What is the Great Apostasy?
By Gatis
An excerpt from the forthcoming 40 Questions About Mormonism (Kregel Academic).
It must have been an uncomfortable excursion for the disciples when Christ led them to the district of Caesarea Philippi, an area far from their Jewish homeland and rife with Gentile paganism. But it was worth the discomfort. There, in the most unlikely of places, Jesus promised the disciples that he would build his church through them and that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 18:16). It was a victorious declaration over a war already won. The church would batter down the “gates of hell,” invade the enemy’s spiritual kingdom, and heaven would prevail. “Go therefore,” the resurrected Christ later commissioned his disciples, commanding them to replicate themselves and leaving them with a promise: “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:19-20).
Throughout the centuries, Christians have interpreted Christ’s words to mean that the church would never fail while also acknowledging the challenges it has faced. Externally, the church has weathered opposition, oppression, and persecution. Internally, episodes of heresy and seasons of compromise and apathy have all threatened the church’s life. Rebellion, whether against God’s people or by them, has called into question the church’s survivability.
Having experienced it himself, the apostle Paul warned the church of such rebellion (apostasia) looming over the horizon. The “day of the Lord” would not come “unless the rebellion comes first” (2 Thess. 2:1-3). Rebellion is the manifestation of apostasy, a faithless and destructive pride that leads to betraying and abandoning God and his will (Josh. 22:16, 22; Jer. 2:17, 19; 2 Chron. 29:19; Acts 21:21). But when exactly would that apostasy come, how pervasive would it be, and what signs would attend it?
Apostasy in Protestant Thought
By the sixteenth century, the Reformers pointed squarely at Rome, an institution they thought was too preoccupied with its vain pursuit of power and wealth to recognize its corruption. Martin Luther likened Rome to a spiritual Babylon, abusing and oppressing captive souls. And John Calvin narrated the gradual, unauthorized consolidation of papal power through prideful men who donned Christ’s name as a pretext. They paved the way for the anti-Christ to sit atop the institutional church. The Reformers sought to rehabilitate Christianity by reforming the church and returning ad fontes (back to the sources) to retrieve the gospel from the Bible.
While the heirs of the Reformation agreed with Luther and Calvin that Roman Catholicism was corrupt, some expressed concerns about the Protestant movement they produced, chief among them were issues of authenticity and disunity, both rooted in authority. How could Protestant churches preach a pure gospel while retaining Roman residue in their practices, e.g., man-made creeds, ecclesiastical hierarchies, liturgies and ceremonies, veneration of saints, etc.? And why had the movement fractured if evidence of true faith is unity (John 17:22)? It only took fifty years from when Luther published his Ninety-five Theses for European Christianity to partition into Catholicism, Lutheranism, Anabaptists, Anglicanism, Swiss Reformed, and Presbyterianism, with more denominations on the horizon.
Critics thought the problem lay in the pedigree of Protestant clergy who traced their origin of authority through Rome. As English Separatist Henry Barrowe (1550-1593) argued; “If the Church of Rome be no true church, then the ministers made therin are no true ministers,” but because Protestant ministers were either “made in” or “fetched from” Rome, the clergy were wholly “Romish, antichristian and false.” By receiving their ministerial heritage from Rome, Protestants had unwittingly renewed the “old scars of the old and first apostasy from the gospel,” becoming as unrecognizable from the apostolic church as Roman Catholicism itself. Barrowe questioned what radical action must take place to restore authentic authority in Christ’s church, going so far as to wonder if “a third Eliah or second Jhon Baptist [must come] downe from heaven to restore this defection.”
Still, he held out hope. In all the “defection, corruption, [and] apostacie” of the universal church, Barrowe believed that “God stil reserved a seed, a litle poore remnant.” Similar to Luther, he compared Catholic and Protestant churches to a spiritual Babylon, an evil power that had taken the true church into captivity and hid it from the world. For this reason, Separatists, as their name implies, advocated separation from the Church of England. “The false church is to be avoided not confuted,” cautioned John Greenwood (1556-1593).
The warning to flee “Babylonish” churches echoed into early-nineteenth-century American Christianity as the concept of apostasy and hope for restoration drove a growing community of Christians to search for the authentic church. A new class of reformers called on Christians to reject false doctrine and corrupt practices to rediscover the true and pure form of “primitive” Christianity found in the NT.
Restorationists, like Alexander Campbell (1788-1866), believed that “all christian sects are more or less apostatized from the institutions of the Saviour.” But like the Separatists, he denied a total apostasy of the faith. The church, not the gospel, suffered corruption and disunity. Christianity was fractured but not false because its authority, the Bible, ruled over an invisible class of true believers. The church, however, remained divided because it relied on the traditions of man, especially ecumenical creeds, which obstruct our view of scripture. What the church needed was not another reformation, argued Campbell, but “[a] restoration of the ancient order of things.”
Restorationists envisioned a restored faith purged of all doctrine, practices, and missions not explicitly outlined in the NT. They called on every Christian to transcend sectarian divisions and pursue unity under the banner of a purely apostolic gospel rediscovered in the NT. They employed a hermeneutic of common-sense rationalism coupled with salvific, biblical minimalism, i.e., the utility of doctrine from the Bible is found primarily in its connection to salvation. So restorationists jettisoned the ecumenical creeds to take up their Bibles and judge matters for themselves.
