Today’s guest post is from longtime friend of the blog, Todd Smithson.
Eve’s words still startle us. She doesn’t apologize for the Fall—she honors it. “If not for our transgression,” she says, “we never would have known the joy of our redemption.”
Her claim turns the old story upside down. Redemption does not rescue us from sin—it moves through it. The door to redemption swings on the hinge of transgression itself.
We often say that obedience grants us grace. But Eve reminds us that grace is not earned; it is revealed—and it is revealed most clearly in our failure.
Until we let go of the fairytale of innocence, we remain outside the house of mercy.
Sin, in this light, is not a moral category but a moment of awakening—a place where we discover what love really means. It is the raw material from which redemption is made.
To arrive there, we must cross the bridge called “nevertheless”—the bridge that carries us from despair to hope, from control to surrender. We leave behind our fantasy of growth without pain, progress without struggle, knowledge without mistake.
And on the far side, we discover what Eve already knew:
Redemption is not the absence of sin and suffering.
It is the fruit that grows from them.
It is the transformation of what we thought was ruined into what is holy.
There is a certain relationship that humanity has with suffering, fallibility and sin. We want to solve suffering once and for all; we admit broadly that we are fallible, but then vehemently deny the specifics; and “sin”, what possible good comes of sin?
It seems useful that a divine living being might attempt to change our minds about how we think about these things. At the heart of redemption is what the word repent means, “to change one’s mind”, where our past becomes our teacher instead of our accuser. What God is doing through redemption is giving “value” to what we think is worthless. It’s like returning a pop can thinking it’s worth is five cents and being given a million dollars. Redemption is a paradigm shift that removes the contempt we have for the detestable. For God, redemption is not the absence of sin and suffering, it’s the prduct of it.
We think “sin” makes us unacceptable to God, while God sees sin as the way to get us to accept him.
Redemption doesn’t erase suffering and failure; it reinterprets them. It doesn’t pretend that fallibility can be bypassed—it insists that this is where grace does its best work.
Redemption, then, is not God removing the past but transforming its meaning— converting what looked like ruin into raw material for wisdom.
Where we see waste, God sees potential.
Where we see shame, God sees the seed of empathy.
Redemption isn’t about reassigning value arbitrarily; it’s about revealing the value that’s been there all along, hidden under layers of self-contempt and fear.
Human beings want to be saved from their mistakes.
God wants to save us through them.
Fallibility is not a design flaw—it’s the way consciousness grows.
It’s how we learn empathy, humility, dependence, and creativity.
To redeem is to reveal that our fragility is not the opposite of divinity, but its echo.
This movement— from worthlessness to value, from death to life—is the central rhythm of creation itself. Paul puts it this way:
“All things work together for good to them that love God.” (Romans 8:28)
Not “all good things,” but all things— including the tragic, the failed, the lost.
To redeem something means to revalue it—to see worth where worthlessness once seemed to reign.
When we redeem a coin or a voucher, we give it purchasing power again; we say, this still has value.
In that same way, divine redemption assigns meaning to what we thought was meaningless—to sin, to suffering, to failure, to the bitter cup itself.
Failure redeemed is failure recognized as the raw material of wisdom.
Sin redeemed is not erased, but understood—it becomes the teacher that shows us how precious love is when we’ve violated its terms.
Suffering redeemed is the crucible where compassion is born.
Lehi once said that “because they are redeemed from the fall, they have become free forever.”
The word “from” can mean “away from”, but it can also mean “by way of”.
Read that way, the passage whispers a deep truth:
We are redeemed “by way of the Fall”—through it, not apart from it.
Redemption is not a rescue from being human; it is the sanctification of it.
God does not erase our wounds; God transforms them into windows.
Grace is not a divine clean-up operation—it’s a re-valuation of what we thought had no worth.
Wheat & Tares 
Beautifully written, Todd! I don’t have anything I can add to this. I will be returning to it over and over, though. It gives me hope, not just for the future, but for my present. Thank you!
I failed to add a couple of questions.
I wrote this article as a thought exercise, challenging the traditional paradigm that “we are saved by obedience”, and a system that professes grace but often collapses it into a kind of divine meritocracy (of course said in soft tones and with a smile)
1. If obedience is the primary path to grace, what do we make of Eve’s assertion that transgression was necessary for redemption to be revealed?
