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Early Christians in Disarray: Contemporary LDS Perspectives on the Christian Apostasy
This book takes a fresh look at the apostasy of the early Christian church. Most Latter-day Saint scholars and leaders previously based their understanding of the Christian apostasy on the findings of Protestant scholars who provided a seemingly endless array of evidences of apostasy in Christian history.
Since the classic treatments of this topic were written, many newly discovered manuscripts written during the first Christian centuries have come to light, giving a clearer picture of what the early Christian experience was like. Drawing on this material, LDS scholars today are able to shift the focus of study to the causes of the apostasy rather than the effects.
This volume of essays reports new research by several LDS scholars in different fields. They identify common myths and misconceptions about the apostasy and promote better understanding of when and why the apostasy occurred.
Since the classic treatments of this topic were written, many newly discovered manuscripts written during the first Christian centuries have come to light, giving a clearer picture of what the early Christian experience was like. Drawing on this material, LDS scholars today are able to shift the focus of study to the causes of the apostasy rather than the effects.
This volume of essays reports new research by several LDS scholars in different fields. They identify common myths and misconceptions about the apostasy and promote better understanding of when and why the apostasy occurred.
397 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
3 people are currently reading
56 people want to read
About the author
Noel B. Reynolds
29 books2 followersNoel B. Reynolds is a professor emeritus of political science of Brigham Young University. He grew up in Cody, Wyoming, and served as a missionary for the LDS Church in Uruguay and Argentina from 1961 to 1964. Reynolds received his MA and PhD from Harvard University. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, Edinburgh University, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Reynolds was one of the editors of the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, published in 1992 by Macmillan. Reynolds has published books and articles in several fields, including legal and political philosophy, American founding, authorship studies, ancient studies and Dead Sea Scrolls, and Mormon studies. Among other callings in the LDS Church, Reynolds has served as president of the Mount Timpanogos Utah Temple and as a bishop and stake president. From 2005 to 2008, Reynolds was the president of the Florida Fort Lauderdale Mission. Reynolds is married to the former Sydney Sharon Smith. They are the parents of eleven children.
from https://rsc.byu.edu/authors/reynolds-...
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_B....
from https://rsc.byu.edu/authors/reynolds-...
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_B....
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
February 7, 2022
This is an incredibly niche topic, so feel free to skip this review altogether.
As the title says, this book is a FARMS collection of papers detailing research into the Great Apostasy as understood by LDS scholars. Modern researchers have new information and new perspectives compared to the early research done by people like Talmage and Nibley and Brown.
The writing is very academic, full of annotations and footnotes. But overall it was pretty interesting.
Early LDS scholars believed that the Apostasy was not just spiritual but intellectual and moral as well, that there were no developments or new ideas until the Renaissance. Newer research shows the Enlightenment and Renaissance were more gradual, however, and people were influenced by the Holy Ghost even during the Dark Ages.
Early scholars also based their research on contemporary Protestant scholars, who naturally had an anti-Catholic bias (as Catholics don’t have the Apostasy in their doctrine), which led to the anti-Catholic sentiment common among Latter-day Saints in the first hundred years or so of the Restoration.
The research details how the Apostasy was (and is) caused by the Christians themselves, not outside forces. Early Christians abandoned or broke covenants, lost priesthood authority, and stopped following the commandments. This happened much earlier than previously thought. Greek philosophy influenced Christianity a lot and tried to unite the many factions that had sprung up by then. It altered doctrines, but by then Christians were complicit.
The book goes into known corruption of scripture; one paper focuses on how the doctrine of God having a physical body changed over time. Through it all, Christians had many questions and many different answers, which, if nothing else, demonstrates the dire need for continual revelation.
============================
A bright thread running through the various ways of understanding apostasy in the New Testament is that inherited from the Old Testament: to apostatize is to refuse to be in covenant with God. This refusal of covenant is, at the same time, a refuse of the priesthood service in which the covenant is enacted, as well as a refusal to understand that the purity necessary for priesthood service comes not by obedience to the law (in other words, not from us), but by the Holy Spirit (in other words, from God). With the problem of schism in the church and the need to explain Christianity to Greeks and Jews in times of pending and actual persecution, Christians gradually moved away from the biblical understanding of apostasy as the rejection of covenant and focused instead on apostasy as false belief. Belief rather than covenant manifest in obedience and priesthood service became central. In spite of that understandable shift in emphasis and understanding, it is a change from the New Testament’s understanding. We cannot understand that it included the loss of the temple and, so, of the priesthood, for ultimately the rebellion of apostasy involves severing one’s covenant relation to God, a relation manifest through the priesthood, through standing in the presence of God.
