CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: THE POPE FRANCIS PROBLEM
1. GETTING THEOLOGY RIGHT
2. I WILL BUILD MY CHURCH
3. A CITY ON A HILL
4. SERVANT OF THE SERVANTS OF GOD
5. THE GOOD SHEPHERD CALLS A SHEPHERD
6. JESUS TETHERS PETER TO HIMSELF
7. THE FISHER POPE
8. PETER AND THE ELEVEN
9. UPON THIS ROCK
10. YOU ARE PETER
11. WHATEVER YOU BIND ON EARTH
12. THE POST-PETRINE PAPACY
Introduction:
THE POPE FRANCIS PROBLEM
“Remember Zika?” the New York Times asked recently. “With measles and Ebola
grabbing headlines, it is easy to forget the health panic of 2016, when Zika was
linked to severe birth defects in thousands of Brazilian newborns whose mothers
were infected while pregnant, striking fear across the country and much of the
Americas.”
1
It’s helpful for us to step back into that world that was panicked about Zika and
its threat to mothers and babies, because it was in that climate that, aboard a plane
headed from Mexico back to Rome, a Spanish reporter named Paloma García
Ovejero asked Pope Francis what should have been a simple softball question:
“Some authorities have proposed abortion, or else avoiding pregnancy. As
regards avoiding pregnancy, on this issue, can the Church take into consideration
the concept of ‘the lesser of two evils’?”
2
The answer is likewise simple, albeit controversial, and has been declared by the
Church repeatedly. In 1931, a year after the Anglicans officially declared an
openness to contraception “where there is such a clearly felt moral obligation to
limit or avoid parenthood, and where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding
complete abstinence,” Pope Pius XI clarified:
No reason, however grave, may be put forward by which anything intrinsically
against nature may become conformable to nature and morally good. Since,
therefore, the conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of
children, those who in exercising it deliberately frustrate its natural power and
purpose sin against nature and commit a deed which is shameful and intrinsically
vicious (Casti Connubii 54, emphasis added).
In his answer, though, Pope Francis said something that sounded closer to the
opposite. While condemning abortion as “an absolute evil,” he seemed to open
the door for contraception to avoid conceiving a child with birth defects:
On the “lesser evil,” avoiding pregnancy, we are speaking in terms of the
conflict between the Fifth and Sixth Commandment. Paul VI, a great man, in a
difficult situation in Africa, permitted nuns to use contraceptives in cases of rape.
. . . Avoiding pregnancy is not an absolute evil. In certain cases, as in this one,
or in the one I mentioned of Bl. Paul VI, it was clear.
3
Both García Ovejero’s question and Pope Francis’s answer were somewhat
ambiguous (for example, “avoiding pregnancy” is a term vague enough to
include abstinence, natural family planning, and contraception), but the Vatican
quickly clarified that Pope Francis did mean contraception. Vatican spokesman Fr.
Federico Lombardi explained that the pope was declaring that “the contraceptive
or the condom, in cases of particularly [sic] emergency and seriousness can also be
objects of a serious discernment of conscience.”
4
Both the pope’s answer and the subsequent clarification were stunning. As
recently as four days earlier, the New York Times had reported, “Catholic Leaders
Say Zika Doesn’t Change Ban on Contraception.”
5 The new headline read:
“Francis Says Contraception Can Be Used to Slow Zika.”
6 This apparent aboutface confirmed non-Catholics’ long-held suspicions that the Church’s opposition
to contraception is arbitrary. The Guardian’s Barbara Ellen and others quickly
asked, “Why is ‘permission’ being granted to safeguard against one virus, Zika,
but not against HIV and AIDS?”
7
It’s a fair question. If it’s okay to contracept because you don’t want to conceive
a child with microcephaly, then why not because you don’t want to conceive a
child with AIDS... or conceive a child born into extreme poverty? And not only
did Pope Francis apparently casually reverse Catholic teaching from inside an
airplane cabin, but he did so by using opaque reasoning and in a way that seemed
to suggest Catholics might be sinning against the Sixth Commandment by not
contracepting.
This might seem like a strange way to begin a book arguing for the papacy.
How can airing the Church’s dirty laundry demonstrate the truth of Catholicism
and its most distinctive doctrine?
Other readers may say I haven’t even scratched the surface of the Church’s folly.
I haven’t said a word about clerical sex crimes and their cover-ups. I haven’t
mentioned the widespread heresy that too often goes unchallenged within
Catholic dioceses, seminaries, and parishes, or the seeming indifference of some
Church leaders toward banal or blasphemous liturgies. I haven’t spoken of many
of the other scandals that seem to suppurate by the day.
But I chose my one example for a reason.
The idea for this book started nearly a decade ago, during the pontificate of
Pope Benedict XVI. On my blog Shameless Popery, I wrote a series of five articles
on the topic of “Pope Peter,” exploring the biblical basis for the idea that the
papacy was established by Christ, with Simon Peter as the first pope. That seed
would eventually flower into this book, but along the way, several things
happened.
Pope Francis was elected in 2013, and although I admired many aspects of his
apparent humility and his general down-to-earth nature, I missed the theological
clarity of his predecessors’ styles. From the beginning, critics accused the pope of
breaking with Church tradition, and on my blog and elsewhere I battled against
them and their uncharitable interpretations of his off-the-cuff remarks. But this
airplane interview in 2016 was a sort of breaking point for me. I found it simply
indefensible. Indeed, after those remarks, some orthodox Catholic philosophers
did try to show that they could be harmonized with Catholic teaching . . . only
to have their interpretation rejected by the pope’s own spokesman.
8
Part of the problem has been pastoral. Thirteen months earlier, the pope had
publicly criticized a mother of seven children for being irresponsible while saying
that Catholics need not “breed like rabbits.”
9 Now he was suggesting that those
with Zika who nevertheless follow Church teaching might be guilty of sinning
against the Fifth Commandment—the commandment against murder. Living in a
way that is faithful to the Church’s sexual ethic is difficult enough in the face of a
hostile world; feeling like even the pope doesn’t have your back makes it almost
unbearably harder.
