Editing Openai/691a45a6-8ed0-8010-a7d9-24657a41a9aa (section)

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Christ established a church whose defining feature was divinely authorized leadership transmitted through a specific gift: apostolic authority (priesthood keys). These keys were not identical to ordinary Christian leadership or teaching ability. They were a unique stewardship given to the Twelve and a few others.

After the apostles’ deaths, the surviving communities continued to worship Christ sincerely, but did not possess the same charismatic, revelatory, and governing authority that had defined the original leadership. With no mechanism to perpetuate apostolic authority indefinitely, the Church gradually lost:

• unified revelatory governance
• authoritative canon-defining power
• access to certain spiritual gifts once tied to apostolic office
• the original structural pattern of the Church

Meanwhile, external pressures (Roman persecution, doctrinal controversies, political entanglement) accelerated institutional drift. Over the second and third centuries, Christianity evolved into a philosophically sophisticated institution, but no longer the same organism Christ founded, because the indispensable ingredient — living apostles with divine commissioning — was missing.

Under this model, the Great Apostasy isn’t about total corruption. It’s about discontinuity of God-authorized leadership. Christianity persisted, but the “authorized version” did not.

Thus, in LDS thought, the long, slow fading of apostolic authority made a later restoration not just plausible but necessary.

===== • Explains the disappearance of public prophecy, oracles, and open-canon revelation after the first century. =====
• Fits the theological expectation that Christ’s church must have authority tied to divinely chosen individuals, not just communal consensus.
• Explains why later Christianity diverged dramatically in structure and doctrine from the New Testament, not just in detail but in kind.
• Takes seriously the lack of universal early mechanisms for replacing apostles.
• Provides a coherent reason for a restoration that produces a recognizable structure of offices.

===== 4 / 10 =====

That’s higher than earlier ratings because this steel-man version avoids vulnerable claims (e.g., total collapse) and focuses on a quiet loss of revelatory governance — something history can’t fully disprove. Still, it’s limited by the lack of evidence for a pristine, uniform apostolic structure that suddenly went missing.