What, do ye suppose that mercy can rob justice? I say unto you, Nay; not one whit. — Alma 42:25

I feel compelled by the Holy Spirit—which is me—to write down some thoughts about Alma 14 and the falling of the prison walls. I say that only partly in jest.

I genuinely do feel something similar to what I would have called the Spirit five, ten, or twenty years ago: a persistent feeling that I ought to think through these things and write about them. What has changed is what I think that feeling means. I no longer assume that because I feel strongly compelled toward an idea, the conclusion must therefore be true. Maybe there is something divine behind those feelings. Maybe there is not. There is obviously no way to settle some of these questions until we die and discover what, if anything, lies beyond this life.

My route into Alma 14 was somewhat accidental.

I have been reading In the Language of Adam: Reading Scripture Like the Book of Mormon’s Visionary Men. It is a book that jumps between ideas and attempts to connect them through assumptions that make much more sense if you are deeply familiar with twenty-first-century Mormon culture. In other words, it is exactly the kind of book I probably would have loved five years ago.

I may write more about the book elsewhere. For the present discussion, what matters is a section called “Turn to Him the Other Also.” The author discusses the Sermon on the Mount, particularly Matthew 5:38–42: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and turning the other cheek.

The larger argument is that the Sermon on the Mount contains temple ritual hidden beneath the surface. If you possess the proper understanding, supposedly you can recognize the ceremony even though the text never openly identifies it. Alma 14 enters the discussion because Alma and Amulek are repeatedly struck—or “smote”—while imprisoned in Ammonihah. The author points to verses 14, 15, 17, 20, 24, and 25 and suggests that the chief judge and others are making a mockery of a sacred ritual gesture.

That requires several assumptions that I do not think the text gives us. First we have to assume that Jesus’s teaching about turning the other cheek is secretly liturgical. Then we have to assume that the same ritual was known among the people of Ammonihah. Then we have to assume that their repeated smiting of Alma and Amulek was deliberately intended to parody that ritual.

That is a lot of interpretive distance to travel without much textual help. It also seems strange to argue that this hidden ritual corresponds somehow to LDS temple worship when I have never been smitten, nor smitten anyone else, in any temple ceremony I have participated in. I am also unaware of anything resembling this in historical descriptions of LDS temple ritual. If the ritual has disappeared entirely from the ceremony it supposedly explains, then appealing to the modern temple does not seem to provide much confirmation.

But that argument is not really what interested me for the present time.

What caught my attention was really the larger Alma-and-Amulek story and in particular it’s emphasis on plainness.

Alma 12:12 says:

And Amulek hath spoken plainly concerning death, and being raised from this mortality to a state of immortality.

Then Alma 13:23 says:

And they are made known unto us in plain terms, that we may understand, that we cannot err.

What are “they”? The immediate context seems to be the glad tidings spoken by angels in the preceding verse.

Then, when Alma and Amulek finish preaching, Alma 14 says that many of the people become angry with Alma “because of the plainness of his words unto Zeezrom.” Apparently Alma and Amulek are not supposed to be speaking in riddles.

This raises a larger question I frequently encounter in scripture. Does God reveal truth plainly, or does God bury it beneath symbols, parables, rituals, types, shadows, metaphors, and meanings that are only visible after someone supplies the proper interpretive framework?

Those ideas do not necessarily contradict one another. A parable can communicate an idea clearly while also containing multiple layers of meaning. Symbolism can illuminate something rather than conceal it. And Alma does not say that every theological question in existence is perfectly obvious. Alma 13:23 specifically refers to certain glad tidings being made known in plain terms.

Still, when a narrative repeatedly praises plain speech, I think it is reasonable to notice how complicated its theology becomes when the individual claims are placed beside one another—and especially when they are placed beside later LDS theology.

The closer I read Alma 9–14, the less plain much of it seems.

One interesting statement comes in Alma 13:20:

Behold, the scriptures are before you; if ye will wrest them it shall be to your own destruction.

Alma clearly expects his audience to have access to scriptures that support what he is teaching. That raises a basic historical question: What scriptures?

Alma obviously knows the brass plates. Alma 37 explicitly mentions them. He also knows traditions surrounding Lehi’s departure from Jerusalem, the family’s journey through the wilderness, their deliverance from enemies, and the Liahona. So Alma has access to something originating with Lehi and Nephi.

