Prophets
Start with what the Church actually teaches about its prophets, because the CES Letter's case in this section depends on the opposite. A prophet, in Latter-day Saint belief, is a man called to speak for God; he is not a man who has stopped being a man. Joseph Smith, asked in 1843 about the limits of the office, drew the line himself:
"A prophet was a prophet only when he was acting as such."[1]
The very first section of the Doctrine and Covenants, the Latter-day Saint book of canonized modern revelations, has the Lord giving commandments to His servants "in their weakness, after the manner of their language," and anticipating that "inasmuch as they erred it might be made known."[2] A faith built on ongoing revelation writes the possibility of human error into its founding charter. It has never promised a finished product handed down by men who cannot be wrong.
That changes the question the section is really asking. The CES Letter stacks up episodes in which a leader taught something the Church later abandoned, Adam-God, blood atonement, the priesthood ban, and lets the pile do the arguing: a "187-year track record" too inconsistent to follow, where "yesterday's doctrine is today's false doctrine" and "yesterday's prophet is today's heretic."[3] The argument only works if the prophets were supposed to be infallible to begin with, and they never claimed to be. Drop that hidden premise and the episodes stop testing whether a prophet can be wrong. They start testing something the Restoration is actually willing to be measured by: when a leader got it wrong, did the Church have a way to set it right?
It did, and the proof is sitting inside the very cases the CES Letter selected to make the opposite point.
The test that came first
Before any of these episodes, the Restoration had already written down how a teaching becomes binding on the Church, and the dates are the whole point. A leader's view does not become doctrine because he is senior, or sincere, or speaking from the pulpit. It becomes doctrine only when it clears a set of canonical bars: it is declared as revelation, accepted by the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and sustained by the body of the Church through what the scriptures call common consent, the congregation's own ratifying vote.
Those bars were in scripture before Brigham Young preached his first sermon on any of the teachings below. "All things shall be done by common consent in the church" was canonized in 1830; the requirement that the First Presidency and the Twelve be unanimous for a decision to carry binding "validity" was canonized in 1835.[4] The Church still states the rule plainly:
"Not every statement made by a Church leader, past or present, necessarily constitutes doctrine. A single statement made by a single leader on a single occasion often represents a personal, though well-considered, opinion, but is not meant to be officially binding for the whole Church."[4:1]
Hold that test in mind, because it is what turns each case below from a contradiction into a correction. The standard is not retrofitted to excuse the past. It predates the episodes it sorts, and faithful leaders applied it to them in real time.
The cases the CES Letter chose
Notice who keeps appearing. The strongest examples all run through Brigham Young, the most powerful figure in nineteenth-century Mormonism, the man best positioned to make a personal conviction stick. If self-correction can reach him, it can reach anyone.
Adam-God is the cleanest illustration, and its strongest form deserves stating without flinching. Brigham did not merely speculate. In an 1873 discourse printed in the Deseret News, he reached for the exact language the Church reserves for canonized scripture, calling Adam "our father and God" and framing it as "doctrine which I revealed to them, and which God revealed to me."[5] Four years later he had a written form of the teaching read into the temple endowment at St. George. That is about as far as a prophet's personal conviction can travel.
It still never became doctrine. Orson Pratt, an apostle and the most prolific theologian of the era, contradicted it in print in The Seer while Brigham was alive and preaching it, and held his ground through years of pressure to recant.[6] Given a perfect opening in 1860 to canonize the teaching and put Pratt outside the fold, the First Presidency declined and let the subject stand unsettled.[6:1] It was never submitted to the Church for the common consent that turns a leader's view into doctrine. Within twenty years of Brigham's death, a future Church President, Joseph F. Smith, wrote the verdict down formally: Brigham's Adam-God discourse "was never given as a revelation or commandment from the Lord," was "never submitted to the councils of the Priesthood nor to the Church," and was therefore "in no sense binding upon the Church."[7]
The safeguards did exactly what they were built to do. They kept a mistaken teaching from hardening into doctrine, even when the man teaching it ran the Church.
