The following comes from Daniel C. Peterson’s blog, Sic et Non on Patheos. To visit his blog, CLICK HERE. 

I was amused to notice a discussion at a predominantly atheistic anti-Mormon website of what some there, at least, seem to consider a devastating discovery—that the Latter-day Saint notion of a “restoration” isn’t original to Latter-day Saints.  This, I take it, is supposed to demonstrate that there are no new ideas in “Mormonism” and presumably this proves “Mormonism” false.  Or something.  (I haven’t been able, thus far, to force myself to read through the thread.)

But did we ever claim that the concept of a restoration was “original”?  Maybe, I suppose, somebody somewhere has claimed such originality at some point.  But not really in my own experience.

I mean, it’s been a commonplace in Latter-day Saint historiography—even on the popular level—that many of the early converts to the message of Joseph Smith had been “Restorationists” of various kinds (e.g., Campbellites), or “Seekers.”  They were looking for something, in particular for a modern equivalent of the primitive Christian gospel and they were convinced that they had found it in the Church.  (See, for example, Wilford Woodruff’s intriguing story of the “prophet” Robert Mason.)

For years, our official visitor centers and some of our pamphlets included quotations from various reformers and leaders who predated the establishment of the Church.

“Happy in the prospect of a restoration of primitive Christianity,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Benjamin Waterhouse dated 22 July 1822, “I must leave to younger athletes to encounter and lop off the false branches which have been engrafted into it by the mythologists of the middle and modern ages.”, I must leave to younger athletes to encounter and lop off the false branches which have been engrafted into it by the mythologists of the middle and modern ages.”

Roger Williams, who had served as the pastor of the oldest Baptist church in America (at Providence, Rhode Island), refused to continue as pastor there on the grounds that

“There is no regularly-constituted church on earth, nor any person authorized to administer any Church ordinance: nor can there be, until new apostles are sent by the great Head of the Church, for whose coming I am seeking.” (William Cullen Bryant, ed., Picturesque America, or the Land We Live In, [New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1872], 1:502.)

Williams also said,

“The apostasy … hath so far corrupted all, that there can be no recovery out of that apostasy until Christ shall send forth new apostles to plant churches anew.” (Edward Underhill, “Struggles and Triumphs of Religious Liberty,, cited in William F. Anderson, Apostasy or Succession, Which? 238-239)

And there’s also this, from the great John Wesley (1703-1791):

“It does not appear that these extraordinary gifts of the Holy Spirit were common in the church for more than two or three centuries. We seldom hear of them after that fatal period when the emperor Constantine called himself a Christian, and from a vain imagination of promoting the Christian cause thereby, heaped riches and power and honor upon Christians in general, but in particular upon the Christian clergy. From this time they almost totally ceased; very few instances of the kind were found. The cause of this was not as has been supposed because there was no more occasion for them because all the world was become Christians. This is a miserable mistake; not a twentieth part of it was then nominally Christian. The real cause of it was the love of many, almost all Christians, so called, was waxed cold. The Christians had no more of the Spirit of Christ than the other heathens. The Son of Man, when he came to examine His Church, could hardly find faith upon the earth. This was the real cause why the extraordinary gifts of the Holy Ghost were no longer to be found in the Christian Church because the Christians were turned heathens again, and only had earth a dead form left.” (Wesley’s Works, vol. 7, 89:26, 27)

My late friend Davis Bitton earned a doctorate in the early modern history of France from Princeton University  before entering into a  teaching  career at the University of Texas at Austin, followed by the University of California at Santa Barbara , and then, ultimately and for nearly thirty years, at the University of Utah. He also went on, though, to become a prominent historian of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (and, in fact, to serve for a number of years as Assistant Church Historian).  In retirement, he taught for a while as a service missionary at the Hawaii campus of Brigham Young University.  For one of his courses there, he actually wrote his own textbook on the general history of Christianity—always, he once told me, staying just a chapter or two ahead of handing it out to his students for their use—under the title of “Nostalgia for the Primitive Church.”  That concept was his recurring theme and organizing principle, and it’s a good one that provides a helpful way of looking at Christian history.  (I hope, someday, to get his never-quite-entirely-finished manuscript up online.)

To a large extent, the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century (along with various proto-Protestant forerunners) was motivated by a desire to return to “original Christianity” and to strip away the human traditions that the Reformers saw as having attached themselves to Christendom like barnacles to a ship’s hull.  Surely this is an important part of the slogan semper reformanda (“ever reforming”).

And significant early movements in Catholic history (e.g., the Franciscans) can also justly be viewed as efforts to get back to the simplicity and purity of the primitive Christian church.

Nor are such urges unique to Christianity.  In Islam, for example, the Prophet Muḥammad is regarded as someone who restored the original, simple, monotheistic faith of Abraham that had been obscured by the unauthorized accretions of Judaism and Christianity.

And there is a prominent Islamic tradition that a “renewer,” a mujaddid, will appear in each century after Muḥammad to revitalize the faith and provide something of a course correction for the Muslim community.  Many regard the great philosophical theologian al-Ghazālī [d. AD 1111) as one of those “renewers.”  The title of one of his two greatest works, the multivolume Iḥyā’ ‘ulūm ad-dīn Ihya ‘Ulum al-Din, is commonly rendered as The Revival of the Religious Sciences.

Some view Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (1703-1792), the founder of the Wahhābī movement that provided the ideological foundation for the House of Saud and that continues to be allied, with greater or lesser degrees of comfort, with today’s Saudi Arabia as yet another example of the mujaddid.)  One can even perhaps see similar attempts to get back to the “Old Time Religion” in the efforts of the 26th Dynasty, during the Saite period in ancient Egypt (ca. 665-525 BC) to go back to more complex or at least old styles of art and hieroglyphic writing as a way of returning to what they saw as the religious purity of their forefathers.  Such deliberate imitation of the ancients is a recurring feature in many of the world’s religious traditions.

The great Mircea Eliade made a great deal of this archaizing urge in the history of religion, the attempt to recapitulate the actions of the ancients in illo tempore.  Heck, one might even argue that there would be something self-contradictory if the concept of a restoration were “original.”

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