History of Mormon, Adventist, and Restorationist Churches

hi this is Matt welcome to episode 6 in my series on the family tree of Christian denominations last time I talked about the first Great Awakening and how it led to the creation of the Methodist Church as well as to tremendous growth among the Baptists today we're therefore going to look at the Second Great Awakening which resulted in many more new branches on the tree including the stone Campbell movement the Latter-Day Saints also known as Mormons the Adventists which I will argue include the Jehovah's Witnesses the Plymouth Brethren and the beginnings of the Holiness movement although I converted to Judaism as an adult the church that I grew up in is located on one of these branches so I'm excited to talk about that part in particular I'm going to skip talking about any minor changes that I've made to the Chart this time because we're nearing the end and therefore in the next episode I'll point out all the final revisions that I've made so in other words this is your last chance to make any suggestions based on previous episodes or this one do keep in mind that because of limited space I cannot include every single denomination out there since the market for this poster is primarily the English speaking world I have admittedly focused more on denominations from the US the UK and Canada if you can think of any denomination that is missing and that comes from one of these countries and has at least 250 000 members do point it out in the comments and if there's any denomination from anywhere in the world that has at least a million members I'll consider adding them too [Music] [Music] so as I mentioned last time the first Great Awakening marked the beginning of what's known as Evangelical Christianity a type of Christianity that is more focused on the individual conversion experience the Second Great Awakening occurred about 100 years later and continued along the same theme however the Second Great Awakening was different in a few key ways first of all whereas the first Great Awakening occurred in both the UK and the US the Second Great Awakening was mostly limited to the U.S also during the first Great Awakening it was mostly existing Christians who were involved people may have had a new conversion experience or even decided to switch to nominations but in most cases they were Christians to begin with in contrast the Second Great Awakening saw many more non-christians convert to Christianity for the very first time this is because by then the world had changed whereas in the early 1700s almost all American settlers were Christians by the early 1800s there were many who were not mostly due to the spread of Enlightenment ideas finally whereas the first Great Awakening was a continuation of the Protestant Reformation in that it mostly sought to reform and changed the church the Second Great Awakening was quite different this time many of the new churches saw the old churches as entirely misguided and were instead attempting to restore the original quote-unquote true church for this reason many of the groups that we are going to talk about today do not consider themselves to be Protestants but rather restorationists note that sometimes the term restorationism is used exclusively to refer to the churches that grew out of the stone Campbell movement whereas sometimes it is instead used for groups such as the Latter-Day Saints and the Jehovah's Witnesses let's start with the stone Campbell restorationists named after two of the earliest preachers associated with the Second Great Awakening Barton Stone and Thomas Campbell both of whom were originally Presbyterians these two men and their followers felt that the church had lost its way and they wanted to return to a more primitive form of Christianity something closer to what the original first century Church would have looked like those who followed Barton Stone simply called themselves Christians whereas those who followed Thomas Campbell and then later his son Alexander Campbell called themselves Disciples of Christ eventually the two groups realized that they had a lot in common and therefore they merged in 18 32 however in 1906 this United group ended up dividing in two those who believed that instruments should not be used in worship became known as Churches of Christ whereas those who were okay with instruments became known as Christian churches but the Christian churches eventually split into as well in 1968 with the more liberal Branch adopting a denominational structure and becoming known as the Christian church and in parentheses Disciples of Christ and the more conservative Branch remaining as a loose network of congregations that use either the name Christian church or Church of Christ now one of the things I like about the various groups that came out of the Second Great Awakening is that many of them have produced some really cool charts such as this one made in 1982 even though I don't agree with the message of this chart from a design point of view I think it's pretty great what we have here here is something similar to the trail of blood chart I showed in the last episode once again we have the idea that the majority of Christians have strayed from the one true church of Christ starting first with the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Churches followed by the various Protestant denominations but note here all the little arrows going from the Protestant churches towards the restoration movement these represent the churches who were part of the original Stone Campbell movement however the person who made this chart is trying to make the point that even most of those churches have since Fallen away as well including the Disciples of Christ the Christian church and a group that he calls the sectarian Churches of Christ now before I move on since I now have the Disciples of Christ on the chart I can finally point out the seven churches that in the U.S are considered to be the