Transcription
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What if I told you the strongest evidence for the Great Apostasy isn't the loss of centralized priesthood authority? You see, the loss of centralized apostolic authority by itself is not apostasy. It's what triggered the [music] apostasy. The apostasy itself was the corruption of the doctrines and practices of the church, which inevitably followed the loss of central prophetic priesthood authority.
What if I were to tell you that history [music] can show the apostasy plain as day? What if history shows that Christians, now devoid of apostolic guidance, slowly adopted a concept of God that came not from prophets, [music] apostles, or Jesus Christ, but from Greek philosophy. Now, before anyone jumps into the comments, let me clarify. I'm not saying other Christians don't love God. I'm not saying other Christians aren't sincere. I'm not saying other Christians don't seek Christ. >> [music] >> I'm saying something much more specific. I'm saying if you look closely at the history and the logic of Greek theism, eventually you see something you [music] can't unsee. You see Christians arriving at a God who looks more and more >> [music] >> like Aristotle's God and less and less like the God of the Bible.
Today, I'm going to show you how that happened. And by the end, I'm going to ask a question that every Christian should wrestle with. Did Christianity preserve the biblical God? Or did it gradually replace him? So, let's start 400 years before Jesus Christ.
The Greek intellectuals at that time were increasingly dissatisfied with the pagan religion of Hera, Zeus, and they felt like it was insufficient to answer the big questions. And these were not trivial questions. You have to remember, mankind has always wrestled with the big questions, like if God exists. Now, take away all of your assumptions about God and religion entirely. Every human has to look around and wonder, "Why is all of this here?" And the Greeks were asking that very question. They were asking, "Why does all of this exist at all?" And philosophers like Aristotle began to try and answer that.
First, he noticed that everything seems to have a cause. Trees come from seeds. Children come from parents. Music comes from instruments. Everything seemed to come from something more fundamental. And eventually Aristotle asked, "Does this go on forever? With everything being caused by something else? Or is there something that is the source of all things? Something that is ultimately fundamental." And that's not a bad question. In fact, it's a great question. Think of it. If something's existence depends on something more fundamental, there are only two possibilities. Either there is an infinite chain backwards, or there is something that is not dependent on anything else. Something that is ultimate.
And Aristotle began deducing what that ultimate explanation must be like given that it can't be dependent in any way on anything else. And he concludes that this ultimate thing must be uncaused, unchanging, unaffected, completely self-sufficient. Because if something changes in any way and if something caused the change, then the thing that caused the change is more fundamental than the thing that was changed. Now, notice something. Aristotle didn't arrive here through revelation. He didn't read Isaiah, he didn't study Moses, he wasn't interpreting Jesus. This was philosophy. Pure philosophy. And frankly, in many ways, it's brilliant. It's a powerful way to argue for the existence of something that is ultimate. And over time, this philosophical notion of God became incredibly influential and still can be seen to this day.
>> There must exist some reality, listen now, whose very nature is to be. There must exist, finally, some reality which is not contingent upon any cause beyond it. But rather is its own explanation. Aquinas uses that lovely term in his Latin, God is actus purus. Right? Pure actuality. Another one, we speak of the self-sufficiency of God. >> [sighs] >> Does God need the world? No. God is God. God is the sheer act of to be itself. God's utterly perfect. God has no need of anything. Here's a term from Thomas Aquinas that I love and I think he would say, maybe it's the most important and fundamental of the divine attributes. He says, God is marked by simplicity. God is simple. So, what does he mean? This depends upon Aquinas' metaphysics of essence and existence. To be God is to be to be. Because God's very essence is his existence. That's what it means to be God.
>> Did you catch that? Notice how none of that language comes from scripture itself. Pure act, unmoved mover, absolute simplicity, these are not biblical categories. These are Greek philosophical categories. And that's important because eventually these classical or Greek philosophical assumptions begin reshaping Christian theology itself. And here's how that happened. You see, the Christian world exploded into the Roman world. And where were the intellectual centers? Well, they were in places like Athens and Alexandria. This was the Greek speaking world. The educated people in that world thought in Greek terms and categories. And after the death of the apostles, for the next 200 years, Christianity continued to spread, but the Greek intellectuals mocked Christianity because they felt it could not be rationally defended and reconciled with their philosophical notions about God. The Christian God seemed to change. The Christian God died on a cross. They claimed that Jesus could not be God because only one thing could be the ultimate cause of all things, and Jesus clearly pointed to his father as more ultimate than him. These were major challenges.
