Of course, it makes sense that Paul’s conversion
is rooted in an encounter with the Messiah—that is, with the figure who had
actually accomplished the event that, Paul would argue throughout his
correspondence, problematizes the ethnic boundary between the Jews and the
Gentiles. What’s peculiar, really, is just that the Book of Mormon portrays its
parallels conversion account by having a meditating angel rather than Jesus
Christ himself interrupt Alma’s persecution of the believers. . . . The key to
these questions, it seems to be, is the largely overlooked angelology of the
Book of Mormon. Students of Mormonism tend in their discussions of Mormon
angelology to focus [on] Joseph Smith’s mature teachings—developed most clearly
only some ten years after the Book of Mormon’s publication—according to which
angels are material resurrected persons from biblical times who serve as
messengers from a divine council held in heaven. The Book of Mormon, however,
has a robust angelology of its own—the important first seeds of which are
planted in two sermons by the very Alma whose conversion I’m considering here
(See Alma 12:28-30 and especially Alma 32:22-23). The clearest articulation of
this angelology, however, comes late in the Book of Mormon, in a sermon by the
book’s author and compiler. In an excerpt worth quoting at some length, Mormon
discusses the roles of angels:
And the office of their ministry is to call men
unto repentance, and to fulfill and to do the work of the covenants of the
Father, which he hath made unto the children of men, . . . by declaring the
word of Christ unto the chosen vessels of the Lord, that they may bear
testimony of him. And by so doing, the Lord God prepareth the way that the residue
of men may have faith in Christ . . . ; and after his manner bringeth to pass
the Father the covenants which he hath made unto the children of men. (Moro. 7:31-32)
This passage, it’s to be noted, opens and closes with
references to “the covenants of th Father.” The Book of Mormon couldn’t be
clearer about which covenants are meant by this phrase, since the book declares
at the outset that its chief purpose is to restore to biblical Christianity an
emphasis on the Israelite or Abrahamic covenant of the Old Testament, which,
the Book of Mormon has the resurrected Christ himself announce, “is not all
fulfilled” (3 Ne. 15:8). Malachi’s prophecy of “fathers” and “children” being
reconciled “before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord”—a prophecy
that the same resurrected Christ quotes verbatim in the Book of Mormon (see 3
Ne. 25:5-6)—is the eschatological horizon the Book of Mormon projects. And
angels, it announces, are those who ensure that the generational reconciliation
takes place by showing themselves to “chosen vessels of the Lord,” “call[ing
them] unto repentance,” and sending them “to fulfill and to do the work of the
covenants of the Lord.”
It's thus perhaps entirely appropriate that
it’s an angel rather than Christ himself who confronts Alma and thereby
launches his conversion experience. The Book of Mormon has as its focus when it
comes to questions of conversion: not the necessity of negotiating ethnic
boundaries overcome by complex fidelity to a messianic event of world-historical
proportions, but the necessity of negating generational boundaries overcome by
the resettlement of Christian worship on the deeply familial ground of the
Hebrew Bible’s covenants—covenants explicitly said in the Book of Mormon to find
their fulfillment not in the messianic triumph over death, but rather in the
angelic work of reconciling children to parents on questions of religion. Where
the New Testament begins from the question of determining the implications of
messianic fulfillment for determining the political or ethnic boundaries of
religion, the Book of Mormon might be said to begin from the question of determining
the implications of angelic ministration for reconciling successive generations
as they split over the inheritance of messianic religion. Each religion,
beginning from its founding text, consequently has a unique conception of
conversion. (Joseph M. Spencer, The Anatomy of Book of Mormon Theology,
2 vols. [Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2021], 2:137, 138-39)
