Dr. Nathan Busenitz · The Master's Seminary · 43 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Nathan Busenitz, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
The Second Great Awakening's religious fervor produced one more family of offshoots: the ugly. This lecture surveys the American cults born of the restorationist impulse, movements that claimed to leap over eighteen centuries of church history back to the primitive church and landed instead in the ancient heresies. Along the way it hands you a durable three-part test for any false religion, and a piece of history, the Book of Abraham, that collapses Mormonism's claims like a house of cards. Knowing the old errors, it turns out, is the best preparation for meeting the new ones.
Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell launched a movement to restore primitive Christianity, treating the creeds, councils, and confessions as corruption to be bypassed. Their Church of Christ, also called the Christian Church or Disciples of Christ, taught baptismal regeneration and, in branches like the Boston movement, developed sharply cultic tendencies. The deeper problem is the paradigm: once eighteen hundred years of church history can be skipped, any self-proclaimed prophet with new revelation can claim to be restoring the early church.
What the restorationists actually rediscovered were the ancient heresies. The lecture's standing thesis from last semester returns: the modern American cults are Gnosticism, Arianism, Judaizing legalism, and echoes of Islam's prophet-plus-new-book pattern, remixed and regurgitated as novelty. Know the old errors and you are ready for the new ones.
A movement proves itself false when it fails on the fundamentals: a right view of the Savior, who God and Jesus are; a right view of salvation, by grace through Christ's work alone; and a right view of the Scriptures as the word of God and highest authority. A cult, in the lecture's working definition, is a movement false from its very beginning while claiming to be Christian, and each group surveyed today fails all three tests.
In 1827 Joseph Smith, a man repeatedly charged with fraud and treasure hunting, claimed to have found golden tablets in ancient Egyptian characters, which conveniently returned to heaven after he produced the Book of Mormon in 1830. Early followers included many from the Church of Christ movement, hence the name Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Mormons moved from Kirtland, Ohio through Missouri to Illinois, where Smith was killed by a mob while in prison.
The house of cards has a documented collapse. Smith's followers bought him authentic Egyptian scrolls, and, since the Rosetta Stone's decipherment had not yet opened Egyptian to scholars, no one could check when he spent two years producing a translation, published as the Book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price. But the scrolls survived, the church acknowledges they are the ones Smith used, and Egyptologists can now read them: they are a common Egyptian funerary text with nothing whatever to do with Abraham. The one translation of Smith's that can be tested is a demonstrable fabrication, which speaks directly to the Book of Mormon he claimed to translate from the same language.
Wrong Savior: Jesus is one of many gods, the physical offspring of the Father and Mary, and faithful Mormons may themselves become gods, a pantheon closer to old Gnostic emanations than to the Bible. Wrong salvation: works, tiered heavens, and rites like baptism for the dead. Wrong Scriptures: three added books, the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price. However family-friendly the public image, and however evangelical the trained missionaries at the door can sound, Mormonism is not another denomination; it is another religion, and its polygamous origins mock the wholesome branding.
William Miller calculated Christ's return at twenty-three hundred years from Ezra's return to Jerusalem: 1843, then, when that failed, 1844, which failed too, the Great Disappointment. Rather than admit error, the movement, with the prophetess Ellen G. White, declared the math right and the event wrong: in 1844 Christ had entered the heavenly sanctuary to begin a second work of atonement. Add soul sleep against Paul's to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, annihilationism, Saturday sabbatarianism with Mosaic dietary rules, and prophecies of White treated as authoritative, and historic Adventism fails the three tests: a second atonement, an added authority, and law-keeping salvation, the Judaizers redivivus.
The classroom wrestles honestly with the question. Spiritually, the god of this age blinds hearts, and Romans 1 shows hardening in falsehood as itself a judgment. Practically, evangelical doctrinal naivete leaves people unable to answer the trained, camouflaged pitch at the door, which is why Titus 1 requires elders able to refute those who contradict. Socially, the groups offer belonging, pressure, and polish, and people in a relativistic age choose what feels welcoming over what is true. Notice too that nearly every cult softens eternal punishment, the fruit of an inflated view of man.
Mary Baker Eddy's movement, neither Christian nor science, regurgitated Gnostic docetism: the material world, including sickness, is illusion to be overcome by mind. It fails the same three tests and illustrates the same pattern, an old heresy in a new American dress.
Charles Taze Russell, influenced by the Millerites, founded what became the Jehovah's Witnesses, Arianism reborn: Jesus a created being, not truly God, supported by their own New World Translation, with salvation through membership and works, plus soul sleep and annihilationism inherited from Adventist soil. Russell read World War I as the end of the world, and the movement has issued and revised end-date predictions ever since, around a dozen failed prophecies, with fresh calculations still built on adding years to 1914. False prophecy, the lecture concludes, is the reliable earmark of these movements: their founders predicted, and God's word stood while theirs fell.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all twelve are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. The restorationist movement of Stone and Campbell sought to
2. The lecture argues that what the cults actually rediscovered was
3. The three-part test for a false religion examines its view of
4. The golden tablets from which Smith claimed to translate the Book of Mormon
5. The surviving scrolls behind the Book of Abraham turned out to be
6. The Book of Abraham matters for evaluating the Book of Mormon because
7. Mormonism teaches that Jesus is
8. When Christ did not return in 1844, the Millerite response was to
9. Historic Adventism fails the three tests through
10. Among the reasons cults thrive, the lecture names
11. The Jehovah's Witnesses revive which ancient heresy?
12. The reliable earmark of these movements, the lecture concludes, is
All twelve correct. Lecture 24 is complete.
The lecture says doctrinal naivete leaves believers speechless at the door. What would it take for your church, or your family, to be genuinely ready for the trained, camouflaged pitch?
A visitor stayed in a cult partly because it felt more welcoming than the evangelical churches he had known. What is the right response to that indictment, without trading truth for warmth?
Every group surveyed softened or removed eternal punishment. Why do you think that doctrine is always the first to go, and what is lost with it?
We are of good courage and would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.
The lecture recommends the Book of Abraham documentary for Mormon apologetics and the first-semester material on the ancient heresies as the best preparation for engaging the modern cults.