seven Mainline denominations these are the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America the Episcopal Church the Presbyterian Church USA the United Church of Christ the United Methodist Church the American Baptist Churches USA and The Disciples of Christ Mainline churches are kind of the opposite of Evangelical churches generally speaking Mainline churches are older and more liturgical meaning that they are more focused on carrying out the traditional elements of the weekly service and taking care of their existing members rather than on going out and trying to convert others and generally speaking they are also considered more liberal in that they're more likely to see some parts of the Bible as being symbolic rather than literal they also tend to be more concerned with social justice issues rather than questions about who is or is not going to heaven finally note that Mainline doesn't mean the same thing as mainstream the word mainstream is more broad meaning dominant or conventional whereas the term Main Line comes from the fact that these seven churches were the kind of churches that you would find in towns along the main Railway line in early America okay let's now move on to the next major group to come out of the Second Great Awakening the Latter-Day Saints AKA The Mormons now it used to be that the main LDS denomination embraced the term Mormon and encouraged their own people to use it however in more recent years they have actually reversed course and they are now trying to distance themselves from that term instead promoting the use of Latter-day Saints or LDS note that going forward I'll be using both terms out of respect for their preference I'll be using LDS whenever I talk about the main denomination but Mormon for the movement as whole including its earliest followers but before I jump into it let me address the elephant in the room are Mormons Christians well for my purposes here that's the wrong question to ask since I am approaching this whole project from an academic perspective rather than a faith-based perspective the only question that I'm interested in is do they belong on this chart and to me the answer to that is yes because if we want to go down the road of R fill in the blank Christians we are going to run into a lot of problems because there are a lot of groups on this chart already who don't see other groups on this chart as being Christians for example some Protestants don't see Catholics as being Christians and some Catholics don't see Protestants as being Christians there are even Baptists who don't see other Baptists as being Christians and so on however I do want to say this if I were to come up with a criteria for distinguishing mainstream Christianity from groups that are more On The Fringe I would use the definition of Nicene Christianity as my measuring stick in episode 1 I pointed out that originally there were many different types of Christianity but that eventually one particular type came to dominate the type known as Nicene Christianity based on what was decided at the Council of nicaea in 325 CE up to now pretty much every group that we have discussed whether they be Catholic Orthodox or Protestant have fit under the category of Nicene Christianity at least traditionally The Only Exception I can think of would be perhaps the Quakers especially the more liberal streams but now that we have reached the Mormons this is no longer the case the main LDS church is quite clearly non-nicene when it comes to their theology what this means is that they reject the traditional concept of the Trinity instead of seeing God of the father Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit as being one the LDS church sees them as being three distinct beings so in order to highlight the various non-nicene churches as they come up on this chart I've decided to indicate them by placing them in this special area here okay so I've already done a fairly lengthy video about the Book of Mormon both from an internal perspective as well as from an external perspective so I won't go into all the details again instead I'll just review the basics if you want to learn more I'll leave a link to that previous video in the description basically it all starts with a man named Joseph Smith who claimed to have found and miraculously translated an ancient document called The Book of Mormon LDS see this book as a third Testament equal in authority to the Old and New Testaments it contains an account of how a group of Israelites traveled to to the Americas over 2000 years before Columbus and then how Jesus visited the descendants of those people after he was crucified over in Judea remember the United States was a very young country in the days of Joseph Smith and the U.S was on the other side of the world to the places where the events in the Bible took place so you can see why a new set of scriptures that expanded the biblical story to include the Americas was very appealing originally Joseph Smith simply called his church the Church of Christ although This was later changed to the Church of Latter-day Saints and then later still to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints however in 1844 when Joseph Smith was just 38 he was assassinated resulting in the movement splitting into several groups the largest group and the one that kept the original name was led by a man named Brigham Young he moved his group from Illinois all the way to what is now Utah where he founded Salt Lake City you can see from this map that today most LDS are concentrated in this same area worldwide the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has about 17 million members the second largest Mormon group was originally called the rlds standing for reorganized Latter-Day Saints and from 1860 to 1914 it was led by Joseph Smith's eldest son Joseph Smith III however in 2001 it changed its name to The Community of Christ it differs from the main LDS church in that a it is actually quite liberal