Come, Follow Me August 5-11: Alma 38-42
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.
The Justice of God
By Terryl L. Givens
There is somewhat more which doth worry your mind, which ye cannot understand—which is concerning the justice of God…. Alma 41:1
Corianton was not the only soul to be disturbed by the scriptural language of punishment, misery, and retribution. What Christian has not been troubled by the prevalence of images of anger and doom that await the wicked?
Corianton was, however, fortunate in being the recipient of the most enlightening explication of the “justice” that scripture affords us. The key to Alma’s exposition is another word that is a central concept in Latter-day Saint thought and scripture: agency. One philosopher referred to the tradition’s “almost obsessive concern for free moral agency.”[1] The Book of Mormon—and the Doctrine and Covenants—certainly give to moral agency an emphasis beyond any biblical treatment. The Restoration posits a founding cosmic narrative that makes debates over agency the stuff of premortal conflict (Moses 4:3), reads the Garden of Eden as the setting where God “gave … unto man his agency” (Moses 7:32), and chose a hymn about agency to feature in the Church’s first hymnal (“Know This That Every Soul is Free”).
It is no surprise, then, that Alma considers agency the grand framework that makes sense out of what is otherwise an intractable problem: why a seeming limit on God’s desire and ability to freely forgive? Why the specter of eternal damnation, the threat of a looming judgment and retribution? To say that God is constrained by justice is to simply substitute one mystery for another. Parents can forgive an errant child without penalty—why not God? What is this Justice before which even God must bow?
The beauty of Alma’s explanation is that Justice becomes, in his rendering, a manifestation of love rather than an impersonal Platonic entity. God offers his children the free choice of eternal life—the life that God enjoys. All that is necessary for us to do is to choose what he calls “the great plan of happiness” (42:8). That our choice will be honored, that our agency is assured, is “according to the restoration of God” (42:28). In other words, God stands as guarantor that all things will be “restored to their proper order” (41:2), by which he means “raised to happiness according to [one’s] desires of happiness, or good according to [one’s] desires of good” (41:5). Or the converse. Judgment, in Alma’s analysis, means no more and no less than the unfolding of a consequence in accordance with our “desire” for that consequence. Love inaugurates this “theology of ascent” as early Christians called it, and love assures that “whoever will may walk therein” (41:8).
Modern revelation affirms that Justice is actually another name for the giftedness of all God wants to give us—contingent only on our choosing it. Judgment unfolds as each person “shall return again to their own place, to enjoy that which they are willing to receive” (88:32).
* * *
What are we willing to receive, and what do we desire? Those may be harder questions than they appear to be. It is doubtful that anyone really wants to run a marathon. On closer examination, most of us will admit that when we say we want to run a marathon, or we want to get up at 5 tomorrow morning, we actually mean “I’d like to have run a marathon,” or “tomorrow I would like to have gotten up at 5 a.m.” In the same way, I think, Alma is telling us what we think we desire is often no more than wishful thinking. Desire shapes our nature—but can we shape those desires?
The philosopher Harry Frankfurt argues that a distinguishing hallmark of humans is that they “are not limited to desires that move them…. They have the reflexive capacity to form desires regarding their own desires—that is, both what they want to want and what they want not to want.” He continues that we are not “merely a passive bystander or victim” regarding our desires and motivation.[2] We can reflect, we can embrace, or we can resist them. We can aspire to a different, more spiritually evolved self.
Alma’s great discourse on justice has far-reaching implications for the way we understand the role of God as designer of “the great plan of mercy” (42:31), the role of Christ as the Great Reconciler, and the task of repentance as the schooling of desire. Positing justice as a reflection of rather than competitor with relationship to love makes his plea to Corianton more compelling: “Let the justice of God, and his mercy, and his long-suffering have full sway in your heart” (42:30).
[1] Sterling McMurrin, The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1965), 52.
[2] Harry G. Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 18-20.
IMAGES
Rembrandt van Jihn, Christ Carried to the Tomb, public domain, ca. 1645.
Marko Ivan Rupnik, Resurrection of Christ, c. 2006.
Citation
Caleb Williams, He Is Not Here; He Is Risen, 2024. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [bookofmormonartcatalog.org/catalog/he-is-not-here-he-is-risen/].
