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During New Testament times, grace (Greek charis) was considered a reciprocal gift, one that not only strengthened ties of friendship and obligation but also established a covenantal bond between people. Photo by natashsergeeva, 123rf.com.

Abstract: In New Testament times, the concept of grace (Greek charis) was operative in relationships in which a person giving something of value to another could expect the recipient to provide service, thanks, or something else of much lesser value in return. When the Apostle Paul described Jesus Christ’s atoning sacrifice as a gift (charis), his ancient audiences understood that redemptive act as initiating a covenantal bond with expectations of devoted discipleship. Bible translators have never properly conveyed Paul’s message of active, obliging grace, an oversight that some scholars of the New Pauline Perspective are now demonstrating. During the Great Apostasy, intellectuals distorted the concept of grace, characterizing it as a mystical feeling that guaranteed salvation with no strings attached. Restoration scripture and modern prophets have restored the active covenantal nuances of grace.

Keywords: Grace, Charis, New Testament theology, Apostle Paul, Joseph Smith, Restoration, Covenants

During New Testament times, grace (Greek charis) was considered a reciprocal gift, one that not only strengthened ties of friendship and obligation but also established a covenantal bond between people.[1] Through analyzing charis in its original first-century context, we can discover how Paul’s ancient audience understood his use of the term grace. With that background, we will explore how theologians during the Great Apostasy twisted the principle of relational grace into an emotional, mystical, and passive feeling of immediate salvation—and also how the Prophet Joseph Smith restored this original concept of grace.

The Meaning of Grace

In the ancient Mediterranean world, the concept of charis—a Greek noun primarily meaning “gift” or “favor”—fostered enduring social connections. Gift giving universally invited a significant response from the recipient. Not reciprocating after receiving a gift commonly produced guilt and shame in the withholder. While charis occasionally referred to a person’s beauty in antiquity, it was most often used to describe some type of favor initiating a client-patron relationship between two unequal people. When used in the sense of gift giving, charis referred to a favor or grace extended by the recipient to the giver. In the New Testament world, the Roman or Greek patron who showered his clients with gifts bound them to him. The patron then expected something in return. Reciprocated gifts included any kind of favors, gifts, service, gratitude, honor, and obedience that usually were of far lesser value than the original gift.

Ancient relationships began with and continued through ongoing rounds of gift giving. These charis relationships developed between people of unequal status, such as between an ancient king and a commoner. The commoner could never really repay the king but was still obligated to demonstrate loyalty and gratitude. By choosing to receive the king’s charis gift, the commoner became bound to the king by ties of loyalty. Charis also described familial gifts, gifts between friends, gifts between kings and servants, and gifts dedicated to and received from the gods. Orderly gift exchange was a key building block in the development of all ancient societies, promoting trust and loyalty among people of different social backgrounds.

New Testament writers described the Atonement of Jesus Christ as an act of charis because something was expected in return. When people accepted Jesus’s obliging gift, they showed gratitude by forming, among other things, a personal relationship with Deity. Even today, sociologists and anthropologists agree that all societies start and flourish by means of reciprocal gift giving.

Reciprocal Gift Giving

Millennia ago, ancient tribes often faced the serious threats of war and disunity. To deal with these challenges, these early societies created reciprocal relationships by gift giving. Forming these obliging relationships was often necessary for survival. Forging friendships and alliances helped avoid conflict and later even resulted in prosperous and stable societies. The gift giving involved was a continuous cycle of exchanging substantial items or benefits, including friendship, marriage, protection, security, land, tools, food, and weapons.

Until the 1960s, social scientists did not pay due attention to the concept of reciprocity as applied to societies both ancient and modern. Although Marcel Mauss wrote along this line in his influential essay “The Gift” in 1924, sociologists and anthropologists did not grasp the cultural significance of the widespread practice of gift exchange until decades later. Mauss identified three parts to gift giving: the need to give a gift, the need to receive it, and the obligation to repay the favor.[2]

The most common kind of gift exchange is vertical reciprocity, or gift exchange between people of differing social status, which has been documented in almost all societies.[3] Paul testified of the vertical, obliging gift of God the Father’s sacrifice of his Beloved Son to redeem fallen mankind: “He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?” (Romans 8:32). Jesus’s atoning gift inspires its recipients to be grateful and to enter into covenant relationships. Faithfulness in this covenant bond allows recipients to receive more enabling spiritual gifts in a cycle of reciprocity. These reciprocal gifts include the gift of the Holy Ghost, specific gifts of the Spirit such as charity, and sacred temple ordinances. Receiving Heavenly Father’s grace empowers his children to understand him better and to become more like him.

Uses of Charis in Archaic and Classical Greece

Archaic and classical Greek writers commonly referred to the relational and obliging nature of charis, as will be seen in the representative sampling that follows.

The four-thousand-year-old Indo-European root *gher- described the pleasure derived from being in good social standing.[4] The derivatives of that Indo-European root word are found in branches of ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, which all express these very old notions of reciprocity.[5] In these Indo-European cultures, powerful expectations of reciprocity were established when people received a gift from the gods or others. The recipients were expected to give something back in this newly formed relationship. Meanings of charis included forming relationships and obligations within a covenantal bond because of the beauty, joy, or usefulness of a gift.

In ��Ӱֱ��r’s Iliad (ca. 650 BC), charis meant to recognize a favor. These favors had an active force. Charis was not a mere passive feeling of appreciation.[6] Throughout the Iliad, the nuances of charis bound ancient people together by motivating some kind of gift in return.[7] The warrior Achilles performed favors (charis) for King Agamemnon, but in time they were no longer appreciated or returned. Disaster occurred when Agamemnon failed to return any favors to Achilles and instead dishonored him. Agamemnon’s failure to reciprocate charis to demonstrate gratitude for Achilles’s favors provoked Achilles’s wrath. In anger Achilles withdrew from the battlefield, with serious consequences for everyone.[8] Achilles was upset not only because of the material gains he did not receive but also because Agamemnon’s failure to reciprocate was an insult to Achilles’s honor. Returned favors granted glory to one’s king and companions in war.[9]

