The Great Apostasy
What an apostasy is, why God allowed the Church of the apostles to be taken from the earth, and the evidence from the Catholic Church and the Reformers themselves.
What Is the Apostasy?
Apostasy is not simply someone losing interest in church. It is the loss of something God gave. The Church’s Gospel Topics entry on Apostasy covers the basics. In short, an apostasy happens in any of four ways:
Four Marks of Apostasy
Changed ordinances — the ordinances and covenants the Lord revealed are changed contrary to his will.
Mingled doctrine — the philosophies of men are mingled with the revealed word of God, creating new and erroneous doctrine.
Rebellion — an individual or a people rebels against God and either no longer believes in him or no longer obeys him.
Lost authority — priesthood authority is no longer on the earth, or it is being used in a way God has not authorized.
How Many Apostasies Have Occurred?
Many apostasies have occurred. Over and over in the history of the world the truth has been lost, and over and over it has been revealed again through a prophet called and authorized by God. Israel did it in the days of the judges, Judah did it under the kings, and the Jews of Christ’s own day had done it, and the Lord said so to their faces. This is not a strange idea that Latter-day Saints invented. It is the normal pattern of the Bible.
Apostasy in the Old and New Testaments
Judges 3:7 — Israel forgot the Lord and served Baalim.
1 Kings 14:22 — Judah did evil in the sight of the Lord.
Jeremiah 2:13 — they forsook the fountain of living waters.
Matthew 15:9, Mark 7:6 — teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.
Acts 7:52, Romans 11:3 — the prophets persecuted and killed.
Scripture Foretold an Apostasy After the Apostles
The New Testament does not promise an unbroken line. It warns, again and again, that wolves would come in, that men would arise speaking perverse things, and that the day of the Lord would not come until there was first a falling away.
“Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition.”
More Prophecies of the Falling Away
Matthew 24:5, 24:24 — many shall come in my name and deceive many.
Acts 20:29–30 — grievous wolves shall enter in, not sparing the flock.
2 Timothy 1:15 — all they which are in Asia be turned away from me.
2 Peter 2:1, 3:17 — false teachers among you, bringing in damnable heresies.
1 John 2:18 — even now are there many antichrists.
Jude 1:4 — certain men crept in unawares.
Revelation 2:2 — them which say they are apostles, and are not.
1 Nephi 13:26 — plain and precious parts taken away.
D&C 1:15 — they have strayed from mine ordinances, and have broken mine everlasting covenant.
Joseph Smith—History 1:19 — they teach for doctrines the commandments of men.
Why Would God Let His Church Be Taken From the Earth?
Some say there never was an apostasy. Christ promised the gates of hell would not prevail, so how could his Church be lost? Turn the question around. Does God force mankind to believe in him? Would he send angels to wicked men who have already rejected his word?
The GOD I love and serve does not force anyone to do anything, because it is against his law to do so. When Satan proposed to force us, he was in open rebellion against God and against the very conditions of existence. Revelation teaches that intelligence is “independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself,” and that without this “there is no existence” (D&C 93:29–30). Existence requires agency, and the whole plan of salvation turns on our ability to choose.
So if the church he established chose to turn away from him, what is he to do? He cannot force them to obey, and he cannot force them to believe. The apostasy was NOT GOD’s choice; it was man’s. GOD lives by law and order, he keeps his own laws, and he is always righteous and good. He did not abandon mankind; they rejected him, and he withdrew from the wicked until a man with sufficient faith came asking.
“There is a law, irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundations of this world, upon which all blessings are predicated— And when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated.”
What Happens to Those Who Lived During the Apostasy?
GOD is perfectly just and perfectly merciful, and he judges every person by the knowledge and revelation they actually received. We do not believe that the people who lived during the apostasy are all damned and going to hell forever. Would that be just? Would that be merciful? No. God does everything possible within the bounds of agency to help his children reach the highest glory they can. He has told us plainly what his work is:
“For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.”
The people who lived in ages when gospel authority was not on the earth, because of the wickedness and choices of men who lived before them, will have the opportunity to learn and accept the gospel of Jesus Christ through ordinances performed for the dead (see The Gospel Is Preached to the Dead). Every person, in every age, will have an equal opportunity to accept Christ. In the end, when the judgments of GOD are pronounced, all will say that his judgments are just and his judgments are merciful.
Why Was a Reformation Required?
What evidence is there that an apostasy actually happened? Start at the foundation: the Catholic Church, from which every Protestant and Evangelical church is rooted.
Many will fight the idea that their church is an offshoot of the Catholic Church. They claim their authority does not come from Rome at all but from the Bible itself. Many of them will tell you the Catholic Church is the one in apostasy and is not even Christian anymore. That is, in and of itself, an admission of apostasy! The Catholic Church was the remnant of the church the apostles organized. That there was authority in that church, and that it was given to men and passed from man to man, is plain from scripture and from Catholic tradition alike. If Rome lost the faith, then the church of the apostles fell away. That is the apostasy.
The Catholic Church Admits the Problem
The Catholic Church itself acknowledges that serious corruption came first. Its own encyclopedia, in the article on the Reformation, says so plainly:
Catholic Encyclopedia (1911), “The Reformation”
“Gradually a regrettable worldliness manifested itself in many high ecclesiastics. Their chief object—to guide man to his eternal goal—claimed too seldom their attention, and worldly activities became in too many cases the chief interest. Political power, material possessions, privileged position in public life, the defence of ancient historical rights, earthly interests of various kinds were only too often the chief aim of many of the higher clergy. Pastoral solicitude, the specifically religious and ecclesiastical aim, fell largely into the background, notwithstanding various spirited and successful attempts to rectify the existing evils.”
