The Modern Era

April 6, 1830 · Heresy & error · Less than two weeks after publishing the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith organized the Church of Christ in New York, later named The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It claimed that the true church had been lost after the apostles and was now restored through a living prophet and new scripture, and it later taught doctrines of God and humanity that differ fundamentally from the biblical faith. Baptists reject the premise: Christ's church never disappeared.

1879–1884 · Heresy & error · Charles Taze Russell began publishing Zion's Watch Tower in 1879 and formed a tract society, legally incorporated in 1884. His Bible Student movement rejected the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and eternal punishment. After his death, most of his followers, led by Joseph Rutherford, took the name Jehovah's Witnesses in 1931.

1906–1909 · Modern movement · In a former church building on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, William J. Seymour, an African American holiness preacher, led meetings marked by speaking in tongues, which participants understood as the baptism in the Holy Spirit. Drawing on the teaching of Charles Parham, the revival helped launch the worldwide Pentecostal movement.

1913–1916 · Heresy & error · At a Pentecostal camp meeting near Los Angeles in 1913, teaching on baptism in the name of Jesus sparked what came to be called the New Issue. Some ministers began rebaptizing in Jesus' name only and taught that Father, Son, and Spirit are titles of one person, Jesus. The Assemblies of God rejected this teaching in 1916, and Oneness Pentecostal bodies formed.

October 1978 · Modern movement · About three hundred evangelical leaders gathered in Chicago under the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy and adopted a statement of nineteen articles of affirmation and denial. It confessed that Scripture, being God's own Word, is without error in all that it teaches, and it became a standard evangelical definition of inerrancy.