An Experiment Upon the Word

Speaker 1

Thanks, Carl. I do appreciate the help from MTA members in not losing my manuscript. Today’s uh the thesis of today’s talk will basic the thesis of today’s talk will basically be that it’s possible for a human being to survive without sleep.

Don Bradley

Or you could call it an experiment. Maybe that’s not really the thesis, but it is an object lesson perhaps that you can draw from the experience. As you’ll notice, I only just remembered to print my paper and couldn’t at that point.

Don Bradley

In about 30 AD, Jesus warned that when a man puts wine into new wine into old bottles, the new wine will burst the bottles and be spilled, and the bottles shall perish. So fast forwarding 2,000 years, many of Jesus’ followers feel no irony in funneling all of human experience into simple frameworks of faith established in the early Roman Empire. As soon as Christianity started to circulate, Christians began creating terse statements of belief, creeds, basically. And we’ve even got some rudimentary creeds that are in the New Testament.

Don Bradley

Mormonism begins at, that’s partly because people were primarily illiterate then, Mormonism begins at a very different point in human history, the post-Enlightenment early American Republic. And when its founding scripture, the Book of Mormon, appeared, it didn’t provide creeds with permanently fixed beliefs. but something more like meta-beliefs, processes by which beliefs could be formed and transformed. And that’s what I’ll talk about with Alma 32 today.

Don Bradley

The Book of Mormon, I’ll argue, critiques and reformulates the traditional Christian and even biblical construct of faith. The book addresses itself not to the ancient world where its narrators live, but to the modern world in which its audiences live. Drawing on the Bible and on a worldview that can only be called scientific, it functions as post-biblical, post-Enlightenment scripture, organically blending the Bible and the scientific worldview to create a new vision of faith.

Don Bradley

By the way, how am I going to know how much time I’ve got? It’s right behind you. Oh, it’s right there. Oh, okay. Oh, okay. Thank you.

Don Bradley

I was going to add this great quote from Adam Miller before I go on, but I don’t have time. about how the Book of Mormon has anachronisms and how he thinks that’s actually not a problem. But we’re going to take that for granted because you’ll see that There are New Testament, distinct New Testament phrases in the text that we’re going to go through. The Book of Mormon does. Includes these without apology or any attempt to hide or even to explain what it’s doing. You have these pages and pages strewn with purposeful New Testament allusions. That the reader is supposed to recognize and supposed to understand as part of its message.

Don Bradley

Amma 32 presents a particularly strong exi Strong example of that. Alma’s parable of the seed occurs in the Book of Mormon narrative long before the rise of the newborn Christ star, but it functions for the reader as a midrash. On the adult Christ’s parables and sayings about faith, true to its own analogy of the sacred word as the seed, the Book of Mormon refuses to leave Christ’s words as dead letters on the biblical page. Instead, drawing on the themes, images, and phrases of Jesus’ teachings about faith, it plants those seeds in novel environments. And this recontextualization brings out a multiplicity of meanings. Some of which were actually implicit in Jesus’ original sayings, and some that are entirely new, emergent meanings.

Don Bradley

In Alma 32, the words and symbols from Jesus’ parables on faith are also allowed to intertwine and grow new meanings. Alma’s analogy of the seed is probably familiar to most of you. I will touch on it really quick. It starts with an exhortation to the audience: Awake! And arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith. So comparing the word to a seed, Alma invites his audience to give place. The seed can be planted in their heart. If the seed’s good, it will sprout and begin to grow. expanding the person’s mind and heart, and then by continuing to test and nourish the seed, continuing to nourish it, they can test its properties, see what happens to it.

Don Bradley

But when it uses the phrase good seed, by the way, it’s not saying actually that the seed is a g like a good plant. It’s actually in context of agriculture, a good seed is a seed that grows. A bad seed is one that Doesn’t grow. And that may come up later if I have time to get there. So but if the recipient of the word takes no thought and neglects to tend and water the plant, then even a good seed will wither and die, or its plant will wither and die.

Don Bradley

In Mormonism’s Bible Plus canon, faith is related to a seed on only two occasions. The first in Jesus’ mustard seed analogy, and the second in Alma’s seed analogy in Alma 32. Um okay. That was it. Yeah.

