Writing in 1904, long before the Church tried to become more mainstream according to many misinformed critics, we read the following by a Latter-day Saint author asserting a soteriology that is dependent upon grace, including the need for God’s grace to be prompted to co-operate with him at one’s initial salvation:
Not only must he will to co-operate with grace, both in the awakening and in the development of the God-ideal within him, if these operations are to go on at all; but, should he choose to do so, he can cease assisting and effectually oppose and destroy this divine power at any point in his evolution. For man is free,--free as God in a negative sense; potentially as free in a positive sense; and dynamically as free, to the extent that his psychic evolution has been completed . . . “For by grace,” says Paul, “are ye saved, through faith, and that not of yourselves,--it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast.” (Eph. ii., 8, 9). In this passage four important concepts occur: grace, salvation, faith, and works. The question is, How are they related? Manifestly the order of sequence is this: (1) faith, the exercise of that native power which opens the soul to truth; (2) grace of the inpouring of the spirit of God, in consequence of the opening of man’s soul to truthness; (3) salvation, involving two things, the awakening of the God-ideal in man, and the progressive evolution of that ideal under the fostering power of grace; (4) works. In the sense of the exertion of man’s will, these are implied in two of the previous operations: in the faith that opens the door to grace, and in the progressive soul-adjustments which are involved in the evolution of the God-ideal. Works in this latter sense are distinctly pointed out by Paul as necessary, in the verse next to those above quoted. “For we are his workmanship, created in Jesus Christ unto good works,”—the works being, as indicated above, those which flow out of grace, i.e., those which we “are created into Christ Jesus” to perform. (Nels L. Nelson, Scientific Aspects of Mormonism or Religion in Terms of Life [New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904], 189-90)
Elsewhere, Nelson wrote the following which refutes the all-too-common charge that “Mormon” soteriology is that of raw works righteousness:
The assertion, sometimes made, that Mormonism believes salvation and exaltation can be won by the laying on of hands will thus be seen to be a slander. The position of the Church is this: while rites and ordinations add nothing in and of themselves, yet are salvation and exaltation impossible without them; for, as we have seen, psychic perfection depends absolutely upon God’s co-operation; but God, being a perfected man and not a vague abstraction, enters into co-operation with lesser psychic beings by definite contract; rites and ordinations are His divinely appointed tokens of such contract. Being therefore essential to God’s co-operation, they are essential to man’s salvation and exaltation; and consequently the man who will not make definite covenants with God—he who vaguely trusts that if he lives a good, honest life, things will come out all right in the end—may not lose eternal life,--since there are a million lower altitudes while only one summit; but he will surely fail of becoming perfect as God is perfect. (Ibid., 290)
