Can we avoid reliving the original apostasy?

Can we avoid reliving the original apostasy?

Joseph Smith had his first prophetic experience in 1820.  The year 2020 will be the 200th anniversary of that earthshaking event, which anniversary is obviously just three years away. I don't know of anyone who can tell us exactly when the gospel which Christ restored to the earth during his life in Jerusalem ceased to be valid as the true representation of Christ's doctrine.  Perhaps it happened at the 200 year mark. We can be fairly certain that by the time the Emperor Constantine became the effective head of the church just after 300 A.D., a church he had not even been baptized into, the church was quite thoroughly corrupted by that political involvement, as creeds, negotiated to achieve some unity among multiple Christian church factions, were substituted for the simple and unchanging truths of the Scriptures. The Book of Mormon does tell us that 200 years after the coming of Christ in the New World, the church which he established there disintegrated, indicating that restorations tend to have a limited life span.

The question for us today is whether we are following the exact same pattern as the prior two restorations, and whether we should soon expect the church to either fall apart completely or to be co-opted by worldly political or economic forces. The next logical question is how would we know whether we are a significant distance down that path?

In the famous book by James E. Talmage entitled The Great Apostasy, the assumption and assertion seems to be that it was nothing more than the untimely deaths of the early leaders or the personal sins and errors of the later church leaders which caused the priesthood line to be broken. However, there are many other factors which might be considered, such as changes to church doctrine and organization for the convenience of the church leaders, actions taken to centralize everything as part of intentionally building a religious empire, etc., as later reached full flower in the Roman Catholic Church which eventually controlled who could be the kings of Europe.

We hear of Peter being crucified in Rome, but according to Wikipedia, that would have been about 35 years after the death of Christ.  The original church quickly grew to include about 4 to 5 million adherents, making it demographically and politically feasible for Constantine to declare Christianity to be the religion of the Roman Empire, replacing paganism.  The growth rates implied by the size of the church at the 100-year, 200-year, and 300-year marks indicate a growth rate of about 8% to 10% each year.  That suggests that by the time of Peter's death, the church could have reached the size of about 40,000-50,000 members.  Surely that would provide an abundance of experienced men who could take up the role of apostle and carry on the religious tradition.  At that point, the death of one or a few men should really have no effect on the transferability of the gospel and its priesthood authority.  The typical answer to what happened to the church is that "all the original apostles died," but the previous calculation seems to negate such a simple explanation. Obviously, it is a mere truism that all men must die, regardless of what happens to the church. The very fact that the Church continued to grow at the 8% to 10% rate for perhaps 300 years seems to indicate that there were indeed sufficient leaders to facilitate that kind of rapid growth over an extended period.

It thus becomes far more likely that there were other powerful factors operating than simply the possibly premature deaths of the original Twelve. The next most likely factors include some changes in doctrine and organization that completely changed the methods of living, administering, and propagating the gospel.

It appears that it could be as late as 96 A.D. that the Apostle John wrote a letter to seven independent churches in Asia offering evaluations and counsel and advice.  It seems highly likely that at this time, even up to about 63 years after the death of Christ, there WAS no central organization whatsoever for the original church beyond the writings and travels and occasional meetings of the original Twelve and their immediate replacements.  In other words, it is highly likely that these seven churches were completely independent from each other, since communications among them would be quite slow and difficult, a far cry from today's options for instantaneous command-and-control systems.

The idea of sending tithing commodities back and forth among these different independent organizations probably made no more practical and religious charitable sense in a largely non-money barter society than it would have for Abraham to continuously send tithing commodities to Melchizedek, perhaps by pack train, and then expect to get most of those tithing commodities back from Melchizedek to take care of Abraham's own people.  More likely those Asian churches were completely independent from a financial standpoint and from a priesthood administrative standpoint.  They each had their "angels," or leaders, (Rev. 2:1) as the Scriptures say.  Most likely that means that someone such as a local patriarch had the sealing power which would allow all priesthood ordinances necessary for salvation for the living and the dead to be administered at the local level of a "church," perhaps what would be today's equivalent of a stake.

The appearances are that the early church members took the parable of the Good Samaritan as their main guide for church behavior and organization.  If they saw a problem, they immediately used their own resources to solve the problem.  There was no point in sending resources to some central location, only hoping to get some of those resources back much later to solve local problems.  That was simply an unnecessary and wasteful round-trip, and also invited fraud, waste, and abuse at the central site, and would be a continuous temptation towards a "paid ministry," and associated unrighteous dominion for personal profit. There was clearly no central paid ministry in these earliest of times, that being the greatest of the early church's defining success factors.

