Prophets
Start with what the Church actually teaches about its prophets, because the CES Letter's case in this section depends on the opposite. 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 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] But the argument only lands 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 Letter selected to make the opposite point.
The cases the 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. Brigham taught it from the Tabernacle pulpit, published it under his own name in the Deseret News, and went so far as to read a written form of it into the temple endowment.[4] By the Letter's logic that should have settled it as binding doctrine. It never came close. 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.[5] When the First Presidency had a perfect opening in 1860 to canonize the teaching and put Pratt outside the fold, they declined and let the subject stand unsettled.[5:1] The teaching was never submitted to the Church for the common consent that turns a leader's view into doctrine. Later prophets rejected it outright. The safeguards the standard works describe were already in scripture decades before Brigham's first Adam-God sermon, and they 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 Letter handles its sources. Brigham preached the severe sermon it quotes in September 1856, at the height of a frontier religious revival. Four months later, from the same stand, he told the Saints the reverse: if they would "sin no more, but faithfully live their religion, their sins will be forgiven them without taking life."[6] 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.
The priesthood and temple ban is the hard one, and it will not be made tidy. For roughly 126 years, Black members were denied ordination and barred from the temple ordinances that 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.[7] No framework worth trusting can wave that away, and this site does not. What the historical record will not support is the Letter's claim 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 in 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.[8] 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.[9] 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."[10] A leader publicly unsaying his own long-held position is not a system covering its tracks. It is a system correcting one.
A claim of a different shape
The fourth item the 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.[11] The real question is what "prophetic discernment" was ever supposed to mean, and the scriptures answer it more modestly than the Letter assumes: the Lord told Joseph Smith directly that he could not "always tell the wicked from the righteous."[12]
Two of the 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.[13] 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.[14] 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 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.
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, it is not the machinery failing. It is revelation still running, doing the work a closed canon never could.
The episodes the CES Letter stacks up as a verdict against the prophets are, read against the Church's own claims, the strongest evidence that the thing it is testing is alive.
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. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Prophets," no. 1 ("Adam-God"), p. 62. The CES Letter's primary-source citations for Adam-God are accurate: Brigham Young taught it over the pulpit in 1852 and 1854, published it in the Deseret News (June 18, 1873), and introduced it into the endowment as the Lecture at the Veil. ↩︎
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." ↩︎ ↩︎
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. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
"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. 4 ("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. ↩︎