Having taken up the theme of the remnant in the Old Testament, the Isaiah Chapters in Second Nephi, and the writings of Nephi in general, I want to turn now to the few appearances of the word and theme in the books of Mosiah and Alma. Significantly, the word/theme does not appear at all in the books of Jacob, Enos, Jarom, or Omni, and it is missing also from the book of Helaman. Moreover, there is only a single reference to the theme in Mosiah, and only a small handful—most of them insignificant—in the book of Alma. What follows, then, will ultimately be mostly a discussion of Alma 46, where an extended discussion of the theme oddly appears. First, though, I’ll deal briefly with the reference in Mosiah and the less significant references in Alma. Read the rest of this entry »

We receive an account of the 7 days of creation in the Old Testament, in the Book of Moses, in the Book of Abraham, and in the temple. We are studying these accounts in Sunday school this year, and there is a lesson in the Gospel Principles manual coming up next month or so (and I’m scheduled to teach it, so I have ulterior motives here!). The creation account must be important for us to ponder and study. But why?

Every answer I can think of leaves me somewhat unsatisfied. Please help me! Some ideas I’ve had or heard:

1. Historical account? I don’t think this is a historical account that we are supposed to study or understand in scientific terms.

2. Ponder and rejoice in the gift of creation?Perhaps we are supposed to just ponder the gift of creation, and rejoice in it. I think this is a good partial answer, but what is the significance of each of the 7 days? Why repeat so often this particular 7-day chronology?

3. Hidden symbolic meaning?. One of the more interesting ideas I’ve read on this approach to the creation is this article on “The Creation Weave” where the structure of the 6 days are analyzed as parallel to each other, and ideas from Jewish mysticism are invoked to try and understand deeper meanings of creation. I’m actually quite interested in these kinds of readings, but somehow I worry about the risk of looking beyond the mark and forcing meaning to be there that isn’t there.

As I wonder about this question, I wonder more generally about the purpose of reading scriptures. Read the rest of this entry »

Following up on my discussion of the remnant in the Isaiah chapters, I want now to take up Nephi’s several references to the remnant throughout his two books. My hope is that I’ll be able to see some kind of coherent theology taking shape. In particular, I’m interested to see how Nephi might be drawing on and even reshaping Isaiah in his construction of the theology. I’m also interested to see if there is any indication that Nephi’s interest in the remnant theology might have led him to Isaiah, rather than his interest in Isaiah having led him to the remnant theology. We’ll see what becomes clear in the course of this discussion. Read the rest of this entry »

In the introductory post to this series of posts on remnant theology in the Book of Mormon, I mentioned my suspicion that the Nephite interest in the theme of the remnant is rooted first in the Nephite interest in Isaiah. Here, then, I would like to spell out (1) a few details concerning the place of Isaiah within the Book of Mormon generally, (2) something of a schema for the way that Nephi employs Isaiah within his two-book contribution to the Book of Mormon, and (3) the basics of the remnant theology as these are outlined in the “Isaiah chapters” of Second Nephi. All of this will set up the next post I’ll do on the remnant theology, in which I’ll take a look at Nephi’s employment of the theme apart from the Isaiah material. Read the rest of this entry »