Book of Mormon Studies Podcast: Enos, Jarom, Omni, Words of Mormon Scholarship with Steven Peck

Rosalynde Welch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Maxwell Institute Book of Mormon Studies Podcast. My name is Rosalynde Welch. I'm the host of the podcast and the associate director of the Institute. And my guest today is a friend, an amazing scholar and really an incredible human being. His name is Dr. Steve Peck. Steve is an associate professor of biology here at Brigham Young University and he's also a fellow at the Maxwell Institute

Steve Peck: So this is such an honor. And Rosalynde, you're one of my heroes. So I'm really intimidated and grateful to be here, to have this chance.

Welch: Oh, don't. Well, so here's the thing. Don't be intimidated. You're a biologist. We love having you. You always bring a really interesting and fresh perspective. And you're also a good Book of Mormon scholar in your own right. You're a regular fixture at the Book of Mormon Studies Association annual meeting. You always have a fascinating paper on the Book of Mormon. You're an excellent reader of the Book of Mormon. And the reality is, as we were just talking about, no university in the world offers a degree in Book of Mormon Studies. Book of Mormon Scholarship simply by love and enthusiasm of the book and by knowledge of the literature. And on both of those counts, you definitely qualify. So we are delighted to have you here today.

Peck: Oh, thank you.

Welch: We're going to be talking about some highlights of the scholarly literature on the books of Enos, Jerom, Omni, and maybe we'll touch on Words of Mormon. I'm not sure whether we'll touch on that, but on these itty bitty books, as Sharon Harris calls them right here at the end of the small plates. So get us in the right frame of mind, Steve. We're thinking about Enos. We're going to start out talking about Enos' experience. You have a few thoughts on the story of Enos that we encounter here in the Small Plates. So take it away.

Peck: Yeah, I love this story. This is a little bit of personal history that few people know, but I got active in the church while I was in the army. And I read Enos, and I took that as an injunction to try that. So I decided I was going to pray all day and all night until something happened. And I took the story seriously, and I did that. But I don't think my heart was in the right place, I stood up from the prayer, I hit my head on the upper bunk of the bunk bed and almost passed out. Some people need a vision, other people need a smack upside the head to find their spiritual roots. So that was my case.

Welch: Well, it's had a very personal, it's touched you very personally then we could say from the beginning. But tell us what you make of it.

Peck: Yes, yes, exactly. Okay, let me actually go to the text and read it. We'll start with just the opening lines. Behold, it came to pass that I, Enos, knowing my father, that he was a just man, for he taught me in his language and also in the nature and admonition of the Lord. And blessed be the name of my God for it. And I will tell you of a wrestle which I had before God before I received a remission of my sins.

So to me it's interesting, what's Jacob out there doing? And there's hints, I think. The first hint comes in his statement that the things that he's thinking about while he's in there. He says, and this is in verse 4, and now my soul hungered, and I kneeled down before my Maker. and I cried mightily, a mighty prayer and supplication for my own soul, and all the day long did I cry. And when the night came, I still did raise my voice high into the heavens."

But notice that what he's praying for isn't for a vision. He's not praying for a particular event. There's nothing in here that indicates what he's praying for, except when he gets answered, he says, thy sins are forgiven thee. And that's interesting to me. And it's interesting to me for a couple of reasons. Let me read one more similar event from the scriptures, If I can find it.

So this is, this is a scripture where somebody has a very similar event. And it's from Joseph Smith's first vision account from 1832. And I look at this and it makes me think of Enos. So as Joseph says, for I looked upon the sun, the glorious luminary of the earth, and also the moon rolling in her majesty through the heavens, and also the stars shining in their courses. And the earth also, upon which I stood, and the beasts of the field, and the fowls of the heaven, and the fish of the waters, and also men walking forth upon the face of the earth in majesty and in the strength of beauty, whose power and intelligence, governing the things which are so exceedingly great and marvelous, even the likeness of him who created them."

