The Great Apostasy and the Restoration

Reform movements usually argue that a church has gone wrong. The Latter-day Saint claim is stronger and different in kind: that after the death of the New Testament apostles the authority to act for God was withdrawn from the earth altogether, and that no institution retained it. This is what the movement means by the Great Apostasy, and it is not a claim about corruption, doctrine or morals in the first instance. It is a claim about priesthood keys.

The consequence is immediate and unavoidable. If no valid authority existed, then no baptism performed between the second century and 1829 was valid, no ordination conferred anything, and the sacraments of every intervening church were sincere but empty. That is why Latter-day Saint practice rebaptises every convert, including a lifelong Catholic, an Orthodox priest or a Baptist minister, and it is the single position that other Christian bodies find hardest to accommodate. The Catholic Church, which recognises the baptisms of most Protestant denominations, declined in 2001 to recognise Latter-day Saint baptism, and most Protestant bodies take the same view.

Latter-day Saints read the New Testament itself as anticipating the apostasy, citing Paul's warning to the Thessalonians of a falling away, Amos on a famine of hearing the word, and Acts on the restitution of all things. Historians outside the movement do not find a moment at which authority can be said to have lapsed, and treat the doctrine as a nineteenth century reading of the early church rather than as a finding about it. The disagreement is genuine, it is old, and neither side has moved.

The restoration is described in the movement's own sources as a sequence of specific events, in specific places, with dates. It begins with what Latter-day Saints call the First Vision, which Joseph Smith reported as an appearance of God the Father and Jesus Christ in a grove of trees near his family's farm in Palmyra, New York, in the spring of 1820. He first wrote an account of it in 1832 and gave several more over the following decade; the differences between those accounts, in emphasis and in what is described, are a matter of real scholarly discussion and the church has published its own essay acknowledging them.

The conferral of authority is placed later and is described as physical. Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery said that on 15 May 1829, near Harmony, Pennsylvania, John the Baptist appeared to them as a resurrected being and conferred the Aaronic priesthood by the laying on of hands; that Peter, James and John afterward conferred the Melchizedek priesthood; and that in the Kirtland Temple on 3 April 1836 Moses, Elias and Elijah delivered further keys, Elijah's being the sealing authority on which the temple ordinances depend. Those events are the warrant for everything the church now does, which is why they are recited in ordination lines and taught in the first months of a convert's membership.

The atlas records what the movement claims and the dates it gives, and does not adjudicate the claims. What is not in dispute is that the sequence, as told, is the constitutional history of a church of about seventeen million people.