But the deeper problem is ecclesiological. The Church cannot be right in
teaching that contraception is contrary to the law of God today and then go and
declare it acceptable tomorrow—not without compromising its claim to be a
bastion of truth. The Zika story is really part of a broader story about a dismaying
lack of clarity that has dogged this pontificate from the start. What does it mean
to believe in the “teaching authority of the pope” in a world in which endless
debates rage over what his words even mean? Many of the world’s Catholics, and
many on the outside looking in, are grappling with that question.
The experience hasn’t caused me to become a “Francis-hater,” or still worse to
lose faith in Christ’s promises to his Church. I still love the pope and pray for him
daily. But my thoughts on the papacy have been purified. As Catholic apologists
sometimes do, I once took a posture of triumphalism. To be sure, like anyone
familiar with the history of the Church I knew that there were some bad popes,
but the problem always seemed safely distant. My entire life had been spent amid
the pontificates of Karol Wojtyła and Joseph Ratzinger, two of the brightest and
holiest men of the twentieth century. It seemed a given that in Rome we would
always have a sort of theologian-in-chief, a pope capable of articulating the
nuances of Catholic doctrines with brilliant lucidity.
These past few years have been a reminder that such clarity can’t be taken for
granted. And there is the silver lining to this crisis.
St. John Henry Newman (1801–1890) observed that “it is a common
occurrence for a quarrel and a lawsuit to bring out the state of the law, and then
the most unexpected results often follow.”
10
In the case of the papacy, “St. Peter’s
prerogative would remain a mere letter, till the complication of ecclesiastical
matters became the cause of ascertaining it. While Christians were ‘of one heart
and one soul,’ it would be suspended; love dispenses with laws.”
11
That is to say, when everyone is in agreement, as in the early days after
Pentecost, it may not always be clear (at least to an outsider) who’s in charge or
what the limits to his authority may be. The true sign of obedience, as Newman
rightly noted, is in the face of a “quarrel or a lawsuit.” It’s when we disagree that
we see how much (or how little) respect for authority we have. And so it is
precisely here that the papacy as a divinely ordained structure of authority shines
through.
Perhaps there is another silver lining as well: the accumulating scandals in the
Catholic Church (including some that long predate Pope Francis’s pontificate)
mean that many non-Catholics are sincerely asking, “Why are you still Catholic?”
This book is my own answer to that question.
CHAPTER 1.
GETTING THEOLOGY RIGHT
IF YOU WANT to know whether or not you should be a Catholic, there’s only one
issue you need to solve: is the papacy true or not? To be sure, the papacy isn’t the
most important doctrine: the existence of God, the divinity of Christ, the
Eucharist, and countless other teachings are of greater importance. But it’s the
most distinctive. Think about it this way: the existence (or non-existence) of a
truck bed is the distinctive feature in determining if you’re looking at a truck or a
car, even though the truck’s bed is a great deal less vital to the truck than is, say,
the engine.
Jews believe in the existence of the God of Abraham, Protestants believe in the
divinity of Christ, and the Eastern Orthodox believe in (and have) the Real
Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. So none of those three doctrines, as crucially
important as they are, is enough to tell me why I should be a Catholic
specifically. But the papacy does solve this question. Quite simply, if the Catholic
Church’s claims about the papacy are true, then everyone should be a Catholic. If
they’re not true, then nobody should be a Catholic.
Within that debate, the crucial question can be understood in one of two ways.
One way of approaching the question is by asking, “Who was the first pope?” If
the first pope was St. Peter, then we know that the papacy is of apostolic origin.
And if Peter was made the first pope by Jesus, then we know that the papacy is
part of God’s plan for the Church. Thus, we should be part of the Church that
has the pope. On the other hand, if the first pope was someone else, then the
papacy isn’t of apostolic origin, and we should reject the Catholic Church. Of
course, the person holding this latter position ought to be able to explain when
and how the papacy arose and who the first pope was, and we should probably
see evidence of Christian outcry over the introduction of an alien papacy.
The other way of approaching the question is by asking, “What was the role of
Peter among the Twelve, and what are the implications of this for subsequent
generations?” Not everything that was established with the apostles was intended
to continue into future generations, but some things were. So this line of inquiry
is asking what kind of Church Christ wants. After all, it’s his Church. If Christ
wanted the Church to look like a democracy, we would reasonably expect him
to establish it as such. So what can we learn from Christ’s words and actions
related to the Church?
Getting Theology Wrong
There’s a common way that we regularly do theology wrong. Let’s say you want
to know what to believe about infant baptism or the nature of the Eucharist.
What do you do? If you’re like most of us, you start investigating. You see what
you can find from the Bible, do a bit of Google searching, and maybe pick up the
writings of some trusted biblical exegetes or commentators or theologians. If it’s
really weighing on you, perhaps you sit down with your priest or pastor or a
knowledgeable friend. After weighing up the evidence, you’re then ready to
decide your position on the doctrine at hand. If the doctrine is of great enough
significance to you, your newfound position might motivate a change of
denominations.
This attitude accounts for a large part of the denominational movement within
Christianity, distinct from the problem of Christians leaving Christianity entirely.
A 2014 Pew study found that most people raised as Protestants no longer identify
with the denomination in which they were raised. Among those raised as
Reformed Protestants, for instance, 34 percent remained Reformed, while 42
percent “now identify with a different Protestant denominational family.”
12 Some
of this is simply the process of coming into an adult faith (as opposed to blindly
believing what your parents taught), but it also points to what Christianity Today
calls the “tremendous amount of turbulence inside Protestantism.”
13 A recent
study following thousands of Protestants from 2010 to 2014 found that 16 percent
of them changed denominational families in just that four-year stretch.
14
But the problem here isn’t simply Christian disunity or denominational
instability. It’s that these theological inquiries presuppose a particular theological
framework: that it’s the duty of every Christian to solve every theological issue to
his own satisfaction, and then to find a church or denomination in which to make
a home (at least for now). What’s missing from this? The role of the Church as
teacher and, particularly, as an authoritative teacher we can trust, and whose
answers are more reliable than the answers I would come to on my own.
What’s striking here is how unbiblical this all is. Where does Scripture suggest that
we should conduct theology in this way? In contrast, Hebrews calls us to “obey
your leaders and submit to them; for they are keeping watch over your souls, as
men who will have to give account” (Heb. 13:17), and the leaders being referred
to are “those who spoke to you the word of God” (7). God’s promise to us is that
“I will give you shepherds after my own heart, who will feed you with
knowledge and understanding” (Jer. 3:15)—not that each of us will be left to be
his own shepherd.
