While I find
a number of this posts to be pretty lame (especially his articles on the
Christology of the Book of Mormon [see here and here]), Jared Cook has a good discussion of
prophetic infallibility and related topics on the By Common Consent blog:
Speaking of
the claim that the leaders of the Church will not lead members astray, Cook
cogently notes that this does not
mean leaders will never make mistakes (even on doctrinal issues) but that the
Church will never fall into a Great Apostasy:
In other words, I read the teaching that the
church will never be led astray not as a promise that the church will never be
wrong at all, but as a restatement of the idea that some the church may get
things wrong, it will not fall into a total apostasy and lose the restored
priesthood. This is sort of like the institutional analogue to the idea of
perseverance–the idea that an individual person is assured of salvation while
still in life.
