Brothers and Sisters and Friends, I am grateful to be back in the land that God forgot to curse and in such a wonderfully multicultural environment. Aloha, Talofa, Malo leilei, bula vinaka, kia ora, la ora na, buenos dias, bom dia, buon giorno, привет, kamusta, an-young-ha-say-yo, ni hao, ohayo gozaimasu, selamat pagi, and hvordan går det! (I need to learn a Mongolian and Vietnamese greeting!) Thank you, Daniel, for the introduction, and thank you, President Tanner, for the invitation.
This semester I have had the great privilege of teaching works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and the great novel Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. These writings can be beautiful and uplifting but also difficult and challenging. They are interesting to compare with another of my favorite Americans from the nineteenth century, Joseph Smith!
One theme you find in Emerson, Dickinson, and Melville is that of the soul’s loneliness, the fear of being cut off from other people. Such New England chilliness is probably a poor fit with the aloha spirit! The Church answers that worry by providing opportunities for fellowship and service in our everyday lives by way of our membership in wards, and by the inspiring doctrine that every human being belongs to the same eternal family. One part of Joseph’s prophetic mission was to heal us from isolation and to show us how we could knit the whole human family together through the sealing power and temples.
Another theme in these American writers is skepticism, the fear of being cut off from nature and God. This is something I want us to think about today. Let me be clear about what I mean: skepticism is not the same as cynicism. Cynicism assumes there is an answer to the riddle of the world, and that it is bad news. Cynicism is sour. Skepticism is something different. It asks if there is an answer to the meaning of life, and is willing to question false answers. Modern thought starts with doubt, and the prophet Joseph gives us an answer to skepticism that is similar to these authors: that faith is the power to call worlds into existence.
Doubt, I think we can agree, can be a useful thing. There is a lot of falsehood, piled-up tradition, and unexamined assumptions both in the world at large and in our own hearts. During my mission, I was perplexed when I repeatedly talked to people who were not curious about their religious beliefs and content not to search. The Restoration began with Joseph Smith’s willingness to question the conventional wisdom. We celebrate a Gospel of Inquiry! We believe that a university like this one only deepens the responsibility we already have as Latter-day Saints to gather and winnow truth, goodness, and beauty wherever we can find them. We have a responsibility to chase away error and cultivate truth.
Doubt is sort of like digestive juices: essential for helping our bodies break down nourishment, but bad when they start to digest the stomach itself and give us ulcers! Or another analogy: doubt is like vinegar, good for cleaning and as an ingredient in your salad dressing, but you don’t want to drink it straight!
Let’s go to the Book of Alma. When you heard I was going to talk about faith and the Book of Alma, I bet you thought I’d start with chapter 32. It’s a great chapter, and I’ll come back to it, but let’s start in chapters 43 and 44. We professors like to find new ways to read familiar texts! Often readers see a sharp break between the doctrinal richness of Alma chapters 30-42 and the sometimes grueling chapters on war starting in Alma 43. Yet the Record of Alma runs through chapter 44: what if we connect the battle scenes to the earlier teachings on faith? This way of reading can offer some interesting insights.
In Alma 43 we meet for the first time the charismatic, volcanic personality of Captain Moroni, one of the most memorable characters in the Book of Mormon. Indeed, Mormon, the compiler of the book, named his son after him. There are many lessons to learn from Captain Moroni. Most of these lessons--his zeal, preparation, faith, courage, self-discipline, and leadership in times of crisis--will be well known to you. I want to emphasize a few things. First, he held to the principle of justified war. He made sure that if he had to fight, it was for reasons of principle--for the defense of life, liberty, and rights to worship. He was an extremely able soldier, but had no illusions about war, and took no joy in bloodshed. Second, he was an innovator. He equipped his troops with the latest technologies, previously unseen in the book’s long history of warfare, such as shields, helmets, breastplates, thick clothing. But his innovations also included strategy and tactics. Third, he was a creative blender of practical and spiritual resources. He reminds me of Brigham Young in this respect. How did he keep tabs on enemy movements when rumors of war started to brew? He asked the prophet to provide intelligence, but he also posted “spies” (i.e. scouts or lookouts). He also positioned part of his army in the land of Jershon, just in case. No prophet or spy told him to do that: he was simply being wise. Prophets, spies, common sense: he used a variety of useful sources. Redundant systems, as the engineers will tell you, are robust. In war and life, you need the best data you can get. Why would a devout leader use spies in addition to prophets? Was he doubting the prophet? Should we fault Moroni for lack of faith? Not at all: As we will see, his use of many sources was a mark of faith, not of its lack.[1]
When they come to battle, Moroni’s troops are outnumbered but better prepared--not only in weaponry and defense, but in position, arms, and understanding; the armies of the Lamanites have walked into a trap. The text calls the fighting “sore” (sounds like an understatement!) and the underequipped Lamanite soldiers fight so desperately that they split some of the Nephites’ helmets in two, but they are clearly losing the battle and are backed into a corner. Desperately, they fight back, but at this critical point, Moroni rallies his troops. He pulls out his ultimate weapon, inspiring words! The battle continues, and the Nephites gain the decisive upper hand.