Think of it like a courtroom. Before a judge can decide a particular matter, he
must know two things. First, does he have the proper jurisdiction over the matter
at hand? Jurisdiction “is the power to hear and determine the subject matter in
controversy between parties to a suit, to adjudicate or exercise any judicial power
over them.”
15 Should another court be hearing the issue? Has a higher court
already settled the question? And second, what’s the governing law? These aren’t
just important questions; they’re the ones that have to be settled first, because
without answering them properly, you can’t move forward properly. A judge
who rushed past these questions to get into the “meat” of the case would be
failing to do his job. He would risk usurping another court’s authority, and there
would be little reason to trust his decision if he made it using the wrong legal
basis.
When a theological dispute comes before the courtroom of our mind, we
would do well to ask the same questions. Is the theological question at hand
something each individual Christian is called to sort out for himself, or is there a
higher authority that can settle these questions? And if it does fall to us, what is the
“governing law” by which we determine the right answer? Are we to adjudicate
using Scripture alone, or is there anything binding in Tradition or prior teachings
of the visible Church? And yet, we typically don’t do this—we simply assume that
it’s up for us to decide, using the Bible alone or whatever happens to be our
preferred theological method.
Asking Better Questions
Part of the problem here is that we often start by asking the wrong questions
about the Church. We begin with a set of our own theological conclusions and
then judge the Church by how well it accords with our own views. If we’re 100
percent convinced on every “Catholic doctrine,” we’ll join the Church, and if
not, we won’t. But even if we are 100 percent convinced, there’s still a problem.
Addressing a group of Catholics, C.S. Lewis said:
The real reason I cannot be in communion with you is not my disagreement
with this or that Roman doctrine, but to accept your Church means, not to
accept a given body of doctrine, but to accept in advance any doctrine your
Church hereafter produces. It is like being asked to agree not only to what a
man has said, but what he’s going to say.
16
The trouble with Lewis’s position is that he’s asking the wrong questions. The
proper question isn’t, “Do I agree with the Church on this or that issue?” or,
“Does that doctrine match my reading of Scripture?” or even, “What might the
Church declare tomorrow?” Instead, it’s, “What is the Church?”
Ironically, the best answer to Lewis’s objection comes from . . . C.S. Lewis. He
recognized that there are people who approach Jesus in this way, simply as
someone who had some great teachings. For instance, author Kurt Vonnegut
explained his religious humanism by quoting his grandfather, Clemens: “If what
Jesus said was good, what can it matter whether he was God or not?”
17 Lewis
recognized the folly of such a position. The right question isn’t, “Do I agree with
Jesus’ teaching on this matter?” but, “Is Jesus really who he claims to be?” If he is,
and I disagree with him on a particular topic, then I need to change. If he isn’t,
then it doesn’t matter if I like a lot of his message, since the foundational reason
why he claims we should heed anything he says in the first place is a falsehood.
But we can’t just treat him as a teacher whose teachings we accept when we
happen to find them “good.” Lewis put the matter this way:
You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or
else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can
spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord
and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a
great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
18
Indeed, “the really foolish thing that people often say about [Jesus]” is “I’m
ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be
God.” But notice how similar that is to Lewis’s own approach to the Catholic
question. In a letter to H. Lyman Stebbins, Lewis explained his position on the
Catholic Church this way:
If there were an ancient Platonic Society still existing at Athens and claiming to
be the exclusive trustees of Plato’s meaning, I should approach them with great
respect. But if I found that their teaching was in many ways curiously unlike his
actual text and unlike what ancient interpreters said, and in some cases could
not be traced back to within 1,000 years of his time, I should reject their
exclusive claims—while ready, of course, to take any particular thing they
taught on its merits.
19
But the Catholic Church’s claim isn’t simply that it should be listened to
because it’s ancient, or that it’s a church that was popular throughout much of
history, or even that it’s right on a great many teachings that the world (and most
Protestant denominations) get wrong. Rather, the Church holds itself out to be
directly founded and sustained by Jesus Christ, in some mysterious way an
extension of his incarnation. If that claim is false—if the Catholic Church doesn’t
even know what the Catholic Church is—there’s no particular reason to
approach it with “great respect.” If the claim is true, we can trust the Church
even if it contradicts our personal reading of Scripture. But what the Church
certainly isn’t is a “great moral teacher,” a manmade body dedicated to the
preservation of the teachings of Jesus Christ, like the “Platonic Society.” It’s
either a great deal more or a great deal less than that. Christ has not left that
option open to us. He did not intend to.
So the right question isn’t whether, left to your own devices, you would come
to the same conclusions on purgatory or the Immaculate Conception or
regenerative baptism. It’s about whether the Church is what it says it is. If it isn’t,
it’s a false church, even if (like all false churches) it gets enough right to be
attractive. But if the Church is what it says it is, then your objections to its
teachings are wrong, even if you don’t yet know why they’re wrong...since its
teachings are really the teachings of its Head. As Jesus said to some of his earliest
representatives, “He who hears you hears me, and he who rejects you rejects me,
and he who rejects me rejects him who sent me” (Luke 10:16). So the question
we ought to be asking is not, “Can I find scriptural support for all of these
Catholic teachings?” but, “Is the Catholic Church what it claims to be?”
The Question of Faith
Behind the question of both Jesus’ identity and the Church’s, there is a question
of what it means to believe. We are not called to a blind faith, but rather (in the
famous words of the eleventh-century theologian St. Anselm), “faith seeking
understanding.”
20 But there’s a world of difference between faith seeking
understanding and faith contingent upon understanding, which is no faith at all. If I
believe where I agree and deny where I disagree, the one I believe is myself.
At the end of John 6, after Jesus has presented his radical teaching on the
Eucharist, the crowd is stunned. These followers had stayed with him even when
he seemed to present himself as the son and equal of God (John 5:18). But now
Jesus has gone too far, in their view. At first, the crowds simply murmur against
him (6:41), but with each subsequent clarification, Jesus seems to double down in
increasingly graphic terms on his teaching about the Eucharist. Finally, they’ve
had enough. Saying, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” many of them
abandon him (60,66). Jesus makes no effort to soften the force of his teaching to
keep his number of followers, the way a modern preacher might. Instead, he
challenges even the Twelve. Simon Peter, in one of his first shows of leadership,
says, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we
have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God” (68–
69). Peter doesn’t claim to understand the teaching, or to have all of his questions
and confusion clarified. He simply accepts it on the basis of Jesus’ identity as the
Holy One of God. He’ll come to understand more in time. But he doesn’t wait
to believe until he fully understands.
