Editing Openai/691a45a6-8ed0-8010-a7d9-24657a41a9aa (section)

=== Hansen is rhetorically agile; he won’t try to beat historians at their game. Instead, he’ll do three things LDS apologists do well: ===

===== He’ll argue something like: =====

• Christianity after the apostles is doctrinally chaotic.
• Competing christologies, gnostic influence, disputes over authority.
• Councils arise precisely because unity was lost.

His framing:
“Continuity of institution doesn’t equal continuity of divine authority.”

Even if it doesn’t prove apostasy, it muddies the waters.

===== Hansen will turn the discussion philosophical: =====

“What defines the true church?
Continuity of community, or continuity of God-given authority?”

By reframing the debate away from “documentary evidence” into “conceptual necessity,” he takes pressure off the historical weakness of the LDS model.

===== He’ll claim apostolic succession lacks: =====

• explicit scriptural definition
• a clear universal mechanism
• early universally accepted rules
• unbroken procedural uniformity

He may say:

“Succession is assumed backwardly from later Catholicism—it’s not in the earliest Christian DNA.”

Even if Heschmeyer can counter this historically, Hansen will make the LDS view sound reasonable.