and B its theology is Nicene the final Mormon church I want to point out is quite the opposite it is the flds which stands for fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints originally the main LDS church was known for practicing polygamy which allows one man to have many wives although the main LDS church put an end to this practice in 1890 the flds which is a splinter group formally established in 1984 continues to practice polygamy in a very extreme fashion which is why its current leader is now in prison okay let's now talk about the Adventists I grew up in the worldwide Church of God which is located on this branch of the tree so I've been looking forward to covering this section the word Advent refers to the arrival of someone or something which is why you'll often hear it used around Christmas time Christmas being a celebration of the Advent or arrival of Jesus however the Adventists do not get their name because they are focused on the original arrival of Jesus they get their name because they are focused on the second arrival of Jesus or in other words on looking forward to his return the movement began with a man named William Miller who taught that Jesus was going to return in the year 1843 although This was later revised to 1844. he came up with this date based on several sets of numbers from the Bible most of which were taken from The Book of Daniel let me share with you just a few of them in Daniel chapter 9 it mentions a period of 49 years followed by a period of 434 years followed by a period of seven years in the middle of which something important would happen Miller interpreted the start of each period as the date when a decree was made for the Jewish temple to be rebuilt which he calculated to be 457 BCE the date when it was finished 408 BCE and the date when Jesus began his ministry 27 CE halfway through that final period Jesus was crucified so it all seemed to fit then there's a verse in Daniel chapter 8 that mentions a period of 2300 years Miller once again started with 457 BCE and used it to argue that 1844 was therefore the year when Jesus would return now there were some other calculations involved as well but this gives you the basic idea the important thing is that during the late 1830s and early 1840s a bunch of people in America started to get really excited thinking that the world was actually about to end but obviously in 1844 the world did not end this led to what's been called the great disappointment at this point most of Miller's followers simply left the movement but others stayed and tried to work out some sort of explanation for why Jesus hadn't returned those who stayed eventually fell into two main camps on one side there were those who felt that Miller had simply gotten his date wrong they therefore came up with a new date and then another new date and so on with many eventually falling back on a position of he's coming soon but we don't know exactly when on the other side there were those who felt that Miller had been right in a sense and that Jesus did sort of come back in 1844 but just not quite as expected I'll come back to that idea in a moment but first I want to mention something else that some Adventists became known for and that is sabbatarianism which is the practice of meeting on Saturday like Jews instead of on Sunday like most Christians although note that the seventh day Adventists use the term seventh day rather than Saturday because technically the seventh day starts on Friday at sundown the idea to observe the sabbath was actually inherited from a very small group of Baptists known as the seventh day Baptists who had been meeting on Saturday since the 1600s but not all Adventists are Seventh-day Adventists there is also a small group of first day Adventists known as the Advent Christian church and then there's the Jehovah's Witnesses a very well-known group with around 8 million members worldwide while they don't see themselves as being Adventists I would argue that they do belong to this part of the tree originally known simply as Bible students they were founded by Charles Russell who taught that 1914 was the year that the world would end once again the world did not actually end in that year but to this day the Jehovah's Witnesses believe that 1914 marked the beginning of the quote-unquote last days like the Mormons their theology is non-nicene and in this case it's quite similar to a very old type of Christianity called arianism which was mentioned in episode one basically they believe that Jesus was created by God rather than being co-eternal with him they also prefer to call god Jehovah because they believe that that's how these four letters should be pronounced note that they're probably wrong though as most scholars believe that they should be pronounced closer to this for now let's move on to the largest Adventist group the seventh day Adventists Who currently have about 22 million members worldwide it was founded by these four individuals but out of these four the most important was arguably Ellen G white because she was considered to have been a prophet or more accurately a profit Tess she was known for having visions and ended up writing over 150 books one of the unique doctrines that she espoused was that something important did happen in 1844 according to Seventh-day Adventist theology there exists in heaven a temple similar to the physical one that used to exist in Jerusalem this Temple has two main rooms the holy place and the holy of holies according to Ellen G white and other early Adventists in 1844 Jesus moved from the Heavenly holy Place into the Heavenly holy of holies where he began a process known as the investigative judgment whereby he started to make his final determination on who's a true Christian and who is not now not all Sabbath observing Adventists agreed with the teachings of Ellen G white eventually those that didn't formed a much smaller denomination known as the Church of God seventh day it was from