A common theme in Latter-day Saint circles, admittedly with some scriptural support (Alma 34), is the idea that what matters at the end of the day is where we are with God at the moment of our death. That if somebody lives a sanctified life but throws it all out the last week of her life then she’s in a worse place than somebody who conversely lived a non-gospel life and found Jesus at the end. That the moment of death is sort of a “pencils down” moment in the test of life.  In terms of Church history, perhaps one example to make this concrete is the case of Amasa Lyman, who remained faithful and personally sacrificed all through the turbulence of the early and Utah-era Church, and then became a Godbeite at the very end. 

I am, of course, fine with somebody finding Jesus at the end ending up in the Good Place a la the thief on the Cross. However, I do think the idea of afterlife progression that Latter-day Saint theology has developed resolves a knotty problem of “moral luck,” where the somewhat arbitrary (at least in a moral sense) issue of when you die has big implications for your place in the hereafter. (I did another post on moral luck and how it relates to sexual minorities in the Church here). 

For example, if in one universe the exact same person goes through this life and has a wild teenager stage where they get involved in all sorts of misdeeds and then at the end they find God and repent, hardly anybody would begrudge that person a spot in the Good Place in the hereafter. However, if the exact same person was hit by a falling rock on a hike and died in the middle of their wild stage, where they end up was logically determined in a sense by the arbitrariness of whether a rock is weathered enough to break free from a mountain.  

At the same time, I’m a little uncomfortable with being judged completely on hypotheticals, because then we kind of get into the predestination territory, where God already knows what we’re going to do so there’s nothing we can do about it. But by the same token we do have some scriptural support for this, with Joseph Smith seeing his brother Alvin in the Celestial Kingdom after being told that those who would have accepted the gospel will get credit for having done so. 

But then if we layer the Joseph F. Smith vision and our theology of afterlife development on top of all this it’s not that we are judged based on a hypothetical, but on what they actually do do in the afterlife. So we do arguably have some tension between Amulek and our postlife learning and development theology, but the latter makes more sense to me.