Restorationism

Restorationism, sometimes called Christian primitivism, is the view that the original teachings and customs of Jesus’ followers were either lost or corrupted after his apostles died, so they need to be brought back. This outlook typically tries to fix what it sees as errors or weaknesses in other Christian groups by looking to the early church as the ideal model. Movements aiming to recover a more authentic, earlier form of Christianity often arise as a reaction to denominational divisions. As Rubel Shelly explained, the goal behind such restoration efforts is to break down barriers between groups by returning to what is original, essential, and common to all Christians. Different movements have pursued this restoration in distinct ways: some focus on church structure and practices, others on ethical living, and still others on the direct experience of the Holy Spirit in a believer’s life. Groups also differ in how important they consider the restoration ideal to be and how fully they believe the early church has been reestablished.

The term “Restorationism” has been applied to the Stone–Campbell Movement in the United States and to certain holiness groups that insist true believers belong to the “church of God,” using that phrase in their names—for example, the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), Church of God (Holiness), and Church of God (Guthrie, Oklahoma). These denominations do not keep membership rolls. The label has also been used for more recent movements aiming to reestablish Christianity in its original form, such as some anti-denominational Charismatic Restorationists that emerged in the 1970s in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

In a narrower sense, “Restorationism” describes several unrelated non-Trinitarian movements, including the Christadelphians (Greek for “Brothers of Christ”), Swedenborgians (also called The New Church), Irvingians (the largest being the New Apostolic Church), The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism), Jehovah’s Witnesses (named after the tetragrammaton for God), La Luz del Mundo (Spanish for “the Light of the World”), and Iglesia ni Cristo (Tagalog for “Church of Christ”). In this context, Restorationism is considered one of the six major categories of Christianity: the Church of the East, Oriental Orthodoxy, Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Restorationism. These groups share the belief that historic Christianity lost the true faith during the Great Apostasy and that the church needed to be restored.

The terms “restorationism,” “restorationist,” and “restoration” are used in several ways within Christianity. As “Christian primitivism,” restorationism means trying to fix perceived problems in the current church by using the early church as a model to reconstruct early Christianity. It has also been described as “practicing church the way it is perceived to have been done in the New Testament.” This approach is sometimes called “apostolic” because it claims to represent the form of Christianity followed by the Twelve Apostles. These ideas appeared early in church history, first in the writings of Irenaeus, and surfaced in some medieval movements. They were expressed to varying degrees during the Protestant Reformation, and Protestantism itself has been called “a form of Christian restorationism,” though some forms—like the Churches of Christ—are more restorationist than others.

Several historical movements can be described as “restoration movements,” including the Glasites in Scotland and England, the independent church led by James Haldane and Robert Haldane in Scotland, the American Restoration Movement, the Landmarkists, and the Mormons. A variety of more recent movements have also been labeled “restorationist.” Restorationism has been described as a basic part of some Pentecostal movements, such as the Assemblies of God. The terms “Restorationism movement” and “Restorationist movement” have also been used for the British New Church Movement. When capitalized, “Restorationism” can be a synonym for the American Restoration Movement. The term can also include the belief that the Jewish people must be restored to the promised land to fulfill biblical prophecy before Christ’s Second Coming. Christian restorationism in this sense usually refers to the 19th-century movement based on that belief, though “Christian Zionism” is more common for later forms.

The word “primitive,” in this context, refers to a scholarly approach based on research into the actual writings of the Church Fathers and other historical documents. Because written records for the first-century underground church are scarce, that church passed down its knowledge orally. Some elements of the primitive Christianity movement reject the patristic tradition of the extensive extra-biblical writings from the 2nd and 3rd centuries (the Ante-Nicene Fathers) and instead try to reconstruct early church practices as they might have existed in the Apostolic Age. To do this, they revive practices found in the Old Testament. The term “apostolic” refers to a nonmainstream, often literal, apostolic succession or historical lineage tracing back to the Apostles and the Great Commission. These restorationist threads are sometimes criticized as being Judaizers in the Ebionite tradition.

The restoration ideal has been interpreted and applied in various ways. Four general historical models can be identified, based on which aspect of early Christianity the individuals and groups involved were attempting to recover.