Come, Follow Me July 29-August 1: Alma 36-38
In 2024, the Maxwell Institute will offer a weekly series of short essays on the Book of Mormon, in support of the Church-wide Come, Follow Me study curriculum. Each week, the Maxwell Institute blog will feature a post by a member of the Institute faculty exploring an aspect of the week’s reading block. We hope these explorations will enrich your study and teaching of the Book of Mormon throughout the coming year.
Judgment and Transformation
By Rachael G. Johnson
Alma the Younger’s conversion is one of the more memorable stories in the Book of Mormon-- not only because it is recounted three times (first in Mosiah 27, then to his sons Helaman and Shiblon in Alma chapters 36 and 38) but because of its tenebristic [1] drama. A thundering angel, a cowering Alma, a soul racked for days with the pains of hell, before a desperate cry for mercy and then an immediate deliverance into exquisite joy, followed by an unwavering, unconditional commitment to preaching salvation for the rest of his days.
It may be tempting to treat Alma’s experience as an exception to rather than a model for our own halting transformations. After all, how many of us receive a preview of judgment in the middle, rather than the end, of our temporal probation as an intervention rather than a culmination? Indeed, Alma and the sons of Mosiah are aware of the unique nature of their experience: Ammon, in Alma 26, considers their merciful rescue from a justly deserved damnation as one of the “mysteries of God” that cannot be known by the “natural man” (Alma 26:21-22), and Alma prefaces his counsel to Helaman insisting that “...God has, by the mouth of his holy angel, made these things known unto me, not of any worthiness of myself” (Alma 36:5). [2] In other words, the transformative experience was not something earned or engineered but gifted.
Yet Alma devoted his life to ensuring that his experience is precisely replicated again and again: as he explains to Helaman (36:24, 26), “from that time even until now, I have labored without ceasing, that I might bring souls unto repentance...[and] because of the word he has imparted to me, many have been born of God, and have tasted as I have tasted, and have seen eye to eye as I have seen; therefore they do know of these things of which I have spoken, as I do know....”
Much of Alma’s work is ensuring that we all learn to recognize and respond to moments of judgment and persist in a life of continual, faithful re-attunement to God’s merciful love. The template, in fact, more or less lines up with the one given by God to his father, Alma the Elder, in Mosiah 26:29-30: “Whosoever transgresseth against me, him shall ye judge according to the sins which he has committed; and if he confess his sins before thee and me, and repenteth in the sincerity of his heart, him shall ye forgive, and I will forgive him also. Yea, and as often as my people repent will I forgive them their trespasses against me.” God, then, expects us to facilitate for each other—repeatedly—the experiences of judgment, transformation, and reconciliation that Alma the Elder prescribed and Alma the Younger experienced in compressed, intensified form.
I’ll focus this post on the nature and role of judgment in our self-conceptions and our transformations. The term carries evaluative and punitive connotations, but I want to consider it more expansively as an experience of unveiling—a perceptual and cognitive discovery of something true about the meaning or ground of our actions that has been hidden from us, whether by culpable or inculpable ignorance.
Consider that when Alma’s son Corianton seems troubled by the seeming “injustice that the sinner should be consigned to a state of misery” (42:1), he is perhaps not implicitly advocating a judgment-free eternity, but rather, one in which the sinner truly knows* what she chooses during mortality and thus receives in judgment only what she knowingly chose in life. Alma goes to great lengths to reassure Corianton that resurrection (including the final judgment) is simply a restoration of the intrinsic relations between our choices and their consequences that a fallen world can sometimes occlude; the sinner will be restored to the misery of being wicked and the righteous, restored to the joy of being holy;[3] but this formula seems to only ensure justice if we can accurately claim what it is we truly want. We humans, being the paradoxical characters that we are—both natural and divine, temporal and eternal, individual and social, and so on—are quite bad at achieving transparent self-knowledge, let alone an alignment between our multiple self-conceptions, aspirations, and practical identities.[4] This is why I think facilitating productive, authentic experiences of judgment is so critical; we become more informed, and thus, more free to intentionally choose.
