The problem with living prophets

My reading for this week was Mosiah 7-11. The Sunday School manual wants to make this reading into a lesson on the importance of following the prophets, which is to say the importance of following church leaders. That isn't really my favorite subject—but let me confront that dislike directly.

Latter-day Saints affirm the existence of living prophets. Potentially, several ideas are embedded in that affirmation, most of which ring true to me:

The scriptural canon is not closed. If prophecy persists from the biblical age into the present, then new texts can be produced which have, for our faith community, the same status as the Bible or our other standard works. In practice, Latter-day Saints have proved sparing about adding new texts to the canon since the death of Joseph Smith; but certainly the adoption of LDS standard works beyond the Bible in the first place hinges on the principle of an open canon and the related principle of modern revelation.

Revelation is a continuing process. Implicit in the idea that we need living prophets is the idea that we need continuing revelation: the existing scriptures are ultimately inadequate. Revelations to living prophets can, at least in theory, supersede past revelations or require us to rethink, even radically, our understanding of what we've taken until now to be truth. In practice, though, the prevailing trend in LDS discourse is to represent the teachings of the living prophets as continuous with existing scripture. Rather than describing modern revelation as a gradual progression in our understanding of truth, correlated discourse prefers to characterize modern prophets as guardians and transmitters of an unchanging gospel.

The biblical tradition of social justice continues today. Prophecy in the ancient Hebrew world had a strong social justice dimension. Prophets denounced oppression and injustice, especially toward the poor. In my reading for this week, the wicked state of affairs that Abinadi denounces in chapter 11 includes arrogance, privilege, and corruption among a priestly hierarchy; the exploitation of the laboring classes by a leisured ruling class (in the form of taxes); and the people's complicity by buying into their state's ideology. If denouncing social injustice is part of the ancient prophetic tradition, then it should be part of a tradition of modern prophecy as well.

God works through spiritual gifts. Nineteenth-century American religious elites regarded phenomena like visions, prophecies, and faith healings as signs of fanatic "enthusiasm." Such things may have been real in biblical times, but they ended with the apostolic age. The Book of Mormon preaches against that view. Spiritual gifts continue today, and God uses them to carry out his work (see, for instance, Moroni 10). It's impossible not to read the discussion of seers in Mosiah 8 in light of Joseph Smith's own use of seerstones. To say that seership is the greatest gift one can have is to powerfully affirm (to privilege, in fact) Joseph Smith's own spiritual gift—a gift that contemporaries maligned as witchcraft or as charlatanry.

My point here is that Mormon affirmations of modern prophecy assert (a) that God can speak through extraordinary experiences like visions and (b) that "folk" ways of knowing (e.g., scrying with seerstones) can be a vehicle for the revelation of truth. With the caveat that careful discernment is required in particular cases, I can sign onto those assertions as general principles.

Inspiration is available to all who carry out God's work. I like to understand living prophets as an extension of the principle that all who serve are entitled to inspiration to guide them. When Gordon B. Hinckley described the process by which the First Presidency and the Twelve make decisions by revelation, what he described was people sitting around talking, expressing differing viewpoints, thinking through issues, and trying to discern the voice of the Spirit until they had arrived at a consensus they felt confident was inspired. There's nothing extraordinary about that process—or alternatively, if it is extraordinary, it's an extraordinary process that can, and should, operate in every arena of church service and within families.

To reject Church leaders' teachings is to reject the revealed will of God. And here's where the doctrine of living prophets becomes a problem for me. The doctrine becomes a basis for elevating the authority of Church leaders to a point where their teachings and policies are effectively beyond challenge. Hence we get slogans like, "When the prophet speaks, the debate is over," or "The Lord will never permit the prophet to lead the Church astray." Apologists or Church public relations are always quick to insist that members are perfectly free to disagree with Church leaders. What isn't said is that when you disagree with Church leaders, it is always assumed that you have and are a problem; it's unthinkable that Church leaders' teachings or policies could be the problem. There are no rhetorical grounds in Mormonism for directly questioning the truth of living Church leaders' teachings or the wisdom of their policy decisions. It can only be done very quietly and very subtly—preferably entirely out of public view. You cannot say openly—even in a soft-spoken humble tone—"I think President Monson or Elder ______ is wrong about..." without running the risk of your bishop wanting to interview you to discuss the spiritual problems that prevent you from fully sustaining the Lord's chosen mouthpiece.

This is an unhealthy institutional dynamic. It reflects a lingering impulse, from the days of persecution, to "close ranks." Dissent is understood as a threat of the same species as the apostates who wanted to assassinate Joseph Smith and aided the anti-Mormon mobs. Elevating Church leaders beyond criticism exposes the Church to the dangers of unrighteous dominion and allows members' respect for Church leaders to bleed toward idolatry. There's no question that there need to be ordered channels of authority in the Church; and as in any institution, there have to be limits to how much dissent can be tolerated before the institution says, "We're sorry, but you can't really function as a member of this organization." My concern is that those limits are drawn much too narrowly and that the channels of authority function too much in a top-down fashion.

The First Presidency and the Twelve have ultimate policy-making authority in the Church, as well as the authority to declare what, at any given moment, has the status of "official" Church teaching. Those are the perogatives of their office. I'm confident that they seek—and receive—inspiration as they make decisions about what to teach and how to administer the Church. It's also true that the men who hold those offices have limitations. Their ability to "study out in their minds" or to "inquire of the Lord" about different possibilities is constrained by the scope of their life experience, their education and training, and their culturally circumscribed ways of thinking and seeing. These constraints on Church leaders' ability to discover or confront new possibilities are exacerbated by the hierarchical nature of Church governance and Mormon tendencies toward conformism, i.e., a tendency to attract the like-minded and to repel people who don't fit within narrowly defined boundaries of diversity. Sanctioned forums for democratic debate about Church doctrine and governance—outside closed doors, I mean—would open up new potential avenues for revelation in the Church, new catalysts for inspiration to those who are responsible to administer the Church at the global level.

Equating certain ecclesiastical offices with the status of "prophet, seer, and revelator" in a way that prevents potentially fruitful criticism of Church leaders' teachings and policies is not a healthy application of the principle of living prophets. It makes a mockery of the kind of individual discernment about Church leaders' teachings that Brigham Young advocated in his famous "Go to God" passage. (Unfortunately, Brigham Young's own authoritarian style made a mockery of the discernment he advocated in that passage.) The party line these days is that praying to know the truth of Church leaders' teachings is a test of our own faithfulness and receptivity to revelation, not a test of Church leaders. The result is a profoundly conservative deference to hierarchical authority and the status quo that I fear impedes the Saints' ability to grow in knowledge and understanding. To phrase it paradoxically: the Saints' undue deference to "prophets, seers, and revelators" impedes continuing revelation. The story of Abinadi is a story of a prophetic voice coming from outside the ruling religious hierarchy. Such a voice would be unable to gain a hearing in the LDS Church.