In Greek belief, the gods also expected reciprocal gratitude for gifts they gave, or shame would result for the human recipient. The early Greek poet Pindar wrote, “Accomplishment is granted to the prayers of men in gratitude (charis) for their piety.”[10] The Greek gods, who proverbially granted victory and honor as rewards when humans returned favors through prayer and sacrifice, especially favored athletes who demonstrated gratitude for their gifts.[11]

In classical antiquity, Herodotus (484–425 BC), known as the father of history, portrayed kings forming alliances by means of charis. For example, in Herodotus’s Histories, book 3, Polycrates exiled his brother Syloson. However, through a generous action of charis, Syloson subsequently won back his homeland, power, and wealth.[12] In Histories book 6, charis was the means to do others the greatest service possible. In Histories book 9, the Athenians requested archers for a favor they had to try to return. By doing a favor to Masistes and Xerxes by saving the king’s brother, Xenagoras became ruler of all the province of Cilicia.[13] Thus we see that in Herodotus’s narratives, charis created expectations and relationships among people that would gradually lead kings to regain their lost kingdoms. The classical Athenian playwright Sophocles (ca. 497–406 BC) expressed this norm in his tragic play Ajax in the words “favor always produces favor.”[14]

Uses of Charis in Hellenistic Literature

The ancient Mediterranean world slowly adopted the Greek language after the conquest of Alexander the Great at the end of the fourth century BC. Subsequent Jewish writers such as Josephus (AD 37–100) pointed out how charis shaped Old Testament narratives. Josephus was a Jewish general who eventually gained a charis relationship favor with the Romans and then received their protection. Josephus noted how the ancient prophet Elijah had benefited from the gift of Jericho’s hospitality and, in return, conferred an everlasting blessing of grace on the land in the form of drinkable water. This charis gift remained to bless his successor, Elisha.[15]

Josephus also showcased the charis relationship between Hiram, king of Tyre, and Solomon, king of Israel.[16] King Solomon inherited from his father this guest-friendship created by charis with Hiram.[17] They strengthened this relationship through the gifts they continually exchanged. Hiram provided Solomon with 120 talents of gold and large quantities of timber as charis gifts to build the temple. In return, Solomon later reciprocated by giving Hiram many gifts.[18] Josephus promoted expectations to repay gifts to others by citing the fifth commandment to honor parents and the elderly.[19] Giving and returning became an expected Jewish social convention, according to Josephus’s writings.

Gentile writings of New Testament times also described the expectations that giving gifts created. For example, the phrase “give and take” (dos kai labe) is commonly found in contemporaneous Greek texts.[20] Plutarch (AD 46–120) wrote, “Not only is it necessary for a statesman to keep himself and his home city blameless toward the rulers, but also always to have some friend in the circles of the most powerful as a firm support for the city. For the Romans themselves are best disposed toward the civic exertions of friends. And it is good that those who enjoy benefits from friendship with the powerful use it for the prosperity of the people.”[21] Plutarch portrayed charis as a reciprocal, obliging gift, one that created enabling and relational bonds and was important in maintaining social and political relationships.[22]

Hellenistic Charis Inscriptions

Ancient Greek government decrees preserved in public inscriptions demonstrate how Gentiles commonly understood charis in the apostolic period. These decrees show how a person or group sought to establish relationships with the gods through the exchange of favors or benefits. For example, a Greek village performed an act of generosity and thanked a god by means of a stone monument because of charis conventions: “It has been decided by the People from the village of Bouseiris of the Leopolite nome who live near the pyramids and by the district secretaries and village secretaries who dwell in (the village) to pass a decree and to erect a stone stele near [the greatest god,] the Sun Hamarchis, from the good deeds engraved on it [showing] his benefactions and letting [everyone] know that his god-like favors recorded by sacred writings, [will] forever be remembered.”[23] The second-century-AD decree of the city of Tomi notes its return of appropriate thanks to the gods for protection from recent attacks by a neighboring tribe.

The celebration of the gods’ blessing of crop fertility is sometimes called the “‘cycle of the gods’ beneficence,” and “gift giving is the appropriate human response of cultic gratitude.”[24] Paul’s cycle of grace in 2 Corinthians 9:11–15 is very similar. In a hymn to Isis-Hermouthis from first-century-AD Egypt, Isidorus wrote, “Remembering your [the gods’] gifts, men to whom you have granted wealth and great blessings (which you give them to possess all their lives) all duly set aside for you one tenth of these blessings, rejoicing each year at the time of your Panegyrie.”[25] In this example the principle of paying one-tenth, or a tithe, to the gods became a reciprocal duty to demonstrate thanks. In a series of papyri (168–161 BC), we learn that people cultivated the favor of the god Sarapis by providing sesame and kiki oils for drink offerings to fulfill their cultic obligations to him: “For this Sarapis and Isis Anmut may now give to you favor (charein) and satisfaction in regard to the King and Queen, on account of your holy relations to the divinity . . . [;] then you should accept elegance [and] favor (charis) [because of the fact] that you are piously disposed towards the divinity.”[26]

Paul taught that these same obliging, binding charis principles are expected because of Jesus’s atoning gift. Paul frequently invited Gentiles to accept God the Father’s gift of Jesus Christ’s atoning gift and to then act as disciples. Continued faithfulness invited other special gifts like those of the Spirit (1 Corinthians 12–13; Galatians 5). Through faithfulness within Christ’s new covenant, one could become a joint heir with Christ (Romans 8:17–18). Today the Christian faithful likewise pay tithes, serve missions, magnify callings, and serve God and others to demonstrate gratitude for Heavenly Father’s blessings.

Gratia in the Client-Patron System of Classical Rome

The Roman patron-client system of Paul’s day formed through reciprocal gift giving. A powerful person known as a patron offered gifts, including political influence, to protect and assist others. The recipients became clients, or beneficiaries of that patronage who were bound to the patron by ties of friendship, respect, deference, obligation, and mutual need. The patron-client system motivated social interaction through material exchange in Roman society. Scholars have pointed out that because patron-client relationships were usually vertical, most clients could never fully pay back their patron.[27] Patrons gained enormous social prestige through gift giving. This prestige created a significant covenantal bond to continue to benefit their faithful clients. Their clients became bound to serve their patron.