Don Bradley

Christ’s meaning here As he compares, he says, if you had faith as a grain of a mustard seed, you can pluck up a command a tree and it will be plucked up. is somewhat obscure. The mustard seed is something he probably chose in part because it’s so tiny. So recognizing this, people have generally interpreted this passage to mean that if you just have this small quantity Of properly directed faith, it will give you tremendous power. Why does Jesus compare faith to a small seed? Why doesn’t he compare it to a gnat? to a dust moat, both of which he uses as examples of something small in other teachings. And the Sorry.

Don Bradley

So Almas 32’s discussion actually gives explicit meaning to the analogy that’s only implicit in the New Testament text itself. And there we go. So here you’ve got Jesus talking on another occasion about the grain of a mustard seed. And in this case, he talks about it actually growing up into a plant, which of course is what a seed is supposed to do.

Don Bradley

In Alma’s analogy, he showed that faith was active and not passive. And a process rather than a possession. So here we’ve got him talking about exercising faith to plant the seed. so the seed will seed will grow. Alma’s parable connecting faith with a seed draws out a natural but generally ignored implication of Jesus’ comparison of faith to a mustard seed. By having us, in the analogy, plant the seed and actualizing the potentials that are inherent in the text. from Jesus, by germinating those inherent in this idea of the seed, Alma’s parable transforms faith from strongly held belief and certainty to a process of action.

Don Bradley

Then, next, we’ve got the parable of the sower, which Alma 32 also evokes, and in this case, very, very clearly. So you see especially down at the bottom, when the heat of the sun cometh and scorcheth it, because it hath no root, it withers away. I meant to actually include the Mark IV text. I don’t know how that. Shoot. Okay, well, here’s the comparison table.

Don Bradley

So in Mark IV, You’ve got it had no depth of Earth, almost 32, will not get any root. Mark IV, but when the sun was up, et cetera, et cetera, down at the end. In Mark 4, because it had no root, it withered away. In Amma 32, because it hath no root, it withers away. So you’ve just got the same words there at the end, only in different tenses. So I wasn’t kidding about this being an experiment in sleep deprivation, by the way.

Don Bradley

With all of these differences between the parables, what, if anything, is different? While Alma’s analogy clearly evokes Jesus’ parable of the sower, in Alma’s version, we have we as it His extended audience aren’t supposed to identify with the ground, we’re not supposed to identify with the seed. Rather, in his version of the parable of the sower, you are the sower, I’m the sower. And when the seed fails to grow in Alma 32, it’s because we haven’t properly cultivated it. He says we neglect the tree and take no thought for its nourishment. So Alma’s parable of the seed and the sower makes us responsible to sow the seed in ourselves.

Don Bradley

We saw earlier how Alma disclosed a fuller meaning of Jesus’ mustard seed by planting it. Now, by changing us from the stories, this story’s plants and minerals back into people. And casting us each in the lead role of the sower, he communicates something else about faith. Faith, this change implies, isn’t exclusively receptive, it’s also proactive. The domain of faith isn’t one where we have to merely wait for God or someone else to do something. We can initiate our own experiments of faith.

Don Bradley

In the wording of the last verse that we talked about from Alma 28, there’s a really fascinating engagement with Jesus’ New Testament sayings about faith. So Alma had talked about if you neglect the tree and take no thought for its nourishment. Jesus uses this in multiple teachings, most particularly The Sermon on the Mount, that same phrase, take no thought, and it’s only used in these teachings in the scriptures, in the LDS canon, in these teachings by Jesus about faith and in Alma 32. And here Jesus says, you know, take no thought for your life, and basically says, like, God will take care of you like the grass of the field.

Don Bradley

Alma32 really radically reformulates this idea. Because in Alma32, it’s Taking no thought is not a good thing. This is not an act of faith. This is an act of unfaith if you take no thought. Instead of exercising one’s faith by taking no thought, like the grasses of the field, in Alma Thirty-Two’s vision of faith, one exercises faith by taking thought, like the farmer or the gar gardener who cultivates the The grasses. So Amma 32 shifts Jesus’ metaphor from one about nature to one about agriculture.

