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.

I can sympathize with those ministers more than I’d like. After all, I have a testimony of Jesus Christ. Do I feel like that makes me a prophet? I’m uncomfortable even considering the question. If I were out walking and saw Elijah’s coat drifting down toward the earth, I’d let it land in a tree. The prophet’s tattered mantle would fascinate me, but I wouldn’t want to take it up. The word prophet is too heavy. Too loaded with connotations.

Maybe it shouldn’t be. Navi, the Hebrew word for prophet, likely came from an older word that meant to call or proclaim. Those both seem like things a disciple of Jesus Christ should aim to do. Things I have done.

In the restored Church, of course, I also associate the term prophet with the president of the Church. And I wouldn’t want to claim a presidential or priestly authority that is not mine. But even if we stuck to the verb and asked if I prophesy, I would balk. In English, to prophesy is not primarily to proclaim or to call. To prophesy is to pierce through time, echoing the future before it happens.

Ask me what I think the world will look like in four, forty, or four hundred years and I’ll tell you plainly that I’m no prophet. Even if I do claim to be a minister of Jesus Christ.

II.

What kind of prophet was Joseph Smith? Like a good navi, he proclaimed plenty of divine truths. He did a staggering amount of calling. He made a habit of reaching back through time to reveal lost pasts. But the future? I suppose the large contours of what is to come are all over Joseph Smith’s revelations. We will meet Jesus, in heaven or on earth. Zion will come down from above. Zion will grow up from below. The world is already ending. The world is going to end.

But it’s rare for Joseph to be very specific about the details of where and when and how. Despite taking on a title closely associated in our shared English language with foretelling, our founding prophet doesn’t seem to have been very focused on saying what would happen next. He was too busy bringing together heaven and earth, I suppose, to trace forward the threads of history.

One prominent exception to that general pattern is the revelation we now know as Doctrine and Covenants 87. In December 1832, while keeping an eye on reports of rising tensions around the world, Joseph Smith followed news of a growing crisis in the United States. The federal government had announced new tariffs. Many southern states objected. The state of South Carolina claimed authority to nullify federal laws it didn’t like. The American president, Andrew Jackson, responded with threats of violent confrontation. South Carolina reacted to those threats with new spending on weapons and on its militias.³ And on December 25, Joseph Smith received a revelation “concerning the wars that will shortly come to pass, beginning at the rebellion of South Carolina, which will eventually terminate in the death of many souls” (Doctrine & Covenants 87:1).

Talking about coming wars would be one thing. Placing their roots in South Carolina is another. And the description that follows is more detailed than other references in the Doctrine and Covenants to the coming instability. The revelation says that the southern states will be divided against the northern states. It mentions the South asking Britain for aid, and speaks about nations calling on their allies until war is poured out on the nations. It speaks of slaves rising, native peoples lashing out against colonization, of famines and of plagues.

Frederick G. Williams, who wrote the words of the revelation down, didn’t leave any accounts about how he felt about Joseph’s prophecy. But I imagine he’d have watched the news with some anxiety over the next few weeks, waiting for the spark of a conflict to unleash consuming flames.

What happened that winter? Nothing you’re likely to see a documentary about. Two months after Joseph’s revelation, President Jackson came up with a compromise. He lowered the tariffs, maintaining the principle of federal authority while also allowing South Carolina a partial victory. South Carolina’s leaders took the opening to back down without losing face. No war broke out. No slaves rose up. The nations of the earth shrugged and looked away.

An observer in 1833 might have called Joseph’s revelation on war a false prophecy. An apologist for Joseph Smith might have interpreted the prophecy as a warning, with the war a conditional outcome ultimately avoided by leaders’ wisdom.

But the chill of that revelation didn’t let go of Joseph Smith. A decade later in Illinois, Joseph reflected again on what he’d felt that Christmas. “I prophesy, in the name of the Lord God, that the commencement of the difficulties which will cause much bloodshed previous to the coming of the Son of Man will be in South Carolina,” he reiterated. “It may probably arise through the slave question. This a voice declared to me, while I was praying earnestly on the subject, December 25th, 1832” (D&C 130:12–13).

Why was Joseph so insistent on holding onto a prophecy that had, by all appearances, failed years before? Maybe prophecy is more like seismology than like a weather report. I think that Joseph had sensed a fault line in his society, one that ran too deep to be healed by one clever compromise. And if the earth hadn’t shaken yet? He could still feel the pressure building beneath the surface.

