Notes on the Book of Mormon from a Nineteenth Century Perspective: Alma and Resurrection

Nineteenth century readers were heirs to Calvinist concerns about resurrection (the Calvinists produced a disproportionate number of papers and sermons compared to the rest of the American colonies—their impact on religious thought was as great as it feels).

Issues regarding resurrection circled around two events: the Millennium and "reasoned" arguments coming out of the Enlightenment.

The Millennium (which these posts will address in more detail later)

When exactly did people resurrect? Some Calvinists believed that they had already resurrected; the change began or definitively occurred with conversion. (Calvinist debate over when precisely conversion takes place could fill several tomes.) Others maintained that the resurrection would take place around a Millennium during a First Resurrection. 

First Resurrection, which postulates that the righteous will resurrect prior to the Final Judgment, was common currency in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. Alma 40:15-18 addresses the "first resurrection" while directly refuting that it is about the status of the converted soul, either before or after death. It is, rather, the “reuniting of the soul with the body” (Alma 40:18).

In fact, the passages in Alma 40 take various definite stances (though Alma admits to some uncertainty):

1. The Resurrection is not abstract.
2. Everybody is resurrected (Alma just isn’t sure when).
3. 
   
   There is a time of purgatory, what Tibetan Buddhists refer to as the Intermediate Existence (the concepts are not exactly the same and not exactly different).

Nineteenth-century readers must have found such clarity a relief. Calvinist debates on the topic had reached bizarre levels of metaphysics, which seems to be a tendency in all religions, abstracting the material world into “meaning” rather than facing its actuality. 

With Calvinists, the problem arose because they wanted to adopt the reasonable, logic-based arguments of the Enlightenment...and then couldn't square those arguments with what they currently understood about the body after death. (They didn't know about DNA.) 

Paul warned the philosophizing Greeks that any type of physical regeneration/reality would prove a “stumbling block” and it did—to the Greeks and to the Mahayana in Buddhism who presented the idea of "mind-only...a form of idealism which sees consciousness as the sole reality and denies objective existence to material objects" (Keown). 

Physical resurrection implies at least two assertions that elites within various religions have found unsettling: experience is more important than a feeling of conversion or a set of “known” beliefs; progress is contingent on a physical body carrying out its agency (rather than "performing" certain tasks as markers of salvation).

Joseph Smith--and his successor, Brigham Young--stuck to a physical restoration/heaven. In many ways, Joseph Smith was attempting to recreate the Calvinist New England covenant society in its person-to-person reality--without all the stuff he didn't like.  

Many of his followers felt the same.