A great apostasy made restoration necessary

Read each warning with the verses around it.

In Acts 20, Paul warns the Ephesian elders that “grievous wolves” will come and that “of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things” (20:29-30). Then he gives them what they need to resist: “I commend you to God, and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up” (20:32). The warning assumes the word stays with them.

In 2 Timothy 4, people “turn away their ears from the truth” (4:4). Paul’s charge to Timothy, in the same letter, is to “Hold fast the form of sound words, which thou hast heard of me” and to keep “that good thing which was committed unto thee” (2 Timothy 1:13-14). Some will turn away, but the truth they turn from is still there to be kept.

In 2 Thessalonians 2, the “falling away” comes together with the “man of sin” before “the day of Christ” (2:2-3), at the end of history. Paul’s instruction in the same chapter is “stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle” (2:15).

Amos 8 is addressed to “my people of Israel” in Amos’s own day (Amos 8:2), the northern kingdom in the eighth century before Christ. It describes a judgment on that people.

None of these passages says the gospel or the church would be taken from the earth. Each one tells believers to hold on to what the apostles gave them.

Jesus made promises about his church that are hard to fit with a total apostasy. “Upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18). “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20).

You may have learned to read Matthew 16:18 as saying the church would be taken away but not finally defeated, because it would be restored. That reading tries to honor the verse. Paul’s words in Ephesians are harder to read that way: “Unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end” (Ephesians 3:21). Paul does not leave room for seventeen centuries in which there was no church to give him glory.

Jude adds that the faith “was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3). The word “once” here means once for all: a faith handed over complete, to be guarded and contended for. Jude does not tell his readers to expect it to be lost and given again.

If the gospel disappeared, there should be a point where it stops appearing in the record. There is no such point. A Roman governor, Pliny the Younger, reported to the emperor around AD 112 that Christians met to sing hymns “to Christ as to a god.” Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, wrote letters around AD 110 confessing Jesus Christ as God. Irenaeus of Lyons, writing around AD 180, defended the four Gospels as the church’s settled witness to Jesus. Papyrus copies of Luke and John from the early third century survive, and so does a complete New Testament from the fourth.

The New Testament you read, the one the Church publishes and quotes in every lesson, came to you through those centuries. Christians whom the Restoration describes as apostate copied it, translated it, read it aloud in worship, and passed it on. The apostles’ gospel was written down, and the written record was never lost. That is how, in the sixteenth century, the Reformers could appeal back to the apostles, and how in 1820 a boy in New York could read James 1:5.

Apostasy was already a problem in Galatia while Paul was alive. He did not tell them to wait for a new revelation. He called the churches back to the gospel they had already received: “though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8). Here “gospel” means the message of who Jesus is and how he saves.

That test works in every century. Where churches drifted, the remedy was to go back to the apostles’ words, and those words were still there to go back to. The same test applies to the creeds Joseph Smith was told were “an abomination,” and it applies equally to the Restoration. Some of the Restoration’s teachings agree with the New Testament. Others are new: that God was once a man, that faithful people may become gods, and that the highest glory depends on temple sealing. Those cannot be the apostles’ gospel restored, because the apostles’ gospel survives, and it does not contain them. You can read more at God was once a man and the Bible lost plain and precious truths.

The Church also teaches that priesthood authority was lost. That is a separate claim, taken up in priesthood authority was restored.