Marion D Hanks taught that without unconditional love, youth could find no place in the church. In his talk entitled “Love Unconditional” from 1971, he says
Four, they have to learn somehow that they are more important than their mistakes; that they are worthwhile, valuable, useful; that they are loved unconditionally.
I knelt with my own family, at the conclusion of a great family home evening, the night before our lovely daughter was to be married in the temple. I think she wouldn’t mind my telling you that after we had laughed and wept and remembered, she was asked to pray. I don’t recall much of her prayer, the tears and the joy and the sweetness, but I remember one thought: she thanked God for the unconditional love she had received. This life doesn’t give one very many chances to feel exultant and a little successful, but I felt wonderful that night, and thank God that she really believes and understands what she said. We cannot, my dear brethren, condition our love by a beard or beads or habits or strange viewpoints. There have to be standards and they must be enforced, but our love must be unconditional.
Hanks, Oct 1971 GC
Contrast this to then Elder Nelson in 2003 who makes sure members understand that God loves us upon condition of obedience.
While divine love can be called perfect, infinite, enduring, and universal, it cannot correctly be characterized as unconditional. The word does not appear in the scriptures. On the other hand, many verses affirm that the higher levels of love the Father and the Son feel for each of us—and certain divine blessings stemming from that love—are conditional.
Ensign, Feb 2003
There is no mistaken that Nelson believes God’s love is conditional. Next he implies that love for our children should be conditional upon their obedience to God.
Perhaps no love in mortality approaches the divine more than the love parents have for their children. As parents, we have the same obligation to teach obedience that our heavenly parents felt obliged to teach us. While we can teach the need for tolerance of others’ differences, we cannot tolerate their infractions of the laws of God. Our children are to be taught the doctrines of the kingdom, to trust in the Lord, and to know that they receive the blessings of His love by first obeying His commandments.
Divine love is perfect, infinite, enduring, and universal. The full flower of divine love and our greatest blessings from that love are conditional—predicated upon our obedience to eternal law. I pray that we may qualify for those blessings and rejoice forever.
Ensign, Feb 2003
So which is it? Conditional or unconditional? But more important, how does one deal with conflicting ideas from our general authorities?
Both of these are just their own opinion, as nether carries the weight of “revelation” and therefore “doctrine”. But then what is this? Good advice? The philosophies of men mingled with scripture?
Maybe it doesn’t matter? The Hanks model could be seen as the more generous, more mercy with grace. The Nelson model more authoritarian, a better way to keep people obedient. Have you seen this harder line reflected in his teachings since he has become the Prophet [1], or has this calling moderated him (I call it the “Benson effect”).
What do you think?
[1] AKA “Global Faith Leader”
Wheat & Tares 
The question for me is, what really are God’s laws that we must obey? Leaders many times I believe, conflate their own pet peeves and biases with God’s will, then claim it’s from God. That is the real meaning of taking the Lords name in vain! As I have gotten older, the Lords “laws” that he requires of us are few in number not many. I think Jesus encountered that with the Pharisees. So many laws made up by man. His law, was to try our best to love one another. Let Him take care of the rest.
I spoke at a funeral for a relative. She and her husband couldn’t have children and had adopted four children. All four had left the church and to a certain degree had not been close to their parents. I felt inspired to say at the funeral, where they were all present, I spoke at a funeral for a relative. She and her husband couldn’t have children and had adopted four children. All four had left the church and to a certain degree had not been close to their parents. I felt inspired to say at the funeral, where they were all present, That Jesus was more merciful than we can imagine and he was also more just then we can imagine.. That seems to fit into your feelings on the post.
Nelson’s statements evoked a strong feeling of “BS”. I have 4 children, at least two of whom will probably not choose the LDS route. One of those chose a wild period of experimentation in high school that severely tried my patience and risked her future. When a counselor asked us what I want my relationship to be with this child I simply responded that I want her as part of my family no matter what.
No matter what my kids do I will always love them, even if they hurt me, I don’t trust them, and I don’t like them. If God is benevolent I think he’d always love his children.
I agree with the idea that the concept of God as portrayed in much of Mormon teaching and discourse has conditional love. The God I believe in, however, has unconditional love.
Nelson hasn’t changed his tune, either. His BYU devotional last year – The Love and Laws of God – carries the same message. God’s love for us is predicated on our obedience to God’s laws. Likewise, we are taught that our love for others is subservient to our obedience to God’s commandments (Oaks often speaks to this in justifying why our obedience to God sometimes means we aren’t nice to gay people).
