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.
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15 responses to ““Moral Luck” and Time of Death”
What we call the final judgment, where housing assignments are made in the telestial, terrestrial, or celestial kingdom, occurs a thousand or so years after the second coming, which hasn’t occurred yet — it doesn’t happen when the rock hits the rebellious youth in the head. He (the rebellious youth) has plenty of time to make things right.
I suspect that God’s infinitely wise judgement will make up for these moral luck hypotheticals, I suspect that if we lean too hard on the message that you can just repent and make it all up in the next life, that people who would have otherwise put in the proper work here in mortality, won’t. And because they didn’t when they should have, they don’t just repent and make it all up in the next.
Our focus should be on doing all that we can in the here and now.
I am not really alright with the picture of the person who is righteous and loving and kind for 65 years, then for whatever reason turns his back on the church going to a lower kingdom than if he had “stayed faithful”. First of all, I think God judges us on how kind and loving we are, not on what exactly we believe about any organized religion. People don’t suddenly go from kind and loving into hateful and that is what God judges us on. Now, what a person thinks about organized religion can change because of a dishonest leader, or even the perception of a dishonest leader, so that can change all of a sudden for reasons outside f the person’s control. And a lot of people who are held up as examples of suddenly going evil turned against Joseph Smith because of polygamy. I happen to agree with them, that Joseph was wrong to ever start polygamy.
I also think God will give us unlimited chances to follow Christ. So, if someone is good for that 65 years, then on their deathbed, oh, say in pain like Job was with the boils and losing his whole family and the curse God. Well, back to Job, did God judge him on those few hours when he was curing God wishing he had never been born? What if he had died just then? No, God judged him on his overall life. People can say or do all kinds of horrible things during moments of great distress, and death is one of those times.
What is the person’s personality? Loving or hateful? That is what God will judge us on, not a few hours or weeks of bad behavior. Bad behavior can happen and I don’t think God is going to judge us on our worst time, even if it is at the end of our life.
Now, deathbed repentance is another thing. Say you have a real jerk. In the last few hours of life they get scared and turn to Jesus. Is it sincere, or just because they got scared of hell? If they were not willing to *live* a Christlike life, who says that their “repentance” will last past “waking up dead” and then being tempted to be a jerk again. I just don’t trust “death bed repentance” to be a real commitment to live in a Christlike way. The old saying about there not being any atheists in foxholes applies here. When people are scared they do and say things that are out of character. I think “deathbed repentance” is just a reaction to fear and it doesn’t usually change their whole character. If they are a selfish twit for 80 years, then have a “deathbed repentance” experience, I just don’t think it changes them permanently. It *might*.
I have seen people have a death scare where they swear up and down they are going to change. Then, say, the doctor cures their cancer and a year later, they are right back to being a selfish jerk. Their “deathbed repentance” just doesn’t last.
So, it is a good thing I don’t have to judge people as to who really changes just before death and who doesn’t. Because I am going to trust the guy who is good until then last while to stay basically good, and want to know what happened to change his mind and I am going to strongly distrust the guy who gets scared and is afraid of going to hell on his deathbed.
ji: Right, but the issue of how much repenting we can do exactly in the hereafter is still a little fuzzy, you can make a historical/theological argument for both perspectives.
jader3rd: That’s a great point with the “eat, drink, and be, merry, for in the afterlife we can repent.” There are at least practical, self-improvement benefits to the idea that we need to resolve our issues in the here and now, so I kind of see the purpose for being somewhat ambiguous about the extent to which we are judged on our mortal life actions versus that plus afterlife decisions and actions.
Anna: You make good points about an overemphasis on the moment of death versus the whole arc, even if we do believe in repentance.
President Kimball believed in moral luck. From The Miracle of Forgiveness:
In an interview with a young man in Mesa, Arizona, I found him only a little sorry he had committed adultery but not sure that he wanted to cleanse himself. After long deliberations in which I seemed to make little headway against his rebellious spirit, I finally said, “Goodbye, Bill, but I warn you, don’t break a speed limit, be careful what you eat, take no chances on your life. Be careful in traffic for you must not die before this matter is cleared up. Don’t you dare to die.” I quoted this scripture:
Wherefore, if they should die in their wickedness they must be cast off also, as to the things which are spiritual, which are pertaining to righteousness; wherefore, they must be brought to stand before God, to be judged of their works.
