Let me suggest another matter on this whole subject of early, powerful, doctrinal declarations of Christ. I am intrigued that more than four-fifths of the Book of Mormon – 86 percent by actual page count – comes out of a period before Christ’s personal appearance to the Nephites in his resurrected state. I am deeply moved by that simple little statistic. I am profoundly touched by it. What faith! And what a way to teach us faith. You and I are expected to have faith in a Christ who has already come and lived and walked and talked and been crucified and resurrected. And we have witnesses, believers and non-believers, who saw him and heard him, who touched the hem of his garment on one day and felt the wounds in his hands and feet and side on another.
But these early Book of Mormon people? This keystone record of ours? It deals in remarkable faith of a very special kind, greater, it seems to me, than you and I are asked to exert. They had (at least 458 pages worth of them had) not a Christ who had come in the flesh but only the trust and consummate hope that such a Christ would come – far in the future and after most of them were dead. What godly, believing, stalwart people. I am moved to the center of my soul. And I feel ashamed for our post-advent generations who have so many witnesses and so much evidence but still do not wish to believe.
| BYU Symposium on the Book of Mormon, 9 August 1994