If any of you have read Homer’s Iliad or other ancient accounts of epic battle you know what happens next: it is time for some speeches! Moroni stops the fighting: he has no interest in being a man of blood.
Moroni speaks first, all faith and fire, working himself into a white-hot account of Nephite justice and Lamanite wrongs. He explains to his opposite number, Zerahemnah, the leader of the Lamanite armies, that his troops have conquered “because of our religion and our faith in Christ” (44:3). Moroni insists that faith won the battle. He even uses passive voice: “This is done unto us because of our faith” (3) and credits God for strengthening their arms. I don’t think it does injustice to this amazing figure to admit that he seems almost to be rubbing it in. He then offers to let Zerahemnah and his troops depart in peace if they will make a covenant to fight no more, a covenant he knows they will probably not keep.[2]
Zerahemnah’s response shows him to be a hardened savvy character, and not without a certain crusty appeal, even though we know he is a ruthless schemer who stirs up racial hatred and sheds blood for his own advantage (Alma 43:5-8). Where Moroni goes on at great length, Zerahemnah is concise.[3] He has the integrity to not swear an oath he knows he will not honor, and has some good lines, a courtesy the Book of Mormon extends several times to the bad guys.[4] As in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the adversaries get to have their say. The righteous do not always have a monopoly on compelling arguments! It is a real debate! Zerahemnah will not make a covenant because he knows it is dishonest--he has no real intent. He offers Moroni both his weaponry and his interpretation of the battle: it was not your God or religion that beat us, but your cunning and preparation. It was your breastplates and shields, not your faith.
Here we have two people, both seasoned and skilled in the practice of warfare, who see an identical fact situation and interpret it in radically different ways. Moroni sees God’s hand, and Zerahemnah sees human cunning.
The viewpoint of Zerahemnah is not wrong, as far as it goes. He seems to have feet on the ground and the facts on his side. He looks like a good tough-minded realist. He wants to boil everything down to troops and materiel. But wait a minute: just who is the realist? Who is the good reader here? Is Moroni closing his eyes to the reality of battle and attributing victory to something that you cannot see? Who is more practical--the one who prepared breastplates and shields and scouted the battlefield or the one who led his armies unprepared and unjustly into battle? Who is more down-to-earth? And isn’t the most down-to-earth man also the most visionary one? Which one gave his troops understanding, training, inspiration, and appropriate equipment? Which one made smart use of intel? Which one, after all, won the fight?
This scene reminds me of an old question in the philosophy of science: Would Aristotle and Galileo have seen the same sunrise? You will recall that Aristotle, the very influential ancient Greek philosopher, placed the earth at the center of the universe and Galileo, a key figure in early modern science, knew that the earth rotated about the sun. What their eyes perceived was identical: the sun appearing in the east. The visual evidence was the same, but the frameworks were different. One saw the heavens turning and the other saw the earth rotating. Aristotle’s sunrise was Galileo’s earthspin. The so-called naked facts will not tell you which framework to apply.
One battle, two interpretations. Moroni sees the hand of God in the battle, Zerahemnah does not. Each one has a compelling case. But note how Zerahemnah’s supposed realism impoverishes his understanding. He separates faith and works; Moroni says weapons, shields, plans, training, position are aspects of his faith. He has the broader view, just as Galileo had both better tools (the telescope) and better questions than Aristotle. Moroni sees faith in works, and generously chooses to celebrate God’s blessing instead of taking credit. Nothing in the situation compelled him to see God’s hand, but he saw it nonetheless. He saw material realities invisible to a skeptic.
Maybe it’s time to pause for a joke. No offense to my colleagues! So there are two professors of economics. One goes to the other for some advice. I’ve gotten this job offer at another university, and I can’t decide whether to take it. What should I do? The colleague replies, what would you tell your students? He answers, well, they should compare the expected marginal utility of the job with the opportunity cost of taking it and then decide rationally on the optimal solution. The colleague says, then why don’t you do that? he protests, Come On! This is Serious!
It’s funny if you know that economists assume a rationality in human behavior that few of us live by. My point is: life’s biggest questions cannot wait for the evidence to roll in. We have to choose what kind of life we want to have, and the evidence will follow. We could spend the rest of our lives waiting—practically speaking, everyone decides what to believe. Faith is a necessity of any life, even one that claims not to be religious. No one lives by calculation alone. As Sister Rosemary M. Wixom said, “our faith can reach beyond the limits of current reason.”[5]
This leads us to Alma 32. I think this chapter teaches the same lesson in multiple ways. You don’t need a building to worship. You don’t need to wait for difficult circumstances to be humble. You don’t need a sign to believe. You don’t need a perfect knowledge to have faith. In other words, faith does not come from the outside. Faith has no “compulsory means.” Brick and mortar do not determine your ability to worship any more than your life conditions determine your attitude. And even more, so-called evidence does not determine your faith. Faith is much more likely to determine your evidence.