Blood atonement follows the same arc, and it exposes how the CES Letter handles its sources. The charge is severe at full strength. During the Mormon Reformation of 1856, a frontier religious revival, Brigham preached that there were sins for which a man's own blood would have to be "spilt upon the ground" to atone, sins the blood of Christ "can never remit."[8] Read cold, the language is as harsh as anything in the pulpit record, and that has to be granted before anything else gets said.
Four months later, from the same stand, Brigham told the Saints the reverse:
"If this people will sin no more, but faithfully live their religion, their sins will be forgiven them without taking life."[9]
The CES Letter prints the September rhetoric and leaves the February correction out entirely, though both sit in the same volume of the same published collection it is citing. The rhetoric was never canonized, never made policy, never carried out as a Church practice. It was qualified by the man who preached it within a single winter, and the standard reference works treat it as exactly that: "not a doctrine of the Church and has never been practiced by the Church at any time."[10]
The hard one
The priesthood and temple ban is the case that will not be made tidy, and it carries the section's real weight. For roughly 126 years, Black members were denied ordination and barred from the temple ordinances the faith holds most sacred. Real people carried that cost. Jane Manning James petitioned senior leaders for her endowment across four decades and was turned down every time; Elijah Abel, ordained under Joseph Smith's authority, was denied his temple blessings by two successive presidents.[11] No framework worth trusting can wave that away, and this site does not.
The strongest form of the charge is not the cost alone but a document. In 1949 the First Presidency put the ban in the language of revelation, calling it:
"not a matter of the declaration of a policy but of direct commandment from the Lord, on which is founded the doctrine of the Church from the days of its organization."[12]
If that statement were what it claims to be, the case would be closed against the Church. But it fails the very test laid out above: it was never presented to the Church for a sustaining vote, never canonized, never added to the standard works, and one of the three men who signed it, J. Reuben Clark, had himself taught that even a Church President can address the Saints without being "moved upon by the Holy Ghost." The 1949 statement expressed the leadership's understanding in 1949. It was wrong by the standard the Church now applies, and conceding that is the framework doing its work rather than a retreat from it.
What the historical record will not support is the CES Letter's premise that the ban reaches back to the founding. The Restoration began with Black members baptized and Black men ordained; the turn is datable to Brigham Young around 1852, and it left no revelation transcript, no canonized declaration, none of the documentary trail every other major revelation in the Church's history produced.[13]
What did finally come through that channel arrived in 1978, after months of fasting, written memos from the apostles, and repeated solitary hours in the temple, in a meeting where the First Presidency and the Twelve reported a shared outpouring of the Spirit that none of them ever took back.[14] One of the ban's most committed theological defenders, Bruce R. McConkie, stood up eleven weeks later and told an audience to "forget everything that I have said... that is contrary to the present revelation," because "it is a new day."[15] A leader publicly unsaying his own long-held position is what correction looks like from the inside, not a system covering its tracks, and it returned the Church to the inclusive posture it started with.
A claim of a different shape
The fourth item the CES Letter files here does not actually belong with the others, and seeing why is part of the answer. Mark Hofmann was not a prophet teaching a doctrine the Church later disowned. He was a master forger, and the charge is that Church leaders failed to detect his fakes. They did fail to detect them. So did the FBI's document laboratory, the Library of Congress, and Kenneth Rendell, the handwriting expert who had just exposed the forged Hitler diaries; every one of them examined Hofmann's work and judged it genuine, using the forensic tools that existed before the chemistry that finally caught him was invented.[16]
The deeper charge is about discernment: surely a prophet should sense a murderer and con man in the room. The scriptures answer that more modestly than the CES Letter assumes. The gift of discernment in Latter-day Saint usage addresses spiritual claims, whether a doctrine or a messenger is from God, and Hofmann never walked in announcing a false revelation; he presented as a credentialed dealer with an appointment about acquisitions. On the narrower question the canon is explicit that the office does not include it. The Lord told Joseph Smith directly:
"But 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."[17]
The same pattern sits inside the Restoration's own founding. When forgers planted the fake Kinderhook Plates in 1843, Joseph Smith examined them and offered a partial translation rather than denouncing them as a hoax. Physical-document fraud routed through trusted hands, examined by the prophetic office and taken as genuine, exposed only by later forensics: the canon never promised that would not happen.
