The Spirit of Prophecy

The Shape of Jesus in Time

I.

“No man is a minister of Jesus Christ without being a prophet,” Joseph Smith once taught.¹

I think he was kinda playing with people. Joseph enjoyed playing with people.

In this case, he was taking a common objection—how can a frontier farmboy like you claim to be a prophet?—and turning it on its head. How can a Christian like you not claim to be a prophet? he’s asking instead.

Most Christians, of course, do not walk around claiming to be prophets. But Joseph used a classical logical structure to suggest that they should. “No man can be a minister of Jesus Christ except he has the testimony of Jesus,” he continued, “and this is the spirit of prophecy.”²

If you rearrange those Joseph Smith quotes to put the justification first, it’s a syllogism—an argument that uses two premises that are acceptable to the audience as support for a conclusion that may surprise the audience.

Premise 1: A minister of Jesus Christ needs a testimony of Jesus.
Premise 2: The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.
Conclusion: A person needs to be a prophet to be a minister.

For Joseph’s audience, the premises were solid. His Christian audience could take for granted that a minister needs a testimony of Jesus. In Bible-soaked nineteenth-century America, many of Joseph’s listeners would also have recognized the scriptural authority in his second claim. The phrase “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” appears out of the mouth of an angel in the Revelation of Saint John the Divine (a book that has heavily influenced Christian ideas about prophecy) at the end of chapter 19, verse 10.

But I doubt the average minister at the time would have been willing to follow Joseph’s premises to his conclusion. Nobody resigned from the ministry for failing to become a prophet first. Nobody decided Joseph was right, and they should call themselves prophets after all. In Joseph Smith’s time and place, most people saw the category of prophet as a safe, solid, and very much complete set. The prophets had spoken. They had given their whole message. Culturally, the role of a minister was to build on that fixed foundation. Not to break the Bible open like a coconut and drink.