Patronage greased the wheels of Roman politics. It secured political offices, enabling officeholders to accumulate societal honor, wealth, and glory. Patronage also facilitated the administration of lucrative contracts for collecting Roman taxes. The eminent Roman historian Richard Saller noted that Roman patronage required the continual asymmetrical exchange of different and unequal goods and services. In this way patronage differed from friendship between equals.”[28] Patrons expected the return of gifts in a cyclical yet unequal manner. The Roman writer Seneca commented that “not to return gratitude for benefits is a disgrace, and the whole world counts it as such.”[29]

In ancient Rome the concept of charis,or gratia in Latin, figured in valuable property inheritance. Roman families celebrated gratia in the reading of wills. All concerned parties strove to be faithful to the master of the estate in order to inherit something valuable. Gratia within the patron-client relationship profoundly influenced Roman social life by enabling people to prosper.

Julius Caesar (100–44 BC) noted the purpose behind the mutually beneficial relationship a patron was supposed to have with his clients: “This custom seems anciently to have been established lest anyone of the people lack aid against the more powerful; indeed, no leader allows his own followers to be oppressed or cheated; if he acted otherwise, he would have no power over his own.”[30] Caesar protected his clients and thereby revealed the secret of attaining power in Rome: gain and ensure the support of more faithful clients than anyone else.[31]

Caesar’s contemporary Cicero (106–43 BC) gradually became a statesman by means of reciprocal grace. Cicero declared in 57 BC that he “should show gratitude for services received; I should cherish the friendships that have proved sterling in the fire. . . . Were I for the rest of my life permitted to discharge no other duty save that of giving proof of adequate gratitude towards merely the chief promoters and foremost champions of my restoration, I should nevertheless count the years that yet remain to me all too scanty a span even for the mere verbal expression of my gratitude, far more for its translation into deeds.”[32]Gratia produced gratitude, which brought about more gift giving and stronger relationships. Among the Romans he addressed, the Apostle Paul, by employing the word charis (gratia), encouraged these binding relationships with God the Father through Jesus Christ—the same relationships that he himself gained.[33]

How Paul’s Gentile Audience Understood Charis

Paul’s Roman audience already knew how grace could establish vibrant, faithful, and socially and politically advantageous interpersonal relationships. The Roman philosopher-statesman Seneca (4 BC–AD 65) held that affection between others occurred because of grace. He noted that an honorable patron would naturally feel concern for those from whom he benefited.[34] A client’s acceptance of a patron’s generous gift produced responsibilities that motivated feelings and actions of goodwill. Both creditor and debtor had many responsibilities in this relationship because “every obligation that involves two persons makes equal demands on both.”[35]

Grace became deeply embedded in Roman culture as a kind of social glue. Many Romans, like Paul in Romans 4:4–5, rejected any strictly commercial nuances of gratia since this obliging gift was not a mere financial transaction—rather, grace enabled future beneficial relationships. In the first-century Roman world of Jesus’s Apostles, Roman writers spotlighted the traditional view that initiating and receiving a patron’s gift was a matter of choice. Yet for honorable elites and their clients, giving and receiving gratitude was not an option. It was an absolute duty that established long-term and often lifelong patron-client relationships.

In many of his epistles, Paul highlighted Jesus’s atoning gift as an act of gratia in order to encourage covenant keeping. Jesus’s reciprocal, obliging gift made him the broker of the patron-client system. Now Heavenly Father was the patron and each person became the client. Christ’s sacrifice ideally gave rise to faithfulness and thereby initiated action in the form of devoted discipleship among the faithful. It is crucial to note that Paul did not teach that grace is a one-way, onetime, permanent gift from Christ. Rather, by accepting his atoning gift, the obedient are motivated to enter into Christ’s new covenant, an infinite gift that inspires faithful covenantal bonds. To reciprocate charis, disciples continually serve God and others. Covenantal faithfulness stimulates further graceful gifts that vertically bind humankind to Heavenly Father, enabling endurance to the end through keeping his commandments.

Paul appropriately made use of the term charis according to its proper Mediterranean social conventions. His audiences understood their obligation to loyally follow Jesus Christ. They manifested their covenantal obedience through service to God and others. For example, in 2 Corinthians 8 and 9, Paul reflected on the effort to provide relief to the Saints in Jerusalem. This Jerusalem collection of funds formed a three-way reciprocal relationship among the Pauline communities, the Saints in Jerusalem, and God.[36] Paul typified the principle of grace through collecting these funds. The Corinthians properly reciprocated charis by donating materially to assist Jerusalem’s poor Saints. These Saints had previously provided obliging charis gifts of spirituality in the form of the gospel of Jesus Christ (Romans 15:27). The Corinthians were obliged to reciprocate in some way.

Paul powerfully taught grace through the law of the harvest. Those who sow (or give) sparingly will reap (or receive) sparingly, and those who sow bountifully will reap bountifully and reciprocally (2 Corinthians 9:6). And just as God gives obliging grace to all his children, his disciples must receive it. The convention of grace created an expectation for them to do good works and build up their communities (v. 8). Church members in Jerusalem were appropriately grateful for the Corinthians’ charis gift to them. Upon receiving this charis gift, these Jerusalem Saints seem to have become concerned for the Corinthians’ well-being. Because of this growing relationship, they hoped the Corinthians would receive an abundance of grace from God in return for their reciprocal gifts. Paul also expressed hope that the Corinthians would eventually be blessed by God’s future reciprocal gifts (v. 8). Gift giving led to blessings for both the Jerusalem and Corinthian Saints. The Corinthians’ charitable acts toward those living in Jerusalem are a manifestation of their charis toward God through service to others.

In several sections of his epistles, Paul credited charis as a means of empowerment in cultivating faithfulness. He claimed that because of the gift of grace he was able to be “a wise masterbuilder” who fulfilled his obligation by laying a foundation for Christ (1 Corinthians 3:10–11). Because of the grace of God, he had a “testimony of . . . conscience” that empowered him in simplicity and godly sincerity (2 Corinthians 1:12). Paul wrote that the Lord had told him that His grace was sufficient, implying that Paul should continue in this covenantal relationship to receive more of God’s gifts. These gifts proved to be enough to sustain him at each stage of his faithful service. As Paul chose to be humble, his weaknesses could become strengths. For example, he received power as he relied on his relationship with Jesus brought about by Jesus’s atoning sacrifice. God’s gifts healed Paul’s thorn in the flesh, whatever that thorn might have been. Paul’s personal weakness led him to appreciate human weakness in general that required Christ’s enabling gifts (12:7–10). Paul stated, “By the grace [charis] of God I am what I am: and his grace [charis] which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace [charis] of God which was with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10).