The angel’s visitation reveals to Alma something about the nature of his actions, and this discovery facilitates a mutual co-emergence of new self-knowledge and a new practical identity—a new way of being in the world. For even though Alma claims in 36:6 (echoing Mosiah 27:10) that he went about “seeking to destroy the church” (intention) and that his three days spent racked with torment were spent “remember[ing] all [his] sins and iniquities,” (recognition), there seems to be an epiphanous element to the angel’s message that reveals something new to him or puts his actions in an entirely different light; Alma is not merely recapitulating, but redefining, his actions.
So what did the angel unveil? For one, Alma seems to discover that God is a reality rather than a mere idea: “And now behold, can ye dispute the power of God? For behold, doth not my voice shake the earth? And can ye not also behold me before you? And I am sent from God,” thunders the angel (Mosiah 27:15). This not only paves the way for the Christ of his father’s (at least not entirely ignored) preaching to become a live possibility during his agonizing experience of hell; it also sets the stage for subsequent reevaluations of whom his actions affected and how.
Another catalyzing discovery is Alma’s confrontation with finitude and death: “And the angel spake more things unto me, which were heard by my brethren, but I did not hear them; for when I heard the words—If thou wilt be destroyed of thyself, seek no more to destroy the church of God—I was struck with such great fear and amazement lest perhaps I should be destroyed, that I fell to the earth and I did hear no more.” While we all surely know, abstractly, that we will die, we spend most of our lives effacing it from our consciousness. But it is only in confronting the inevitable “possibility of our impossibility,” as Heidegger describes it, that we can fully take responsibility for the ways in which we respond to life and the possibilities that are uniquely ours. Death puts into sharp relief the true shape of our actions by tracing them to their definitive end in our demise; in contemplating our absence, the distinctiveness of our being, the movements we ripple into the world, shine forth. [5] Or, in Alma’s case, glint ominously.
For Alma now sees his actions in a different light. What was initially described by the editor of Mosiah as Alma’s pursuit of “drawing people away from the church” now appears in Alma’s inner vision as “murdering many of [God’s] children” (36:14). Alma sees his actions not merely as he experienced them, but as they were experienced by others—and this triangulation is a key feature of judgment and self-knowledge. We can never be the sole interpretative authorities on who we are, for we exist in fundamental relation to the world, to other people. We are subject and object, constituted not only by our own practical identities and self-conceptions, but the ways in which others perceive and experience us. [6] What Alma formerly experienced as a play of power and flattery is now revealed to him as a spiritual destruction of fellow children of God.
This recognition highlights another feature about authentic judgment: it is not merely representing a state of affairs but in bringing them to light, providing conditions for their transformation.[7] Consider how, despite claiming merely to remember his sins and his rebellion, by naming them such, Alma reveals himself to be a different person than the Alma who originally, supposedly, sinned and rebelled. In naming his dissensions as “murder,” he both signifies a new understanding and makes an old understanding (dissension) less available to himself in the future. In naming those he affected “God’s children,” he is both signifying a new relation to these people in light of his direct experience with God (Mos. 27:25) and is less able to forthwith experience them as merely pawns in an egoic game. New self-knowledge facilitates the death and rebirth of self, and the death and rebirth of self facilitates new knowledge (“if I had not been born of God I should not have known these things,” he tells Shiblon in Alma 38:6).
This is why judgment must be a continual spiritual practice rather than a culminating evaluation: judgment is not a one-time snapshot but part of an ongoing transformation. The unveiling wrought by judgment can be facilitated by an angel, by the Spirit, by the law, by words of scripture (most of chapter 37 is Alma’s exhortation to Helaman about preserving the records of scripture, for they “enlarge the memory of the people” and help break open our provincial narratives); by our own self-reflections and deliberations, [8] and by each other. Enacting the role of judge for each other is fraught, of course, but I think the spiritually discerning witnessing of friends, family and even strangers—even and often especially those who do not see eye to eye with us—is an important source of self-knowledge; the sons of Mosiah and Alma “confess” (Mos. 27:35) to each other often (a correlate of judgment), and the practice keeps their self-conceptions pliable, porous, and receptive—the opposites of the great vices of the Book of Mormon: “the hardness of their hearts, and the deafness of their ears, and the blindness of their minds, and the stiffness of their necks” (Jarom 1:3).
