The History of Christ's Church Part 3: The Restoration

After exploring some of the history from parts 1 and 2, it should be readily evident that man was in desperate need for Christ's church and leadership. Enforcing constantly changing dogma with the sword wasn't getting man any closer to Christ's church, neither was using one's own interpretive abilities - reaching the correct gospel wasn't a skill issue and if it were, then the unacademic common man was woefully unprepared to ever get close to Christ. Man was undoubtedly in a state of revelatory absence and reading, voting, enforcing, and guessing wasn't getting him anywhere but deeper into a state of theological confusion.

So why did this happen, why did God remove His prophetic presence from the Earth? Well, it's hard to argue that brutally murdering Christ Himself and nearly all of His apostles wouldn't merit a serious absence of the direct influence of God for a while from a more temporal mindset, but there's likely deeper reasoning to it. While we're not able to get into the mind of God, we can make some inferences from what the restored gospel itself has taught us about what we do and don't receive from God.

One of the most powerful resolutions of the apostasy we've received from a restored gospel is that of a granular salvation - solving the problem of the myopic, binary salvation that many traditions teach. That is to say, each individual receives their reward specifically in relation to their entire individual picture, not whether or not they barely make it above some pass/fail bar. This idea follows a similar picture throughout the restored gospel - one where it is our relationship with God and others that is our reward, and how much we're able to partake in those relationships. With this picture in mind, it is not unreasonable to frame the great apostasy as a direct result of man's level of desire for relationship with God. Man rejected the Son and His church, and when man started forming it himself, he chose dogma over the gospel, performance over love.

With the advent of the reformations, man began showing a greater desire for closeness with God over correctness of practice and things started to change. With the advent of such great and noble men like John Wycliffe (1328-1384 AD), Sebastian Castellio (1515-1563 AD), John Locke (1632-1704 AD), and others, it was becoming clear that man was finally becoming ready to leave the muck of chaos and control for a deeper relationship with the Father. Conditions weren't becoming perfect, but they were becoming ready - ready for the underlying current to change sufficient that the evil on top could not last under scrutiny with the current below it. This is perhaps why the constitution of the United States is so fundamental to the restoration of the church, as it is representative of this very concept of the flaws being sanitized under the heat of the underlying principles within it.

So the stage was finally set, man was proving to gradually let freedom and faith win over orthodoxy and control. With this stage of man presenting a readiness for relationship with God again, and a great spiritual revival providing the platform, God mercifully started opening the heavens again, freeing man of the chaos and confusion of nearly two millennia of unpropitious absence.

The Chaos Resolved

Being confused by the great many religious voices of his time and being prompted by James 1:5, the young Joseph Smith, after much study, retreated into a grove of trees to say a prayer, asking which, if any of the churches were true.

“If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.”

It was then that God the Father and Jesus Christ revealed themselves to Joseph and began the miraculous restoration of Christ's church upon the earth - immediately granting resolution to the most contested question over the last several centuries - the shape of the Godhead.

No longer was Greek mysticism a requirement for understanding the Godhead or God's doctrine. No longer did we need wonder about our purpose, our path, or our place in God's creation, and no longer did we need to rely on our own understandings to decode what is most essential to us - our Saviour and how to obtain His salvation.

What Was Restored

Godhead Resolved - The answer to the nature of the Godhead is so profoundly resolving of the tensions in the bible that one can't help but wonder if it was purposefully kept from man's mind such that it would stand in such stark contrast to the trinity upon being revealed. The answer revealed is that God is not a fixed, yet obscure, ontological category, God is a nature or office that can be attained - the very thing taught by catholic bishops for centuries, lost in the battle against neoplatonism. The bible, as well as most early church fathers, taught that we could be “joint heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:17) - it wasn't until Aquinas that that doctrine was altered, as greek mysticism didn't sit well with the notion of a relatable God. Thus the doctrine of eternal progression was restored to the earth, clarifying much of our purpose after this life.

Living Authority - Not just the authority to lead Christ's church was restored, but the structure - 12 apostles - and the revelation required to do so. It's one thing to submit that you get to decide what the doctrine says, it's completely another to have a direct connection with God to help you do so.