2. How does the traditional emphasis on avoiding sin limit our ability to experience the kind of transformation that redemption offers?
3. In what ways does viewing the Fall as a gift, rather than a mistake, shift our understanding of what it means to be “worthy” before God?
Wowzers! What a great article! This is truly worthy of what Wheat and Tares once was; years ago. A beautiful and thoughtful narrative. My sincere compliments to Todd. Please ask this gentlemen to participate often. This place could really us him!
“If obedience is the primary path to grace, what do we make of Eve’s assertion that transgression was necessary for redemption to be revealed?”
One of the persistent issues I have with how the church (and Christianity in general) has such a laser focus on obedience as being necessary to salvation. I do not see obedience as the first law of heaven. Rather, obedience is more a fruit of the Spirit, an outgrowth of the transgressions, sufferings, setbacks, and poor choices we are here to experience in mortality. As your post so eloquently frames it, redemption inspires obedience as an expression of gratitude and a closer approach to the divine.
This is thought-provoking and beautifully written. I especially liked this phrase: “where our past becomes our teacher instead of our accuser.” This beautifully describes a state of grace and redemption. Instead of feeling shamed by our past, we’ve acknowledged and accepted it, and learned from it. I love this — when we say we learn from our mistakes, this is what it means.
Nothing like this would ever be taught at General Conference. As you acknowledge, your thoughts run contrary to the teachings of obedience. That perfectionism keeps people from grace. This line is also excellent: “Until we let go of the fairytale of innocence, we remain outside the house of mercy.” I’m going to change one word in it. “Until we let go of the fairytale of righteousness, we remain outside the house of mercy.” When people cling to righteousness and obedience, they reject grace and redemption. Because of course the first step is admitting you need grace and redemption.
I recall lessons as a youth, cautioning against sin as a learning experience. I guess some thought that the best way to gain a testimony of the Atonement was to sin and repent? I don’t know, but I remember lessons teaching that it was better to stay faithful and obedient, than to fall away and come back. This led me to rely on my own righteousness rather than grace. The Church should trust us more. That tension is already there — as you mention, Eve’s transgression was necessary. But no other transgressions are necessary! Don’t ever stray! Eve’s choice was an exception to the general teachings of obedience. I noticed, even as a youth, that the praise for Eve was inconsistent with the teaching that it’s better to never sin at all. Speakers would go into long descriptions of how sin has a whole different meaning than transgression.
If we can be saved at all, it’s by grace. Jesus made that clear by offering mercy to those who had no works left to give – like the dying thief on the cross next to his.
Insistence on strict obedience has much more to do with the power of religious leaders than anything that Jesus actually taught…which was made clear by the Sadducees and Pharisees who pressed for Jesus to be crucified for his defiance of their authority.
I very much appreciate these ideas. I have often felt that I am probably a better person because of my longstanding struggles with sin. But I am curious how the OP would articulate the role of Christ in this revaluing of sin. Does redemption happen to everyone, regardless of faith, understanding, or actions? If not, what mix of conditions is required for God to enact redemption?
YourFoodAllergy has a point about the roll of Jesus in this whole process of moving from sin to redemption. I look at Jesus’s role as teaching us that we are loved. When we accept Christ as our Savior, we are accepting his love for us. His *unconditional* love for us. “We love Him because he first loved us.” He loves us in our sin. That is the big idea that the people who push obedience as the first law don’t seem to get. We don’t have to be obedient to be loved by Jesus. But we show our love for him by our obedience. He loves us first, and there is the grace. He offers us love even when we are horrible unloving mean jerks. And if we can accept that love, then we learn to love others, and then we stop being horrible unloving mean jerks. It is this huge miracle that Jesus can love us even in our unlovable state. He loves us when we are still sinners because he sees the potential for us to learn from those mistakes.
When we learn love is when we can start to look at our mistakes and see them as mistakes and learn from them.
Obedience is not the first law of heaven. Love is. And we learn to love by having the kind of compassion for others in their suffering that Jesus has for us in ours.
your food allergy – Thank you for the question. As I said above, how I think about things may, in fact, be the way I have realized provides the most hope and makes the most sense. I simply cannot side with the traditional doctrinal theory of Atonement passed down from Augustine to Calvin. Penal substitution is the dominant idea espoused in our correlated LDS material, but I find it incoherent and impossible to reconcile with any version of God I would call loving.