The more disposed we can be to the unveiling of judgment, the more effective may be the work of transformation. But while Alma’s own transformation might seem swift and sudden (and not exactly induced in the ways he prescribes to his own sons), it was not effortless: he tells the assembled people that he repented “nigh unto death” in those three days of tormenting self-knowledge (Mos. 27:28). It also did not transpire without ongoing tension: even though he claimed that after being delivered by God’s forgiveness he was “harrowed up” by his sins no more, he deliberately maintained the awareness of his past guilt and his perpetual “unworthiness” (Alma 38:14) in part, I believe, because holding these polarities in tension—condemnation and mercy, our practical and aspirational identities, our fallen and divine natures, our engaging-the-world and being-experienced-in-the-world—is what ensures that the perpetual work of becoming will never cease.[9]
I find it reassuring, then, when Paul, another figure who experienced an angelic judgment and transformation, can still write in pained frustration: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do...I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out” (Romans 7:15-17 NIV). As the philosopher Merleau-Ponty pointed out, “My freedom, even if it has the power to commit me to [some new cause], does not have the power to turn me immediately into what I decide to be.” We may experience the pull of our residual practical identities long after our aspirational identity has crystallized, but we can be assured that even by aspiring to be different, we already, at least in some measure, are. [10]
Upon consenting to judgment’s dialectic of self-knowledge and self-transformation, I have on rare and sacred occasions tasted a measure of divine goodness that radically transcends even my highest aspirations; for “eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2:9). May I, like Alma, embrace the chances to unstop my ears, open my eyes, and soften my heart, to be more fit for the goodness I cannot even yet comprehend.
[1] Tenebrism: a style of painting especially associated with the Italian painter Caravaggio and his followers in which most of the figures are engulfed in shadow but some are dramatically illuminated by a beam of light usually from an identifiable source
[2] See Mark Wrathall, Alma (30-63): A Brief Theological Introduction (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2020), 93-94 for Ammon’s and Alma’s comments in the context of mercy, anguish, and justice.
* Or rather, “more” truly knows, to stress that our actions may not have an ultimate, definitive “meaning,” but are open to more or less truthful interpretations. I want to maintain an emphasis on a practical and transformative, rather than evaluative and definitive, understanding of judgment.
[3] Ibid., see chapter 9 (Death and Restoration) and chapter 10 (Judgment) for discussions on coercive vs. noncoercive punishment and intrinsic relations in judgment.
[4] See Justin F. White, “Backsliding and Bad Faith: Aspiration, Disavowal, and (Residual) Practical Identities,” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 26:1 (November 2023). See also Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death (1849).
[5] See Mark Wrathall, “The Possibility of Death,” generously shared with me and forthcoming in The Cambridge Critical Guide to Being and Time, eds. A. J. Wendland, T. Keiling, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
[6] See Justin White, "Self-Conception and Self-Deception," presented at the 2017 Central APA Annual Meeting; the existential and phenomenological philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger speak at great length to this intersubjective relatedness.
[7] It seems likely this process endlessly repeats itself as we—and those who perceive us—move across time and space; our new locations and situatedness reveal new facets of our experiencing; see also footnote 9.
[8] I find the discussions in Paul Cruysberghs, Johan Taels, Karl Verstrynge, eds. Immediacy and Reflection in Kierkegaard’s Thought (Leuven University Press, 2003) very rich on this topic.
[9] The Latter-day Saint teachings on eternal progression are particularly interesting in light of this question, for when does the work of self-knowledge and becoming ever cease? See Terryl L. Givens, “How Final is Final Judgment?” BYU Studies Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2021), and Taylor-Grey Miller and Derek Hadlie, “Sider’s Puzzle and the Mormon Afterlife,” Journal of Analytic Theology 8:1 (2020).
[10] The citation of Merleau-Ponty is included in, and the concluding sentence is shaped in large part by, Justin White’s paper cited above (“Backsliding”).
IMAGES
R. Gino Santa Maria, Monarch Butterfly, stock.adobe.com.
Mindi Oaten, Behold Him: the One who Transforms, c. 2020.
Jerry Thompson, [Storm and Winds Come], c. 1978. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [bookofmormonartcatalog.org/catalog/storm-and-winds-come/]
Jen Tolman, Woman, not to be copied.