I definitely see this reflected in the way we treat people. Our church claims to love and invest a lot of resources in our youth but we don’t do that to meet them on their own terms – we don’t love them for what they are, we love them for what they can be (return missionary, temple married church leaders). And we don’t serve them so much out of love as to drive towards that outcome. It’s a strings-attached love. (I am not saying everyone in the church does this but I think it’s our culture.)
We’ve been taught that the prophet will never lead the church astray. I’ve often heard that qualified as “the prophet may make mistakes but he will never lead the church astray on the doctrine of Christ.” For me, last year’s BYU devotional made me realize the prophet does indeed lead us astray. If we can’t trust the prophet to reveal the correct nature of God’s love, I don’t know what he’s really good for.
@Stella I don’t think any commandment that doesn’t help us either live a better life personally or love others is a true commandment. That’s a big part of why I reject the church’s teachings on gay marriage. Those teachings don’t make sense unless you believe a disconnected, lonely life is worth settling for in order to earn a reward in heaven. I don’t believe in commandments that make us miserable here so that we can earn a reward someday. The kingdom of heaven is at hand (right here!) and this life is the only sure thing for us. We should use it to care for one another, which is the only thing I think God truly cares about.
Unconditional love encompasses the whole gospel of Jesus Christ.
Everything else is just “stuff”, that gets additional layer after layer of unnecessary “stuff” with each generation
I suspect that both Hanks and Nelson’s remarks reflect the philosophies of their parents, mingled with scriptures.
My own experience with the divine would be that of overwhelming love, even if at times that is mingled with sadness and disappointment when I do what I know to be wrong.
This kind of thing is what drives my strong preference for New Testament Jesus (and by extension God) over Mormon Jesus.
Easy question to answer – never, ever has the spirit whispered to me that God’s love is conditioned upon my actions or responses. Lot’s of other things in life are, but not His love. I chose to fully embrace the spirit’s whisperings to me – I am loved, regardless of my belief and actions. If not…. where is the “Good News” of the Gospel? I can get condemnation and judgment from man. That is why God is who He is.
I can remotely see how Nelson’s first quote could be seen as conditional love. I think the second quote, however, is talking more about the blessings of unconditional love.
I love all my kids unconditionally. However, if dessert is contingent on getting after-dinner chores completed, I don’t think withholding dessert from a child who didn’t earn it means I love them less. It means I’m teaching them a lesson in hopes that they learn the value of after-dinner chores both in the short-term and eventually for its intrinsic value alone. At no point during this am I going to try to make them feel less loved, even if others try to tell them that’s the case. In most cases, I feel they’ll look back sooner or later and find that kind of love made them better people, which is what I desire for them in the first place.
@Eli, read the talk in its entirety. It’s 100% explicit that love is conditional. This post is not a misinterpretation of it. I read it and was shocked.
I get what you mean about consequences and that distinction. But that’s not what Nelson is saying. He’s saying – you’ll love your daughter whether or not she does the dishes but you reserve your highest divine love for her only if she does.
(My other comment is lost in moderation but I noted that Nelson’s 2019 BYU devotional, The Love and Laws of God, teaches the same “conditional love”. One of several reasons I can’t / won’t sustain him as a prophet because I expect a prophet to teach a correct view of God.)
As we seek after the infinite love of God and struggle to comprehend it’s expansiveness, we also come up against mortal man’s incredible limiting power of that divine love, and the earthly power that comes from being able to control access to it.
I strongly disagree with Pres. Nelson’s “conditional love” approach, but it appears to be consistent with his worldview. I imagine like many high-achieving people, Nelson spent his life constantly seeking approval from higher authorities and still felt inadequate.
Nelson’s talk is incoherent, but is not “100% explicit that love is conditional.” It is explicit that God’s love is “infinite and universal,” which makes his efforts to defend conditionality quite contorted. He is teaching a correct principle, but doing so in a way that is almost designed to be misunderstood.
I was asked to give a talk on this subject a few years ago (during the Monson administration) and I responded to the bishop that If I did so, I would be contradicting Nelson by preaching unconditionality. He told me to go for it. The talk is too long to post as a comment, but I took the position that “love” is used to mean different things in the scriptures and that those implying conditionality are referring to a meaning (i.e., equating “love” with “blessings”) that is different from what we normally think of as love. I got zero pushback afterwards.
@Lastlemming agree the talk is incoherent. But in the printed version there is heading after heading stating that love is conditional. So that’s explicit enough for me.
