Sunday, October 1, 2023

Andrew Love Neff on Blood Atonement

  

 

THE DOCTRINE OF BLOOD ATONEMENT

 

There were, however, certain new factors in the equation to which attention must be directed. The Reformation Movement of the previous winter, instituted for the moral and spiritual betterment of the Mormon society, provoked considerable discussion of the theological doctrine of blood atonement, a constantly reoccurring theme in biblical lore and Christian controversy. Psychologists have observed that repentance-from-sin drives, while conductive to betterment from a church viewpoint, invite to excesses those of unstable mentality.

 

One of Mormonism’s foundation stones is that the Savior went to the cross as a voluntary to atone for the sins of mankind, the second of their Articles of Faith, reading: “”We believe that through the atonement of Christ all mankind may be saved by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel.” The third runs: “We believe that men will be punished for their own sins and not for Adam’s transgression.” Furthermore, doctrinal dissertations establish a category known as “unpardonable” sins, and yet again sins that are so serious that they may be expiated only by the voluntary sacrifice of one’s own blood. Reasonings such as these gave rise to the popular designation of blood as “innocent” or “guilty.”

 

These preachments indicate that a sinner, whose would was in the balance, the scales of which seemed to be tipping hell-ward rather than heavenward, might rescue himself from dread perdition by a sacrificial offering of his life-blood. This theological concept should be differentiated sharply from suicide, a means of escape from mortality by self-destruction and annihilation, based on a philosophy of despair. Notice that in dooming himself to die, the blood atonist was motivated by aspiration to measurably square the mistakes of mortality, and make provision for futurity or eternal life by the supreme sacrifice. In the achievement of this sacrificial act, it was permissible for the self-judged guilty person to secure the cooperation of relatives or friends. However, the proposition was purely a theoretical consideration as men are indisposed to surrender voluntarily earth existence to expiate crime. Quite foreign to this theological concept was the idea that a man of his volition might weight another individual in the balance, adjudge him guilty, and administer the death penalty. Such a deed would properly constitute an act of murder.

 

Whereas the mental psychology of the Mormons of this storm and stress period was verbally to damn Gentile enemies for time and eternity rather than to save them, it is obviously a perversion and distortion of their theology to argue or insist that the Mountain Meadows Massacre had its origin in an orthodox conception of the doctrine of blood atonement. Muddled thought often, however, leads to the perpetration of dark deeds. Misconceptions in this instance may temporarily have blinded some to the path of rectitude and honor. No worth-while correlation exists between the theological doctrine of self-imposed blood atonement and the crime of murder, except in the distorted imagination of hostile-minded, loose-thinking critics, and the addled brain of John D. Lee who, like other criminals, sought desperately for a -pretext which would seem to explain and justify the wanton killing of countrymen. (Andrew Love Neff, History of Utah: 1847 to 1869, ed. Leland Hargrave Creer [Salt Lake City: The Deseret News Press, 1948], 412-14)

 

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