LDS theology teaches that the church Christ established fell into total apostasy after the death of the apostles, a loss not merely of some believers or some congregations but of core truth and, crucially, of priesthood authority itself (Doctrine and Covenants 1:15 to 16; 86:1 to 6). The New Testament does anticipate falling away in the last days: Paul warns the Thessalonians of a coming "rebellion" (2 Thessalonians 2:1 to 3), Timothy is warned that some "will abandon the faith" (1 Timothy 4:1 to 3), and Paul warns the Ephesian elders that "savage wolves" will rise even from among their own number (Acts 20:29 to 30). This book reads those warnings as describing a real and serious falling away among individuals and congregations, consistent with the mixed faithfulness of the seven churches addressed in Revelation 2 and 3, rather than as describing the total disappearance of a true, authorized church from the earth. Matthew 16:18's promise that the gates of Hades will not overcome the church, and Paul's doxology "to him be glory in the church... throughout all generations, for ever and ever" (Ephesians 3:21), both describe a church that persists rather than one that vanishes and must later be restored from nothing.
The writings of the earliest generations after the apostles bear directly on how quickly, and how completely, this loss is supposed to have occurred, and they are worth examining on their own terms rather than taken on faith in either direction. Clement of Rome, writing to the Corinthian church around AD 96, within living memory of the apostles and by most reckonings before the death of the apostle John, describes an orderly, already-functioning structure of ordained leadership rather than a church already sliding into doctrinal collapse: the apostles, he writes, "appointed the first fruits of their labours, having first proved them by the Spirit, to be bishops and deacons of those who should afterwards believe," and further, "gave instructions, that when these should fall asleep, other approved men should succeed them in their ministry."[18] Roughly fifteen years later, around AD 110, Ignatius of Antioch, writing on his way to martyrdom in Rome, describes a church still recognizably organized and unified around its bishops: "Wherever the bishop appears, there let the people be, even as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church."[19] By around AD 180, Irenaeus of Lyons could still trace a continuous, named line of leadership reaching back to the apostles themselves, writing that it is "within the power of all... to contemplate clearly the tradition of the apostles manifested throughout the whole world," since believers "are in a position to reckon up those who were by the apostles instituted bishops in the Churches, and to demonstrate the succession of these men to our own times."[20] None of this proves that every doctrine taught in these early centuries was correct; this book has raised its own disagreements with later patristic and conciliar developments elsewhere. But a total apostasy, understood as the wholesale loss of core truth and priesthood authority essentially at the apostles' deaths, is difficult to square with a church that Clement, writing within that same generation, describes as already possessing an orderly, functioning, self-perpetuating structure of ordained leadership, one Ignatius and then Irenaeus describe as still visibly continuous with the apostles decades and then generations later. Whatever falling away these early centuries did contain, and this book has already granted that the New Testament anticipates real falling away among individuals and congregations, it was not the kind of near-total, structural collapse the doctrine of a Great Apostasy requires.
According to LDS teaching, the Restoration reversed this total apostasy through a specific sequence of events: Joseph Smith's First Vision in the spring of 1820, in which he reported that God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him and told him that the existing churches were wrong (Joseph Smith, History 1:15 to 20); the visit of the angel Moroni in 1823 concerning the Book of Mormon; the translation of that book from 1827 to 1830; the restoration of the Aaronic Priesthood by John the Baptist and of the Melchizedek Priesthood by Peter, James, and John in 1829 (Doctrine and Covenants 13; 27); and the formal organization of the Church in 1830 (Doctrine and Covenants 20:1 to 16).
From section 7.2, "The Great Apostasy and the Restoration," in Grace, Legalism, and the Gospel by Rexford Beardsley Jr.
