What seems to me to have been the most vital insight during the course of our discussions this week is the apparent structural parallel between the “conversions” of Alma and Korihor. Most vital: one can hang every other narrative, thematic, or linguistic connection between chapters 30-31 and chapter 32 on this insight. What this insight reveals is that Alma’s primary and guiding concern, in his sermon to the Zoramites, is to disambiguate these two structures. That is, Alma 32 might most profitably be read as a more or less systematic working out of how Alma’s conversion is structurally different from Korihor’s.
If this, then, focuses us forward, it also highlights what absolutely must not be missed in chapters 30-31: the terminological, thematic, and even narrative ties between these two chapters and the sermonic chapter that follows them are all rooted in the fact that there one finds so many clues, more or less unsystematically scattered about a narrative text, that are necessary for the work of the disambiguation undertaken in chapter 32.
On one reading, this would seem to set chapters 30-31 in a kind of subordinate position with relation to chapter 32: the former two chapters might be taken as a kind of lexicon for the latter. But this would be, I think, a misreading. Rather, what we have in chapters 30-32 is a pairing of two rather different ways of disambiguating the two “conversions”: chapters 30-31 are a narrative way or working things out, and chapter 32 is a sermonic way of doing the same. That is, while chapters 30-31 describe so many historical happenings, chapter 32 prescribes an ahistorical model. One could perhaps say that while chapters 30-31 are the case study, chapter 32 is the drawing of theoretical conclusions.
In part, it seems to me that this difference will have to guide our discussions of chapter 32: there, we ought to be able to begin to work up a kind of “model” of faith, meant to disambiguate between two kinds of “conversion” experience, since that is, I think, what Alma himself is doing.
As Alma 31:5, by far the most model-esque verse in the two chapters we undertook to study this week, makes clear, what serves primarily to work out the disambiguation will be “the word.”
Joe, does Alma 32 show how Alma’s conversion is structurally different than Korihor’s? Or is the point of the parallel that there is something, a gift, that exceeds the structure of conversion?
That is, I think, the central question, Jim. And I can only wish I knew the answer already!
Joe, I like how you’re framing the question here, and Jim’s question seems very important to me. As I’ve been thinking about this issue the past week, I’m more inclined to see the two experiences as broadly sharing the same form or structure: visitation by a messenger, words spoken, message ultimately shared with others as original receiver turns into messenger. Within that, however, we have Alma deferring to the word(s)—they force him to turn about and face his own pending damnation—and, as a result, acknowledging his own culpability and responsibility. In other words, he takes actions that result in a spiritual witness of the truth of the message he receives. Korihor, on the other hand, simply accepts the message and begins to share it without any personal verification/experimentation. Replication without experimentation = damnation? Or another way, reception of the word ≠ reception of the gift? I definitely need to keep thinking about this.
This is a very helpful way of approaching the issue, Jenny. As I’ve been doing some (further) work on Alma 36 this week, I’ve begun to think that Alma only attempts to look at the question of parallel or disparate structures with his words to Helaman. Which is to say that I find your way of seeing him work through these issues in chapter 32 is very convincing.