Transcription
The claim that Christianity fell into an apostasy after the time of the Apostles is false biblically, historically, and theologically, and I want to show you why. If the Christian Church really never fell into apostasy, then these three statements are necessarily true: first, Joseph Smith never would have needed to restore the True Church of Christ. Second, the First Vision account would have to be false because Jesus wouldn't say that all the churches were wrong if they really weren't. And third, therefore, Joseph Smith would be a false prophet.
So, this matters tremendously. It is one of the most foundational claims of the LDS Church and a point where Christianity profoundly disagrees with LDS teaching. But before we get to why the Great Apostasy is false biblically, historically, and theologically, we need to understand what the LDS Church says about it. ChurchofJesusChrist.org describes the Great Apostasy like this: "The Apostles were killed and priesthood authority, including the keys to direct and receive revelation for the church, was taken from the earth. Because the church was no longer led by priesthood authority, error crept into church teachings. Good people and much truth remained, but the gospel as established by Jesus Christ was lost."
So, if I were to draw out summary points from this statement, it would be these four things: first, Christianity lost priesthood authority. Second, that we lost authoritative prophetic revelation. Third, that doctrines were corrupted. And fourth, that the Gospel of Jesus Christ was definitively lost.
Joseph Fielding Smith adds to this list: "Religious denominations relied entirely on the dead letter of the Bible for their authority. They closed the heavens against themselves, and their interpretations of scripture without divine guidance led them into division." So, he adds to that list, "closed canon," that the rejection of ongoing revelation is really a marker of this apostasy.
Founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith himself, said, "I believe the Bible as it is read when it came from the pen of the original writers. Ignorant translators, careless transcribers, or designing and corrupt priests have committed many errors." Other LDS presidents said the Bible, as it has been transmitted over the centuries, has suffered the loss of many plain and precious parts. So, they also add the corruption of scripture as a key sign of the Great Apostasy.
Now, when I've talked to Latter-day Saints about this issue, there tends to be a spectrum of how people view the Great Apostasy. Some believed that the apostasy was total and complete. People like Bruce R. McConkie, LDS Apostle, he wrote, "The falling away shall be complete. The apostasy universal. Gross darkness shall be everywhere. The gospel shall not be found in any nation, among any kindred, no tongue shall teach its truths, and no people rejoice in its blessings, for all these shall receive it as a result of the angelic ministrations and history of the church says nothing less than a complete apostasy from the Christian religion would warrant the establishment of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."
Now, others seem to take a slightly softer approach. They say that Christianity mostly had a lesser amount of truth. It's not that truth was gone, but we just needed more. 15th President of the LDS Church, Gordon B. Hinckley, said this: "Let me say that we appreciate the truth in all churches and the good which they do. We say to the people, in effect, 'You bring with you all the good that you have, and then let us see if we can add to it.' That is the spirit of this work. That is the essence of our missionary service."
Regardless of where people land on the spectrum, the common core of this doctrine is this: truth was distorted and true authority was lost. So, the question is, why do Christians think that this doctrine is false? You might even be wondering why I, as a Protestant who is not Roman Catholic, would not say that the church fell into apostasy. I'm going to give you four reasons why.
First, the claim of a Great Apostasy is unbiblical. The Bible simply does not allow for a Great Apostasy where the gospel was lost, where truth was distorted, and where Christ's Church ceased to be on the earth. In Matthew 13, Jesus tells a set of three parables which absolutely decimate the notion that there could be a Great Apostasy. The first of these parables begins like this: "The Kingdom of Heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away."
In the parable, the servants come to the master, saying, "Hey, our enemy has sown weeds in our field." And the master says, "Let both the wheat and the weeds grow together until the harvest." When Jesus's disciples came to him and asked, "What is this parable mean?" Here's what he said: "The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man. The field is the world, and the good seed is the sons of the Kingdom. The weeds are the sons of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil. The Harvest is the End of the Age."
So, Jesus is teaching that from the time of his ministry until the time of his return at the End of the Age, there will be both wheat and weeds. Wheat being the righteous who will shine like the sun in the Kingdom of their Father, and weeds who are sons of the evil one who are separated from God in that place where there's weeping and gnashing of teeth. Jesus was teaching that both his church and unbelievers would exist together until his return. It's not as though the wheat grew a little bit at his coming and then died for 1800 years and then came back when Joseph Smith restored Christ's true church. No, from the time of Jesus' first coming till the time of his second coming, there will always be both wheat and weeds.