A vigorous Good Samaritan/Golden Rule attitude among the saints could easily explain the great popularity of the gospel and its associated members, resulting in its rapid and continuous growth. A local tradition of members helping members and others in need would amount to a very valuable social insurance function, something which was sorely lacking then, as it is in so many places today. This spontaneous gospel-based behavior would have been a very efficient use of resources available to members. There would have been no wasteful taxes, no huge administrative overhead, no monthly fees, and no regulatory burden as is typical of highly bureaucratized government-style welfare systems.

As to other administrative activity, the Scriptures tell us about one important meeting by the apostles and others in Jerusalem concerning taking the gospel to the Gentiles. That meeting could have included all the apostles, Acts 15:6, but otherwise it appears that nearly all the information we have about the administrative activities of the apostles are the instructions and exhortations contained in the 14 epistles of Paul (including Hebrews), 3 epistles by John, 2 by Peter, 1 by James, and 1 by Jude. In general, we seem left to assume that the Twelve operated much as a Methodist circuit rider who might have visited various outpost communities on the American frontier.

The turning point

The theory I want to present is that as soon as one leader in one city decided he was more important than any others and demanded control of resources from other areas and pulled back priesthood authorization to offer all priesthood ordinances locally for free, it was at that point that the original church became corrupted and ceased to function at the extremely high level of effectiveness that it had before. There may have been other elements of elitism that crept into the church over time, creating a two-class system, something to watch out for today. The scriptural phrase "freely ye have received, freely give," (Matt. 10:8) quite likely refers to administering all priesthood ordinances for free, without demanding in any way, direct, or indirect, the payment of money to receive those priesthood ordinances. This is still the meaning of charitable service.

The Law of Moses was terminated by Christ, making every man his own priest and ending the need for a tribe of professional priests. The Law of Moses included the concept of tithing, which was defined at that time as having the 11 tribes send 10% of the foodstuffs they produced to the Levites for their living maintenance, and the Levites would in turn send 10% of that 10% on to the central temple for sustaining the professional priests there.  In other words, the original tithing system allowed for about 1% of only a subset of the produce of the Israelite tribes to go to a central site.

It appears that under today's rules of sending a full 10% to the central church government, that goes far beyond anything that was operating under the original Law of Moses system, which itself was thought to be far too constraining and burdensome. Today's policies impinge greatly on the religious freedom of the members, especially concerning their charitable acts.

Perhaps most important of all is that members today can plausibly say that they have "paid at the office" by sending their 10% to Salt Lake City, and can legitimately feel that is the end of their charitable duty at home.  They have delegated their charity duties and their charity resources to Salt Lake City, and if they do very little extra charity at the local level, that would be perfectly justified. What practical sense does it make to have someone send all their charity money to Salt Lake where it may just disappear without accounting to the members, and then have to pay all their charity money again to take care of the actual local matters that need attention? Personal effort and administration, combined with personal resources, carefully used, can probably be easily 10 times more effective than any centralized government-style welfare operation. We say that personal examples of living the gospel are very powerful and convincing, but our current system minimizes the possible impact of personal examples by constraining close individual behavior in favor of remote institutional behavior, which tends to be a much blunter instrument.

Most countries in the history of the world have operated very successfully on about 5% or less of the resources of their citizens. But today local governments spend about 10% of GDP, state governments spend about 9% of GDP, the federal government spends about 21% of GDP, and the church has become just another layer of government, taking its 10%, for a staggering total of 50% of GDP for members. Those many governmental units, each and every one, are all supposed to be solving all of our social insurance problems for us, but none of them do, even with all their vast tax income.

I don't know that any of these governmental systems can be justified on any religious basis although they have explicitly claimed to have taken over all important religious charitable functions but perform those functions extremely inefficiently.  And the highly centralized church, with its 10% now, as opposed to its 1% before, seems to be on shaky doctrinal and social theory grounds.

There were numerous doctrinal changes that were required to override the teachings of the Savior which demanded that neither he nor any of his disciples receive any income as a matter of religious right from anyone.  Christ took great pains, both during his temptations, and thereafter, to make sure that he never claimed any power or authority or money from anyone.  He certainly did not build any kind of a bureaucracy -- military, civil, economic, or religious. It is interesting that James E. Talmage, in his other well-known book Jesus the Christ, omits any discussion of Christ's many statements on this point of avoiding any financial claims on members or engaging in any empire-building. Christ's kingdom was truly not of this world, and even Pilate believed him, where Pilate was paid to be suspicious of people's empire-building motives. Could the central church today say that its extensive kingdom is not of this world, and do so with a straight face and a clear conscience?