Mormonism and the Great Apostasy
In many ways, early Latter-day Saints agreed with their restorationist contemporaries that the church was established in purity but had, according to LDS scripture, “become corrupted every whit” (D&C 33:4). Initially, their concern focused on the lapsed morality among Christians, “a crooked and perverse generation” who wandered into a spiritual wilderness led by corrupt clergy (D&C 33:2, 4). But as their movement grew, so did their conception of the great apostasy, as they would come to call it. The falling away was worse than the Reformers and Restorationists imagined.
Mormonism envisions human history unfolding in a series of eras or dispensations, each headed by prophets who act as chief stewards of God’s power and authority. Adam, the first prophet, was followed by Noah, Abraham, Moses, and ultimately Jesus Christ. But each dispensation ends in tragedy, a story that repeats over and again: people rebel against and reject the prophets, God reduces or removes his power and authority from earth, and the world becomes lost in a dark postlude of apostasy. So Christianity was not merely corrupt and wayward, as the restorationists contended; instead, it became wholly inauthentic and powerless. It suffered incredible loss of doctrinal clarity, scriptural purity, and church unity, which blunted the gospel’s saving power.
After the apostolic era, men blended the gospel with pagan philosophies to produce foreign doctrines (e.g., original sin, Trinitarianism, the Nicene Creed, etc.) and unauthorized practices (e.g., asceticism, consubstantiation, infant baptism, etc.). The church also forfeited genuine works of the Holy Spirit, like exorcisms and speaking in tongues. This absence of charismatic signs was a strong indicator to Joseph Smith of “the apostacy [that] there has been from the Apostolic platform.” Without unifying authorities and powers, the church was shattered, hopelessly “lost in a strife of words and a contest about opinions,” said Smith. Christianity was cast toward an irredeemable fate of disunity, completely “disorganized and lost from among men,” wrote LDS apostle Parley Pratt. Western society was consequently thrust into the dark ages.
Unlike the restorationists, though, Latter-day Saints rejected the hope of retrieving truth by going back to the Bible. The problem, they claimed, was the Bible itself, which they viewed as an insufficient source of revelation. Generations of transmission compromised the biblical manuscripts through the hands of careless and corrupt scribes who “transfigured the holy word of God,” according to the Book of Mormon (Mormon 8:33). The negligence was so bad that LDS apostle Orson Pratt questioned whether “even one verse of the whole Bible has escaped pollution, so as to convey the same sense now that it did in the original?” Consequently, “plain and precious” truths of the gospel and vital “covenants of the Lord” were “taken away” (1 Nephi 13:26) and universal apostasy followed.
But the most detrimental loss of all was the disappearance of divine power and authority on earth, or what Latter-day Saints call the “priesthood.” (We’ll explore the priesthood more in a later post.) LDS leader Benjamin Winchester explained that, without the priesthood, Christians habitually rejected “immediate revelation from God to themselves” and forfeited “the administration of angels.” So early Latter-day Saints looked for the return of the priesthood through supernatural means. Among these signs were the miraculous translation of the Book of Mormon, modern revelation from a living prophet, ordination to power by angels, and the reinstitution of apostolic offices and ancient practices.
For the church to be restored, it needed the radical return of divine activity, a brilliant reopening of the heavens to “break forth through the dark atmosphere of sectarian wickedness,” said Smith. He added that the consequences of rejecting the restoration were severe. To deny latter day “revelation and the oracles of God” was to choose apostasy over obedience and hell over heaven. “I tell you, in the name of Jesus Christ,” Smith warned, “they will be damned.”
Contemporary LDS Perspectives on the Great Apostasy
Contemporary Latter-day Saints generally hold more nuanced views of the great apostasy, absent the kind of polemics that often accompanied earlier LDS rhetoric. They still maintain that apostasy occurred; there would be no need for restoration without it. But they appreciate that church history cannot be explained in the binary categories of either a state of depravity or purity.
Scholars recognize that early Latter-day Saints formulated their conception of the great apostasy during intense theological controversies and heightened millenarian expectation, all while enduring opposition and persecution. Undoubtedly, the immediate context and experiences of the early LDS Church affected how they viewed church history and their present state. And later, Latter-day Saints framed their story within the popular myth of western history as divided into three periods after the fall of the Roman Empire: the so-called dark ages, Renaissance, and Enlightenment. This version of history harmonized nicely with the Mormon apostasy-restoration thesis.
But today, Latter-day Saints recognize that God was at work in the lives of believers during and after the early church despite it taking on forms they find objectionable. And the Middle Ages were not a dark, backward era completely suppressed by apostasy. To adopt such a view is to ignore the breathtaking beauty of the art, scholarship, and chivalry produced during the Middle Ages and to further concede to the self-serving myth by Enlightenment elites that western civilization was hopelessly lost in ignorance until their brilliance saved the day.
Latter-day Saints now also tend to place more emphasis on the restoration than apostasy, reorienting themselves towards a “future responsibility and potential rather than past loss,” wrote one LDS scholar. Still, Mormonism maintains that after the apostolic era, Christianity became incomplete in form, insufficient in power, and inauthentic in being. And while the apostasy was not terminal, it was pervasive enough to warrant the restoration, which will be explored in the next post.
Thus, the great apostasy is the “linchpin” doctrine of Mormonism, as one LDS historian argued. Without it, the restorationist claims of Joseph Smith lose their reason for being, and his movement collapses, which invites an obvious question. Did the great apostasy occur? While I agree that apostasy has and does occur, it does not—nor cannot—rise to a level at which the gospel, with its full power and authority to save, was or ever will be washed away. The great apostasy narrative favors the few biblical warnings of falling away over its dominant theme of perseverance for the church until Christ’s return. But I’ve not quite finished crafting my position on this very important question, so you’ll have to wait until the book is published.