Jesus continued on with yet another parable: "The Kingdom of Heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it is grown, it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches." Jesus's Church would grow from very, very small to very widespread without any interlude or interruption.
And again, yet another parable: "The Kingdom of Heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour till it was all leavened." By all of these, we're told that the Kingdom of Heaven, Christ's Church, would grow from tiny to vast without interruption in the face of persecution, even when such growth was difficult to perceive. Jesus even promised that the church would have victory and that he himself would assure that victory. Matthew 16:18: "And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." The church's resilience to defeat is grounded in the promise that Jesus gave. "I will build my church." This advancement of his kingdom is so certain that Jesus promises that even the gates of hell would not prevail against it. Jesus has not failed to build his church in every age, despite the opposition of hell itself.
But wait, you might be saying, what about those texts that do foretell of a great apostasy?
Number two, an apostasy doesn't mean a total apostasy. Latter-day Saints often refer me to numerous texts which seem to speak about a coming apostasy. Second Thessalonians in the King James says, "That day shall not come, except there come a falling away." First Timothy 4 says, "In the latter times some shall depart from the faith giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils." Second Timothy 4: "For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; and they shall turn away their ears from the truth."
Notice what all of these do not say. They do not say that all will depart from the faith, but rather that some will depart from the faith. The scale of this apostasy is not as widespread as the LDS Church likes to claim. We agree that there's false teaching. We agree that the weeds grow along with the wheat, but the presence of false teaching does not mean that the gospel has been lost or that Christ's Church fell away.
Number three, historically, the church has not fallen away. Many people assume that because we're Protestant, we have no leg to stand on concerning this great apostasy. I've heard Latter-day Saints say, "If we're not true, then the Roman Catholic Church is correct. They're the only ones who have an unbroken line of authority going back to the Apostles." But that line of thinking is based on this faulty assumption that the true church is exclusively a visible, worldwide, earthly institution. That's not true, and here's why.
In Galatians, Paul talked about how he operated as an Apostle with apostolic authority without ever having met or interacted with the other Apostles. Though many like to claim that the early church was institutionally organized just like the LDS Church, with an apostolic hierarchy, with Peter being at the top, Galatians tells a different story. Paul was a real Apostle, even though this hierarchy of Apostles had not called him to that office. Because the church was an invisible, universal reality, he didn't have to be a part of this structured, institutional church in order to be a genuine Apostle.
Jesus says that his Kingdom is coming in ways that cannot be observed. It is universal, spiritual, and invisible. This universal church is expressed in various visible, local churches, and each particular local church is judged in its own right. In the Book of Revelation, which is the last book in the Bible, Jesus writes letters to each of the seven churches, telling them to deal with their own individual struggles and difficulties. Ephesus struggled to love the Lord as it once had. Smyrna was experiencing persecution. Sardis struggled to live righteously. In each case, Jesus threatens to remove the individual lampstand, which represents their church, if the church does not repent and conquer these particular struggles that they had. Never do we see that the entire gospel or entire church hinged on the performance of a single institution, nor does Jesus warn about a universal apostasy that would affect all churches everywhere.
And this is especially notable because at the time of John's writing of the Book of Revelation, most of the other Apostles had died and had not been replaced, and yet Jesus warns of the particular dangers facing local churches, not this universal danger of widespread apostasy throughout his entire church. So, when we as Protestants look at the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, we do see error, but this error is not reason to think that all truth was lost from Christ's Church or that the gospel was lost or that there was such a Great Apostasy. We can believe that local congregations had their own issues and struggles with doctrinal truth without believing that the entirety of Christ's universal, invisible church had gone apostate.
Another thing Latter-day Saints often bring up is that our churches aren't modeled after the way the early church looked, meaning we don't have 12 Apostles and things like that. But this is based on two assumptions that I think are faulty: Assumption number one is that the church was meant to have this institutional structure, and two, that this structure was intended to continue for all time. You see, when Judas died in Acts 1, the Apostles replaced him with Matthias. But just a few years later, when the Apostle James dies, they don't replace him. Latter-day Saints view this as a sign that the church was already dealing with apostasy. But could we not also see this as an indication that we were never meant to continue this office of Apostle into our modern day?