Paul often credited his becoming an effective Apostle to the gift of obliging grace.[37] Unlike later theologians who would promote the doctrine of salvation by grace alone, Paul taught empowerment through reciprocating with God in covenantal faithfulness. For example, when in Romans 3:24 Paul speaks of “being justified freely by his grace,” his point seems to be that we can be justified as a gift (dorean) through Christ’s grace. This idea may lie behind Joseph Smith’s change of freely to only in the Joseph Smith Translation, which better reflects the nature of Jesus’s inviting, obliging gift. This slight difference in wording is significant because gifts were not given “freely” in the sense of being without any obligations. Every gift expected some demonstration of reciprocity and Christian discipleship.

The King James Version (KJV) translators did not properly communicate the first-century reciprocity of grace in New Testament verses that were central to Reformed Protestant theology’s view of salvation by grace alone. For example, the translation of Romans 10:9—“If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved”—does not express the covenantal nuances that this verse contained in the first century AD.[38] The Greek word ��dz��DZ��Dz���ō that the KJV translates as “confess” is more properly rendered “to consent,” “agree,” or even “make a promise to something or someone.” ��dz��DZ��Dz���ō in this verse meant to vocally assent, with the expectation that those assenting to Jesus’s lordship would transform their lives and become true disciples through entering a reciprocal charis relationship with him through the ordinance of baptism.

Matthew’s Gospel references the nature of reciprocal and obliging grace in the first-century Mediterranean world. We see this in 18:23–25, where Jesus teaches reciprocity in the parable of the unforgiving servant. The king, representing God the Father, pardoned his servant ten thousand talents. That amount may symbolically represent the innumerable sins that all people have individually committed, an amount that can never be repaid.[39] In the parable, the pardon reflects the social convention of reciprocity: A wealthy person like this king did not expect to be repaid; however, his gifts created obligations of positive action in those who received his gifts.

Despite accepting the king’s pardon (and his expectation that his servants would forgive the debts of others), the servant refused to pardon another servant who owed him one hundred silver coins (probably equal to about one hundred days of labor). The first servant had not lived up to his charis obligations, so he was turned over to the tormentors (Matthew 18:28, 34). His punishment was justified because in receiving the king’s gift of forgiveness, he became obligated to act as a future agent of the king’s mercy. This unfaithful servant should have reciprocated by granting forgiveness just as he had received it. That is, he should have felt and honored the expectations of grace to help and pardon others.

Expectations of grace are found in other New Testament writings. Jude, the half-brother of Jesus, warned in his short epistle that some evil people had crept in among the early Saints to corrupt them and were “turning the grace [charis] of our God into lasciviousness” (Jude 1:4). The blessing of obliging grace had to be actively reciprocated with Heavenly Father through faithful, covenantal obedience. However, some broke the law of chastity and thereby refused to have a relationship with God the Father. To fall into such a serious sin dishonored Jesus’s new covenant of obliging grace. Certain dishonorable, opportunistic Gentiles sometimes sought to take advantage of gifts without appropriately reciprocating. Such freeloaders were rightfully condemned. For religious people today, grace is one-sided as well if they focus only on Christ’s universally available atoning gift while ignoring charis’s relational nuances that encourage and expect the covenantal loyalty of discipleship. Charis requires strict obedience to all of God’s commandments, in contrast to popular cheap grace holding that one is saved by grace alone.

The Apostasy and Passive and Irresistible Grace

As early Christian theologians attempted to make the gospel respectable to the pagan masses, they interpreted Christian doctrines such as the Trinity and agency, as well as the principle of grace, through the popular third-century-AD philosophy of Neoplatonism. Plotinus (AD 204–70), the foremost pagan Neoplatonist philosopher of later antiquity, rejected the traditional active concept of grace in Roman society. He extolled the life of the mind and sought unity with “the One” through passivity. Because the One was abstract, Plotinus reasoned there was no way a person could cultivate a relationship with it; only a mystical unity with the One was possible. Thus the One became the highest form of an idea for Neoplatonists. Form for these Neoplatonists during the first five centuries AD was a timeless, absolute, nonphysical, and changeless essence of all things because physical objects of a physical world were allegedly mere imitations. For Plotinus, abstract, ideal forms of matter and the goodness of life became added goals of the human intellect (noesis).

Plotinus transformed Plato’s forms to focus only on the “One,” which for Plotinus was everything, a kind of divine light. Whereas Plato’s One was rational and filled everything with love and grace, Plotinus’s Neoplatonic One was both intellect and will, having all sovereign power while mankind had none.[40] Plotinus rejected traditional expectations of charis—both between people and between people and God—because he saw humankind as all having the same substance and thus being a very low emanation of the One. Moreover, he held that because humans could not resist the grace of the One, grace could never be reciprocated within covenant relationships. In promoting a purely altruistic form of giving outside the typical patron-client reciprocal model of charis, Plotinus redefined charis as completely free, unconditional, irresistible, and only altruistic.[41]

Saint Augustine (AD 354–430), the most influential Catholic Church father and the bishop of Hippo, admired Plotinus. He conveniently interpreted the Catholic doctrine of grace through Neoplatonism beginning in the late fourth century AD. Active, relational, first-century grace proved to be incompatible with the incomprehensible God of the later Christian creeds. This incomprehensible triune God without parts or passions neither expected nor required anything. Following the thinking of the pagan Plotinus, Augustine asserted in the fifth century that charis no longer obliged Christians to perform any works or acts of loyalty or covenantal faithfulness. In his later years as a bishop, Augustine argued for the irresistibility of God’s grace, insisting that because only God had agency, mankind accepted divinely bestowed gifts only if God desired. In this way Augustine and other Western Christian theologians effectively severed the link of covenants, reciprocity, and obligations by twisting the traditional meaning of charis. “It is not to be doubted,” wrote Augustine, “that the human will cannot resist the will of God,” just as Plotinus had argued.[42]

By the fifth century AD, guided by Neoplatonist thinking, the Catholic Church fathers had negated human agency by viewing the doctrine of grace in terms of an undefined passive mysticism. At the same time, these theologians were grappling with the collapse of the Roman patronage system in the West. Conventions of gift giving had ceased, and the concept of Roman fidelity had evaporated along with it. The chaos brought about by the fall of Rome influenced many Christian intellectuals during the apostasy to see grace as an abstract mystical force.

