https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZf0yfsTEAw&t=473s
What follows is a transcript of an question and answer interchange between a caller and Pastor Adriel Sanchez – from Episode 1489 of Core Christianity, May 15, 2024 at the 14 minute mark:
Question for Pastor Adriel Sanchez: Hey, Adriel, I was hoping you could talk a bit on the Protestant understanding of Apostolic Succession. I’ve heard some people say that Protestant churches aren’t real churches because they don’t have this particular connection to the apostles or the early church. Thank you.
Adriel: Yeah. Thank you for that question. I’ve heard that objection as well, and of course the argument goes something like this – our church traces its lineage all the way back to the original apostles through the laying on of hands through this succession of an apostolic ministry. And early on in some of the Early Church Fathers, you begin to see this idea and in part it was a way of guarding against false teaching, gnostic heresy that was floating around in that day.
The question was, okay, well, do you have the apostolic deposit? The word that was passed down through the laying on of hands, that ordination to the ministry. And so one of the arguments is that churches will make is, well, you don’t have that as Protestant Christians. Only the Roman Catholics have that, or only the Eastern Orthodox have that.
I guess what we emphasize a lot of times in Protestant circles and Protestant theology is the centrality of the word, the importance of the word. That it’s not so much an apostolic ministry that’s passed down through the laying on of hands, you know, through these ”apostolic ministers” but the apostolic message of the gospel, that’s what makes the church the church, because ministers can go astray but the word is the word.
And so you think of what Paul tells the Galatians, for example, in Galatians 1:6, he says, ”I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel, not that there is another, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.”
These are very strong words from the Apostle Paul here. He’s saying, look, even if we as apostles or an angel from heaven came and, and began preaching to you something different than what we had given to you, um, that apostolic message that centers around the life, death, burial, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, if they come with that, let them be accursed, right?
So it seems to me, what Paul is getting at here is the focus primarily is on the message of the apostles. This is what Paul entrust Timothy with, and what he encourages Timothy to entrust to faithful men that apostolic deposit, the word of the gospel. And so I would say a church is in succession to the apostles, so long as it holds onto that message and if the church goes astray from that message, well then it’s no longer in line with the teaching of the apostles.
And of course, there in the book of Galatians, central to the apostolic deposit is the right understanding of justification – the doctrine of justification by grace through faith that was being called into question by the agitators there in Galatia. They were saying, if you want to be justified, you need to obey the law of Moses. You need to go through these ceremonies. You need to essentially become Jewish, if you really want to be justified before God.
And Paul says, no, you can’t add to the gospel. And so again, thinking about what he says there, is his focus on the apostolic message and that’s what Protestants with the Protestant Reformers claimed that they were recovering the purity of the gospel that had been obscured by rituals, extra biblical rituals, by, by things that were not in line with scripture and I think that’s again, where we need to focus. If we want to be in line with the apostles, we need the doctrine of the apostles as it’s given to us in holy scripture. And that’s what the Protestant Reformers, sought to uphold.