My confession is to acknowledge my awareness of the many linguistic, historical, and theological difficulties that arise as one attempts to analyze such documents as the Book of Abraham and the Book of Mormon, and also as one tries to take account of the Mormon (or any faith's) past.  Both my professional study and my continuing attempts to conform my private life to the requirements of the scriptures have led me to this awareness.  I have reconciled many of these difficulties, not reconciled others, and have suspended judgment on certain of them.  Most are explicable if one approaches them not from the perpective that the church is essentially divine, marred only by the weakness of human administrators, but rather that the Church on earth consists entirely of human beings (with all their limitations) who are trying to respond to the divine with which they have been touched.  The distinction is crucial, for the second conception is an inversion of the first.

-Philip L. Barlow, "The Uniquely True Church" (pg 239) A Thoughtful Faith