Faith (Long) After Christ

The Way of Miracles in Ether 12

“To pray is to keep the world restless with the future, where the God of the gaps means the gaps God opens, not the gaps God fills. . . . Prayer does not commune with the eternal but exposes itself to the disjointedness of time.” (John Caputo, Hoping Against Hope, 196)

The book of Ether reflects the character and experience of its editor and narrator, Moroni. And Moroni is a time traveler, a ghost walking the border between two worlds: “I speak unto you as though I spake from the dead,” he writes to his modern readers (Morm. 9:30). Having witnessed the apocalyptic destruction of his world, he is preoccupied with the apocalyptic future into which the Book of Mormon will emerge. His split-screen perspective straddles the distant past of the Jaredites and the distant future of the Gentiles.  At times, his immersion in the nineteenth-century context of the early restoration is so complete that we might plausibly consider Moroni the first latter-day prophet: “Behold, I speak unto you as if ye were present,” he writes to his latter-day readers, “and yet ye are not” (Mormon 8:35). 

At first, time may not seem like a question of theology. We take its constant passing for granted as the backdrop of our experience. But readers of scripture will often find themselves grappling with time as a central dimension of our relationship to God. Theologians debate whether God exists outside of time, and, if he does, how he can act within time. For Moroni, a more pressing question is how humans can relate to God through and across and within time. Moroni seems to worry that modern readers, living centuries after Christ, will see the elapsing of time, future or past, as a barrier between themselves and Christ, like a distant shoreline receding on the horizon. 

Ether 12, Moroni’s lengthy personal interjection into the Jaredite record, takes up the modern question of how to exercise faith in Christ long after Christ, through a thick tissue of elapsed centuries. Characteristically, Moroni begins with the necessity of faith, which he arranges in an ordered relationship to the witness of salvation: “ye receive no witness until after the trial of your faith” (verse 6). He then catalogs eight scriptural episodes demonstrating that the power of Christ arrives only after the disciple exercises faith and hope, despite initially “see[ing] not” (verse 6). He carefully selects these instances from periods before, during, and after the visitation of the Messiah, noting that “all they who wrought miracles wrought them by faith, even those who were before Christ and also those who were after” (verse 16).

In a narrative masterstroke, the series culminates when Moroni reveals that, after his own psychological trial of faith laid bare on the page, he himself has received a witness of Jesus Christ comparable to that of the scriptural heroes just named. He reveals “that I have seen Jesus, and that he hath talked with me face to face, and that he told me in plain humility, even as a man telleth another in mine own language, concerning these things” (verse 39). Moroni’s life and his theology cannot be separated. He experiences Christ’s saving presence according to the pattern he discerns in the scriptures and then offers his own experience to the reader as another witness.

In this discussion of spiritual witnesses arriving after faith, Moroni draws on several different senses of the word after. He uses it in its familiar chronological and sequential senses, to show that 1) believers living long after Christ may witness miracles through faith, and 2) those miracles will not be manifest until after believers exercise that faith (see Ether 12:16 and 18).  But Moroni also invokes an important third sense of the word after, which transcends its ordinary chronological or sequential sense. Noting the faith of ancient priests, Moroni writes that “it was by faith that they of old were called after the holy order of God” (verse 10). After here means “according to” or “in the way of”: the faithful were called “according to” the pattern of the holy order of God. The word isn’t intended to relate two things chronologically but instead to describe a kind of relation in which one thing properly harmonizes itself to another.

If we consider that Moroni has this third sense of the word in mind at some level throughout the chapter, a newly personal interpretation of the relationship between faith and miracle comes into view. In this sense, divine witness comes after faith, not because it occurs later in time but because the form in which God makes himself present is shaped by the faith of the individual to whom he responds. The nature of one’s divine witness gives itself after the nature of her faithfulness. 

This idea is clear in Moroni’s explanation that the mighty manifestations given to the brother of Jared follow from the mightiness of his faith: “For the brother of Jared said unto the mountain Zerin, Remove—and it was removed. And if he had not had faith it would not have moved; wherefore thou workest after men have faith” (Ether 12:30). Here Moroni activates the third meaning of after: Christ works after—harmonized with, attentive of, responsive to—the faith of his disciple. God manifests his power to his children, individually and collectively, in a form befitting the character of our faith.

The implications of this idea are many. My experience of God will take a different form than the brother of Jared’s experience—and different too from my husband’s, my parent’s, or my child’s—because the character of my faith is personal. Collectively, we should expect that the faith of modern Gentiles entrusted with the Book of Mormon—the present-day heirs of the Restoration—will call forth different miracles and different kinds of revelation than did peoples of the past, because our faith is shaped by and to our historical moment. But God’s love still reverberates, no matter how long after the events of Christ’s life. We encounter that power in moments of grace given after the character of our faith.

When interpreted in a strictly chronological sense, the idea that miracle follows faith can be misunderstood as a kind of crude causation—as if the ordered linking of faith→miracle means that faith demands or purchases the miraculous presence of God. Moroni takes pains to clarify that faith cannot “buy” a miracle in a spiritual tit-for-tat. This is why he frames salvation in Christ’s presence as a gift, which by its nature is not caused or purchased. He assures the Gentiles that they too may be “partakers of the heavenly gift”—a gift that he soon names as “the gift of his Son” (Ether 12:8, 11). While the form in which the gift is given responds sensitively to the needs of the recipient’s faith, it always remains a gift that is freely given and must be freely received—not a menu board from which the recipient chooses a preferred flavor of gelato.

Faith is intertwined with divine witness, but faith and witness must be offered and received unconditionally. God shows himself to those willing to receive the heavenly gift. But neither giver nor receiver of the divine witness may coerce the self-giving of the other. To do so would be to wreck the nature of the gift itself.

Rosalynde Welch is a research fellow and associate director at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship.

Art by Brian Kershisnik.

These essays appear in Theological Insights from the Book of Mormon, a Wayfare series that pairs the 2024 Come, Follow Me curriculum with authors of the Maxwell Institute’s Brief Theological Introductions to the Book of Mormon series.

CELEBRATE WITH US!

Join us this Friday, November 15th 6pm at The Compass for a party to celebrate the release of Issue 4. Readings, music, food and friendship. Come!

KEEP READING