I am convinced, as the Buddha concluded, and Jesus teaches, that the primary problem of life is suffering, not sin. Sin is adding suffering to suffering. The Buddha tells the parable of the two arrows, the first being the painful happenings endemic to our mortal world, the second arrow is the “missing of the mark”, the maladaptive responses we learn and practice to the inherent suffering. Christianity, through the life and story of Jesus, attempts to reorient us to life’s suffering and show us the way to respond, to heal and redeem, instead of fanning, fueling and perpetuating the fire already burning.
The suffering God we see in Jesus says more about the cost of love than the cost of sin. Where love exists, suffering will abound, and where suffering exists love will send its relief.
In “Fiddler on the Roof,” the phrase “when you have trouble I have trouble” essentially means that the speaker, Tevye, identifies so closely with his community and their struggles that when someone else faces hardship, he feels the weight of that hardship as if it were his own; it reflects the idea that everyone in the community is interconnected and shares each other’s burdens, just like a “fiddler on the roof” trying to maintain balance in a precarious situation.
The penal substitution idea is a legalistic view that grew out of the doctrine of original sin. And, as such, if we begin with universal guilt then The Atonement becomes something that rescues us from sin and the wrath of God. However, if we reject original sin and accept “the fall” as an ascent, a necessary step, then our concept of Atonement needs a subsequent facelift to align with that presupposition. Instead of seeing Jesus as a vicarious payment for a debt incurred, we begin to see his suffering as the result of loving deeply, not as a transaction to restore Gods view of mankind.
At the core of Jesus’ incarnation is a relentless paradox. The Protestant view of Jesus’ role as savior is that mankind is fundamentally incapable of suffering the necessary price for our own sins, that we need Jesus to come to earth to accept that suffering on our behalf. But it doesn’t alleviate the moral burden, this is the paradox. If this is the case, that Jesus suffered for our sins, meaning “in our place”, vicariously accomplishing the task we were not capable of, then why do we seem to suffer so greatly for our sins.
Is there something we are missing?
If we change the meaning of the preposition “for” from “in place of” to “because” then his sacrifice changes to something of a powerful example, a morally influential force(Enabling power), him showing us “the way” to redemption, and becomes the path of “Imitacio dei” (follow him, imitate deity).I
To see Atonement in a broader light we first must untangle the paradigm that justice demands suffering. The historical conception of justice uses suffering as an explanation for what justice demands instead of seeing justice as the result of responding to suffering with mercy. Prior to Jesus’ ministry, the concept of justice was retributive, seen only in the past tense where suffering is both deserved and demanded. Jesus, in the sermon on the mount, turns justice upside down, teaching his people to view it in the future tense, where instead of justice demanding more suffering, it demands restorative mercy. Instead of requiring an eye for an eye, justice asks not what evil must be returned for evil, but what good is needed to restore justice.
Justice does not demand punishment, that is returning evil for evil. Justice requires the good that will help a person or relationship become just again, brought back into alignment or At-one-ment again.
Atonement, I believe, is about applying the principles and processes to repair the ruptures, it’s about mending the fractures in relationship, and restoring the wholeness found as a member of the body of Christ.
Terryl Givens describes it this way; “It would be tragic if the mechanism by which Atonement was carried out displaces, in our mind, the effect it was meant to achieve. Atonement does not necessarily describe something Christ did but something he hopes to achieve. Not just a description of his heroic sacrifice but the product of that sacrifice”.
In response to
Jesus, in the sermon on the mount, turns justice upside down, teaching his people to view it in the future tense, where instead of justice demanding more suffering, it demands restorative mercy.
and
Justice does not demand punishment, that is returning evil for evil. Justice requires the good that will help a person or relationship become just again, brought back into alignment or At-one-ment again.
You have all the right words in there, but I think in the wrong order.
I see justice as entirely about the victims and mercy as entirely about the sinner. If I’m right, “restorative mercy” is a non sequitur. Justice requires restoration of the victim’s wholeness; it does not require punishment of the perpetrator. But it doesn’t explicitly forbid punishment either, it simply ignores it, so mercy comes into play with respect to the perpetrator. From there, your argument can proceed as you have done. (I haven’t decided whether or not I agree with it.)
