Saturday, January 13, 2024

Sharon J. Harris on the Communal Aspects of the Atonement in the Book of Mormon

  

The Book of Mormon announces self-referential prophecies of its destiny to gather in a Lehite remnant and thereby unite the Lehite branch of Israel. Readers encounter this message on its title page, in its final chapter of Moroni 10, and throughout the volume. But the narrative arc of the volume details the tragedy of how this branch of Israel destroyed itself. It tells how the e could not be relied on to help save one another. Thus, the Book of Mormon asserts the necessity of collective salvation while demonstrating the Lehites’ failure to achieve it. What is more, for years they failed precisely because they permitted belief in Christ to separate them from one another rather than uniting them. Ultimately, in their separation and the subsequent Nephite extinction, Christ disappeared altogether. The Book of Mormon suggests that whatever individual salvation the atonement makes possible, Christ requires collective from his covenant disciples for other communities. Without it, and for all the atonement’s efficacy, over time groups (and the individuals who comprise them) collectively fail to embrace Christ and the covenant. Eventually the Nephites rejected Christ just as the Lamanites had. While Christ’s atonement is infinite, those lost to the wash of history in this way must be brought back to it by some other means. (Sharon J. Harris, “Saving the House of Israel: Collective Atonement in the Book of Mormon,” in Latter-day Saint Perspectives on Atonement, ed. Deirdre Nicole Green and Eric D. Huntsman [Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2024], 128)