President Nelson’s conditional love doctrine is both wrong and right at the same time. It is true that God’s ( Jesus) love is conditional because regardless of how much He loves us He will not save us unconditionally. We all need to repent and be baptized which are clearly conditions we all need to follow. On the other hand God’s (Elohim) love is unconditional. He is a God that weeps for His children and He has done everything He can for us including providing us with an infinite atonement which is part of His perfect plan. Therefore love is both conditional and/or unconditional depending on how you define God.
President Nelson’s statement that God’s love in conditional is proof that prophets are fallible.
This idea of conditional love is, perhaps, the most insidious idea in Mormondom today because it justifies cruelty on both a macro and micro level. My brother-in-law is gay and basically isn’t allowed to even set foot in his parents’ house. They take their cues from DHO to justify the wholesale rejection of their son. It’s cruel. Full stop.
As to whether this idea comes of doctrine or the personal opinions of current leaders, I’d argue that it’s part and parcel of any religion with a degree of Biblical fundamentalism in its teachings. The cruelty of God is the background radiation of the Old Testament, and will be present in the church so long as that document is considered an accurate description of God’s character and actions.
I was actually repulsed when RMN first said it – shocking.
Later when thinking about it, the phrase “the word does not appear in the scriptures” really bothered me. The fact that the word does not appear in scripture does not mean God’s love is not unconditional – just that the word does not appear. The word “ludicrous” doesn’t appear either.
There seem to be plenty of passages that would lead one to believe that God loves us unconditionally. One must resort to a very narrow and legalistic argument to say otherwise.
He may really believe that God loves conditionally. I don’t.
What is the psychological effect on a child who grows up with parents whose love is conditional? I worry that it could be quite damaging. I would love to hear from those with more expertise on the subject.
When I first heard the talk I thought 1) Its wrong, and 2) it makes not sense. How can love be “perfect, infinite, enduring, and universal” and conditional at the same time?
this discussion reminds me of a GC talk RMN gave a couple of years ago in which he mentioned his daughter who had recently died. And as he described her, he highlighted how obedient she was to the commandments as she was about to depart this life. He implied very strongly that his love and admiration for her was very conditional based on her obedience and faithfulness. That made me sad
The inescapable condition of life is that we are in a society, we are in this life and in the next together. Hence the first and great commandment, that we love God with all our heart, might mind and strength, and love our neighbors as ourselves. Hence, the commandment to sacrifice, because doing so acknowleges to God and to one another that “It’s not all about me and what I want for myself,” but rather that God knows more than I do, and wants what is best for me, and other people matter as much as I do and my own choices should recognize that inescapable reality. So, is God’s love so unconditional that he says, “Because I love you, I will let you make your own commandments, and I will clean up whatever mess that creates, because it would be wrong for anyone to ever feel guilt or shame or face consquences for their own choices.” (Trump, it happens, is a good example of where that kind of thing leads: sociopathic narcissism. It is not heaven, nor heavenly.) Or, does not God love us so much that he is willing to state the conditions of this life and the next, even if some disciples say, “This is a hard saying, Who can hear it?” Even if some crown him with thorns, and spit, and whip, and crucify him? Even at the cost a a bitter cup so terrible that we cannot comprehend, so terrible that he might shrink that he would not have to drink it, but that he accepted the inescapable condition that he would personally make a sacrifice that no one else could make for the benefit of all? Notice that even the most radical statement about love in the New Testament that Jesus makes about love does not say anything about being “unconditional” but clearly states the conditions for which it applies and the personally sets the example by having the consequences of acceptance in the palms of his hands and in his side.
But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you, and persecute you: THAT YE MAY BE the CHILDREN OF YOUR FATHER WHICH IS IN HEAVEN…”
Upper-cased there to show that this is the condition attached to the behavior. What happens to the love, if that blessing is removed, if it no longer applies to the behavior? God’s love, which demonstrates an infinitely enlarged soul capable of infinite At-One-ment, rather than a contracted soul focused only on personal desires for the here and now, is willing, and even required by it’s nature and love for all, to state the conditions that come with our place in societies of people, nature, and eternity. And part of God’s love is a period of probation, where we get time and opportunity to choose and to learn by our experiences the bitter and the sweet, and hopefully, by means of gentleness, meekness, persuasion, pure knowledge, and love unfeigned, to attract, rather than coerce, one another towards God.
@Kevin Christensen, so again, what exactly are God’s commandments? Don’t wear more than one pair of earrings? Women, don’t wear sleeveless shirts? Don’t drink tea, coffee, or alcohol? Go to church every Sunday? Get married in temple or you won’t be with your family? Pay tithing or you can’t live with God? And on and on and on…….
