“Adam and Eve’s fall wasn’t down, rather, as I have heard it expressed, they fell forward.”
“This may raise the ridiculous idea that the Fall took God by surprise and upset His plan, or else — more ridiculously still — that God planned the whole thing for conditions which, He well knew, were never going to be realised. In fact, of course, God saw the crucifixion in the act of creating the first nebula.”
“It may appear strange to some of you, and it certainly does to the world, to say it is possible for a man or woman to become perfect on this earth. It is written “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” Again, “If any man offend not in word, the same is a perfect man, and able also to bridle the whole body.” This is perfectly consistent to the person who understands what perfection really is. If the first passage I have quoted is not worded to our understanding, we can alter the phraseology of the sentence, and say, “Be ye as perfect as ye can,” for that is all we can do, though it is written, be ye perfect as your Father who is in heaven is perfect. To be as perfect as we possibly can, according to our knowledge, is to be just as perfect as our Father in heaven is. He cannot be any more perfect than He knows how, any more than we. When we are doing as well as we know how in the sphere and station which we occupy here, we are justified in the justice, righteousness, mercy, and judgment that go before the Lord of heaven and earth. We are as justified as the angels who are before the throne of God. The sin that will cleave to all the posterity of Adam and Eve is, that they have not done as well as they knew how.”
| December 18, 1853; Journal of Discourses 2:130
“Just as a man does not really desire food until he is hungry, so he does not desire the salvation of Christ until he knows why he needs Christ. No one adequately and properly knows why he needs Christ until he understands and accepts the doctrine of the Fall and its effects upon all mankind”
| The Continuous Atonement
“We were born in the image of God our Father; He begat us like unto Himself. There is the nature of Deity in the composition of our spiritual organization. In our spiritual birth, our Father transmitted to us the capabilities, powers and faculties which He possessed, as much so as the child on its mother’s bosom possesses, although in an undeveloped state, the faculties, powers and susceptibilities of its parent.”
| in Eliza R. Snow, Biography and Family Record of Lorenzo Snow, 335
“Had agency come to man without the Atonement, it would have been a fatal gift.”
| "Atonement, Agency, Accountability," Conference April 1988
“Under his forming hands a creature grew,
Manlike, but different sex, so lovely fair,
That what seem’d fair in all the world, seem’d now
Mean, or in her summ’d up, in her contain’d,
And in her looks, which from that time infus’d
Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before.”
| Paradise Lost, 253; book 8, lines 470–75.
“The simple truth is that we cannot comprehend the Atonement and Resurrection of Christ and we will not adequately appreciate the unique purpose of His birth or His death-in other words, there is no way to truly celebrate Christmas or Easter- without understanding that there was an actual Adam and Eve who fell from an actual Eden, with all the consequences that fall carried with it.”
| Where Justice, Love, and Mercy Meet (April 2015)
The Sermon on the Mount proves that before God we all stand on level ground:
murderers and temper-throwers, adulterers and lusters, thieves and coveters. We are all desperate, and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Having fallen from the absolute Ideal, we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of absolute grace.
Had agency come to man without the Atonement, it would have been a fatal gift.
“After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.”
| "The Adam & Eve Diaries"
“No one adequately and properly knows why he needs Christ until he understands and accepts the doctrine of the Fall and its effect upon all mankind.”
| A Witness and a Warning
“Life is assumed to be about the fundamental, clear-cut choice between good and evil. Mormonism sees no such simple dichotomy in the primeval options. Yes, obedience and safety and security in God’s presence are presented as one of the choices, But Mormonism is more sympathetic to Eve’s perception of the alternative; the beauty of the fruit, its goodness as food, its desirability ‘to make one wise.’ Not coincidentally, ancient philosophers like Plato considered the triad of ideas – Beauty, Goodness, Truth – to be the highest manifestation of divine virtue. In the Mormon narrative, therefore, the circumstances that define the reality of the human predicament are not a blatant choice between Good and Evil but a wrenching decision to be made between competing sets of Good. The philosopher Hegel believed that this scenario, replicated in myriad artistic narratives, expressed the inescapably tragic nature of the universe. There are very few simple choices. No blueprint gives us easy answers. Life’s most wrenching choices are not between right and wrong but between competing demands on our time, our resources, our love and loyalty.”
“We may assume that because we have fallen before, falling is a part of our identity. Like one famous author said, ‘And so we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past.'”
“You have agency, and you are free to choose. But there is actually no free agency. Agency has its price. You have to pay the consequences of your choices.”
| On the Wings of Eagles, BYU Devotional, July 2006
“Sin and death are not the beginning of the human saga; divine parentage and a planned destiny are. Christ’s central purpose from the beginning was not to correct an Adamic misstep, but to draw us further into a world of joyful sociality. His voluntary mission was not to take us back to an original condition, but to move us forward — from primeval wholeness (‘whole from the foundation of the world’) to a more abundant existence (‘added upon’).”
“Some men who are evidently unable to gain respect by the goodness of their lives, use as justification for their actions the statement that Eve was told that Adam should rule over her. How much sadness, how much tragedy, how much heartbreak has been caused through centuries of time by weak men who have used that as a scriptural warrant for atrocious behavior! They do not recognize that the same account indicates that Eve was given as a helpmeet to Adam. The facts are that they stood side by side in the garden. They were expelled from the garden together, and they worked together, side by side, in gaining their bread by the sweat of their brows.”
| Ensign, November 1991, p. 51
“This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life, and self-expression – and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax.”
“Adam wandered alone in the glorious Garden in Eden, which he had dressed and adorned… for sin was not yet in the world. Through all this magnificence Adam wandered, lonely, unsolaced, uncompanioned, the only being of his kind in the whole world, his life unshared in a solitude of exquisite elegance, and, what was of far greater moment, his mission, as he knew it to be, impossible of fulfillment, except the Father gave him an helpmeet.”
| Selected Papers on Religion, Education, and Youth