This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This week covers the Saturday Morning Session of the October 2014 Conference.
I thought Elder Christofferson's talk about agency was one of the clearest explanations of that doctrine I've ever read. I'm not sure I can explain why—maybe I'm just able to comprehend it better than I was a couple decades ago—but it helped me understand the nature of agency in ways I never have before. For example, this:
God will not act to make us something we do not choose by our actions to become.
It's so simple but has such deep implications. Why won't God save everyone? Why does he give us commandments? Why must there be degrees of glory in heaven? All those questions are answered by this one principle: God will not act to make us something we do not choose by our actions to become. I think it's beautiful. Because God loves us so much, he wants us to truly choose what and whom we want to be. He learns (or we learn) what and who we want to be by what we choose to do. Since He knows we are children and don't know how choose good sometimes, He gives us commandments as a guide to becoming like Him, and if we choose to act in harmony with those, we will become like Him. Everything depends on what we choose—not, as Elder Christofferson points out clearly, through our own work, because we can do nothing of ourselves—but through God's help in every moment we choose to follow Him:
Truly He loves us, and because He loves us, He neither compels nor abandons us. Rather He helps and guides us. Indeed, the real manifestation of God’s love is His commandments.
It’s amazing to me to realize that God’s commitment to our agency, to letting us choose what we truly want, is SO great that he will not act against it. It’s not that he doesn’t want to let us do what we want. It’s that he wants SO much to let us do what we want that he will absolutely not intervene to make us into someone we have not CHOSEN to become—even if that means letting some of our potential go unrealized. But at the same time, He makes it abundantly possible for anyone who even slightly does want to become like Him, to absolutely have every tool to do so.
Then Elder Christofferson explains how justice and mercy connect to our agency through the linking principle of repentance:
The gospel of Jesus Christ opens the path to what we may become. Through the Atonement of Jesus Christ and His grace, our failures to live the celestial law perfectly and consistently in mortality can be erased and we are enabled to develop a Christlike character. Justice demands, however, that none of this happen without our willing agreement and participation.…Justice is an essential attribute of God. We can have faith in God because He is perfectly trustworthy. …We rely on the divine quality of justice for faith, confidence, and hope.…It is compelling evidence of His justice that God has forged the companion principle of mercy. It is because He is just that He devised the means for mercy to play its indispensable role in our eternal destiny.…Even so, “according to justice, the plan of redemption could not be brought about, only on conditions of repentance.” It is the requirement of and the opportunity for repentance that permits mercy to perform its labor without trampling justice.Christ died not to save indiscriminately but to offer repentance. We rely “wholly upon the merits of him who is mighty to save” in the process of repentance, but acting to repent is a self-willed change. So by making repentance a condition for receiving the gift of grace, God enables us to retain responsibility for ourselves. Repentance respects and sustains our moral agency: “And thus mercy can satisfy the demands of justice, and encircles them in the arms of safety, while he that exercises no faith unto repentance is exposed to the whole law of the demands of justice; therefore only unto him that has faith unto repentance is brought about the great and eternal plan of redemption.”
To me this suggests that repentance is not a determined wrenching of one's self to just stop being bad, or a sort of superhuman act of change needed as I've sometimes felt it must be. Instead it's more like repentance starts with a tiny crucial moment of choice, (a "space granted," if you will) during which all we must do is turn our hearts to desire God. The moment we wish/will/desire to follow Him (activating our agency to make even the tiniest effort), Christ's mercy and enabling power flood down to help us continue, at which point we can exercise our agency again to obey what the Spirit has given us and thus receive even more aid.
This was another part of the talk I thought was amazing:
To those who believe anything or everything could be true, the declaration of objective, fixed, and universal truth feels like coercion—“I shouldn’t be forced to believe something is true that I don’t like.” But that does not change reality. Resenting the law of gravity won’t keep a person from falling if he steps off a cliff. The same is true for eternal law and justice. Freedom comes not from resisting it but from applying it. That is fundamental to God’s own power. If it were not for the reality of fixed and immutable truths, the gift of agency would be meaningless since we would never be able to foresee and intend the consequences of our actions.
Maybe that seems obvious (I’ve heard the “the law of gravity works whether you believe it or not” analogy before) but that last sentence—"If it were not for the reality of fixed and immutable truths, the gift of agency would be meaningless since we would never be able to foresee and intend the consequences of our actions”—is something I’d never thought about with God before. There must be fixed truth in the universe or there is no virtue in choosing good—since there would be no way of telling what “good” was and no guarantee that choosing “good” wouldn’t end up making lots of people miserable! Of course, as imperfect beings it is possible for us to choose what we THINK is good and end up making people unhappy with it because our understanding is flawed. Or people might be unhappy even when we do good to them, because they aren’t in the right place to receive that good yet. BUT for God, who knows all truth, we can count on the fact that when he says something is good, it IS good and will lead to good. We can count on His laws leading to exactly the outcomes He says they will lead to. And therefore we can exercise our agency FOR good or FOR bad, and our choice is meaningful (even if the immediate consequences aren’t exactly what we intended or predicted).
This summary just feels so right to me:
I am under no illusion that [any of this] can be achieved by our own efforts alone without His very substantial and constant help. “We know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do.” And we do not need to achieve some minimum level of capacity or goodness before God will help—divine aid can be ours every hour of every day, no matter where we are in the path of obedience. But I know that beyond desiring His help, we must exert ourselves, repent, and choose God for Him to be able to act in our lives consistent with justice and moral agency. My plea is simply to take responsibility and go to work so that there is something for God to help us with.
Of course I've always known agency is an essential part of God's plan. And I've learned in recent years the counterpoint of how little we can affect the agency of others! All of us will have and be what we ultimately desire to have and be. But I love the interweaving principle here of God helping us discover what we really want to have and be, of God helping us experience different ways of having and being so our choice is an informed one—even of God giving us strength and power beyond our own so we can taste some of the fruits of having what He has and being what He is long before we actually earn them. Knowing that the smallest, most fumbling efforts to "exert ourselves, repent, and choose God" will lead to all that help (for anyone! No matter how lost or stubborn!) is one of the most hopeful doctrines the gospel offers.
