One particularly (in my opinion) credulous meme in the Mormon Church is that the time, place, and manner in which the Church was restored was the only way God could have done it. Now granted, Mormon God is not fully omnipotent in the definitional sense (even though the missionaries teach that he is), but seriously, it seems pretty clear to me that if God needed to do the Restoration, he could have done it anywhere he wanted. Europe handled the Reformation, and Protestantism is going strong today. Europe could have also handled the Restoration, assuming such a thing needed to happen at all.
In my last post, I talked about the problems with the doctrine of the Great Apostasy. I want to now deal with a couple more. Primarily, if some regeneration did need to happen, why didn’t God do it within his Church, like he appears to have done at very other time throughout Mormon scriptural history? Why wasn’t Joseph Smith a Roman Catholic (or Eastern Orthodox!) priest who God raised up to be His Pope and restore all that was lost? Unless the Catholic Church wasn’t God’s church, but that could only be the case if True Christians were actually wiped out and replaced by impostors at some point. Gradual corruption never made God totally abandon his Church and start over again in the scriptures, so why would this be the one weird exception?
Because God couldn’t have done so? Poppycock. At best, God didn’t want to. Mysterious ways and all that, but to me that’s really a cop-out. The whole business is one more counterintuitive thing that has to be accepted on faith, or based on an extremely subtle “whispering of the spirit” that is absolutely indistinguishable from the rublmings in my stomach due to not having eaten breakfast yet.
And don’t even get me started on why God waited like 1800 years to restore the truth. That’s nonsense. The bit about how that’s when the time was right is also nonsense. Even if God had to do the whole Restoration thing the way he supposedly has done it according to Mormonism, there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t have persevered despite the persecution just like all kinds of other heretical movements throughout Christianity have done.
And seriously, this is God. He can preserve his people from their enemies, right! Didn’t he have an angel kill like 180,000 people in the Bible once to preserve the Israelites? Sigh.
Note- I have also added this post to my Sailing Away From Mormonism page.
Sailing to Byzantium 
As you might imagine, I’d respectfully disagree.
Of course! But I’m interested to hear your reasons why. Beyond the generic strawman answers that I’ve already set up and knocked down. 😉
God clearly is an American, so the Restoration had to wait until after the United States came into being.
I’m pretty much a left-brain person. I like order and I like things to make sense. So it’s kind of ironic that I have deep personal religious beliefs, because (like most religious beliefs) they don’t always make sense. Oh, they do sometimes. It’s good to love other people and it’s probably beneficial to treat everyone kindly. But what about some of the more seemingly arbitrary tenets of faith? I think that’s what you’re saying, Kullervo, and I have a certain amount of empathy for that perspective.
I personally have concluded that not everything has to make sense to me in order for me to believe it. Religion, after all, is about the supernatural, and faith is about the unseen and the untestable. I’m not always entirely satisfied with how I perceive certain doctrine, but I’m also open to the possibility of explanations or rationales that I don’t know and may never know. For a control freak, this is kinda tough, but I’m learning to live with it. To be honest, I think it helps me be a better person, less of a control freak, and more understanding to other things I don’t understand.
So about the doctrine of the apostasy: I don’t know definitively why God chose to restore gospel truths when He did, or in the way He did. Why America? Why the 1800’s? Why not from within an existing church? I have some good guesses, but I have to concede that there may be many reasons I don’t understand. And if you’ll pardon me saying, I think declaring such principles “nonsense” is equally nonsensical. I realize you don’t find the common rationales very convincing, but if you accept the existence of a Supreme Being, isn’t it more absurd to dictate what or why He can or cannot do? This may go back to your more fundamental question of the existence of Deity, but to my mind, the Apostasy and Restoration are no less true because they don’t conform to our expected method timeline.
I actually have some ideas as to why the Restoration happened when and how it did, but I thought the more pertinent question was whether we accept reasons we can’t explain. Maybe I’ll post some of those ideas later, if you like, but my lunch break is about over. 🙂
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think the Restoration is inconsistent. It’s unique, even in Mormon theology and interpretation of scripture.