The parable of the seed in this chapter is a kind of description of the experimental method: step by step discovery of different truths. But we can ruin the experiment, or guarantee its negative outcome, by lack of faith: it is both the seed, and our faith, that are on trial. The fruits depend on the work and care we put into their cultivation. Proof comes as fruit, light, feeling, swelling, deliciousness, experience. These things are not figments of the imagination. They are facts in our lives.
Alma 32 offers a recipe for an activist spirituality in which we take responsibility for the results. Our knowledge of divine things depends to a large degree on how we conduct the experiment. Faith does not grow from overpowering clinching evidence. The soil, or the farmer, are being tested as much as the seed. Faith allows things to grow that would not exist otherwise. It is a greenhouse for beautiful plants. It is a habitat. Faith enables growth--of seeds, of selves.
A couple years ago I heard a presentation by a couple of young physicists who had produced, in rare experimental conditions, physical substances predicted by Einstein and colleagues in the 1920s. These condensates are real but rare and can only exist at temperatures near absolute zero in the extreme conditions of the laboratory. These scientists were not faking reality; they were discovering it. But the conditions for doing so were very precise and very delicate.
Alma 32 and the New England authors I started with all teach us to take responsibility for our experience and to choose what kind of world we will live in. They see how the world we live in follows from the faith we live by. They also recognize that the natural universe proclaims the glory of God. As Emerson observed: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty . . .”[6] It is easy for the glory of creation to sink into everyday habit.
We find the idea in the Book of Alma that Creation is a quiet witness of God, but not one that everyone sees or hears. God’s respect for our agency is so great that he has designed a world that does not compel our faith. The evidences for his existence are perhaps designed not to be overpowering. Nature bears witness of God subtly—with a still and small voice. The prophets have always turned down requests for spectacular demonstrations that are supposed to prove faith. The antichrist Korihor in Alma chapter 30 wants a sign, and foolishly persisting, gets one. Be careful what you ask for! But the prophet Alma only reluctantly gives him a sign. He says the signs are already there. All things—the earth, the planets in their motion—denote that there is a creator.[7] Why can’t Korihor see that? Sometimes the thing right before our face is the hardest thing to see. His experimental settings were not properly tuned. The divinity of the creation can seem obvious once you look for it, but it is a truth that is not in-your-face. God seems not to speak with truths that force the soul. He invites, and evidence follows faith. The universe is big enough to sustain many frameworks. Those who have eyes to see and ears to hear can have experiences they would otherwise miss.
In many ways, knowledge is secondary to belief. We can know something and not believe it. When I was young there was a funny TV commercial for an antacid whose punchline was: I can’t believe I ate the whole thing. The guy obviously knows he ate too much but can’t manage to work that fact into his outlook. Belief is not just a question of knowledge. We say stuff like that all the time—“I can’t believe what just happened”—suggesting that belief is not about knowing something to be true but about taking a truth into our minds and hearts. We believe what we are willing to act on, not what we know. We all know that Laman and Lemuel saw an angel but that had little effect on how they lived.
On my mission in the Netherlands forty years ago I had an experience that has always stayed with me. Our mission rule was to contact people until 9:30 pm. One night we had a discussion that went until about 8:45. We had no other appointments, and it was a bit late to be knocking on doors, and we were very near the apartment of a man we knew who had served in World War II with American soldiers. He had no interest in the Gospel, but did love to practice his English, which was full of salty soldier slang. My companion and I decided to drop by and see if his interest had changed, but when we stood in front of his door we looked at each other and shook our heads: no, we would rather knock on doors than be immersed in a flood of profanity. Now having the desire to knock on doors was a rare thing, since in my mission at that time we could do that twelve hours a day without being invited in. But knocking was our desire. So we knocked on the next door over. Nobody home. Next door: someone who only spoke Turkish. Next door: nobody home. Next door a man named André opened up. We started to introduce ourselves and before we could get the words out, he invited us in. He asked us how we knew. Knew what, we asked? That he had recently gone to the public library and checked out a copy of the Book of Mormon. We had a great discussion with him that night and many more, but I was transferred and never learned how things turned out.
This event was a miracle. What are the odds in a city of over one hundred thousand people of finding the person who just checked out a book? To us it was already a miracle that someone was interested in the church on their own—that never happened! It was a tough mission with lots of rejection every day. But the lesson was this: we clearly were sent to André. But how? We didn’t feel any promptings. We had no clue of the overall plan. We just desired to do the work instead of wasting time. Our desire was the medium God used to take us where he wanted us. It’s possible if we didn’t desire to work we never would have met this man and history would be different. Breastplates and faith are hard to tell apart!
