Revelation After Joseph Smith: A Scholarly Response
Examining the claims of ldsdiscussions.com regarding post-Restoration revelation, prophetic authority, and the nature of divine communication in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Overview and Framing
The ldsdiscussions.com series on revelation reaches its third installment by examining revelations issued by Church leaders after Joseph Smith's death. The author presents four main case studies — John Taylor's 1886 revelation on plural marriage, the 1890 Manifesto, the 1978 priesthood revelation, changes to the temple endowment, Russell M. Nelson's name revelation, and the 2015/2019 LGBT policy reversal — and from these draws sweeping conclusions: that revelation in the Church is nothing more than motivated reasoning by ambitious men; that prophets lack genuine discernment; and that the entire institution of post-Joseph revelation is fraudulent.
This response examines each claim in its proper historical, theological, and evidential context. It will demonstrate that the author's framework rests on a fundamental category error about the nature of revelation, employs selective quotation to misrepresent eyewitness testimony, and expects from Latter-day Saint prophets a standard of supernatural performance that neither scripture nor the history of biblical prophecy has ever required.
Importantly, this response does not claim prophets are infallible. The Church does not teach prophetic infallibility, and never has. What we argue is that the author conflates human fallibility with institutional fraud, and that the evidence — assessed honestly — supports the conclusion that genuine divine communication has occurred within the Restoration movement after Joseph Smith's death.
I. The Author's Core Category Error: What Revelation Is
Before addressing individual case studies, the argument's foundational premise must be examined. The author constructs an implicit standard: authentic revelation must (1) arrive dramatically and unpredictably, (2) be uninfluenced by prior thought or social context, (3) never be revised or superseded, and (4) enable its recipients to supernaturally detect fraud. Because post-Joseph revelation does not consistently meet these criteria, the author concludes it is not genuine.
This standard is foreign to both the Bible and the Restoration's own scriptures. The premise that revelation cannot be influenced by prior concern, deliberation, or social context runs directly counter to the entire prophetic tradition. In the biblical record, Elijah did not receive his divine communication as a thunderclap, but as a still, small voice — precisely after exhaustion, defeat, and flight (1 Kings 19). The Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 resolved the Gentile question through deliberation, testimony, and consensus before concluding, “It seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us” (Acts 15:28). God's communication came through and within a human deliberative process, not in spite of it.
The Doctrine and Covenants addresses this directly. Section 9 describes revelation as a burning or stupor of thought — internal spiritual impressions, not external audible voices. Section 58:26–29 explicitly rebukes waiting for constant divine commands, stating that the Lord expects His servants to exercise judgment and initiative, acting of themselves. The pattern of Restoration scripture is one of ongoing collaboration between divine promptings and human reasoning — not a system where God overrides human thought altogether.
The author effectively argues that if a prophet had previously thought about something, any subsequent revelation on that topic is invalidated. This would eliminate not just modern revelation but virtually every prophetic utterance in scripture: Jeremiah had long contemplated Israel's apostasy before receiving his call; Paul had spent years studying law and Torah before revelation reoriented it. Preparation, deliberation, and prior concern do not contaminate revelation — they are the soil in which it grows.
With this framework corrected, we can evaluate the specific case studies on their actual merits.
II. John Taylor's 1886 Revelation and the Logic of Divine Command
The author presents John Taylor's 1886 revelation as a case of God reversing Himself: Taylor received what appeared to be an ironclad eternal command to continue polygamy, only for Wilford Woodruff to receive a revelation suspending it four years later. This, the author argues, proves that God is either changeable or that the revelations were invented by men.
The argument contains a crucial theological error. The entire Latter-day Saint theology of revelation — from the Book of Mormon forward — is built on the premise that God adapts His commands to the circumstances and capacities of His people. This is not doctrinal weakness; it is a foundational scriptural principle. In 1 Nephi 9, the Lord prepares backup plates precisely because He foresees contingencies. In D&C 64:29–33, the Saints are instructed that requirements change according to circumstances. The Book of Mormon itself contains the frank acknowledgment that the Lord commands and revokes according to His purposes — and the book of Jacob explicitly teaches that polygamy is commanded or forbidden according to divine direction depending on circumstances (Jacob 2:30).
