The Pattern of Prophecy — When Revelation Changes

Does the history of Latter-day Saint prophecy show revelations from one generation becoming the condemned errors of the next — or does it show a living church distinguishing eternal principle from time-bound practice exactly the way its own founding scriptures said it would?

The CES Letter’s Argument

The CES Letter presses a pattern: that the revelations of one generation of Latter-day Saint prophets become the discarded teachings of the next. Plural marriage was once tied to exaltation and was later discontinued; the priesthood restriction was once taught as the will of God, and both the restriction and the explanations given for it were later set aside. If prophetic teaching can be reversed like this, the argument runs, how can members trust that today’s prophetic counsel will not itself be overturned by a future prophet?

This is one of the CES Letter’s most powerful moves, because it asserts a pattern, and a pattern feels like a diagnosis: if prophets keep reversing themselves, no living prophet can be trusted, since tomorrow’s may condemn what today’s revealed. The argument deserves a real answer, met in its strongest form.

When a practice or teaching from a prophet’s era later changes, an honest observer has two roads — and Jeremy took the first without pausing at the second.

The simplistic path (Jeremy’s): Treat every change as proof that a prior “revelation” was false. Equate discontinuation with repudiation. Equate the administrative timing of a divine institution with revealed doctrine. Flatten the difference between an eternal principle and the particular form it took in one century. On this reading, any change anywhere collapses the whole office.

The historical, contextual path (the one he skipped): Ask what actually changed. A conditional command that the founding scripture said would be turned on and off? A human explanation that was never canonized in the first place? Or an eternal principle? These are three different things, and the Latter-day Saint canon itself drew those lines — in 1830 and the 1830s, long before plural marriage ended, long before 1978, and nearly two centuries before the CES Letter was written in 2013.

That is decisive: the “nuance” is not damage control invented after the fact. The distinctions that dissolve Jeremy’s pattern are printed in the earliest Restoration scripture, on the pre-2013 record — in his own primary sources. The nuanced reading is better supported precisely because it is the one the founding text already committed to.

1. The Pattern Is Biblical, Not Exceptional

Before the two flagship examples, notice the frame. The CES Letter presents prophets who are reproved, who grow, and who administer God’s work through a human hand as if this were a uniquely Latter-day Saint embarrassment. But the biblical record is saturated with exactly this — presented not as disqualification but as the ordinary texture of how God works through mortals.

• Peter, the chief apostle, withdrew from table fellowship with Gentile believers to avoid offending Jewish Christians — against what his own vision (Acts 10) had taught him — and Paul withstood him “to the face” (Galatians 2:11). A sitting apostle needed public correction, and the Church went on.
• Nathan the prophet told David to build the temple, then the same night the Lord sent him back to reverse the counsel entirely (2 Samuel 7:3–5) — inspired-sounding counsel revised within a day, now canonized scripture.
• Moses struck the rock in anger rather than speaking to it as commanded, and it cost him the promised land (Numbers 20:11–12) — yet he remains history’s paradigmatic prophet.

The Latter-day Saint position has never been that prophets are flawless. It is that a prophet is a man called of God to a divine office, carrying divine communication through a mortal channel. Scripture itself models that, and the Church teaches it plainly — see Prophets Don’t Have to Be Perfect and What is a Prophet?. So the mere existence of correction is no scandal. The real weight of Jeremy’s claim rests on his two flagship cases — and that is where the fork matters most.

2. Plural Marriage: A Conditional Command, Not a Reversal

Here is the strongest form of Jeremy’s polygamy point — and it is genuinely strong, so we will not soften it. This is not a case of an uncanonized sermon. Doctrine and Covenants 132 is canonized scripture, printed in the Standard Works. It does not merely permit plural marriage — it commands it, binds it to “the new and everlasting covenant,” and warns that those who reject that covenant “are damned” (v.4). So the strong objection is not “a prophet gave a speech that got walked back.” It is this: a canonized revelation commanded plural marriage and tied it to the highest blessings, and then the practice stopped. If the canon-versus-speculation filter is the whole answer, it cannot touch this case — because here the command is in the canon. That is the version that has to be answered.

It can be — but the answer is not “that was never really scripture.” It is that the canonized revelation itself carries its own conditionality, supplied by an earlier canonized text. The objection would land only if the founding scripture had presented plural marriage as a permanent, universal requirement. It did the opposite. The Book of Mormon, published in 1830 — thirteen years before D&C 132 was recorded — sets monogamy as the standing rule and plural marriage as a rare, commandable exception the Lord alone activates:

Jacob 2:27, 30

“Wherefore, my brethren, hear me, and hearken to the word of the Lord: For there shall not any man among you have save it be one wife… For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up seed unto me, I will command my people; otherwise they shall hearken unto these things.”

Read that carefully (Jacob 2:27, 30). The default is one wife. Plural marriage exists only when God specifically commands it — “if I will… I will command” — and otherwise the monogamous rule stands. The on-and-off character of plural marriage was written into Latter-day Saint scripture in 1830, before it was ever practiced. This is the key the strong objection missed: D&C 132 is not a free-standing, permanent command sitting in tension with a later reversal. It is precisely the “I will command my people” that Jacob 2:30 had already said would come — the switch being thrown on, exactly as the earlier canon provided. And Official Declaration 1 — itself canonized, sustained by common consent, and bound into the same Standard Works as D&C 132 — is the same switch being thrown off by the same authority. Two canonized revelations, one turning a commandable exception on and one turning it off, are not revelation contradicting revelation. They are the single, consistent principle of Jacob 2:30 operating from start to finish exactly as stated.