Couple of things in this, Joseph Smith is noticing the beauties of the earth. He's talking about experiencing nature and this is one of the possibilities for Enos out hunting, out there experiencing nature. He's noticing how often the prophets go to wilderness is often astonishing to me and it seems to be a place of revelation and it says there and Joseph continues, therefore I cried, none else to whom I could go and obtain mercy. And the Lord heard my cry in the wilderness, and while in the attitude of calling upon the Lord, in the sixteenth year of my age, a pillar of light above the brightness of the sun at noonday came down from above and rested upon me, and I was filled with the Spirit of God. And the Lord opened the heavens upon me, and I saw the Lord, and he spake unto me, saying, Joseph, my son, thy sins are forgiven thee. Go thy way and walk in my statues and keep my commandments. Behold, I am the Lord of glory. I was crucified for the world, and all those who believe on my name may have eternal life." So, in neither case does it seem like a vision's being sought? What's being sought is forgiveness, that my standing before the Lord. And that comes across very powerfully, I think, in Enos, this idea of, he feels a lack of joy in his life. He's out there hunting, he's remembering his father had a vision of the Savior, he's remembering the condition of the Lamanites. All these things are playing on his mind when he begins his prayer. And so for me, this is a prayer of where do I fit in this? Where I'm filled with sins, and I'll say more about that in just a second, but that's kind of interesting to me, this connection that this revelatory thing isn't done by saying, I want to see a vision. I need, I'm not going to believe until I see something. But it happens anyway. Same with Brother Jared. I mean, it's all over the place. These visions where you come before the Lord in faith, but not the faith that you're going to get what you think you're going to get.

Welch: Yes, exactly. That's it. Sometimes the Lord hears our prayer and answers them. That's an unmistakable theme throughout the small plates: that the Lord invites us to come to him to seek further light and knowledge, but it doesn't always look like you think it's going to look.

Peck: Yes, yes.

Welch: Sometimes it's a little different. I've, you know, and I've mentioned this on past podcasts and I ask forgiveness of my listeners if they're getting tired of me harping on this, but I have just been so struck by the relevance of Matthew 7, 7 through 12 or so, in the Sermon on the Mount to the small plates. And that's where the Lord invites us to ask, seek and knock. And, you know, He says, which of you, if your son asks for bread, you'll give him a stone. Or if he asks for fish, you'll give him a snake. Saying, you don't give bad things to your children, how much more will your father in heaven give you good things? What strikes me is that, yes, the Lord will give us good things, but they might not be exactly what we ask for. Maybe we ask for bread and he's going to give us a carrot. Or are we? We ask for a fish and he's gonna give us a cat or something. So it might not be what we expect, but we can trust that he will, sort of beyond our ability to ask, he will give us what we need.

Peck: Right, right. I suppose he could give us a snake if we needed a snake.

Welch: If we needed a snake, he'd give us a snake. Well, Steve, this has been such a fascinating kind of immersion in the mind and the mindset of Enos at the opening here of these small verses. And I think you've brought so many themes that are going to be important throughout, the relationship between Lamanites and Nephites and what it means to have faith and how do we connect with the Lord and what happens when that connection seems to go dark.

Can I jump in here? Would you mind? I think this would be a great opportunity to share a reading from Sharon Harris's little book, Brief Theological Introduction to Enos, Jerom, and Omni, which by now our listeners probably know was published in 2020 as part of an entire series. First of all, it's a remarkable achievement that she was able to write, you know, 100 plus pages on these small books, right? I think she says that the entire number of verses is less than the total number of verses in Jacob 6, right? Yeah. So it's remarkable what she's been able to pull out of these books, doing the kind of close, careful reading that you've just demonstrated for us. But I wanted to highlight in particular the way she reads the Book of Enos and Enos's own prayer. She has a very particular lens that she puts on it, that I think makes a lot of sense. And the lens that she brings is an idea taken from the New Testament and from sort of the technical language of theology. So it's a word that may not be familiar to all of our listeners. It's the word kenosis. And that again shows up in the book of Philippians chapter two. And it's this idea that Christ in coming to earth was willing to empty himself of his pre-existent, pre-mortal glory and come to earth in a body in all of the limitations that entails, and submit even to death in performing the atonement for us. But then, having worked the wondrous work of the atonement, he was exalted again to be at the right hand of God. So it's this kind of V or valley shape text. All about--in following Christ we too are called to empty ourselves and divest ourselves of our own will and our own ego and any investment that we might have in our own power.

So, using this frame, Sharon very closely reads the story of Enos and she points out a couple of key moments. First of all, after the sequence that you've just summarized for us where he goes before the Lord and prays, we're told that Enos is made whole, that he's made whole by this experience, this very personal experience of forgiveness.