Jacob 2:30
“For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up seed unto me, I will command my people; otherwise they shall hearken unto these things.”
The author's claim that Taylor's language (“an everlasting covenant that shall not be revoked”) forecloses this reading misunderstands what was being communicated. Taylor's revelation was addressing whether apostasy from the command was permissible — answering that it was not. What the revelation does not address is the separate question of whether God Himself could later change the command. The eternally binding nature of the celestial law of marriage in no way prevents God from suspending its earthly practice under specific historical circumstances, which is precisely what the Manifesto framed itself as doing.
The author also misreads the 1886 revelation's status. It was not canonized scripture, was not accepted by a general conference vote, and its provenance has been questioned by historians. Treating it as equivalent to a formal Official Declaration fundamentally misrepresents the Church's own hierarchy of prophetic utterances. The author's broader argument depends on treating every private claim to revelation as carrying the same weight as formally sustained Church action — which is not how the Restoration theology of revelation operates.
Furthermore, the very pattern the author cites as damning — God responding to governmental pressure — is precisely the pattern of biblical prophecy. God instructed Elijah to flee before Jezebel, not to stand and be martyred. God permitted Nehemiah to work within Persian political structures. The Apostolic Church navigated Roman law. Divine pragmatism in the face of hostile earthly power is a feature of revealed religion, not evidence against it.
III. The 1890 Manifesto: Political Capitulation or Revealed Preservation?
The author's treatment of the Manifesto relies almost entirely on the surface claim that because the United States government was threatening the Church with asset confiscation, the Manifesto must have been politically motivated rather than divinely revealed. This is a classic case of the genetic fallacy: dismissing the content of a revelation by pointing to the circumstances in which it was received, while ignoring the independent evidence for its divine character.
The historical record regarding Woodruff's experience is substantially richer than the author acknowledges. On the night of September 23, 1890, Wilford Woodruff recorded receiving a specific vision in which the Lord showed him the consequences of two paths: continuing plural marriage versus suspending it. The vision was explicit: all temples would be lost, ordinances would cease, and Church leaders would be imprisoned. Woodruff testified: “When the hour came…it was all clear to me. I went before the Lord, and I wrote what the Lord told me to write.” He was emphatic that he would have accepted imprisonment and death rather than issue the Manifesto if God had not commanded it. This is not the language of a corporate executive making a pragmatic business decision.
The author notes, correctly, that Woodruff did not initially frame the Manifesto as revelation in a formal public statement. But this observation actually supports the faithful reading: it took Woodruff time to articulate and defend what he had experienced because revelation often requires subsequent reflection and expression. The fact that he began testifying more explicitly of a divine directive within a year is not evidence of post-hoc invention; it is the normal pattern of processing and communicating spiritual experience.
Theologically, the author's implicit argument is self-defeating. If the Church cannot receive revelation instructing it to preserve itself and its ordinances by accommodating legal realities, then revelation is effectively useless — a divine voice that only speaks when the stakes are low. The Restoration model holds that God is actively interested in preserving the vehicle through which exalting ordinances are administered, and will instruct His servants accordingly. The preservation of temple work for both the living and the dead was — by Woodruff's own account — the entire point of the Manifesto. Dismissing this as mere capitulation requires ignoring Woodruff's explicit testimony.
Woodruff's 1889 declaration also provides theological context: “The Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as President of this Church to lead you astray. It is not in the programme. It is not in the mind of God. If I were to attempt that, the Lord would remove me out of my place.” This statement, made one year before the Manifesto, frames it as an act of obedience rather than betrayal.
IV. The 1978 Revelation: The Author's Most Serious Misrepresentation
The author's treatment of Official Declaration 2 is the most problematic section of the entire essay, and represents a clear case of selective quotation deployed to reverse the actual meaning of the evidence.
