By Ian R. Harvey
Wandering through the Internet one day, I bumped into a YouTube video of Hugh Nibley giving his “Adam and Eve” presentation in his Pearl of Great Price lecture series,1 so I decided to sit in. About 23 minutes into the video, just after Dr. Nibley has zipped through Moses 5:112 without comment, an intrepid class member tentatively interrupts the lecture, and (with Brother Nibley’s permission) asks him about the clearly contingent if/then nature of the conversation between Elohim and Jehovah: If they should fall, then we shall provide a Savior for them. She then asks him whether Lucifer’s contention that “there is no other way” for Adam and Eve to progress except by eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is true. Nibley asks, “Well, what other way would you suggest?” She says she doesn’t know and looks to him as the teacher, at which point he summarily cuts off the discussion with, “There isn’t any.”
I have to wonder who that insightful and brave young woman was,3 because I think she is on to something very important: Why not wonder why it was okay to obey Lucifer back then, when such is rather frowned upon now? Why should disobedience to a direct commandment from God––complete with “Thou shalt not” and punctuated with “I forbid it!”––be the single, isolated exception to the irrevocable Law of Heaven “upon which all blessings are predicated”?4 Why do we make heroine and hero out of our first parents for having supposed 5 that God was only kidding? Were there really technical difficulties preventing our parents from keeping his commandments to multiply and replenish the earth?6 (Good thing it wasn’t stubborn young Nephi7 in the Garden, or we would all be pretty stuck, I guess.)
And what does Lucifer’s account of the Garden story imply about the nature of God? 1: That God once ate the fruit of “knowledge” himself to fall into the need for personal salvation.8 2: That God commanded one thing while harboring an opposite intention. Should not such duplicity from God be disturbing to us? Isn’t it a bit disappointing that this is the best he could do (“there is no other way,” Lucifer insists) to create an exalted life for a very small fraction of his children, through a process of suffering, privation, sorrow, fruitless toil, thorns, and death? And we call such a plan “happiness”? (Let’s ask the Syrians, the cancer victims, and the Chibok girls if this is indeed, a happy plan.)
In fact, it seems that Lucifer comes out of the story rather rosy: He tells us “secrets” about our Father––that we believe. He tells us “secrets” about how to become like God––that we take to be truth. He convinces us, almost purely through repetition,9 that there is “no other way.” Shall we believe that Lucifer unwittingly helps to complete God’s secret plan?10 At the end, Lucifer is crowned god of this world!11
I have always had a hard time believing the traditional LDS interpretation of the Fall.12 Not only does it go against Ockham’s Razor13 of rational interpretation, it also goes against every Primary song and against one of the most basic tenets of Christian belief: God is righteous and trustworthy; Lucifer is cunning, manipulative, and false. Jesus says of the devil:
Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it. (John 8:44)
This is a pretty unequivocal statement. Jesus doesn’t make room for the devil to be a truth-teller at any point. But, for some reason, we have decided that Lucifer’s statements to Adam and Eve are true.
And then Jesus describes his own Father:
Then answered Jesus and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise. For the Father loveth the Son, and sheweth him all things that himself doeth: and he will shew him greater works than these, that ye may marvel. (John 5:19–20)
Jesus was perfect and unblemished precisely because of the ever-righteous example shown him by his Father!
My perspective on the Fall—as well as the temple endowment itself—changed dramatically when I chose to take Jesus at his word: disbelieving Lucifer every whit, assuming there is “no truth” in him; and believing God entirely.
With these two thoughts under our belt—that Lucifer has always been a liar and that God always tells the truth—what changes when we read these statements?
You must partake of this fruit. For that is the way father obtained his knowledge.
I want you to take of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil that your eyes may be opened. You must partake of this fruit in order to comprehend that everything has its opposite: good and evil, virtue and vice, light and darkness, health and sickness, pleasure and pain.
There is no other way!