Jeremy’s framing — that plural marriage was required for exaltation — performs a quiet substitution. What Latter-day Saint doctrine ties to exaltation is eternal marriage — the temple sealing of husband and wife for eternity, a sacred principle that has never changed and is in full force today. Plural sealing in mortality was a particular application of the sealing power for a season, not the eternal principle itself. Jeremy collapses the time-bound practice into the eternal principle, then calls the ending of the practice a reversal of it. It is not: the principle stands, and the season closed on the Lord’s terms, just as His own scripture provided.

3. The Priesthood: Administration and Explanation Are Not the Same Thing

The priesthood question is tender and deserves care rather than cleverness. Two distinct things have to be held apart, because Jeremy fuses them.

First, the timing of who received the priesthood and when. The Lord paces the ordinances of His Church on His own schedule — the gospel went first to Israel and the Gentiles were grafted in later (Romans 11) — and that timing was His administration of His own house through mortal servants, not a human verdict on anyone’s eternal worth. The 1978 revelation extending the priesthood to all worthy men (Official Declaration 2) opened that door by revelation. A restriction lifted by revelation is the priesthood office working — not failing.

Second, the explanations that individual members and leaders offered over the years for that timing. Various nineteenth-century theories were the reasoning of men working within the cultural assumptions of their day — and here is the point Jeremy needs and never supplies: those explanations were never canonized. They were never voted into the Standard Works by common consent. They never passed through the filter the Restoration built for exactly this purpose (see section 5). The Church’s own published record has since made plain that those explanations were the ideas of men, not revealed doctrine. Setting aside the speculations of men is not a prophet condemning a prior prophet’s revelation — because they were never revelation to begin with.

So Jeremy’s framing — that the priesthood restriction was once God’s will and was later set aside — smuggles two different objects under one verb. The opening of the priesthood by revelation and the setting aside of uncanonized human theories are not the same event, and neither one is a revealed doctrine being overturned. The fuller treatment of Adam-God, blood atonement, and the priesthood restriction lives on our companion page, Adam-God, Blood Atonement, and the Priesthood Ban.

4. Canon vs. Speculation: The Restoration Built the Filter Itself

Grant Jeremy his premise that things change over time: the instinct that this is damning gets the logic backward. An institution with no living prophetic channel can only preserve its inherited positions; a living church can receive further light and act on it — which is what the two Official Declarations are, not a system breaking down but a working channel through which the Lord’s word arrives. That understanding grows over time is what living revelation looks like (see Did LDS Theology About God Change Over Time?). But the deeper point — the load-bearing one — predates every controversy Jeremy cites. Latter-day Saint theology distinguishes canonized scripture — the Standard Works and Official Declarations, adopted by common consent — from individual statements delivered in sermons, interviews, and addresses. That distinction is not a modern escape hatch; it is written into the founding revelations.

The threshold is set in D&C 68:4: a leader’s words carry scriptural weight “when moved upon by the Holy Ghost” — a conditional clause, not a blanket guarantee that every utterance is doctrine. Because that filter existed from the 1830s, the later setting aside of a nineteenth-century speculation is not a contradiction in the system. It is the system, doing what it was designed from the beginning to do: hold canon fixed while letting the reasoning of men be weighed, refined, and, where needed, left behind.

This is why the “pattern of reversals” dissolves. Jeremy builds it by scooping every sermon, editorial, and speculation into one bin labeled “prophetic revelation,” then noting that the bin’s contents disagree. But the Church never put them all in one bin. The canon is remarkably stable; it is the uncanonized commentary around it that gets refined — exactly as D&C 68:4 anticipated.

5. The System Has Checks — Not a Rubber Stamp

D&C 1:38 promises that “whether by mine own voice or by the voice of my servants, it is the same.” Jeremy reads this as a claim of automatic infallibility. But the same book of revelations teaches that even one receiving revelation must “study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right” (D&C 9:7–9). Revelation is not automated; it requires study, asking, and confirmation.

The structure reinforces it: decisions of the presiding quorums are to be made in unanimity (D&C 107:27–29), and matters done by common consent (D&C 26:2). No single leader’s word is automatically binding on the whole Church. This is how a member can “test” a prophet honestly rather than blindly — worked out in The Test of a Prophet — and when Jeremy elsewhere argues that specific prophecies failed, the same principles apply, as covered in Joseph Smith’s Prophecies — Did They Fail?

Joseph Smith himself drew the very line Jeremy erases — distinguishing his own fallible person from the revelations he delivered. As one contemporary recollection has him putting it, he never claimed to be a perfect man, yet maintained that the revelations he had taught were of God, not of himself. The mortal man and the revelation he carried are two different things, and the CES Letter’s pattern argument works only by collapsing them — treating a man’s cultural assumptions, an unrecorded theory, and a canonized revelation as one undifferentiated substance called “prophecy.”

What is resolved: The “pattern of reversals” is an artifact of Jeremy’s method, not of the historical record. His two flagship cases are not revelation-versus-revelation contradictions. Plural marriage began and ended on the conditional terms Jacob 2:30 laid out in 1830. The priesthood was opened by revelation, and what was set aside afterward was uncanonized human explanation, never revealed doctrine. The very distinction between canon and speculation that dissolves the whole argument was built into D&C 68:4 in the 1830s — on the pre-2013 record, in Jeremy’s own primary sources. He had the nuanced, historically grounded reading available and chose the flattened one instead.

What remains genuinely (and only mildly) open: Faithful Latter-day Saints do not all describe the timing of the priesthood in identical terms, and the Church has been content to leave the precise “why” of that timing in the Lord’s hands rather than legislate a single explanation. That humility — declining to manufacture certainty where revelation has not spoken — is not the weakness Jeremy needs it to be. On the load-bearing question — can members trust the prophetic office when teachings develop over time? — the answer holds: what develops is the human understanding around the canon, while the canon and its eternal principles stand.