I think a growing theological problem in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is that members are taking on the Nicene God without taking on the Nicene council. They want the God of Nicaea without Nicaea. It’s a byproduct of their desire to be “mainstream” and not “peculiar”. You hear it whenever a member insists that God knows every outcome in advance and could cure any child of cancer with a word, but simply chooses not to. That is Augustine’s God, not Joseph’s. The God of the Restoration exists within time, is an exalted being who instituted the eternal laws, and is bound by them. Alma said it plainly: if he broke them, he would cease to be God. And this matters more than almost anything else we argue about, because Augustine’s God, the creedal one, has no answer for that child struck with cancer, but Joseph’s does. Augustine’s God created everything from nothing. He wrote the laws of biology, knew before the first atom existed which children would get cancer, and can suspend any of it at any moment at no cost to himself. So every dead child was either decreed or permitted by a being who could have done otherwise for free. Augustine spent his life trying to talk his way out of that. Joseph reveal a different deity. Matter is eternal and was organized, not spoken into existence (D&C 93:33). Intelligence was never created and cannot be (D&C 93:29). Agency is not a privilege God hands out but the grain of being itself, otherwise there is no existence (D&C 93:30). Law was irrevocably decreed before the foundation of the world (D&C 130:20). God is an exalted being who lives within time, works within that law, and is bound by it That God is not choosing to let a child die. He is working inside a world of real agents and real matter running on real law, a world he did not build with cancer in it, and he is doing everything the law allows. That is why Enoch watched him weep (Moses 7:28). Augustine’s God cannot weep. Impassibility forbids it. A God who cannot be hurt by what happens to you never has to answer for it. Joseph’s God weeps because he is inside the same story you are. In Augustine’s world a child’s cancer was decreed or permitted. In Joseph’s world it is grieved, shared, and one day undone. When LDS members start arguing for exhaustive foreknowledge and a God who could fix anything at will, they are not defending the Restoration. They are handing back the one problem Joseph actually solved, and they inherit Augustine’s silence at the graveside along with it.