Moroni 10:32-33:
32 Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him [meaning to be in Christ as Paul puts it], and deny yourselves of all ungodliness [meaning, choosing to be baptized which is the context of the entire Book of Mormon and the meaning of repentance unto baptism]; and if you shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and love God with all your might, mind and strength [in the process of repentance and baptism and the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit], then is his grace sufficient for you, that by his grace you may be perfect in Christ; and if by the grace of God you are perfect in Christ, you can in nowise deny the power of God.
33 And again, if you by the grace of God are perfect in Christ [i.e. made perfect through the perfect faithfulness of Christ], and deny not his power [to save and exalt], then are you sanctified in Christ by the grace of God, through the shedding of the blood of Christ, which is in the covenant of the Father unto the remission of your sins, that you become holy, without spot.
Note that you become holy, a holy one, through the perfect merits of Christ. It's very clear that you are without spot and holy through covenanting with the Father in getting baptized, and receiving the sanctifying fire of the Holy Spirit.
Consider these verses for reflection:
Alma 22: 13-14 (emphasis added):
13 And Aaron did expound unto him the scriptures from the creation of Adam, laying the fall of man before him, and their carnal state and also the plan of redemption, which was prepared from the foundation of the world, through Christ, for all whosoever would believe on his name.
14 And since man had fallen he could not merit anything of himself; but the sufferings and death of Christ atone for their sins, through faith and repentance, and so forth; and that he breaketh the bands of death, that the grave shall have no victory, and that the sting of death should be swallowed up in the hopes of glory; and Aaron did expound all these things unto the king.
2 Nephi 10:24-25
Wherefore, my beloved brethren, reconcile yourselves to the will of God, …; and remember, after you are reconciled unto God, that it is only in and through the grace of God that you are saved.
Wherefore, may God raise you from death by the power of the resurrection, and also from everlasting death by the power of the atonement, that you may be received into the eternal kingdom of God, that you may praise him through grace divine. Amen.
Helaman 14:
13 And if you believe on his name you will repent of all your sins, that thereby you may have a remission of them through his merits. ...
29 … whosoever will believe might be saved …
Repentance in the Book of Mormon simply meant confession to Christ alone and/or apologizing for your mistakes publicly in front of the church (meaning the whole assembly) and committing to re-choosing the Christ-Path prior to your baptism.
In his article, 2 Nephi 25: 23 in Literary and Rhetorical Context, author Daniel O. McClellan concludes his article saying:
The original intended sense of our clause in 2 Nephi 25: 23 was “it is by grace that we are saved, despite all we can do.” “After all” was an idiom with an established meaning in circulation at the time Joseph Smith was translating the Book of Mormon. Its usage in that translation fits seamlessly into the literary and rhetorical contexts provided by the eighteenth and nineteenth-century texts shared above, as well as into those found in the Book of Mormon itself. Our phrase is most accurately interpreted according to its usage in those contexts, which is the clear and consistent interpretation to which early informed readers would have appealed. The Book of Mormon did not appropriate contemporary conventions from the broader literary environment only to furtively reverse their meaning.
In the years following the publication of the Book of Mormon, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gravitated toward a more orthopraxic soteriology, likely as a result of developing ideologies and practices related to the nature of God, to priesthood and its associated ordinances, to industriousness, and perhaps also in reaction to anti-Mormon polemic on the part of mainstream Protestantism. [50] By the time we find Church leaders interpreting this passage in print, the intended sense seems to have given way, thanks to ideological boundary maintenance, to decreased engagement with Protestant literature, and to the natural ambiguity of the idiom, to the long-normative notion that we must exhaust every last effort before God’s grace is activated. This reading became a firmly entrenched identity marker for generations of readers of the Book of Mormon, but its retirement is long overdue.