But after that in verse 10, sorry, in verse nine, then he turns outward and it says, Enos did pour out my whole soul unto God for them. Isn't that beautiful? So what…

Peck: And it is beautiful.

Welch: The Lord has just made whole. Enos turns right around and pours that wholeness out. He pours out the wholeness that God has given him on behalf of his brethren, the Nephites. And this, I think it's not just metaphorical. He talks about struggling in the spirit and about wrestling for this. So oftentimes the kind of emptying, self-emptying that we're asked to undertake is rigorous, is a rigorous process of stripping ourselves of vanity and ego.

That's important to note what she started out with, which is that we're not being asked to be doormats, right? We're not being asked to give up any sense of self at all. Enos was made whole before he's asked to pour himself out. So we should strive to come before the Lord and ask him to make us whole. “Only that which is whole can fully empty itself,” she says.

So, but then moving on in the story, you know, God informs Enos that the Nephites will eventually be destroyed. And what's interesting is that at that moment, Enos writes that his faith “began to be unshaken in the Lord,” which is really a surprising moment because you'd expect having just learned that eventually his own people will be destroyed in dwindle and wickedness. You'd expect that he would be overcome with grief as Nephi was, right? We saw that happen earlier.

But instead for Enos, his faith begins to be unshaken. And Sharon asks, does Enos not really understand right? Did he just kind of gloss over that part? And she says, no. “I venture that he comprehends his relationship to the Lamanites with new clarity. He realizes that since the Nephites cannot be relied on to stay righteous by themselves, they will need the Lamanites, the Lamanite remnant to rejuvenate the covenant.”

So he starts to see how actually his own people will depend on the Lamanites, they have to have some kind of interdependent relationship in the long run for God to be able to carry out his purposes to gather the house of Israel.

So then he turns in spirit towards the Lamanites and with many long strugglings we're told he prays for the Lamanites. And Sharon sees in this a kind of archetype that when God makes us whole, he asks us to “go to.” That's the phrase that he uses for Enos is “go to.” And it's a phrase that we saw in the allegory of the vineyard as well. It seems to be the phrase that the Lord uses when he asks us to go out and serve, pour out what I've given you and serve those around you.

So, she asked whether this kind of self-emptying can happen at the communal level of a whole people. Any of us who've lived in a family relationship know how on a personal level, we…in order to, the work of love consists in this kind of self emptying and work on behalf of the good of our spouse or our child. So we recognize that kind of Christ-like service in that way.

But what about at the level of a whole people, at the world historical level? And she says, yes, we can be, kenosis is operative at that level as well. And in fact, we have a name for it in the restoration. We call it consecration. Consecration is what it is when as a whole people we commit to give both of our resources and our will on behalf of others to serve and to bless the world. I love how she puts it here: “The question is always whether possessing the gift of agency, we will insist on our will as Satan did in the Council of Heaven. Will we hoard our will to ourselves or will we self-empty in the service of others?”

So I think it's such a beautiful lens and frame for understanding the kind of spiritual movement that Enos makes through the process of his prayer, from being made whole to pouring himself out on behalf of increasingly distant, and somewhat removed from himself, peoples who nevertheless he recognizes his inherent connection to them and in fact his interdependence and dependence on them for God to be able to carry out his greatest purposes.

Peck: Oh, that's fantastic. It's interesting to me too, there's one little word in those verses that stood out to me. And so when he pours out his soul, he uses the word for, maybe I can actually quote it. So that…I'm often accused of paraphrasing things that I ought to not. But he says, “I began to feel desire for the welfare of my brethren, the Nephites." And when he gets to the Lamanites, he says, I prayed unto him with many strong strugglings for my brethren, the Lamanites. So I thought that he used the word brethren was kind of significant there because if they were nothing but enemies you'd expect maybe brethren to be left off just the Lamanites or our enemies the Lamanites or those people that are different. So yeah.

Welch: No, I agree. Yeah, I agree that it's very telling there. Yeah. All right, well, let's shift gears. Let's talk about another article, another work of scholarship on these books, these small plates books. What have you got for us, Steve?