Distortions of grace led to other doctrinal errors, including determinism and original sin. Now, as Augustine taught, “wholly gratuitous grace means wholly efficacious and unconditional election: if God chooses to give us grace, then without fail we freely choose to receive it. So it is God who determines who receives grace and who does not.”[43] In his treatise On the Grace of Christ (AD 418), Augustine asserted that gratia was an inner teaching of understanding. By the fifth century, grace was a mystery that could be understood only privately and not as a gift that someone might choose to receive from God.[44] One result of this view was that faithful Christians could no longer cultivate a binding covenant relationship with God. Over the centuries, these evolving abstract concepts of grace gradually became accepted in Western Christianity.

Some Christians wisely opposed Augustine’s new definition of grace, but Augustine politically outmaneuvered them. However, Augustine did not know Greek well, unlike his contemporary critic Pelagius from Roman Britain (AD 354–440?). Pelagius taught that Jesus’s charis gift expected discipleship of all true Christians. Pelagius’s doctrine of grace was in harmony with classical meanings when he wrote, “God gives all graces to him who has been worthy of receiving them, just as he gave them to the apostle Paul.”[45] Pelagius seems to have argued, according to Augustine, that each person could choose between good and evil. He often reportedly said, “Whatever I ought to do, I can do.”[46]

Unfortunately, Augustine discredited Pelagius and other Pelagians through bribery. Augustine’s wealthy friend provided a horse to each bishop at church councils in order to garner votes for his theological innovations of mystical grace.[47] These greedy bishops later condemned Pelagius and his followers as heretics for teaching relational apostolic forms of grace that expected Christian discipleship. In the early Middle Ages grace became a one-directional, mystical freebie in Western Christianity. Several centuries later in the high Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas (1225–75) wholeheartedly accepted Augustine’s conclusions about grace, and his Catholic followers have promoted them since.[48]

Martin Luther (1483–1546), an Augustinian monk, further distorted the relational nature of grace. Luther considered Augustine as Christ’s thirteenth apostle. Luther professed his gladness that “God has taken my salvation out of my hands [and] into his, making it depend on his choice and not mine, and has promised to save me not by my own work or exertion but by his grace and mercy,” exhibiting both Augustinian and Neoplatonist influences.[49] Luther wrote that the Sermon on the Mount was the devil’s masterpiece because it required too much of Christians. He notoriously relegated the Epistle of James, which emphasized “faith without works is dead” (2:26), to the refuse pile because it “had no gospel quality to it.”[50] However, James’s epistle preserved the doctrine of Christian discipleship that resulted from a covenantal relationship initiated and empowered by the covenantal bonds of Jesus’s grace.

A couple of generations later, John Calvin’s (1509–64) followers summarized his teachings about agency and grace by the popular acronym TULIP: total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the Saints. Calvin argued that those who will be saved cannot resist the grace of Christ, which will automatically save them and then cause them to passively persevere to be saved. Calvin’s teachings were incompatible with the understanding since apostolic times of obliging, active covenantal charis. Irresistible grace became the foundation of Calvinistic doctrine in the sixteenth century and continues to influence Reformed Protestant theology today. Loss of the principle of relational grace provides evidence that a universal apostasy distorted the central doctrine of agency. It would appear that a correct understanding of grace was one of the plain and precious truths taken away from the Bible through translation (1 Nephi 13:26).

Fortunately, like Pelagius who disagreed with Augustine, not all later reformers agreed with Luther and Calvin. Jacob Arminius (1560–1609) opposed the opportunistic evolution of grace’s original and classical meanings. Instead, he asserted that God’s children had great power of will to appropriately act. Arminius argued that Christians needed to correctly use their power of will and therefore opposed the doctrine of predestination.[51] Many scholars have correctly noted that because Arminius argued for moral agency, he advanced the same doctrines of obliging grace as Pelagius once did. Herbert Thorndike (1598–1672), who adopted some of Arminius’s views, taught the fundamental nature of covenants associated with reciprocal grace in a spirit of free will.[52] He also asserted the importance of moral agency in fulfilling God’s covenant of grace.

In modern times, some churches and theologians adopted this semi-Pelagian, Arminian principle of grace. In fact, the Methodist Church incorporated much of Arminius’s theology that encouraged Christian discipleship as the proper response to God’s grace. Joseph Smith wrote that he was impressed with Methodism (Joseph Smith—History 1:8) “and thus may have been more Arminian in his thinking at that young age.”[53] In the twentieth century Dietrich Bonhoeffer taught that “cheap grace” was not what Christ intended. Bonhoeffer contrasted it with “costly grace,” the devoted, self-sacrificing discipleship required of Jesus’s followers.[54] C. S. Lewis likened grace to a pair of scissors made up of two blades: the classical reciprocity of one blade putting forth moral effort and the other having faith after receiving a gift from God.[55] In postmodern times, gifts are inherently free with no strings attached, but this is not how Jesus’s disciples perceived the expectations of his atoning gift.

Scholarship of the New Pauline Perspective strives to understand Paul’s message in his original first-century context. Scholars of this diverse New Testament perspective, including N. T. Wright, James Dunn, Bruce Malina, James Harrison, and John Barclay, generally reject the conventional thinking of cheap grace popularized long ago by Augustine, Luther, and Calvin. For example, in his 2015 book Paul and the Gift, Barclay conclusively demonstrates the reciprocal, obliging nature of charis in the New Testament.

