Adam Miller Wonder of Scripture Lecture

Transcript

The title of my talk today is “The Whole Meaning of the Law: Atonement as Epiphany”

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In book three of his ethics, (Ethics: Part 3 by Benedict de Spinoza) Spinoza defines wonder as follows: “Wonder is an imagination of a thing in which the mind remains fixed because this singular imagination has no connection with the others. As a result,” he says ,wonder keeps a person, “so suspended in considering this orphaned idea that they cannot think of other things.” In this sense, wonder indicates a problem. It indicates a failure to understand. We understand an idea to the degree that we can connect it to other ideas. But wonder is what happens when an idea has no connections, and so our thinking comes to an abrupt halt. We reach a dead end. We're stuck. We're fixated. We can't move on. We experience a stupor of thought. We're dazed, entranced and confused. This is wonder. This is the wonder of Scripture. When in reading scripture, I'm brought up short, lose the thread, and no longer know what it means. ... Wonder indicates that the smooth operation of my imagination has been derailed and the tiny, closed loop of my expectations has been interrupted. This sounds like a problem, and it is, but this problem is also a gift. The possibility of encountering this exact problem, the problem of wonder. This is why I bothered to read Scripture in the first place, to have the feedback loop of my self-absorbed fantasies falter, to have my two easy explanations and self-congratulatory expectations called into question by what I don't understand. We preach Christ crucified Paul tells the Corinthians because he is a stumbling block.

In general, though we're keen to avoid this. When we read Scripture, we tend to read it in such a way as to avoid this stumbling block, we let our eyes pass over the pages, scanning only for familiar words that can be extracted from their native context and then smoothly plugged into our ready-made, pre-fabricated stories, stories that are inevitably about us. Deploying this method, we neither wonder nor stumble and instead rest in the pleasant buzz that follows from confirming that indeed we were already right all along, just as we suspected. In my experience, though, our scriptures are ready to challenge us on every page, we hardly understand them, and they rarely actually say what we expect them to say. This may be especially true of the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon preaches Christ on nearly every page, and so the Book of Mormon is full of stumbling blocks. Most every verse is primed to induce wonder, to force us to stop, get stuck, and wonder aloud: “does this verse really say anything like what I thought it was going to say?” Wonder, though, is not the end goal. The goal in wonder is to interrupt the prejudicial chatter of our own minds long enough to see the truth and connect with God. The goal is to stop assuming imaginary connections between ideas and instead follow the words on the page as they connect in challenging and surprising ways with each other. The goal is to let God Himself connect the dots and to follow along as he connects, not only one word to another, but one verse to another, and even one chapter to another, or one whole book to another. Building out a profound and elaborate network of connections that sketches in miniature what Christ's Atonement itself promises to do, to gather all things in one, both in heaven and in earth, to gather all in all.

With the time then that's mine today, I want to conduct an experiment in wonder. I want to investigate Alma chapter 34 but instead of assuming that I already know what this chapter is going to say about atonement and justice and mercy, I want to wonder what it's actually saying, how it defines its own terms, how it connects its own dots, and thus how it draws me out from behind my circled wagons to set me face to face with God. As best I can tell, Alma 34 is a very surprising chapter. It is full of wonder, and when I let it interrupt me, and then listen carefully, I find that Alma chapter 34 is saying something quite different, something much more powerful than I'd expected. In Alma 34 Amulek teaches that the Son of God will offer himself as a great and last sacrifice, and that thus he shall bring salvation to all those who shall believe on his name. How, though, does this thus work? How does Christ's sacrifice bring salvation to those who believe? How am I saved? My argument is that in Alma 34 Amulek develops a powerful account of the Atonement that is unique to the Book of Mormon. Rather than reading Christ's sacrifice as a way of generating moral influence, ransoming us from the devil, or vicariously appeasing God's wrath, Amulek treats Christ's sacrifice as a revelation that satisfies the demands of justice by showing how mercy was all along from the foundation of the world, “the whole meaning of the law.” Taking God's law as a sign or a type, Amulek treats Christ's sacrifice as an epiphany that redeems by fulfilling and displaying the true meaning of that divine sign. In short, as Amulek describes it, the relationship between justice and mercy is semi-logical. Justice is a sign. Mercy is the meaning of this sign, and sin is what happens when I act in ignorance of this sign. Another way to say this is that when Amma and Amulek repeatedly urged the Zoramites to, “experiment upon the word” or “plant the word in their hearts”, I don't think they just mean the gospel in a vague and general sense. Rather, I think they both have one single actual word in mind, and I think this exact word is quite explicitly, specifically and precisely mercy. Christ's atoning sacrifice is an epiphany that reveals “the word” as mercy.

