Acknowledging that the Book of Mormon is a record of a fallen people, Robert L. Millet nevertheless drew an optimistic message from it during his presentation at the Sidney B. Sperry Symposium Oct. 7.
"The plight and promise, the malady and the medication, the Fall and the Atonement - this is the burden of the Book of Mormon," declared Brother Millet, dean of religious education at BYU."The Latter-day Saint view of the Fall is remarkably optimistic. We believe that Adam and Eve went into the Garden of Eden to fall, that what they did had the approbation of the Gods and thus is termed a transgression and not a sin, and that their fall was as much a part of the foreordained plan of the Father as was the very Atonement."
Distancing LDS belief from that of much of the Christian world, that men and women are depraved and incapable of choosing good on their own, Brother Millet said: "I hasten to add that there was a fall and that the Fall does indeed take a measured toll on all mankind. It is real, and its effects cannot be ignored or its pull on the human heart mitigated by enlightened conversation. . . . One's capacity to become as God is one thing, while his or her inclination to sin is quite another. It is only as men and women overcome many of the effects of the Fall through the atoning blood and ransoming power of Jesus Christ that they place themselves on the path to godhood."
From the Book of Mormon, he drew the following doctrines:
All mankind are lost and fallen.
We inherit a fallen nature through conception.
One may be faithful and pure-hearted and yet still be buffeted by the pulls of a natural world.
Little children are innocent by virtue of the Atonement, not by nature.
The natural man is an enemy to God and to all righteousness.
Concluding, he said, "I rejoice in the great plan of happiness and in the satisfaction that comes from the knowledge that God does indeed have a plan and that there is purpose in all we experience in this life. I rejoice in the fact that Adam fell that we might be (2 Ne. 2:25) and that because of the fall all of us enter into mortality to undertake the second phase of our eternal journey. I rejoice in the Fall, for it brought forth the Atonement, the means whereby our hearts might be cleansed and our souls transformed and prepared to dwell with Christ and our Eternal Father."
