Friday, June 1, 2018

Jared Cook, Prophetic Fallibility, Institutional Revelation, and Institutional Salvation

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.