I have a suggestion that I’d like to make to Brother Nibley: “There is another way: Choose to always believe God and to always disbelieve Lucifer!”14
Yes, what I mean is that, because they disobeyed God’s commandment, Adam and Eve indeed fell. And it was not a fortunate fall. Nor did they fall “up.” If I choose to believe that God always tells the truth, then there is no way to spin or dress the Fall other than as Adam and Eve’s failure.15 Believing that God always tells the truth implies that, while in the Garden of Eden, the way was already open for Adam and Eve to receive every promised joy and to directly progress toward exaltation.16 God had given them a good commandment. It did not need to be broken to enable fertility. Breaking that commandment was a sin, just as breaking a commandment today is a sin.
This proposed interpretation of the Fall gives the pre-ordinance Eden re-enactment significant relevance to our lives. With the traditional view, I might be tempted to doze off, comfortably supposing that God had designed and intended all of this. Now I need to sit up and pay attention—as if I were in Adam and Eve’s place, faced with the same test they are facing, and with the stakes just as high. What would I do in such a circumstance? How loyal would I be to Father? Which God (or would-be god) would I hearken unto?
Of course, we know how the story goes. Adam and Eve eat the bitter fruit proffered by the liar and are cast into exile. But now comes the important part of the story: We discover that our first parents are sufficiently courageous to begin repenting and making covenants with the Lord. We watch as they set the pattern for us to be saved along with them. We are inspired by their desire to come back into God’s presence. Their courage to repent invites our respect, honor, and emulation—even though their repentance process gets off to a pretty rocky start.17
How much more sacred does the scene of the Fall become to me when I realize that our parents failed and that I am now being similarly tested? How much more desperate am I for salvation when I realize that the path of sorrow is not what my God intended, and that dramatic rescue is now vital? Christ has paid––in full––the price of the Fall, as a ransom to the one whom I once (wittingly or not) claimed as master. This was all foreseen by omniscience and allowed through moral agency. Now it is up to me to take full advantage of that Atonement.
The entire temple experience takes on a new meaning as the pattern of administering the gift of moral agency to our first parents in Eden is made available to each of us: We are brought into a holy place, set in the presence of Father and taught by his voice. Then we are allowed to be tempted by the voice of the adversary, who speaks as one unopposed from a central bully pulpit. No one tells us that he is lying, but we must choose for ourselves individually and collectively––just as our first parents did––whether we believe Lucifer in preference to our Father. Will we likewise partake of that same forbidden fruit?
This new perspective also changed how I interpret the fig-leaf apron. Is it really a symbol of fertility, given to me through a prudent choice of disobedience to God? Well, consider who commanded the apron’s use in the first place! Perhaps it is now more fitting to see it as a symbol of cherishing Lucifer’s lies––that by wearing it I have not yet fully given myself over to Christ as I cling to Lucifer’s ownership. Perhaps I should seek the means to release myself from the fig leaves of betrayal, trading them for the palm fronds of true praise:
After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands . . . (Revelation 7:9)
The paradoxes that plague our current interpretation of the Fall entirely dissipated as I simply chose to disbelieve Lucifer and to believe God at face value. The pre-endowment presentation became more relevant to my own condition before God, presenting me with the same test of moral agency that our first parents faced. This new temple perspective promotes honor and reverence to Mother Eve and Father Adam not for their perceived courage to obey Lucifer, but rather for their exemplary willingness to repent from having obeyed him! It also allows me to honor and revere the temple, not for the secret teachings of Lucifer, but rather for the sacred opportunity to be tested, to be found true, and to covenant with God!
President Monson was recently quoted in the October 2016 Ensign First Presidency Message, “The greatest lesson we can learn in mortality, is that when God speaks and we obey, we will always be right.”18 I believe that these words bespeak an eternal principle, timeless and unchanging. I believe that the principle is not only true that we can always be right, but the same was also true at the great test of the first estate, in the Grand Council of Heaven, as well as at the first test of the second estate, in Eden. Even our first parents can take that principle “to the bank” in Eden: Obedience to God always makes us right. Because they failed that test, we can only rejoice that our parents later taught us to repent and continually seek our Father.
I can still find eternal joy through the atoning “Plan-B” Plan of Salvation: redemption and rescue by the Lord whom I now may praise and worship without equivocation or excuse: Jesus Christ, master of my soul and my sole Master.
