In the church, we now have a lot of Joseph-idolatry. People who have lost any convictions about the current prophetic mantle in the church tend to go back to Joseph Smith and cut out the things he taught that don’t fit their paradigm, in an effort to create a Joseph in their own image. And they call this figment of their imagination “Mormonism.” So we have narratives that Joseph was not polygamous, that he had an “expansive” vision that didn’t care what people actually believed, and so forth.
This isn’t new. The ages-old conflict has always been between living prophets and idolaters who say If I had lived in times of old, I would have followed those “true prophets” of the past. After all, prophets of the past can’t explain themselves in the present. So why not make them into idols that do our bidding?
Continue reading “Joseph Smith was neither authoritarian, nor a relativist”