And as more Greeks converted to Christianity, including those schooled in Greek philosophy, they began to push back. Soon you had apologists like Tertullian, Irenaeus, and Justin Martyr who were born and raised in the Greco-Roman culture, and they were seeking to provide a defense against Greek objections to Christianity. And what you immediately see is that things begin to change. In the first century, Jesus and the apostles in the New Testament come from a thought world that is very much Jewish. And the writings of the people from that era reflect that. But the trajectory over time, as the center of Christian culture changes from the Jewish world to the world of the Greeks, you can see the apologists who grew up in this Greco-Roman culture that they begin adopting Greek philosophical frameworks to try and defend Christianity. Now, to be fair, they had good intentions. They weren't trying to corrupt Christianity. They were dealing with the Greek criticisms of their time. And they thought they were strengthening Christianity. But there's an old saying, if all you have is a hammer, everything eventually starts looking like a nail. And instead of rejecting the very assumptions and frameworks of Greek metaphysics, the apologists granted them and started to try and argue that their God, the God of the Bible, was the same God as the God of the Greek philosophers.
>> Since the time the apologists first began to offer a reasoned and philosophical presentation of Christianity to pagan intellectuals, Christian thinkers had claimed to worship the same God honored by the Greeks and Romans. In other words, the deity adored by other reasonable men and women. Indeed, Christians adopted precisely the same language to describe God as did pagan intellectuals. The Christian apologist Theophilus of Antioch described God as ineffable, inexpressible, uncontainable, incomprehensible, inconceivable, incomparable, unteachable, immutable. This view that God was an immaterial, timeless, and impassable divine being became the keystone of Christian apologetics, for it served to establish a decisive link to the Greek spiritual and intellectual tradition.
>> You see, once you accept the assumptions and frameworks of a Greek classical theism, the idea is that God must be the uncaused cause that cannot change or be affected in any way. And eventually you start reading the Bible through that lens. And that's exactly what happened. But is the Bible compatible with this notion of God found in classical or Greek theism? Let's just take one example. It's called divine simplicity. This is the idea that the most fundamental thing can't have parts. And it's actually pretty airtight philosophically. Here's how it works. So, if we are searching for the most fundamental thing and it can't be dependent on anything else, then it must be only one thing. It can't be made of multiple things. It can't have parts. Think of it like this. If I have a Lego house, the house is one thing, but it is one thing that is actually made up of many other things. So, the Lego house depends on the other things, its parts, for its existence. So, here's the question. Is the house fundamental or are the individual Legos? Obviously, you would not have the house without the individual Legos. So, the house is not the most ultimate and fundamental thing. So, in classical theism, God must be one, totally unique thing. Like the one Lego that started it all. This is why classical theism is also a hard monotheism. It says you can only have one God. And the idea behind that is that there can only be one fundamental thing that can properly be called God. And this immediately rules out the possibility of Jesus and the Father both being properly called God. Because you can only have one thing, and Jesus and the Father are clearly two different things. Don't believe me? Just ask this simple question. The Father is not the Son, correct? The Son is not the Holy Spirit, correct? The Holy Ghost is not the Father, correct? Good. Then what makes them different? Seriously, what distinguishes them? There has to be something. Because if there isn't, then they are literally the same person. Yes, the Father and the Son are one in the Bible, but what does that mean? You see, in the Bible, people can be one in the sense that they're perfectly united, totally in unison. But do you see how people read those verses now with Greek philosophical assumptions when they read about the oneness of God? And theologians have now spent centuries trying to explain how three genuinely distinct persons, three different things, are actually just one thing. And this is where the doctrine of the Trinity comes from. It's an attempt to try and turn three things into one thing. And that's why these explanations constantly become really strange and abstract, because they're trying to force a round peg into a square hole. They're trying to say that three things are actually one thing.