Notes
1. “Hugh Nibley, ‘Adam and Eve’ (Pearl of Great Price Lecture Series – 19),” YouTube, The Maxwell Institute, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XpdC4nJ-o0 (accessed 17 November 2016).
2. We Latter-day Saints normally take this verse as an unquestioned core element of our traditional theology. The clear message speaks for itself and typically leads us to vaunting the special insight we gain “only from modern revelation” and supposing to ourselves the otherwise childless and purposeless would-be parents moping forever in a boring garden . . . unless they did what God really intended, which was—reluctantly, but obviously—to break his own commandment (it must not have been a real commandment, and its breaking not a real sin): “And Eve, his wife, heard all these things and was glad, saying: Were it not for our transgression we never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil, and the joy of our redemption, and the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient” (Moses 5:11).
3. She must be about my age, though, because I was in Institute then (though at the University of Utah), and asking similar questions!
4. D&C 130:20–21, “There is a law, irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundations of this world, upon which all blessings are predicated—And when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated.”
5. 2 Nephi 9:28–29, “O that cunning plan of the evil one! O the vainness, and the frailties, and the foolishness of men! When they are learned they think they are wise, and they hearken not unto the counsel of God, for they set it aside, supposing they know of themselves, wherefore, their wisdom is foolishness and it profiteth them not. And they shall perish. But to be learned is good if they hearken unto the counsels of God” (emphasis added).
6. He had married them, commanded them to procreate, and promised them joy and rejoicing in their posterity. It has really got to be much simpler than all the reasons we speculate in Gospel Doctrine class why God cannot provide the blessings from fulfilling his own commandment (see again the irrevocable Law of Heaven in D&C 130:20–21). We are so learned, we suffer from TMI: too much information from Lucifer in the temple where cultural taboo prevents discussion of his lies; too much information from beguiled (her word) Eve in Moses 5:11 and too much speculation from Lehi in 2 Nephi 2:22–24 after he had read Eve (see 1 Nephi 5:11) and tried to suppose (that word again, his word, per 2 Nephi 2:17) her yet-to-be-repented (see Moses 5:8) deluded rationalizations into his otherwise insightful 2 Nephi 2 sermon.
7. 1 Nephi 3:7, “And it came to pass that I, Nephi, said unto my father: I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them.”
8. Lucifer’s statement “. . . for that is the way Father gained his knowledge . . .” leads directly to an anthropomorphic construction of God articulated by then-Elder Lorenzo Snow: “As man is, God once was . . .” Believing Satan’s lie creates a god who was once carnal, sensual, and devilish as we are now, and, in my opinion, is legitimately the most damning evidence that other Christians have that Mormons are not Christian, in spite of how nice we are, in spite of how charitable we are, and regardless of how intensely our marketing campaigns work to paint us as “normal.” I suggest we need to purge our practice of hearkening to Lucifer as a source of knowledge regarding the nature of God. Why should we complain about others using Joseph Smith’s enemies as his character witnesses when we ourselves use the eternal enemy of our God as his principal defining witness? Dropping our traditional belief in Lucifer’s lies is perhaps the most important ecumenical step we could take in truly uniting with fellow Christians against a common foe.
9. “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth” is a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels. Among psychologists, something like this is known as the “illusion of truth” effect. Tom Stafford, “How Liars Create the Illusion of Truth,” BBC Online, 26 October 2016, http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20161026-how-liars-create-the-illusion-of-truth (accessed 17 November 2016).
10. 2 Nephi 2:24 is commonly used to suggest that God designed and intended all of this to happen in his great wisdom, and that this manipulation of Lucifer to fulfill his great will is simply part of God’s overall cunning plan. This leads to what I heard some missionaries once declare after teaching this lesson, “Boy, I would sure hate to play chess with God!” Such a view misses two key points: first, the fundamentally unchanging nature of an ever-righteous God who says what he means and means what he says (See Joseph Smith, Lectures on Faith 3:10, 11, 15, 16, 22; 4:19); and second, the fundamental nature of moral agency, in which God is “in charge” only insofar as having designed a means for us to experience opposition, make choices among legitimate alternatives, and to fully own all the consequences of our actions. He is clearly not manipulating our lives “behind the scenes.”