As a Protestant, I'm downstream of the Reformation. And the reformers did not aim to restore the church, but rather to reform it, to look more like its Apostolic form with the doctrines and practices of the early church. Even John Calvin said, "Today we do not deprive the Papists of those traces of the church which the Lord willed should among them survive the destruction by his own providence. He caused other vestiges to remain that the church might not utterly die. He did not allow his church either to be destroyed to the very foundations by Antichrist or to be leveled to the ground." The reformers didn't see the Reformation as a restoring of something that was lost, but a reforming and a refining of the church to make it pure again. There was genuine truth present, threads of orthodoxy from the time of the Apostles all the way until now. Christ has not failed to preserve his church.
Number four, biblical theology does not allow for a Great Apostasy. Beyond particular proof texts and historical arguments, broader theological categories do not allow for a so-called Great Apostasy. The church is the body and bride of Christ, and Christ assures her survival. Christ has not failed to accomplish what he set out to do. Ephesians 5 says, "Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish." Titus 2 says something similar: "Jesus gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works." This was the Church of Paul's day, the Church of Christ, the church which he did not fail to save from lawlessness. We are the body of Christ, he is our head, we're told, and Christ has not been decapitated. He has not separated head from body for 1800 years.
The preservation of the church is also demanded by certain Old Testament prophecies which tell of the Messiah who would establish an eternal Kingdom that will never be destroyed. "The God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdoms be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever. The stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth."
Throughout the Old Testament, God's people constantly struggled with sin. They couldn't keep the law and they were judged time and time and time again for their sin. Yet, even at the worst periods in Israel's history, when God's people were at their worst, he says this: "I have kept for myself 7,000 men who have not bowed the knee to Baal." The Apostle Paul says this was true both in Israel's day and also in the days of the church. So too, at the present time, there is a remnant chosen by grace, despite widespread, though not complete, rebellion.
The hope which God offered to Israel was this: a new covenant was coming, a better covenant. The Old Testament law was insufficient, and it exposed rebelliousness in the hearts of Israel, which led to disaster after disaster after disaster. The promised Messiah was to bring about a new covenant people that were different. They were to be a people who had new hearts, who were forgiven, who were an obedient people, who all knew the Lord. Jeremiah 31, speaking about this New Covenant, says this: "I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother saying, 'Know the Lord,' for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more."
When Jesus came, he inaugurated this New Covenant for his people. You remember the Last Supper? "This cup that is poured out for you is the New Covenant in my blood." So, all Christians, members of the New Covenant, experience a unique privilege amongst those in redemptive history. We are part of a new covenant, not a mixed people with both believers and unbelievers, but a purified people who all know the Lord, who are all forgiven, who are all obedient, and who have the law of God written on our very hearts.
The entire thrust and hope of the Old Covenant anticipates this fulfillment. When the people sinned and Israel was in disarray, their hope was that God would fix what was broken, that God would provide another covenant with better promises and a better hope. And indeed, he did through Jesus. Was the prophetic hope of the Old Testament thwarted? The gospel is the very hinge of the New Covenant, which brings forgiveness of sins. If it was lost, that would make God out to be a liar. God would have failed what he promised to do through the Old Testament prophets. Hebrews 12, speaking about the Kingdom of God which comes through the shedding of Christ's blood, says this: "Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire."
This is why the very last thing Jesus promises his disciples before ascending into heaven is this: "Surely I am with you even to the very end of the age." Jesus didn't abandon his church. God did not fail to fulfill his promises. Satan did not have victory over the gospel and over the work of Christ for 1800 years. The wheat grows together with the weeds.
Now, there's one last thing I didn't talk about, and that's priesthood authority. How do we respond to the claim that priesthood authority needed to be restored? Well, this topic was just too much to include in this video and would take too much time. So, I'm going to link here at the end a link to another video that we did concerning priesthood authority. I don't think the priesthood authority needed to be restored because I don't think that the LDS version of priesthood authority is ultimately biblical.
If you have any other questions about anything in this video, be sure to leave them below in the comments. And thanks for watching.