>> So, the key point here is is that you have the same substance, which is able to be located in disjoint regions, R1, R2, and R3. Now, divinity, insofar as it's in R1, is what I call an aspect. Now, divinity has different aspects, which are location-specific. So, divinity is located at R1, um and it bears an aspect to R1. It's located at R2, bears an aspect to R2, and it's located at R3, and bears an aspect to R3. And so, divinity, insofar as it's located at R1, bears the attribute of a first-person perspective. And a first-person perspective, as I argue in my work, building on the work of Lynn Rudder Baker, is what is necessary and sufficient to be a person.
>> Now, let me ask a question. Does that sound like Peter preaching on Pentecost? Does that sound like Jesus teaching fishermen in Galilee? Or does it sound like philosophers trying to solve a problem created by philosophy? Now, don't get me wrong. I love philosophy. Philosophy is incredibly useful, but philosophy is based on the assumptions that you bring to the philosophy. And there's a huge difference between the assumptions brought by Greek philosophy and the assumptions of the ancient Hebrews.
Now, let's leave the philosophy aside for a moment. Just open your Bible. What kind of God do you actually find? Do you find an unmoved mover? A God whose state of existence cannot be affected by outside forces? Or do we see a God who speaks? A God who rejoices? A God who grieves? A God who becomes angry? A God who forgives? A God who enters covenants? A God who responds to people? A God who acts in history? A God who is a loving heavenly Father? The entire story assumes a genuine relationship, real interaction, real responsiveness. But classical theology repeatedly tells us, "Not really." God only appears to respond. He only appears to grieve. He only appears to react. He only appears to engage. But does that make any sense?
>> In simplest terms, divine impassibility means that God does not suffer. Or to put it a little more broadly, impassibility means God cannot be acted upon from without, neither can his inner state change for better or worse. As the Westminster Confession of Faith puts it, God is without body, parts, or passions.
>> Again, these are not my claims. These are the theological consequences of the system. And notice what keeps happening. The Bible says one thing and the philosophical framework says another. And then scripture gets reinterpreted until it fits the philosophy. And at some point we have to ask, "Are we letting the scripture tell us about God? Or are we demanding scripture deliver the God of the philosophy?"
So why do creedal Christians do this? Can't they see what's going on here? I honestly think that many of them do. But it's too late. Because for centuries and centuries, this conception of God has been written right into their creeds. You see, the creeds said that in order to be a Christian, you had to embrace these notions about God. And to say the creeds are wrong would be to admit something that would shatter their entire world. The idea that an apostasy happened. And for centuries, Christians have misunderstood God.
Now, let's bring this home. Latter-day Saints often talk about the great apostasy as the loss of authority, and that's true. But, what if something even deeper was lost? What if the God of Abraham became the God of Aristotle? What if the God who genuinely relates became the God who cannot be affected? What if the God revealed through the prophets became buried underneath centuries of Greek metaphysics? What if the God of the Bible was not some metaphysical abstraction, but a loving father?
You see, the story of Joseph Smith might sound crazy. And in some ways, all miraculous stories are that way. But, when you understand Joseph's theology, you start to wonder if something happened. If something incredible happened. Because Joseph didn't simply restore priesthood authority. He restored our understanding of God. A personal God. A relational God. A God with genuine attributes. A God who can actually engage with his children. A God who looks remarkably similar to the God found in scripture.
So, the next time someone talks about God like this, >> rather God is in Thomas's pithy Latin, the subsistent act of to be itself. >> Just ask a simple question. Where did these ideas come from? Jerusalem or Athens? Prophets or philosophers? Scripture or Greek metaphysics? Because when you follow classical theism all the way to its conclusion, you don't just end up with a different explanation of God. You end up with a different God. And if that's true, then one of the strongest evidences for the great apostasy may be staring us right in the face. The Christian movement didn't merely lose centralized authority. It didn't merely lose the apostolic keys. It didn't merely lose the ordinances. It lost the God of the Bible and replaced him with the God of Aristotle.
And if you want to learn more about this topic, visit comeuntochrist.org and request a visit from Latter-day Saint missionaries.