This is reinforced in the following chapter. In his ministry to Jerusalem, the
people begin to debate who Jesus is. St. John identifies two groups. The first
(John 7:25–27) says, “Is not this the man whom they seek to kill? And here he is,
speaking openly, and they say nothing to him! Can it be that the authorities really
know that this is the Christ?” But they second-guess themselves because they
have an unanswered theological objection: “Yet we know where this man comes
from; and when the Christ appears, no one will know where he comes from.”
Jesus wastes little time on such questions (even though we readers realize that he
could have clarified everything). Instead, he rebuffs the questioners with such
force that many of them joined those seeking to have him arrested (30). Others,
however, asked a better question: “When the Christ appears, will he do more
signs than this man has done?” (31). In other words, Jesus presents himself as the
Messiah and performs miracles. Even if they don’t have every one of their
questions answered, they have enough to believe.
At a certain point, you’ve been given enough to trust, and conditioning your
belief on getting yet more free answers or yet more free bread is a form of
faithlessness or disobedience.
I’ve tried to compile, and answer, some of the best and most popular Protestant
objections to the papacy. But there’s no way I can answer every possible
objection you can dream up, and a book that tried to do so would be tediously
long. Instead, my goal is to give you enough to believe that the Catholic Church,
with the papacy, was instituted by Christ, and that we should be part of it. What
you do from there is up to you.
CHAPTER 2.
I WILL BUILD MY CHURCH
BEFORE WE CAN say whether or not Jesus placed St. Peter at the head of the
earthly Church, we’ve got to clear up what we mean by Church. Catholics and
Protestants tend to understand this word in different ways. One of the clearest
ways that we can see this is by discussing the idea of the “true Church.” For
Catholics, that’s the Catholic Church, based on the idea that it was founded by
Jesus Christ and preserved by the Holy Spirit throughout history. If you’re
unfamiliar with Protestantism, you might imagine that Protestants speak of their
own denominations in the same way: that the “Baptist church” or “Methodist
church” is the one true Church. This would make a certain amount of sense: if
you think it’s important enough for you to be a Methodist, why isn’t it important
for me to be a Methodist? But barring a few fringe elements within Protestantism,
these days, few Protestants actually say anything of the sort.
Instead, most Protestants will argue that there is no true Church on earth, in the
sense of any particular denomination or visible body. Matt Slick, a radio host and
the main author behind the popular Calvinist website CARM (Christian
Apologetics and Research Ministry), claims that people “mistakenly think that
there is an earthly organization that is the one true church as if a collection of
people, church structures, and ‘authority’ designates that it is the ‘one true
church’ on earth.”
21
J.C. Ryle, the Evangelical Anglican bishop of Liverpool at
the turn of the last century, likewise argues that “no visible Church has any right
to say, ‘We are the only true Church’” and that “no visible Church should ever
dare to say, ‘We shall stand forever. The gates of hell will not overcome us.’”
22
What both sides agree upon is this: in Matthew 16, there’s a moment when
Peter confesses Jesus as the Christ, and Jesus responds to him, “And I tell you,
you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church” (Matt. 16:18). We’ll look
at that passage much closer later on, but for now, just focus on those last five
words. When Jesus says to Peter, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my
church,” we can become so fixated on understanding who or what he means by
“this rock” that we can overlook his promise, “I will build my church.”
There’s a parallel here to marriage. One of the strongest arguments used by
conservative Protestants against redefining the legal definition of marriage to
include same-sex couples (and other proposed innovations) is that marriage isn’t
something for us to invent or design. Marriage, along with biological sex, is
something that we instead discover, something ultimately designed by God rather
than us. Focus on the Family’s Kermit Rainman, for instance, argues that
“revisionist gay theology violates God’s intentional design for gender and
sexuality by saying that women don’t need men and men don’t need women.”
Instead, Rainman says:
Scripture begins and ends with the picture of marriage as an institution ordained
by God—designed for the union of a man and a woman in a life-long, faithful,
covenantal relationship. This view is affirmed by Moses, Christ, and Paul, and
has been upheld through thousands of years of Judeo Christian history and
tradition.
23
If Jesus is the one who builds the Church, then the same principle applies here.
It is sinful folly to imagine that our job is to invent new forms of marriage. But
God also designed the Church, and so our job ought not to be to create new
churches or denominations, or “new ways of being church.”
24
Instead, it ought to
be to discover God’s plan for the Church, to understand the structure of that
Church, and to become fully united with that church—and, thus, the design plan
for the world. So where, and what, is this Church?
To summarize, the Church is a visible community. As a community, it has
some structure and basic organization, and there are specialized roles within the
community. Christ himself is the ultimate head of the Church. But this visible
Church is not simply on earth. The holy souls in purgatory and the saints in
heaven are also a part of this Church. These are what the Catechism refers to as
the “three states of the Church” (CCC 953). Traditionally, they are known as the
Church Militant, Church Suf ering, and Church Triumphant.
25 Things aren’t always so
black and white: just like any other society, there are people on the borders,
related to the Church in a more complicated way than simply “in” or “out.”
How Might a Protestant Respond?
Throughout this book, I will respond to some of the best Protestant arguments
against the Catholic view of the Church, the papacy, and St. Peter’s role. Since
“highbrow” and “lowbrow” Protestants often run in different circles, I’ve done
my best to cultivate a mix of professors, theologians, preachers, and popular
authors. It’s important to recognize at the outset that there’s no such thing as
“the” Protestant view on virtually any topic in Christianity. Indeed, this is
precisely one of the critiques of Protestantism from a Catholic perspective: there
is no one capable of speaking on behalf of the whole, no presence capable of
unifying and leading the various factions. As a result, it’s unlikely that anyone will
feel represented by all of these authors (many of whom disagree with one
another), but hopefully everyone will find at least some of their likely objections
presented.