Footnotes [50]: Grant Underwood observes: “Throughout much of Mormon history, there has been a tendency to stress the human contribution. This seems to be the result of several factors. First and foremost is the stunning potency of the idea that human spirits are God’s literal children, endowed with seeds of divinity. This elevated anthropology has been reinforced by the way in which the practical demands of colonization and community-building in the second half of the nineteenth century infused Mormon preaching on spiritual growth with a pragmatic, ‘can-do’quality. Moreover, an early revelation counseled the Saints to be ‘anxiously engaged in a good cause, and do many things of their own free will, and bring to pass much righteousness; For,’ the revelation affirmed, ‘the power is in them’ (D& C 58: 27–28)” (“Justification, Theosis, and Grace in Early Christian, Lutheran, and Mormon Discourse,” International Journal of Mormon Studies 2 [2009]: 219). For perspectives on the development of concepts of grace and salvation, see Blake T. Ostler, “The Development of the Mormon Concept of Grace,”Dialogue 24/ 1 (1991): 57–84; Paulsen and Walker, “Work, Worship, and Grace,”83–177; Matthew Bowman, “The Crisis of Mormon Christology: History, Progress, and Protestantism, 1880–1930,”Fides et Historia 40/ 2 (2008): 1–26.
LDS scholar Don Bradley in an interview said something like the passage, “for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do” (2 Nephi 25:23), is best understood when you look up the phrase “after all we can do” in the early 1820s and learn it doesn’t mean works-based righteousness. I then read this on a Forum:
My Journal of Book of Mormon Studies article, "2 Nephi 25:23 in Literary and Rhetorical Context," is now digitally available on JSTOR ...
My paper demonstrates that "after all we can do" was a phrase commonly used by English-language writers discussing grace in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, and it always and only meant "despite all we can do."
If you don't have access, message me and I'll be happy to send you a PDF.
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The article, Why Does Nephi State that We Are Saved by Grace “After All We Can Do"? by BMC Team
(October 10, 2017) KnoWhy #371, states:
BYU Professor Stephen Robinson explained, “At first glance at this scripture, we might think that grace is offered to us only chronologically after we have completed doing all we can do, but this is demonstrably false.”[1]
… Jacob had explained that “after ye are reconciled unto God, that it is only in and through the grace of God that ye are saved” (2 Nephi 10:24).
Benjamin Spackman, an LDS scholar, argued that comparing these two passages implies that Nephi’s clause “after all we can do” parallels Jacob’s phrase “after ye are reconciled unto to God.” The comparison suggests that being reconciled unto God is all we can do.3 This conclusion is supported by other passages in the Book of Mormon which use the phrase “all we can do.” For example, in Alma 24:11 the king of the Anti-Nephi-Lehies, after their conversion, claimed that “it was all we could do to repent sufficiently before God that he would take away our stain.”[4] …
… [Moroni] declared that it is “through the shedding of the blood of Christ, which is in the covenant of the Father … that ye become holy, without spot” (Moroni 10:33, emphasis added).
It is clear that the focus of Nephi’s teaching in 2 Nephi 25:23, like that of Jacob’s in 2 Nephi 10:24, is on remembering that we are saved through the grace of God. As Joseph Spencer concluded, “Regardless of what actually has been done, grace is what saves—and that remains true even after all that can be done."[5]
If “all we can do” is “be reconciled unto God,” then we, as Ben Spackman noted, “commit to doing God’s will and trying to change when we fail to do so.”[6]
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In other words, later man-made traditions changed the origional meaning of being "saved by grace despite your own merits," for one is made holy through the merits of Christ alone.
Joseph Smith never corrected the original LDS doctrine of grace in Mormon Scripture, which was that you achieve entrance into God's celestial Kingdom through Christ's merits alone and not through your own merits.
All that Joseph Smith was doing with temple work was focusing on what kind of being you would be in the heavens after being saved by Christ. Even Paul says that Christians would eventually be above the angels and even judge the angels. So what kind of beings or body would Christians be? To understand why Joseph Smith implemented plural marriage and why I believe it was only meant as a temporary solution to expiate puritanical Augustinianism from the consciousness of the saints, see my blog post here.
