“To Act and Be Acted Upon”
Let me begin with two statements from a man who 350 years ago struggled to live a life of faith. An eminent mathematician, Blaise Pascal was also a philosopher and religious thinker who knew both the value of rigorous analysis and the limitations of reason. The first quotation, from his Pensees, is his famous theistic wager:
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Alma’s Experiment in Faith: A Broader Context
The thesis of this paper is a modest one, namely, that reading the Book of Mormon with an eye to its literary context significantly enhances the reading experience regardless of whether one’s objective is instruction, insight, aesthetics, or merely the pleasure of discovering coherence in its various details.A necessary corollary is that the Book of Mormon, as a text, is sufficiently crafted to warrant such attentive effort. There is nothing remarkable about the suggestion that internal context matters—that even a minimal level of understanding of any scriptural passage requires consideration not only of who is speaking, why, and to whom, but also of how a particular verse fits into a larger argument or interacts with nearby passages, or of how a discourse re lates to either its immediate or extended corresponding narrative. But this is not the manner in which Latter-day Saints typically read the Book of Mormon, either individually or as a community; even as we make our way sequentially through the book, we are much more likely to reflect upon isolated doctrinal proof texts or paraphrased narrative episodes.
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