What
must I do to join Christ in his offered covenant of grace?
While
sin is commonly described as a kind of death, being saved by grace is also described
as a king of death. Paul, in particular, talks this way. In Romans 6, he even
describes redemption as a crucifixion. According to Paul we must be “planted
together in the likeness of [Christ’s] death” so that “we shall be also in the
likeness of his resurrection: knowing this, that our old man is crucified with
him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not
serve sin. For he that is dead is freed from sin” (Romans 6:5-7).
To
be saved by grace, my pride must be crucified with Christ on the cross of my
own nothingness.
For
this to work, however, there must be a specific kind of death. In fact,
a specific part of the sinner must die. What happens, Paul says, is that we “become
dead” to the law by the body of Christ” (Romans 7:4). What happens is that “we
are delivered from the law wherein we were held, being dead to the law, that we
should serve in newness of spirit, not in the oldness of the letter” (Joseph
Smith Translation, Romans 7:6).
What
must we do in order to be saved? We must die. We must become dead to the
law. Or, as Paul clarifies in Romans 7:6, we must die to a particular, sinful
way of handling the law. Once we are “dead to the law,” we can “serve in
newness of spirit” and escape “the oldness of the letter.” Rather than being
captive to the letter of the law, we can yoke ourselves in Christ to the spirit
of the law. We can discover, at long last, the true purpose of God’s law.
When
Nephi explains in 2 Nephi 25:23 what it means to be saved by grace “after all
we can do,” he explains it in exactly these same terms. Nephi and Paul are
working from the same root template: being saved by grace means dying to the
law and being made alive in Christ. (Adam S. Miller, Original Grace: An
Experiment in Restoration Thinking [Provo, Utah: BYU Maxwell Institute;
Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2022], 73-74, italics in original)
After quoting 2 Nephi 25:23-27,
Miller continues:
To
be saved by grace, we must adopt a new way of handling God’s law. And Nephi,
like Paul, describes this conversion in terms of dying to the law and being “made
alive in Christ because of our faith” (2 Nephi 25:25).
Discovering
“the deadness of the law” doesn’t leave the law unfulfilled. In fact, as Nephi
has it, it’s only by “knowing the deadness of the law” that we “may look
forward unto that life which is in Christ and know for what end the law was
given” (2 Nephi 25:27). And this, of course, is the crucial point. For what end
was the law given? What is the purpose of the law? “The law is fulfilled in Christ,”
and we join Christ in fulfilling the law only by dying to that law and being
made alive in partnership with him (2 Nephi 25:27; emphasis added).
Obedience
is still required. Obedience is still the key to fulfilling the law. But
obedience to what? Obedience to Christ and the purpose of the law. Obedience to
the logic of justice and grace.
If dying to that old way of using God’s law is, then, Nephi’s own explanation for
how we are saved by grace, why does he add in 2 Nephi 25:23 that we are saved
by grace “after all we can do”? What does this additional phrase mean? In
particular, what did “after all we can do” mean when the Book of Mormon was
first translated into English? (Ibid., 75-76)
Miller then notes that “after all
we can do” was a very specific idiom, consistently used for describing
circumstances that obtain in spite of everything that may be done to overcome,
prevent or avoid them. On this, see this blog post.
