Whence authority? (Tozer for Tuesday)

Then there is another kind of authority with prophets and apostles and popes and bishops and religious sages. If they are good, they have borrowed their authority; and if they are bad, they have usurped it. They have authority all right; nobody can doubt it.

Bishops have authority. They can say, “Don’t you do so- and-so,” and the little preacher does not dare do it. Then there are popes and apostles and prophets. Now I say again that if they were good men, they borrowed their authority from God; and if they were bad men, they usurped it from God. So either way they got it from God. But they all had to surrender their authority and die.—A.W. Tozer, Reclaiming Christianity, 32