But how much?

That question becomes important in Alma 13:25:

And now we only wait to hear the joyful news declared unto us by the mouth of angels, of his coming; for the time cometh, we know not how soon.

Alma apparently does not know when the Messiah will come. That is strange when compared with Nephi.

In 1 Nephi 10:4, Nephi says that the Messiah will come six hundred years after Lehi leaves Jerusalem. In 1 Nephi 19:8 he repeats essentially the same chronology:

Behold he cometh, according to the words of the angel, in six hundred years from the time my father left Jerusalem.

Then 2 Nephi 25:19 says:

For according to the words of the prophets, the Messiah cometh in six hundred years from the time that my father left Jerusalem; and according to the words of the prophets, and also the word of the angel of God, his name shall be Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

If Alma had access to the writings we now know as 1 and 2 Nephi, his statement that “we know not how soon” is difficult for me to understand.

There are possible explanations. Maybe Alma did not possess Nephi’s complete writings. That is entirely possible within the world of the narrative. Perhaps the different Nephite records were not combined or distributed in the way we naturally imagine when reading the finished Book of Mormon. Alma could have known major ancestral traditions—Lehi, the brass plates, the Liahona, the wilderness journey—without having access to everything contained on Nephi’s small plates.

There is also some flexibility in what Alma means by not knowing “how soon.” Perhaps he knows a broad chronology while not knowing exactly where he sits within it. I do not find that entirely satisfying, particularly because Alma goes on to wish that Christ might come during his own lifetime, but it is possible.

Nephi also says the six-hundred-year chronology comes “according to the words of the prophets,” plural, as well as from an angel. That raises another question, although I do not think we can push it too far. Does Nephi mean that this particular chronology was known through multiple prophetic traditions? Were those traditions written down? Were they preserved among the Nephites? The text does not tell us.

What it does tell us is that Nephi treats the chronology as established prophetic knowledge, while Alma later says that they do not know how soon Christ will come. If Alma possessed Nephi’s writings, that is difficult for me to reconcile. If he did not, that tells us something interesting about how fragmented Nephite scriptural knowledge may have been.

Either possibility raises questions. I do not think this proves or disproves the Book of Mormon. I simply think it is an interesting tension that becomes visible when the different books are allowed to speak to one another.

Alma tells his opponents that “the scriptures are before you.” Yet some of the scriptures that are before us contain information Alma himself apparently does not know.

There are other places in Alma 13 where I find the supposedly plain teaching less plain once I try to map it onto modern LDS theology.

Verse 1 says:

I would cite your minds forward to the time when the Lord God gave these commandments unto his children; and I would that ye should remember that the Lord God ordained priests, after his holy order, which was after the order of his Son, to teach these things unto the people.

I originally became interested in exactly who “the Lord God” is supposed to be here. Modern Mormon vocabulary often encourages us to distinguish very carefully between God the Father and Jehovah, who is identified as the premortal Jesus Christ.

But I do not think the English phrase Lord God in the Book of Mormon gives us enough information to build much of an argument on that distinction. Trying to reconstruct a specific Hebrew divine name behind an English Book of Mormon phrase is questionable to begin with. The Book of Mormon claims to come through a Reformed Egyptian record translated into English. Trying to work backward through all of that and determine exactly what ancient divine title supposedly stood behind “Lord God” creates more assumptions than it solves.

The immediate passage seems to work well enough if “Lord God” refers to the Father and “his Son” refers to Christ.

What still interests me is the broader problem. The divine titles used throughout the Book of Mormon do not always map neatly onto the carefully distinguished Father/Son terminology of modern LDS theology. Some passages seem much more comfortable allowing the identities, titles, and roles of Father and Son to overlap.

I personally think significant portions of the Book of Mormon reflect a less differentiated theology of God than modern Mormonism does. At times I have described that theology as modalistic. That may be too precise a label for a collection of texts that does not present a systematic theology and also contains passages that clearly distinguish Father and Son.

So I would not claim that Alma 13 proves modalism, or that the entire Book of Mormon can simply be classified that way. My point is more modest: if someone encountered the Book of Mormon without later LDS theological categories already in place, I am not convinced that person would naturally reconstruct the same sharply differentiated Father/Jehovah/Jesus terminology used in modern Mormonism.