“… Many members of cathedral chapters and other beneficed ecclesiastics were chiefly concerned with their income and how to increase it, especially by uniting several prebends (even episcopal sees) in the hands of one person, who thus enjoyed a larger income and greater power. Luxury prevailed widely among the higher clergy, while the lower clergy were often oppressed.”
“The great applause which Luther received on his first appearance, both in humanistic circles and among some theologians and some of the earnest-minded laity, was due to the dissatisfaction with the existing abuses. His own erroneous views and the influence of a portion of his followers very soon drove Luther into rebellion against ecclesiastical authority as such, and eventually led him into open apostasy and schism.”
— J. P. Kirsch, Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 12, “The Reformation,” sections I and II
Notice what both sides are saying here. Rome admits its leaders had turned to money and power. Rome calls Luther’s break an apostasy. Luther says Rome had fallen into error. Each accuses the other of apostasy, and on the evidence of their own words each has a point.
The Reformation: A Direct Result of Apostasy
Randolph C. Head, “Reformation, Protestant”
“The term Reformation refers in general to the major religious changes that swept across Europe during the 1500s, transforming worship, politics, society, and basic cultural patterns. One key dimension was the Protestant Reformation, the movement that began in 1517 with Martin Luther’s critique of doctrinal principles and church actions in Germany and that led to the establishment of new official churches—the Lutheran, the Reformed or Calvinist, and the Anglican. These were separate from the Latin Catholic Church in organization and different from it in theology.”
— Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World (2004)
Luther himself told the Diet of Worms why he could not go back:
Martin Luther, Before the Diet of Worms (1521)
“I can not submit my faith either to the pope or to the council, because it is as clear as noonday that they have fallen into error and even into glaring inconsistency with themselves. If, then, I am not convinced by proof from Holy Scripture, or by cogent reasons, if I am not satisfied by the very text I have cited, and if my judgment is not in this way brought into subjection to God’s word, I neither can nor will retract anything; for it can not be right for a Christian to speak against his [conscience]. I stand here and can say no more. God help me. Amen.”
— William Jennings Bryan, ed., The World’s Famous Orations, vol. 7 (1906), from D’Aubigné’s History of the Reformation. Bryan’s text prints “country”; D’Aubigné reads “conscience.”
He believed the Church had fallen into error, did he not? Then he believed it had apostatized from the truth, whatever word he would have used for it. The man who started the Reformation is a witness for the apostasy. A reading of the speech is on YouTube.
The Reformers Could Not Agree on Essential Doctrine
If the Bible alone were enough, the churches that left Rome should have agreed on what it teaches. They did not. Within a century the two great Protestant systems, Calvinism and Arminianism, held opposite answers on every one of five central questions about how a man is saved.
In the words of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “As shaped by Calvin’s successor at Geneva, Theodore Beza (1519–1605), Calvinism emphasizes the doctrine of predestination, holding that God extends grace and grants salvation only to the chosen, or elect.” It is summed up in the acronym T.U.L.I.P. Arminianism, which grew out of the same Reformed churches, answers each point the other way.
Calvinism (T.U.L.I.P.)
Arminianism
Total depravity. Man’s heart is evil and he cannot choose God at all, so God must predestine.
Free will. The fall wounded man but did not leave him helpless. God enables every sinner to repent and believe without interfering with his freedom.
Unconditional election. God chooses the elect without regard to anything in them. Others are simply not elected.
Conditional election. God chose those he foresaw would freely believe.
Limited atonement. Jesus died only for the elect. His sacrifice was sufficient for all but efficacious only for them.
Universal redemption. Christ died for every man, making salvation possible for all, but it saves only those who believe.
Irresistible grace. When God calls the elect inwardly, they cannot resist.
Resistible grace. The Spirit calls everyone, and because man is free he can successfully resist that call.
Perseverance of the saints. You cannot lose your salvation. Those God has saved are eternally secure.
Falling from grace. Those truly saved can be lost by failing to keep their faith. (Arminians themselves never fully agreed on this point.)
The table summarizes each side in its own advocates’ terms: the Calvinist points as Matt Slick sets them out in “What is Calvinism?” (CARM), and the Arminian points from the comparison in David Steele and Curtis Thomas, The Five Points of Calvinism: Defined, Defended, Documented (1963).
Both sides stack verses. The Calvinist quotes Romans 9 and John 6:44. The Arminian quotes John 3:16 and 2 Peter 3:9. Both claim the Bible alone, and both cannot be right, so is God the author of that confusion?
Calvin and Arminius are only the start, because today there are thousands of Christian denominations teaching differing doctrines, many of which they say are essential for salvation. They divide over the place of works in salvation; whether a man can fall from grace after he is saved; whether baptism is required, and how it is done (sprinkling or immersion); and whether confession alone saves, once saved always saved. And many others besides, where some reject what the Bible plainly teaches, and some accept what it plainly refutes.
One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism
“One Lord, one faith, one baptism.”
What of that scripture? And what of the pattern so plainly taught in the Bible, where a doctrinal dispute was taken to the apostles and elders and settled by them (Acts 15)? Who can a Christian take that question to today?
These are real questions, asked in sincerity. If there never was an apostasy, what is the answer to them? Does God like confusion? Did he allow it in the church of the apostles? Paul says no: “God is not the author of confusion, but of peace.” So why would it be fine now?
Apostasies have happened many times in the history of the earth. It is not a foreign concept but rather a normal one. Whenever a people who know the gospel of Jesus Christ, who hold his priesthood and have his ordinances revealed to them, reject that doctrine, that priesthood and those ordinances, an apostasy has occurred. And every time, the answer has been the same. God calls a prophet and restores what was lost (see Why a Restoration Was Necessary).