Audio only:
Joe gives his opening statement from his debate with LDS apologist Jacob Hansen on The Great Apostacy.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, and Mormons all agree that Jesus Christ founded a church. After all, he tells us that he’s founding a church. But most of us also agree that people can fall away from the faith. This falling away in Greek is apostasia, which is where we get words like apostate and apostasy. But Mormons and many Protestants believe that not only can individuals fall away from the church, but that the church itself can and has fallen away. That is, the church that Jesus founded fell into error, an event that Mormons called the great apostasy. Now, this belief is integral to the claims of Mormonism in particular. As preached my gospel, the LDS church’s handbook for missionary puts it. A universal apostasy occurred following the death of Jesus Christ and his apostles. If there had been no apostasy, there would’ve been no need of a restoration.
So if the great apostasy didn’t happen, then Mormonism is false. On the other hand, if the great apostasy did happen, then Catholicism, as well as Orthodoxia and Coptic Christianity are all false. Either way you cut it, it’s going to be a knockout punch for one or the other side. Now, the LDS apologist, Jacob Hanson, and I just debated this topic last week, or at least that is the debate that he proposed. He actually handpicked both me as an opponent, Cameron Bertusia’s moderator, saying that he enjoyed my content and tone. In that sense, one of the major objections to Mormonism is his notion of a great apostasy. It’d be good to do a debate on whether there are good reasons to believe the Latter Day Saint claims about a great apostasy. So I’ve done my best in this episode to make sure I’ve used the LDS Church website and official Mormon materials and to make sure I’m using the official church claims.
And as you’ll see, my argument is that the church’s claims are false, unbiblical, and disproven by history and scripture alike. Jacob, in the debate we agreed upon, was going to have the burden of proof to show that the Mormon church’s claims of a great apostasy are true. I would then argue against it. But unfortunately, when the time came for debate, here’s how he began his opening statement.
CLIP:
And Joe here is here to claim that the Pope has always sat in the chair of Peter and therefore all believers in Christ, including Protestants and Orthodox must submit to the infallible dictates of the Pope.
Joe:
So instead of even defending the Mormon claims of the great apostasy, Jacob tries to turn this instead into a referendum on Catholic doctrines like the papacy. And instead of meeting his own burden of proof as the affirmative, he tells the audience falsely that as a negative, I’m the one who actually has to provide the burden of proof to present the evidence for seemingly whatever Catholic doctrines he decides I need to prove.
CLIP:
And if you’re going to assert that the apostles taught the infallibility of the bishop of Rome icon veneration and Marian dogmas, then please provide some evidence.
Joe:
Now, the absurdity of all this is manifest. When you get midway through his opening statement, in a debate he proposed on the Mormon claims about the great apostasy, and he insists that it’s going to be off topic if I bring up Mormonism at all.
CLIP:
Also, every time Joe mentions Mormonism today, I want you to whisper to the person next to you. He’s dodging.
Joe:
This is unfortunate, and I’ll be honest. It seems dishonest. Imagine somebody invites you to play basketball, you train for it, you show up, and then they pull out a soccer ball and say, “Remember, if he uses his hands, he’s cheating.” Instead of just inviting me to debate him on the papacy, Jacob brought me to Utah on false pretext and lied to the audience, both about what we were debating and who had the burden of proof. Because the truth is, whatever you believe about the papacy, and that’s a doctrine I’ve defended elsewhere many times, the Mormon belief in the great apostasy is clearly false. It’s contrary both to scripture and to history. But to get there, we need to start with what the belief is and where it’s coming from. In 1832, the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, wrote his autobiography. And in it, he recounted how between the ages of 12 and 15, he realized from searching the scriptures that the various churches on earth had all apostasized from the true and living faith, and there was no society or denomination that was built upon the gospel of Jesus Christ as recorded in the New Testament.
Later at the age of 16, he describes praying again and the Lord opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord. So that’s the first version of events. Before he ever saw the Lord, Joseph had already become convinced of a great apostasy just from searching the scriptures somewhere between the ages of 12 and 15. A few years later, he tells a radically different story. Now it’s no longer searching the scriptures that convinces him of the great apostasy. Rather, that idea has never even crossed his mind until he has a heavenly vision, seemingly at the age of 16. And now he no longer just sees the Lord. He actually sees two personages, heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. Now, this is a version that Mormons consider inspired scripture. And in this version, Joseph asked heavenly father and Jesus, which of all the sex was right, for at this time it had never entered into my heart that all were wrong and which I should join.