@Stella don’t forget “withhold priesthood from blacks and women” and “don’t let gay people get married” and “excommunicate people who you don’t agree with …
Josh h – I remember that talk, and the dismal feeling it gave me. I often wonder if life -long leaders are simply conditioned to say things like that. It made me really question: does he really MEAN what he is saying? Perhaps he does. But I really wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. Kind of like when someone gets up in church and says “More than anything else in the world, it makes me happy to see my children are all active in the church, and obedient”. Really?
Thanks, Kevin…
Personally, I think RMN talk on God’s “conditional love” is horse hooey; and invalidates God’s grace and Christ’s sacrifice. IMO RMN suffers rather severely from a rather advanced case of a “God Complex”.
Piggybacking off of Kevin and Stella: I’ll go along with needing to “love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you, and persecute you” in order to be numbered among the “children of your Father which is in heaven,” but that hardly encompasses everything else ascribed under the banner of Mormonism.
Kevin Christensen wrote: ‘So, is God’s love so unconditional that he says, “Because I love you, I will let you make your own commandments, and I will clean up whatever mess that creates, because it would be wrong for anyone to ever feel guilt or shame or face consequences for their own choices.”’
What a ridiculous straw man. Whatever Christensen is worried about here, it has nothing to do with love. My first thought was to wonder what serious person would think that loving someone without conditions would mean anything like what Christensen is afraid of? Yet on second thought I recognize that there are many among us who do think this way. This tortured argument is wrong. It ought to stop among our people.
It’s a tragic misunderstanding of the nature of love to fear that love leads to anarchy. If you’re afraid of love, if you think that love has to be hedged or made conditional, if you think that love is at some level a danger to our souls, you have not yet learned what love is.
Just what is meant by “unconditional love” and “conditional love?” It is clear from the comments to this post that different people have very different conceptions of these phrases, both among high-level Church leaders, and rank-and-file members.
I am not shy about offering my thoughts, as people who read W and T can attest (probably with rolled eyes), and I think I am reasonably intelligent and capable with words, having written analytical reports for the U. S. government for 40-odd years. But I wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole trying to give definitions of those two phrases. It is God who will decide what these phrases mean. So I will simply say;
1. I dislike the rule-bound nature of the Church. To me, it smacks of pharisaism. We suffer from perfectionism in the Church, and what I call. “Check-List Mormonism.” Do A through K, and you will be exalted.
2. Nevertheless, I like that the Church expects a lot of me. Christ is very easy to please, but extremely hard to satisfy; He wants me to be more like Him.
3. He also wants me to love Him, and my neighbor as myself. He wants mercy and not sacrifice. He wants us to follow His commandments with exactness, but NEVER at the expense of following the two greatest commandments. The problem is, when we focus more on check-lists, we have less energy to focus on God’s love and service to our fellow-men and women. We need His grace and are lost without it.
4. God knows our hearts, and it is He who will decide how He shows His love to us. I do not think He will demonstrate his love equally to Adolf Hitler and Mother Theresa.
5. He tells us in the NT that many there are who are first who shall be last, and many that are last who shall be first. There will be many surprises. I have seen many Church members without temple recommends who are better Christians than some recommend holders.
6. The end of the 8th Chapter of Romans tells us that NOTHiNG shall separate us from the love of God.
7. One of the glories of Joseph Smith’s revelations, pointed out in several places in the D and C and the POGP, is that only the most stubbornly unwilling will not be saved. They are those who cannot bear to be touched by the love of God. I personally think they are the ones who cannot bear to love others, who insist on their own superiority (this can be apply to both TBMs and Prog-mos), and who can only be happy when others are hurt.
8. I choose to not let other people tell me how much or how little God will love me.
FWIW.
There is a difference between loving someone unconditionally and treating someone unconditionally. One is “I will only love you if you obey me.” The thing Keven above is afraid of is not unconditional love, it is unconditional reward. Big difference, but somehow he can’t see it? Love isn’t telling your child, you can do anything you want and I will bail you out of any mess. I don’t know exactly what I would call that kind of parenting, but it isn’t love. Love tells the child, I will love you no matter what you do, but you sure as heck don’t get your allowance if you can’t follow the rules. The love is unconditional, but the reward has conditions. This seems to be the same confusion that RMN suffers from, thinking that if God continues to love sinners, that he must also reward sinners equally with the good children.
