The Authority of the Apostles

Are Paul’s letters less authoritative than the words of Jesus in the Gospels? Today, R.C. Sproul reminds us that the writings of the Apostles bear an authority that has been delegated by Christ Himself.

It’s very fashionable in our own day for people to distinguish between the authority of Christ and the authority of the Apostles. People say, “Well, I believe the teachings of Jesus. See, I submit to the teachings of Jesus. It’s Paul that I can’t take, you see.” Or, “It’s John who bothers me. Those are men. They’re not Jesus.” And so, people will try to set Paul and Jesus over against each other—recognizing the authority of Christ, despising any authority to Paul. Well, of course, let me remind you that we don’t know anything about Jesus, save for the testimony of the Apostles.

They are the primary sources, and in and of itself, that would constitute a certain amount of at least academic authority in the Christian community. But more than that, if those documents are simply basically reliable—forget now about inspiration or infallibility or inerrancy, but just basically reliable—we can certainly learn enough from them to come to the conclusion that Jesus gave authority to His Apostles that was more than just basically reliable, more than just trustworthy in general.

When He commissioned His Apostles, He made this statement unequivocally: “He who hears you, hears me. And those who refuse to hear you, refuse to hear me” (Luke 10:16). The same dispute He had with the Pharisees, that said, “We believe in God; it’s you, Jesus, that we can’t take.” Jesus said, “You can’t say that because the Father bears witness to me. And if you’re really listening to the Father, you will listen to me. If you reject me, you are rejecting the Father” (John 8:18–20).

And so, in the second century, the early apologists took this line of reasoning, and to those who refused to submit to the Apostolic authority, they would say to them, “Look, if you don’t accept the authority of the Apostles, you are thereby rejecting the authority of the One who delegated them their authority. You are rejecting the authority of Christ. And if you reject the authority of Christ, as Christ Himself had pointed out, you therefore reject the authority of God.” So that in the reasoning process that went on there that I think is absolutely valid, a rejection of the authority of Paul is nothing less than a rejection of the authority of God Himself. Hence the crisis of the question of the authority of Scripture in the church is, at root, a question of the authority of God Himself.