Alma 34 is Amulek explanation of Alma’s sermon in Alma 32 and 33, these dots must be connected, and from beginning to end, Alma sermon is itself tightly focused on addressing the power of what he simply calls the word. In Alma 32 Alma famously compares this word to a seed. Asks the Zoramites to plant this word in their hearts, and then urges them to tend to this word as it grows into a tree of life. However, before he ever develops this analogy of word as seed, Alma explains exactly what he means by the word, when in Alma, 32:22 he introduces the term. “I would that ye should remember,” Alma tells the Zoramites, “that God is merciful unto all who believe on his name. Therefore, he desires in the first place that ye should believe, yea, even on His word.” Here, Alma introduces the idea of God's word, as he asks the Zoramites to believe on His word. But the meaning of the word in this verse is not obscure or mysterious. The terms specific antecedent is the promise that God is merciful unto all who will believe on his name. As Alma describes it, the word must be planted in one's heart, the word that must be believed, this is God's own word that he is merciful. Alma’s entire analogy of the word as seed is then meant to illustrate what happens when this specific word that God is merciful is planted in one's heart. However, Alma’s analogy in Alma 32 is baroque enough in its development that once he's finished, the Zoramites themselves need some additional clarification about how they should quote, plant the word or the seed in their hearts. Alma responds with an example illustrating how to pray. He says, “do you remember to have read what Zenos said concerning prayer or worship?” When Zenos prayed, Alma explains, Zenos prayed like this:

“Thou art merciful, O God, for thou hast heard my prayer, even when I was in the wilderness; yea, thou wast merciful when I prayed concerning those who were mine enemies ... Yea, O God, and thou wast merciful unto me when I did cry unto thee in my field ... Yea, thou art merciful unto thy children when they cry unto thee ... Yea, O God, thou hast been merciful unto me, and heard my cries... and it is because of thy Son that thou hast been thus merciful unto me.” (Alma 33:4-11)

This explanation of the word is, I think, quite emphatic. The Zoramites ask how to plant the word, Alma tells them to pray, and he gives them one example, an example where Zenos prayed one word again and again: mercy, mercy, mercy.

When Amulek gets his turn to speak to the Zoramites in Alma 34, Amulek then offers an explanation of Alma 32 and 33 that repeats Almas discourse, but with a twist. Amulek transposes Almas claims about the word into a Christological register, where he explains how mercy is the fulcrum of Christ's own atoning work. What follows then in Alma 34 is a parallel explanation of Christ's own atoning sacrifice, in terms of words or signs, and their fulfillment. Or what follows is an explanation that, in light of the word, understands Atonement as epiphany. Amulek opens his sermon in Alma 34 by reframing the question the Zoramites had asked Alma about how to plant the word. As Amulek reframes it, the real question the Zoramites are asking is this, “The great question which is in your minds is whether the word be in the Son of God, or whether there shall be no Christ.” (Alma 34:5) The problem, as Amulek sees it, is that when it comes to answering this question, the Zoramites suffer from an impossible kind of ignorance. This is the first thing Amulek says to the Zoramites: “My brethren, I think it is impossible that ye should be ignorant of the things which have been spoken concerning the coming of Christ, who is taught by us to be the Son of God.” (Alma 34:2) Nonetheless, according to Amulek, this is the great question in the minds of the Zoramites. Whether the word be in the Son of God, or whether there shall be no Christ. It should be impossible for the Zoramites to be ignorant about whether the word is in Christ, but somehow, they still are. This is the bind that defines the Zoramite dilemma. They've failed to know something that it should be impossible for them not to know.

