[Commenting on the King Follett Discourse]
Thus, God has prepared a plan which grants us a space so that
we are free to enter into relationship with him because we are free to choose
whether to reject him. The most basic commitment of the Mormon understanding of
God is that a genuine relationship of love cannot be guaranteed or unilaterally
caused by one of the parties so that relationship but must be mutually and
freely chosen. On this view, salvation is not a status that one obtains but one
that arises from enjoying a loving relationship with God; and conversely, sin
is not an evil status but an alienation from and the breaching of this relationship.
The very purpose of life is found in the fact that God seeks to persuade us to
enter into the same type of relationship that the individual divine persons of
the Godhead have to one another and thereby to bring us to their same glory and
exaltation. The relationship which God seeks with us is characterized by loving
and mutually glorifying unity.
Blake T. Ostler, Exploring Mormon Thought: The Problems of
Theism and the Love of God (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2006), 4-5