Let’s try separating love from approval. There was a time that we sat our oldest child down and explained to her that no matter what, we will always love her, but we may not approve of some of her choices or behavior. We told her that as an adult, she doesn’t need our approval. As a child she did, because our approval of how well she followed the house rules determined her rewards and punishments, but that as an adult, she didn’t need our approval because life itself would kick her butt for screwing up, so her parents didn’t need to kick her butt. But along with adulthood came full on suffering the consequences of her choices. We assured her that she would always have our love, but it no longer hurt us if she bought a car that turned out to be a junker, so our approval of the car she bought was not important. As a child things had been different because we had a responsibility to bail her out if she got into a mess, but when she became an adult, that responsibility went away. So, now she can marry someone we don’t approve of, because she is an adult. She can spend her money in ways we don’t approve of. Because we don’t have to fix her mess. But even if she makes a mess, we will love her because she is our daughter and nothing can change that.
Now, back to “is God’s love unconditional?” His love for us is unconditional, but his approval has conditions because we humans may be trying to grow up to be Gods, but we are not there yet. So, we need God’s approval because Jesus has promised to bail us out if we make a mess. God’s approval has conditions. His love for use does not have conditions placed on it because we are his children and nothing we do can change that.
Approval = conditions.
Love = unconditional.
What RMN is talking about when he uses the wrong word and says that God’s love is conditional upon our behavior is he, is really talking about God’s approval of us. God’s approval of us is conditional upon our behavior. And rewards and punishment are given our according to how much God approves of our behavior. But God still loves Adolph Hitler, he is just disappointed in his behavior. I don’t know why RMN confuses approval with love, maybe because his parents didn’t really love him unless they also approved of him. But he is confusing the two and thus confusing the church members.
@Anna wouldn’t it be easier to just say that choices have consequences? Take God’s love — or approval — out of the picture?
I get what you’re saying but “approval” still seems a bit too much like God’s esteem for us depends on our behavior. I don’t think it does. But I do think commandments may be to protect us and others from negative natural consequences that result from breaking those commandments. Doesn’t have to be about God withholding or conditioning rewards or blessings. (FWIW I also believe in a restorative rather than retributive view of the atonement so I just don’t really believe in punishment apart from natural consequences, and that the atonement covers those consequences including consequences we suffer because of someone else’s choices.)
FWIW (maybe nothing)
I have wondered whether removing “unconditional love” from our church vocabulary could be a “major victory for Satan.” 😊
It certainly caused a stir in 2003 in response to RMN’s February 2003 Ensign article and among some again and again since then. I expect there will be continual stirs over it as people learn of both that article and the prior use and approval of the term “unconditional love” by multiple general authorities prior to that article. I remember being quite angry about that article. One friend asked me later how I got over it. The answer: I just got tired of being angry and perhaps a little more charitable about GA’s rhetorical incoherence and, accordingly, somewhat less likely to take them literally as I understand their words.
In 2003 one reader was so put off by that article and its incoherence that he reviewed every scripture cited in it for the notion that God loves us only when we are obedient. While I cannot now find that reader’s report, as I remember, he concluded that none of those scriptures requires that interpretation, though many are open to it. That conclusion was based on the fact that all but one of those scriptures uses “if-then” language and not “only if- then” language. While “if-then” statements in common English sometimes means “only if-then,” such statements also, and perhaps more often, sometimes describe a merely sufficient predicate for their conclusion and not a necessary predicate. The one exception noted, a D&C verse, used “only if” language, but that verse was contradicted by the same D&C section within 10 verses thereafter, and so could not reasonably be taken to mean what it said.
As noted by others here, the incoherence is largely a function of insisting simultaneously (a) that God’s love for us is conditional and (b) that God’s love for us is infinite and universal. It would seem that in writing of “the higher[*] levels of love the Father and the Son feel for each of us” RMN confused feeling/concern/caring with “certain divine blessings stemming from that love.” It seems that he, like some others, was unable to imagine a distinction between loving and rewarding.
I’ve met one of those others – a born-again evangelical who insisted that because he had been “saved” his adultery and his abandonment of his wife did not matter. Others have been concerned about what they characterized as the Protestant view of salvation by grace (though my acquaintance’s troublesome view is only one such Protestant view and the BoM includes its own doctrine of salvation by grace). In March 2003 Sunstone Magazine reported:
“SUNSTONE has learned that the question of whether God’s love is unconditional was discussed by the Church’s correlation committee some five years ago and submitted to the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve for direction. The highest governing bodies in the Church replied that God’s love is not unconditional, and the expression “God’s unconditional love” has since been eliminated from all official publications. BYU religion professor Joseph Fielding McConkie has op- posed the term “unconditional love” since the 1980s. “The phrase itself is entirely unscriptural,” stated McConkie in June 1987. “When I have asked people who teach this so-called doctrine how they distinguish God’s ‘unconditional love’ from salvation by grace as taught in the Protestant world, they have been unable to do so” (A Scriptural Search for the Ten Tribes and Other Things We Lost [Brigham Young University, 1987], 7). …”
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qXKO73pemE0J:https://www.sunstonemagazine.com/pdf/126-72-79.pdf+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-b-1-d
There was also a rumor that I cannot track down that, for some years before his passing in 1985, Bruce R McConkie had been carrying on a personal campaign to eradicate “unconditional love” from Church vocabulary on the same grounds. (Given BRM’s confidence in himself and Joseph Fielding’s adulation of his father the rumor was believable even if unfounded.)