Thank you Todd for your beautiful essay.
It is a great irony to me that while I value the teachings of my LDS religion, this religion is very inadequate at teaching the principle of Redemption. The Book of Mormon actually teaches the principle very powerfully. But the religion is stuck on the necessity of rules and protocols for ecclesiastical leaders to stand in the way of spiritual redemption. Furthermore, the religious culture, which is supreme, emphasizes that redemption is earned and proven by obedience – that grace is simply the cherry on top after one has been properly obedient.
There are LDS leaders who seem to understand the meaning and power of Redemption and Elder Christofferson is one of them. He has given several Conference talks on the subject and I highly recommend them.
To me, one of the blessings of grace is that in the midst of my flawed existence, I can see the beauty of God’s creation and recognize his Light. I do not need to be perfect (I am far from that!) to receive God’s grace. I can receive it any time I look for it and earnestly desire it! Sometimes “all I can do” is to have the desire for God to be near and God becomes near.
I wholly agree with the LDS teachings on the Fall concerning the point where Adam & Eve arrive in mortality. I find confusing and unsatisfactory the role of the Garden of Eden in preparing Adam & Eve for mortality. Per the narrative (and it is mostly consistent across Christian religions) Adam & Eve are given the freedom to choose and they choose according to selfish & prideful persuasions (the LDS version has an explicit Satan to coax Eve in her iniquity).
How does one square the idea that Eve’s choice was “Evil” when it proves to be Good? The LDS narrative fails to solve this riddle and this has always troubled me. If it is “necessary to taste the bitter to appreciate the sweet”, then what was God’s plan to do this other than for Adam & Eve to leave the Garden and live in a fallen world? The parting thought of the LDS endowment is that when God commands, maybe it is better to disobey*. Crazy, isn’t it?
* LDS apologists say that Eve wasn’t patient, didn’t have sufficient faith or we aren’t shown everything Eve was taught. This is an inadequate explanation. We learn by what is actually taught and what we see in the Garden of Eden is that Eve was left on her own with almost no instruction to decide between (A) perpetual boredom or (B) something more. And she chose something more AND WAS GLAD SHE DID!!!!!! And yet we are supposed to view her choice as a transgression and a violation of God’s commandment.
your food allergy – I want to go back and try to address your question directly. “Does redemption happen to everyone, regardless of faith, understanding, or actions? If not, what mix of conditions is required for God to enact redemption?”
I’ll start by reiterating what I believe “redemption” means. Redemption and “repentance” are inextricably connected. If repentance literally means “to change one’s mind” (metanoia in Greek), Meta (beyond) noia (the mind), then forward progress begins by altering the meaning we have given to our past. We are “damned” (stuck) in place by the meaning we have given to weakness, need, suffering, sin, fallibility, etc. Redemption then is God’s act of changing our mind about ourselves. It’s not God removing the past but transforming its meaning–converting what looked like ruin into raw material for wisdom. I’m not suggesting this is easy or even that I have figured it out. This topic is deeply personal to me as I have, more or less, felt the weight over the past 4 years of examining a life that didn’t measure up to my wildest dreams.
Human beings want to be saved “from” their mistakes. God wants to save us “through” them. In this light, redemption is not something done “for” us, but something done “with” us. We become co-redemptive beings–turning our own pain into wisdom that can heal others. Paul calls this “filling up that which is lacking in the sufferings of Christ”–not because Christ’s suffering was incomplete, but because redemption keeps unfolding wherever love transforms pain into meaning. We are meaning makers, and the meaning (stories) we use to define behavior influences the response to it.
So, does redemption happen to everyone, regardless of faith, actions, etc? I hope everyone feels the tender embrace of mercy dissolve the self-imposed prison of their mistakes.
3 years ago, while teaching Gospel doctrine, the story of Enos took on a radically new reading. In the midst of mid-life and not enough information to determine Enos’s age, I saw him as a middle-aged man reckoning with an underwhelming life. What jumped off the page was what I called:
“Enos and the midlife prayer”
We want good things, we want to be good people, but our methods often sabotage the goal. We misunderstand how things actually grow. Things don’t grow by doing battle with them, but by proper care and gardening.
