We need to see that there is not only an eschatology of the world, the study of the end of the world situation, but also an eschatology of the church. Our study of this crucial matter is according to the divine revelation of the Scriptures. We believers in Christ are not only in the world but also in the church. The genuine church exists within Christianity. Christianity has become very great and includes mainly the Catholic Church and the Protestant church. The Catholic Church and the Protestant church were not there at the time of the apostle Paul. What was there at his time was the original and recovered church. The recovered church refers to the original church. These two are one.
Paul rebuked the Corinthian believers in his first Epistle to them by telling them that they were trying to divide Christ. There were various parties in Corinth who were saying, “I am of Paul,” “I am of Apollos,” and “I am of Cephas.” The self-supposed “spiritual” ones said, “I am of Christ” (1:12-13a). Thus, there were four divisions in Corinth. The church in Corinth was an original church, but it had degraded; it had lost something. At that juncture Paul wrote them. His Epistles to them were recovery books; they recovered the church in Corinth.
By reading Paul’s second Epistle to Timothy, we can also see that at Paul’s time the church had degraded. Some had left the Christian faith. Others, like Alexander the coppersmith, opposed Paul to the uttermost (4:14). But Paul himself declared that he had kept the faith (v. 7). Second Timothy is a book of recovery. The original church existed only for about half a century. The apostles established the original church within less than fifty years. But while Peter, John, and Paul were still living, the church fell from its original state to a degraded state, a deformed state, and even a transmuted state. This is why the Epistles were written. All the “second” letters of Peter, John, and Paul (e.g., 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, 2 Corinthians, etc.) were letters of recovery. All these letters were for recovering the lost church.
At John’s time, some even said that Christ never came in the flesh (1 John 4:2-3; 2 John 7). Others said that Christ was not the Son of God but eventually became the Son of God (1 John 2:22-23). The church had become deformed, changed in form, and transmuted, changed in nature. Thus, John wrote to the believers to recover them. At the time of the apostles we can see the original and recovered church.
The recovered church came into being just a little later than the original church. The original church lasted only for a short time. It was born into a sick situation, an unhealthy environment. When the apostle Paul was sent by the Holy Spirit from Antioch to Asia to preach the gospel and to set up churches, the opposing Jews came to frustrate him. After the churches were established, the Gnostics came in to make trouble. Thus, the church became sick either from Judaism or Gnosticism. The original church did not last too long, but God would not let the church be lost without any kind of recovery. This is why the Lord as the Head of the Body charged the apostles Peter, John, and Paul to write their later Epistles to recover the church. We have to realize that the Lord’s recovery began at the end of the first century. In every century afterward, the Lord raised up a number of “Ezras” and “Nehemiahs” to recover, to reconstitute, the church.
In the first five centuries, there was only the original and recovered church. Then near the end of the sixth century the Catholic Church came into existence. At that time the pope was recognized as the authority of the Catholic Church. The Protestant church came into existence at the time of Martin Luther during the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Today there are still these three kinds of churches.
The church of the recovery is always taking a narrow way. All of those who participate in the recovered church learn the special lessons in the Christian life. They learn to know Christ, to know themselves, and to know the flesh. They learn how to be crucified to live the God-man life. All the members of the church should be God-men because the church is formed with the deified man. The high truth of God becoming a man that man might become God in life and nature but not in the Godhead was discovered by the church fathers in the second century. This was something of the Lord’s recovery. With us the Lord’s recovery began in mainland China seventy-two years ago. Today there are mainly three kinds of churches on earth: the Catholic Church, the Protestant church, and the original and recovered church. We must choose the original and recovered church because it is genuine.