And they are the ones who introduce him to the idea of the great apostacy, telling him that he’s to join none of them, for they were all wrong. And the person in who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight, that those professors were all corrupt. So whichever version of Joseph’s story you’re inclined towards, the moral of the story is the same. The Christian churches are all false. The professing Christians are all corrupt and the hearts of all Christians are far from God. Perhaps it’s unsurprising then that Mormon’s Christian neighbors quickly saw them not merely as one more Protestant denomination, but as a break with Christianity itself. As BYU’s Terrell Givens puts it, Mormons insist on the need for a gospel restoration, but then feel the sting of being excluded from the fold of Christiandom they have just dismissed as irredeemably apostate.
Whenever else it means, the great apostasy means that after the death of the apostles, priesthood authority, including the keys to direct and receive revelation for the church was taken from the earth. Here, the story again is a bit confusing. Some LDS publications claim that men corrupted the principles of the gospel and made unauthorized changes in church organization and priesthood ordinances, and that it was because of this widespread apostasy that the Lord withdrew the authority of the priesthood from the earth. But other LDS materials say that priesthood authority was taken away first, and because the church was no longer led by priesthood authority, error crept into church teachings. So I don’t know which it is. Did the loss of priesthood lead to doctrinal changes or did doctrinal changes lead to the loss of priesthood? The story’s a bit murky on the details. Now, some modern Mormons are going to downplay the differences between Mormonism and Christianity, or they’ll try to focus on areas of agreement, and that is precisely the approach Jacob took in our debate.
But the Mormon Church has urged the missionaries to instead focus on the great apostasy, since just as a diamond displayed on black velvet appears more brilliant, so the restoration stands in striking contrast to the dark background of the great apostasy. But while that’s the church’s official approach, that black and white telling of history simply isn’t true and Mormon scholars know that. BYU’s Miranda Wilcox, for instance, describes how this kind of binary logic of great apostasy and restoration became a self-evident tradition in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, even as academic historians challenged and largely rejected the assumptions underpinning its historical claims. And Jason Combs, a Mormon scripture scholar, writes in his book, Ancient Christians, an introduction for Latter Day Saints, the following. Historians today recognize that the synthesized humanist reformation narrative of a dark age of apostasy born in the 15th and 16th centuries is not supported by historical evidence.
And he warns that the narrative of widespread apostasy ignores evidence that good Christians continually served each other and worshiped God throughout the history of Christianity. I would go further and say the Mormon narrative ignores something else as well, that the Bible promises not only that there will always be good Christians, but that the church itself will never fall into apostasy. Remember, the Mormon claim isn’t just that some individuals went into apostasy or even that a lot of people did. It’s that the church fell into universal apostasy. And the details here are once again, strangely fuzzy, like when did this happen? The LDS manual doctrines of the gospel quotes James Talmage is saying it probably happened before the year 100, but it’s bizarre at such a cataclysmic event. The destruction of the church that Christ founded wouldn’t be more specific than that and wouldn’t even be mentioned in the Bible.
After all, prophets like Isaiah foretold how the Assyrians would conquer Samarian send the people into exile. Prophets like Jeremiah for told precisely about how the Babylonians would conquer Judea, destroy the temple, that people would be able to return after 70 years of exile. We can name these events historically to the year and how long they happened. Jesus himself foretold how the Romans would destroy the second temple, leaving not one stone upon another. In each of these cases, the prophecies are clear, they’re precise and they’re vindicated by history. Where is something comparable for the great apostasy? After all, the Bible calls the church the temple of a living God, and it’s a temple built both by and upon Jesus Christ. So why doesn’t Jesus or anyone give us some clear prophecy about how this temple is about to be destroyed by apostasy in the very near future?
Instead, Mormon sources, official Mormon sources, repeatedly point to one Old Testament passage in particular. This isn’t the only one that comes up, this is the most frequent that comes up. It’s Amos eight, verses 11 to 12. They highlight portions of this prophecy of MS8 talking about God sending a famine in the land of hearing the words of the Lord. But all the context is cut out. Amos isn’t talking about the church at all. He is explicitly speaking about the destruction of the northern kingdom. What we now call Samaria, what used to be called Israel. And the reason that there’s a famine of the word is that these northerners are unwilling to go south to the temple and Jerusalem where the true religion is still being practiced because it’s in the neighboring country of Judea. Instead, they wander from sea to sea, that means east to west and from north to east.
So again, notice as the Jewish scholar Shalom Paul puts it, the one place they’re not looking is south because the south is precisely where Judah is located. In this Southern prophet, most surely believes that therein Judah at least, one surely can find the words of the Lord. This is plainly then not a prediction about how one day Christians are going to fall into a universal apostasy and the priest is going to be taken from the church. Even in our debate, Jacob basically concedes this point. There are no biblical passages that point to a great apostasy in any clarity. And the ones Mormons often point to don’t really work, but it’s not just that scripture is silent. It’s that we actually have numerous promises ensuring us that the kingdom that Christ comes to establish will never fall away. Since we’re at the end of the season of Advent, let’s start with the promises made about the birth of Jesus.
