Difference between revisions of "No complete apostasy?"

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Reformer Sebastian Franck believed that the “outward church of Christ was wasted immediately after the apostles because the early Fathers, whom he calls ‘wolves’ and ‘anti-christs’, justified war, power of magistracy, tithes, the priesthood, etc.”{{ref|frank1}}
 
Reformer Sebastian Franck believed that the “outward church of Christ was wasted immediately after the apostles because the early Fathers, whom he calls ‘wolves’ and ‘anti-christs’, justified war, power of magistracy, tithes, the priesthood, etc.”{{ref|frank1}}
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John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, lamented that the Christian had apostatized from the gospel that Christ and the apostles had taught, had lost the spiritual gifts that they once enjoyed, and had returned to heathenism, having on a dead form remaining:
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:It does not appear that these extraordinary gifts of the Holy Spirit were common in the church for more than two or three centuries. We seldom hear of them after that fatal period when the emperor Constantine called himself a Christian, and from a vain imagination of promoting the Christian cause thereby, heaped riches and power and honor upon Christians in general, but in particular upon the Christian clergy. From this time they almost totally ceased; very few instances of the kind were found. The cause of this was not as has been supposed because there was no more occasion for them because all the world was become Christians. This is a miserable mistake; not a twentieth part of it was then nominally Christian. The real cause of it was the love of many, almost all Christians, so called, was waxed cold. The Christians had no more of the Spirit of Christ than the other heathens. The Son of Man, when he came to examine His Church, could hardly find faith upon the earth. This was the real cause why the extraordinary gifts of the Holy Ghost were no longer to be found in the Christian Church because the Christians were turned heathens again, and only had earth a dead form left.{{ref|wesley1}}
  
 
===Church of England===
 
===Church of England===
Line 35: Line 39:
 
:A religious reformation is afoot, and at heart it is the endeavor to recover for our modern life the religion of Jesus as against the vast, intricate, largely inadequate and often positively false religion about Jesus. Christianity today has largely left the religion which he preached, taught and lived, and has substituted another kind of religion altogether. If Jesus should come back to now, hear the mythologies built up around him, see the creedalism, denominationalism, sacramentalism, carried on in his name, he would certainly say, 'If this is Christianity, I am not a Christian.'{{ref|fosdick1}}
 
:A religious reformation is afoot, and at heart it is the endeavor to recover for our modern life the religion of Jesus as against the vast, intricate, largely inadequate and often positively false religion about Jesus. Christianity today has largely left the religion which he preached, taught and lived, and has substituted another kind of religion altogether. If Jesus should come back to now, hear the mythologies built up around him, see the creedalism, denominationalism, sacramentalism, carried on in his name, he would certainly say, 'If this is Christianity, I am not a Christian.'{{ref|fosdick1}}
  
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John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, lamented that the Christian had apostatized from the gospel that Christ and the apostles had taught, had lost the spiritual gifts that they once enjoyed, and had returned to heathenism, having on a dead form remaining:
 
  
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:It does not appear that these extraordinary gifts of the Holy Spirit were common in the church for more than two or three centuries. We seldom hear of them after that fatal period when the emperor Constantine called himself a Christian, and from a vain imagination of promoting the Christian cause thereby, heaped riches and power and honor upon Christians in general, but in particular upon the Christian clergy. From this time they almost totally ceased; very few instances of the kind were found. The cause of this was not as has been supposed because there was no more occasion for them because all the world was become Christians. This is a miserable mistake; not a twentieth part of it was then nominally Christian. The real cause of it was the love of many, almost all Christians, so called, was waxed cold. The Christians had no more of the Spirit of Christ than the other heathens. The Son of Man, when he came to examine His Church, could hardly find faith upon the earth. This was the real cause why the extraordinary gifts of the Holy Ghost were no longer to be found in the Christian Church because the Christians were turned heathens again, and only had earth a dead form left.{{ref|wesley1}}
 
  
 
In the Church of England Homily Against Peril of Idolatry we read:  
 
In the Church of England Homily Against Peril of Idolatry we read:  
Line 57: Line 59:
 
#{{note|muntzer1}} Muntzer, “Sermon before the Princes” (Allstedt, 13 July 1524), in ''Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers'', ed. G.H. Williams (Philadelphia, Westminster Press 1957): 51 (103-4).
 