And this, I think, is also a good working description of what it's like to be a sinner. Sinners suffer from an impossible ignorance. As a sinner, there's something crucial, something hidden in plain sight that it should be impossible for me not to know, and yet I don't know it. I can't see it, or at least I won't see it. As a sinner, this failure to understand and affirm what should be obvious about life and death, about myself and the world, about the meaning of the word, is at the root of my destructive actions. In practical terms, the Zoramites’ great question about Christ could be restated in this way, as the Amulek does in verse three, “Ye have desired of my beloved brother that he should make known unto you what ye should do because of your afflictions.” (verse 3) Here, the Zoramites’ apparently technical, theological questions about whether there is one God or whether the word be in the Son of God are recast in a very pragmatic form. What should the people do about their afflictions? They suffer, but they don't understand what to do. They don't understand the meaning of their suffering as a sign. And what's more, this suffering is compounded by the fact that their hearts, the very place where the saving word must be planted, are hard. As Amulek puts it, “All are hardened; yea, all are fallen and are lost, and must perish except it be through the Atonement which it is expedient should be made.” (verse 9) In the context of Alma 32 through 34, what does it mean to have a hard heart? In Alma 33, Alma has already stipulated a definition of what it means to have a hard heart, when the Zoramites ask how to plant the word in their hearts. Alma, as we've seen, appeals to Zenos and urges them to pray for mercy. But in addition to this positive example, Alma also appeals to both Zenok and Moses for negative examples, for examples of what it looks like when our hearts are hard, and we fail to plant the word. Quoting Zenok, Alma describes how God is angry with his people, quote, “because they will not understand [one crucial thing;] thy mercies, which thou hast bestowed upon them because of thy son.” (Alma 33:16)

Alma then adds to this general claim a case study in failing to understand God's mercy, the type or sign of the serpent that Moses raised up in the wilderness, that whosoever might look upon it might live. While some did look and live, he says, many did not understand this sign of God's mercy. In fact, few understood the meaning of those things, he says, because of the hardness of their hearts. Here, Moses' serpent is an excellent example of a type or sign given in plain sight whose meaning is not understood. It should be impossible to not look and live, and yet the people fail to understand the meaning of the sign and they perish. Thus, in context, Alma and Amulek most both mean something very specific when they talk about having a hard heart. The hard heart of a sinner, of someone lost and fallen, of someone who will unavoidably perish, is a heart that (1) fails to understand the meaning of the signs or types given by God, and (2) fails to understand that the specific meaning of these signs or types is God's mercy as manifest in his Son. This frame is the key to understanding Amulek’s explanation of Christ's Atoning Sacrifice as an epiphany, because for Amulek, there is no better sign or type of Christ than God's own law. For Amulek, God's law is itself a sign whose meaning sinners fail to understand. As Amulek puts it, this is the problem that Christ must solve. Given that “all are hardened” and that all have failed to understand the word, “it is expedient that an atonement should be made... it is expedient that there should be a great and last sacrifice;” it is expedient that there should be an epiphany that satisfies the signs and reveals God's mercy as “the whole meaning of the law” (Alma 34:9-10, 14). The people must come to understand God's mercy. Their hearts must be softened. The word must take root in that soil.

In the dense and powerful verses that follow in Alma 34:10-16, Amulek then offers an explanation of how this happens. “This atonement requires,” he says, “a great and last sacrifice, an infinite and eternal sacrifice.” (verse 10) That, rather than substituting one finite life for another, under penalty of law, will instead fulfill the entire law, revealing its whole and true meaning. As Amulek describes it, then the intent of this last sacrifice is “to bring about the bowels of mercy which overpower justice and bring about means unto men that they may have faith unto repentance. And thus mercy can satisfy the demands of justice, and encircle them in the arms of safety, while he that exercises no faith unto repentance is exposed to the whole law of the demands of justice... thus he shall bring about salvation to all those who shall believe on his name.” (verse 15-16)

