Wow. Yeah, well HUGE topic. One place to go to read something about it is Alexander Reid Harrison's MA Thesis: Joseph F. Smith: The Father of Modern Mormonism. It's not the best treatment of the subject, but it is easily accessible:
The so-called prophets do not claim any revelations. A great example of this is The Proclamation, which members even frame and hang on their walls. Elder Packer said that this was a "revelation" in a General Conference talk in 2010, but then the correlation committee censored out the word "revelation" and replaced it with the word "guide" in the Ensign. Some say Packer was involved in this censorship himself,
So the Apostles themselves have no idea if what they receive is a revelation or not...... wow.
Dr CamNC4Me
"Dr. Peterson and his Callithumpian cabal of BYU idiots have been marginalized by their own inevitable irrelevancy defending a fraud."
In his opening address at the eighty-ninth Semiannual General Conference of the Church, on October 4, 1918, President Smith declared that he had received several divine communications during the previous months. One of these, concerning the Savior’s visit to the spirits of the dead while his body was in the tomb, he had received the previous day. It was written immediately following the close of the conference; on October 31, 1918, it was submitted to the counselors in the First Presidency, the Council of the Twelve, and the Patriarch, and it was unanimously accepted by them.
So there is one who declared himself a prophet in the last 100 years to the general assembly of the Church. One of my favorites because he leaves Lorenzo Snow OUT of the lineup. As well he should have been.
Kishkumen wrote:If the Proclamation is a revelation, its source is Kirton McConkie.
We'd have to go PM, but I happen to have some insider knowledge of where the proclamation came from. You're not far from the truth.
Thought I read somewhere that the inspiration for the Proclamation idea came one day while the BYU law professor author was driving to or from work. He saw that a doctrinal underpinning was needed to justify the Church's War Against Gays. In that sense, the Proclamation serves as our very own Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (which enabled the Vietnam War). If you want to declare a war you need an official sanction and justification. You can't go willy-nilly mining Hai Phong Harbor without some type of warrant, nor can you launch a major political drive to block a measure in the Hawaii Legislature without some official declaration of war. Sun Tzu would roll over in his tomb if a war was conducted on such a casual basis to not require a proclamation!
moksha wrote:In that sense, the Proclamation serves as our very own Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (which enabled the Vietnam War).
It was much more satisfying during the cold war when Ezra Taft Benson and Cleon Skousen could shake their age spotted fists at the Soviets and declare them to be forces of the Adversary who made Elvis shake his hips suggestively and plotted to have black people gain civil rights.
Those Soviets could be demonized and not actually have to suffer for all that expended wrath. But then Mikhail Gorbachev had to go spouting all that perestroika and glasnost stuff till President Reagan had enough and ordered them to tear down that wall. A fine kettle of fish that was: we needed to find a new target to hate on and it would be a group which would unfortunately not have a large enough stone wall to prevent any personal slights or injuries.