Covenanting is a huge feature in Mormon theology and group life. Beginning at age eight with baptism, and extending through the temple endowment and sealing rites, Latter-day Saints make a lot of covenants. Sundays build into the sacrament ritual the chance to "renew" the covenants one has made. For many Mormons, making these covenants are among the most sacred events of their lives, inspiring them to try to live up to the promises contained within each covenant. For others, especially those whose faith has shifted in the years following the time they made covenants, the burden of having covenanted to do something that they are no longer as certain about, or perhaps even now reject, can be crushing. Some feel regret that the "Mormon track" has members make covenants at very young ages, prior to the typical times when complexity enters one's worldview. "If only I'd known what I know now, I would have chosen differently." Others feel they were underprepared for the specifics of the covenants they made in the temple, and that when they reached that stage of the endowment they went ahead with them partly because of family and loved ones who were present and expecting that of them. Mormonism teaches that when things are done through proper priesthood authority, "what is bound on earth is bound in heaven." How, then, should someone whose journey is taking them into great complexity regarding Mormonism relate to such weighty covenants?
In this episode, Charles Randall Paul, Jennifer Finlayson-Fife, and Joseph Stanford, join Mormon Matters host Dan Wotherspoon for a wonderful and intense query into covenanting within Mormonism and whether or not it, or God, has an expectation of personal growth and change that would naturally affect our views and understandings of covenants we have previously made, about what exactly are we "bound" to with regard to our covenants, and several other aspects of this topic. The panel shares their own experiences and thoughts about their covenanting pasts and relationships with them now, and seeks to celebrate best thinking and ideas about us as covenanters that doesn't depend upon static relationships with God and "etched in stone at the time one covenanted" understandings of this important element of the Mormon tradition.