Great Apostasy

In Christianity, the Great Apostasy is the notion that mainstream Christian Churches have fallen away from the faith founded by Jesus and promulgated through his Twelve Apostles.

A belief in a Great Apostasy has been characteristic of the Restorationist tradition of Christianity, which includes unrelated groups emerging after the Second Great Awakening, such as the Christadelphians, Swedenborgians, Non-Denominational, Latter Day Saints, Jehovah's Witnesses, Oneness Pentecostals, and Iglesia ni Cristo. These groups hold that traditional Christianity, represented by Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodoxy, has fallen into error and thus, the true faith needs to be restored.

The term has been used to describe the perceived fallen state of traditional Christianity, especially the Catholic Church, sometimes claiming that it changed the doctrines of the early church and allowed traditional Greco-Roman culture (i.e., Greco-Roman mysteries, deities of solar monism such as Mithras and Sol Invictus, pagan festivals and Mithraic sun worship and idol worship) into the Church on its own perception of authority. Because it made these changes using claims of tradition and not from scripture, the Church – in the opinion of those adhering to this concept – has fallen into apostasy. A major thread of this perception is the suggestion that, to attract and convert people to Christianity, the Church in Rome incorporated pagan beliefs and practices within the Christian religion, mostly Graeco-Roman rituals, mysteries, and festivals.

The term is derived from the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, in which the Apostle Paul (or someone writing as Paul) informs the Christians of Thessalonica that a great apostasy must occur before the return of Christ, when "the man of sin is revealed, the son of destruction" (chapter 2:1–12). The Catholic Church, Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Churches, as well as Dispensationalists, have interpreted this chapter as referring to a future falling-away, during the reign of the Antichrist at the end of time.

Overview

Some modern scholars believe that the Christian Church in the early stages picked up pagan oral teachings from Jewish and Hellenistic sources, which formed the basis of a secret oral tradition, which in the 4th century came to be called the disciplina arcani. Mainstream theologians believe it contained liturgical details and certain other pagan traditions which remain a part of some branches of mainstream Christianity (for example, some Catholic theologians thought that the doctrine of transubstantiation was a part of this).