The story of Enos tells of mankind’s fundamental misunderstanding with how people grow. Like a giant oak tree, that started from a tiny seed, it grows because of the Sun and rain that freely falls as a heavenly grace. The tree does nothing to deserve the transcendent blessing from above. It only takes in that grace and then shares it with the toddler trees whose branches are not yet tall enough to reach the direct sunlight. That misunderstanding causes us to engage in the impossible project of gaining God’s acceptance. Instead of using Gods presence and love as the reward for good behavior, switch the order, and trust God instead of fear. Position God first, as the solution and allow behavior to grow. When grace is the seed, grace will also be the fruit.
We often read Enos as a story about repentance. But it may just as well be a story about the midlife crisis of the soul. At some point, every life slows down enough for the questions to catch up. You look back—and what you see is uneven, incomplete,
a mixture of good intentions and wasted years. The early energy of proving yourself gives way to the quiet terror of wondering what it was all for. That’s where Enos begins. He goes into the forest not as a rebel but as a man haunted by memory.
The echo of his father’s words still lingers, but they no longer fit neatly. He wrestles—not for belief, but for meaning. He’s not asking, “Did I sin?” He’s asking, “Did my life matter?”
And heaven’s reply cuts through the ledger he’s been keeping: “Enos, thy sins are forgiven thee.” And I, Enos, knew that God could not lie; wherefore, my guilt was swept away. Even Enos is gob smacked, he says “how is it done”. The following verse repeats the same words used by Jesus in the New Testament “Thy faith hath made the whole”. Faith in each of these stories is an act of vulnerable trust, the bringing forth of weakness, the experience of feeling the healing power of speaking our pain.
It isn’t indulgence. It’s liberation. It’s God saying: your past is not a prison; it’s a seed. Grace doesn’t erase what’s behind you—it transfigures it. It gives value to what you thought was wasted. To be forgiven is to be freed from dragging that heavy backpack of guilt through the rest of your journey. And when that weight falls away, something miraculous happens—your concern shifts. No longer trapped in the narrow economy of personal worthiness, your heart opens outward. You begin to care not about proving yourself but about loving your fellow travelers. The same mercy that met you in your unfinishedness becomes the mercy you offer to others still unfinished. That’s the quiet miracle of Enos. It’s the midlife conversion—not from sin to sainthood, but from self-preoccupation to participation in grace. He entered the forest fearing a wasted life. He left discovering that nothing, not even the waste, was ever wasted.
Coming to this late —
Thank you for this meditation on redemption and grace. “By way of” is a useful interpretation.
For work by others, I would recommend Adam Miller’s “Grace is not God’s Backup Plan” which is a paraphrase of Paul’s letter to the Romans.
For analysis, I enter in through the word μετανοέω (metanoeo) which is translated “repentance” in the KJV New Testament. There is a long history of discussion and debate about how the word is used and what it means. See “Metanoia (theology)” in Wikipedia for an easily accessible version. Some see in metanoeo the idea of penance. Others argue that metanoeo is better understand as a change of mind or change in character. I prefer the latter.
For transformative (to me) thinking, I take the route of scars. I have an unusually large number of physical scars, and a fairly typical number of psychic and emotional scars. I own my scars. My scars own me. I am my scars. I don’t think of my scars as filled with gold, but I find the Japanese idea of kintsugi (金継ぎ) useful to meditate on.
Thanks for your thoughtful responses, Toddsmithson. I am also, like you, Dostoevsky and probably other Christian existentialists, convinced that suffering is the main problem of life. Sin, as a cause of suffering, I think can be viewed as a subset of suffering. That being the case, a model of atonement that I find personally meaningful is one that is focused on explaining, and thereby making acceptable and even redemptive, suffering. Something like, God’s incarnation and acceptance of the worst this world has to offer is a sign of love and solidarity for all of us poor souls, and a demonstration that love is the way that suffering can be redeemed.
It’s interesting that your starting point in the above development of ideas was the incoherence of the primacy of obedience. That part of the temple ceremony that seems to teach that unquestioned obedience is fundamental to a plan that starts off being about agency has always driven me a little crazy.