4 - Death, faith and eternity

Summary

Latter-day Saint theology is, above all else, a theology of death's conquest. While that might be said of Christianity in general, it by no means reaches the same degree of complexity or ritual enactment as it does in Mormonism. Here the LDS Church, once more, develops ordinary Christian ideas to the point where they transform into a unique configuration of belief and action. Christianity takes death, with its root cause of sin, as the major flaw in existence that has to be overcome if salvation is to be achieved; in this chapter we see how Latter-day Saints have realigned basic notions of sin, atonement, repentance, faith, resurrection and exaltation to produce a powerful theological basis for a ritual life that relates life to death in a particularly appealing fashion. Here, ‘relations and principles’ come to cohere in a dramatic way through baptism for the dead: family relationships are framed by the principle of ritual performed on earth resulting in benefits available in the heavens.

A THREEFOLD CONQUEST

Mormonism has approached death in at least three ways; they are not mutually exclusive and have historically influenced each other at different times. One concerns the millenarian response of preparing for the coming of Christ, which I will consider but briefly. Another is through belief in the resurrection, which in Mormonism is associated with the doctrine of the atonement, and with the fact that it is through divine grace that everyone will receive a resurrection from the dead.