My talk about nonsense mostly is confined to the typical LDS rationale of why “then and there.” I’ve heard my whole life things like “God had ot wait for a country with Religious freedom, and for the Reformation to have happened, etc.” And I don;t buy that. All God needed, from the Mormon perspective, was a boy willing to pray open-mindedly. In other words, the element of free will. The rest is plainly in God’s power- he is capable of preserving his people under virtually any circumstances via both natural and supernatural means, as he demonstrated in the Old Testament, Book of Mormon, and latter-day church over and over again. So to say that God had to restore the Church in upstate NY in 1820 is what I call nonsense. Those kinds of rationalizations seem to smack of serious confirmation bias to me.
I definitely agree that the Restoration is a singular event in Mormon theology, but it isn’t entirely unique. I’ve also noticed a cyclical apostasy/restoration pattern in scriptures. Obviously it’s a part of Book of Mormon history, but much of the Old Testament deals with cycles of faithfulness and apostasy, usually in the form of the worship of false gods. One example that I can remember off the top of my head is King Josiah of Judah. He destroyed idolatry in Judah and during his reign they found the Book of the Law, which apparently had been lost. Apparently they hadn’t even known what to teach for a few generations. So the Restoration may not be as unique as we think.
As for why it was more important or why it was then and there, I can think of a few reasons, but they’re not the final word. It seems to be important that there will never be a falling away again after the Restoration until the Second Coming. I don’t think there is any one authoritative explanation for the exact ~1800-year period of Apostasy. Most other periods of apostasy were shorter, on the order of years or decades. But it doesn’t strike me as impermissibly different. There are enough singular events in Christian theology (the Fall, the Flood, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, etc.) to show that not all events have to be part of some pattern. There may even be distinct reasons for why the General Apostasy lasted so long, such as the fact that this Apostasy happened after the Coming of Christ. I don’t know. I just think that the Restoration can be wholly consistent with LDS and general Christian theology, despite its singular nature.
I am in complete agreement with your assessment of “nonsense” with respect to popular wisdom rationales behind the why and when of the Restoration. I find many of them to be very Ameri-centrist views, essentially lauding the U.S. for being such a great nation. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice country, but it’s not so great that Deity relies on it. Both you and I have lived outside the U.S., and while living abroad I rarely if ever heard those ideas expressed. I think that viewpoint is probably more a symptom of American egos than actual theology. God didn’t have to restore the Church the way He did. But he chose to do it that way, and that’s enough to know. Attempting to attribute motives to a Supreme Being is probably an exercise in futility.
Thanks for the post, by the way. It’s been kinda fun to think some of this stuff through.
The point I am trying to make, however, is that although there have been many cycles of apostasy and “restoration,” most all of them have been done within the framework of God’s people/kingdom, not by simply scrapping the entire apostate system and starting anew somewhere else.
Even the advent of Christianity began as a movement within Judaism. Jesus certainly gave the establishment a chance to change from within, even though it was essentially futile. Furthermore, Jesus as a descendant of David by two different lines and who would have arguably been a royal heir under different circumstances was in a particular position to speak with authority within the system of corrupt Judaism.
Even setting that aside (or taking into consideration the fact that ultimately Christianity went ot the Gentiles), then the establishment of Christianity is the only other “forged anew” return from apostasy that we see in the scriptures. I have a problem with the Restoration being on a conceptual par with, or even more extreme than, the effects of the life and mission of Jesus Christ.
And it still leaves open the (in my opinion) too-hastily dismissed question of priesthood authority in the Catholic churches that can demonstrate apostolic succession.
And by the way, I always appreciate your input. I appreciate most anyones’ input, but I really am always happy to hear a well-reasoned dissenting opinion. Especially since i’m really trying to figure all of this stuff out for myself anyway. I may not agree with your conclusions, but I not only respect but am interested in hearing and thinking about your reasons for arriving at them.
PS, did you go back and read my other post on the Apostasy?
Yeah, sorry, I saw it after the fact. I realize now part of my response overlaps into that post, so I’ll probably respond there too. I have trouble keeping up with your posts sometimes!
I’ll talk about priesthood authority over there, but just to sum up my position on the Apostasy/Restoration, I do not see the lack of precedent as an invalidating trait of the Apostasy. I just don’t think everything needs to have happened before in order for it to be true.
However, I’m with you on at least one thing: the Restoration is not an event equal to the life, ministry, and atonement of Jesus Christ. The Restoration, as Mormons understand it, is enormously significant. It certainly has affected tens of millions of people. But it just can’t compare to the central event in Christianity. The Restoration is only important because it taught about Jesus, not because it rivaled His work in importance. I think that, if asked to clarify, most Mormons would agree.