“The prophet is a man who feels fiercely,” Abraham Joshua Heschel would write over a century later. “Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profaned riches of this world.”⁴ Though the 1832 crisis had been resolved, justice was by no means restored. I wonder if Joseph Smith, having felt the slave rebellions stirring, sometimes still caught a sour taste to the air, or a periodic dissonance in the music in his head. Prophecy, perhaps, sometimes takes the form of a coiled sense of wrongness that lingers long after the experience that first elicited it.

Joseph died in 1844. Toward the end of his life, he and the Council of Fifty talked about how to prepare for a day when the system of nations he knew would collapse. They talked about how to find a refuge in the West. Was he running from the rumblings of a larger felt fate?

Orson Pratt kept Joseph Smith’s warning about wars and pondered it in his heart. He turned to Joseph’s words in 1860, when South Carolinians spoke again about rebellion. Orson Pratt and other Saints took the revelation’s call to stand in holy places literally. Whole Church branches in the eastern United States closed that year as their remaining members migrated west and the Saints braced themselves for whatever would come.

Orson’s experience of that text shaped mine. When I first learned about Doctrine and Covenants 87, it was as Joseph Smith’s Civil War prophecy. Our interpretation of the prophecy when I grew up was mostly to treat it as a one-to-one match between an earlier thing a prophet said and a later thing that happened. In Sunday school, no one mentioned the 1832 nullification crisis. And no one pointed out that passages in the section, like its discussion of nations calling on each other for aid in a system of alliances, don’t actually sound like the Civil War. As a teenager with a deep interest in history, I had to notice those details on my own.

I don’t mind that the people in my ward saw this revelation simply. But I’m glad I didn’t. Because while other people went home with a lesson that prophecy works, I came home with questions about how. And those questions still fascinate me.

For a while, I still thought of the prophecy as a prediction of a specific event. But the event got bigger. In my history reading, I started to notice connections between the US Civil War and the wars that followed. The Cinco de Mayo holiday, for example, marks an 1862 battle in which a small Mexican force fought French troops that invaded and occupied Mexico from 1862-1867. If South Carolina had not rebelled against the United States, I wondered, would France have risked its invasion of Mexico? If the French army had not wasted resources in Mexico, would the French have been more prepared to fight against the Prussians in 1870? Did the Civil War pave the way for World War I?

As I read about German unification and the path to the first World War, I started to see other links to the United States Civil War. Accounts of how German generals studied the Civil War’s weapons and tactics stood out to me in my reading. I learned how they took note of the vital military role of railroads. At the same time French troops were in a quagmire in Mexico, Prussian generals were making plans to move troops faster than their neighbors. They unified Germany through railroad-oriented wars. Those studies shaped the first World War. Maybe, I thought, Doctrine and Covenants actually predicted a war that began in 1860 in South Carolina and ended in 1918 with the end of an old order in famine and plague and serfs rising against their masters.

An interpreter of Doctrine and Covenants 87 could stop in 1865. It’s possible to read the reference to the South calling on Great Britain as a conditional prophecy. To imagine that rest of the prophecy represents an alternate history, one where Abraham Lincoln never issues the Emancipation Proclamation, the war escalates, and an unrepentant nation dissolves.

Then again, why should an interpreter stop in 1865, or even in 1918, when war in this world never really does? It’s possible to see the American Civil War as a turning point into a modern age of global, mechanized war we still live in the shadow of. It’s possible to read the American Civil War, the late nineteenth-century European Wars, the World Wars, independence movements, revolutions, and more as all layered together in a single Christmas revelation to Joseph Smith.

Once I drew lines between predictions and events like a game of connect-the-dots. But I no longer think about prophetic language as having a one-to-one correspondence between forecast and fulfillment. Now I imagine that prophets glimpse the future at times because they recognize the patterns beneath the surface of history. They see time in shadows and types. Maybe history is like a cloth being folded back and forth over underlying forms. Or maybe it’s like music. When we listen to a musical note, we’re not hearing a single pitch. We also hear overtones, a series of higher pitches with frequencies that resonate with the fundamental tone. Maybe prophets hear the music of the world better than we do.

