§ 56. The Permanence of Ecclesiastical Authority

After the ascension of Christ and the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles, they showed at once, in deed and in word, the authority which they had received from Christ. This was shown especially by the Apostle Paul in his activity, as his epistles testify, in that he asserted the authority received from Jesus Christ in all the affairs of the respective churches and in all branches of church governance. In matters common to the whole Church, the apostles exercised the supreme authority jointly, and their decisions were regarded—as indeed they in fact were—as decisions inspired by the Holy Spirit, and hence unconditionally binding on all the faithful. In some matters of church governance, when the apostles exercised their authority, we find that the faithful laity also took part. This was the case when the apostle Matthias was chosen in the place of Judas,[1] when the first deacons were chosen,[2] and when it had to be decided whether circumcision was necessary for Christians.[3] But this participation of the people in these actions was not of essential significance, for the business itself was conducted by the apostles by their own authority, and the respective decisions were issued by the apostles themselves, as a determination of their own authority.

The authority which Christ handed over to the apostles for church governance was appointed for all the ages during which the earthly Church endures, and hence that same authority could not cease with the death of the apostles, but had to pass to those who would serve in the Church in the apostles’ stead. These their successors the apostles themselves appointed already in their own lifetime, in all those places where new churches had been founded, and they called them bishops. To these their successors, the bishops, the apostles, by their own laying on of hands and invocation of the Holy Spirit, handed over all that authority which they themselves had received from Jesus Christ, and which these bishops were to exercise by that same right by which the apostles themselves had exercised it, handing it on afterward in turn to their own successors on the chief priestly thrones. In this way the first bishops came to be: Timothy for the church of Ephesus, Titus for that of Crete, James for that of Jerusalem, Linus for that of Rome, Evodius for that of Antioch, Dionysius for that of Athens,[4] and so on. And Clement of Rome writes: “Preaching through towns and cities, the apostles appointed their first converts, having tested them by the Spirit, to be bishops and deacons unto them that should believe, for the rest of the faithful and for those who would in the future enter the Church.”[5] And this the apostles did, as Ignatius the God-bearer says, by the will of God.[6]