The Wandering Bishops: Apostles of a New Spirituality - Home Temple

WANDERING BISHOPS 10
Historically, one Bishop can validly make another Bishop by Consecration, although Roman
Catholic canons require three Bishops to make one Catholic Bishop—a device to protect the
Church from the proliferation of renegade or heretical Bishops. This is not required in other
communions.
The original Apostles were independent Bishops who wandered to many different parts of the
known world. Their disciples established separate and often competing schools of religion, each
with only one or two lines of Apostolic Succession. Thus Apostolic Christianity, like later
Protestantism, fragmented into many differing churches separated by geography, language, and
tradition.
After the French Revolution, the clandestine Gnostic and Rosicrucian churches, who carried
valid Apostolic Succession, emerged from their centuries of hiding from the Inquisition. Later in
the nineteenth century the English Order of Corporate Reunion was founded to reunite the
ancient Apostolic lineages and infuse the Anglican Church with indisputably valid Apostolic
Succession by means of well-documented but clandestine mutual sub-conditional
Consecrations. With the emigration of Orthodox, Coptic, and other ethnic Christians to America,
new congregations with independent Bishops who grew away from the theology of the Old
World were established. Three Catholic Bishops of Utrecht Consecrated Bishop Matthews,
through whom valid Apostolic Succession was transmitted into the new Theosophical Liberal
Catholic Church.
The stage was set for major reform and innovation of Apostolic Gnosis by a new breed of
Episcopi Vagantes or independent “wandering” Bishops. Some were merely individualists who
wanted the right to exercise independent Apostolic ministry. But others were as diverse and
talented as the original Apostles of Jesus. They searched for the Divine Mysteries of the Master
that had long ago been lost to gentile Christianity. They delved deeply into the Western Mystery
Tradition that had been driven underground by the Church, and they made pilgrimage to other
religions and traditions of the East and Near East.
This book tells the story of the twentieth-century Episcopi Vangantes, the Wandering Bishops.
They herald the emergence of a new and powerful Apostolic Gnosis for the twenty-first century.
Summer Solstice, 2000
Bishop Lewis Keizer, M.Div., Ph.D.
First published in 1976 as The Wandering Bishops: Heralds of a New Christianity, republished
by St. Thomas Press in 1984, this new edition has been rewritten, much expanded, and
updated.