When the angel Gabriel visits Mary, he announces that she’s to bear Jesus and that the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father, David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever and of his kingdom, there will be no end. Similarly, you’ve got the famous for unto us the child is born prophecy from Isaiah, which says that the government will be upon his shoulder and his name will be called wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting father, prince of peace. Of the reign of this newborn God king, Isaiah tells us that the increase of his government will know no end and that he will reign with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore. Now those promises do not appear consistent with his kingdom on earth having an end under a century later. Now it’s worth also listening to how Jesus describes his own kingdom.
In Matthew 13, for instance, he describes the kingdom as a field containing both wheat and weeds, which are going to grow together until the close of the age. He likens it to a mustard seed, the smallest of seeds, which is going to grow into the greatest of shrubs and he likens it to leavened bread rising. He notably doesn’t say weeds are about to destroy the field. The mustard seed is about to die out and need to be replanted 1700 years later. The bread’s going to fail to rise. There’s not a hint of any of that. Jesus his own promises actually seem to directly debunk the idea of his church ever falling into a universal apostasy. Famously, he tells Peter that on this rock, I’ll build my church and some translation said the powers of death, but it’s literally the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.
Now, some Mormons will say, “Well, this just means hell won’t win out in the end or death won’t win out in the end.” But the Greek word being used for prevail is the same one used in the Greek translation of Exodus 17:11, which we read that whenever Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed, and whenever he lowered his hand, Amalek prevailed. So if the church is wiped out for 1700 years, the gates of Hades prevailed in the sins the Bible uses that term. But this isn’t all that Jesus says either. When he sins his followers out on the great commission, he does so promising, “I’m with you always to the close of the age.” At the last supper, he promises to sin the Holy Spirit, he calls the Spirit of truth, to be with his church forever, to dwell in us, and he promises the Holy Spirit, the spirit of truth will teach us all things.
He goes on to promise that this spirit will guide you into all the truth. The New Testament depicts the church, not just as a group of disciples following after Jesus, but as people incorporated into Jesus spiritually. Paul declares the church Jesus’ body and bride describes even a one flesh union between Christ and the church, and he calls the church the fullness of him who fills all and all. None of that imagery is consistent with the universal apostasy. Sure, it’s possible for a member of the body to fall off. That’s personal apostasy. A cell can leave the body, but it’s not possible for the entire body to fall off unless you decapitate the body of Christ or sever what God has joined together between Christ and his church. There’s another problem with the apostasy theory, which is that it just runs counter to the entire story of the Old and New Testament.
People like to make fun of the writing in episode nine of Star Wars for notoriously bad bits of writing like this.
CLIP:
Somehow Palpatein returned.
Joe:
After spending several movies showing the rebels overcoming and killing Palpatein, were expected to just accept with no narrative explanation whatsoever that somehow offscreen Palpatine came back. I’ve got a similar reaction reading Mormon claims about the great apostasy. Throughout the Old Testament, there are these ebbs and flows, but God preserves a faithful remnant throughout. St. Paul points this out. You can take it for granted. Even when all hope seems lost, God always preserves his people. There is never a universal apostasy. And in the New Testament, we don’t just have a remnant. We actually have a mustard seed that grows into a mustard tree, and we get to watch that growth. The early Christians are incredibly effective at spreading Christianity. Now, to be sure, there are opponents, persecutions, and internal battles in the rest, but the overall picture, despite all this, is that the gospel is spreading rapidly.
And this is a picture we see not just on the pages of the New Testament, but amply demonstrated from other historical evidence marking the growth of Christianity in its first 300 years. St. Paul says it best when he tells the Colossians how the word of the truth, the gospel which has come to you as indeed in the whole world, it is bearing fruit and growing. And yet the Mormon belief is that during this time, the gospel actually isn’t bearing fruit and growing, but rather the faithlessness of Christians is causing them already to fall into total apostasy. According to the claims of Mormon leaders, the disobedience and loss of faith by the early Christians in this period of time is already so bad that the apostles died without the keys being passed on to successors. That is, the apostasy happens apparently in the very first generation.