11. The devil is happy to play the fool when he succeeds in getting us to transpose notions of God’s true character with those of his own.
12. Our traditional––albeit unwitting––assignment of manipulation, cunning and duplicity to God’s behavioral patterns strikes me as blasphemous.
13. William of Ockham: a fourteenth-century Franciscan friar credited with the notion that complex problems are best solved using the simplest, minimum set of assumptions.
14. Dr. Nibley’s response represents the most common reaction to what is treated as an outlandish notion that there might have been “another way”: through absolute obedience to God. “Well, what was it then?” If I strictly follow the divine definition of truth in terms of what was, what is, and what is to come (D&C 93:24), then I can definitely offer possibilities about what has happened on other planets of God’s vast creation portfolio, in which there is naught but justice, truth, and peace; and in which there has been no society-encompassing fall (Moses 7:30–31). But if I respond hypothetically to what “might have been different, if only . . .”, then I stoop to the same forbidden source as Eve (compare Moses 5:11 to D&C 93:25), and my conjecture carries no more credibility than her rationalization.
C.S. Lewis well understood the limits of “coulda, shoulda, woulda,” placing them all into a common, irrelevant, and energy-wasting category. He did this even without the benefit we Latter-day Saints enjoy of the revelation in D&C 93:25, defining such conjecture as coming from the one who was a “liar from the beginning.” Lewis narrates his friend Ransom pondering as follows on page 45 in Perelandra, the second book in his little known series The Space Trilogy:
In vain did his mind hark back, time after time, to the book of Genesis, asking “what would have happened?” But to this the Darkness gave him no answer. Patiently and inexorably it brought him back to the here and now, and to the growing certainty of what it was here and now demanded. Almost he felt that the words “would have happened” were meaningless––near invitations to wander in what the Lady would have called an “alongside world” which had no reality.
Lewis was keenly aware of––and specifically avoided––the hypothetical by placing himself directly into the story as a first-person participant in a real-time event, even if imagining narrating Ransom’s story. For Lewis it is strikingly testimonial. As to the specifics of what it is like in an unfallen world, he described justice, truth and peace; but not without opposition, challenge, disappointment, and pain. He demonstrated satisfying personal growth experiences without the fallen influence of betrayal and sin. Again in Perelandra, Ransom is “called” to participate as an advocate for good while the devil from Earth attempts to beguile and enslave the first Lady of Perelandra. Lewis conveys Lucifer’s seductive sophistry most convincingly then compellingly persuades the Lady—and us—that we are better off obeying God’s commandments than falling.
From C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (New York: Collier Books, 1944), Lucifer’s voice begins on page 115:
“These other commands of his––to love, to sleep, to fill this world with your children––you see for yourself that they are good and they are the same in all worlds. But the command against living on the fixed island [comparable to the eating of the forbidden fruit] is not so. You have already learned that he gave no such command to my world. And you cannot see the goodness of it . . . It is forbidding for the mere sake of forbidding . . . In order that you may break it. What other reason can there be? It is not good. It is not the same for other worlds. It stands between you and all settled life, all command of your own days. Is not [Deity] showing you as plainly as he can that it was set up as a test––as a great wave you have to go over that you may become really [mature], really separate from him . . . He longs––oh, how greatly he longs––to see his creature become fully itself, to stand up in its own reason and its own courage even against him.”
“Lady,” said Ransom, “if I speak will you hear me?”
“This man has said that the law against living on the fixed island is different from the other laws, because it is not the same for all worlds and because we cannot see the goodness in it. And so far he says well. But then he says that it is thus different in order that you may disobey it. But there might be another reason.”
“I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him, is but doing what seems good in your own eyes also. Is love content with that? You do them, indeed, because they are His will, but not only because they are His will. Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless He bids you do something for which His bidding is the only reason?”
(Lucifer’s voice, p.119) “Your deepest will, at present, is to obey him––to be always as you are now, only his beast or his very young child. The way out of that is hard. It was made hard that only the very great, the very wise, the very courageous should dare to walk in it, to go on––on without this smallness in which you now live––through the dark wave of his forbidding, into the real life, deep life with all its joy and splendor and hardness.”
