Saturday, March 29, 2014

On the Braden and Kelley Debate (Part I)

Reading the Braden and Kelley Debate up to the Third Speech of Mr Kelley, there are several points of interest for me.

  • Kelley is right that Braden is a jerk in calling Joe Smith an impostor, because Braden specifically had the concept of visionary available to him, and chose not to use it. That is unnecessarily ad hominem (and not backed by arguments, as Kelley notes).
  • Kelley points out that the "road sign is not the road" by exposing the differential between the iniquities of David and Salomon as compared to the excellence of their Psalms and Wisdom words, respectively; thus undercutting the "Joe Smith was a knave" argument as impinging the truth of the revelation. 
  • Braden gives a fascinating interpretation of I Cor 12-14, where the child/adult distinction that Paul uses is leveraged to make the present-day Church the fully developed, adult form, where miracles & revelations and & inspirations are not necessary anymore. His parallelism with the development of the US political state, in the context of the post-Civil War era of the late winter of 1884, must have been especially poignant.
  • It is strategically unclear to me why Kelley insists on the exegesis of the Jacobs prophecy in Deuteronomy, whose vague "wall" terminology Turner already exposed as difficult to interpret.

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