Apostolic Succession

For anybody who's interested, below is something I recently wrote to somebody who sent me a letter asking some questions about apostolic succession. I begin with the appointing of Judas' replacement in Acts 1, since he mentioned that passage.

Judas is replaced as a unique fulfillment of prophecy (Acts 1:16), and his being replaced is seen as something negative (Acts 1:20), not something positive. He's replaced by one man (Acts 1:20, 1:22), not by multiple men all claiming to be his successors. The requirements that Judas' replacement had to meet cannot possibly be met by people alive today (Acts 1:21-22). And when people like James, Paul, and Peter are killed or are nearing death, the events of Acts 1 aren't repeated. People are told to remember what Jesus and the apostles had taught (Acts 20:28-35, 2 Peter 1:13-15, 3:1-2), not to expect all apostolic teaching to be infallibly maintained in unbroken succession throughout church history.

While it would be possible for the apostles to tell people to remember their teachings without an intention to deny church infallibility, we ought to ask why the alleged assurance of having an infallible church is never mentioned. People are often told to use their memory to bring to mind what Jesus and the apostles had taught, and they're told to consult the writings of the New Testament and Old Testament authors (2 Timothy 3:15-17, 2 Peter 1:14-15, 3:1-2), but no future infallible church seems to be in view. Every passage cited as alleged evidence of an infallible church (Matthew 28:20, John 16:13, 1 Timothy 3:15, etc.) can plausibly be interpreted otherwise and, in some cases, can be shown to be unlikely to refer to an infallible church. In the context surrounding John 16:13, for example, Jesus makes comments that couldn't possibly be applied to post-apostolic men. The context of 1 Timothy 3 is the local church, not a worldwide denomination, and the church can have a role involving supporting the truth without being infallible. Etc.

You refer to Irenaeus' listing of "Popes", but he doesn't describe the bishops of Rome as Popes. The concept of a papacy isn't found anywhere in Irenaeus. He refers to the bishops of Rome having been appointed by apostles (plural), and he gives non-papal reasons for his concept of Roman primacy. Rather than giving us evidence of an early papacy, Irenaeus gives us evidence of the concept's early absence. If Irenaeus had such a concept in mind, we would expect it to be mentioned explicitly and often in his writings. It isn't mentioned at all.

Different patristic sources defined apostolic succession in different ways. Irenaeus believed that the churches in Rome, Ephesus, and other cities had a lineage of bishops from the apostles that was significant as evidence against the claims of the Gnostics. However, the circumstances in which Irenaeus was living were radically different from ours.

The fact that the church of Ephesus, for example, was faithful to apostolic teaching in Irenaeus' day doesn't prove that the same Ephesian church would always exist and always be faithful to apostolic teaching. And Irenaeus was writing less than a century after the death of the apostles. The evidential significance of a lineage of bishops in Irenaeus' day is much higher than it is today. One of the reasons Irenaeus gave for the significance of the Roman church was that Christians from around the world often traveled to Rome, so that the traditions of the Roman church would tend to reflect the traditions of Christians around the world. Rome was the capital of the empire. But Rome isn't the capital of an ongoing Roman empire today. Christians don't travel to Rome today in the same manner in which they did in the past, and our technology today allows us to much more easily hear from Christians around the world without traveling. Irenaeus goes on to explain that we must separate from bishops who don't meet moral and doctrinal requirements, and that standard alone would in my view justify separating from the bishops of Roman Catholicism. But even aside from that standard, the reasons Irenaeus gives for holding a high view of the Roman church of his day are radically different from the reasons Roman Catholics are giving us today to hold a high view of their denomination.

While various forms of apostolic succession were popular in patristic times, we often find the patristic advocates of apostolic succession including qualifiers that modern advocates don't include. And some of the patristic authors don't say anything about any type of apostolic succession, even when discussing the most foundational elements of the Christian faith and when telling people how to discern what is and isn't true Christian teaching. We find the patristic sources referring to a variety of forms of church government, including election by the people of a congregation and the appointing of church leaders against the will of the clergy. Often, people will quote what a church father said about the general principles of church government without mentioning the qualifiers the same father added in other contexts.

Many issues of church government, including apostolic succession, became important in church history. But the lack of emphasis on such issues early on, accompanied by the variety of views expressed later, suggests that the authority systems we see in Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, for example, weren't founded by the apostles. They're later developments that are neither probably nor necessarily derived from anything Jesus and the apostles taught. Even worse, some of the teachings of groups like Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy can be shown to contradict what Jesus and the apostles taught. They also contradict much of what the church fathers believed. The fact that they can produce lists of bishops going back to the apostles, all the while contradicting the apostles and the church fathers, doesn't have much significance.