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In the thread which began as whether Christ in His humanity would have had a defective reproductive system, Benjamin McGuire wrote an incisive reply to one of my posts that deserves its own thread I think. Benjamin wrote: Mosiah 15 does it's best to differentiate between the two natures of Jesus and to point to the fact that it is the fully human nature of Jesus that allows for intercession to be made. To a God, there is no real suffering, there is no real temptation. To say that Jesus suffers in the capacity of His divine nature is to say that he suffered a trivial thing. And Mosiah 15 presents a view of atonement which I suspect is not all that different from @3DOP's, as well as a view of the nature of Jesus that isn't too far off (Mosiah 15 is quite similar in a way to Chalcedon's Statement of Faith). I would be pleased if Mosiah 15 is compatible with the view of @3DOP on the Atonement. From discussions that I have had in the past, most LDS here seem to take a position which I think mirrors Evangelical thought, that Christ had to suffer all that He did in order to appease God's wrath and to make reparation or atone for all of our sins. At the outset, I admit that this used to be my view of the matter. I was an Evangelical for almost twenty years and a minister for seven years. As a Catholic, I retained that view of the Atonement when I converted in 1995 to the Catholic faith. That idea of the Atonement is compatible with the Catholic faith. But so is the view, which is undefined for us, which I have come to adopt. I want to be clear that the view that I am going to suggest as being the most fitting is only one of at least two schools of thoughts that is permissible for the Catholic faithful if I understand the matter correctly. Anyway, I would be pleased as I said, to discover that among LDS also, different schools of thought might be considered permissible so that there might be more open-mindedness on the LDS side as I try to explain my position. I did not come to my conclusions from a systematic manual kind of study, but rather ascetical/devotional material that was trying to rouse in the reader a deeper love and affection for our Lord and Saviour. Manuals of systemic theology are good in their place. But we are also in need of something to make our hearts go pitter-pat. Summas Theologica are not written in such a way as to do that, in my opinion, for the ordinary Christian, who is just trying to be close to God and learn to pray. St. Thomas takes us to the land of pitter-pat with his beautiful hymns about the Eucharist. Shoot, I think I even heard the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing Panis Angelicus once! I am not dismissing the immense value that St. Thomas and others have given to the faithful in their systematic theologies. And to prove this point, I am going to use such a theological text to show that my more recently adopted view, that makes my heart glow more readily, might also be possible within both the LDS (Mosiah 15?) and Catholic faiths. When Holy Scripture designates Christ's precious blood, or the giving up of His life, as a ransom-price for our sins, the basic thought is that the atonement offered is of equal value to the guilt of the sins. Yes. I think many Catholics and LDS would agree. Then we read: Christ's Vicarious Atonement is superabundant, that is, the positive value of the expiation is greater than the negative value of the sin. (Sent. communis.) The bolded above is a bolded subheading in the treatise. The Latin words in the parenthesis has to do with the grade of certainty with which Catholics can at this time regard the teaching. It will mean that it is clearly not defined. There is room for discussion. it is explained here: Common teaching (sententia communis) is doctrine, which in itself belongs to the field of free opinions, but which is accepted by theologians generally. I include one quote under the subheading that might explain how this "free opinion" can be understood: Pope Clement VI declared in the Jubilee Bull "Unigenitus Dei filius" of the year 1343, that Christ had shed His blood copiously, as it were, in streams, even though one little drop of blood, on account of the Hypostatic union with the Logos, would have sufficed for the Redemption of the whole human race. ---Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, Ludwig Ott, 4th Edition May 1960, Tan Books and Publishers, Rockford, IL, pp. 188, 189 (grade of certainty concept on p. 10) So instead of an assumption that many Catholics can correctly hold, that Christ was appeasing the wrath of His Almighty Father, Catholics may ponder why it could have been the will of the Father and the Son to exceed what was judicially adequate to redeem a fallen race through the Son's passion and death. My question for my LDS friends here is about whether like us Catholics, the Latter-day Saint faithful have the freedom to ponder this question? Or is the question settled by dogmatic LDS teaching? Thanks, 3DOP