Restorationist
The restorationist impulse
A junction rather than a body. Three descendants, three incompatible answers to what was lost, and demonologies that land where nothing else on this chart does.
In its own terms
What this body is doing
Carried as a node with no positions. The bodies below it share a premise and very little else: that the apostolic church did not merely need correcting but had ceased, and that what is required is restoration. One restores it by continuing revelation to a prophet, one by returning to the practice of the New Testament and nothing beyond it, one by a recovered reading of prophecy.
Filing them under the separatist branch is a judgement about the ground they grew in rather than a claim of descent from any one body: the frontier they arose on was congregational in temper, and the premise that a gathered people may constitute the church without asking anyone is what made restoration thinkable in the first place. A reader who would rather see them as roots of their own has a case, and the same caution applies here as at the Pentecostal node.
Where it stands in the tree
Descent
Separated from
Congregationalist · 1830Not one separation but a shared premise, worked out on the American frontier: that the church of the apostles was lost and must be restored rather than reformed. What each body restores, and on whose authority, is where they part company.
Bodies that separated from it
- Latter-day Saints1830
A claim of restored priesthood authority by angelic ordination and of continuing revelation to a living prophet, which no other body on this chart accepts and which makes every other question secondary.
- Stone-Campbell churches1832
A union rather than a division: two frontier movements merging on the principle that the New Testament church can be restored by keeping to what the New Testament actually prescribes, and that creeds are the cause of division rather than a cure for it.
The same questions asked of every body
What the corpus cannot yet say
This body is carried without positions, on purpose. It is either a junction in the tree — a stage every later body descends through rather than a party to the argument — or one the corpus holds no primary text for. Filling six answers in from general knowledge would produce exactly the confident, uncitable summary this site exists against.
Are the gifts still given?
Not established here. Not an exorcism question, and the one that decides the rest. A body holding the gifts ceased with the apostles has no room for a deliverance ministry; a body holding they continue has no reason to license one.
Who may act?
Not established here. The first thing a rite settles, usually in its opening rubric, and the sharpest divide between an office and a gift.
What counts as evidence?
Not established here. Where a tradition decides it is dealing with a spirit rather than an illness, a grief, or nothing at all.
Where is the spirit?
Not established here. All four inherit gospel scenes in which spirits are in people. What each adds beyond that is the largest difference between them.
Whom do the words address?
Not established here. A formal difference a reader can check by counting clauses rather than by weighing tone.
What restraint is written in?
Not established here. Every one of these traditions knows the practice can harm. What each does about that is what popular accounts leave out.
What closes the matter?
Not established here. Whether the encounter ends, and who declares it, separates a rite from an ongoing practice.
This page records what a body holds and where that is written down. It takes no position on whether any of it is true, and nothing here is instruction — the rites are described by what they contain, never as something to follow.