The author quotes a 1978 interview with Elder LeGrand Richards conducted by Wesley P. Walters, in which Richards describes a deliberative process: President Kimball gathered input, individual apostles prayed, references were compiled, and a vote was taken. From this, the author concludes the revelation was “nothing more than a signed statement that allowed the church to solve an attendance problem for the Brazil temple.”
This reading requires the complete excision of what actually happened in the upper room of the Salt Lake Temple on June 1, 1978, documented by multiple independent eyewitnesses.
Eyewitness Testimony — June 1, 1978
- Gordon B. Hinckley — “There was a hallowed and sanctified atmosphere in the room. For me, it felt as if a conduit opened between the heavenly throne and the kneeling, pleading prophet…Every man in that circle, by the power of the Holy Ghost, knew the same thing. Not one of us who was present on that occasion was ever quite the same after that.”
- David B. Haight — “An outpouring of the Spirit which bonded our souls together in perfect unity…so strong that none of us could speak afterwards.”
- Bruce R. McConkie — “From the midst of eternity, the voice of God, conveyed by the power of the Spirit, spoke to his prophet…The Spirit of the Lord rested mightily upon us all. We felt something akin to what happened on the day of Pentecost and as cloven tongues of fire…Every man in that room knew the same thing.”
Bruce R. McConkie — a man whose theological conservatism on racial matters had been among the most pronounced of any apostle, and who had written explicitly against the extension of the priesthood to Black men in his earlier work Mormon Doctrine — subsequently issued one of the most extraordinary reversals in the history of LDS discourse: “Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon or whosoever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation. We spoke with a limited understanding and were in error.”
The author never mentions this. He never mentions that McConkie — perhaps the last person anyone would have expected to describe a Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit ratifying the extension of priesthood to all men — gave the most vivid and theologically detailed account of the 1978 revelation. McConkie had strong institutional and personal reasons to resist this change. The fact that he became its most powerful witness is significant evidence that something extraordinary happened in that room on June 1, 1978.
The author's use of the LeGrand Richards interview is also methodologically flawed. Richards, 84 years old at the time of the interview and speaking casually to a known critic of the Church, described the procedural framework of how the matter came to a head over several weeks. He did not claim that this was the entirety of what happened on June 1, 1978 itself. Critically, Richards had separately reported a visionary experience in the Salt Lake Temple prior to that meeting. The interview captures only one dimension of a multi-dimensional event.
Moreover, the author's framing — that Brazil's temple dedication being the practical catalyst is somehow damning — exposes a logical inconsistency. Earlier in the essay he argues that God only gives revelation in response to questions asked. Now he argues that the existence of a practical problem prompting the question invalidates the revelation that answered it. These two positions cannot both be true. If God responds to the questions His servants bring, then the existence of a Brazil-shaped question tells us nothing about whether God answered it.
The 1978 revelation remains one of the best-attested spiritual events in modern Latter-day Saint history: fifteen senior leaders as independent witnesses, a dramatic and transformative experience described in contemporaneous accounts, a formal canonical declaration ratified by the entire Church membership, and the remarkable personal conversion of its most theologically resistant potential objector. Dismissing this as a boardroom decision is not skepticism — it is the willful suppression of inconvenient evidence.
V. Temple Changes, Adam-God, and the Distinction Between Prophetic Teaching and Official Doctrine
The author argues that because the temple endowment has changed since Brigham Young declared it “perfected,” and because Young's Adam-God teachings were later repudiated, this proves revelation in the Church is unreliable.
This conflates two distinct categories that Latter-day Saint theology has always maintained: the official canonized doctrine of the Church and the personal theological opinions of individual leaders. This distinction is not a post-hoc apologetic invention — it is articulated in the Church's own doctrinal standards. The 1835 preface to the Doctrine and Covenants explicitly rejected the idea that the Church president's teachings were automatically binding: revelation required a process of presentation and common consent.
