{"id":33015,"date":"2015-03-17T07:12:37","date_gmt":"2015-03-17T12:12:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=33015"},"modified":"2015-03-17T07:15:04","modified_gmt":"2015-03-17T12:15:04","slug":"what-was-satans-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2015\/03\/what-was-satans-plan\/","title":{"rendered":"What Was Satan’s Plan?"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s an article<\/a> in this month’s Ensign that makes two\u00a0interesting moves. (There are also a few\u00a0really unpleasant aspects of this article, but that’s a topic for a different post.)<\/p>\n

1. It suggests, following President Clark, that Satan’s plan may have actually been to permit people to do whatever they want without suffering any consequences for it. I first encountered this idea in this post<\/a>\u00a0and it very much resonated with me. (I believe Terryl Givens has also explored this theory, but I can’t put my finger on where at the moment.) This view of Satan’s plan solves a huge problem with the traditional Mormon interpretation (namely, that Satan’s plan was to force everyone to do right): why did Satan do a 180 on tactics between the premortal and mortal life? It makes more sense to me to see Satan’s perpetual message to be “do whatever you want–there’s no consequence” than to see him advocate for force in the premortal realm but choice on earth. However, I’ve been hesitant to broach this topic in church settings because, save the one President Clark quote, there wasn’t much by way of official teachings to point to in defense of the idea and, on the other hand, quite a bit <\/a>advocating for the view that Satan’s plan was to force everyone to choose the right.<\/p>\n

2. You’ll note the way that the author presents two possibilities for Satan’s plan without settling on one. I so wish there were more of this in Mormon discourse! Frankly, there is a lot that we simply don’t know and I think we sell ourselves short (and sometimes end up in a bind) when we advocate strongly for a position for which there is a reasonable alternative. I think it a grand thing indeed that this article models an approach to thinking about doctrine where we might say “This could be A or it could be B. We don’t know.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s an article in this month’s Ensign that makes two\u00a0interesting moves. (There are also a few\u00a0really unpleasant aspects of this article, but that’s a topic for a different post.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33015"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33022,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33015\/revisions\/33022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}