The same thing happens with priesthood in Alma 13. The chapter repeatedly says that priests are called, prepared, and ordained according to a holy order. It even refers to a “holy ordinance.” So it would be wrong to say that these people are simply called without any ordinance.

What Alma does not explain is the mechanism modern Latter-day Saints normally picture when they hear the word ordination: the laying on of hands, ordination to a specific priesthood office, and a chain of authority transmitted through someone who already possesses that authority.

None of that means those things could not have existed. Alma simply is not discussing them.

Again, my point is narrow. If Alma 13 were the only text we possessed about priesthood, I do not think we would reconstruct the modern LDS priesthood system from it. We can fit later Mormon priesthood theology into the chapter, but much of the framework has to come from somewhere else.

That is not necessarily a contradiction. It just is not particularly plain.

The beginning of Alma 14 contains an interesting narrative turn.

Verse 2 says that most of the people wanted to “destroy Alma and Amulek.” Verse 3 then says they sought to “put them away privily.” I think the natural reading is that they initially intended to dispose of them quietly—probably to kill them without making the matter public.

Then verse 4 says:

But it came to pass that they did not; but they took them and bound them with strong cords, and took them before the chief judge of the land.

That change interests me. The text goes out of its way to tell us that the original intention was private and then immediately tells us that they abandoned that plan. Instead, Alma and Amulek are subjected to something resembling a public legal proceeding.

Witnesses testify against them. The accusations seem to revolve around lying, reviling the law, and speaking against the lawyers and judges. There apparently was a legal basis for punishing lying within Nephite law. Earlier in Alma we are told that liars could be punished, while people could not be punished simply for their beliefs.

That makes the legal dispute more interesting than simply saying that Ammonihah invented some vague prohibition against lying. The question becomes whether the charges were legitimate. Amulek insists that he has not spoken against the law itself, but against corrupt lawyers and judges who are undermining it.

That creates something resembling a political prosecution.

The people already want Alma and Amulek destroyed. Rather than quietly disposing of them, they bring them before the chief judge and accuse them of violating the law. Then the situation escalates.

Zeezrom becomes overwhelmed with guilt and publicly admits that Alma and Amulek are innocent. The people turn against him. Zeezrom and the men who believe are expelled from the city and stoned as they are driven out. Then the wives and children of the believers are gathered together and burned. Their scriptures are burned with them.

What began as a plan to quietly dispose of two troublemakers becomes a public spectacle involving an entire believing community.

Maybe the reason is simply narrative. Maybe the leaders wanted legal legitimacy. Maybe they wanted to humiliate Alma and Amulek publicly. Maybe the reaction escalated as more people began siding with them. The text does not explain the transition.

I simply find it interesting how quickly the story expands from two unpopular preachers to what amounts to the violent purification of an entire community.

There is another practical detail that makes me stop and think.

Alma 14:1 says that those who believed Alma and Amulek “began to repent, and to search the scriptures.” Later, when the believers are killed, their “records which contained the holy scriptures” are burned with them.

I do not think this requires every person in Ammonihah to own a personal set of scriptures. They could have been family records, communal texts, religious manuscripts shared among several households, or something else entirely. The text never explains how scriptural access worked.

What interests me is the logistics and the passage of time. How readily available were these records? How many copies existed? What exactly were they reading? How long did the new believers spend searching them before the persecution began?

The story moves very quickly when we read it. Alma and Amulek finish preaching. People believe. They repent and begin searching the scriptures. Zeezrom changes sides. The believers become identifiable as a group. Some are expelled. The wives and children are gathered and killed.

Maybe days passed. Maybe weeks. Maybe longer. The text does not tell us.

There is nothing impossible about a city the narrator considers wicked still possessing religious texts. Wicked people can own scriptures. What I find interesting is that the story assumes enough access to written scripture for new converts to immediately begin searching it and for those records later to become part of the persecution.

I would like to know what that actually looked like on the ground.

This is where the story becomes much harder for me.

Amulek watches the women and children being burned and wants to intervene. He says:

How can we witness this awful scene? Therefore let us stretch forth our hands, and exercise the power of God which is in us, and save them from the flames.

Alma does not tell him that they lack the power. He says that the Spirit constrains him.