Brigham Young's Adam-God theory was never presented to a general conference for a sustaining vote. It was never canonized. It was a private theological speculation voiced from a pulpit that was subsequently questioned, debated, and ultimately set aside by later Church leaders, including Spencer W. Kimball who explicitly denounced it as “false doctrine” in a 1976 General Conference address. FAIR scholar Stephen Robinson has characterized it accurately as an “anomaly” — something inconsistent with core Restoration scripture, which the institutional Church handled by declining to formalize it.
The author holds up this episode as evidence that prophets are unreliable. In fact, it demonstrates the opposite: that the Church has a self-correcting mechanism. The same institutional structure the author dismisses as merely human — the Quorum of the Twelve, the First Presidency, the process of common consent — successfully identified and rejected a theological speculation that was inconsistent with Restoration scripture. This is the system working as designed.
On temple changes, the author erects a false either/or: either the temple ceremony is perfect and unchangeable, or it is man-made. But this dichotomy ignores the explicit theology of progressive restoration. The Church has never claimed that every detail of the endowment was finalized in 1877. What it claims is that the salvific principles are continuously maintained through divine guidance, while ceremonial forms can be refined. The removal of Masonic-style penalties, the revision of certain symbolic elements, and the adjustments to language are all consistent with a theology in which form serves substance, and form can be refined while substance is preserved.
If the author's standard were applied to biblical religion consistently, the results would be equally destructive: the Council of Jerusalem overrode Mosaic dietary law. Paul's instructions about women keeping silent in churches are not observed in any Christian tradition today. The New Testament itself is an extended record of doctrinal and liturgical practice being refined as the early community grew in understanding. Change within a revelation-receiving institution is not proof of fraud; it is proof of continued engagement with a living God.
VI. Russell M. Nelson, the Name “Mormon,” and the Logic of Prior Conviction
The author dedicates substantial space to arguing that President Nelson's 2018 revelation about the Church's name is fraudulent because Nelson had advocated the same position as an apostle 28 years earlier. He quotes Wendy Nelson's statement that her husband was “unleashed” as a prophet to do what he had long believed was right.
This argument proves far too much. By this logic, no revelation can ever be genuine if the recipient previously held related convictions. Yet this is the pattern of virtually every prophetic call in scripture. Jeremiah was told before his birth that he was ordained a prophet (Jeremiah 1:5) — meaning his entire prior life was preparation for what he would reveal. Paul's years as a Pharisee gave him the scriptural vocabulary through which he later articulated the gospel of grace. Moses's forty years in the wilderness shaped the man who would lead Israel. Prior conviction and personal alignment with a message are not evidence that the message is self-generated; they are the precondition for being the right vessel to receive it.
Wendy Nelson's statement is being misread. She said her husband was “free to follow through” on things he had “been concerned about.” This is entirely consistent with the Latter-day Saint theology of the prophetic office: the President of the Church is the only person with the authority and keys to bind the Church in certain formal ways. A junior apostle who receives a prompting about Church direction is not yet in a position to act on it organizationally — that is not because the prompting is invalid, but because the keys for binding the entire Church rest with the President. As Nelson assumed that stewardship, acting on those long-held impressions was theologically appropriate, not fraudulent.
The author also argues that the “I'm a Mormon” campaign under Thomas Monson contradicts the idea that God found the nickname problematic. But this assumes God micromanages every institutional communication strategy. Latter-day Saint theology does not hold that every Church marketing decision is divinely directed. Monson's approval of the campaign was a practical institutional judgment. Nelson's later revelatory direction was a deeper correction of the Church's fundamental self-designation. These can coexist without contradiction.
Comparing revelations among apostles who hold different views simultaneously is not unique to modern Mormonism. Peter and Paul disagreed sharply at Antioch (Galatians 2:11). The early Church's councils involved genuine prophetic disagreement. The author expects a unanimity and consistency among Church leaders that even the New Testament does not model or require.
VII. The 2015/2019 LGBT Policy Reversal: Revelation, Process, and Refinement
The author treats the reversal of the November 2015 policy as a definitive case of revelation failing: Russell M. Nelson testified that the 2015 policy was revelation confirmed by spiritual witness, then three and a half years later proclaimed its reversal was also revelation. This, the author argues, proves spiritual confirmations are not reliable.