Others have defended the RMN article, e..g. https://ldsanswers.org/unconditional-love-scriptural-doctrine/ . That defense is interesting to me in part for its report of the origin and history of the term “unconditional love” in popular language/culture, though I have no idea if that report is accurate. I doubt that it is complete enough to give a full picture. That defense is also interesting for its adoption of the Church publication practice of attributing to presidents of the Church things they said before they became president. (The authors wrote “President Russell M. Nelson confronted this nearly universal ‘gospel rumor’ in an Ensign article entitled, ‘Divine Love.’” But in 2003 RMN was president of exactly nothing and did not, in that capacity, “confront” anything.)
It seems clear, however, that RMN was writing under assignment. He wrote to an inquirer:
“When I was asked to prepare the “Divine Love” article for the Ensign, I tried to organize it in such a way that one could see the many scriptures that indicate the importance of individual effort and the blessing of repentance. Some have felt the full love and blessings of the Lord could come regardless of personal behavior. The Lord wants to love and to bless us. This He can do only through our obedience. “I, the Lord, am bound when ye do what I say; but when ye do not what I say, ye have no promise.” (D&C 82:10)”
Unfortunately, it seems the Ensign editors did not (could not?) sufficiently call the article’s confusion and incoherence to the author’s attention before it was published. That confusion continues in the quoted letter by its lumping together “love and blessings” and in its resulting distortion of the meaning of the quoted scripture. It is simply not true that the Lord cannot love or bless us except through our obedience. That notion turns the quoted scripture on its head. It is not a limitation on the Lord’s love or ability to bless; it merely points out that the Lord has not promised to bless in the face of our disobedience.
How much better it would have been to simply write an article describing why the brethren prefer that we not use the term “unconditional love,” i.e. for fear of confusing Joseph Fielding McConkie and those inclined to believe that their actions do not have consequences. The various meanings of the word “love” could also have been explored. Instead, we got an inadequately explained and incoherent theology, that has caused significant problems for those struggling to believe in their own value and/or in the possibility of repentance and forgiveness.
Some of the more thorough discussions of the article might be found in Paul Toscano’s open letter** to Elder Nelson, http://mormon-alliance.org/newsletter/jul_2003.htm , and in the comments at https://www.timesandseasons.org/harchive/2014/02/unconditional-love/ which include the text of the RMN letter explaining what he was trying to do in that article.
*I’m not sure what is meant by “higher levels” of love, but I suppose it is part of RMN’s confusion of love with “higher levels” of salvation/exaltation that are divine blessings made possible by love and by our actions.
** I may not be inclined to adopt all of Toscano’s thinking, but I’m also not inclined to reject it because he was one of 1993’s “September Six”.
Bishop Bill, If you think it worthwhile, consider fishing a comment out of moderation.
Elisa, I actually agree with you that God doesn’t send blessing to the righteous or punishment to the unrighteousness while we are on this earth. But RMN seems to believe that. What he sees as blessings for righteousness are all natural consequences, not blessing or punishment from God. I also agree that God’s esteem for us doesn’t depend on our behavior. But “approval” was the best word that I could come up with to explain in Mormon terms where I think many people confuse things to say that God’s love for us is conditional. I was stepping back into the common way Mormons view things, that like BKP said, the atonement pays the debt we owe God. I am completely disbelieving in the God RMN talks about. But how to explain to people like him that God is not a jerk? My view of God is exactly what you said that the atonement is not to get us out of the wrath of God, but it is to restore justice to those we hurt. Our Father did not need Jesus to die in order to pay any debt of sin owed to God. When we sin, we don’t hurt God, but we hurt each other and that is what the atonement does, It fixes the mess we of our relationships, by restoring to the sinned against what sin took away from them. If people like Keven can separate God’s love from how pleasing our actions are to God, maybe it takes them one step closer to a loving God instead of the kind of jerk God that RMN talks about.
Wondering, you long comment was not in our pending folder, it was actually in the “SPAM” folder. I’ll have to apologize for WordPress making such assumptions just because you comment is long, and has a link in it, evidently both flags for the Spam filter! Great insight on Sunstone intel on this being discussed by the Q12!
