athena, I’ll try to remember to put a link up when my piece is published, which should be next month.

also, i think before we can talk about how to access truth, we need to define what “revelation” is.

This rings true and I feel it accords with my experience as well, that revelation is a spirit to spirit communication and once received it still must be interpreted and extracted through the brain. Both the extraction and the subsequent communication if shared both give rise to potential convolutions, which is why I believe it is so important that the receiver or the receiving end must also have the spirit with them. The word can be received in the brain, but it is only a seed, a seed that will hopefully strike a chord and open the spirit to communication from spirit for one prepared (my sheep will hear my voice), or inspire enough faith that the hearer experiments upon the word to subsequently qualify for that spiritual communication/revelation for themselves.

Is not that implying some sort of absolute discernment?

I’m with you though, everyone/thing is a filter. That is why I generally give deference to scripture which quotes Jesus directly.

Ben S., I think I’d want to nuance (although I’m sure you already know this) that sometimes, we take a step backwards, so sometimes how it was done (or what was believed) in the past is a closer approximation of truth than what we have now.

No, Brad L., that’s not what I’m suggesting at all. Far from it; you are misreading me in several ways.

One section of the paper argues that the JST–indeed, all revelation–is not inerrant

Inerrant revelation is a contradiction in terms isn’t it? Isn’t revelation privileged information that God gives directly to select persons? And shouldn’t God’s words be considered inerrant? I think what you mean to say is that some of what Joseph Smith and subsequent LDS church leaders claimed to be revelation wasn’t actually revelation. That it was either a wrong interpretation of what God was communicating to them at best or completely invented in their own imaginations at worst.

absolute truth exists, but you can’t access it perfectly from a prophet because every revelation comes through a prophet who is bound by cultural and intellectual and spiritual and linguistic limitations and will thus be conveyed in a limited sense.

If this is the case, then what makes the prophets better than any other philosopher or thinker out there? There has to be some way of nailing down what those actual revelations are. By conceding too much that prophets are products of their culture and time and said things that they shouldn’t have, you throw them under the bus.

“And no tongue can speak, neither can there be written by any man, neither can the hearts of men conceive so great and marvelous things as we both saw and heard Jesus speak; and no one can conceive of the joy which filled our souls at the time we heard him pray for us unto the Father.”

Seems pretty cut and dried.

@Clark is on to something–all this absolutism and “knowing” has more to do with what people are reacting against than anything else.

When someone raises it without a context I’m never sure what’s meant. To me truth is what survives all attempts to doubt in the long run regardless of sufficient inquiry. That’s objective enough for me.

The problem I have with how some approach scripture is they want a nice short list of proposition giving truth. Scripture rarely does that and when it does, it seems to use terms vague enough as to not do what people want. The JST to me shows that Joseph thought scripture was much more of a dialog. Not just a conversation like inquiring about the scriptures but with God as well. To tie scripture down too much is to limit it and thus cut off this dialog and thereby revelation. In this scheme scripture’s most important role is not to give us propositions as if they were universal equations of the universe. Scripture’s most important role is as a catalyst to revelation.