we eat literally has the consequences of saving us temporally or invoking an earlier demise. Even so, we still have the built-in genetics that makes our life unpredictable in certain regards. There is a purpose for this.
In order to make the right choices, we must educate ourselves and then discipline ourselves to use the knowledge of what is best. Why didn't God just give us that which is good for us? There are scientifically good and bad choices. We are at liberty to choose. In this, we are saved in a temporal sense by good choices.
What is the reason God gives us commandments? Are they to benefit us or Him? Is he testing us or blessing us, or both? What happens when we obey the commandment not to commit adultery if we are married, or to not fornicate if we are single? Our body says that sex is something we want. It is a drive built into our being for most of us. It has a divine purpose and a selfish purpose.
For which purpose do we choose to use it? When we live according to these "laws of God", don't we establish a foundation of love. trust and commitment in our intimate relationship of marriage that brings stability and happiness? Aren't we saved from most of the consequences of not obeying? Which by the way are the natural consequences of disobedience? He is using his knowledge to guide us on our path through mortality. If he punished us for disobedience the moment we sinned, the result would be to force us to do good.
Here we begin to see the reasoning behind the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil. In establishing His eternal plan for us, God put our choice which is agency above His in all but some essential areas to bring about a system of progressing without force. Adam and Eve were free to choose, yet God established the consequences of partaking from the tree. Initially death was not a natural consequence. He could have made partaking of the tree have any result he wanted.
Could he have simply removed the tree or stopped Satan from tempting Adam and Eve? Certainly, he could have, but He didn't. It was His intent that mankind enters a period of mortality where freedom of choice was and is the highest priority. His plan was not for our first parents to live eternally in the Garden of Eden.
This discussion often takes place when as Latter-day Saints we talk about ordinances being an essential step for our exaltation. Latter-day Saint teachings distinguish between what traditional Christendom calls salvation or the seeking to be with God in heaven for all eternity, and the term exaltation used by Latter-day doctrines often to refer to salvation and live as God does as we inherit the promises of his covenants.
These terms are not really the same and yet there are often interchangeable in vocabulary. Ordinances are an elevated form of worship. In and of themselves they do not save us, and yet God has said they are necessary. The effects of keeping the covenants associated with the ordinances bless us in remarkable ways.
The basic understanding that separates the two concepts of our eternal destiny has to do with what God's plans and intentions are with regard to the purpose of creation and the existence of our soul.
Latter-day Saints hold to the principle of Agency. Moral agency to be more precise. This is living with the priority to exercise our free will. Our freedom to choose has consequences and we are accountable to God for how we live. To make this freedom available to us, God created a world and gave us a mortal life in it. Latter-day Saints do not believe that we were created spontaneously at our birth.
This mortal life is a step in the eternal plan being that has been implemented and is being carried out because of the divine and perfect love of our Heavenly Father and his Son, Jesus Christ. Here in mortality, we live by faith. We gain faith through the word of God and his servants who proclaim and teach it.
The grace afforded by Jesus Christ is understood differently by members of the Church of Jesus Christ and traditional mainstream teachings. What is the difference between exaltation and salvation? Exaltation is the process of becoming like God by following Jesus, keeping covenants, and being blessed by the grace and mercy of his atonement. Salvation is being resurrected and living forever in a greater state of existence than what was experienced prior to our birth into mortality.
By being free and having the opportunity to repent of our sins a greater opportunity exists for those who have the faith and desire to obey God's will. Sin is the violation of eternal laws that exist based on immutable principles, and these have fixed penalties or consequences that are also eternal.
To know the nature of our desires we have been placed, that is given life in an environment with a certain knowledge of good and evil. This is requisite to offer the opportunity to choose. Good and evil are co-eternal principles. At the end of our lives, there is a judgment and we know with certain knowledge how our desires were reflected in our opportunity to live.
Those that choose the good and allow themselves to be guided by the light of Christ and the additional light and power of the Holy Ghost prepare themselves to live with God and even be like God. This also entails being willing to receive instructions from God in the way of commandments and covenants that protect us from the pitfalls in mortality and the susceptibility of the fallen person to sin.
Sin is the cause of most of our individual and collective misery and suffering. Other forms of suffering are due to the imperfect mortal body, ie our genetics will cause us some suffering we cannot control. This does test our resolve to obey God even when it seems He is not looking out for us. All suffering of this type is temporary as it ends at death. With our limited suffering, we gain a minute understanding of what Jesus went through to pay the price for sin. When we choose to repent and forsake our sins, we can be forgiven and escape the eternal damnation that stops us from progressing in eternity.
Traditional Christianity has for the most part adopted a doctrinal understanding of unconditional grace. They believe that once a person accepts Jesus in some fashion, they are saved for all eternity. What does it mean to be saved according to this understanding? The interesting part of the orthodox faith system is that they don't really know much about heaven, only that it is the place to be since the other option is hell and it cannot be something that anyone would desire. These doctrines stem from the universal creeds and established in Catholicism, kept as Protestant doctrine and the teachings of some of the reformers who lived in the 1500s who added to them things such as the Five Solas. These were Martin Luther, John Calvin,Wesley and others.
The concept of grace espoused by these orthodox theologians and scholars essentially removes the agency of individuals by proclaiming that they will be saved unconditionally by their acceptance of Jesus at some particular moment. There is no need to verify or identify one's acceptance other than saying you have done so. Ordinances have been deemed unnecessary by large numbers of Christian denominations. They say Jesus is all you need to be saved.
According to them, a person doesn't do any work or make any decisions that move them closer to salvation. Some believe that God even selects ahead of time who will be saved and the only reason they accept Jesus is that they were led to do it while others would not be led to such a decision. There is no obedience of any kind required to obtain this salvation.
We have a doctrinal understanding that we are saved only by Jesus Christ. There is no other way or means that a person can be saved in the eternal sense. There is no action or series of actions that we can take to save ourselves from the fall or the consequences of sin. We are all sinners and we will all die. One sin makes us unworthy to live in the presence of God. If the penalty for such is not satisfied and the person's soul cleansed from the sin then they remain incapable of entering God's full presence. Only the blood of Jesus Christ can cleanse us and reconcile us to the perfect justice of divine law.
Latter-day Saints teach the concept of exaltation or becoming like God because that is what He wants. We believe as Latter-day Saints that we are God’s children. Non- Latter-day Saint Christianity does not.
Salvation in the traditional sense is an eternal limitation with a divorce decree written into the marriage relationship. At death saved individuals move to and eternally static state of existence with no chance of progressing any more in capacity.
For Latter-day Saints Hell is a temporary place where those souls that were disobedient suffer in some way until they become aware of the consequences of their choices. They will be redeemed but not prepared to live eternally in the presence of the Father and the Son because of their own choices. Mainstream teachings place souls in hell eternally for no reason other than they were created by a "wrathful" god.
Modern revelation teaches us that there are degrees of salvation, some of which require repentance and making a covenant with God and others that do not. Exaltation is the highest order of heaven. It is eternal family life with increase. The other eternal kingdoms of salvation are very different and yet is a better station in eternity than individuals were before we entered mortality.
Even people not acquainted with Jesus Christ or his gospel will have a just opportunity to correct those attitudes and characteristics that are not compatible with residing in the presence of God. All will be judged perfectly and fairly based on every conceivable consideration that only God knows. That is amazing grace extending to every soul to live on earth.
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