In many respects, the Restored Gospel as it emerged after 1820 had been pre-rejected over 150 years previously in a series of debates that ran through the middle of Protestantism.

Apocalypsis Reserata (“Apocalypse Unlocked,” today attributed to Martin Gühler), published in 1653, interprets Revelation 11 and 16 by dividing history since the New Testament was written into three eras: the direct rule of the diabolical Dragon, the reign of the Roman Antichrist, and then a time of peace in Christ’s kingdom that would begin in 1656. Apart from the near-term expectation, this does not seem at first glance like the type of work to spark Lutheran intramural controversy. But Johannes Ursin, pastor in Speyer, brought his polemic heavy artillery to bear against the work in his 1654 Richtiges Zeigerhändlein (“Correct Minute Hand”). Ursin closed his 341-page treatise by emphatically rejecting the anonymous work’s main points:

1. 1. Will all Jews, or at least the majority, be converted before the Last Day? Answer: No!
   2. Will this world exist for 6000 years? No!
   3. Will our Savior appear again before the Last Day in person or represented by a special delegate? No!
   4. Will the Antichrist be destroyed 1000 years before the Last Day? No!
   5. Will the Turkish monarchy meet its end just as far in advance? No!
   6. Will the gospel be preached again in the whole world and thus one faith established? No!
   7. Will the sacred ministry and all worldly authority pass away before the Last Day? No!
   8. Will the holy martyrs be resurrected and rule on Earth for 1000 years before the resurrection of the flesh? No!
   9. Will divine teaching shine brighter before the end of the world? No?
   10. Will there be peace throughout the world? (340-41)

While you won’t find all these points in our own Tenth Article of Faith – concerns about the Turkish monarchy have declined since the seventeenth century – Ursin rejected a recognizable cousin of our own premillenniarism and restorationism. Pre- versus postmillennialism may seem like a purely abstract concern, but it’s just one of a series of interconnected boundary markers between Lutheran orthodoxy and heresy that were drawn between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

Ursin’s rejection of points 9 and 10 is less clear, but in the foregoing fuller exposition, his attitude is also negative. While the Christian church may become larger or more righteous, he sees any significant new doctrine as impossible:

But that [God] will reveal other principle articles of faith essential for salvation before the end of the world is so absurd that it hopefully didn’t enter Forbesius’ mind; no new saving doctrine can be revealed except that which has been revealed to us; it has been proclaimed to us sufficiently for instruction to salvation and all of God’s counsel in it; no new sacraments can be established, for these shall remain until the end of the world when the Lord will visibly return on that day. (295)

So Ursin’s firm stance against what we might call our Tenth Article of Faith would lead him to reject the Ninth as well.

The premillennial Apocalypsis Reserata situates its readers chronologically in the middle of the Apocalypse, with multiple important events from Revelation unfolding before their eyes. But in Ursin’s postmillennial view, most of Revelation’s prophecies were fulfilled in the first three Christian centuries, with the few remaining only to be fulfilled at the Last Day. Ursin situates readers in mundane time, distant from both the times of the apostles and early saints and from the Last Day still to come.

A telling example of this is the prophecy in Matthew 24:14 that the gospel would be preached to every nation before the Last Day. While Ursin accepts the prophecy’s validity, he sees it as having already been fulfilled. In his view, the gospel was preached to every nation by the Apostles and the Seventy in the early centuries of the Christian church.

But wait, one might object: What about the New World? Wasn’t the contemporary preaching of the gospel in the Americas the literal fulfillment of the prophecy in Matthew 24? Ursin has an answer:

It is also not necessary to trouble oneself concerning the American peoples and those who inhabit distant, long unknown islands: For just as all manner of footprints and traces of Christian doctrine and ceremonies are to be found among them, as attested in the histories, there can be no solid evidence produced that these American lands and islands were already inhabited at the time of the Apostles; the opposite is to be concluded from convincing conjectures. […] Thus Japan, the large land near China, was only settled within the last 600 years; Iceland in the year 874, Greenland in 982, Mexico in the New World in 820. Macocapac the first king in Peru, who built the city Cuzco, lived around 400 years before the Spanish discovered and conquered the West Indies etc. And those who have diligently contemplated such things have observed three migrations or displacements of peoples to the New World, one of the Phoenicians before the birth of Christ (which is based on nothing but sand and froth) and two after Christ our Lord, one of the Scythians and Tartars, the other of the Chinese; see Georgius Hornius. (115-16)

Thus Ursin’s postmillennialism rules out the Book of Mormon on both doctrinal and historical grounds, 170 years before its publication.