Then he explains why:

The Lord receiveth them up unto himself, in glory; and he doth suffer that they may do this thing, or that the people may do this thing unto them, according to the hardness of their hearts, that the judgments which he shall exercise upon them in his wrath may be just; and the blood of the innocent shall stand as a witness against them, yea, and cry mightily against them at the last day.

This is not merely a general statement that God has to allow human beings to exercise agency. Alma gives a specific reason for allowing this particular act to happen. God permits these people to carry their wickedness through to its horrifying conclusion so that the judgment he later exercises against them will be just. The blood of their victims becomes a witness against them.

I do not think Alma is saying that God could have had no possible justification for judging these people if he had saved the victims. They had already plotted to destroy Alma and Amulek and presumably had plenty of other sins for which they could be accountable. But Alma does seem to make the completion of this atrocity part of the justification for the particular wrath God will later exercise against them.

That raises a question I do not know how to answer: Why does the evil need to be completed?

If God knows their hearts perfectly, he already knows what they intend to do. If they attempt to murder these people and God miraculously stops them, their intentions do not become righteous simply because they failed. Why is attempted murder combined with perfect divine knowledge insufficient? Why does innocent blood actually have to be spilled before it can stand as a witness?

In this story, God apparently could intervene. Amulek believes they possess the power to save the victims, and Alma's response is not that Amulek is mistaken. Alma says that the Spirit prevents him from doing it.

The suffering is therefore not presented merely as something God is unable to stop. According to Alma's explanation, God deliberately permits it because the suffering itself has a role in making his later judgment of the perpetrators just.

That is the part I find morally difficult. It means the innocent are not merely unfortunate casualties of human freedom. Their actual deaths become part of the divine case against the wicked.

The contrast becomes even stranger in the next exchange.

Amulek asks whether they are going to be burned too. Alma responds:

Be it according to the will of the Lord. But, behold, our work is not finished; therefore they burn us not.

I do not think this means Alma and Amulek are more worthy than the women and children who just died. The text never says that. But it does create a very clear asymmetry.

God allows the believers to die and receives them into glory. Alma and Amulek, on the other hand, are preserved because they still have work to perform in mortality. The implication seems to be that their continued lives still serve some necessary earthly purpose that the lives of the victims, at least from the perspective of God's plan in this story, no longer do.

Theologically, that can work. God can have different purposes for different people. But it is still uncomfortable.

Most of us probably would not describe God as allowing one person to die because their mortal work can end while miraculously preserving another because he still has something useful for them to accomplish. Yet that seems very close to the explanation Alma actually gives.

The problem becomes sharper because the preceding verse has already established that divine intervention was apparently possible. God could save the victims, but does not. Then Alma expects that God will save him and Amulek because their work is not finished.

There may be a theological explanation for that. I am not sure there is a morally satisfying one.

Alma and Amulek remain imprisoned and are repeatedly abused. Eventually the chief judge, lawyers, priests, and teachers who have been tormenting them are gathered inside the prison.

Alma cries to God for strength and deliverance. The earth shakes. The prison walls fall. Everyone inside except Alma and Amulek is killed.

The text clearly frames those who die as Alma and Amulek's persecutors. There is no indication that a separate group of innocent prisoners is crushed with them. So there is a kind of narrative justice to the ending. The people involved in persecuting the believers and torturing Alma and Amulek are suddenly killed, while the two men they have been abusing walk out alive.

But even then the preceding sermons make it difficult to believe that their physical deaths settle everything. Alma has just spent several chapters discussing resurrection, judgment, justice, mercy, punishment, and the fate of the wicked.

Alma 12 describes their eventual condition in terrifying language:

Then is the time when their torments shall be as a lake of fire and brimstone, whose flame ascendeth up forever and ever; and then is the time that they shall be chained down to an everlasting destruction, according to the power and captivity of Satan, he having subjected them according to his will.

And:

Then, I say unto you, they shall be as though there had been no redemption made; for they cannot be redeemed according to God’s justice; and they cannot die, seeing there is no more corruption.

Whatever exactly that imagery means, judgment remains ahead. The prison collapse cannot be the final judgment. Something still waits beyond death.

And that is where I begin having trouble understanding how justice is supposed to work.

I should probably be more precise when I use the word justice.