Myopia Resolved - the restored gospel has revealed that while saving ordinances like baptism by the correct authority are necessary, that through proxy work and the millennium that literally every soul who's walked the earth will have an opportunity to receive Christ's gift. It has also resolved the false narrative of a pass/fail test where you merit your salvation based on if you were just barely good enough or not - instead we've learned that our place in heavens is determined by Christ's atonement first, but then our desires to have that relationship with Christ and on a granular level - those who desire more will receive more and vice versa (Isaiah 28:10).

Here's a more full, yet inexhaustive picture:

I. Living Authority

The restoration's first and most fundamental gift: not correct doctrine but the mechanism that makes correct doctrine possible - living apostolic authority connected to ongoing revelation.

What this actually means in practice: when genuine questions arise about doctrine, practice, or the nature of God, the Church has a mechanism for obtaining answers that is not personal interpretation of scripture, philosophical inference, or institutional consensus - it is asking God and receiving answers through his appointed servants
The contrast with every alternative the essay has traced: fifteen centuries of theological dispute, 47,000 denominations, mutually exclusive accounts of salvation - all produced by a tradition operating without this mechanism; the restoration restores the mechanism rather than adding one more interpretation to the pile
The specificity of the claim: not that Joseph Smith was a wise teacher or a sincere reformer but that he was a prophet who saw God and was given authority - a claim of the same kind as Moses or Isaiah, not of the same kind as Luther or Aquinas
What this means for the individual: the question “which church is true?” has an answer that is not merely one more interpretation competing with others - it is an answer given by the same kind of authority that established the original church

The resolution of Part One's central question: if the authority was on the earth to resolve the tensions, why did it take thousands of years and ultimately fail? Because it wasn't - and now it is.

II. The Plain Picture of God

The restoration does not provide a competing metaphysical system - it removes the Neoplatonic filter and restores the plain picture the biblical text presents before the filter is applied.

The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man's (D&C 130:22) - not a primitive anthropomorphism to be explained away but the plain statement of what the resurrection means when taken seriously: that embodiment is the point, not an inconvenience
The Father and the Son are separate, distinct, personal beings - not a philosophical formula about shared substance but two beings who appeared to a fourteen-year-old boy in a grove and spoke to him personally; the experience is the doctrine
The Holy Ghost is a personage of spirit - distinct, personal, genuinely communicative - not a third mode of a single divine substance or a philosophical abstraction
The practical consequences:
- God is personal enough to know you specifically
- Relational enough to hear your prayer genuinely and respond
- Embodied enough to be the template for what the resurrection means for you
- Not a philosophical principle approached through contemplation but a Father approached through prayer
- Prayer is a genuine conversation with a genuine person rather than a one-directional address to an impassible first cause
- The God of the Old Testament who walks in gardens, changes his mind in response to human intercession, grieves over human choices - that God requires no anthropomorphism escape valve in LDS theology because the plain reading was always right

III. The Restored Atonement

The atonement in the garden of Gethsemane: the infinite spiritual suffering of a being who is genuinely, personally, relationally invested in every soul he is redeeming.

The restoration restores the coherence the Neoplatonic framework made structurally problematic: Christ suffers genuinely because God genuinely suffers; the atonement has infinite scope because the being accomplishing it is infinite and genuinely passible
No two-natures management required - Christ is a distinct personal being who genuinely suffered, not a philosophical formula trying to hold together impassibility and genuine suffering in the same person
No communicatio idiomatum necessary - no need to argue that attributes communicate between natures to make the suffering real; it was real because he is real and capable of it
The practical consequence: the atonement is not a transaction between an impassible deity and human sin managed through a two-natured mediator - it is the personal investment of a God who knows every specific sorrow, every specific sin, every specific consequence of every human choice across all of history, and took them on personally
The Gethsemane emphasis is not a departure from Christian theology but its most coherent expression - available only to a theology that does not require God to be impassible

The resolution of Part Two's suffering problem: the atonement is infinite because he is genuinely infinite and genuinely capable of suffering - not despite his divine nature but because of it.

IV. Pre-mortal Existence

The restoration of the pre-mortal life answers questions the tradition without it cannot address: who are you before birth, what is the purpose of mortal experience, why do spirits come to earth at all.