#{{note|muntzer1}} Muntzer, “Sermon before the Princes” (Allstedt, 13 July 1524), in ''Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers'', ed. G.H. Williams (Philadelphia, Westminster Press 1957): 51 (103-4).
 
#{{note|frank1}} Franck, Letter to Campanus, in ''Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers'', ed. G.H. Williams, (Philadelphia, Westminster Press 1957), 51:151-152.
 
#{{note|frank1}} Franck, Letter to Campanus, in ''Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers'', ed. G.H. Williams, (Philadelphia, Westminster Press 1957), 51:151-152.
 +
#{{note|wesley1}} John Wesley, cited in ''Wesley's Works'', Vol. 7, 89:26, 27.
 +
#{{note|cofe}} Church of England, ''Homily Against Peril of Idolatry'' (Date). {{link|url=http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/ret/homilies/bk2hom2.html}}
 
#{{note|williams1}} William Cullen Bryant (editor), ''Picturesque America, or the Land We Live In'' (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1872), 1:502.
 
#{{note|williams1}} William Cullen Bryant (editor), ''Picturesque America, or the Land We Live In'' (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1872), 1:502.
 
#{{note|williams2}} Edward Underhill, "Struggles and Triumphs of Religious Liberty", cited in William F. Anderson, "Apostasy or Succession, Which?," 2387ndash;239.
 
#{{note|williams2}} Edward Underhill, "Struggles and Triumphs of Religious Liberty", cited in William F. Anderson, "Apostasy or Succession, Which?," 2387ndash;239.
 
#{{note|smith1}} Dr. William Smith, ''Smith's Dictionary of the Bible'' (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1896).{{an|Note: Dr. Smith is not connected with Joseph Smith or the Church.}}
 
#{{note|smith1}} Dr. William Smith, ''Smith's Dictionary of the Bible'' (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1896).{{an|Note: Dr. Smith is not connected with Joseph Smith or the Church.}}
 
#{{note|fosdick1}} Daniel H. Williams, “The Corruption of the Church and its Tradition”, in Williams, ''Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism'' (Eerdmans, 1999): 1017ndash;131.
 
#{{note|fosdick1}} Daniel H. Williams, “The Corruption of the Church and its Tradition”, in Williams, ''Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism'' (Eerdmans, 1999): 1017ndash;131.
−
#{{note|wesley1}} John Wesley, cited in ''Wesley's Works'', Vol. 7, 89:26, 27.
 
−
#{{note|cofe}} Church of England, ''Homily Against Peril of Idolatry'' (Date). {{link|url=http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/ret/homilies/bk2hom2.html}}
 
 
#{{note|durant1}} Will Durant, ''The Story of Civilization, Volume 3: Caesar and Christ,'' (1944), 595.
 
#{{note|durant1}} Will Durant, ''The Story of Civilization, Volume 3: Caesar and Christ,'' (1944), 595.
 
#{{note|jefferson1}} Thomas Jefferson, cited in Norman Cousins, ''In God We Trust'' (Harper & Brothers, 1958), 162.
 
#{{note|jefferson1}} Thomas Jefferson, cited in Norman Cousins, ''In God We Trust'' (Harper & Brothers, 1958), 162.

Revision as of 13:57, 14 July 2007

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Early Christianity &
Apostasy
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Apostasy

Authority: and Priesthood

Doctrinal shift:

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Criticism

Critics charge that althought the apostasy is predicted in scripture, there would be no universal apostasy. They insist that a band of faithful Christian believers who kept the "true faith" were always present on the earth. The presence of these believers means, for the critic, that there was no need of a Restoration as taught by Joseph Smith.

