Rest assured that only the one, holy, catholic and APOSTOLIC Church is the true Church of Christ. The minister is engaged in wishful thinking.
Lord bless your son, he is coming home.
May the Holy Spirit guide you on your journey. Jesus is waiting for you to come home. God bless you!
To the best of my knowledge, the only Protestant communion that would claim a historical succession of the apostles through an ecclessiastical appointment is the Church of England.
Yep and they ruined that back in the 1500’s, shame about that. But it is a discussion for another thread.
It is, but I always wondered…why exactly did they lose apostolic succession from a Catholic point of view? Being the bishops who opposed Rome were validly ordained, no?
I’m a convert myself. One thing I found in the Catholic Church that I found (and find) nowhere else: there is NO objection that she cannot/will not overcome.
The apostolic succession was broken,because the Lutherans believed in a priesthood of the laity,and so laypersons began ordaining bishops and pastors.
I don’t mean Lutherans, anthony, sorry. I know by Catholic teaching Luther was not a bishop, so he couldn’t ordain. I meant Anglicans. Anglican bishops who were previously Catholic bishops ordained other priests. Where did the apostolic succession break?
It was somewhere around the time they stopped listening to the Pope, allowed the monateries to be sacked, allowed divorce, and allowed Henry VIII to be declared ‘‘head of the Church’’.
I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but it has something to do with their ordination prayers. At some point they changed the prayers so dramatically (especially removing any reference to the Mass as a sacrifice, even implicitly) that the form was considered defective and the true intention of ordination was called into question. Eventually all validly ordained priests and bishops died off, leaving only those ordained with the invalid formula and thus breaking apostolic succession.
Anyone can make up a timeline. Let’s see some of the writers of their Church from the 1st, 2nd , 3rd centuries all the way up to the present time. Also, I’d want to see some physical evidence such as CoC Church buildings and sacred artifacts from the first several centuries. Also, how about a list of the chief pastors of CoC from the Apostles all the way through to the present time.
If listening to the Pope and having the exact same doctrine were the categories required then the Orthodox wouldn’t have valid holy orders either.
Church of Christ (Disciples of Christ) is Protestant.
Is it because they were excommunicated?
I am guessing this is probably closer to the truth; but didn’t Rome and Constantinople mutually excommunicate the other? Yet they still have valid holy orders. I am not too “in” on the historical disputes between East and West. Would excommunication immediately invalidate ordination, though?
It has nothing to do with excommunication, as Catholicism allows for valid orders outside of the true Church. The Orthodox maintain apostolic succession because they did not alter their rites of ordination, at least not in such a way as to invalidate them. The Anglicans changed their rite of ordination, removing any reference to the Mass as a sacrifice. This is not only a defect of form, but it also calls into question the intention of both the one performing and receiving the ordination. Since Anglican bishops began using this invalid form, they ceased to confer true ordination. Thus when the last validly ordained Anglican bishops died, apostolic succession died with them.
Thanks for the explanation! That does make sense…from a Catholic theology point of view.