This argument imports a view of revelation as a one-time, final, irrevocable declaration. But this is explicitly not the Latter-day Saint or biblical theology of ongoing revelation. The New Testament records the early Church refining its understanding even after direct apostolic direction. The Jerusalem Council's decision in Acts 15 itself represented a revision of the strict Mosaic position that had previously been operative. Doctrinal and policy understanding develops through continued engagement with God.
Latter-day Saint theology explicitly accommodates this: D&C 98:12 speaks of revelation coming “line upon line, precept upon precept.” The Lord acknowledged to Joseph Smith that His people are taught “as they are able to bear.” A revelation that proved difficult in application, caused suffering to some, and was subsequently refined through further divine communication is not self-evidently false — it is, by the Church's own theology, an example of how the Lord works with His people over time.
The author also sets up an unfair comparison with the 116-page episode: God planned 2,400 years in advance for that contingency but could not anticipate the 2015 policy reversal. This comparison misunderstands the nature of each situation. The 116-page plan was a direct scripturally-described divine foresight regarding the canonical integrity of the Book of Mormon. The 2015 policy was a pastoral administrative directive navigating genuinely new social territory. The suggestion that God must manage both at the same level of foresight and precision is a category error that would also invalidate every imperfect pastoral decision recorded in Acts and the Pauline letters.
The existence of pain in the 2015–2019 period is real and should not be dismissed. But the question is not whether the policy caused pain — it is whether the subsequent course correction through ongoing revelation is evidence of fraud or evidence of a living institution continuing to seek God's will. The biblical record suggests the latter: the early Church's decision not to require circumcision caused enormous conflict for many Jewish Christians. God guided that community through the conflict. Latter-day Saints believe He does the same today.
VIII. Prophetic Discernment: What It Is and What It Is Not
The author argues that the Kinderhook Plates hoax and the Mark Hofmann forgeries prove that LDS prophets lack genuine discernment. If Gordon B. Hinckley was deceived by Hofmann, how can he be a prophet, seer, and revelator?
This argument exposes a fundamental misunderstanding of what both Latter-day Saint theology and biblical theology actually claim about the gift of discernment. Nowhere in scripture or in official Church teaching is the claim made that prophets possess omniscient fraud detection. The biblical prophets were deceived: Elijah feared Jezebel to the point of suicidal despair (1 Kings 19:4). Nathan initially encouraged David to build the Temple before God countermanded his counsel the very same night (2 Samuel 7). Peter was manipulated by circumcision advocates until Paul confronted him publicly (Galatians 2). Paul himself testified that letters were being forged in his name (2 Thessalonians 2:2). The gift of discernment is a spiritual gift for specific spiritual purposes — not a generalized supernatural lie detector.
The Hofmann case presents additional important context the author suppresses. President Hinckley was explicit in his uncertainty about the documents' authenticity — he said publicly that the Church was “not certain” they were genuine and “may never be.” He deferred to expert authentication, which is precisely what good institutional stewardship looks like. Hofmann successfully deceived the FBI, the Library of Congress, professional document authenticators, and major universities. Using the metric of “he was fooled by the best forger of the 20th century, therefore he is not a prophet” is a standard that would eliminate virtually every institutional leader of every religious tradition in that era. The argument proves nothing about prophetic authority specifically.
The author also makes much of the claim that the anti-Mormon Tanners identified the Salamander Letter as suspicious before Church leaders did. This is somewhat misleading. The Tanners' analysis was based on textual and historical critique, not supernatural discernment. Moreover, Hofmann's forgeries were not definitively exposed until modern forensic document analysis techniques were applied after his arrest. The claim that critics had better “discernment” than Church leaders in this case does not survive scrutiny.
The Doctrine and Covenants addresses the limits of prophetic omniscience directly: “As you cannot always judge the righteous, or as you cannot always tell the wicked from the righteous, therefore I say unto you, hold your peace until I shall see fit to make all things known” (D&C 10:37). God does not typically override human agency to prevent the deceptions of evil actors. This is not a loophole invented by apologists; it is stated canonical doctrine.
