Tasting the Light

Alma's Sermon on Faith

In the modern understanding, faith is something you do with your mind. To have faith is to believe a proposition. Or, more precisely, it is to believe a proposition even when lacking supporting evidence. But this is an impoverished conception of faith—one, incidentally, that Alma does not share.

Popular accounts of Alma’s magnificent sermon on faith often get it wrong in their telling of the details of the central metaphor of the sermon—the planting and sprouting and eventual fruition of the seed. In Alma’s sermon, faith is not “a little seed . . . swelling within my heart.” Rather, the seed is the word—meaning the “word of God.” Or, perhaps more precisely, the seed is the Son of God, who “will come to redeem his people,” who will “suffer and die to atone for their sins,” who will “rise again from the dead, which shall bring to pass the resurrection, that all men shall stand before him, to be judged at the last and judgment day, according to their works” (Alma 33:22). “And now,” Alma urges, “I desire that ye shall plant this word in your hearts” (Alma 33: 23). 

Faith, then, isn’t the seed. Instead, faith is what we use to “nourish the word, yea, nourish the tree as it beginneth to grow” (Alma 32: 41; compare Alma 33: 23). How are we to understand this? 

There are two things to focus on here in interpreting Alma’s metaphor. First, how does one plant the Son of God in one’s heart? And, second, what does it mean to nourish this “word”?

I plant the seed by resolving to make an experiment on the Word. This experiment will show me how different my life would be if my heart were set on the Son of God.

I nourish the word by carrying out this experiment. I act as if God does have the power to redeem his people, and I let myself hope that I could, someday and somehow, be forgiven for my wrongdoing. Or I might let the word act on my affections, as I practice loving others without reserve—without safeguarding my heart against the inevitable death of the people and relationships around me. I’m not planting the word in my mind, so for the time being it doesn’t matter whether I believe the doctrine of the word. And it will take considerable humility to conduct the experiment correctly. To act in the light of the Son of God as redeemer is to admit that I am not in control of my fate and that I depend on others. 

Alma’s test requires us to be humble enough to let those ideas work on our dispositions and desires and intentions and affections. So what does this teach us about faith? It teaches us that faith is not something you do with your mind. Faith involves movements of one’s whole being. Faith involves a changed perceptual capacity—that is, it literally brings a light that illuminates the world and changes the way we see the people and situations around us. Faith involves a readiness to act. As this disposition to act becomes stronger and more sure, it grows into a changed emotional response to the world. As Alma puts it in a delightfully synaesthetic description, by nourishing the word in our hearts, we learn to “taste this light” (Alma 32: 35). The light that lets us see is something that we taste, and what we taste is delicious and desirable (Alma 32:28). 

Why does Alma mix up sight and taste in this way? When we taste something, we experience it with a kind of visceral immediacy, unfiltered by the concepts and categories of the intellect. We rarely have words that are fine-grained enough to capture what our tongue detects and understands. Moreover, our sense of taste guides our most basic desires—it directs us in the satisfaction of our hunger and thirst. So Alma’s description of the effects of planting the seed in our hearts (in other words, the effects of faithfully acting on a humble devotion to God) includes a peculiar change in our feelings that accompanies the change in our perceptual capacities. We henceforth distinguish activities in terms of how delicious, sweet, or bitter they “taste” (see Alma 32:42; 36:21; 38:8; 40:26). The person of faith guides his or her activities accordingly.

This is a much richer understanding of faith than the thin and anemic modernist view, which defines faith as believing in a proposition without rational evidence.  Faith for Alma is a practical stance—a way of being poised and ready to actively respond to the world. Faith transforms our existence, reshapes our perceptions, and drives us to act. 

What, according to Alma, is the goal of faith? Alma’s answer is so simple that it is easy to miss. Faith nurtures the seed, and “every seed bringeth forth unto its own likeness” (Alma 32:31). The word “unto” expresses the change in character of the person who has planted the seed. A “likeness” is something that copies or resembles another thing. So Alma’s ultimate test to tell whether a seed is good is this: does it produce something with a character, nature, or quality that resembles the Word itself? 

As the seed grows, then, we’ll understand God better because we will be more like him. And as we develop our faith, we will be disposed to act in the way that Christ would act. We are brought forth into a likeness to the Son of God insofar as we are able to pursue the aims and ends that Christ himself has. The goal of Christian faith, then, is to produce people who take as their own aim the work of the Father—the redemptive work of succoring and showing mercy to others. This is something that no mere belief could ever hope to achieve.

Mark Wrathall is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Tutorial Fellow at Corpus Christi College.  He specializes in 19th and 20th century European philosophy, with a particular focus on the existential and phenomenological traditions of thought.  Current areas of research involve the philosophy of agency, philosophy of art, and philosophy of religion.

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.

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