My instinctive reaction to Alma 14 is largely based on a retributive idea of justice. If someone deliberately inflicts terrible suffering on another person, justice seems to require some punishment proportionate to the wrong committed.

That does not necessarily mean literally doing the same physical thing to the perpetrator. An eye for an eye can be understood as proportionality rather than requiring every murderer to die by exactly the same method used on the victim.

Retribution is also not the only possible understanding of justice. There is restoration, restitution, rehabilitation, reconciliation, compensation, and the possibility of making the victim whole.

But Alma 14 itself seems strongly retributive. Innocent blood cries against the perpetrators. God's wrath is coming. Judgment must be just. Then the persecutors inside the prison die.

So when I ask what justice means in this story, I am not insisting that the murderers literally need to be burned alive. I am asking what proportionate judgment looks like for people who deliberately burned innocent women and children to death.

Then I want to know what happens to that judgment once later LDS teachings about repentance, the Atonement, spirit prison, proxy ordinances, and salvation enter the picture.

I do not think modern Mormon theology lacks a concept of justice. It clearly has one.

Doctrine and Covenants 138 says that the dead who repent will be redeemed through obedience to temple ordinances after they have “paid the penalty of their transgressions” and been washed clean. So there is apparently some idea that consequences or penalties remain.

But then Doctrine and Covenants 19 gives us another important piece. Christ says:

For behold, I, God, have suffered these things for all, that they might not suffer if they would repent;

But if they would not repent they must suffer even as I.

So what exactly happens?

If a wicked person dies, enters spirit prison, eventually hears the gospel, and genuinely repents, does that person still have to suffer for the terrible things he did? D&C 138 sounds as though some penalty remains. D&C 19 sounds as though the purpose of Christ's suffering is specifically that the repentant sinner does not have to suffer the punishment himself.

Maybe these passages are talking about different kinds of suffering. Maybe the penalty described in D&C 138 occurs before repentance is complete. Maybe “paying the penalty” means experiencing guilt, remorse, separation from God, or the natural consequences of sin rather than undergoing some proportional retributive punishment. Maybe there is a distinction between suffering that brings someone to repentance and punishment that Christ's Atonement ultimately removes.

There are possible ways to reconcile the ideas, but none of them seem particularly obvious.

Bring the people of Ammonihah back into the question. Suppose one of the men who participated in burning the women and children enters spirit prison. Eventually he fully understands what he has done. He experiences genuine remorse. He hears the gospel. He accepts Christ. He repents.

What happens next?

Does he still have to suffer for murdering those people? If yes, how much? What does “paying the penalty” actually mean? And in what sense has Christ already suffered so that the repentant sinner need not suffer?

If no further punishment is required, what happened to the judgment for which the innocent blood was specifically allowed to be spilled?

That is the problem I am trying to understand. Alma's story seems to give the innocent blood a real judicial function. It cries against the guilty. It helps make God's wrath just.

If the guilty can later repent and Christ absorbs the punishment, what ultimately becomes of that blood crying for judgment?

Maybe the answer is that justice is fully satisfied through Christ rather than through the personal suffering of the perpetrator. That is a possible Christian answer. But then I am back to asking what the word justice actually means in practical terms.

There is also the other side of the story.

Where did the victims go when they died?

Alma says:

The Lord receiveth them up unto himself, in glory.

That sounds about as positive as it possibly could.

Some of the victims were children. If they were below the age of accountability, modern LDS theology creates no baptism problem for them. The Book of Mormon itself explicitly rejects infant baptism, and LDS teaching holds that children who die before accountability are saved.

So set the young children aside.

What about the wives, other adults, and any older children who had reached the age of accountability?

Alma 14 never tells us that they had been baptized. Maybe they were. Perhaps enough time passed between conversion and persecution for Alma and Amulek to baptize them, and Mormon simply did not include the detail. Maybe they were not. The text does not say.

That creates an interesting problem when the story is placed beside modern LDS descriptions of the spirit world.

The usual simplified description is that the righteous dwell in paradise while those who die without having accepted the restored gospel remain in spirit prison, where they can be taught, repent, and receive the benefits of proxy ordinances performed for them.

Exactly which ordinances are necessary before someone moves from prison to paradise is much less clear than the simplified diagrams tend to suggest. Baptism and confirmation are obviously central. What about the endowment? What about sealing?

