Why does God always have to use prophets? For the sake of argument, let’s just assume there is a divine being who is intimately involved and concerned with what goes on in this world and in our personal lives. It would be much more efficient to just communicate with each person individually. Oh, sure there are “holy” books that do that on behalf of the divine being, but that requires relying on a lot of personal interpretation involves many intermediaries through the scribes and translators. This leaves so much room for confusion, enough so that Shirley Phelps Roper, Barak Obama, and Joseph Ratzinger are all trying to live by the same book!

Let’s look at a few relative recent examples of the kinds of people called to be prophets. One example is Ellen G. White, the prophetess of the Seventh-day Adventist church. At the age of 11 she was struck in the head with a rock thrown by a classmate. She survived the concussion, but was left with very poor eyesight. A few years later young Ellen and her family were convicted of the soon return of Jesus Christ on October 22, 1844 and were greatly disappointed when that day passed and nothing happened.

A few of the early Adventists refused to admit that they had been wrong about the date, it must have been the event. Through the next few months they spent countless hours in study and prayer. Eventually one of the brethren figured out an unfalsifiable event to pin it too. Around the same time the now 17 year old Ellen started having visions, thus started her many decades of prophetic visions and her writing of numerous books.

As the church and her prophetic ministry matured, her husband, James White served as the head of the church’s publishing house and eventually as General Conference President. When the church leaders, James included, would decide new doctrinal positions, EGW wouldn’t have a vision about it until after they had come to a conclusion. Then God would send his stamp of approval down in the form of a vision.

Of course, everything I’ve said so far is the official church position. What seems much more likely is that in the midst of the emotional turmoil and heightened religiosity around the the “Great Disappointment”, and suffering from some brain damage, EGW began to have hallucinations. Her doctrinal visions were far from original since she would just echo what her husband and the rest of the brethren had concluded. As far as her counsel on lifestyle and diet, these also weren’t original. The Mormons have the same ideas and Joseph Smith beat EGW to the punch by several decades. As far as the copious volumes of writings, EGW was very well read and would often copy lines and even pages straight from what ever she had been reading on the topic, unfortunately you wouldn’t know that by reading her books since she had a nasty habit of failing to cite sources. Her writings are impressively numerous, but after all, she was paid a salary by the church with no official duties, so of course she had plenty of time to study and write.

This brings us to the Mormon prophets, Joseph Smith and every church president after him. I think pointing out that their church president is an ex officio prophet should be enough to point out the problem here. Unfortunately it can be argued that he’s not chosen by God to be a prophet because he’s elected by the church, it’s that he’s elected to the office because he’s been called to be the prophet. My questions then would be: (1) Why wasn’t he called to be a prophet sooner? (2) Why can’t there be more than one prophet? (3) Couldn’t God choose one person to be the administrator of the church and a different person to be the prophet?

If you look at the Biblical prophets, they all seem to exhibit clear signs of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or dementia. This is in spite of the hundreds of years of editing that their writings (whether authentic or not) have had to polish things up.

It’s no wonder that people can interpret God’s word so many different ways considering what a horrible job he does at choosing people to speak for him… or is it considering the kinds of nut bags who claim to speak on behalf of their imaginary friend.