God does his work through us, and we can influence how things go. It is a remarkable fact, one we don’t think about often, that our treasured Book of Mormon is not the original version due to a human error by Joseph Smith, who foolishly lost the 116 pages. Of course there was a back-up plan, explained in the Words of Mormon—note again the robustness of redundancy! But the history of the church and the shape of our scriptures remain permanently altered by human choice. We are on earth to choose, and Heavenly Father leaves us free and without compulsion. Forced faith is no more real than forced love. The choice is real: one third of our spirit brothers and sisters were lost: the stakes are serious!
Faith produces attitude-dependent realities.[8] The existence of many things depends on how we act. My relations with others depend on how I treat them. If I want to have a friend I should be a friend. Kindness is a reality that comes into being by being kind. As the old saying goes, whether you think you can or think you can’t, you are right! The reality of most of the things that matter depends on us. It is silly to think that the measure of faith is how well it corresponds with reality when reality is so varied. “Water, Fire, Truth and God are all realities,” said Joseph Smith. He was right: but see how diverse these realities are, each one acting according to its own principles. Somehow many have become convinced by an image of knowledge and proof that doesn’t even hold up well in science. Evidence of God’s love will appear to those who seek it.
Elder Neil L. Andersen has recently abbreviated a famous scripture to make a point: “Faith is substance.”[9] Full stop. In like manner we can shorten a famous line from Ether 12:6: “Faith is things.” Faith is less information than transformation. Moroni saw a miracle; Zerahemnah saw a winning battle-plan. Both saw truths, but Moroni’s vision was greater, and more successful as well. At some deep level, we choose the cosmos we dwell in. William James put it well: "the cosmos is in some degree, however slight, made structurally different by every act of ours that takes place in it."[10] The universe awaits our response. That is the challenge, the tragedy, and the glory.
This is the point where Emerson the transcendentalist and Joseph the Prophet agree. Faith is the evidence of things not seen: faith is the way by which we call realities into being! Where they disagree is on the need for Christ and the atonement to clean up the messes when our freedom to act goes wrong—and that is a crucial difference. For Joseph, faith always meant faith in Christ, and faith unto repentance, to the transformation of our souls and the turning away from the natural man and woman. Faith in Christ changes what is perhaps the hardest reality of all—our hearts and minds.
To conclude: Joseph had an uncle named Jesse Smith, a staunch Calvinist, who criticized his nephew with a short phrase that is almost poetic: he “has eyes to see things that are not, and then the audacity to say they are.”[11] Jesse did not mean this as praise. He thought Joseph an imposter. It is true that people can succumb to illusions, no doubt about it, but we can flip Jesse’s criticism and see it as a precise description of what a prophet is. Let us be grateful for eyes to see things that are not or rather not yet. Much of reality is not yet. If we see things like faith, hope, and love, let us also have the audacity to live our lives in ways that make them real.
I can think of no better evidence of the power of faith than the place in which we are gathered.
As you all know better than I, in a century and a half Lai’e went from a small struggling colony where people could barely survive due to lack of water to a blessed place crowned with both a temple of God and a temple of learning. If you want a concrete example of how faith changes the world, look around you. Here we see the realities of water, fire, truth and God. We are here because of countless acts of faith, innumerable choices to make Zion grow in beauty and holiness, outside and in our hearts. That it may continue to do so is my prayer in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
[1] This whole paragraph builds on Hugh W. Nibley, Since Cumorah (1967), chap. 11. https://publications.mi.byu.edu/fullscreen/?pub=1113&index=13
[2] Nibley, Since Cumorah
[3] Moroni’s speech is 418 words; Zerahemnah’s is 118, a ratio of nearly 4:1. Moroni has 78% of the words in the exchange.
[4] The traitorous Zoramite general Ammoron, for instance, defends the equality of all God’s children (Alma 54:21).
[5] General Conference, April 2015
[6] RWE, Nature, section 1. See also his “Swedenborg, or the Mystic,” “as large a demand is made on our faith by nature as by miracles."
[7] Compare Moses 6:33.
[8] Samuel Morris Brown, “Minds, Bodies, and Objects,” Mormon Studies Review 5 (2018): 26-32.
[9] https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2015/10/faith-is-not-by-chance-but-by-choice?lang=eng
[10] William James, "Report on Mrs. Piper’s Hodgson-Control," in William James on Psychical Research, ed. and compiled by Gardner Murphy and Robert O. Ballou (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), 208.
[11] Ann Taves, “History and the Claims of Revelation: Joseph Smith and the Materialization of the Golden Plates,” Numen: International Review for the History of Religions 61:2-3 (2014): 182-207.