Peck: So one of my favorite papers, this is an academic paper, by Dr. Becky Rosler at BYUI. She's a music professor, but also is involved in Mormon studies. As you said, to be a Book of Mormon scholar, there's nowhere to get a degree. So you take on the labor with many strong wrestlings on your own. So but it's really a brilliant paper because what she does is she carefully examines the small plates through history. What she notices is, and this is some incredible detective work, is that nobody seems to be reading it. They get passed down and they eventually end up with King Benjamin and Alma, but nowhere do they specifically designate the separation of plates after that. And they're just lumped in with everything. And when we get to the words of Mormon, there's this big surprise. And I will give one of my paraphrases for this. But Mormon I says, Holy cow! He's poking around in all the junk I've been given. And looky here! I found these small plates and they're really cool. But what Rosler does is she goes back into those parts of the Book of Mormon. And she looks at some things that Alma says where Alma's talking about some prophecies, and he explains no one knows when Christ is coming. And holy cow, it's right there in 1 Nephi. We get a date. And she goes through many, many examples. It's worth reading the paper in its entirety. But she goes through many examples where the current prophet is explaining what they don't know and yet what they don't know is very explicit in the small plates in 1 and 2 Nephi and it looks there. So she does a very nice analysis of what that sort of implies about these were not kept current in a way.

So I think that was so much fun to see that it withstood that kind of scrutiny, that there's something going on there. I mean, that's not a detail that I as an author would have added to a story that this goes missing. It's almost just an artifact that no one, nobody's looked at until she looked at that. And so I thought that was really cool.

Welch: Yeah. Oh, that is fascinating. It brings up so many things. One of them, as you say, one thing I didn't mention about you, Steve, is that you are also, in addition to being a biologist and a scholar of science and religion, you're a novelist, and you're actually a really amazing novelist. So when you think about putting together a narrative, you've actually done that. And just as you say, I am struck so often in just tiny and subtle ways by the complexity and the reality, multi-layered effect of the Book of Mormon that it really is difficult for me to imagine one person just doing this, right? It really bears the authentic traces of different minds and different hands and different historical moments bringing this together. And it is genuinely a work of scriptural art, the Book of Mormon. The more I study it, the more I come to believe that.

Well, can I share another piece of scholarship with you then?

Peck: You bet.

Welch: This is one that I really love, and I think it's fascinating for a couple of reasons. It's written by a scholar named Elizabeth Fenton. She is a professor of English at the University of Vermont. And she is not a Latter-day Saint. And yet she's interested in the Book of Mormon. But she comes to it with a very different kind of interest than for many years we saw. For many years, the dynamic was: any non-Latter-day Saint reader of the Book of Mormon was likely to be somebody who came from an oppositional religious perspective and who was reading the book with unfriendly sectarian eyes wanting to debunk it. And there was really very little middle ground. There were really very few interested and impartial non-Latter-day Saint readers of the Book of Mormon.

But a very, very interesting development in Book of Mormon studies over the past 10 years or so has been in fact the emergence of a group of non-Latter-day Saint secular scholars but who approach the Book of Mormon with curiosity, with openness, and often with real appreciation as a work of literature, as a text. And there are a lot of reasons why you know, we've been able to come to this moment. Part of it is the good work done by scholars like Royal Skousen in developing a critical text that can be used. Scholars like Grant Hardy, who wrote his Understanding the Book of Mormon is an incredibly useful guide to the narrative and the narratology, and that speaks in a language that non-Latter-day Saint scholars can understand.

So for all of those reasons, there's really been a kind of gathering interest among historians and literature scholars of early America in the Book of Mormon. And it sort of culminated in this book, which was co-edited by Elizabeth Fenton, the author I've just, scholar I've just been talking about. She and Jared Hickman edited this book, Americanist Approaches to the Book of Mormon. This includes essays by Latter-day Saints and non-Latter-day Saints, all approaching the Book of Mormon from the question of its reception. In other words, what would it have meant, how would it have been received in the 19th century when it was brought forth? And that's a question that can engage believers and non-believers. And it generated tons of very interesting insights of great value, I think, even to me, somebody who believes in the divinity of the Book of Mormon as scripture and as the word of God.