What might it feel like to perceive time with prophetic senses? Moses remembers wandering in the wilderness and senses that his people will wander again. The history in Exodus and the predictions of exile in Deuteronomy are two layers of the same note. Isaiah sees through a time of peace to coming wars with Assyria. And then he sees through a coming time of war back to peace. Disciples from the schools of prophets that grew around him remember his words when they’re carried away as captives into Babylon. They write those old promises down when they come back, unfolding older overtones into their own layer of sacred texts.

A few of their descendants remember those words when Jesus suffers and dies. They quote Isaiah’s words in their testimonies that Jesus, like Jerusalem, rose again. In their testimony, the course of Jesus’ life will ring with the spirit of prophecies.

III.

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

Maybe Joseph wasn’t just playing. Maybe there’s more to this teaching than some sleight of hand in the space between the spirit of prophecy and the title of prophet. Certainly, Joseph’s experiences with the gift of prophecy added depth to his witness of Jesus Christ. A man who feels the weight of wars that are yet to be fought has a more desperate grip on the human need for redemption. Prophecy pierces through time, backward and forward, to feel out the shape of our collective wounds. The shape is the same as the wounds on Jesus’s hands.

I shrink back in trepidation from the gift of prophecy. I suspect that’s partly because my mind is still too linear to lean over time’s railings for a different view. I suspect I’m also frightened of what I might see if I really opened my spirit to this world’s fault lines.

But my faith has no meaning without the gift of prophecy. I believe in Jesus Christ because I believe that long ago, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus pierced time. I believe in Jesus because he carried the weight of this world as it would fall on you and on me and on everybody. I believe that Jesus Christ felt the whip of the South Carolina slaver, the sting of mustard gas in the eyes, that his lungs knew the press of the Mediterranean Sea on a refugee toddler’s lungs. I believe in a Jesus who took in the tangle of sin and suffering across all time. And who, having weighed it, turned to his disciples and asked, “Couldn’t you watch for one hour?”

My favorite piece of Mormon literature from the past decade is Citlalli Xochitiotzin’s 473-word story “TIEMPO una partícula.” (In English, “TIME a particle.”) It’s set in the Garden of Gethsemane. As Jesus Christ’s blood falls from the pores in his forehead in front of his eyes, he sees “a kaleidoscope of horror, of screams, hunger, anxiety, unease.” Through imagery and lyrical language, Citlalli tries to help us watch with Jesus for three minutes. She does her best to help us imagine the layered burden of Christ’s prophetic connection with humanity’s coming suffering.

The piece is not easy on the heart. Not far from a description of how an olive tree in the garden shudders, Citlalli inserts a reference to a prominent kidnapping and murder of a group of students in twenty-first-century Mexico. In her telling, Jesus experiences the students’ suffering in a cacophony of perceptions: “voices break inside two giant trucks, they burst into shrouded screams, dozens of bodies wrapped in black plastic,”she writes. “Children, men, women, the shouting strikes his belly, he weeps, they weep together. The jasmines about him shudder, the heavens moan. There is no time, everything is the same.”

A paragraph later, Citlalli imagines Jesus experiencing the pain and death associated with the global migrant crisis of the 2010s. “The trailers stink with the stench of hyenas, the dead bodies multiply, in Africa, Palestine, Syria, Greece, Turkey, in the beaches of Italy, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, El Salvador,” she writes. All my memories of those times are through reports and photographs, but the names of the countries still hit me like the pounding of waves. And then the waves roll into the Garden. “In the large window of time, every pain will become his pain.”

I don’t know what the future has in store. Ask me what the world will be like in four, forty, or four hundred years and I’ll tell you I’m no prophet. But there’s more to prophecy than prediction. Ask me what my children and grandchildren might wrestle with and it’s different. I still don’t know. But I’ll crack my heart open to feel for the possibilities.

And maybe that’s the spirit of prophecy. A weighing of the world as it was, and as it is, and as it will likely continue to be. And a turn toward the One who carried everything.

James Goldberg is a poet, playwright, essayist, novelist, documentary filmmaker, scholar, and translator who specializes in Mormon literature.

Art by Claire Åkebrand.

1. “Discourse, between circa 26 June and circa 4 August 1839–A, as Published in Clayton, Revelations,” josephsmithpapers.org.

2. “Discourse, between circa 26 June and circa 4 August 1839–A.”

3. See Jed Woodworth, “Peace and War,” in Revelations in Context.

4. Abraham Joshua Heschel, “Religion in a Free Society,” in The Insecurity of Freedom: Essays on Human Existence (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1959), 11–12.