Apostolic Succession

Apostolic succession is the doctrine that the bishops of the Church stand in an unbroken succession of ordination, conferred by the laying on of hands, reaching back through the centuries to the apostles. In Anglican theology the doctrine expresses the continuity of the Church's ministry, teaching, and sacramental life with the apostolic age: the Church of today is not a new creation of the sixteenth century, but the same Church, reformed. When the Church of England was reformed in the sixteenth century, the historic threefold order of bishops, priests, and deacons was deliberately retained, and the succession of bishops in their sees was preserved unbroken through the English Reformation.

The Ordinal and the threefold ministry

The classic Anglican statement of the doctrine is the preface to the Ordinal — the book of services for making, ordaining, and consecrating bishops, priests, and deacons — which was retained in the Book of Common Prayer of 1662. The preface declares the Church's intention to continue the orders of ministry that had been in the Church from the beginning: "It is evident unto all men diligently reading the holy Scripture and ancient Authors, that from the Apostles' time there have been these Orders of Ministers in Christ's Church; Bishops, Priests, and Deacons." It follows from this that no one is to be accounted a lawful bishop, priest, or deacon in the Church of England unless he has received episcopal consecration or ordination — that is, ordination at the hands of a bishop standing within the succession. The succession is thus not treated as a bare pedigree. It is the means by which the ministry of Word and sacrament is handed on from age to age, each generation of bishops receiving its commission from those who went before, in a chain of ordination that Anglicans believe reaches back in unbroken sequence to the apostles themselves.

The consecration of Matthew Parker

The critical moment for the English succession came in 1559. Matthew Parker, the first Archbishop of Canterbury of the Elizabethan settlement, was consecrated on 17 December 1559 at Lambeth by four bishops: William Barlow, John Scory, Miles Coverdale, and John Hodgkins — men whose own consecrations carried the succession through the upheavals of the preceding reigns. The consecration is recorded in the archiepiscopal register at Lambeth, which survives as documentary evidence of the event. Against this record stands the famous "Nag's Head" story: a later fable, circulated by the Church of England's Roman Catholic controversialists, alleged that Parker had received no true consecration at all, but only a mock ceremony at the Nag's Head tavern in Cheapside, in which a Bible was laid upon his neck. The story has no contemporary evidence behind it and is contradicted by the register; historians treat it as a fable. The fullest early documentation of Parker's consecration and career is John Strype's biography, published on this wiki as the Life of Matthew Parker (Strype, 1821), which prints the evidence on which the succession through Parker rests.

The historic episcopate and the ecumenical movement

Because the succession was preserved, the "historic episcopate" became one of the defining marks of Anglican identity in the Church's dealings with other Christians. When the bishops of the Anglican Communion set out the terms on which Christian reunion might be approached — in the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, first adopted by the American bishops at Chicago in 1886 and then by the Lambeth Conference in 1888 — they named four points, of which the fourth was the "Historic Episcopate, locally adapted in the methods of its administration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples called of God into the Unity of His Church". The Quadrilateral did not demand that other churches adopt Anglican polity in detail; it asked that the episcopate inherited from the ancient Church, adapted to local circumstances, be part of any restored unity. Apostolic succession, in this Anglican presentation, is therefore both a doctrine about the Church's own continuity and an ecumenical gift: the succession Anglicans received, they hold in trust for the whole Church.

See also

• Life of Matthew Parker (Strype, 1821)
• Matthew Parker
• Adherence to the Apostolical Succession the Safest Course
• Richard Nelson I. Bishops, Priests, and Deacons
• On the Apostolical Succession in the English Church
• On Arguing Concerning the Apostolical Succession

References

• The Preface to the Ordinal, in the Book of Common Prayer.
• J. B. Lightfoot, "The Christian Ministry", in Saint Paul's Epistle to the Philippians (1868).