Stella asked What exactly are God’s commandments? I have been under the impression that all the all commandments derive from the standing condition that we are all in this together, and in that situation, we ought to love God (who knows more than we do) with all our heart, might mind and strength, love our neighbors as ourselves. Personally, I don’t see where earrings and sleeveless shirts come into it in how we treat one another, unless it happens that God asks something of me in order to test whether my love for him comes first. There is a difference between Abraham asking God whether he would destroy the righteous with the wicked, and Peter, on one occasion, flat out telling Jesus, “That can’t be right! This crucifixtion business will not happen to you!” There is a difference between opening a dialogue with God in order to understand, and declaring to God that there is no more that can be said.
In the case of a member of a covenant community, where I have made temple covenants, that is between me and God, rather than between me and my neighbors. And what my neighbors do is between them and God as they understand God. As Brigham Young puts in (quoted in a classic Nibley essay, “Brigham Young and the Enemy”
“You may see, or think you see, a thousand faults in your brethren, yet they are organized as you are; they are flesh of your flesh, bone of your bone; they are of your Father who is in heaven: we are all his children, and should be satisfied with each other as far as possible.”
“There is one principle I wish to urge upon the Saints in a way that it may remain with them–that is, to understand men and women as they are, and not understand them as you are.”
“If brethren and sisters are overtaken in fault, your hearts should be filled with kindness–with brotherly angelic feeling–to overlook their faults as far as possible.”
…
“People come here from different parts of the earth, to make this their adopted country, and old residents expect them to at once conform to and adopt their manners, customs, and traditions,… In other words, ‘If every man, woman, and child doe snot act, think and see as I do, theyare sinners.’ It is very necessary that we have charity that will cover a multitude of what we may suppose to be sins.” ((See CWHN vol 13, Brigham Challenges the Saints, 223, 228)
My personal thoughts on the matter of Unconditional Love and the tensions involved in stating significant conditions as an important part of expressing love comes from decades of working with addicts and addiction. A person struggling with addiction needs to know that they are loved, despite of things that they have done to hurt themselves and others. But they also have to recognize what they can and must do in order to change and that failing to change has consequences. In that situation, earrings and sleeves are not the first and great issue.
FWIW,
Kevin Christensen
Canonsburg, PA
“In Yom Kippur, the status of being unclean fades before the divine presence. Yet if one cannot distinguish between God and Satan, if one calls evil good, if one’s religion places limits on the love of God, if one claims that being God’s chosen means that all others are God’s rejected, then there can be no atonement, and Yom Kippur is a failure.”
John Shelby Spong – Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew’s Gospel
@Wondering so interesting! If one (such as RMN) has to spill paragraphs and paragraphs of ink to somehow describe and limit God’s infinite love, I have to wonder if maybe he’s gone off base somewhere very, very fundamental.
It seems to come down to fear and control — we can’t let members think that God will love them no matter what or else they’ll go out and sin! That’s a topic unto itself, but if commandments have good reasons behind them (reasons why we should be living them *now* as opposed to why we should live them to earn God’s love) we shouldn’t need the fear and threats.
Yes, Elisa, You are not the first to wonder whether “he’s gone off base”. Some have even wondered whether “he’s gone off the rails!” On the other hand, looking at a series of writings and talks from him, one could charitably conclude that, however brilliant he is in some ways, he is not good at noting the complexity and variety of human conditions or experiences, or at analysis or explication of his analysis of religious/theological/philosophical issues. One of the most blatant examples, in addition to the 2003 article, is that section of his January 2016 Worldwide speech that commented on the November 2015 policy. Then we got another bit of extraordinarily overblown rhetoric about truth telling in the BYU speech on the effective reversal of that policy in favor of an informed parental consent policy that some were ready to recommend years earlier — and not only as to gay parents. Oh well, if you knock the rhetoric down a notch or two or ten you can often find something worthwhile. For some it’s worth the effort sometimes; for some it may not be.
As to fear and control — yes, for me there is much too much of that, but it is not unique to our Church or present day. The scriptures — at least OT, NT, BoM, and D&C are replete with motivation out of fear as well as including motivation out of love. The latter is far more effective for me. Maybe some people need fear and threats for a time. I’ve become fairly adept at ignoring them, but was not always so. It’s at least peripherally relevant to note that fear of what may be in the hereafter was a great part of the concerns of the culture JS was surrounded by and to which a good many of his revelations responded. That’s a natural result of the commonness of early deaths of friends, family, etc. and a lot of Christian teaching of the time. On that score, Sam Brown’s “In Heaven as It is on Earth” (OUP) is very enlightening, though not at all an easy read. It implicitly helped me recognize how much presentism we commonly try to read into history and scripture even as recent as JS, let alone the OT or NT.
