The Apostle's Creed

[TOmNossor]

This is a piece of LDS doctrine that Iâ??ve never understood properly. (or at least I suspect I havenâ??t)

Were the people who lived during the great apostasy apostate because they were somehow less righteous than Joseph and his church, or was it just because they lived at an unfortunate time in history, or some mix of those, or what?

Of course unity is great when you can have it, but when someone persists in something false eventually a division must be made.

Itâ??s happened in the CoJCoLDS too.

As I understand you, the difference is that the LDS has authority and the councils did not. But certainly they has every reason to think they still had authorityâ?¦ And assuming that, then they did the right thing.

So is it all just a depressingly honest mistake?

As near as I can determine the mechanics of the apostasy have no official explanation. LDS believe there was an apostasy because God initiated a restoration and spoke of an apostasy in doing so.

What the nature of this apostasy was, has been a point of speculation by LDS for many years.

Some of the earlier views were quite Protestant and pointed to the Catholic Church in the middle ages. I do not think this view works very well for a number of reasons, the most clear being that LDS suggest that a church should have leaders who are apostles / prophets. The second century church did not appear to have such a structure and it would thus seem apostasy had begun long before the middle ages.

I subscribe to the view that I think is most common now. An apostasy of authority lead to various symptoms of apostasy. Like doctrinal developments LDS would call wrong and Catholics would call good. Like the movement from two way covenantal nomism sacraments (seven +) to one way â??reception of Graceâ? sacraments (seven or two or ???). Like the absence and denial of continuing supernatural public revelation to lead the church.

As you seem to allude to, I would say there were good Christians doing the best they could in the absence of the â??general authorityâ? of the church. I do not think salvation is predicated upon sophisticated Chalcedon orthodoxy. Instead, I think salvation is predicated upon ones relationship with God regardless of which side of Chalcedon orthodoxy one inhabits. So, during the apostasy there were many Christians who walked with God and received all the blessings God had in store for any of us.

As an example of Christians attempting to do the best they could let me offer this:

I believe much that Gerard May (a Protestant scholar) has written about the development of the doctrine of Creation ex Nihilo. Except that Gerard May considers this development a good and necessary mid-second century development and I consider it the foundational doctrinal slip that occurred in the mid-second century. Still, I sympathize with May in his â??it was goodâ? assessment; and I also believe the Irenaeus, Tatian and Theopholis thought â??it was good.â? Unfortunately (at least as I see the philosophy and history), creation ex nihilo spawned the Trinity debates, the Christology debates, the muting/hiding of the doctrine of deification, and if truth be known the difficulties / impossibilities of asserting that men are actually free to chose to love God.

Ultimately, almost all of the above is merely my attempt to understand what the apostasy was from looking at early church history. LDS know there was an apostasy because it is part of the apostasy/restoration. The specifics are not revealed.

Charity, TOm

[Dr. Sandwich]

Hmmmm