Saturday, August 19, 2023

Blake Ostler on D&C 43:3-5

[Commenting on D&C 45:3-5:]

 

It appears, at first glance, that this scripture teaches that the Father must be appeased by the blood of Christ so that the Father can be glorified. This scripture must be construed to implicitly suggest that the Father would impose judgment and penalty upon sinning humankind except the Son has persuaded him otherwise by shedding his blood to propitiate the Father’s wrath. However, I suggest the advantages of adopting a reading that does not make the Father appear to be an angry and punitive Go, demanding a pound of flesh from his Son to appease his anger. It seems to me that this scripture is better seen as an expression of the love of the Son and of the Father’s love for the Son in which the Father honors the Son by recognizing him as the one who intercedes as mediator. The point of this scripture is not propitiation but the Father’s gift of his Son is that he also participates in the gift of the Atonement. That is, the focal point of this scripture is the joint gift: “the blood of him whom thou gavest.” Christ gives his blood to save us—but so does the Father. The father gave the blood of his own Son to express his love for us and the unity of the Father and the Son in the Atonement. As any loving father knows, he would rather suffer the pain and anguish himself rather than have his son do it. This shared suffering in the suffering of the Son seems to me to be the point of the scripture. In this way, the blood of Christ becomes a joint gift to us from both the Father and the Son to express their love to us. The Father is not propitiated or appeased in his anger—and this scripture says nothing of God’s anger or wrath. Rather, it is the shared gift of life that they both offer to us to persuade us to repent, and not to persuade the Father to treat us with love—for he needs no such persuasion.

 

Blake T. Ostler, Exploring Mormon Thought: The Problems of Theism and the Love of God (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2006), 268-69