Are We Superior to the Early Christians?

The Argument for the Great Apostasy

If the early Church was the Catholic Church, why can’t we say that Christians just lost their way early on? That’s the argument many Mormon and Protestant theologians make. In Mormon theology, this idea is expressed in terms of a Great Apostasy that followed the death of the apostles:

Following the death of Jesus Christ, wicked people persecuted and killed many Church members. Other Church members drifted from the principles taught by Jesus Christ and his apostles. The apostles were killed, and priesthood authority—including the keys to direct and receive revelation for the Church—was taken from the earth. Because the Church was no longer led by priesthood authority, error crept into Church teachings. Good people and much truth remained, but the gospel as established by Jesus Christ was lost. This period is called the Great Apostasy.

My point here isn’t exclusively about Mormonism. Many Protestants, including theologians and Church historians, settle for a version of Church history that sounds more like Mormonism than Christianity.

Jean Daillé’s Protestant View on Church History

The seventeenth-century Protestant preacher Jean Daillé wrote an entire book on how to approach the “Church Fathers” in deciding religious controversies. In it, he argues:

Now according to this hypothesis, which, as I conceive, is equally common to all Protestants, the doctrine of the Church must necessarily have suffered some alteration in the second age of Christianity, by admitting the mixture of some new matter into its faith and discipline: and so likewise in the third age some other corruption must necessarily have crept in: and so in the fourth, fifth, and the rest that follow; the Christian religion continually losing something of its original purity and simplicity, and on the other side still contracting all along some new impurities, till at length it came to the highest degree of corruption.

In other words, the standard Protestant narrative is basically the same as the Mormon narrative: Jesus built the Church, but it fell apart almost immediately. What’s more, this theological erosion “must necessarily” have occurred, because the second generation of Christians simply could not be counted on to faithfully preserve what their parents taught them, even though their parents were taught directly by the apostles. This story is a tragedy, and its logical conclusion is a complete loss of faith in Christianity. For if the second generation of Christians couldn’t figure out the gospel, and the third generation was worse, and Daillé is writing some sixteen hundred years later, what hope could he (or we) possibly have of knowing what Christ really taught?

The Reformation and Protestant Restoration

But there's a second part of the story, beginning with the Reformation, in which Protestants “have now at last, by the guidance of the Scriptures,” restored the Church “to the self-same state wherein it was at the beginning; and have, as it were, fixed again upon its true and proper hinge.” For some reason, it’s not the case that the second generation of Protestants “must necessarily” have fallen farther from the truth than the original Reformers in the same way that the second generation of Christians allegedly fell from the truth of Christ.

Daillé explains that this is because, unlike early Christianity, Protestant “doctrine is the very same that was in the time of the apostles, as being taken immediately out of their books.” By this reasoning, all that the Christians of the second century needed to avoid the “progress of corruption” was to ignore what they had learned about the apostles from their elders (those who had learned from the apostles in person) and rely only upon the information that could be found in books.

Of course, Protestantism isn’t really “taken immediately out of” the Bible, which is why serious Protestants read biblical commentaries and works of spirituality and theology and try to educate themselves beyond their own best guesses about what the biblical texts mean. No one, including the Reformers, ever arrived at a full-fledged Protestant theology simply by picking up a Bible to read by himself. If you could arrive at a complete and orthodox faith that way, how did it take Christians fifteen hundred years to realize this?

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Learn more about this topic: 20 Answers: The Early Church