In the sixteenth century, an anonymous work of Lutheran apocalypticism may not have met as much resistance, but Ursin lived in much different time. The devastation of the Thirty Years War had created an opening for a handful of lay apocalypticists to publish independent and unduly optimistic interpretations of scripture beginning around 1618; after their hopes were dashed by the early 1630s, they were succeeded in print by a dozen lay visionaries. Lay prophets were not uncommon in Lutheran communities, but in the context of wartime disorder, the challenge they posed was more acute. Their preaching was either concordant with scripture and thus redundant, or in tension with it and thus heretical. Meanwhile they lacked both formal training and the authority of a pastoral office. These New Prophets, as their opponents referred to them, thus posed a challenge to the Protestant doctrines of sola scriptura and the priesthood of all believers – essential doctrinal planks that had made Luther’s break with Rome conceivable.

For Ursin, the work of an anonymous apocalypticist was part of a tradition of “irrational, overenthusiastic prophets” that included lay visionaries and untrained interpreters of scripture. He traces their origin to “Nicolaus Storck, Thomas Müntzer, Marx Stübner, Martinus Cellarius, Andreas Karlstad, Caspar Schwenckfeld, etc.” as well as Conrad Grebel, Jacob Kautz, Melchior Hoffman, and the leaders of the Münster rebellion. More recent antecedents included the “Libertines and followers of Menno Simmons, David Joris, Valentine Weigel, Michel Stiefel, Ezechiel Meth, Rosicrucians, Familists, Brownists, and so on” (and to be clear, some of these people had genuinely terrible ideas or did genuinely terrible things). Before long, other polemicists would add Quakers and then Pietists to the disreputable family of Anabaptists, radicals and sectarians.

These are, in other words, the losers of the Protestant Reformation. There might be bitter doctrinal disagreements with Catholics and Calvinists, but Ursin sees the New Prophets as something worse: a blot on Lutheran orthodoxy, with much more at stake than just interpretations of Revelation. (Is Plato wrapped up in this too? Absolutely, as Stephen F. might remind us.)

There are some things we can learn from this.

In its doctrinal positions on authority, revelation, scripture, and the shape of the Latter Days, the Restored Gospel predominately sides with the losers of the Reformation. All these early fundamental doctrinal decisions removed the Restoration from the Protestant mainstream.

The real prelude to the Restoration (not just the history we claim as ours, but the currents that washed us ashore) isn’t the widely lauded work of the famous Reformers, but succeeding generations of people dissatisfied with any of the available options. By allowing the New Prophets to flourish and then precipitating their expulsion from orthodoxy, the Defenestration of Prague and the Peace of Westphalia were key antecedents. Even if you reject the historicity of the Book of Mormon, a focus strictly on 19th-century frontier America and English-language sources is inadequate to explain this work of scripture and the rise of the Restoration associated with it. Debates within Christian Europe in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are a crucial part of the Restoration’s context. And these are arguments between Protestants. Belief in a Great Apostasy that saw a cessation of miracles is not solely the product of anti-Catholic polemic or Protestant history writing. The heavens were also closed to further revelation as a consequence of intra-Lutheran debate.

The logic of sola scriptura and Luther’s priesthood of all believers makes Protestant rejection of prophets all but inevitable. But there are also costs to offering believers only creedal orthodoxy in a disenchanted world, so that movements keep arising in tension with it. There are at least structural similarities in the emergence of various radical and Anabaptist movements, Pietism, and the Latter-day Saints. And one might see an element of genetic continuity as well. In a continent of established national churches, exile was both a form of religious persecution, and a route to keeping a religious tradition alive. It is perhaps no coincidence that remnants of many of the losers of the Reformation ended up in the colonial United States.