If you went back in time and asked a Christian from the first 1,500 years of
Church history what the Church is, there’s a good chance you would get
something that sounds like the answer I mentioned above. But starting in the
mid-1300s, a seminary professor and priest named John Wycliffe started to preach
a radically different vision of the Church. It changed the course of Church
history. The alternate vision of the Church from Wycliffe was embraced by Jan
Hus, and then Martin Luther, and then (with some important modifications) John
Calvin. It’s for this reason that Wycliffe is sometimes called the “Morning Star of
the Reformation,” and although there’s no such thing as a “Protestant doctrine”
agreed upon by all Protestants, Wycliffe’s take has, historically at least, come
close.
The heart of Wycliffe’s claim was simple: “Those who will one day be blessed
in heaven are members of holy Church, and no one besides.”
26 That is to say, “the
Church” means the ultimately saved. It solves the problem of bad Catholics (and
particularly bad clergy) neatly: it turns out that they were never part of the
Church. Luther puts the view succinctly: “God be praised, a seven-year-old child
knows what the church is: holy believers and ‘the little sheep who hear the voice
of their shepherd.’”
27 Elsewhere, he says you cannot tell who is and isn’t a
Christian because “Christianity is a spiritual assembly of souls in one faith,” and
“this is the way Holy Scripture speaks of the holy church and of Christendom. It
cannot speak about it in any other way.”
28 As for “physical, external
Christendom,” Luther argues that this is “manmade,” and that it’s an abuse of the
language to apply terms like “spiritual” or “church” to it.
29
The Reformer John Calvin takes a slightly more nuanced view, arguing that
“the scriptures speak of the Church in two ways.” The first is “the Church as it
really is before God,” comprising “the elect who have existed from the beginning
of the world.” This is Luther’s invisible Church. The second is the visible
Church, and Calvin warns that “in this Church there is a very large mixture of
hypocrites, who have nothing of Christ but the name and outward appearance.”
30
As Slick summarizes, “The invisible church is the church made up of true
believers. The visible church consists of those who say they are Christian but may
or may not be truly saved.”
31
This shift in understanding the Church is a turning point for the Protestant
Reformation. As the historian Eugene Rice recounts, it’s a myth that the
Reformation was primarily about reform:
The leaders of the Protestant Reformation, too, were sensitive to ecclesiastical
abuses and wished to reform them. Yet the reform of abuses was not their
fundamental concern. The attempt to reform an institution, after all, suggests
that its abuses are temporary blemishes on a body fundamentally sound and
beautiful. Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin did not believe this. They attacked the
corruption of the Renaissance papacy, but their aim was not merely to reform
it; they identified the pope with Antichrist and wished to abolish the papacy
altogether.
32
As Rice explains, “The Protestant Reformation was not strictly a ‘reformation’
at all,” because “in its relation to the Church as it existed in the second decade of
the sixteenth century, it came not to reform but to destroy.”
33 But you cannot
simultaneously hold that Christ founded the visible Church and spend your life
trying to destroy the visible Church and change its doctrines. So it’s necessary
that the Reformers hold that the church that everyone could see isn’t the true
Church. Instead, the true Church is invisible, and no one knows who’s part of it,
and we need to implement the Reformers’ ideas to bring the visible church closer
to this invisible Church.
One Church or Two?
So what does this view of the Church get wrong? For starters, Wycliffe and
Luther can’t be right that the Church is just the invisible church of the saved,
since there are far too many biblical references to the earthly structure and
governance of the Church. And Calvin can’t be right to separate the visible from
the invisible Church, since it creates two separate churches. That’s not an
acceptable solution. It’s not just that the New Testament consistently speaks of
“the church” in the singular (cf. Matt. 18:17; Acts 8:3, 12:1, 12:5; etc.). It’s also
because St. Paul describes the Church as the body of Christ and the Bride of
Christ (cf. Eph. 5:23–32), and it runs directly counter to the meaning of these
expressions to suggest that Christ has multiple brides or multiple bodies. In
Christ’s own words, he promises to build “my Church.” Where are these other
churches coming from?
I should quickly note that Protestant theologians are divided over whether or
not their view requires two separate churches. For instance, the biblical scholar
(and Presbyterian minister) John Bright is quite explicit that he believes that “the
visible churches are not the Church. At best they are shot through with sin and
pride and are but the palest approximation of the body of Christ,” and that “over
these frail weak churches there towers this other Church, the Church invisible.”
34
John MacArthur likewise says that “although the visible and invisible church
were initially the same, the picture changed as false believers associated with the
church.”
35
Such a view raises huge theological problems. How can Christ have multiple
brides, or multiple bodies? And why doesn’t Scripture ever mention this second,
invisible, truer Church? Why are there so many passages about the oneness of the
Church and absolutely none about the “twoness”? Even many of the “invisible
Church” advocates recognize this difficulty and seek to find ways around it. For
instance, the Scottish theologian James Bannerman (1807–1868) insists that it’s
really just “the same Church under two different characters.”
We do not assert that Christ has founded two Churches on earth, but only one;
and we affirm that that one Church is to be regarded under two distinct aspects.
As the Church invisible, it consists of the whole number of the elect, who are
vitally united to Christ the Head, and of none other. As the Church visible, it
consists of all those who profess the faith of Christ, together with their
children.
36
It’s true that both Catholics and Protestants would say there are visible and
invisible aspects of the true Church. Bannerman describes the visible Church as
“an outward and visible society, embracing and encompassing the invisible and
spiritual one; in other words, an outward Church, within which the invisible
Church of real believers is embosomed, protected, perfected.”
37 The image seems
to be something like Russian nesting dolls: on the outside is the visible Church,
but the true Church is somewhere inside this. But if that’s true, then we’re not
actually talking about two churches, one visible and one invisible. Moreover, he
says that “the proper party with whom the covenant of grace is made, and to
whom its promises and privileges belong, is the invisible Church of real believers.
It is this Church for which Christ died.”
38 So Christ died not for the visible
Church, but for the invisible Church. Does this still sound as though we’re
talking about one and the same Church?
It may be that the only real difference between Bright’s views and Bannerman’s
is that Bright is being straightforward about the implications of his beliefs. The
Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), one of the most important Reformed
confessions, decrees that “the catholic or universal church, which is invisible,
consists of the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be
gathered into one, under Christ the Head thereof; and is the spouse, the body,
the fullness of him that filleth all in all.” In addition, there is “the visible Church,
which is also catholic or universal under the gospel,” but of this second universal
Church, even “the purest churches under heaven are subject both to mixture and
error; and some have so degenerated, as to become no churches of Christ, but
synagogues of Satan.”
