possible reason the Council of 50 minutes are withheld
Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2012 9:39 pm
While reading a thread about Council of 50 minutes being locked up tight in the infamous vault, it occurred to me there may well be a very mundane reason for this.
We've all (except BCSpace) noticed that the church has been repudiating its past teachings with alarming regularity in recent years, calling the words of past Prophets, Seers, and Revelators the speculative teachings unsupported by scriptural doctrine.
In the Council of 50 minutes are purported to be dozens if not hundreds of pages of the teachings of Joseph Smith. I'd really love to know what Smith had to say to these men, but it's possible that this is exactly what the church wants to prevent, because what Smith had to say back then doesn't mesh well with the new and improved version of Mormonism that the PR department has been churning out for the last 30 years or so, and they simply don't want the headache of having to repudiate it.
My dad and I used to talk about gospel and church things a fair bit when I was younger, and I remember him so often prefacing a remark with "the Prophet Joseph Smith taught that...." and he would proceed to mention something contained in the JoD, or some other writing, or transcribed sermon, or article from the Times and Seasons or whatever. Imagine the absolute gold mine of new quotable teachings of Joseph Smith contained in the Council of 50 minutes. Imagine the bonanza of sacrament meeting talks generated by faithful readers of these minutes, based on all the stuff Joseph Smith taught that we've never heard or seen before.
And the church leadership simply doesn't want to deal with that. They've got their message, they've got their correlated version of the Gospel, the church history, and all that, and they simply don't want to deal with more Joseph Smith.
"A Bible! A Bible! We have got a Bible, and there cannot be any more Bible."
Who knows. Maybe someday we'll find out what these minutes contain. I wonder then whether the feeling will be more disappointment at how mundane it all is, or excited by how scandalous it all is, or just plain amused at how quaint it all is viewing it from our more scientifically-informed position, or some other feeling altogether.
We've all (except BCSpace) noticed that the church has been repudiating its past teachings with alarming regularity in recent years, calling the words of past Prophets, Seers, and Revelators the speculative teachings unsupported by scriptural doctrine.
In the Council of 50 minutes are purported to be dozens if not hundreds of pages of the teachings of Joseph Smith. I'd really love to know what Smith had to say to these men, but it's possible that this is exactly what the church wants to prevent, because what Smith had to say back then doesn't mesh well with the new and improved version of Mormonism that the PR department has been churning out for the last 30 years or so, and they simply don't want the headache of having to repudiate it.
My dad and I used to talk about gospel and church things a fair bit when I was younger, and I remember him so often prefacing a remark with "the Prophet Joseph Smith taught that...." and he would proceed to mention something contained in the JoD, or some other writing, or transcribed sermon, or article from the Times and Seasons or whatever. Imagine the absolute gold mine of new quotable teachings of Joseph Smith contained in the Council of 50 minutes. Imagine the bonanza of sacrament meeting talks generated by faithful readers of these minutes, based on all the stuff Joseph Smith taught that we've never heard or seen before.
And the church leadership simply doesn't want to deal with that. They've got their message, they've got their correlated version of the Gospel, the church history, and all that, and they simply don't want to deal with more Joseph Smith.
"A Bible! A Bible! We have got a Bible, and there cannot be any more Bible."
Who knows. Maybe someday we'll find out what these minutes contain. I wonder then whether the feeling will be more disappointment at how mundane it all is, or excited by how scandalous it all is, or just plain amused at how quaint it all is viewing it from our more scientifically-informed position, or some other feeling altogether.