It seems likely that, rather than merely individual sins and errors, the great overriding deviation of the church in Rome was to claim money from the members as a matter of right, as did Caesar, as opposed to simply receiving gifts as a matter of charity.  It is interesting to see that the Catholic Church still has explicit political agreements, called concordats, to receive tax monies from some European governments. Other countries supply tax monies without such concordats. See "church_tax" in Wikipedia. Also, it is reported that, according to a German bishop's 2012 decree, "Germany's Roman Catholics are to be denied the right to Holy Communion or religious burial if they stop paying a special church tax." This amounts to excommunication, but without using the "E" word, presumably to allow an easier return to the fold. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-19699581

In summary, it appears that the Church today is following the exact path of the early Church which led to such a grand failure as it prostituted its religious legitimacy to support a corrupt political government.  The church today is claiming tithing as a matter of right from its members, without which it will not certify that members are in good standing with the church, and that their priesthood blessings are current with the Lord. However one chooses to describe the situation, that amounts to charging money for the receipt of the highest priesthood blessings.  There is no practical conceptual difference between this and the selling of indulgences by the Roman Catholic Church to receive and maintain salvation.

We might also notice that the church growth rates today are immensely smaller than occurred just after the life of Christ. Something critical has been lost. Those 8% to 10% growth rates are now in the range of 0.2%, 1%, or 2%, based on the assumptions used.  I believe the 0.2% growth rate is most accurate and illustrative, since it only counts those who become long-term members and who will continue to advance the cause, not those that come and go quickly.

It appears that we are far down the same path taken by the early church toward the inefficient centralized administration of everything and we should expect the same eventual result. Obviously, the early church had to itself become thoroughly centralized before it could be taken over by the Emperor in one easy step, thus adding it as one of his many levers of concentrated power over his citizens. If the church had consisted of perhaps 3,000 separate independent units scattered throughout the known world and beyond, as today, that joinder would probably never have been attempted, and the church would have remained "not of this world" in that important sense, and perhaps could have remained uncorrupted by politics for millennia.

We might even say that the church's being accepted as a legitimate competitor for tax monies, collected worldwide, like any other worldly government, is the beginning of its downfall. That essentially makes it a government supported church, because it is at least using governmental methods to collect that support. If there is no conflict or friction at all with worldly governments, Satan's preferred realm, then we should be suspicious that the true gospel has been damaged or lost. Additionally, the church is essentially asserting today that without an international banking system available to all potential members, linking them to Salt Lake City, no one can fully live the gospel or be saved.

Verifying the theory

I believe there is at least one important issue we could directly verify today without having to rely on medieval church history to confirm speculations about the earliest administrative methods, especially since the necessary detailed early church history may or may not have been preserved in a form we could use for that purpose. A simple "pilot program" of letting the Saints today spend nearly all their charitable money on local charity opportunities might quickly verify how well such a system works, and could demonstrate that the early Saints likely used such a system to achieve their great success, partly out of the near practical impossibility then of doing it any other way.

In fact, we have already given this system of tithing administration a good try and it came through with flying colors, doing as well as in the early years after Christ. The tithing system we have today was not even begun until about 1896 under Wilford Woodruff and only became full-blown in about 1960. The growth rates were just as good or even better under the administrations of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young as they were in the early church. A large gathering of members in the United States in the 30,000 range was given a huge boost by the 90,000 members who came from Europe during that same time period under those policies. They seem to have offered their lives instead of just their tithing.

Some more recent statistical data seem to verify the other side of the basic assertion that there is an inverse relationship between church headquarters income, size, and levels of worldwide control, as compared with church growth rates. Today's tithing policy was apparently finally put in place about 1960, and the growth numbers show a peak growth rate of 7.79% in 1962 with growth rates continuously declining ever since until we have reached the very low level today of 2% using comparable computation methods (actually 0.2% using more plausible assumptions). And this occurred in spite of innovations such as sending out more missionaries at a younger age. That may or may not be considered a statistically provable correlation, but it seems pretty instructive and convincing to me.

The church headquarters probably already has more recent data which would verify the same assertion, although the data may never have been examined with this question in mind. It is likely that imposing the "all tithing/charitable contributions first go to Salt Lake City" policy on all members worldwide, including those newest areas in countries around the world where the church may spontaneously spring up on its own because of information gained over the Internet, even before missionaries are sent there, may prove to be a great constraint and disincentive to the church's taking root in those places. This is likely to be especially true in the more remote and less affluent places where the gospel might otherwise be expected to be very much needed and very well received.