To follow this explanation, we need, I think, to untie the knot at its center. On one hand, Amulek claims that the intent of this last sacrifice is to bring about the bowels of mercy, which overpower justice. But on the other hand, Amulek also claims that thus, Mercy can satisfy the demands of justice. This is an odd pair of claims. How can mercy both overpower and satisfy justice at the same time? In fact, how can mercy overpowering justice lead directly, thus, Amulek says, to mercy satisfying justice? Normally, the party that's just been overpowered is not the party whose demands have thus also been satisfied. The overpowered party isn't usually the satisfied party. Is mercy overpowering justice? Or is mercy satisfying justice? Or if mercy is doing both, then how? Consider first the word overpower. In Alma 34 the word is used on one other occasion, and in that instance, its meaning is spelled out. This second use comes in Alma 34:39, “I will I also exhort you, my brethren, that ye be watchful unto prayer continually, that ye may not be led away by the temptations of the devil, that he may not overpower you, that ye may not become his subjects at the last day.” Here, being overpowered means “to become subject to.” Applying this definition to Alma 34:15 then we get the following, “To say that mercy has overpowered justice is to say that justice has become subject unto mercy.” The question, though, remains, how could becoming subject to Mercy satisfy Justice's own demands?

Consider then the word satisfy. What does it mean to satisfy? Amulek, again, offers a series of tightly aligned images that frame what's at stake in satisfaction. The law is satisfied, he indicates, when it is fulfilled. The great and last sacrifice that operationalizes mercy can satisfy the demands of justice precisely, he says, because it fulfills the law. And this sacrifice doesn't just fulfill some local elements of the law or compensate exclusively for some broken aspects of the law. Amulek is quite emphatic that mercy fulfills all of the law. There must be a great and last sacrifice, Amulek says, and then the law shall all be fulfilled, every jot and title and none shall have passed away.

How then can justice be overpowered by mercy and have its demand and have its demands fulfilled by mercy? The straightforward answer is, I suspect, too obvious to easily see. Both of these things can easily be true. If mercy is what justice demands. If justice demands that it becomes subject unto mercy, then being overpowered by mercy would precisely fulfill this demand. Again, this sounds a little weird, but I'm not being especially creative. Something like this is actually what Amulek himself says. Christ, Amulek says, “is the whole meaning of the law every whit pointing to the great and last sacrifice.” Amulek does not treat Christ's sacrifice as an ad hoc workaround for sinners, an amendment that's foreign to God's law or the demands of justice. Rather, Amulek treats Christ's sacrifice as the whole meaning of the law and His mercy as the fulfillment of the love that the law itself demands. If justice is a quality of the law, which Amulek indicates when he introduces justice in verse 11, saying, “our law which is just,” and the whole meaning of the law is Christ's great and last sacrifice which brings about the bowels of mercy, then how surprised can we be that the law, when fulfilled, ends up being overpowered by its own meaning?

This is exactly how meaning works. As Amulek describes it, the relationship between mercy and justice is here structured like the relationship between a sign and its meaning, just laws are the sign and mercy is their meaning. What satisfies a sign? Signs are satisfied by meanings. What do signs demand? Signs demand meaning. Or again, to fulfill their destiny signs must be filled with and overpowered by their meaning. In this way, meaning, it seems to me, is a truly excellent model for thinking about how something can be both overpowered and satisfied at the same time. And conveniently, it appears to be exactly the model that Alma has framed, and Amulek has elaborated. For Amulek, the whole of God's law, ritual, civil, moral, all of it, functions as a type of Christ. The whole law is a sign, and Christ is the meaning of that sign. Christ's great and last sacrifice is the epiphany that in one overpowering stroke, brings about the bowels of mercy, and thus reveals the whole meaning of the law, a meaning that from the start it should have been impossible not to see. And this kind of epiphany is precisely what sinners need in order to be saved, the epiphany of God's mercy, as revealed in the son's sacrifice. This epiphany is what brings about means unto men that they may have faith unto repentance. Because failing to understand this, failing to understand that these signs and types all point to God's mercy, is exactly what it means to have a hard heart. This is what it means to suffer from an impossible ignorance. This is what it means to be lost and fallen and unavoidably perishing.