According to the New Pauline Perspective, Paul’s first-century Roman audience would have understood Jesus’s Atonement as an act of charis, or an obliging gift (Romans 3:24). This special relational, reciprocal gift enables one to become just (righteous) through covenantal faithfulness (5:16). Grace inspires faithfulness leading to eternal life (v. 21) as people fully accept Jesus’s new covenant through baptism (Romans 6). When accepting God’s special gifts of Jesus’s Atonement, the gift of the Holy Ghost, and other relational gifts of the Spirit, all people may be saved through covenantal obedience. Entering into a covenant with God the Father through his Son becomes the appropriate, loyal, covenantal response to grace by which all Christian disciples now may stand (5:2). Paul’s Roman audience would have understood that by means of the Father and Son’s charis, all people who choose to fully embrace the gospel will be enabled to endure to the end, become like them, and thereby have hope in a glorious, celestial resurrection.

Joseph Smith Restores Relational Grace

Joseph Smith’s translation of the Book of Mormon restores the ancient principle of relational grace. The book’s narratives showcase faithfulness within a covenant established by the empowering gift of Christ’s Atonement. Grace as depicted in the Book of Mormon is remarkably in harmony with the social sciences and parallels ancient Mediterranean understandings of charis. Its depictions of relational grace fit the Near Eastern setting of the Bible and Paul’s ancient Mediterranean world. It is especially notable that modern Protestant beliefs associated with the abstract, one-directional grace of Joseph’s nineteenth-century contemporaries are missing. In particular, the Book of Mormon’s uses of grace parallel the meanings of hesed (“mercy”) and hen (“favor”) from the Old Testament since all gifts give rise to reciprocal obligations. Grace in the Book of Mormon necessarily inspires faithfulness. It even encourages disciples to restore broken covenant relationships.

The sermons of Jacob and Nephi in 2 Nephi 10 and 25, respectively, restore active, relational, and covenantal grace. Nephi explains later in the text why he works so hard to persuade his posterity and his brethren, faithful or recalcitrant, “to believe in Christ.” It is because all must “be reconciled to God,” preserving or restoring their good standing within a covenantal relationship through the proper exercise of moral agency, “for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do” (2 Nephi 25:23). Here Nephi’s famous words echo, almost verbatim, the words of Jacob in 2 Nephi 10:24, where he admonishes the “brethren” to reconcile themselves to the will of God and to remember that “after ye are reconciled unto God, that it is only in and through the grace of God that ye are saved.” Nephi’s phrase “reconciled to God” is a shortened allusion to Jacob’s slightly longer phrases “reconcile yourselves to the will of God” and “after ye are reconciled to God.”

When Nephi says “We know that it is by grace that we are saved,” he not only speaks for himself but also implicitly recognizes Jacob as the source of this expression. Moreover, we can surmise that in writing “after all we can do,” Nephi is expecting his readers to recall what Jacob has previously taught—namely, that salvation occurs through the grace of God only after one is reconciled to God. “After all we can do” can thus be seen as an elliptical reference to Jacob’s statement “after ye are reconciled unto God,” a linkage that maintains the covenantal relationship through divine atonement and human reconciliation of any infractions of God’s law. This covenant relationship allows the grace, justice, wisdom, power, mercy, and greatness of God to operate as further reciprocal gifts so that we “are saved” (2 Nephi 10:24; 25:23).[56] Besides being a stunning example of the Book of Mormon’s intertextuality, Nephi’s teaching on grace in 2 Nephi 25 correctly invokes the ancient covenantal understanding of charis that was common in the preclassical Mediterranean world.

Notably, Jacob’s sermon was delivered in a temple context since Jacob had “come up into the temple this day that I might declare unto you the word of God” (Jacob 2:2) as Nephi delivered his message of covenantal grace after the dedication of the temple. In his narrative introduction to his discourse, Jacob informed his listeners that both he and his fellow priesthood holders had “labored diligently” to convince their people to “come unto Christ and partake of the goodness of God, that they might enter into his rest” (1:7).[57] This “rest” seems to allude to Psalm 95, which denoted being able to be in the presence of God.[58] This opportunity to be in God’s presence, as Jacob taught, must have motivated the righteous to reconcile themselves through covenants (2 Nephi 10:24). This insight into the Book of Mormon’s covenantal nature of grace is most illuminating. Its theology clearly stands in tension with ideas of cheap grace that emerged during the Great Apostasy. Joseph Smith’s 1842 formulation of the doctrine of salvation subtly restores the ancient concept of charis: “We believe that through the Atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel” (Articles of Faith 1:3). Joseph Smith understood the centrality of human agency. Jesus’s atoning gift inspires and enables its recipients to receive all the gifts of God, including the empowering gift of the Holy Ghost.

With this restored understanding, Jesus’s grace once again invited genuine Christian discipleship. Its restoration empowered those who made and kept covenants to become like him (Doctrine and Covenants 84:19–20). Joseph Smith conspicuously set the Church apart from contemporary Reformed Protestant views of grace when he emphasized that being born again comes by the Spirit of God through ordinances.[59] Lectures on Faith emphasizes the importance of drawing near to God by choosing to develop a faithful relationship with him. As people “begin to live by faith they begin to draw near to God; and when faith is perfected they are like him; and because he is saved they are saved also; for they will be in the same situation he is in, because they have come to him; and when he appears they shall be like him, for they will see him as he is.”[60] Elder Bruce R. McConkie (1915–1985) insightfully noted that some modern teachings of easy grace are incorrect because they do not help mankind repent. He explained that “anytime men can devise a system of worship that will let them continue to live after the manner of the world, to live in their carnal and fallen state, and at the same time one which will satisfy their innate and instinctive desires to worship, such, to them is a marvelous achievement.”[61] Certain modern notions of grace are similar to Lucifer’s plan to save all humankind by destroying their agency. Such ideas are false, have no salvation in them, and are not of God.[62]

The charis relationships initiated by Jesus’s Atonement enable covenantal faithfulness. God grants the gift of Jesus’s Atonement to all, and in return mankind becomes obligated to reciprocate through properly using moral agency. A divine charis relationship occurs only when people make and keep covenants according to priesthood ordinances that God has restored. As disciples faithfully strive to keep these covenants and remain loyal, they will receive more empowering gifts. Through reciprocating in covenant relationships, they will gradually become fully converted. Faithful disciples will notice a strengthening of their personal relationships with God the Father as they receive more grace or gifts from him. Through choosing to endure to the end, as necessitated by the covenant relationship of obliging grace, disciples come closer to God. By covenantal faithfulness, they can even become like him, “grace for grace,” as often taught in scripture of the Restoration (Doctrine and Covenants 93:12–13, 20). In sum, grace is an empowering, enabling, relational principle that ultimately motivates people to properly utilize their moral agency, resulting in covenantal faithfulness.