Two of the CES Letter's specific factual claims here are simply wrong on the record. It says the Church bought the Salamander Letter and suppressed it. The Church did not buy it; a private collector, Steven Christensen, purchased it and later donated it.[18] And the Church did not bury it: it printed the letter's full text in the Church News in April 1985, months before the forgery was exposed and while nearly everyone still believed it was authentic.[19] A document you publish in your own newspaper is not a document you are hiding.
What the record shows
Hold the section to its own evidence and it turns over in the hand. The CES Letter assembled these cases to prove the prophets cannot be trusted because they have changed their teachings. What the cases actually show is a Church that caught its own errors, repeatedly, by the mechanism it has claimed from the start: an apostle dissenting in real time, a First Presidency refusing to canonize a popular teaching, a prophet qualifying his own sermon within months, a later revelation reversing a long institutional wrong while its staunchest defender recanted in public. Brigham Young, the figure these cases lean on hardest, was the one who put the principle most bluntly: "Can a Prophet or an Apostle be mistaken? Do not ask me any such question, for I will acknowledge that all the time."[20]
The section is also built so the Church cannot win. A leader who never reverses course is rigid; one who does was wrong before, so why follow him now? No living institution could satisfy a test rigged to fail in both directions, which is a fair sign it was never meant to be satisfied. A church promising perfect, finished men would have nowhere to put any of this. A church promising continuing revelation through fallible servants should be expected to clarify, to refine, and now and then to repudiate. When that last thing happens, the machinery has not broken down; it is revelation still running, doing the work a closed canon never could.
None of this rests on the prophets having been right every time. It rests on something steadier: a Church with a way to set a leader's error right, written into its founding charter and applied, in real time, to the very cases the CES Letter assembled to prove the opposite. Fallible men have carried this work, corrected one another, and now and then had to be corrected by revelation. Measured against the Church's own claims, the episodes the section piles up as a verdict against the prophets turn into the strongest sign that the revelation those men answer to has never closed.
Joseph Smith, History of the Church, 5:265 (1843): "a prophet was a prophet only when he was acting as such." The CES Letter waves off this standard Latter-day Saint distinction in passing ("I'm told that prophets are just men who are only prophets when acting as such") without noting that Joseph Smith himself was the one who drew it. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Prophets," p. 68. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 1:24–28: "These commandments are of me, and were given unto my servants in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding... and inasmuch as they erred it might be made known." Compare Articles of Faith 1:9, which promises that God "will yet reveal many great and important things," that is, ongoing revelation rather than a closed canon. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Prophets," pp. 61–69. The refrain "Yesterday's doctrine is today's false doctrine. Yesterday's prophet is today's heretic" first appears on p. 63 and recurs through the section; the "187-year track record" line closes it on p. 69. ↩︎
Church Newsroom, "Approaching Mormon Doctrine," May 4, 2007. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/approaching-mormon-doctrine. The official Church statement on the binding-doctrine framework: "A single statement made by a single leader on a single occasion often represents a personal, though well-considered, opinion, but is not meant to be officially binding for the whole Church." The underlying canonical bars predate the cases in this section: D&C 26:2 (common consent) was canonized in 1830, and D&C 107:27 (unanimity of the First Presidency and Twelve for binding decisions) in 1835. ↩︎ ↩︎
