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Roberts v. Smith: Death Before the Fall (p2of2)

Roberts v. Smith: Death Before the Fall (p2of2)

Last updated on: September 7, 2010 at 11:04 am by bhodges

Roberts v. Smith: Death Before the Fall (p2of2) 2010-09-07T11:04:45-05:00 bhodges

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See part 1 here. This post is super quote-heavy and light on analysis. I simply want to convey a sense of Roberts’s presentation and get his argument on the table for discussion (as well as point out that his argument was virtually ignored at the time it was first explained and seems to have been largely forgotten since).

Roberts rejected Smith’s scriptural exegesis regarding the condition of Eve and Adam in the Garden of Eden on logical grounds, and in accordance with the way he understood immortality as described in the revelations of Joseph Smith: “I mention [this argument on immortality] now merely to bring it into the record of this case that it may receive consideration and not be lost sight of,” Roberts explained in his presentation to the Twelve, “for it is very important, and should receive more attention than I am attempting to give it here.” It seems it didn’t receive much more attention at all, nor has it since. Roberts was responding to one of Smith’s main scriptural proof-texts:

And now, behold, if Adam had not transgressed he would not have fallen, but he would have remained in the garden of Eden. And all things which were created must have remained in the same state in which they were after they were created; and they must have remained forever, and had no end (2 Nephi 2:22).

Roberts quoted directly from Smith’s critical paper which Smith had earlier presented to the Twelve:1

By revelation we are well informed that Adam was not subject to death when he was placed in the garden of Eden… He <Adam>2 did not come here as a resurrected being to die again for we are taught most clearly that those who pass through the resurrection receive eternal life, and can die no more. It is sufficient for us to know, until the Lord reveals more about it, that Adam was not subject to death, but had power through transgressing the law, to become subject to death…3

Roberts responded that such an explanation was self-contradictory:

I am very glad to observe…that Elder Smith makes this declaration that “Adam was not a resurrected being,” for it makes it possible for me to add, then he was not an immortal being, for the only way to the status of immortality sometimes referred to as “eternal life,” is through mortality and the resurrection from death to immortality. The resurrected Christ is the true type and ensample of an immortal man, deathless; he can die no more!4

Roberts didn’t leave it at that; he reiterated the same argument for seven more paragraphs, arguing that the very possibility of a fall indicated that—however long the “royal planters” as he called them (324) could have remained in the Garden—they were not truly “immortal”:

Well, if Adam could die, as he did, then he was after all subject to death. No matter what means, I repeat, if he could die, by any means whatsoever, then he was subject to death; he was not immortal; and the proof that he was subject to death is in the fact that he did die. It does not help matters to say “but <he, Adam> had the power through transgressing the law, to become subject to death”; for if he had that power, he was subject to death, and he did die. In the face of that stern fact it is useless and illogical to say Adam “was not subject to death.”

“Let it be remembered,” he emphasized, “that there is no such thing as conditional immortality.” 5

Roberts used D&C 93 and Alma 11 to support his definition of immortality, which is not achieved before an individual undergoes mortality, death, and resurrection, combining body and spirit in an inseparable union. He punctuated the argument by including a hint of his own unique proposal that Eve and Adam were not immortal, but were mortals in a translated state who were brought to earth to begin a new dispensation.

Roberts left a puzzling question mark, however, in his description of translated beings:

Men are either mortal or translated, or immortal, if for if they die for any cause] no matter from what cause; they are mortal; for they are subject to death. Translated men are those in whom death is (?) [sic] but are subject to death. If they are immortal then they are not subject to death, They cannot; they are like the Christ in that respect, spirit and element are inseparably connected in them…6

For whatever reason, Roberts’s line of argument seems to have been unconvincing to the review committee who requested changes be made, Roberts refusing, leaving the manuscript unpublished for decades.7

Roberts was soon gone, as were John A. Widtsoe and James E. Talmage, two apostles more sympathetic to Roberts’s scientific approach. Then-elder Smith, on the other hand, had plenty of time to help his perspective become better known through publication. Interestingly, Smith made no mention of Roberts’s argument in his subsequently-published book Man, His Origin and Destiny (1954), a book which argues for a young earth and against evolution. There Smith repeats the same proof-texts he’d related to the review committee regarding Adam’s immortal state.

However, Bruce R. McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine (relying partly on Smith’s Doctrines of Salvation) seems to indirectly respond to Roberts. Perhaps this overall discussion helps explain McConkie’s bifurcated entry for “Immortality,” the first part of which refers entirely to embodied prelapsarians, the second to post-mortal resurrected folk:

Adam and all forms of life were first created in immortality. There was no death in the world until after the fall. (2 Ne. 2:22-24.) When Adam fell, becoming the first mortal flesh on earth (Moses 3:7), mortality and the consequent death that flows from such a status of existence passed upon all forms of life. (Doctrines of Salvation, vol. 1, pp. 72-127.) This original immortality was designed to continue only until the fall; it was not to be of unending duration; it ceased when mortality began.

Immortality is to live forever in the resurrected state with body and spirit inseparably connected….8

Perhaps less relevantly, McConkie did not include the verse from D&C 93 Roberts referred to (regarding spirit and matter being connected for a fullness of joy being required for immortality) in his scriptural references for immortality. It is referenced in the entry for “Resurrection,” however.

Was Roberts splitting hairs with his argument on the definition of immortality and whether prelapsarian Eve and Adam could rightfully be called immortal? Was Joseph Fielding Smith fair in ignoring the objection in subsequent publications?

FOOTNOTES
Roberts incorporated quotes directly from Smith’s presentation into an “Addendum” added to chapter 31 of the second draft of TWL. I agree with the assessment of the editors who note: “One can safely conclude that when Roberts presented his ideas to the Quorum of the Twelve on January 7, 1931, he read the draft of chapter 31 together with the preceding sections and this conclusion” (The Truth, the Way, the Life: An Elementary Treatise on Theology, ed. John W. Welch [Provo, Utah: BYU Studies, 1994], 318). Mad props to BYU Studies for including this Addendum, from which the quotes in this post are taken. It is absent from the Signature volume, I presume because it was not made available to them, they only had access to the so-called “Draft 3,” which was a copy donated to the Marriott Library at the U of U by Edwin B. Firmage, which spurred the publication of Signature’s volume, which spurred the publication by BYU Studies.

In the BYU Studies edition, Roberts’s own explanatory insertions into quotes are noted in angle brackets < >.

The Truth, the Way, the Life: An Elementary Treatise on Theology, ed. John W. Welch (Provo, Utah: BYU Studies, 1994), 320.

Ibid., 321.

Ibid.

Ibid. The review committee disagreed with Roberts’s hypothesis in their response to Roberts (their objections are included in the footnotes of the BYU Studies edition of TWL): “The doctrine that Adam came here a ‘translated’ being from some other world is not accepted as a doctrine of the Church…” (326).

A similar argument on immortality was already included in the main text of TWL, see pp. 324-330.

Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1966), 376-377.

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