Substituting “covenantal bond” or “obliging gift” when encountering the word grace in the King James Version of Paul’s epistles restores the message his original readers once understood. Christ’s Atonement enables its recipients to faithfully take advantage of God the Father’s amazing gifts. All qualify by faithful covenantal loyalty to receive even more special enabling gifts. Relational grace inspires faithfulness, repentance, and the reception of other gifts such as saving priesthood ordinances of the temple. These charis relationships with God the Father and his Beloved Son, when gradually guided by the gift of the Holy Ghost, result in the ability to endure on the covenant path of exaltation.

The principle of grace as an obliging gift that establishes a covenantal bond was once found in even the most puzzling New Testament texts. Properly rendering these verses that seemingly teach immediate salvation by grace alone in fact restores their original, ancient meanings. This can be seen in the five examples that follow, with each proposed rendering of Paul’s words restoring the original idea of relational grace and thereby exhibiting with added clarity the empowering nature of Jesus’s atoning grace.

Romans 4:16 reads, “Therefore it [justification] is of faith, that it might be by grace.” This statement was rightly corrected by Joseph Smith to highlight the obligations of properly using moral agency. Each person chooses to receive Christ’s grace through actions of discipleship since “therefore ye are justified of faith and works, through grace” (Joseph Smith Translation, Romans 4:16). Paul’s original first-century readers would have likely read the entire verse as follows: “Therefore this is derived through covenant so that by covenantal bond the promise might endure for all his descendants, not only for the descendants of the Mosaic law but even for the descendants of the Abrahamic covenant, who is the father of all of us.”

Romans 5:20 reads, “Moreover the law entered, that the offence might abound. But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” Paul’s audience likely understood this verse as saying, “Mosaic law came into being so that the transgression might proliferate; but where wrongdoing proliferated, His covenantal bond might proliferate even more.”

Later in Romans 11:6, Paul writes, “And if by grace, then is it [a reciprocal gift] no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace. But if it be of works, then is it no more grace: otherwise work is no more work.” This was likely understood as “If it is by covenantal bond, it is no longer derived from Mosaic actions, since the covenantal bond would no longer be a relational gift.”

When Paul mentioned his apostolic calling by “his grace” (Galatians 1:15), his audience knew he was referring to Jesus’s covenant bond encouraged by the reciprocal gift of his atoning sacrifice.

Finally, Paul’s audience likely understood Galatians 2:21—“I do not frustrate the grace of God: for if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain”—to mean “I do not reject the covenantal bond of God the Father; for if justness comes from Mosaic law, did Christ die as a worthless gift?”

Rather than supporting doctrines of guaranteed immediate salvation by experiencing grace as a mystical experience, all people may affirm the empowering nature of Christ’s relational grace that invites the bestowal of more enabling gifts of God in mortality.

Notes

[1] I explore in detail how charis established a covenantal bond between people in my book Relational Grace: The Reciprocal and Binding Covenant of Charis (Provo, UT: BYU Studies, 2015). Much of the information in this article is drawn from this book.

[2] Marcel Mauss, “Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l’echange dans les societes archaiques,” L’Année Sociologique 1 (1923–24): 30–186. Mauss’s popular essay was turned into a work entitled The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967).

[3] Mary Douglas, The World of Goods (New York: Routledge, 1996); and Geoffrey MacCormack, “Reciprocity,” Man 11, no. 1 (March 1976): 97.

[4] Bonnie MacLachlan, The Age of Grace: Charis in Early Greek Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 4. In Proto-Indo-European, the ending (a stem or a suffix) -went (or -vant or -ent) means “to have” or “to have received” something. For example, in Sanskrit, the ending was added to putra- (son) and became putravant, “having sons.” This ending was added to the Greek word chari- (lovely), and it became charient, meaning “having or receiving grace.” The ending -went includes the meaning of people receiving something, such as a lovely gift, deed, action, or relationship. Don Ringe, From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic: A Linguistic History of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 63.

[5] Sabapathy Kulendran, Grace: A Comparative Study of the Doctrine in Christianity and Hinduism (London: Lutterworth, 1964), 27–28. Kulendran points to the Sanskrit word Prasada,meaning “being clear,” “being glad,” or “favorable.” See Christopher Gill, Norman Postlethwaite, and Richard Seaford, eds., Reciprocity in Ancient Greece (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), on early Greek reciprocity.

[6] MacLachlan, Age of Grace, 5–6.

[7] One good example is in ��Ӱֱ��r, Iliad 14.233–35.

[8] ��Ӱֱ��r, Iliad 9.316.

[9] ��Ӱֱ��r, Iliad 4.95; 5.211; 9.613; 15.449; 17.291. See MacLachlan, Age of Grace, 15.

[10] Pindar, Olympian Odes 8.5.

[11] Pindar, Olympian Odes 8.7–8.

[12] Nick Fisher, “Popular Morality in Herodotus,” in Brill’s Companion to Herodotus (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 213.

[13] Herodotus, Histories 9.107.3.

[14] Sophocles, Ajax, line 522.

[15] Josephus, Jewish War 4.461.

[16] Josephus, Against Apion 1.110.

[17] Josephus, Against Apion 1.110.

[18] Josephus, Against Apion 1.110–11.

[19] Josephus, Against Apion 2.206.

[20] Plato, Laws 774C.3, 774D.1–2; Xenophon, Cyropaedia 4.6.10; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 3.8.5; 4.11.2; 10.18.4; 15.5.1; Demosthenes, Orationes 37.37; Xenophon, Anabasis 4.8.7; 7.7.36.

[21] Plutarch, Moralia 814C.

[22] Plutarch, Vita Theseus 10.3; Plutarch, Moralia 814 C; Richard P. Saller, Personal Patronage under the Early Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 154.