…And there cannot any unclean thing enter into the kingdom of God; wherefore there must needs be a place of filthiness prepared for that which is filthy. (1 Ne. 15:33-34.)
A slow death has its advantages over the sudden demise. The cancer victim who is head of a family, for instance, should use his time to be an advisor to those who will survive him. The period of inactivity after a patient learns there is no hope for his life can be a period of great productivity. How much more true this is of one who has been involved in deliberate sin! He must not die until he has made his peace with God. He must be careful and not have an accident.
I don’t believe in moral luck and it’s turning me into a Calvinist and I absolutely hate that.
The D&C 19 principle (God will, at the very least, allow His word to be misinterpreted if that misinterpretation produces net-salutary effects) is really quite a bombshell. In this case it makes possible what jader3rd suggests – it’s better to believe in a bit of arbitrary moral luck which spurs actual action than the sentiment parodied by 2 Nephi 28:7-8.
We should probably learn to apply “all models are wrong, but some models are useful” to religion.
It is difficult for me to state how much I dislike this conversation. I am reminded of a well-intentioned Seminary teacher who promised to pay $100 (this was in 1995) to any student who read the entire BoM during the school year. They were so excited, and they all did it.
I’m sure he believed that doing the right thing for the wrong reason is still a good thing. But I disliked that so much. First, it gives the students this idea: “The BoM is so boring, or stupid, or possibly worthless that I will read it only if I am paid to do so.” What is the reward for reading the BoM? It is reading the BoM.
What is the reward for being good? It is that being good is, er, good. It is its own reward, and is not related to the here-after. Didn’t King Mosiah talk about this? That we are instantly rewarded for doing good things, so we can’t run up a “debt” to God. How are we rewarded for being good? Goodness is its own reward. I am not honest because I believe it will promote my well-being in the next life. I am honest because honesty promotes good relationships. And other things. Being honest is both the goal AND the reward.
If we think that we are earning our way to the Celestial Kingdom, we don’t understand. (In my opinion.) We don’t sacrifice in this life in order to obtain a bigger bonus in the next life.
We really don’t understand the next life. Anyone who says they do is not being fully honest, or doesn’t understand that they are just guessing about many things. Joseph Smith taught that whatever intelligence we obtain in this life, will rise with us. Intelligence, again, is its own reward. Joseph told us that the relationships we form in the life will follow in the next. The relationships are their own reward. We don’t form friendships in order to pave the way to more friends in the life to come. We form friendships because true friendship is its own reward.
Go back and watch “The Good Place” again, which makes it clear (yes, I am quoting a sit-com) that doing good for the sake of earning “points” in the next life is futile. We don’t get points if we do it just to get points.
Perhaps the most blatant example of this is Ammon telling Lamoni’s father in Alma 20 that if he died right then his soul could not be saved, but the fact that he lived four more chapters apparently changed everything. One option is assuming God makes sure people die at the right time–though if you accept the premise that Amasa Lyman lost his exaltation at the bitter end that may not be the time that’s most favorable to us. That feels to me like God choosing who will be saved or not, so I’d prefer to think that while the Nephites had an incredible amount of light and knowledge about the atonement of Christ or the scattering and gathering of Israel, their understanding of what comes after this life was limited.
We need to let go of the idea that God sent us here so he can learn something about us. One of the things God wants us to know about him is that he can see the future. He makes the point over and over again in the scriptures. I get where Last Lemming is coming from, but in my mind this differs from Calvinism in two very important ways: 1) We choose our final outcome; God just knows what our choice will be, and 2) God does not set up anyone to fail. Even the Telestial Kingdom is a major step forward from our previous state. (Yes, outer darkness raises interesting questions.)
