“Acting as a Man” and Other Less-than-Useful Frameworks for Talking About Prophets

I tend not to use the words “fallible” or “speaking as a man” or “prophets aren’t perfect” when talking about the nature of prophethood.

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The reason for their absence is that I believe that in their simplicity, these common framings miss the mark or even lead us in less-than-helpful directions. Taking the last first, Joseph Smith is reported to have said

that a Prophet was a Prophet only, when <he was> acting as such

and this has led to what might be called “the prophet-man distinction.”

Joseph reportedly said this in context of a visit from

a brother and sister from Michigan—who thought that ‘a Prophet’ [was] always a Prophet.

Their conception of a prophet was, apparently, someone otherworldly, somber, and perhaps mystical. Perhaps most importantly, they thought of prophets as always “on,” always serving as a friction-free conduit for a perfection of divine knowledge, speaking nothing but

direct locutions of God, [which] pass through their human authors like sunlight through the clearest glass.¹David Bentley Hart, quoted in my FAIR talk on Paradoxical Preservation of Faith

A real prophet would never engage in wrestling for fun, even in his “time off.”

The problem here is that the “acting as a man” distinction contributes little to our understanding of the nature of prophethood or revelation when the man is “acting as a prophet.” It perpetuates the idea that we can easily identify the human aspects— because they are the less-than-perfect ones— but that when “on,”  the prophetic message should be ideal, complete, divine, and timeless. That’s… inerrancy.

When defending the idea of prophethood, we conflate the nature of revelation with the moral and human status of the prophet. In effect, we’re saying, “prophets aren’t perfect… but revelation IS.” I think that’s a problem, for a variety of reasons, like the principle of accommodation. 

But back to the the prophet-man distinction; it’s  too neat, too siloed, too binary in its on/off.

The nature of what is already in our canon should challenge simplistic views of bright-line divisions between “man” and “prophet,” were we to actually delve into our scriptures. Scripture contains multiple letters, including composite and edited letters (like 2 Corinthians.) The Doctrine and Covenants includes several sections that were letters, but of which only parts are canonized. Is it reasonable to assume that divine revelation kicked in neatly and discretely on this sentence and then ended precisely on that period? That “the man” wrote this part, but God through his prophetic typewriter wrote that part? That we could go through the original letter and highlight the inspired parts, but the rest were purely human?

I can’t help but be reminded of passages from history books on the history of Christian fundamentalism in America. They

acknowledged that Scripture possessed a human as well as a divine character and they consistently denied mechanical dictation theories of inspiration. But the supernatural element was so essential to their view of Scripture, and the natural so incidental, that their view would have been little different had they considered the authors of Scripture to be simply secretaries.

-Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 56.

Similarly, I don’t think the language of “fallibility” and “mistakes” is useful, at least not without extensive further discussion. Asking if a prophet can make mistakes is somewhat like asking if a boat can sink. Sure, it can, but practically speaking, it doesn’t… right? And if it does, something went dramatically wrong.

The framework is inherently—albeit innocently—misleading because it allows for the possibility while simultaneously suggesting it does not really happen, that human aspects simply should not be present in true prophetic communications.

To draw another metaphor, the implication of this framework is that prophets are like computers with 99.9 percent uptime, as if the default mode of prophetic operation is flawless transmission of divinely perfect knowledge; but then every so often there is a crash, a glitch, and you get the priesthood and temple ban.

These framings do not promote constructive discussion or add depth to our understanding the nature of revelation, prophets, or scripture. I have made tentative attempts to do so in posts like this and this. What we have, the vast majority of the time— to borrow from Kenton Sparks— is God’s Word in human words. Sparks wrote up a more accessible version of his argument from that book in this one. All of this, of course, is trying to answer the question, how can something so imperfect have any authority?   I think we need to take seriously and apply the feelings of Joseph Smith’s letter from Liberty Jail and move past simplistic defenses and constructs.

the things of God are of deep import, and time and experience, and careful and ponderous and solemn thoughts can only find them out, thy mind . . . must stretch.

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