Alma 40-42: God and Fairness, Part I

Resurrection

Nineteenth century readers were heirs to Calvinist concerns about resurrection (the Calvinists produced a disproportionate number of papers and sermons compared to the rest of the American colonies—their impact on religious thought in America was as great as it feels).

When exactly did people resurrect? Some Calvinists believed that they had already resurrected; the change began or definitively occurred with conversion. (Calvinist debate over when precisely conversion takes place could fill several tomes.) Others maintained that a First Resurrection would take place around a Millennium. 

First Resurrection, which postulates that the righteous will resurrect prior to the Final Judgment, was common currency in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. Alma 40:15-18 addresses the "first resurrection" while directly refuting that resurrection itself refers to a state of mind. According to Alma 40,

1. The Resurrection is not abstract.
2. Everybody is resurrected (Alma just isn’t sure when).
3. 
   
   There is a time of purgatory, what Tibetan Buddhists refer to as the Intermediate Existence (the concepts are not exactly the same and not exactly different).

Nineteenth-century readers must have found such clarity a relief. Calvinist debates on the topic had reached non-relatable levels of metaphysics, which seems to be a tendency in all religions, abstracting the material world into “meaning” rather than facing its actuality. 

With Calvinists, the problem arose in part because they couldn't square the reason-based arguments of the Enlightenment, what they currently understood about the body after death, with theology. (They didn't know about DNA.) 

Paul warned the philosophizing Greeks that any type of physical regeneration/reality would prove a “stumbling block” and it did—to the Greeks, Christian groups, and to the Mahayana in Buddhism who presented the idea of "mind-only...a form of idealism which sees consciousness as the sole reality and denies objective existence to material objects" (Keown). 

Physical resurrection implies at least two realities that elites within various religions have found unsettling: experience is more important than a feeling of conversion or a set of “known” beliefs; progress is contingent on a physical body carrying out its agency (rather than performing certain tasks as markers of salvation).

Joseph Smith--and his successor, Brigham Young--stuck to a physical restoration/heaven. In many ways, Joseph Smith was attempting to recreate the Calvinist New England covenant society in its person-to-person reality--without all the stuff he didn't like.  

Many of his followers felt the same.

Worries about the Final Judgment accompanied debates about resurrection and the end of times through the nineteenth century. When Alma proposes a judgment that sorts the righteous from the unrighteous (as opposed to the elect from the non-elect), nineteenth-century readers would have recognized his arguments as denying antinomianism, which argues that salvation isn’t contingent on behavior or, at least, a particular type of behavior. (The Calvinist tradition was inherently prone to antinomianism since it was, itself, a rebellious act--which rebellion made its adherents extremely nervous.)

Yes, says Alma 41, salvation is contingent on behavior.

Except the dissonance of a loving yet punishing god--which also troubled nineteenth-century believers--is immediately qualified and transformed in Alma 41 and Helaman 14:30-31. In Alma 41, judgment becomes about "restoration" or, to borrow from Buddhism, the result of "actions driven by intention." Where a person ends up is contingent on behavior because behavior (or works) indicate "[one's] desires of happiness or good" (Alma 41:4-5).

Buddhism addresses the same tension over intention, behavior, and results: Isn’t performing good deeds just a checklist? Can it really ever lead anywhere? Round and round and round we go...Early on, Buddhists determined that more was needed. Virtue, sure, but also wisdom.

Any teacher can point to the difference. The student who has produced an essay isn’t in the same state/condition/learning as a student who understands how and why and when to produce an essay. The same problem underscores all human endeavors. Are people just performing monkeys (put enough monkeys in a room with typewriters...) or are they learning and growing and developing in individually unique ways? 

Likewise, in The Book of Mormon, the solution to the problem of merely virtuous behavior--checklists--is to go beyond that checklist to character: What type of person have you become? What do you care about? What will you be drawn to? What will accrue to you? Where will you automatically sort yourself? 

Joseph Smith likely would have been accused of antinomianism (again, everybody in early America was) when the book he produced declared, 

"Behold, ye are free; ye are permitted to act for yourselves" (Helaman 14:30). 

The caveat that follows, "wickedness never was happiness," is not, in fact, a punishing or warning phrase. It is part of a larger argument, an argument which occupied nineteenth-century theologians:

How fair is God? Really?