Holding Church leaders to a standard of supernatural document authentication while exempting every other institution and every biblical prophet from that standard is not rigorous analysis. It is special pleading applied asymmetrically to achieve a predetermined conclusion.
IX. The “Watered-Down Revelation” Argument and the Canon Since Joseph Smith
The author quotes Spencer W. Kimball's statement that revelation comes as “deep impressions, but without spectacle or glamour” and uses this to argue that modern prophets are admitting their revelations are merely mundane thoughts dressed up in divine language.
This reading inverts Kimball's actual meaning. Kimball was warning members not to expect revelation to always arrive with pyrotechnics — precisely so they would not dismiss genuine divine communication because it came quietly. This is a message from the New Testament: “The wind bloweth where it listeth…so is every one that is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). The Spirit operates in ways that are not always dramatic. Paul's anguish over his “thorn in the flesh” was resolved not by a vision but by a quiet assurance: “My grace is sufficient for thee” (2 Corinthians 12:9).
The author's standard — that only Joseph Smith-style voice-of-God dictations count as real revelation — is also theologically problematic by the Restoration's own terms. Joseph Smith himself taught that the Spirit of Prophecy was available to all members, and that the most common mode of divine communication is impression and feeling rather than audible voice. Doctrine and Covenants 8:2–3 explicitly describes revelation as coming to “mind and heart,” not to the ear. Framing quiet spiritual confirmation as nothing more than motivated thinking requires rejecting the entire Restoration epistemology of how God speaks to human beings.
The author also claims that no new section has been added to the Doctrine and Covenants since D&C 138 in 1918. This is factually incorrect. Official Declaration 1 (the Manifesto) and Official Declaration 2 (the 1978 priesthood revelation) are both in the Doctrine and Covenants as canonized scripture, formally accepted by Church membership. The 1978 revelation is literally in the standard works. The claim of revelatory silence simply does not hold.
More importantly, the pattern of fewer dramatic foundational revelations as a Church matures is anticipated in the Restoration's own theology. Joseph Smith received foundational revelations because the Restoration was being constructed from nothing — the canon, the priesthood structure, the ordinances, the theology all had to be established. Once that canon is established, subsequent revelation primarily clarifies, applies, and extends it rather than building new foundations. This is not decline; it is the natural progression of an institution working within an established revelatory framework, exactly as the biblical canon developed from the dramatic Sinai revelations forward through the more pastoral New Testament epistles.
X. COVID-19 and the Unfair Standard of Predictive Prophecy
The author argues that the Church's failure to prophesy COVID-19 in advance, and the failure of worldwide fasts to end the pandemic, prove that the prophetic and priesthood power claimed by the Church does not exist.
This argument betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the biblical prophetic role. Biblical prophets did not routinely predict natural disasters in advance so communities could avoid them. They did not prophesy the great plagues of the ancient world, the Black Death, or the Justinianic Plague. When Jerusalem was destroyed by Babylon — a catastrophe that Jeremiah spent his entire career warning about — the prophecy was about spiritual causes and consequences, not a warning that enabled the city to evacuate safely. Jesus prophesied the destruction of the Temple (Matthew 24), but Christian communities in Jerusalem in 70 AD still experienced that destruction firsthand. Prophecy does not function as supernatural disaster insurance.
Similarly, the failure of worldwide fasts to immediately end COVID-19 does not disprove priesthood power. The biblical model of prayer is filled with petitions that were not granted immediately or were answered in ways other than expected. Paul prayed three times to have his thorn removed; God declined (2 Corinthians 12:8–9). The Psalmists regularly cried out in crisis and recorded ongoing suffering before resolution. Faith does not guarantee specific outcomes on specific timetables. This is the common condition of every praying community in the history of religion, not a uniquely Latter-day Saint problem.
The author's comparison of Church institutional decision-making during COVID to government and sports league timelines also misframes the situation. No one claims the NBA commissioner is a prophet because he suspended games before the Church suspended meetings. Institutional response timelines during a novel crisis reflect information management and organizational structure, not spiritual authority. Using the Church's response timeline as a theological argument requires the incoherent premise that institutional agility equals prophetic authenticity.