So it's a really interesting question. If you're a non-Latter-day saint reader of the Book of Mormon and you're coming to it for the first time and you're friendly and you're curious and you're open about it, what's going to strike you? What's going to be the most interesting thing about this book? And so we see the answer to that question in this first article that Liz ever wrote on the Book of Mormon and it’s titled Open Canons. And what strikes her about the Book of Mormon here is the way that the Book of Mormon is a scripture about scripture, and it's history about history. It's a record about record keeping. There's this self-referential quality to it that we especially see in The Small Plates that is just fascinating to her as a textual scholar.

And she notices right away a difference from the Bible. When you open up the book of Genesis and you start reading the Bible from the beginning there, you don't have any first person discourse, any first person characters or personality or any trace of the sort of human narrator. Instead you have this sort of omniscient voice from nowhere that opens onto the creation of the world.

How different is that from especially the small plates where every book starts with I, Nephi, or I, Enos, I, Jerom, where you have this first person limited perspective. It's a prophetic perspective, but it's a limited human perspective woven into the narrative of the Book of Mormon from the very beginning. And they mention over and over again the ways that they're limited, these Book of Mormon narrators do, especially in the small plates. They talk about how they don't have very much room in the plates. And so they have to be very selective. They can only include a fraction of the total material. They talk about, they're very openly about their own imperfections and their own failings. Omni says, of myself, I am a wicked man. On the title page of the Book of Mormon.

Moroni mentions the imperfections that might be in these plates. So the Book of Mormon is very open and candid about the reality of its human element. It of course insists on its prophetic divinity as well. But it says, yes, this was written by men, men who are imperfect and are limited by the space and the plates and by their own human ability.

So what, what Liz, Elizabeth Fenton draws from this aspect of the Book of Mormon is a larger reflection on what it means to write history at all. Because the reality is that all historians are like the Book of Mormon historians, right? All historians are human and they all work within certain limitations and perspectives and no single historian can give the full omniscient, perfect account of any particular history. But so often historians try to hide that, right? They try to hide their limitations and give the impression that they are giving the definitive account of a history.

So the Book of Mormon shows us an alternate model of historiography, one that is open about the erasures and the failures and the losses. And she sees this as a very, very powerful response to early American Puritanism in particular, which tended to have a kind of triumphalist tone, right? That first of all saw the Bible itself as perfectly sufficient, entirely whole and perfect. And in that model, they kind of saw their own Puritan project as entirely sufficient, whole, and perfect. And they created these histories, mimicking the sort of character of the biblical record that sort of gave an inevitability to the American project.

But she sees the Book of Mormon as offering a very powerful revision or corrective to that kind of triumphalist critique. Just as the Book of Mormon says, you know, the Bible is the word of God, but it has been deeply wounded by the processes of human history, and it is not sufficient on its own.

In the same way, it gives an alternate historical account of the origins of Christianity in America. It invites readers to turn away from the kind of Puritan triumphalist past where there is a new Israel that has come to replace the old Israel and it will lead the continent to enlightenment. And instead shows a different point of origin for American Christianity, an indigenous Christianity, a Christianity that existed before European colonialism and before Anglo Protestants came.

So I think it's a fascinating account of, first of all, what the Book of Mormon might have meant to its earliest readers in that moment as they encountered this alternate history of America and that sort of radically decentered the self-concept of the Puritan elite. So it's so interesting and powerful. And I receive it as a gift of friendship to see what a non-Latter-day Saint scholar makes of the Book of Mormon. She's willing to approach it with such curiosity and openness and expertise in American history and literature.

Peck: Oh, that's fantastic.

Welch: All right, well, let's shift gears once more. And you've got one last book to share with us. It's actually a new book and a very exciting one.

Peck: Yeah, this is a very exciting book and it's relevant to what you were just talking about. It's Michael Austin's new book, The Testimony of Two Nations, where he looks at how the Book of Mormon reads the Bible. And the whole project has been fascinating. I focused on the Enoch chapters and things. And he's seen things that I haven't seen before.

But it's a very, very careful reading in conversation with the way that the Bible converses with the Book of Mormon and vice versa. He's looking at biblical narratives that appear subtly in the Book of Mormon in ways that are powerful and profound, a lot like Fenton's work, I think. I think she would appreciate this in terms of that it paints a very vivid and interesting picture of how those two texts, the testimony of two nations, how they become a testimony, or another testament of Christ. I mean, this is his point, but he's looking at it in a lot of different ways. He's kind of a, he's now the provost at Snow College, but his background is in English literature. And so he draws on that quite a bit to, to contextualize the things that he's talking about. It's just a fascinating work.

