Alma here gives another new detail about the Zoramite mission. Preaching the Messiah’s mission was Corianton’s original assignment; but while boasting of his own strength, Corianton’s faith was shaken by Zoramite disbelief. He apparently encountered questions for which he had no answers, allowing them to fester into apostasy.
Alma starts by clarifying Corianton’s faulty understanding, since it “will ease your mind somewhat.” In other words, the information that follows responds to some of the issues that generated Corianton’s apostasy. Corianton’s uncertainty, though not specified, is identified in Alma’s response.
Alma asks rhetorically: “Is not a soul at this time as precious unto God as a soul will be at the time of his coming?” Believers could be vulnerable to scoffers who ridiculed faith based on a distant future—and hence, perhaps improbable—event. Their culture was steeped in tradition, as confirmed by the number of references to the traditions of the fathers. It is no accident that such cultures are frequently termed “traditional cultures.” The past had tremendous power to influence and dictate the present. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz notes: “In polities firmly embedded in Edmund Burke’s golden assemblage of ‘ancient opinions and rules of life,’ the role of ideology, in any explicit sense, is marginal. In such truly traditional political systems the participants act as (to use another Burkean phrase) men of untaught feelings; they are guided both emotionally and intellectually in their judgments and activities by unexamined prejudices.” Thus, reliance on the future, rather than past, could seem very odd indeed. Probably the question that troubled Corianton might be stated as: “How can this Atoning Messiah be just or loving if he abandons people now without atonement, only to offer it to others in the future?” This issue has obvious relevance to those living before Christ’s earthly mission, but we seldom think of it, since that mission is in our past.
Alma deals with the disjunction between the atonement and its timing (in Corianton’s future) by accepting the problem of the future, but focusing on Yahweh’s justice and love. Even though this mission will occur in the future, he affirms, in the form of the question, that “a soul at this time [is] as precious unto God as a soul will be at the time of his coming.”