Now think about that timeline for a minute. Acts 12 records James, the brother of John, being martyred around the year 44, and he’s not replaced with another apostle. So if they’re right, the apostasy is seemingly starting right now, about two decades before Paul ever writes to the Colossians about how well the church is doing. It’s already bad enough to take the New Testament picture of a growing church and then slap on an ending where you say, offscreen, a few years later, they all went into apostacy somehow in order to justify your needless sequel. But the Mormon claim is worse than that, is that the church is failing even while the apostles are saying that it’s not failing. But if the great apostacy were true, that would also mean that Christianity is false. In Acts five, Gamelie, St. Paul’s teacher, looks at false messianic movements. He looks at Thudius and Judas Galian, and he points out when those leaders died, their followers were dispersed, and that this proves it wasn’t really from God.
He gives us a simple test. If this plan or this undertaking is of men, it will fail, but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow it. And sure enough, when Muhammad dies, Muslims split immediately into Suni and Shiite. When Joseph Smith dies in 1844, Mormons immediately split into several different denominations, but we don’t see this happen to Christianity in the first century. The one visible church is actually a clear sign that this undertaking is of God rather than of men, and that you can’t overthrow it and you don’t need to restore it. But by claiming the opposite, Joseph Smith is able to present himself as superior to Jesus. And in fact, he says this himself. He boasts shortly before his death that he has more to boast of than any man, including Jesus because the followers of Jesus ran away from him, but the Latter-day Saints never ran away from me yet.
Now critical to this claim is the Mormon belief that while the great Apostacy happened to Jesus’s original church, that can never happen to the restored church of Jesus Christ. They claim that the scriptures teach that the church will never again be destroyed, and their basis for this claim is Daniel too, which happens to be my favorite passage for disproving the great apostasy. So in this passage, King Nebuchadnezzar has a dream of a statue that has a head of fine gold, it’s breast in arms or of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet, partly of iron and partly of clay. So these various materials represent four kingdoms, which will successively rule over Israel. The first one, of course, is Nebuchadnezzar’s own Babylonian empire. Next is imito Persian empire, which in Daniel eight is a two horned ram. Here it’s a chest with two arms.
The third kingdom is the Greek empire, which Daniel rightly foretells shall rule over all the earth, and that leaves a fourth kingdom. Now, we know from the rest of history that this fourth kingdom is the Roman empire. It is described as a kingdom of iron that will start to disintegrate into a mix of iron and clay since it shall be a divided kingdom. Some interpreters are going to try to invent a fifth kingdom, but Daniel is clear that it’s this fourth kingdom that starts out strong as iron, but which slowly becomes divided. In any case, what is it that he prophesies is going to happen during the time of this fourth kingdom, which we now know is the Roman Empire, that in the days of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed, nor shall it sovereignty be left to another people.
So we’re promised quite explicitly, this heavenly kingdom is never going to become a positive. It’s not going to fall away by those worldly empires fall away. Not only will it not be destroyed, its sovereignty, that is its authority won’t be left to anyone else. So you can’t just say, “Well, faithful Christians remain because the authority structure is part of the promise.” And the arrival of this heavenly kingdom is signified with the image of a rock uncut by human hands. Now that sounds like the kingdom of Christ built upon the foundation of Christ as a cornerstone. And the timing of course lines up perfectly since Jesus’ kingdom arrives in history during the Roman Empire, the fourth kingdom. And not only will his kingdom not be destroyed or is sovereignty left to another people, but in fact, this stone became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.
We’ll get back to that in a second. Mormons agree this is about an apostap seaproof church, but they say it’s not about the Roman empire at all. It’s about something that happens in the 1830s in the USA. Here’s what President Kimball had to say.
CLIP:
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints restored in 1830 after the numerous revelations from divine source and this kingdom set up by the God of heaven would never be destroyed and superseded and the stone cut out of the mountain without hands would become a great mountain and would fill the earth.
Joe:
So again, both sides actually agree. Daniel two is foretelling some kingdom that God is going to establish that will never apostatize. The question is just when Daniel two is fulfilled. I think it’s very clear from the biblical context that he’s foretelling the incarnation of Jesus Christ and the establishment of his church in the first century, while Israel’s still under Roman occupation. Trying to turn this as Mormons do into a prophecy about 1830s America just makes zero sense because number one, America never occupied Israel. Number two, America’s not a kingdom. And number three, there’s just no coherent connection between the kingdoms of Babylon, Meadow Persia, Greece, and the US of A. Rather, Daniel two is clearly foretelling Christ and the early Christians realizes, and it’s foretelling how his church is going to be Catholic in the sense that it’s going to make disciples of all nations and it’s going to fill the whole earth.
This Catholic church will never be destroyed. Its sovereignty will never be left to another, and that’s precisely why we don’t believe in anything like a great apostasy. If you want more on this, I’d encourage you to check out my debate with Jacob Hansom which you can find right here over at Capturing Christianity’s channel and no episode, of course, this Thursday on account of it being Christmas. So have a Merry Christmas. I will see you all again a week from now. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.