Welch: Yeah. Well, I'm excited to pick it up. I admit that's not on my shelf yet. It just was published a couple of months ago and I haven't picked it up yet. Is there any sort of particular reading or points from the, from the book that has really stayed with you?

Peck: Yeah, let me just, he looks at how the Exodus plays out. This is from chapter four. And he looks really carefully at the way that populations in the Book of Mormon don't reenact it, but the elements of the Exodus, the leaving, the cleansing of land, the wars, all of the different aspects. And he reads the Book of Mormon reading the Bible about these things. And this would have been in the brass plates. And he just does a really nice job of constructing those parallels and their meaning.

I think that's one of the things that really struck me is he's diving into not only the structural elements of both the Bible and the Book of Mormon, but he's talking about the implications of that, what it means, how do we interpret it, and why that interpretation matters in light of these structural elements in the Book of Mormon and the Bible. So it's a lot of fun.

Welch: Oh, that's great. It is true, the Exodus motif and the exit into the wilderness is this moment that we see over and over and over again in the Book of Mormon. Sometimes we just think about the initial migration out of Jerusalem into the New World. But no sooner had they settled in the New World than Nephi led his people into the wilderness again. And then here, actually, in the Book of Omni, there's another one. You'd miss it if you weren't reading carefully.

Peck: Yes!

Welch: If you really read carefully through Amoron and then Abinadom and then to Amalekai, there's this tremendous battle between the Lamanites and the Nephites. And it says that the more wicked part of the Nephites were destroyed. So there's a kind of Nephite remnant that's remaining. And then under King Mosiah, there's a kind of, seems to be a sort of spiritual renewal. And once again, the Lord is speaking to them, calling them away, just as we've seen in two other occasions. And so Mosiah then leads all the people who believed in the prophecies and the revelation, followed him into the wilderness. And once again, they undertake this exodus as refugees, right? The wilderness trek is always the migration of refugees searching for that place of refuge. And they find it at Zarahemla. And Zarahemla then will become this place where multiple groups of wandering refugees will come to congregate together. And then it's the task of the book of Mosiah to show how they can be knit together into one community of share one common life and one common interest. So yes, that's an incredibly important archetype of the Exodus.

Peck: Yeah, and he actually goes into the Omni case really beautifully. So yeah, that's fantastic. Yeah.

Welch: Good. Wonderful. Well, thanks for alerting us to that. Hot off the presses. This is cutting edge Book of Mormon Scholarship here. Great. Well, as we're coming into the end of our time together, Steve, I wanted to give you a chance just to share a particular scripture that you've loved or any other thoughts that you'd like to share with us and experiences as you reflect on Enos, Jerem, and Omni.

Peck: So, and this is in verse 11 of Enos. And after I, Enos, had heard these words, my faith began to be unshaken in the Lord. And you talked about that and Sharon's perspective on that. And I prayed unto him for many long strugglings for my brother and the Lamanites. And it came to pass that after I had prayed and labored with all diligence, the Lord said to me, I will grant unto thee according to thy desires because of thy faith.

But over and over again, there's a sense in me growing that I don't need to know what I need to pray in a sense. That part of life's experience for me has been learning to let go in a lot of ways of the things that I think are right for me, that I need to do. And I see that over and over again. And now that I'm attuned to it, I recognize that I need maybe more humility in my life. I need to let things unfold as they will, and let things appear in my life that surprise me and aren't a linear process of from A to B.

So many things have appeared that just seem almost at random, and yet they change my life in significant ways that I could have never asked for and never dared ask.

Welch: I think about where Paul talks about the groanings in the spirit and the whole earth groans in this way that we can't even articulate what it is that we are missing, what it is that we lack. But we have a good father who hears us and will give us what we need. That's an incredibly powerful reading of that opening verse of Enos. You know, in a way, the real question, the root of it is a question about time. And whether all the evil that has piled up in our own lives, all the suffering and all the scars that we bear in our collective life, in the way that our beautiful home and our society together has been degraded, is there any way to escape the determinism of time? Is there any way that something new can happen? Can we get out of the kind of inexorable progression from cause to effect to cause to effect. And the answer I think for Christians is yes, but there is a different kind of time. There's a time, there's a way to go back in fact, and, and change the past in certain ways. Right.

