Wednesday, November 10, 2021

Joseph M. Spencer on why, in their conversion, Paul saw Jesus but Alma saw an Angel

  

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)