39 This is an important detail, because it means that even if
there were a single visible Church over the whole world, it would still (a) be subject to
error and (b) not be the same as the invisible Church.
Despite the protestations of some Protestant theologians, what’s being described
can’t be reduced to simply two aspects of the same church. Instead, these
theologians and confessions are clearly describing two distinct churches: a holy
invisible one and a less holy visible one. Only one of these, according to these
theologians, is a part of the New Covenant. What’s more, these two churches
have different membership. The Second Helvetic Confession, composed by the
Swiss Reformer Heinrich Bullinger, says that “the Church of God may be termed
invisible; not that the men whereof it consists are invisible, but because, being
hidden from our sight, and known only unto God, it cannot be discerned by the
judgment of man.”
40 We can know who’s a member of the visible Church, but
we can’t know who’s a member of the invisible Church.
The problem here is not that there are visible and invisible dimensions to the
Church, or even that there are those who might be connected to the Church in
ways known only to God. Rather, it’s in creating two realities: a visible Church
and an invisible Church, that are not only separate, but even at times pitted
against each other. To approach the problem from a slightly different angle, if the
“visible Church” isn’t the Church headed (and saved) by Christ, then we
shouldn’t give it the name “Church” at all, and we’re back to the Lutheran
position that the only Church is the invisible one.
The Judas Problem
Whether we consider the theories of the Church advanced by Hus, Wycliffe,
Luther, Calvin, or most of their successors, they share the same strength and
weakness. Part of the appeal of the “invisible Church” theories is that they let us
explain away the bad behavior of Christians. Focus on the Family’s Robert
Velarde explains that it’s important for us to distinguish the visible and invisible
Church “so that we do not confuse what we sometimes see fallible churches
doing with the reality of the universal church. Not only do visible and local
churches often host nonbelievers, but also the believers themselves are imperfect,
resulting in challenges and tensions in every visible church.”
41 That’s the
advantage: if the invisible Church is hidden somewhere within the visible
Church, and no one can say quite where, then there’s no risk of responsibility for
the bad behavior of Christians.
But it’s not at all clear that Jesus wants us to approach the Church the way a
dishonest company uses shell corporations. Indeed, it’s worth looking at how
differently Jesus and the Reformers approach perhaps the biggest personnel
scandal in the Church’s history, Judas Iscariot. Wycliffe argued that “Judas was a
thief and no member of Christ, nor part of holy Church, though he ministered
the order of bishop.”
42 Likewise, Calvin conceded that Judas was an apostle, since
he possessed “apostolical office,” but denied that he was ever in any way a part of
the body of Christ, since “not one of those whom Christ has once ingrafted into
his body will he ever permit to perish.”
43
Wycliffe’s and Calvin’s distinction—that Judas could somehow be a bishop and
an apostle without being a part of the Church—beggars belief. The idea that
apostles are part of the body of Christ isn’t just implicit in Scripture. St. Paul says
it explicitly (1 Cor. 12:27–28):
Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has
appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then
workers of miracles, then healers, helpers, administrators, speakers in various
kinds of tongues.
An apostle is by definition a part of the body of Christ, the Church. If Calvin
can’t harmonize that with his vision of the Church and his understanding of
predestination, then those are the ideas that need amending. Moreover, Judas isn’t
a false apostle, like the men Paul seems to have encountered in Corinth. Jesus
called him by name, as we see in the Gospel of Matthew, which says that Jesus
“called to him his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits,
to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every infirmity. The names of the
twelve apostles are these: . . . and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him” (Matt. 10:1–
4). Indeed, Jesus seems to make a point of this when he says, “Did I not choose
you, the twelve, and one of you is a devil?” (John 6:70).
Lest there be any confusion, St. John adds that Jesus “spoke of Judas the son of
Simon Iscariot, for he, one of the twelve, was to betray him” (71). So the
shortcoming of this view is that it contradicts the way Jesus describes his own
Church. There’s no room for Judas in Luther’s church, but there is in Jesus’
Church. (That doesn’t mean that Judas is saved: the whole point is that, contra the
Reformers, there are at least some unsaved people in the Church.) So it’s clear
that Jesus’ Church and Luther’s aren’t the same.
Ecclesial Deism
A second problem with this view is the role it gives to the visible Church and to
the question of denomination. I experienced this personally while evangelizing
on a secular campus, when a Baptist faculty member said to my friend and me
that “God doesn’t care what church you’re in, as long as you’re a believer!” In
the past, when I encountered claims like this one, it was usually in opposition to
Catholicism. But here, the woman clearly meant it as an olive branch of sorts, to
let us know she considered us fellow Christians, despite our being Catholic. This
made it all the stranger, as if you were to comfort someone going through marital
difficulties by telling him that his struggles don’t matter to God, as long as he has
faith. It’s a claim much more at home in a religious system like deism (in which
God winds the universe up like a clock and then lets it go) than Christianity, in
which God has entered history. Indeed, my friend Bryan Cross coined the term
“ecclesial deism” for this belief, which he defines as follows:
Ecclesial deism is the notion that Christ founded his Church, but then
withdrew, not protecting his Church’s Magisterium (i.e., the apostles and/or
their successors in the teaching office of the Church) from falling into heresy or
apostasy. Ecclesial deism is not the belief that individual members of the
Magisterium could fall into heresy or apostasy. It is the belief that the
Magisterium itself could lose or corrupt some essential of the deposit of faith, or
add something to the deposit of faith, as, according to Protestants, allegedly
occurred in the fifth, sixth, and seventh ecumenical councils.
44
In other words, the problem here isn’t just that Protestants are separating the
visible Church from the invisible Church. It’s that they’re suggesting that God let
the entire visible Church actually fall into doctrinal error, or even apostasy. After
all, there’s no way that all of the competing denominations of Christianity, or
even all of the competing denominations of Protestantism, could be right. So that
leaves us with three possibilities. The first is that God doesn’t care about these
doctrinal issues. If that’s the case, it hardly makes sense for us to divide into camps
as Christians. As St. Paul would say, “I appeal to you, brethren, by the name of
our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree and that there be no dissensions
among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment” (1
Cor. 1:10). The second is that God does care about these doctrinal issues, but
none of the visible churches on earth get it right. That’s the “ecclesial deism”
position—everyone is in error, and God hasn’t protected anyone. The third is that
God does care about these doctrinal issues, and one Church is right. And it can
be only one, since two disagreeing churches can’t both be right.
