Kishkumen wrote:I have a lot to think about.
It seems that so far as clarifying what the leadership's understanding of authority and apostasy really is, the thinking has already been done, by yourself at least.
Brigham Young, October 9, 1859
Intelligence, Etc.
Remarks by President BRIGHAM YOUNG,
delivered in the Tabernacle, Great Salt Lake City, October 9, 1859.
Reported by G. D. Watt
Journal of Discourses, Vol. 7, p.282-91
Joseph Smith holds the keys of this last dispensation, and is now engaged behind the vail in the great work of the last days. I can tell our beloved brother Christians who have slain the Prophets and butchered and otherwise caused the death of thousands of Latter-day Saints, the priests who have thanked God in their prayers and thanksgiving from the pulpit that we have been plundered, driven, and slain, and the deacons under the pulpit, and their brethren and sisters in their closets, who have thanked God, thinking that the Latter-day Saints were wasted away, something that no doubt will mortify them—something that, to say the least, is a matter of deep regret to them—namely, that no man or woman in this dispensation will ever enter into the celestial kingdom of God without the consent of Joseph Smith. From the day that the Priesthood was taken from the earth to the winding-up scene of all things, every man and woman must have the certificate of Joseph Smith, junior, as a passport to their entrance into the mansion where God and Christ are—I with you and you with me. I cannot go there without his consent. He holds the keys of that kingdom for the last dispensation—the keys to rule in the spirit-world; and he rules there triumphantly, for he gained full power and a glorious victory over the power of Satan while he was yet in the flesh, and was a martyr to his religion and to the name of Christ, which gives him a most perfect victory in the spirit-world. He reigns there as supreme a being in his sphere, capacity, and calling, as God does in heaven. Many will exclaim—"Oh, that is very disagreeable! It is preposterous! We cannot bear the thought!" But it is true.
I remember reading this some time ago, and wondering why this kind of thing never seemed to get talked about nowadays. But as your analysis strongly suggests, this is no "Adam-God" weirdness, to be shuffled out of the way as just one of Brother Brigham's flights of rhetoric from those rough frontier days. It still seems to be a major basis for decisions today.
Surely it will be in an authorized manual somewhere? Can anybody locate it?