“Listen, Lady,” said Ransom, “there is something he is not telling you. All this that we are now talking has been talked before. The thing he wants you to try has been tried before. Long ago, when our world began, there was only one man and one woman in it, as you and the King are in this. And there once before he stood as he stands now, talking to the woman. He had found her alone as he has found you alone. And she listened, and did the thing [Deity] had forbidden her to do. But no joy and splendor came of it. What came of it I cannot tell you because you have no image of it in your mind. But all love was troubled and made cold, and [Deity’s] voice became hard to hear so that wisdom grew little among them; and the woman was against the man and the mother against the child; and when they looked to eat there was no fruit on the trees, and hunting for food took all their time so that their life became narrower not wider.”
“He has hidden the half of what happened,” said [Lucifer]. “Hardness came out of it but also splendor. They made with their own hands mountains higher than your fixed island. They made for themselves floating islands greater than yours which they could move at will through the ocean faster than any bird can fly. Because there was not always food enough, a woman could give the only fruit to her child or her husband and eat death instead––could give them all, as you and your little narrow life of playing and kissing and riding fishes have never done, nor shall do till you break the commandment. Because knowledge was harder to find, those few who found it became more beautiful and excel above their fellows as you excel the beasts; and thousands were striving for their love. There is more. He has not told you that it was this breaking of the commandment which brought [Deity] to our world and because of which he was made man. He dare not deny it.”
“I will tell you what I say,” answered Ransom, “of course good came of it. Is [Deity] a beast that we can stop His path, or a leaf that we can twist His shape? Whatever you do, He will make good of it. But not the good He had prepared for you if you had obeyed Him. That is lost forever. The first King and first Mother of our world did the forbidden thing; and He brought good of it in the end. But what they did was not good; and what they lost we have not seen. And there were some to whom no good can nor ever will come.”
“You,” Ransom said, “tell her all. What good came to you? Do you rejoice that [Deity] became a man? Tell her of your joys, and of what profit you had when you made [Deity] and death acquainted.”
15. We should be careful rationalizing the Fall as something other than “sin,” since that is the word God himself uses to describe why the Tree of Life needs to be guarded so that his now-exiled children might not partake of the fruit thereof and live forever in their sins.
16. Exaltation is not the same as salvation. This usage of the term “exaltation” is precisely the original meaning of “keeping the second estate.” It is the direct “Plan-A” route to exaltation, without being required to be rescued, redeemed, ransomed, and snatched from damnation through the “Plan-B” Plan of Salvation coming at the horrific cost of Jesus’ Atonement. It is the notion of glory being added upon “for ever and ever” without the annoying interruption of having chosen to become carnal, sensual, and devilish, with a very small chance of ever regaining all the Plan-A opportunities. This is the very essence of the idea that there is another way, the preferred way!
And they who keep their first estate shall be added upon; and they who keep not their first estate shall not have glory in the same kingdom with those who keep their first estate; and they who keep their second estate shall have glory added upon their heads for ever and ever. (Abraham 3:26)
17. Moses 5:4–11 documents the very first command to repent (v.8) and the first influence of the comforter (v.9) as our parents realized they were being rescued from their lonely exile away from the presence of the Lord. The scripture then subsequently and objectively records their delirious responses in v.10–11. But our parent’s responses reflect no understanding of the Plan of Salvation to be revealed later, as documented in Moses 6. Their reactions, in varying degrees, still reflect a tone of rationalizing their actions as evidenced by the fact that light only comes to us in obedience, never as a result of disobedience (D&C 93:26–28, 31, 37–39). In full repentance, the Holy Ghost gives us love, comfort, and relief from the sense of being saved, redeemed, snatched; but we must not assign to the Holy Ghost the deluded sense that “It sure is a good thing that I sinned after all because of how good it feels to repent, and just look at all the opportunities I would have missed if I hadn’t sinned.” It helps to keep in mind that they had only just been commanded to repent, and that that purging action––producing thoughts realigned to true principles––had yet to be consummated over time. Moses 6:48–62 documents their later learning of the Plan of Salvation and their full repentance.
18. Thomas S. Monson, “They Marked the Path to Follow,” Ensign, October 2007, 7.