The practical consequence: mortal life is not an arbitrary starting point but a continuation of a relationship with God that predates birth - you knew what you were coming into, the experiences of mortality are part of a larger plan you participated in before you arrived
The resolution of the foreknowledge and agency problem: God's foreknowledge does not eliminate genuine freedom because the plan was presented, understood, and chosen in a pre-mortal existence where real choices were made; the Calvinist predestination and Arminian free will debate dissolves when the relationship between God and his children predates mortality
The genealogical impulse in LDS culture is not merely institutional - it flows from the theological reality that the pre-mortal family of God includes everyone who has ever lived, and the relationships that matter are not limited by mortality or geography

The resolution of the creation problem: the tradition without pre-mortal existence has no coherent account of why God creates souls at birth with no prior relationship and immediately subjects them to a test they had no part in designing; the plan of salvation answers this with a framework in which the relationship preceded the test and the test was accepted before it began.

V. Exaltation

The restoration recovers the deification tradition that was mainstream in the early Church and suppressed by the Neoplatonic inheritance - Irenaeus's “men may be made gods,” Athanasius's “man might become god” - not as a philosophical claim but as the plain statement of what eternal life actually means.

“As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may become” - not a competing metaphysical system but the restored understanding of what the resurrection, the atonement, and the plan of salvation are aimed at
The practical consequence: the entire project of human life has a scope and significance that no other theological framework quite matches - not escape from matter, not forensic declaration of righteousness, not contemplative dissolution into the divine, but the literal continuation and elevation of personal existence in an eternal family relationship with God
The answer to the operative question the tradition's fracturing left unanswered: what is God actually offering? - exaltation, the fullest possible participation in the divine life, eternal family relationships, progression without end

The resolution of Part Two's deification problem: the Creator-creature gulf that the Neoplatonic framework made absolute is not a permanent metaphysical fact but a description of where humanity is now relative to where it is going; the gulf is meant to be crossed, and the restoration restores the plain early Christian teaching that crossing it is the point.

VI. Eternal Families

The sealing power: the authority to bind on earth what is bound in heaven, making family relationships eternal rather than terminated at death.

The practical consequence for how anyone lives: the relationships that matter most are not incidental to salvation but central to it - exaltation is a family project, not a solo achievement; who you love and how you love them is not merely a feature of mortality but the substance of eternal life
The answer to grief: death does not sever the relationships that constitute identity - the sealing power is the doctrinal basis for the most practically transformative promise the restoration makes; the people you love are not lost, they are ahead
The genealogical mission flows from this: every person who has ever lived is a child of God with the same claim on the blessings of the restoration, and the sealing power can reach backward through generations as well as forward; the work is not complete until everyone has had the opportunity
This is not a doctrine the philosophical tradition could have arrived at through speculation - it requires the specific authority and the specific keys restored through Joseph Smith; it is available only because the restoration happened

The resolution of the mortality problem: if this life is the only relationship we have with the people we love, mortality is a tragedy with a theological explanation; if the relationships are eternal and the sealing power makes them so, mortality is a chapter in a story that does not end.

VII. The Millennium

The LDS expectation of a literal millennium recovers the position of the early Church - Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and every major figure of the first three centuries.

The practical consequence:
- history is going somewhere specific
- Christ will reign literally on this earth
- the resurrection is not a metaphor about spiritual renewal but a literal transformation of embodied beings who will live and reign in a physical world made new
The millennium as the culmination of the plan of salvation: universal resurrection, the earth transformed, Christ present among his people - not an afterthought or a debated apocalyptic scenario but the literal fulfillment of what the restoration described from the beginning

The resolution of Part Two's allegorization problem: the Neoplatonic framework could not accommodate a literal earthly kingdom because it could not fully accommodate permanent meaningful embodiment; LDS theology's comfort with the millennium follows directly from its comfort with an embodied God - the plain reading of Revelation 20 requires no allegorization when embodiment is the point rather than an inconvenience.

VIII. Continuing Revelation

The restoration did not produce a closed system requiring no further input - it restored a living connection that continues to provide guidance through living prophets and apostles.

The practical consequence: the Church is not managing a fixed inheritance from the first century but receiving ongoing guidance for present circumstances; the doctrines and practices the Church holds are not merely inherited but actively maintained through the same mechanism that established them
Personal revelation as the individual dimension of continuing revelation: every member has access to the witness of the Holy Ghost confirming truth, guiding decisions, and providing the experiential grounding for faith that Aquinas honestly said reason alone could not provide
The resolution of the assurance problem: the anxious Calvinist question - am I among the elect, was my experience genuine, how can I know - does not arise in the same form because salvation is not located in a single unrepeatable interior event whose authenticity is uncertain; it is an ongoing covenant relationship confirmed by ongoing revelation
The resolution of the 47,000-denomination problem: when genuine questions arise, the Church has a mechanism for obtaining answers; the multiplication of incompatible interpretations that characterizes the tradition without living authority does not occur because the mechanism that prevents it has been restored

The plain answer to the question Aquinas was honest enough to ask and humble enough to admit he could not answer from reason alone: how do you know? - you ask, and you receive.

