{"id":46967,"date":"2015-05-12T07:00:41","date_gmt":"2015-05-12T14:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/?p=46967"},"modified":"2015-05-12T08:39:48","modified_gmt":"2015-05-12T15:39:48","slug":"apostasy-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/2015\/05\/12\/apostasy-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"Great Apostasy Questions"},"content":{"rendered":"

A while back, I produced a post in which I listed some Canon Questions<\/a>, some specific questions I ask when talking to non-Catholics about the Table of Contents found in their Bible. Following my post concerning my recent encounter with a Jehovah’s Witness<\/a>, I’ve decided to do another post similar to my\u00a0Canon Questions<\/a>, but this time concerning the “Great Apostasy”, the belief that that the Church effectively disappeared from the earth some time after Christ’s death.<\/p>\n

\"Apostasy\"<\/p>\n

Groups like the Mormons<\/em> hold to the Great Apostasy\u00a0and use this as an explanation for the significant differences between their doctrine and the doctrine of historic Christianity.\u00a0Muslims<\/em> hold to this narrative too, to justify the teachings of Muhammad which stand in stark contradiction<\/a> to the New Testament.\u00a0Additionally, most Protestant groups<\/em>, while typically not holding such a radical version of this doctrine, usually hold to some variation of it, saying that somewhere along the line the Church went off-track in a rather major way.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So, when encountering people who hold to this belief, these are the questions I typically ask to guide the conversation:<\/p>\n

1. When do you believe the Great Apostasy happened?<\/strong>
\nIt’s important to establish the point at which the person believes the Church really went off track. I typically find many people who hold to the Great Apostasy are extremely fuzzy as to when it actually happened. I always push them for a dat, or at least a Century.<\/p>\n

2. Have you read the writings of the Christians from the First Century? The Didache, Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, \u2026 Do you think they reflect your group\u2019s teaching?<\/strong>
\nIt is good to ask whether the person asserting the Great Apostasy has read any of the Christian works of the 1st and 2nd Century. If they place the Great Apostasy after<\/em> this date, then these writings should be examined to see what Christians believed. If they place the Great Apostasy before<\/em> this date, then it means that the Church was already lost possibly even prior to the death of the last Apostle!<\/p>\n

3. Can an apostate Church select the canon? Can an apostate Church be trusted to safely preserve the Scriptural manuscripts?<\/strong>
\nI would suggest that most people who assert the Great Apostasy say that it happened in the first few centuries. This puts them in a rather awkward position since the question of the canon didn’t really get addressed until the Third Century.<\/p>\n

4. Can an apostate Church be trusted to safely preserve the Scriptural manuscripts through the centuries?<\/strong>
\nHow can you friend trust the contents of his Bible if the Bible was in the custody of an apostate Church for over a millennia\u00a0until his own group appeared?<\/p>\n

5. Why do you think God allow the long-awaited Messiah to come, but for His message to be utterly lost within one\/two generations? Were the apostles really such terrible teachers?<\/strong>
\nThis question begs incredulity. What’s the point in Jesus establishing a Church that could so easily be completely lost? It doesn’t speak much for the providence and sovereignty of God…<\/p>\n

6.\u00a0How has your group managed to preserve the truth when the Church established by Christ failed so quickly?<\/strong>
\nAll those who assert the Great Apostasy typically claim that\u00a0they<\/em> have the truth. If this is the case, what makes their group so special? Why has\u00a0God preserved them and not the original Church? What was it about the Early Church that gave rise to the Great Apostasy? Why is your friend’s group immune to this?<\/p>\n

If you ask these questions, hopefully it’ll really test your friend’s claims of a Great Apostasy. Do you disagree? Do you think you can answer these questions? If so, please answer them in the comments!<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A while back, I produced a post in which I listed some Canon Questions, some specific questions I ask when talking to non-Catholics about the Table of Contents found in their Bible. Following my post concerning my recent encounter with a Jehovah’s Witness, I’ve decided to do another post similar to my\u00a0Canon Questions, but this time concerning the “Great Apostasy”,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":57426,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[2969,1869,29,1330,2882,528,703,122],"class_list":["post-46967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-faith","tag-featured","tag-great-apostasy","tag-islam","tag-jehovah-witness","tag-mormon","tag-mormonism","tag-muslim","tag-questions"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/Apostasy.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46967"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57434,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46967\/revisions\/57434"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}