Source(s) of the Criticism

Response

The realization that no Christian church has continuity with the church established by Jesus in divine authority or doctrine is not an idea that originated with the LDS Christians. Many Protestant clergymen and others have long realized that if the Catholic Church's claims to be the proper continuationi of Christ's church are false, then a universal apostasy must have occured.

Indeed, were it not for a belief in the complete apostasy of all current churches, there would have been no motivation for the founders of various denominations to start their own churches—they would have simply joined the denomination which they believed had continuity with the original church of Jesus and the apostles.

Reformers

Early Anabaptist Thomas Muntzer believed that “the Christian church lost its virginity and became an adulteress soon after the death of the disciples of the apostles because of corrupt leadership, manifested in the predominance of a clergy who cared more for the amassing of property and power than for the acquiring of spiritual virtues.” [1]

Reformer Sebastian Franck believed that the “outward church of Christ was wasted immediately after the apostles because the early Fathers, whom he calls ‘wolves’ and ‘anti-christs’, justified war, power of magistracy, tithes, the priesthood, etc.”[2]

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, lamented that the Christian had apostatized from the gospel that Christ and the apostles had taught, had lost the spiritual gifts that they once enjoyed, and had returned to heathenism, having on a dead form remaining:

It does not appear that these extraordinary gifts of the Holy Spirit were common in the church for more than two or three centuries. We seldom hear of them after that fatal period when the emperor Constantine called himself a Christian, and from a vain imagination of promoting the Christian cause thereby, heaped riches and power and honor upon Christians in general, but in particular upon the Christian clergy. From this time they almost totally ceased; very few instances of the kind were found. The cause of this was not as has been supposed because there was no more occasion for them because all the world was become Christians. This is a miserable mistake; not a twentieth part of it was then nominally Christian. The real cause of it was the love of many, almost all Christians, so called, was waxed cold. The Christians had no more of the Spirit of Christ than the other heathens. The Son of Man, when he came to examine His Church, could hardly find faith upon the earth. This was the real cause why the extraordinary gifts of the Holy Ghost were no longer to be found in the Christian Church because the Christians were turned heathens again, and only had earth a dead form left.[3]

Church of England

American Protestants

Roger Williams, pastor of the oldest Baptist Church in America at Providence, Rhode Island, refused to continue as pastor on the grounds that

There is no regularly-constituted church on earth, nor any person authorized to administer any Church ordinance: nor can there be, until new apostles are sent by the great Head of the Church, for whose coming I am seeking.[4]

Williams also said, "The apostasy... hath so far corrupted all, that there can be no recovery out of that apostasy until Christ shall send forth new apostles to plant churches anew."[5]

In a work prepared by seventy-three noted theologians and Bible students, we read: "...we must not expect to see the Church of Holy Scripture actually existing in its perfection on the earth. It is not to be found, thus perfect, either in the collected fragments of Christendom, or still less in any one of these fragments. . . ."[6]

Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, prominent American Baptist clergyman and author, described the condition of the Christian churches of the first half of the twentieth century in these words:

A religious reformation is afoot, and at heart it is the endeavor to recover for our modern life the religion of Jesus as against the vast, intricate, largely inadequate and often positively false religion about Jesus. Christianity today has largely left the religion which he preached, taught and lived, and has substituted another kind of religion altogether. If Jesus should come back to now, hear the mythologies built up around him, see the creedalism, denominationalism, sacramentalism, carried on in his name, he would certainly say, 'If this is Christianity, I am not a Christian.'[7]


In the Church of England Homily Against Peril of Idolatry we read:

So that laity and clergy, learned and unlearned, all ages, sects, and degrees of men, women, and children of whole Christendom—an horrible and most dreadful thing to think—have been at once drowned in abominable idolatry; of all other vices most detested by God, and most damnable to man; and that by the space of eight hundred years and more.[8]

The Book of Homilies dates from about the middle of the sixteenth century; and in it is thus officially affirmed that the so-called Church and the whole religious world had been utterly apostate for eight centuries or more prior to the establishment of the Church of England.