We’re here so that we can learn, in particular to learn by our own experience to distinguish good from evil and choose between them. Those choices are always filtered through our cultural baggage and the light and knowledge we have at the time. I don’t think God really judges us on hypotheticals: he knew how Alvin Smith would respond to the restored Gospel by observing how he responded to the light and knowledge he did have.
I firmly believe that what God cares about is not what we’re like on the day of our death, or whether we accumulated enough points over the course of our mortal life (i.e. The Good Place), but what we will be in a billion years and all the eternities that follow. And given infinite time and the infinite power of the atonement, that comes down to what we really want. Now, if we’re putting off becoming someone better because we don’t really want to be better, a billion years won’t change that. But we do have plenty of time for mistakes and false starts. Mortal life is a time of particular moral clarity, and I think it’s tenable to say God’s judgement is basically predicting our future based on what we do in mortality. But he could be just looking at what he already knows we’ll become.
If there really is a law irrevocably decreed in heaven upon which all blessings are predicated upon then God cannot simply have a charitable grading scale. Rather he’s going to need an infinite grading period whereby people can repent and use the atonement to grow.
Maybe God judges us our final character (who we are as a person) rather than on our final relationship with the rules of living a certain way (how well we keep the commandments).
Character isn’t going to change in the final week/s or month/s of a life regardless of whether we sudden convert or leave the church, etc.
Robert K: While I’m reticent to wholly accept the idea that the day of your death is the only day that matters, I also don’t think it has the exact same significance as any other day, so I’m not all the way on one side or the other.
Last Lemming: Lol, although Calvinism is the ultimate moral luck, isn’t it? God decides where you go and you don’t have a choice.
Stephenchardy: This conversation doesn’t necessarily hinge on motivation, just on the reality: is our standing the moment of our death the main thing?
RLD: Of course, I forgot about that one. The Ammon story is another good example of the earlier Book of Mormon theology on this.
“I firmly believe that what God cares about is not what we’re like on the day of our death, or whether we accumulated enough points over the course of our mortal life (i.e. The Good Place), but what we will be in a billion years and all the eternities that follow. And given infinite time and the infinite power of the atonement, that comes down to what we really want.”
This is basically my belief. With a bajillion years you have a large enough sample size to really make an estimate about somebody, and the bumpy randomness of your mood that day/week/year is “smoothed.”
@Casey F: “Rather he’s going to need an infinite grading period whereby people can repent and use the atonement to grow.” Similar to my RLD comment above, I agree.
@ReTX: I think our differences with mainstream Chrisitanity are important here. I do think we can be saved in the traditional sense by a deathbed or post-life acceptance of Jesus, but for exaltation I think you’re right.
I have a personal stake in deathbed repentance. One of my brothers seems to have been born a rebel. When he was diagnosed with a deadly brain tumor as a tween, knowing he probably wouldn’t survive to adulthood–oddly enough–didn’t lead him to make more responsible choices. He got in a lot of trouble and caused my parents a lot of grief. But when in process of time probability became certainty and someday became soon, he started thinking hard about what would come next. He had some long talks with the faithful home teacher who had insisted on checking in with him every month all those years. That led to talks with the bishop. (He may have been repentant but he was still sixteen–of course he wasn’t going to talk with his parents.) And on the morning of his funeral I received a powerful witness that he had gotten right with God and was bound for the celestial kingdom.
So, deathbed repentance, but a change of character? He’d always been a deeply good kid: kind, ready to help, always looking out for those on the lower rungs of the social ladder (even when their influence got him in trouble). The hospital staff all fell in love with him: he made them laugh by cracking jokes to the end; he made them cry by insisting on spelling out “thank you” by slowly touching one letter at a time on a card when that was the only way he could communicate.
I really don’t know if we change what we want at the deepest level. (If we want to change what we want, don’t we already want it?) But our affiliations, our loyalties, our beliefs about the world, even our understanding of how to best help people, those can change in a heartbeat. Just ask Paul and Alma the Younger. I suspect we’re going to find a lot of people we now disagree with in the celestial kingdom, even people we think of as enemies of the Church.
That’s a beautiful story RLD, thank you.
RLD thank you for sharing.