If those ordinances matter only for eventual exaltation and have no bearing on a person's immediate condition in the spirit world, that is entirely possible. But then it raises another question: why the urgency surrounding temple work for the dead?

If someone can remain completely happy in paradise for centuries while waiting for an endowment or sealing, then those ordinances apparently have no immediate effect on that person's present condition. Again, maybe that is the answer.

But baptism seems more complicated.

Alma says these newly converted victims are immediately received by God “in glory.” Suppose some of the adults had accepted the message but had not yet been baptized. Perhaps their desire to follow God was sufficient because they died before they had a reasonable opportunity to receive the ordinance.

LDS scripture certainly leaves room for God to judge people according to what they would have done if given the opportunity. That makes sense to me.

But it creates another question. If sincere acceptance of Christ and the desire to receive baptism can determine someone's immediate postmortal condition, what exactly changes when the proxy baptism is later performed?

And if proxy baptism really is required before someone can leave spirit prison and enter paradise, what happens during the interval?

The doctrine seems to contain both ideas: ordinances are absolutely necessary, and God will not condemn people for circumstances outside their control. I understand both propositions independently.

What I do not understand particularly well is how they operate together.

I do not want to push the Alma story farther than the evidence allows.

We have no idea whether the names of those killed were preserved. Maybe Alma and Amulek knew every one of them. Maybe the Church at the time kept records. Maybe those records survived. Maybe proxy ordinances were performed at some later point within whatever system LDS theology requires.

Within an LDS framework, anything that could not be completed historically can also eventually be resolved during the Millennium. So I cannot reasonably say that these particular women are still sitting in spirit prison because no one knows their names.

We simply do not know.

The Alma story is useful because it raises the question. The question becomes much harder when we move from a scriptural narrative with missing historical details to real atrocities involving millions of people, incomplete records, unidentified bodies, destroyed families, and victims whose names may simply be lost.

That is where the practical consequences of the doctrine become much harder to avoid.

This question came back to me recently while listening to Elder Dale G. Renlund discuss his visit to Choeung Ek, one of the Khmer Rouge killing fields in Cambodia.

Standing at a place associated with enormous human cruelty, he describes wondering whether the Atonement of Jesus Christ is really sufficient for something this terrible.

My first instinct when I hear language about the Atonement “covering” something is to think about the sinner. Christ pays for sin so that the guilty person can repent and be forgiven.

But that is not really what Renlund is emphasizing. His focus is on the victims. His answer is that Christ will somehow compensate them and their families and make what happened right.

I actually find that idea more interesting than the question I initially thought he was asking.

What does it mean to make something like this right?

Suppose someone is tortured and murdered. Resurrection can repair death. Perhaps Christ can heal emotional and spiritual trauma completely. Perhaps broken relationships are restored. Perhaps the victim receives an eternity so overwhelmingly good that the suffering of mortality becomes comparatively small.

I can understand those ideas.

But is that justice?

Making the victim whole and holding the perpetrator accountable seem like related but different problems.

If someone murders another person and God later resurrects the victim, heals every wound, restores every lost relationship, and gives that victim eternal happiness, perhaps the victim has been completely compensated.

But what does that mean for the murderer?

If the murderer also eventually repents, accepts Christ, and receives salvation, where exactly has the retributive side of justice occurred?

Perhaps it does not need to occur in the way I instinctively imagine. Perhaps divine justice is fundamentally restorative rather than retributive. Perhaps genuine repentance transforms the perpetrator so completely that punishment ceases to be the point. Perhaps Christ's suffering somehow satisfies a moral debt that I am trying too literally to assign to the guilty person.

Those are possible answers.

But they make Alma 14 more difficult for me rather than less. Alma does not merely say that God will heal the victims. He says God allows them to be killed so that their blood can stand as a witness against their killers and so that God's wrath against those killers can be just.

That sounds very much like accountability for the perpetrators, not merely compensation for the victims.

Renlund's statement gives one possible answer to what God does for the innocent.

I am still trying to understand what God does about the guilty.

The historical situation at Choeung Ek also makes the ordinance problem more concrete. The victims of the Khmer Rouge were not, for the most part, baptized Latter-day Saints. For many victims there are records and names. For others there may not be. Some people disappeared. Some bodies were never individually identified. Some records were destroyed.