Don Bradley

The same phrase in a different tense here, took no thought, is used in the Book of Mormon, and a negative example in the War chapters. It’s used in DNC 9 when Oliver Cowdery misunderstands the translation process and fails to translate because he took no thought. So, where the phrasing about taking no thought occurs in the New Testament, it’s viewed favorably. This is an expression of full and fixed faith in God. But where the phrase is deployed in LDS scripture, It becomes primarily negative, a failure to think wisely and take the personal initiative that God expects of us. So the the Book of Mormon is using the same words here, but they’re radically repurposed.

Don Bradley

What the Book of Mormon does here with the sayings of Jesus is it puts them in dialogue with one another and with the post-Enlightenment worldview of the book’s audience. the people in the nineteenth century and us. In repurposing the phrase, take no thought and framing it negatively instead of positively, it’s as if LDS Scripture is saying Show me your faith without thought, and I will show you my faith by my thought. The role of this idea of taking thought in the process of faith can be seen even better when we look more closely at Alma 32. And I’m going to have to go through this really quick.

Don Bradley

So it’s the analogy of the seed starts out awake and arouse your faculties. So the year before the Book of Mormon is published, fortunate or dictated. Fortunately, Noel Webster does the first American dictionary of the English language. This word aroused to excite into action that Which is at rest, to stir, put in motion or exertion, et cetera. Dormant, which he uses and is used later in Alma 32, means sleeping at rest, not in action. Faculties, the powers of the mind or intellect. So when he says, Awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment on my word. we can sum that up with these definitions. He’s saying, wake up your sleeping mind and put it to work. That’s how we begin to exercise faith. The intellect during the exercise of faith isn’t supposed to be turned off. It’s supposed to become more active.

Don Bradley

So, how do we put our minds to work in faith? And here it’s we arouse our faculties to an experiment. So there’s an experimental method by which we put our faith into action.

Don Bradley

We also got in ALMA 32, we’ve got this language, right? Experiment dormant particle. Now, I had meant to leave the title off of that and ask, like, what is this the language of? You know, is this the language of traditional religion? Experiment? Particle dormant. This no, obviously this is this is the language of science. And I’m going to need to skip ahead a little.

Don Bradley

I actually checked, and there’s another word in there that was very interesting, discernible, which at the time meant discoverable. And I did a search on Google Books up to 1830 for those terms that I just had up there in discernible. And two books came up. And the two books are A Scientific and Medical Dictionary and John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

Don Bradley

So what let’s dip really quickly back into Alma 32 and ask what is faith? I think a good clue is right here, where it says that when you have reached a certain point in your experiment Your knowledge is perfect in that thing, that the seed is good, in other words, that it grows, and your faith is dormant. In that thing, right? So something can only be dormant if it can be active. Something can only be asleep if it can be awake. And so faith on this understanding is not a passive something that’s there. It’s not just holding a belief. Faith is an active process.

Don Bradley

So an implication that I draw from this basically is that all faith is what I would call trans faith. It all aims at something beyond itself. Once faith reaches what lies beyond it, or the thing that it aims at, it ceases to be faith, and to continue the process, the faith then needs to be aimed at a new horizon. And going over Alma 32 a bunch of times and trying to figure out, you know, by close reading what is faith, this is the Definition that I’ve come up with, a working definition. Faith is experimental hope that initiates and sustains the processes of discovery, achievement, and growth.

Don Bradley

For us as Latter-day Saints, those of us who are, experimentation then isn’t just a scientific concept Or practice. It’s also a religious concept and practice. Faith, as presented in Alma 32, isn’t the passive reception of belief. It’s not the active attempt either to force oneself to believe the unbelievable. It’s a kind of experimental science in the spiritual domain.

Don Bradley

In Closing, this paper really made me think that doing this, that as Mormons, we need to learn to do midrash. We need to learn to. I don’t know how many are familiar with this Jewish tradition of really engaging the text and basically writing a kind of new narrative that deals with the problems that are in the text and applies them more to our lives. I think we see something like that.

Speaker 1

In AMA 32, and I hope that we will try experiments like that and others and use our practical faith. Thank you.