The Unassembled Body
The “invisible Church” of Protestantism isn’t united in any visible, meaningful
way. In fact, as proponents of this theory will tell you, its members exist in a
variety of denominations preaching contradictory creeds. But the result of this is
that the “church” becomes reduced to the number of believers—that the Church
is, as one “Bible handbook” puts it, “people who believe.”
45
In this ecclesiology,
“Church” becomes just a stand-in for the total number of believers. In other
words, it’s atomistic, reducing the whole to the sum of the parts. It’s the same
mistake that the astronomer Carl Sagan makes about his body when he says, “I
am a collection of water, calcium, and organic molecules called Carl Sagan. You
are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label.”
46
But every minute, millions of neutrophilic white blood cells are dying and being
replaced in a process known as apoptosis.
47
If “you” are just the sum total of your
cells, and that precise sum total only exists for a fraction of a second, then you
don’t functionally exist. To put it another way, if Sagan is right, a different person
began reading this sentence from the one who finished reading it. Plus, as Sagan
notes, you and I are each made up of water, calcium, and organic molecules—so
what makes one collection you and another collection me?
The difference is what philosophers call the form. The difference between a
chunk of marble and Michelangelo’s David is not a quality of the molecules of the
marble, but the form or arrangement of the matter. In human beings, the
“principle by which we primarily understand, whether it be called the intellect or
the intellectual soul, is the form of the body.”
48
In other words, there’s a unifying
design to each human body, arranging the constituent molecular parts. Once we
die, that plan goes away, and the parts decompose and go their separate ways.
That’s what Sagan is missing about the human body, and it’s what many
Protestant authors are missing about the body of Christ. If the Church is just a
cross-section of believers, then it exists only as a concept or a measurement, like
“the set of left-handed people” or the temperature outside. It’s a mere “collective
label,” to use Sagan’s term. The result is that you’re left with nothing, which is
how you get a Church that can’t do anything and “is at no time more than a few
years old”—as the minister Albert Torbet claimed back in 1917.
49
In fact, this
atomistic “Church” is much younger than Torbet lets on. Like Sagan’s body, the
body of Christ is in constant flux, as members come to faith and are baptized on
the one hand and physically or spiritually die on the other. If Torbet is right, the
Church is perhaps never more than a few seconds old. That doesn’t sound like
the Church established by Christ two thousand years ago, over which he
promised that the gates of hell wouldn’t prevail. Rather, the church Torbet is
describing is wiped out by the gates of hell every few moments.
The corrective, in both cases, is the same. Just as Sagan errs by missing the form
of the human body, these Protestant authors err by missing the form of the
Church. “As it is,” St. Paul says, “there are many parts, yet one body” (1 Cor.
12:20). We’re not just molecules or organs, but a body that’s formed, assembled
together by Christ. We’re not just the sum total of a collection of stones, but
“living stones” being “built into a spiritual house” (1 Pet. 2:5). Paul puts it this
way (Eph. 4:19–22):
So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens
with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the
foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the
cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a
holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built into it for a dwelling place
of God in the Spirit.
Torbet and others who think like him are good at seeing the stones and bad at
seeing the “whole structure.” They’re right to see that the Church is made up of
people, but they’re wrong to reduce the Church to the total number of people,
just as Sagan was right to see that the body is made up of molecules but wrong to
reduce the body to the sum total of those molecules. They’ve missed the crucial
and unmistakable difference between a collection of rocks and a house.
An Invisible Assembly?
One of the most devastating critiques of these invisible Church theories comes
from the Norwegian Lutheran theologian Harald Hegstad, who argues that “it is
the concrete, visible church that is the only real church.”
50 Hegstad points out
that these invisible Church theories run directly contrary to both the way the
Church is spoken of in the New Testament and even the meaning of the word
itself:
The word we usually translate as church comes from the Greek word ekklesia.
In secular usage the Greek word simply means a political gathering of citizens.
In the New Testament, however, ekklesia also alludes to the Hebrew kahal,
which is used in the Old Testament to refer to the people of Israel gathered in
the presence of God (Deut. 23:2–8; 1 Chr. 28:8; Mic. 2:5). . . . Ekklesia is both
the act of coming together (to fellowship/to commune) and the group that comes
together (the fellowship/the community). The church is not only present in the
worship service, but continues to be the church beyond the formal gathering.
51
The important detail to note here is that “both the term itself, and its use in the
New Testament presuppose not only a group of people, but a group of people
that gathers together.”
52 This is impossible for the “invisible Church.” As
Bannerman explains, “The form of the invisible Church cannot be distinguished
by the eye of man, for the features and lineaments of it are known only to
God.”
53
Since there are no known members of the invisible Church (save for Christ
himself), and no visible structures, or buildings, or locations, that can be identified
with the invisible Church, there’s nowhere to assemble, and no one to do the
assembling. We’ve already seen that Bannerman’s “visible Church” isn’t a church
because he says it isn’t the one headed by Christ, or party to the New Covenant;
but now it turns out that his “invisible Church” isn’t a church either, as it is not
an ekklesia.
A Disembodied Incarnation
The problem with viewing the body of Christ as an “invisible assembly” isn’t just
that it can’t assemble. It’s that it’s no longer a “body” in any meaningful sense of
the term. Most Christians know that St. Paul refers to the Church as the “body of
Christ” (1 Cor. 12:27), but fewer think about the meaning of these words.
Consider why the Second Person of the Holy Trinity took on a body in the first
place. As St. Athanasius (296–373) explains, God saw that “men, having rejected
the contemplation of God, and with their eyes downward, as though sunk in the
deep, were seeking about for God in nature and in the world of sense, feigning
gods for themselves of mortal men and demons,” and he responded lovingly, by
taking “a body, and as man walks among men and meets the senses of all men
half-way.”
54
In other words, Christ rescues us from idolatry by becoming “the
image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:14), so that he might, in Athanasius’s words,
“persuade them by the works he did that he is not man only, but also God, and
the Word and Wisdom of the true God.”