In the words of one eminent historian, "Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it. The Greek mind, dying, came to a transmigrated [new] life in the theology and liturgy of the Church."[9]

Thomas Jefferson, though surely not a cleric, was a great student of Christianity. Even he acknowledged the loss of the original gospel and said that he looked forward to "the prospect of a restoration of primitive Christianity. I must leave to younger athletes to encounter and lop off the false branches which have been engrafted into it by the mythologies of the middle and modern ages"[10]

Conclusion

A summary of the argument against the criticism.

Endnotes

  1. [note]  Muntzer, “Sermon before the Princes” (Allstedt, 13 July 1524), in Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers, ed. G.H. Williams (Philadelphia, Westminster Press 1957): 51 (103-4).
  2. [note]  Franck, Letter to Campanus, in Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers, ed. G.H. Williams, (Philadelphia, Westminster Press 1957), 51:151-152.
  3. [note]  John Wesley, cited in Wesley's Works, Vol. 7, 89:26, 27.
  4. [note]  Church of England, Homily Against Peril of Idolatry (Date). off-site
  5. [note]  William Cullen Bryant (editor), Picturesque America, or the Land We Live In (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1872), 1:502.
  6. [note]  Edward Underhill, "Struggles and Triumphs of Religious Liberty", cited in William F. Anderson, "Apostasy or Succession, Which?," 2387ndash;239.
  7. [note]  Dr. William Smith, Smith's Dictionary of the Bible (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1896).
    Note: Dr. Smith is not connected with Joseph Smith or the Church.
  8. [note]  Daniel H. Williams, “The Corruption of the Church and its Tradition”, in Williams, Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism (Eerdmans, 1999): 1017ndash;131.
  9. [note]  Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Volume 3: Caesar and Christ, (1944), 595.
  10. [note]  Thomas Jefferson, cited in Norman Cousins, In God We Trust (Harper & Brothers, 1958), 162.

Further reading

FAIR wiki articles

The early Christian Church and the Great Apostasy


Jump to Subtopic:

Evidence of a total apostasy


Jump to Subtopic:

Biblical evidence of an apostasy after Christ


Jump to details:


Evidence of an apostasy after Christ from early Christian history other than the Bible

Summary: Do the Early Church Fathers and other post-Biblical documents shed any light on the apostasy?


Jump to details:


Visible evidence of the apostasy


Jump to details:


Extent of the apostasy


Jump to Subtopic:

Complete apostasy after Christ

Summary: Do other Christian denominations believe that no other church on earth is complete, or is this an arrogant belief assumed only by the "Mormons"?


Jump to details:


Apostasy and the "gates of hell"

Summary: Is Jesus' teaching about "the gates of hell" prevailing against "the rock" inconsistent with a belief in a universal apostasy?


Jump to details:


Priesthood on the earth during the apostasy


Jump to details:


Reasons why the apostasy occurred


Jump to Subtopic:

God permitted the apostasy to occur

Summary: If there were some people who would have accepted the Gospel as taught in Mormonism, why did God allow the earthly Church to pass from the earth?


Jump to details:


Relationship of Mormonism to other branches of Christianity

Summary: What does the apostasy doctrine mean with respect to the relationship of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to other branches of Christianity?


Jump to details:


The office of Apostle within the ancient Church of Jesus Christ


Jump to details:


Mormonism and priesthood


Jump to Subtopic:

Restoration of the priesthood


Jump to Subtopic:


Administration of priesthood authority


Jump to Subtopic:


Criticisms of the Mormon priesthood


Jump to Subtopic:


FAIR web site

Apostasy FairMormon articles on-line
  • Roger Keller, "The Apostasy," FAIR 2004 conference. FAIR link
    Dr. Keller is a former Presbyterian minister.

