One of the biggest “red pills” behind my conversion was realizing that the vast majority of Protestants (including myself) had virtually the same theology of history as the Latter-day Saints church (the Mormons), and we didn’t even realize it. I found the consequences of this to be extremely disturbing.
The LDS church teaches that after the death of the last apostle, the authority of the priesthood and the keys was lost. As a result, Christians fell into deeper and deeper error, and the true faith was lost. They call this the “Great Apostasy.”
Many Protestants—often prevented from realizing it by historical ignorance—believe basically the same thing. This was one of the most sobering conclusions I came to in my final days as a Protestant, and it helped lead to my conversion.
Here’s why.
To have any religion whatsoever, you must, at minimum, have three doctrines:
- How you join the religion (initiation)
- How the members of the religion govern themselves, who has authority, etc. (government)
- How the religion worships whatever deity/deities it acknowledges
Without these three, it’s arguably impossible to claim you even have a religion.
On these three matters, the Church Fathers—the Christian leaders of whom we have any record from the earliest days of the Church through roughly the first millennium—are UNANIMOUS.
They UNANIMOUSLY believed in:
- baptismal regeneration (how we become Christians),
- apostolic succession (how the Church is governed), and
- the sacrifice of the Eucharist (how Christians worship).
Giving as much credit as possible, Anglicans and (some) Lutherans are the two biggest sects who believe in items one AND two. However, even if we say ALL of them believed in both (which is not true), together, they constitute only about twenty percent of worldwide Protestantism.
All Protestants reject item three (some Anglicans and Lutherans will quibble with this, but that’s for another article).
Thus, the vast majority of Protestants reject all three of these fundamental Christian doctrines upon which the ancient Church was unanimous and which are absolutely essential to having a religion of any kind whatsoever.
That means the vast majority of Protestants (including myself at one time) must necessarily believe—whether they realize it or not—that from the very first generation after the apostles forward, all Christians got it wrong on how we become Christians, how the Church is governed, and how Christians worship. In other words, they must believe that Christians got the essence of their religion wrong, that it got worse and worse through time, and that this began right after the death of the last apostle, since every Church Father of which we have any record is squarely opposed to Protestantism on these three fundamental doctrines.
While these Protestants do not claim to believe this is what happened, this is nonetheless the necessary conclusion if their doctrines are true, making their theology of history virtually identical with that of the LDS Church.
This is absurd for various reasons, but here is where it gets very disturbing.
If this is true—that the fundamentals of Christianity were essentially lost from the first post-Apostolic generation, but have been available in one form or another for the 500 years since the Reformation—then this conclusion necessarily follows: what God in the flesh established in the first century was weaker than what men like Luther, Calvin, and others re-established in the sixteenth century.
I made the same objection to Mormon missionaries who visited me for several weeks. “If your religion is true,” I said, “then what Christ himself established was weaker than what Joseph Smith re-established.”
As disturbing as I found this conclusion about the nature of my own Protestantism, it was nonetheless true in light of the facts of history.
I realized I had been deceived by a religious system that had surreptitiously claimed to achieve something greater than even the apostles.
I explore this subject in greater detail in this article.