But there is little to distinguish between Hanks’ position and Nelson’s 2003 position (I’ve paid no attention to later development ) that cannot be explained by semantics, the incoherence of Nelson’s view of “love” and the early 2003 Nelson and Q12 fear that some might think “unconditional love” means it doesn’t matter what they do rather than that they are valued and hoped for and may be helped no matter what they do. I tend to subscribe to the position Aaron Brown laid out in comments to the Times and Seasons blog post I cited. I hope you arrive at peace with whatever view you settle on as to this and related issues.
I feel that 2 different principles are discussed in these quotes. Elder Hank’s spoke of parental, and divine love, being stronger than the cords of death. This is love that will succor, persuade, and comfort regardless of the actions of the child. God has this love for each of us.
President Nelson was speaking of, while God loves is unconditionally and eternally, the blessings we receive are conditional. This is because blessings are not boons, doled out by God to his favorites, but are conditional upon our actions, they are the natural consequences of what we do sheeter blessings or cursings.
The Plan of Happiness is not the rules we follow to make God happy, it is the path we take to make us happy.
Many people today teach that God will reward us just because he loves us, regardless of our actions or accomplishments. The Evangelical Christian doctrine teaches this very principle, that if we accept Christ as our Saviour, he will beat us with a few stripes, but bring us to his presence. Not true.
He will always love us, but we can’t return to his presence until we become like him. Moroni explained that we will be in anguish on his presence if we have not become like him, a process that combines our own learning with the healing power of the Atonement of Jesus Christ.
There is no contradiction.
@kevin Christensen @David
You are right Kevin, sleeveless shirts and earrings don’t matter. That’s my point. So many times the greatest commandment of all, love God and your neighbor, is relegated to the bottom of the list of importance. And David, what would be the natural consequences of so many of the things we consider commandments but really are not? The “natural” consequences of over emphasizing rules that God really hasn’t given, are many times, shame and condemnation from our community. What is the natural consequence of gay marriage, other than excommunication and rejection? Those consequences are not natural, they are unnecessary and harmful ones the church has chosen to impose. Those consequences could be avoided if we concentrated more on loving one another. Everyone would agree about the natural consequences of self destructive behavior, like getting addicted to drugs, or behavior that causes harm to others. But like I said before, shame, rejection from family or community maybe the only consequence of so many of our man given commandments. Case in point, when my daughter was going to BYU Idaho, Bednar gave a talk where he told of a young man who was dating a girl who wore two sets of earrings. The young man was troubled because the girl wasn’t being obedient to Pres. Hinckley’s preference for one earring per ear. Bednar then praised the young man for breaking off the relationship because the girl wasn’t obedient. Bednar was encouraging the whole world to be pharisaical about something God doesn’t give a hoot about. I say, the girl dodged a bullet! My point is, because we have buried, smothered, or at times even dismissed the greatest of all commandments, with a bunch of stuff that God really doesn’t care about, we are often quite misguided in the decisions we make and how we see each other.
@Stella so crazy! That girl dodged a bullet, but it’s sad that it was even an issue.
A plea for compassion: let’s not cast blame and judgement on people who use harmful and addicting drugs. I think that in the background of every such person, there is a story. There are events that brought them to that point. (In stella’s most recent note.)
Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family, makes OxyContin. They’ve been in the news over the last few years, as it has been discovered that they knew that OxyContin is extremely addicting, while they were providing false information to doctors, leading many to over prescribe their powerfully addicting med. They were sued by numerous states. As the lawsuits continued, the Sacklers were hiding billions of dollars to avoid it being used for compensation. It is quite similar to the tobacco companies in the 1950’s. Except the deaths that resulted from OxyContin addiction were not as drawn out.
The Sacklers fueled the opioid crisis. As scores of people experienced excritiating withdrawals and death, they were strategically cultivating an image of being philanthropists, donating sufficient millions to get their name associated with Ivy League universities and iconic museums world wide. In 2016 Forbes listed them as a top 20 richest families in America. They continue to have wealth among the elites. Raymond Sackler was knighted by Queen Elizabeth.
I can’t disagree with the last part of the comment, about those who cause harm to others. Ironically, as a society, we often laud the Sacklers of the world, even while we blame, judge, and fear those they harm.
When I read the New Testament, I’ve noted the types of people and behaviors that Jesus directs ire at, and it’s largely people who harm others, exploiting vulnerabilities for gain.