External links

Learn more about the Great Apostasy
Key sources
  • Noel B. Reynolds (editor), Early Christians in Disarray: Contemporary LDS Perspectives on the Christian Apostasy (Provo, Utah: FARMS, 2005), 1. ISBN 0934893020. off-site
FAIR links
  • Barry Bickmore, "Joseph Smith Among the Early Christians," Proceedings of the 2014 FAIR Conference (August 2014). link
  • John Gee, "The Corruption of Scripture in the Second Century," Proceedings of the 1999 FAIR Conference (August 1999). link
  • John Hall, "As Far as it is Translated Correctly: The Problem of Tampering with the Word of God in the Transmission and Translation of the New Testament," Proceedings of the 2007 FAIR Conference (August 2007). link
  • Roger Keller, "The Apostasy," Proceedings of the 2004 FAIR Conference (August 2004). link
  • Daniel C. Peterson, "What Has Athens to do with Jerusalem?: Apostasy and Restoration in the Big Picture," Proceedings of the 1999 FAIR Conference (August 1999). link
Online
  • David Stewart, Jr., "The Christian Apostasy," cumorah.com off-site
  • Roger D. Cook, "'How Deep the Platonism? A Review of Owen and Mosser's Appendix: Hellenism, Greek Philosophy, and the Creedal Straightjacket of Christian Orthodoxy'," FARMS Review 11/2 (2000). [265–299] link
  • Dallin H. Oaks, "Apostasy and Restoration," Ensign (May 1995): 84.off-site
  • Hoyt W. Brewster Jr., "I Have A Question: What Was There in the Creeds of Men that the Lord Found Abominable, as He Stated in the First Vision?”," Ensign (July 1987): 65–67. off-site
  • Hyde M. Merrill, "The Great Apostasy as Seen by Eusebius," Ensign (November 1972): 34.off-site
  • Kent P. Jackson, "Early Signs of the Apostasy," Ensign (December 1984): 8.off-site
  • Richard L. Anderson, "Clement, Ignatius, and Polycarp: Three Bishops between the Apostles and Apostasy," Ensign (August 1976): 51.off-site
  • Matthew L. Bowen, "'Unto the Taking Away of Their Stumbling Blocks': The Taking Away and Keeping Back of Plain and Precious Things and Their Restoration in 1 Nephi 13–15," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 53/9 (7 October 2022). [145–170] link
  • William J. Hamblin and Daniel C. Peterson, "The Evangelical Is Our Brother (Review of How Wide the Divide? A Mormon and an Evangelical in Conversation)," FARMS Review 11/2 (2000). [178–209] link
Video
The Apostasy, Roger Keller (Former Presbyterian minister), 2004 FAIR Conference
Print
  • Hugh W. Nibley, "Evangelium Quadraginta Dierum," Vigiliae Christianae 20 (1966):1-24; reprinted in "Evangelium Quadraginta Dierum: The Forty-day Mission of Christ-The Forgotten Heritage," in Mormonism and Early Christianity (Vol. 4 of Collected Works of Hugh Nibley), edited by Todd Compton and Stephen D. Ricks, (Salt Lake City, Utah : Deseret Book Company ; Provo, Utah : Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1987),10–44. direct off-site
  • Matthew B. Brown, "Evidences of Apostasy," in All Things Restored, 2d ed. (American Fork, UT: Covenant, 2006),1–32. AISN B000R4LXSM. ISBN 1577347129.
Navigators

Printed material

Apostasy printed materials
  • Matthew B. Brown, "Evidences of Apostasy," in All Things Restored, 2d ed. (American Fork, UT: Covenant, 2006),1–32. AISN B000R4LXSM. ISBN 1577347129.
  • Noel B. Reynolds (editor), Early Christians in Disarray: Contemporary LDS Perspectives on the Christian Apostasy (Provo, Utah: FARMS, 2005), 1. ISBN 0934893020. off-site  (Key source)
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