IX. The Operative God

The restoration restores answers to the questions that actually matter for how anyone lives:

what does God want from me
what is he offering me
what is my relationship to him
does he hear me
does he love me
am I accountable to him

None of these depend on the metaphysical composition of the Godhead - they depend on the operative nature of God, and the restoration provides plain, coherent, practically meaningful answers to all of them.

The contrast with fifteen centuries of philosophical dispute: the tradition spent that time arguing about what God is made of while remaining fractured on what he wants and what he is offering; the restoration cuts through all of it not by winning the philosophical argument but by restoring the plain picture and the living authority that make the philosophical argument unnecessary
What God wants: covenant faithfulness - specific commitments, specific ordinances, specific relationships - rather than doctrinal conformity to metaphysical propositions or purely interior states of faith; the commandments are not arbitrary requirements but the architecture of the life the plan of salvation is aimed at
What God is offering: exaltation - the literal continuation and elevation of personal existence in an eternal family relationship, the fullest possible participation in the divine life, progression without end
The two great commandments restored to coherence: when asked which commandment was greatest, Christ gave a two-line answer about love - love God and love your neighbor; the Athanasian Creed contains neither word, the Nicene Creed contains neither word, the tradition spent fifteen centuries enforcing vocabulary Christ never used while largely neglecting the vocabulary he said everything else hung upon
The restored God makes the two great commandments something other than a metaphor - you cannot genuinely love an impassible, timeless, unknowable philosophical principle; you can only perform compliance with its vocabulary; the LDS God is personal enough, relational enough, and genuinely invested enough in individual human outcomes that love of God is not a category error but the most natural response available

The plain answer to the operative questions is what religion is actually for - and the restoration provides it in the plainest possible form: a boy asked God which church was true, and God answered.

X. The Binary That Resolves Everything

The apostasy produced tensions because it was operating without the mechanism that resolves them - every tension was a symptom of that absence, and no amount of philosophical patching could cure a symptom whose cause was still present; the patches created new tensions because philosophy without revelation is inherently provisional.

The restoration does not merely resolve the specific tensions Parts One and Two identified - it restores the mechanism that makes resolution possible in principle
New tensions will always arise - finite human minds encountering infinite divine reality will always generate questions; in the apostasy a new tension was a crisis because there was no authoritative way to resolve it; in the restoration a new tension is simply a question, and questions have a mechanism for receiving answers
The entire burden of the series collapses into a single binary: did God appear to Joseph Smith or not; everything else follows from that one question
You do not need to resolve every theological question provisionally before believing - you need to resolve one question; if the restoration is true, then God speaks, prophets exist, and every subsequent question has a resolution available in principle even if not yet in hand
This is also the answer to the verification problem Part Two ended on: the tradition could not verify its analogies because it had no access to the thing being analogized; the restoration's answer is not a better analogy but direct access - once direct access is restored, verification is no longer a philosophical problem but a practical one
The practical verification mechanism - personal revelation, the witness of the Holy Ghost, asking God and receiving an answer - is precisely what the restoration claims to provide and precisely what the apostasy lost when the apostles left the room

If the restoration is true then all other tensions need not even be held provisionally - they necessarily resolve in the claim's favor; the truth of the restoration is not one conclusion among many that must be weighed against competing conclusions, it is the premise from which all other conclusions follow. This is the freeing nature of the restoration's logic: not that it eliminates questions but that it provides the mechanism by which questions receive answers, transforming every theological tension from a threat into an invitation.

Conclusion

Had God not sent us another prophet, man's outlook would have been bleak indeed - he would have continued to fumble in the dark for answers he'd have to invent on his own or never receive. Presumably because there was enough momentum towards seeking God as opposed to dogma, man was prepared just enough to receive a larger share of a relationship with God. The good had begun outweighing the bad and though there was still bad - as even the very first prophet of the restoration was martyred - it ultimately was defeated by reconciliation with the good.