I think the trick is that before we can change the past, we have to forgive it and accept it. I think we have to come to a place of, of radical honesty and acceptance and confession of our sins and of our past. But when we get to that point, then the promise is that our sins, that though they be a scarlet, they can be made as wool, right? That they can be forgiven. And that something about who Christ is and the atonement that he worked on our behalf has a way of getting in there into the guts of time and being able to reorder it and reorganize it for us in a way that can lead to new life and to new beginnings. And in a way that leads, that's exactly what I wanted to share, and the scripture that I wanted to share. It's one here in the Book of Jerom. You know, oftentimes in the past, conversation about the Book of Mormon has centered around anachronisms that might show up in the Book of Mormon and different ways that those can be resolved. There's a central anachronism that will always be there, the central stumbling block that we will always hit our toe against fact that centuries before Christ's coming, prophets in the New World, Hebrew prophets were teaching in great detail about the coming of Christ and a developed Christian theology. That's a kind of anachronism that is never going to go away and never going to be explained away in the Book of Mormon. So the question is, what do we do with that? Does that count against the Book of Mormon and make it sort of implausible in some ways?

I think the work of recent scholars has showed us that no, on the contrary, that kind of central, what we might call anachronism at the heart of the Book of Mormon is the source of its power. And there's this really wonderful verse here in, in Jarom where he's, he's just sort of touches on it briefly, but he's talking about what it looked like, what Nephite worship looked like at the time. And he says, Jarom 1 11, wherefore the prophets and the priests and the teachers did labor diligently, exhorting with all long-suffering the people to diligence, teaching the law of Moses and the intent for which it was given, persuading them to look forward unto the Messiah and believe in him to come as though he already was. And after this manner did they teach them."

So the whole power of Nephite religion, Nephite Christianity, and especially Nephite prophecy, which is the beating heart and light at the center of the Book of Mormon, is the sense that Christ is already here. Even though he's not here yet. He won't be here for hundreds of years, but he's already with us and among us in certain ways. And that's the way that Christ can get in there into the gears and guts of normal, ordinary time and can reorder it and reorganize it, to give us access to new life and new creation. What would it be like? What if we lived in that same way? Now today as 21st century believers in the Book of Mormon, we look forward to his second coming and believe in him as if it had already happened. What if we already lived in the kingdom of God? What would that look like? What would that be like? Do we have access to that way of life and that way of being? And I think the promise in the Book of Mormon is that, yes, we do. And history piles up with its bodies and its wars and its pollutions, but that in Christ there is newness and there is hope and there's promise.

Peck: Oh, that's so beautiful. That's so beautiful and so important. I mean, as you were talking, I was thinking about sort of that disruptive event, the anti-Nephi Lehi's, who nobody knew they were going to give up their swords and bury them. I mean, and that was an act. That was an emptying, literally, an emptying of their lives, these weapons of violence. And

You couldn't have asked them to do that. I mean, that would have seemed absurd. And yet, out of their belief, their conversion process, they felt a call to do something unprecedented in the Book of Mormon anywhere, as far as I can tell. What would happen if that event happened in the world, the trouble in…all over the world, there are wars and rumors of wars everywhere going on. And yet we polarize, we polarize, and we cling to the things that are harming us the most with the most tenacity. And it's such a strange thing that you're right. This time. We almost have to break time in a way. This linear cause and effect requires a spiritual break with the way things are happening usually. And that's, I think, the power that is available and just as you described, that was fantastic.

Welch: Well, Steve, I think that's a good place to end. It's a sober note, but I think that soberness is appropriate to these books in the Book of Mormon. Mormon was a sober lad, we're told, and I think that as readers of the Book of Mormon, it's appropriate, I think, to feel that hope and joy in Christ, and also to be willing to bear, to be willing to bear the soberness and the weight that it gives us as well. So thank you so much for talking with us today on the Book of Mormon Studies podcast.

Peck: Thank you. This is such a pleasure. I feel like a grown up with the big, I'm at the big table now. I usually get put at the kids table, so this is fantastic. Yeah, all good. Bye.

Welch: You're gonna get extra dessert. You'll find out. Yeah. Steve, thanks for being with us today. Bye-bye.