Brigham Young, Deseret News, June 18, 1873, reporting his June 8, 1873 New Tabernacle discourse: "How much unbelief exists in the minds of the Latter-day Saints in regard to one particular doctrine which I revealed to them, and which God revealed to me — namely that Adam is our father and God... Our Father Adam is the man who stands at the gate and holds the keys of everlasting life and salvation to all his children." This is the citation the CES Letter relies on most heavily for Adam-God, and the prophetic-revelation framing is genuine; the Adam-God article treats the 1873 statement as the hardest of the three primary documents to absorb. ↩︎
Gary James Bergera, "The Orson Pratt–Brigham Young Controversies: Conflict Within the Quorums, 1853 to 1868," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 13, no. 2 (1980): 7–49. https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/the-orson-pratt-brigham-young-controversies-conflict-within-the-quorums-1853-to-1868/. Pratt opposed Adam-God publicly in The Seer (1853–54) and maintained private dissent for years; the First Presidency's January 29, 1860 public statement on Pratt's errors declined to canonize Adam-God, calling it wisest "to let that subject remain without further explanation at present." ↩︎ ↩︎
Joseph F. Smith to A. Saxey, January 7, 1897, LDS Church Archives, quoted in Matthew B. Brown, "Brigham Young's Teachings on Adam." Of Brigham's April 1852 Adam-God discourse: "What he said was not given as a revelation or commandment from the Lord. The doctrine was never submitted to the councils of the Priesthood nor to the Church for approval or ratification and was never formally or otherwise accepted by the Church. It is therefore in no sense binding upon the Church nor upon the consciences of any of the members thereof." Joseph F. Smith was a member of the First Presidency at the time and would become Church President in 1901; the statement predates Kimball's 1976 denunciation by seventy-nine years. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Prophets," no. 2 ("Blood Atonement"), pp. 63–64, quoting Brigham Young's September 21, 1856 sermon (Journal of Discourses 4:53–54): "they would be perfectly willing to have their blood spilt upon the ground... there are sins that the blood of a lamb, of a calf, or of turtle doves, cannot remit, but they must be atoned for by the blood of the man." The CES Letter quotes the sermon accurately but omits Brigham's own salvific framing ("it is to save them, not to destroy them") and the February 1857 qualifier. ↩︎
Brigham Young, February 8, 1857, Journal of Discourses 4:219–220: if the people "will sin no more, but faithfully live their religion, their sins will be forgiven them without taking life." Delivered roughly four months after the September 21, 1856 sermon the CES Letter quotes (Journal of Discourses 4:53–54), in the same Bowery on Temple Square. See also the Church's Gospel Topics essay "Peace and Violence among 19th-Century Latter-day Saints," which confirms the blood-atonement rhetoric was never doctrine, policy, or practice. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/peace-and-violence-among-19th-century-latter-day-saints. ↩︎
Encyclopedia of Mormonism, ed. Daniel H. Ludlow, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1992), s.v. "Blood Atonement." https://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Blood_Atonement. The Encyclopedia entry states: "this view is not a doctrine of the Church and has never been practiced by the Church at any time." The entry frames Brigham's Reformation rhetoric as theoretical Mosaic-theocratic principle, identifies the February 1857 sermon as the Church President's own qualifier on the rhetoric, and emphasizes that Christ's atonement is the means by which sins are forgiven for those who repent. ↩︎
Church History Topics, "Jane Elizabeth Manning James" and "Elijah Able," The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/jane-elizabeth-manning-james and https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/elijah-able. James petitioned senior leaders for her temple endowment across four decades and was denied each time, receiving it only by proxy in 1979; Abel was ordained to the Melchizedek Priesthood in 1836 under authority delegated by Joseph Smith, served three missions, and was denied his endowment by Brigham Young and John Taylor. ↩︎
