Quotes & Sayings About Apostolic Succession

I held apostolic succession fully, and the channels of grace to be there only. — John Nelson Darby

In the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic papacy developed into an abusive, corrupt, autocratic, totalitarian system by claiming apostolic authority through a supposed line of succession back to Peter. — John F. MacArthur Jr.

Of the doctrines and injunctions kept by the Church, some we have from instruction. But some we have received, from Apostolic Tradition, by succession in private [i.e., unwritten tradition]. Both the former and the latter have one and the same force for piety, and this will be contradicted by no one who has ever so little knowledge in the ordinances of the Church; for were we to dare to reject unwritten customs, as if they had no great importance, we should insensibly mutilate the Gospel, even in the most essential points, or, rather, for the teaching of the Apostles leave but an empty name.17 — Andrew Stephen Damick

Moltmann indicates, "the Church can only be apostolic when it takes up its cross. Its apostolic succession is the succession of the suffering Christ — Henry G. Covert

Alongside this [apostolic succession], largely hidden, existing on a "charismatic" rather than an official level, there is secondly the apostolic succession of the spiritual fathers and mothers in each generation of the Church - the succession of the saints, stretching from the apostolic age to our own day, which St. Symeon the New Theologian termed the "golden chain."... — Herman A. Middleton

They know they dare not have their stuff stripped down to plain words. These Bishops and parsons with their beloved Christianity are like a man who has poisoned his wife and says her body's too sacred for a post-mortem. Nowadays, by the light we have, any ecclesiastic must be born blind or an intellectual rascal. Don't tell me. The world's had this apostolic succession of oily old humbugs from early Egypt onwards, trying to come it over people. Antiquity's no excuse. A sham is no better for being six thousand years stale. Christianity's no more use to us now than
the Pyramids. — H.G.Wells