“Atonement” in the Book of Mormon

This chapter presents an overview of how the concept of atonement is constructed throughout the nineteenth-century religious text known as the Book of Mormon. This chapter argues that there are three key ways atonement is understood: (1) as a means of speaking about the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ; (2) as a means of focusing on the divine personage performing the atonement; and (3) as a reference to Jesus’s experience in Gethsemane in which he bled “from every pore.” While the latter point is the least developed in the Book of Mormon, it has become the dominant interpretation of atonement in Latter-day Saint thought. This chapter argues that atonement in the Book of Mormon must be understood more broadly if readers are going to fully grasp what the book is attempting to convey in its different usages.