In the early second century, things were not going well for the increasingly divided Christians. The return of Christ was delayed. The generation of apostles and other eyewitnesses died. Then the disciples of that first generation died. No one had clear authority to speak for God. Christians in many areas experienced various forms of discrimination and even violent opposition or persecution. Entrepreneurial opportunists lured segments of the Christian community away to novel doctrines and practices. In the hope of persuading Roman elites to treat them with greater tolerance, Christian apologists wrote epistles and treatises arguing that the Platonized Stoicism of the times was not significantly different from the essential beliefs and practices of Christians. By the end of the second century, a few Christian thinkers were already turning to philosophy and adopting its rationalist strategy to stabilize and clarify their own tradition. And by the early fourth century, the marriage of Greek philosophy and Christianity was irreversible.
A few generations ago the medieval centuries of European history were widely regarded as “The Dark Ages.” Western man was thought to have dropped into a deep slumber at the fall of the Western Roman Empire in A.D. 476, awakening at length, like Rip Van Winkle, in the bright dawn of the Italian Renaissance. ... It was … a millennium of darkness—a thousand years without a bath. Today this ungenerous point of view stands discredited, although it persists among the half-educated. Several generations of rigorous historical scholarship have demonstrated clearly that the medieval period was an epoch of immense vitality and profound creativity. The age that produced Thomas Aquinas and Dante, Notre Dame de Paris and Chartres, Parliament and the university, can hardly be described as “dark” or “barbaric.” ( C. Warren Hollister)
Any number of things can lead someone into apostasy. ... But these cannot be understood apart from also understanding apostasy as rejecting the requirement that we stand before God in priesthood service. This distinguishes Christianity as a religion from what we might describe as a merely Christian ethos. One could live according to the principles of Christianity, its law, if you will, without believing in God. In principle, one could even live according to those principles and believe in God and have one’s mind attuned to spiritual things without being a Christian. In other words, one can be ethical or even spiritual without being godly—without being covenanted. In the end, however, the Father requires godliness of us, not merely ethics and not only spirituality. To be ungodly is not to be apostate; insofar as we remain human we are, in a certain sense, ungodly. To reject godliness and its requirements is to be apostate.
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As the title says, this book is a FARMS collection of papers detailing research into the Great Apostasy as understood by LDS scholars. Modern researchers have new information and new perspectives compared to the early research done by people like Talmage and Nibley and Brown.
The writing is very academic, full of annotations and footnotes. But overall it was pretty interesting.
Early LDS scholars believed that the Apostasy was not just spiritual but intellectual and moral as well, that there were no developments or new ideas until the Renaissance. Newer research shows the Enlightenment and Renaissance were more gradual, however, and people were influenced by the Holy Ghost even during the Dark Ages.
Early scholars also based their research on contemporary Protestant scholars, who naturally had an anti-Catholic bias (as Catholics don’t have the Apostasy in their doctrine), which led to the anti-Catholic sentiment common among Latter-day Saints in the first hundred years or so of the Restoration.
The research details how the Apostasy was (and is) caused by the Christians themselves, not outside forces. Early Christians abandoned or broke covenants, lost priesthood authority, and stopped following the commandments. This happened much earlier than previously thought. Greek philosophy influenced Christianity a lot and tried to unite the many factions that had sprung up by then. It altered doctrines, but by then Christians were complicit.
The book goes into known corruption of scripture; one paper focuses on how the doctrine of God having a physical body changed over time. Through it all, Christians had many questions and many different answers, which, if nothing else, demonstrates the dire need for continual revelation.
============================
A bright thread running through the various ways of understanding apostasy in the New Testament is that inherited from the Old Testament: to apostatize is to refuse to be in covenant with God. This refusal of covenant is, at the same time, a refuse of the priesthood service in which the covenant is enacted, as well as a refusal to understand that the purity necessary for priesthood service comes not by obedience to the law (in other words, not from us), but by the Holy Spirit (in other words, from God). With the problem of schism in the church and the need to explain Christianity to Greeks and Jews in times of pending and actual persecution, Christians gradually moved away from the biblical understanding of apostasy as the rejection of covenant and focused instead on apostasy as false belief. Belief rather than covenant manifest in obedience and priesthood service became central. In spite of that understandable shift in emphasis and understanding, it is a change from the New Testament’s understanding. We cannot understand that it included the loss of the temple and, so, of the priesthood, for ultimately the rebellion of apostasy involves severing one’s covenant relation to God, a relation manifest through the priesthood, through standing in the presence of God.
In the early second century, things were not going well for the increasingly divided Christians. The return of Christ was delayed. The generation of apostles and other eyewitnesses died. Then the disciples of that first generation died. No one had clear authority to speak for God. Christians in many areas experienced various forms of discrimination and even violent opposition or persecution. Entrepreneurial opportunists lured segments of the Christian community away to novel doctrines and practices. In the hope of persuading Roman elites to treat them with greater tolerance, Christian apologists wrote epistles and treatises arguing that the Platonized Stoicism of the times was not significantly different from the essential beliefs and practices of Christians. By the end of the second century, a few Christian thinkers were already turning to philosophy and adopting its rationalist strategy to stabilize and clarify their own tradition. And by the early fourth century, the marriage of Greek philosophy and Christianity was irreversible.
