Conversion, covenant, and the Christian life

My reading for this week was Mosiah 4-6. Here's my outline:

4:1-3  A revivalist's wildest dream come true: In response to Benjamin's preaching, the people cry out to God en masse for Christ's atonement to be applied in their lives. In answer to their prayer, the Spirit comes upon them. Feelings of fear and worthlessness are purged away, replaced with joy and peace of conscience. In 4:6, 11 Benjamin describes the change they have experienced in terms of coming to know, or having "tasted," God's goodness, patience, long-suffering, and love.

Note that this kind of conversion experience has two phases: first, the convert is brought to experience guilt and fear; then those feelings are alleviated by the knowledge that Christ has atoned for the convert's sins. This process resembles what psychiatrist Marc Galanter, who studies charismatic religious groups, calls "the pincer effect." According to Galanter's theory, charismatic groups reinforce adherents' commitment by (1) placing pressures on them that cause them emotional distress, then (2) providing means to alleviate that distress. In this case, Benjamin's preaching creates emotional distress, causing his people to feel that they are "less than the dust of the earth" (4:2) and in danger of "a never-ending torment" for having incurred "the wrath of God" (5:5). But Benjamin's preaching also provides a way to relieve that distress, i.e., praying to God for forgiveness through Christ's atonement.

I don't regard this as a healthy dynamic. I can testify from my own experience of the profound relief that comes from embracing the idea that Christ has atoned from my sins and failings. My mission, especially, was a period when I frequently felt inadequate and frequently experienced relief through praying for forgiveness and reflecting on Christ's love as manifest through the atonement. In retrospect, I wish that the rhetoric used to motivate missionaries hadn't been so perfectionistic—talk to everybody, be exactly obedient, make more sacrifices, exercise greater faith—and thus hadn't worked to produce so much guilt in me in the first place. I thank God—literally—that I had teachings about the atonement to turn to in order to relieve my guilt. But looking back, I think I would have been a lot healthier if I hadn't experienced so much guilt in the first place.

My point is: I'm not thrilled about Benjamin's version of a revival camp meeting—preach guilt and hellfire 'til they throw themselves on the altar of mercy—as a model for conversion. But I do hear in these verses an affirmation that Christ's work, and the Spirit's work, is to abolish feelings of fear and worthlessness, replacing them with experiential knowledge of God's goodness, patience, love, and awesome, uplifting grandeur.


4:4-30  Benjamin instructs his people in the Christian life, promising that if they live his teaching, they will "be filled with the love of God" and "grow in the knowledge . . . of that which is just and true" (v. 12). He exhorts them to:

• Pray daily. Benjamin seems to present this discipline as a means to cultivate or practice humility (v. 11).
  
  
• Live peaceably, not seeking to injure others (v. 13).
  
  
• Do justice, rendering to everyone what is due to them (v. 13).
  
  
• See that "your children" are physically cared for and are taught to love and serve one another (vv. 14-15). I wondered if we could interpret the "your" in "your children" as addressing the community as a whole, not to parents only; i.e., the whole community is responsible for the nurture of the rising generation.
  
  
• Assist people in physical want (vv. 16-27). This is the bulk of Benjamin's address. While expounding this theme, he teaches that:
  
  
  • Christians must not "moralize" poverty in the sense of conceiving of poverty as a consequence of individual wrong-doing (vv. 17-18).
    
    
  • Christians should cultivate a spirit of solidarity with impoverished people, not just a spirit of service, by recognizing that we are all beggars before God (vv. 19-21).
    
    
  • Assisting the poor is not an act of largesse, but a matter of stewardship, a matter of redistributing goods which do not really belong to us in the first place (v. 22).

5:1-5  Benjamin's people testify that their conversion experience has given them a disposition to do good continually and has filled them with a spirit of prophecy. (Both here and throughout chapter 4, I was intrigued how conversion is presented not only as a means of gaining redemption, but also as a means of gaining knowledge through the Spirit. It underscores the importance of knowledge and personal revelation in Mormon spirituality.) The people express their willingness to enter a covenant to do God's will all their lives.

Note that this is a conversion en masse. An entire people has simultaneously undergone a revival-style conversion experience. This caught my eye because in American religious history, revivalism is typically understood to have an individualizing influence as distinct from Puritan notions of covenant, which presupposed an entire community of saints. The story of King Benjamin's people fuses individual-oriented revivalism and Puritan-style covenant: in this story, revivalism produces individual transformations on a universal scale, so that the entire community is brought into covenant together. Basically, this story plays out the Puritan ideal for how you forge a righteous community. Later, as we'll read, King Benjamin's people eventually run into the same problem the Puritans ran into: what becomes of the covenant, and thus your identity as a Christian people, when members of the rising generation don't experience the individual transformation that their parents did? Elsewhere, the Book of Mormon presents other ways of envisioning conversion that involve only some members of a family or community, with the tensions and divisions that creates.

All of this presents something of a spiritual challenge for me, because my status as an exile from the community whose traditions I still claim as my own leads me to prefer to conceive of the covenant as an individual commitment rather than as an expression of a communal identity. Certainly Mormon covenant-making—baptism, the endowment—has an individualized dimension: you, as an individual, make promises with God and you, as an individual, are accountable to God for how you live out those promises. But it's also true that the Christian covenant creates a community, a people, a body, the body of Christ, the body of the baptized, the assembly of the saints, the church. I don't have at this point in my life a clearly defined communal identity as a Christian, meaning that I don't formally belong (ergo, am not wholly committed to) a particular Christian community. That's a problem but one I don't yet know how to resolve.


5:6-15  Benjamin teaches his people that because of the covenant they have made, they will be called the children of Christ. They have been both spiritually begotten of Christ and spiritually born of Christ, which is to say that Christ is both their father and their mother (v. 7). If you're interested in female images of the divine in LDS tradition, underline that verse.

As Christ's children, Christ's covenant people, we take on Christ's name. This is to say that we become one with Christ: because Christ stands at God's right hand, we, too, by virtue of bearing Christ's name, will also be called to stand at God's right hand on the day of judgment (vv. 9-10). Another image we're given here is that taking Christ's name means that Christ "seals" us as his (v. 15). We see here the germ of a concept that will be much elaborated in Smith's later teaching. Here the point of saying that we are sealed to Christ is that he claims us and will not allow us to be separated from him. I was about to add the caveat, "unless we choose to separate ourselves from him." That conditionality is certainly implicit in Benjamin's teaching, and there's a sense in which I believe it's true: Christ reaches out to us but cannot compel our response. At the same time, I also believe there's a sense in which Christ remains with us always even when we turn away: in that sense, his unwillingness to let us go is what leaves open the possibility of grace.