While the LDS Church claims to have “living prophets”, and claims to have a direct line of prophets from JS through Brigham Young and down to our day, when you really examine their claim, it gets pretty shaky.

Most prominent and visible is the reality that the modern prophets don’t prophesy or seem to have any other gifts that would mark them as a prophet of God. Modern LDSs try to have it both ways, because they will try to claim that their leaders get revelation from God and are in constant or at least frequent communication with Him, but must acknowledge the truth that their prophets have given little or nothing that would be considered “prophecy”. You can demonstrate this latter point by asking them what revelations and/or prophecies the LDS President has given since the time of JS. They’ll usually present a paltry handful of such revelations — the very few D&Cs that were canonized after the time of JS, along with possibly the Declaration on the Family. They may even throw in the cessation of the Black Priesthood Ban in 1978, but that was actually just an announcement that a revelation had been received; it was never given as an actual revelation. (And if you read the historical background of it from the people who were actually there, the claims of receiving “revelation” go up in smoke. It was just that all of the men there unanimously agreed that the BPB needed to end, and they called that a revelation!)

Compare that to JS who gave well over 100 canonized Scriptures, and gave who knows how many more revelations and prophecies that were never canonized! [After all, his now-famous prediction about the coming civil war made in 1832 wasn’t put into the 1835 or the 1844 printings of the D&Cs — that is, the compilations made during his lifetime — so one can only wonder how many other predictions and prophecies and revelations were similarly overlooked, perhaps forever?] Many of the revelations that were canonized were on some of the most unimportant and mundane topics, too! So Mormons have to believe that God was so concerned with even minor and unimportant details that over the course of about 15 years He gave JS well over 100 revelations that needed to be officially canonized and included in LDS Scripture, but for the next 170 years, even with all the major events that were going on (the American Civil War, two World Wars, the Civil Rights movement, the Sexual Revolution, Prohibition, the Great Depression, the 9/11 terrorism attacks, and Covid, just to name a few), God couldn’t be bothered to give more than a handful of revelations.

Some will try to say that every semiannual General Conference has God giving revelation to the LDS Prophet, but then you have to ask, “if it’s revelation, how come it isn’t considered Scripture and is never canonized?” You can also ask why some of the GC talks have been more or less ignored or even essentially repudiated in later years, if it was revelation from God? (I haven’t read most of the GC sermons, but would assume that many of them in the past have talked about things that are now not emphasized or have even been disavowed, such as Adam-God, Blood Atonement, the BPB, God having sex with Mary to produce the body of Jesus, etc., etc.). That doesn’t exactly instill confidence in them as revelation from God, if they can be set aside or ignored a few years later or even outright disavowed some decades later.

The Prophet Joseph Smith got revelations all the time over every picayune matter, and the modern LDS Prophets claim to follow in his footsteps, but most of them never even claimed to receive any revelation at all. How does this not concern modern LDSs?

Further, because of the LDS tradition that the longest-serving Apostle becomes the LDS President (and Prophet, Seer, and Revelator), and that he continues until his death (no retirement!), this also means that most of the LDS Prophets are quite old when they become Prophet, and don’t get any younger (see the graphic below, from Wikipedia, that shows the various LDS Presidents, and how long each served). It was actually quite widely whispered that the previous LDS President (Thomas Monson) was suffering from some form of age-related dementia or Alzheimer’s during his tenure, so that he was even more of a figurehead than most.

Notice how relatively short most of the red/orange stripes are that mark off the tenure. (For those who are colorblind, you can get this same info in written form here.)

When faced with the reality of the LDS Church having a “prophet” who doesn’t prophesy, most modern LDSs default to the claim that just because they’re called a Prophet doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll receive prophecy regularly, or ever. Rather, they say that the LDS Prophet is more of a place-holder, keeping the office filled so that whenever there is a need for God to communicate with the LDS Church, they’ve got someone already at the ready. They envision that around the time of Armageddon, the LDS Prophet (whoever he may be) will suddenly receive lots of timely, needful revelations, and that this might come up so suddenly that there needs to be someone in the position all the time, so that they don’t have an empty seat that they have to scramble to fill — which would apparently mean that God would be forced to be incommunicado due to a lack of an LDS Prophet, as if He is limited to speaking to just that one individual and can’t give revelation to anyone He chooses.

I’m not sure they’ve thought this whole thing through, to be honest.

As you can see, there are many issues and problems with the LDS Church claiming to have prophets, but another one is that earlier LDS Prophets have been shown to fail the Biblical test of prophets, while later/modern LDS Prophets affirm those false prophets as true prophets. Calling a false prophet a true prophet shows at minimum a lack of discernment which is incompatible with being a true prophet receiving revelation from God. QED, the modern LDS Church has no true prophet, and is thus a non-prophet organization.

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