It seems unavoidable that there are people throughout human history whose identities are simply unrecoverable by ordinary genealogical means.

Within LDS theology, the Millennium can solve that problem. God can reveal what humans cannot reconstruct. Temple work can eventually be performed.

Fine.

But until then, what is the actual condition of those people?

If sincere acceptance of truth in the spirit world is enough for them to experience paradise while waiting for ordinances, then the ordinances are necessary in some ultimate sense but not immediately determinative of their condition.

If the ordinances are immediately necessary, then people whose names are lost seem to face potentially enormous delays through no fault of their own.

Perhaps there is a doctrinal answer somewhere that reconciles all of this.

I have not found one that seems particularly plain.

The question becomes even stranger when I move back to the perpetrator.

Many Khmer Rouge leaders were eventually imprisoned. Others were never punished proportionately in mortality. Some died before meaningful legal accountability ever occurred.

Now imagine one of those people entering the spirit world. Perhaps he never had a meaningful opportunity to understand Christianity, much less Mormonism. Now he does. He sees clearly what he did. He experiences whatever spiritual reality exists there. He feels genuine remorse. He repents.

Should he be forgiven?

If Mormonism's claims about Christ are true, I think the answer ultimately has to be yes. That is the point of an infinite Atonement.

And I am not arguing that he shouldn't be forgiven. I am asking what forgiveness does to justice.

Does he suffer first? How long? For what? Is his remorse itself the suffering? Does he have to experience something proportionate to the suffering he caused? Does Christ experience that punishment instead? Has Christ already experienced it?

If Christ has fully paid the debt, why does D&C 138 talk about repentant spirits paying penalties for transgression? If the sinner must still pay some penalty, what exactly did Christ remove?

And if the entire matter can ultimately be resolved through repentance, Christ's suffering, resurrection, and compensation of the victims, why did the innocent blood in Alma 14 need to be spilled in the first place so that God's judgment could be just?

Maybe all of those questions have answers. I am not arguing that because I do not know the answers there cannot be any.

I am saying that the system becomes much less straightforward the closer I look at it.

I do not think the problem is that Mormon theology completely lacks an account of justice. It has several.

The Book of Mormon speaks about punishment, wrath, judgment, innocent blood crying against the wicked, and people becoming subject to the demands of justice. Later LDS scripture adds Christ suffering in place of the repentant sinner, postmortal preaching, spirit prison, proxy ordinances, repentance after death, penalties for transgression, resurrection, degrees of glory, and the promise that somehow every injustice suffered by the innocent can ultimately be made right.

Maybe all of those teachings fit together perfectly.

What I am struggling to understand is how.

In Alma 14 the moral structure initially seems almost brutally simple. Innocent people are murdered. Their blood witnesses against the guilty. God promises judgment. Some of the persecutors are killed when the prison falls. A greater judgment still waits beyond death.

Then later Mormon theology adds mercy and possibilities the Alma narrative itself does not explain.

Now I have to ask what happens if the murderer repents. I have to ask whether he suffers for his own sins or whether Christ already did. I have to ask what it means for D&C 138 to say that the repentant dead still “pay the penalty” of their transgressions. I have to ask what ordinances the victims need and when those ordinances change their condition.

I have to ask what happens to the person whose name is lost and whose temple work cannot presently be performed. I have to ask what it means for Christ to compensate a victim for something that can never be undone in mortality. I have to ask what justice means once everyone involved can ultimately be resurrected, healed, forgiven, transformed, and assigned to an eternal condition according to God's judgment.

Maybe those doctrines provide the answers.

But they also make the mechanics of justice much less obvious.

And that brings me back to the thing that started this whole discussion.

Alma repeatedly talks about plainness. The glad tidings have supposedly been revealed “in plain terms, that we may understand, that we cannot err.” The people become angry because Alma speaks so plainly.

Yet the closer I look, the less plain any of this becomes.

Why did God allow those women and children to burn? Why did their blood need to stand as a witness? Why were Alma and Amulek preserved? What happens to the victims immediately after death? What happens to their killers?

What does a murderer have to suffer if he genuinely repents? What exactly does Christ pay, and what is still left for the guilty person to pay? What ordinances actually matter in the spirit world, and when? What does it mean to compensate the innocent and “make it right”?

Maybe there are answers to all of those questions.

I just don't think the answers are plain.