this church that Herbert W Armstrong split he went on to form the worldwide Church of God which is the non-nicene church that I was raised in although relatively small it became well known during the 60s 70s and 80s for producing the plain truth magazine as well as the world tomorrow television show now growing up in the worldwide Church of God I had no knowledge of anyone named William Miller but basically Herbert Armstrong was just recycling many of Miller's ideas for example here's one of Miller's original charts my church talked about a lot of the same things stuff taken from Daniel and Revelation it just used updated images the one unique thing that Armstrong added to the mix was British israelism a topic that I've discussed in a previous video again I'll leave a link to that in the description however in the mid 90s something interesting happened within the worldwide Church of God it gave up all of its non-mainstream ideas and embraced Nicene Christianity instead and it eventually changed its name to Grace Communion International which is what it's known by today of course lots of members didn't agree with these changes so a good chunk of them formed a new church called the United Church of God which is basically the same as the old worldwide Church of God now before I move on a quick note about my personal Journey because I get asked about it a lot after having grown up in the worldwide Church of God and having been in that church during the time of its doctrinal changes I ended up attending an Assemblies of God Church as well as an Anglican Church while living overseas but then while working on my PA HD thesis about atheists I myself became an atheist or more of an agnostic actually then I married my wife who is Jewish a few years later I started to become interested in Judaism after learning that it was actually quite different from what I thought it was in particular I liked how it encouraged doubt and questioning at the same time as maintaining a basic faith in God there was also the fact that I was already familiar with many Jewish Customs because the worldwide Church of God had integrated many of those into its belief system so overall it seemed a good fit after a year of study which is required for all Jewish converts I converted so nowadays I am a Jew although because I attended several different Christian churches in the past and have an undergraduate degree in Christian theology plus a PhD in religious studies I'm still able to teach about Christianity from an academic perspective active like I'm doing in this series okay one last thing about the Adventist Branch I want to point out these guys here the Branch Davidians although a very small group they are well known because in 1993 their leader David koresh had a standoff with the FBI in Waco Texas that ended in the deaths of 86 people including koresh 47 of his adult followers 28 children and four Law Enforcement Officers the event took place just a few months before I myself left for Texas to attend the worldwide Church of Gods College there my friends knowing that I belong to a strange Church joked that I must be part of the Waco group well strangely while I didn't realize it at the time there was actually a connection between my church and David koresh's group both traced their Roots back to William Miller the Branch Davidians are actually a brand that split off from the Davidians who themselves split off from the seventh day Adventists also known as The Shepherd's Rod the Davidians are not well known but luckily Joshua over at ready to harvest has done a video today all about them so after you finish this video be sure to head over there and check that out okay so there's one more branch that I want to talk about before I go that's the Plymouth Brethren who are different from the anabaptist Brethren that I mentioned in episode 4. they originated in the UK as a split from anglicanism but ended up influencing American Christianity in a major way even though they themselves remained a relatively small unstructured group this is because it was the founder of the exclusive Brethren John Nelson Darby who became the father of dispensationalism dispensationalism is a theological framework that spread throughout Amer American Christianity in the early 1900s and remains popular in many churches today especially among the Baptists and Pentecostals one of my all-time favorite chart makers is the Baptist dispensationalist Clarence Larkin he made hundreds of hand-drawn charts like this one which remind me a lot of what I was taught during my childhood but it's this one that I want to take a closer look at because it nicely sums up what dispensationalism is all about basically the idea is that human history can be divided into six dispensations with one more to come a dispensation being a kind of legal structure so first there was innocence which is what Adam and Eve lived under this was followed by personal conscience which lasted up until the flood then there's human government up to Abraham a family-based dispensation during the patriarchal period and then the law from Moses to Jesus according to dispensationalists we are currently living under the church-based dispensation but soon Jesus will return ushering in the final dispensation in which the world will be recreated as God intended it to be now before I go I should mention that the Holiness movement started during the Second Great Awakening as well but since it continued on during the third Great Awakening I'm going to wait and cover it in the next episode along with the Pentecostals and charismatics okay so that was a lot of history to cover in one episode like I say though this is my favorite period in church history so if there's anything you want me to return to in a future video let me know in the comments thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: UsefulCharts

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Length: 27min 25sec (1645 seconds)

Published: Fri May 12 2023