Amulek has now explained how the word is in the Son of God, but one very practical question remains, how can the Zoramites, like Christ, also plant the seed or word in their hearts? On my reading, these two questions are tightly intertwined. As Amulek explains it, we plant the word in our hearts in the same way Christ planted mercy in the law: by way of sacrifice. And as a practical matter, as Alma has already explained, this sacrificial work of exercising faith unto repentance is the work of prayer. We participate in this sacrificial work by praying for mercy. How is prayer a form of sacrifice? When Amulek describes why there must be an atonement made or else all Mankind must unavoidably perish, he repeatedly uses an unusual word: expedience.

This word is, I think, essential to understanding the nature of atoning sacrifices and the role played by prayer in that sacrificial work. In Alma 34:9 through 13, Alma uses the word expedient five times. It's expedient that an atonement should be made. All are fallen and are lost and must perish, except it be through the Atonement which it is expedient should be made. It's expedient that there should be a great and last sacrifice. Therefore, it's expedient that there should be a great and last sacrifice. And as a result, it's also expedient there should be a stop to the shedding of blood. Right? What's expedience?

An expedient is something that expedites. It speeds up or advances a desired result. It's an urgent means adopted out of necessity. It removes obstacles to progress. Etymologically, expedience literally means to free (ex) the feet (ped) from fetters. In short, expedience with urgency, liberates. As Amulek describes that Christ's atoning sacrifice is characterized or colored through and through by expedience, or we might say, expedience names the mood proper to atonement and sacrifice. Here, I especially mean the term mood in the grammatical sense. In grammar, the mood of a verb refers to its modality. Grammatical moods are quote verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying. Grammatical moods include the indicative, the imperative, the optative, the interrogative, the conditional, everyone's favorite, the subjunctive, etc. My suggestion is that as expedient, as urgently necessary, the grammatical mood of atonement is the imperative mood. In light of the great plans of the eternal God, expedience signals what must be done. There must be an atonement made, or else all mankind must unavoidably perish. The grammatical mood of atoning sacrifice as expedient is imperative. How does this help?

My claim is that atoning sacrifice as expedient opens the redemptive possibility of living, suffering, and even dying in a fundamentally different grammatical mood. And in this sense, to become a Christian, to be converted, to bear the name of Christ, to accept and live the law of sacrifice is to start living continually in this imperative mood. The Zoramites asked Alma, “What should we do because of our afflictions?” To this, Amulek adds the fact that the Zoramites are not only suffering more as hardened as impossibly ignorant of something that is painfully obvious, they must also, he says, unavoidably perish. Christ's atoning sacrifice intervenes in response to this problem. Because of Christ's sacrifice, Amulek says, it is no longer the case that we must unavoidably perish. We can, I think, offer two different ways of reading what this means. First, if we read perishing as referring to hell or eternal damnation, then Christ's Atoning Sacrifice prevents this perishing from being unavoidable. If we have faith unto repentance, perishing can be avoided altogether. But more interesting to me is the second reading, if we read perishing as just meaning death, then Christ's Atoning Sacrifice clearly doesn't prevent anyone from dying. Despite resurrection, everyone must still first suffer death. What then does Christ's sacrifice accomplish on this second reading? My suggestion is that Christ's sacrifice opens the possibility of living and especially dying in a different grammatical mood, rather than dying in the indicative mood, where suffering and dying are just empty unavoidable facts. Christ's sacrifice opens the possibility of suffering and dying in the imperative mood. Rather than suffering my death as unavoidable, I can now, like Christ, take up my death as something expedient. In the imperative mood, I can expedite or hasten my dying in an otherwise avoidable way. I can we might say, intentionally or avoidably perish. What do you call a death that, rather than being unavoidable is now undergone intentionally in the imperative mood, in a way that could have been avoided? What do you call death, when out of an imperative sense of urgency, you expedite that death by taking it up early. You call it a sacrifice. In the indicative mood, death is just death. But in the imperative mood as expedient, death is sacrifice.

