reject apostolic succession; otherwise he could not justify causing a schism from the Church and establishing another church based on his own authority. At the same time he needed plausible justification for that authority. So he and the other Reformers posited a new idea: that authority is given by God to whoever teaches the true gospel—a doctrine sometimes called apostolicity.108 This broke the Catholic Church’s monopoly on apostolic authority and opened up that authority to Luther, Calvin, the Anabaptists—to anyone, really, who thought that he was teaching the truth from the Bible.