XI. The Deeper Question: What Pattern Does the Evidence Actually Support?
The ldsdiscussions.com essay argues that when you “look at the patterns objectively,” the evidence supports the conclusion that prophets are simply men enacting their personal worldviews. A genuinely objective look at the patterns supports a more nuanced and honest conclusion.
The 1890 Manifesto was issued by a man who testified of a specific vision, who had explicitly rejected worldly accommodation for years, and whose statement was ratified by a general membership vote. The 1978 revelation was attested by fifteen senior leaders — including the man with the most institutional reason to resist it — in contemporaneous accounts, and was subsequently canonized. These are not features of pure political pragmatism; they are features of a community that genuinely believed it was receiving divine guidance and documented that belief in contemporaneous testimony.
The author's framework is unfalsifiable in a troubling direction: any evidence of process, deliberation, or prior concern disqualifies a revelation as “merely human.” Any evidence of dramatic experience can be dismissed as collective emotional contagion. Any doctrinal change is inconsistency; any doctrinal consistency is rigidity. No possible combination of evidence could, by this framework, count as genuine revelation. That is not skeptical rigor — it is a closed epistemic system that has decided its conclusion in advance.
The Latter-day Saint position is more epistemically honest. We acknowledge that prophets are fallible. We acknowledge that some teachings by Church leaders have been wrong, including Brigham Young's Adam-God speculation, the false defense of the Kinderhook Plates, and the racial theories underlying the priesthood ban. We do not claim prophetic infallibility. What we claim is that within this flawed, human institution, there is also genuine divine contact — evidenced by the transformative spiritual experience that multiple independent witnesses reported in June 1978, by the preservation of an institution that has navigated extraordinary historical challenges, and by the ongoing spiritual witness available to individuals who engage seriously with these questions.
The author concludes by invoking Occam's Razor: it is simpler to believe prophets are just men than that God communicates with them. But Occam's Razor is a principle of parsimony between otherwise equal explanations — not a license to exclude transcendent categories entirely. If one already assumes that God does not act in human history, every claimed revelation will naturally look like motivated reasoning. The question is whether that assumption is itself warranted. The evidence examined throughout this response suggests it should not be accepted uncritically.
Conclusion
The ldsdiscussions.com overview on post-Joseph revelation raises genuine and important questions that deserve honest engagement. This response has provided that engagement.
We have shown that the author's framework rests on a non-biblical, non-Restoration standard for genuine revelation — one that would invalidate virtually every prophetic act in scripture. We have shown that the LeGrand Richards interview, the author's most dramatic evidence against the 1978 revelation, is selectively cited to exclude the very testimony that makes the case for that revelation most compelling. We have shown that prophetic fallibility — which the Church itself acknowledges candidly — is not the same as institutional fraud. We have shown that doctrinal change and refinement, including through painful errors, is the pattern of every revelation-receiving community in the biblical tradition.
None of this requires accepting every decision of every Church leader as divinely inspired. It does require recognizing that the evidence for genuine divine communication in the post-Joseph Church — most powerfully in the 1978 revelation — is substantially stronger than the author's treatment suggests. And it requires the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that a framework which makes genuine revelation impossible to identify in principle is not neutral analysis; it is a conclusion dressed up as a method.
The Restoration tradition holds that God does not leave His people without continuing communication, that prophets are both human and inspired, and that the Spirit will confirm truth to those who seek it with sincerity and humility. The evidence examined in this response, assessed without the author's unfalsifiable presuppositions, is consistent with that claim.
Doctrine & Covenants 1:38
“What I the Lord have spoken, I have spoken, and I excuse not myself; and though the heavens and the earth pass away, my word shall not pass away, but shall all be fulfilled, whether by mine own voice or by the voice of my servants, it is the same.”
The Lord has spoken through imperfect servants since the beginning of recorded history. That imperfection does not silence the voice — it illuminates the grace.