“Faith and Perfect Knowledge: Parsing Alma and the Hebrew Lexicon”
Paper at Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology
Doers of theWord: Belief and Practice, Oct 8-10, 2015

At a recent conference on Mormon theology, Ben Spackman (PhD student in Religion at Claremont Graduate University) compared the language of faith in Alma 32 and the Hebrew Bible, suggesting that Alma considered “faith” to mean something like “certainty without proof.” The difference, Spackman concluded, between faith and knowledge was not degree of certainty, but experiential proof. However, he noted that Alma’s language is ambiguous enough to undermine strong assertions of this definition.