[23] Wilhelm Dittenberger, Orientis Graeci Inscriptiones Selectae (Hildesheim, Germany: George Olms, 1960), 666, using “tas istheous charitas autou”; and James R. Harrison, Paul’s Language of Grace in Its Graeco-Roman Context (Tubingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 28.

[24] Otto Michel, Der Brief an die Römer (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1955), 344; and Harrison, Paul’s Language of Grace, 28, 54, 55.

[25] Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1994), 8:549; Isidorus, Hymn II, lines 21–8; and Harrison, Paul’s Language of Grace, 54.

[26] Ulrich Wilcken, Urkunden der Ptolemäerzeit (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1927), 1:34–6; and Harrison, Paul’s Language of Grace, 86–87.

[27] See especially the works of A. R. Hands, Charities and Social Aid in Greece and Rome (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968); and MacLachlan, Age of Grace, 1993.

[28] Richard P. Saller, Personal Patronage under the Early Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1982),1.

[29] Seneca, De Beneficiis 3.1.1; compare 4.18.1.

[30] Julius Caesar, Commentarii de Bello Gallico 6.11.4.

[31] Saller, Personal Patronage under the Early Empire, 17, 20.

[32] Cicero, Oratio Post Reditum Senatu 9.23–4.

[33] Romans 1:5: “By whom we have received grace and apostleship, for obedience to the faith among all nations, for his name.” In other words, Paul’s reception of charis motivated his own obedience and covenantal faithfulness during his apostolic ministry.

[34] Seneca, De Beneficiis 2.18.5–6.

[35] Seneca, De Beneficiis 2.18.1.

[36] Romans 15:25, 28; Stephan J. Joubert, Paul as Benefactor: Reciprocity, Strategy and Theological Reflection in Paul’s Collection (Tubingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 133. See Joubert’s discussion on this topic on pp. 139–40, 200, 202, 216; and Richard R. Melick Jr., “The Collection for the Saints: 2 Corinthians 8–9,” Criswell Theological Review 4, no. 1 (Dallas: Criswell College, 1989): 97–117.

[37] 1 Corinthians 3:10–11; 15:10; 2 Corinthians 1:12; 12:7–10; Ephesians 3:7–8; 1 Timothy 1:14.

[38] Online Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. “ὁμολογέω”; and Loren Graham, “The Power of Names: In Culture and in Mathematics,” American Philosophical Society 157, no. 2 (June 2013): 230.

[39] For example, we can convert the amount to modern US dollars as follows: There are 16 ounces of gold in a pound, and 1 talent is approximately 75 pounds in the parable. Further, 16 multiplied by 75 multiplied by 10,000 talents multiplied by 2,300 (if gold is at $2,300 per ounce) would be $27,600,000,000—an astronomical debt for anyone.

[40] Plotinus, Enneads �ձ�.7.35.30–4��.

[41] Robert M. Berchman, “The Golden Rule in Greco-Roman Religion and Philosophy,” in The Golden Rule: The Ethics of Reciprocity in World Religions, ed. Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton (New York: Continuum, 2008) 40–54, esp. 51–52. It should be noted that Plotinus, Iamblichus, Porphyry, and Proclus did believe in the importance of good works through rituals they often calledtheurgy. Plotinus, Enneads II.2.5, 13–14; III.2.8; Proclus, Platonic Theology 1.19; Iamblichus, On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians 1.12, 14; 2.11; 3.16–18; Porphyry, Ad Marcellam 16.

[42] Augustine, De Correptione et Gratia 14; Augustine, The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love 100.2.

[43] Augustine’s main idea in Ad Simplicianum; Phillip Cary, Inner Grace: Augustine in the Traditions of Plato and Paul (Oxford: Oxford University, 2008), 87–88.

[44] Augustine, On the Grace of Christ 13–22; and Cary, Inner Grace, 94.

[45] Pelagius, De Get. Pelag. 32.

[46] Pelagius, De Get. Pelag. 33

[47] Augustine, Against Julian 1:42; 3:35; Henry Chadwick, “Orthodoxy and Heresy from the Death of Constantine to the Eve of the First Council of Ephesus,” in The Cambridge Ancient History, ed. Averil Cameron and Peter Garnsey, vol. 13, The Late Empire, AD 337–425 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1998), 453, 561–600. See Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California, 2000), 364; Christopher Kelly, “Emperors, Government, and Bureaucracy,” in Cambridge Ancient History, 13:138–83.

[48] Aquinas, Summa Theologica: Prima Secundae Partis, questions 62.4.3; 109.2. See Michael Mawson, “Understandings of Nature and Grace in John Milbank and Thomas Aquinas,” Scottish Journal of Theology 62, no. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2009): 351.

[49] Martin Luther, On the Bondage of the Will (Luther’s Works, 33:289); and Cary, Inner Grace, 85.

[50] Martin Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar, Germany: H. Böhlaus, 1906), 6:10. See John W. Welch, The Sermon on the Mount in the Light of the Temple (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), esp. 36, 123.

[51] See a succinct discussion of these theological ideas in Robert L. Millet, What Happened to the Cross? (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2007), 9.

[52] Michael McGiffert, “Herbert Thorndike and the Covenant of Grace,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 58, no. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2007): 440–60, esp. 447–48.

[53] Robert L. Millet, “Joseph Smith Encounters Calvinism,” BYU Studies 50, no. 4 (2011): 14.

[54] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 55, 59, 68–69.

[55] C. S. Lewis, The Joyful Christian (New York: Macmillian, 1977), 135.

[56] For further discussion on this topic, see Joseph M. Spencer, “What Can We Do? Reflections on 2 Nephi 25:23,” Religious Educator 15, no. 2 (2014): 33, 36–37.

[57] David E. Bokovoy, “Ancient Temple Imagery in the Sermons of Jacob,” Interpreter 46 (2021): 34.

[58] Bokovoy, “Ancient Temple Imagery,” 34–35.

[59] History, 1838–1856, volume C-1 (2 November 1838–31 July 1842), addenda, 13, www.josephsmithpapers.org.

[60] Lectures on Faith (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1985), 74, par. 8.

[61] Bruce R. McConkie, “What Think Ye of Salvation by Grace?” (Brigham Young University devotional, January 10, 1984), https://speeches.bye.edu.

[62] McConkie, “What Think Ye of Salvation by Grace?”