CaliforniaKid wrote:Water Dog wrote:Imagine a parent with a child who has cancer. Imagine if somehow this parent were able to give themselves cancer, so that they could experience, literally, all the things that their child is experiencing. Then the parent could "succour" their child, comfort them, and act as a guide showing them how to overcome this horrible trial. This is where Christ comes in. His having been tortured is irrelevant as far as the actual act of the atonement is concerned. Two other guys were on crosses right next to him, they suffered just the same. The great miracle that Christ performed was a kind of acquisition of knowledge. A kind of comprehensive knowledge of the human condition and all the possible temptations and hardships that come with it. Holy Ghost is medium through which that knowledge is transferred to us. This is why Book of Mormon has such a strong emphasis on living by the spirit.
This is the doctrine of incarnation, not the doctrine of atonement, and except for the reference to the Book of Mormon it could have been written by any nineteenth-century Protestant.
At the end of the day, the Book of Mormon is a pretty Protestant book—especially in its understanding of atonement. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, mind you. But it shoots holes in the theory that the Book of Mormon's religious agenda is to introduce a new theology of atonement. Now, its agenda could be to simply drive home the standard Protestant theory in compelling narrative and simple language, but then that leaves a lot of other, more interesting stuff in the Book of Mormon unaccounted for.
God needed to learn something from Jesus's life and death and then share that knowledge with us through the spirit?
That may be the strangest proposal I have heard to explain what Christianity is about.
How could God need to learn?
Is this a step to later Mormon thinking about God once being man?I think not. That scenario would mean God had already experience human condition first hand.