It is nonsense to say that someone has a testimony apart from their actively and directly experiencing the power of the Atonement...Testimonies do not refer to objects or creeds.  They refer only to a living experience of what solicits their witness.  Testimonies are no accidental by-product of God's grace.  Rather, they are its indispensable embodiment....

To have a testimony of the Book of Mormon can only mean that through it one has experienced the Atonement of Jesus Christ.  The same follows for Joseph Smith, President Monson, tithing, the word of wisdom, the Church as an institution, etc.  To have a testimony of these things is to have experienced the Atonement in connection with them--nothing more, nothing less.  Who would be more horrified by the idea of people having a testimony of Joseph smith than Joseph Smith?  Who would be more horrified by the idea of people having a testimony of the Book of Mormon than Mormon?  We may be justified in making certain inferences about Joseph Smith, President Monson, or the Book of Mormon based on our experience of God's saving grace in connection with the, but this is not the same thing as having a testimony that refers directly to them.

In each instance, the message and the messenger are only as effective as they are transparent.  To claim otherwise is to claim for them something that they would not claim for themselves.  To claim otherwise is to exchange a testimony for a sign.  The moment when any person, object, doctrine, or principle detaches itself from the task of occasioning an experience of Christ's atonement is the moment when that thing becomes a sign, a dead limb splintered from the tree of life.  If adultery is a desire for sex without the demands of genuine intimacy, then the trouble with adultery is that it substitutes the sign of love for love itself.  In this sense, Joseph Smith was right to claim that every sign-seeker is undoubtedly an adulterer.  To want a testimony grounded in signs is to want the idea of a thing without the responsibility of submitting to the difficulty of the thing itself.  It is to want "a form of godliness" while "denying the power thereof" (2 Tim. 3:5).  Such is the perpetual temptation of religion.