A few generations ago the medieval centuries of European history were widely regarded as “The Dark Ages.” Western man was thought to have dropped into a deep slumber at the fall of the Western Roman Empire in A.D. 476, awakening at length, like Rip Van Winkle, in the bright dawn of the Italian Renaissance. ... It was … a millennium of darkness—a thousand years without a bath. Today this ungenerous point of view stands discredited, although it persists among the half-educated. Several generations of rigorous historical scholarship have demonstrated clearly that the medieval period was an epoch of immense vitality and profound creativity. The age that produced Thomas Aquinas and Dante, Notre Dame de Paris and Chartres, Parliament and the university, can hardly be described as “dark” or “barbaric.” ( C. Warren Hollister)
Any number of things can lead someone into apostasy. ... But these cannot be understood apart from also understanding apostasy as rejecting the requirement that we stand before God in priesthood service. This distinguishes Christianity as a religion from what we might describe as a merely Christian ethos. One could live according to the principles of Christianity, its law, if you will, without believing in God. In principle, one could even live according to those principles and believe in God and have one’s mind attuned to spiritual things without being a Christian. In other words, one can be ethical or even spiritual without being godly—without being covenanted. In the end, however, the Father requires godliness of us, not merely ethics and not only spirituality. To be ungodly is not to be apostate; insofar as we remain human we are, in a certain sense, ungodly. To reject godliness and its requirements is to be apostate.
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January 7, 2008
series of articles focused on deconstructing mormon views of apostasy. identifies 19th century bias in the works of roberts, talmage, etc thru to mcconkie, resulting in unwitting, if not malicious, prejudice toward traditional christianity. partial read to which i'm quite partial.
Read
July 4, 2023Historical essays.
June 9, 2008
The reactionary undertone of this collection is a little bit strong for me. I won't assign an infallible status to the historiography of Roberts, Talmage, and Smith, but I little appreciated the early-on slam of Joseph Fielding Smith in light of reverence for B.H. Roberts (p. 375 even cites President Smith's dependency upon Roberts, a laughable notion)...may as well move them down a notch equally.
The reassessment of our views on the Apostasy is admittedly necessary. I particularly enjoyed Welch's essay, along with Paulsen and Reynolds (239 forward). The appendices are a rather invaluable addition.
I'd probably rate this at 3.75. The viewpoints are not of a piece, so criticism and praise must be handed out discriminately. Nonetheless, while it's harsh and still slightly subjective, it is also professional, thoughtful, incisive, and thorough in its use of primary sources and critique of secondary ones.
The reassessment of our views on the Apostasy is admittedly necessary. I particularly enjoyed Welch's essay, along with Paulsen and Reynolds (239 forward). The appendices are a rather invaluable addition.
I'd probably rate this at 3.75. The viewpoints are not of a piece, so criticism and praise must be handed out discriminately. Nonetheless, while it's harsh and still slightly subjective, it is also professional, thoughtful, incisive, and thorough in its use of primary sources and critique of secondary ones.
October 27, 2011
This book by a number of LDS scholars is an overview of LDS research done about Christian history after the death of the apostles. Some is tedious and familiar but it was exciting to me to read that the consensus of historians (not just LDS) is that 'Dark Ages' is wrong. "The one conclusion that everyone can agree to is the great complexity of high medieval culture, society, government, law, economy and religion." (Norman Cantor p. 59) Eric R. Dursteler writes that LDS historians have wrongly categorized this period as a time when the Heavens were shut. This is wrong and it is time for historians to research and correct the record. It is a good outline of all that happened to change the Bible, doctrine, ordinances and causes and effects of the apostasy.
November 13, 2008
I really enjoyed this book. It's not a page-turner, but taught me a lot about what happened to Christianity between the death of the apostles and now - both what's been believed and what is now believed. I particularly enjoyed the chapters on the hellenization of Christianity and the loss of covenant in Christian thought. I will come back to this book again and again I am sure, and would like to find more books like it.
March 1, 2008
I pray this is indicative of where FARMS scholarship is headed!
March 8, 2016
Good commentary of the early church after Christ's death. Interesting information.
April 1, 2016
This book was very technical and sometimes kind of deep but I really enjoyed it. I really learned a lot of interesting facts. I understand the Apostasy much better now.
Read
September 29, 2016Miranda Wilcox's Standing Apart is better, but this volume was a decent stepping stone to get us to the point where she could do the work she did.
April 7, 2009
Changed my view of the Apostasy.
Read
September 10, 2017I don't feel like it would be fair to try to give this book a rating since I felt like I was out of my depth for so much of it. But this collection of articles about early Christianity and the obstacles the Church faced in the 1st through 4th or 5th centuries was quite informative and gave me a new perspective about the Apostasy and why we worship as we do now.
Want to read
November 12, 2017Referenced in the lds Essay on "are Mormons Christian?"
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews