Th replied
Ergo the poetic D&C 76?

Yes, and D&C 88 and the new song in D&C 84:98-102 and little poetic touches like in D&C 85:6 ,
“Yea, thus saith the still small voice, which whispereth through and pierceth all things, and often times it maketh my bones to quake while it maketh manifest, saying:”

Most people who say truth is relative treat relative as a synonym for arbitrary. Jim Faulconer once said something to the effect that people may say morals are conventional, but God called the convention. Similarly, you can qualify the statement truth is relative by noting that our Heavenly Parents are the first relatives, the ones who produced all the other relatives and set the vast web of relatives vibrating with the music of the spheres. Truth is related to the person who says or lives it–”truth embraceth truth” (D&C 88:40).

Even a rock solid truth like “Jesus wrought an atonement for us” is related to the person who says it. Suppose you saw a short film praising Jesus as Lord and Savior and at the end a man in a dark business suit stepped onscreen and said, “My name is Satan and I approved this message” (See Mark 3:11-12 ).

We like to say that Satan will tell 1,000 truths to get us to believe one lie, but Satan is incapable of telling truth. Everything he says is a lie (another insight from Jim Faulconer), so even if the words he speaks would be true if, say, Chieko Okazaki spoke them, Satan doesn’t believe their truth, so the words are a lie. Truth is not related to the words spoken–it is related to the intent of the speaker’s heart.

Of course, that word intent raises the question, how do we know the intent of another’s heart? which we sometimes treat as rhetorical. But it’s not. I saw a copy of M. Scott Peck’s People of the Lie on the library’s sales table, which I read 20 years ago after an Institute instructor in Seattle mentioned it. Peck says lies breed confusion, and if you feel constantly confused around someone, that person may be lying to you.

And if you don’t find yourself confused, if you find joy in another person’s words, you may be tasting truth (see part II of the King Follett Discourse in the May 1971 Ensign, page 13 or 14, or just Yahoo “you say honey is sweet”)

Both my academic training and my practical experience as an informational writer/editor tell me that truth isn’t something that can be captured in words. The most that words – even inspired words, I believe – can hope to do is bring us closer to an understanding of truth in our own minds. I look at things like D&C 121:33, where Joseph Smith revels in the process of revelation which, like rolling waters, won’t remain impure, and the scriptural injunctions about learning line upon line – and my own personal experiences with divine inspiration – and I really think God is much more interested in the process of bringing us closer to him than he is in avoiding error along the way – including errors in our own understanding which nonetheless can be corrected going forward.

I agree with Thom that this requires rejecting the way some people think about what “must” be true about scripture, but it’s also an approach that I think is much more true of fundamental Mormon ideas. And it also makes it easier for some of us to stay in the Church.

Indeed, I believe he strove greatly to develop a style that could match the sublimity of the visions he received.

Ergo the poetic D&C 76?

Joseph Smith didn’t believe in perfect utterance, and if a prophet stutters, or utters something broken and imperfect, or engraves a record clumsily the Lord will allow the broken and imperfect language to pass into the record, and send another revelation or a later prophet to correct the imperfections, and yet a later revelation to correct that prophet’s imperfections–even so until the end of the world. Amen.

This has to be one of the most Mormon things I have ever heard.

And I’m with William: Messiness is totally of God. He recognizes what we’re like and he seems reasonably satisfied to meet us where we are. (For now.)

This is fantastic, Harlow. The more I get to know God through scripture and through living, the more I come to believe that the dialog between us and Him and the messiness that results is precisely the point. As you point out, if the gap between how we conceive him and how he presents his will is so huge, so alien that we can’t even begin to approach it then how can we even began to progress, even take a step on the road to where He is?

That doesn’t mean that there’s no truth or even Truth — that everything is relative* — but rather that faith and humility and charity need to be operative parts of our quest to know the mind and will of the Lord.

* the horrors of relativism as the fruits of postmodernism is a major bugaboo for some Mormons. I never experience that horror.