Here, the redemptive effect of an Atoning Sacrifice depends on adding something to death. To the bare indicative fact of death is added the imperative moral intention to willingly die. This additional supplementary willingness to die robs death of its mood of unavoidability, and instead endows that death with meaning and moral weight. Christ's sacrifice reveals the meaning of death, and a meaningful death is what you call a sacrifice. Here, if death was previously an empty and terrifying sign, then sacrifice is death as epiphany.

Sacrifice is an epiphany that fulfills death, that fills it with meaning. And the meaning of sacrifice, of death rendered as a gift in the imperative mood, is mercy. And mercy, it turns out, is the very word that must be planted in our hearts.

In Alma 34:17-27, Amulek follows up this discussion of atonement with detailed instructions that then finally explain how to both, (1) plant the word in our hearts, and (2) participate in this expedient work of sacrifice. We plant the word in our hearts, he says, by praying the word mercy, morning, midday and evening, and we offer our lives as a sacrifice through prayer, by continually handing our lives and wills over to God. As Amulek describes it in Alma 34:26, this kind of prayer can be described as the work of pouring out your soul, and this image is, I think, explicitly sacrificial. You must, Amulek says, “pour out your souls in your closets, and your secret places, and in your wilderness. Yea, and when you do not cry unto the Lord, let your hearts be full, drawn out in prayer unto him continually for your welfare, and also for the welfare of those which are around you.” (Alma 34:26-27)

The decisive image in this passage appears, ... quite clearly to be a libation image. Pouring out one's soul to God is an image meant to mirror the form of a wine libation, or a drink offering. As part of the law of Moses, the Israelites were commanded to offer libations of wine with their sacrifices. These libations were continually poured out at the base of the temple altar. As Numbers 28:15 directs and one kid of the goats for a sin offering unto the Lord shall be offered beside the continual burnt offering and his drink offering. This is what it looks like when, as Christians, we begin living and dying in the imperative mood. It looks like the continual work of pouring out one's soul as a sacrificial offering on God's altar. An expedient life, a life overpowered by mercy and filled with meaning, is life lived as a prayer.

Amulek’s instructions in Alma 34:17-27 for pouring out one's soul in prayer as a continual sacrifice are as detailed as any in restoration scripture. If you're looking somewhere in Scripture for a description of how to pray and how to do it, this is as best as you're going to get. And given their own repeated emphasis on the necessity of saying mercy, these verses may make the strongest case of all, for my suggestion that the word that must be planted in our hearts is literally, specifically the word mercy. Remember that God is merciful, Amulek instructs, by literally crying unto God for mercy and then crucially continuing in this prayer for mercy, this cry for mercy, He says, should continue in the field, in the house, in the closet, in our secret places, and in the wilderness. This cry for mercy should extend to all our flocks, all our crops, all our household, and even all our enemies. We should cry mercy, mercy, mercy at morning, midday and evening. Wherever we go, whatever we do, Mercy should be our mantra. We should say it out loud, and we should say it in our hearts. We should shout it and we should whisper it, and whenever we do not cry unto the Lord with our voices, we must learn how to let our hearts be full, drawn out unto God continually in this same prayer for mercy. We must keep saying this prayer again and again, until instead of saying this prayer, this prayer begins to say us. We must keep saying this prayer, until, instead of planting this word in our hearts, the heart of mercy has grown in us, and the bowels of mercy have overpowered us. We must continue in this prayer with unbroken attention until the meaning of our lives and deaths and suffering is revealed at once in an epiphany, and God is manifest, and our impossible ignorance passes away like a brief but disquieting dream endured in the indicative mood, from which we've only just been awoken by the imperative of sacrifice. This is redemption, this is mercy, and the time for this redemption is now. “Now is the time and the day of [our] salvation;” Amulek says, and “if [we] will repent and harden not [our] hearts, immediately shall the great plan of redemption be brought about unto [us].” (Alma 34:31) Thank you.