First Presidency Statement, August 17, 1949 (signed by George Albert Smith, J. Reuben Clark Jr., and David O. McKay). Reproduced in Bush, "Mormonism's Negro Doctrine," Dialogue 8, no. 1 (1973): 11–68; and in Matthew L. Harris and Newell G. Bringhurst, eds., The Mormon Church and Blacks: A Documentary History (University of Illinois Press, 2015). The priesthood and temple ban article treats this as the single hardest document in the case and engages it in full. ↩︎
"Race and the Priesthood," Gospel Topics Essays, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/race-and-the-priesthood. The essay notes that Church records offer no clear insight into the origin of the restriction and that it began under Brigham Young, not Joseph Smith; the early Restoration saw Black members baptized and at least one Black man, Elijah Abel, ordained. On the absence of any contemporary written revelation underlying the ban, see also W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (Oxford University Press, 2015). ↩︎
Edward L. Kimball, "Spencer W. Kimball and the Revelation on Priesthood," BYU Studies 47, no. 2 (2008): 4–78. https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/spencer-w-kimball-and-the-revelation-on-priesthood/. Documents the multi-year preparation: written memos requested from individual apostles in 1977, repeated solitary visits to the temple, and the June 1, 1978 meeting in which the First Presidency and ten of the Twelve reported a unified spiritual experience, recounted consistently and never retracted across decades of independent accounts. ↩︎
Bruce R. McConkie, "All Are Alike unto God," CES Religious Educators Symposium, Brigham Young University, August 18, 1978: "Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon or whomsoever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation... It doesn't make a particle of difference what anybody ever said about the Negro matter before the first day of June of this year, 1978. It is a new day." McConkie had defended the restriction in his own Mormon Doctrine (1958, 1966). https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/bruce-r-mcconkie/alike-unto-god/. ↩︎
Richard E. Turley Jr., Victims: The LDS Church and the Mark Hofmann Case (University of Illinois Press, 1992); Dallin H. Oaks, "Recent Events Involving Church History and Forged Documents," Ensign, October 1987. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1987/10/recent-events-involving-church-history-and-forged-documents. The FBI's document laboratory, the Library of Congress (which nearly purchased Hofmann's forged "Oath of a Freeman"), and Kenneth Rendell, who had broken the Hitler diaries case the year before, all examined Hofmann documents and found them genuine. The forgeries were exposed only after the 1985 bombings, by forensic chemistry (George Throckmorton and William Flynn) that had not previously existed. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 10:37: "But as you cannot always judge the righteous, or as you cannot always tell the wicked from the righteous... hold your peace." The verse, given directly to Joseph Smith, places the limits of discernment inside the canon itself; compare Joshua 9, where Joshua is deceived by the Gibeonites because the leaders "asked not counsel at the mouth of the Lord." ↩︎
Oaks, "Recent Events," Ensign, October 1987; Turley, Victims. The Salamander Letter was purchased from Hofmann in January 1984 by Steven F. Christensen, a private collector and bishop, in his personal capacity. Christensen donated it to the Church as a gift in April 1985, more than a year later. The Church did not purchase it from Hofmann. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Prophets," no. 5 ("Mark Hofmann"), pp. 66–67. ↩︎
"Letter on Mormon Church origins is called genuine," Church News, April 28, 1985, which printed the complete text of the Salamander Letter, over five months before the bombings and nearly two years before forensic analysis exposed the forgery, while the document was still widely believed authentic. Suppression of a document whose full text the Church published in its own newspaper is not supportable on the record. ↩︎
Brigham Young, "A Series of Instructions and Remarks at a Special Council, Tabernacle, March 21, 1858," in Richard S. Van Wagoner, ed., The Complete Discourses of Brigham Young (Smith-Pettit Foundation, 2009), 3:1418. "Can a Prophet or an Apostle be mistaken? Do not ask me any such question, for I will acknowledge that all the time." See also FAIR, "Prophets are not infallible." https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Mormonism_and_doctrine/Prophets_are_not_infallible. ↩︎