55
Indeed, this is the lynchpin of the Incarnation: that God became visible, that
“the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). For the Word to take
on a body is for the Word to become visible. The grittiness of the Incarnation is a
scandal from the start of Christianity, with the Gnostics fighting it hard. St. John
seems to have them in view when he warns that “many deceivers have gone out
into the world, men who will not acknowledge the coming of Jesus Christ in the
flesh; such a one is the deceiver and the Antichrist” (2 John 1:7). So those within
the Church who deny the physical reality of the body of Christ are liars and
antichrists.
What should we make of those who deny the physical reality of the body of
Christ, the Church, then? After all, Paul describes the Church as Christ’s “body,
the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Eph. 1:23). It’s not just that the Church is
the body of Christ; it’s that you don’t have the fullness of Christ without the
Church. In other words, there’s a certain real sense in which the Church is the
body of Christ because it’s a continuation of his Incarnation. After all, the whole
“body” imagery suggests and supposes visibility. So what can be said of those
who reduce the body of Christ that is the Church from something visible and
tangible to an invisible thing known only to God? Gottfried Locher, president of
the Protestant Church in Switzerland (PCS),
56 asks the critical questions:
What exactly is to be understood by an invisible body? How can the Church of
the Creed be the body of Christ, if visible churchdom is not identical with this
body? What does one mean if one calls the true Church the body of Christ, and
yet this body lacks physical (“bodily”) qualities, such as being visibly realized in
time and space?
57
So the Protestant view can’t account for how the “body of Christ” is both a
“body” and “of Christ.” Given his position, you might imagine that Locher raises
these questions rhetorically, to show why this understanding of the invisible
Church actually makes sense. But he doesn’t. Instead, he concludes that “calling
the Church a mixed body ultimately goes along with maintaining a logical
distinction between the historical church and the body of Christ,” but that “the
price to be paid for such two-dimensionality is a congregation which remains
ontologically deprived of its inmost essence: to be the visible body of Christ.”
58
In
other words, the Reformers did what they needed to do to justify breaking away
from the visible Church, but what they did (creating an unbiblical separation
between the visible Church and the invisible Church) ended up gutting the
Church’s inmost essence as the visible body of Christ.
Three Other Visions of the Church
For a variety of reasons, even many Protestant thinkers are dissatisfied with the
general Protestant vision of the Church. There are three major alternate views
worth mentioning at least briefly.
Baptists often apply the biblical passages about the Church exclusively to the
“visible, local congregation” while denying the existence of any “invisible,
universal Church.”
59 The difficulty with this view is that it conflates the universal
Church and the invisible Church. These Baptists are right to reject the invisible
view of the Church but wrong to conclude that this leaves us with only the local
congregation. St. Paul, who isn’t a member of the local church of Corinth, can
nevertheless say to them that “by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body
—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit” (1
Cor. 12:13). So there is a universal Church to which all the baptized are
connected; it just isn’t the kind of invisible Church theorized by the Reformers.
60
Anglicans have historically been associated with what’s called the branch theory.
Charles Lemuel Dibble explains in the Anglican Theological Review that “the
Anglican is convinced that the Church is a living, organic thing and hence
visible.”
He agrees with the Eastern that the visible Church must have unity of orders
and doctrine. These he feels sure he has. Yet he finds himself excluded, for
different reasons, by both Roman and Eastern. To meet this situation, he
develops the “branch” theory of the Church. According to this theory, the
Catholic Church exists in three branches: Roman, Eastern, and Anglican.
61
Dibble notes that this view of the Church avoids what Anglicans regard as the
errors of Orthodoxy and Catholicism, but it does so “only by throwing logic to
the winds . . . it is somewhat amusing that the Anglican church should claim to
be one with two others, one of which repudiates it bitterly and the other of
which holds out the left hand.”
62
That leaves one final view, the idea that “the Church” is just any gathering of
two or three in Christ’s name. It’s based on Christ’s promise that “where two or
three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matt. 18:20).
Miroslav Volf argues that “where two or three are gathered in Christ’s name, not only is
Christ present among them, but a Christian church is there as well, perhaps a bad
church, a church that may well transgress against love and truth, but a church
nonetheless.”
63 But it’s enough to look at the context of Jesus’ words to see that
this conclusion doesn’t follow. Immediately before this, Jesus says that “if your
brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone.” If
this doesn’t work, “take one or two others along with you, that every word may
be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses.” And if even this doesn’t
work, “tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him
be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector” (15–17). But this process only makes
sense if there’s a difference between the “two or three” in the second step and
“the church” in the third step.
So if the proper understanding of the Church isn’t the one articulated by Luther
and Calvin, and it’s not any of these three other views, what’s the correct view?
CHAPTER 3.
A CITY ON A HILL
IF THE MAJOR Protestant theories about the Church are wrong, where does that
leave us? We need to return to the words of Jesus. In the Sermon on the Mount,
he says (Matt. 5:14–16):
You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Nor do men
light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in
the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good
works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.
This passage was famously used by the Puritan John Winthrop to describe the
Massachusetts Bay Colony, and was later applied (by figures as diverse as John F.
Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Sarah Palin) to describe America as the city on a
hill.
64
But of course, that’s not what the text actually means. Jesus wasn’t giving a
sermon about America. The Reformed theologian Richard Gamble traces the
history of how this passage has been interpreted and concludes that the early
Church Fathers, continuing on down to the time of Aquinas in the thirteenth
century, “understood the city’s visibility as expressing the same meaning as Jesus’
point in the following verse about a lamp’s visibility on a stand and its power
from that height to illuminate the whole house.”
65 For about the first thirteen
hundred years of Christianity, Gamble says, these authors interpret Jesus’ words in
a variety of ways, “but always within a fairly narrow range and always in
reference to the church. . . . It was Jesus’ metaphor for his Church as his own
body, for its ongoing teaching ministry, and for the conspicuous doctrine and life
of his disciples and the teachers of the Word who followed after them.”
66 As
Gamble points out, the early Protestants agreed with Catholics that the passage
was about the Church, not about godly or exceptional nations.
Washington University’s Abram Van Engen points out an important difference,
however. Whereas seventeenth-century Protestants (like Winthrop) applied the
“city on a hill” to “the gathering of the godly in particular places,” for Catholics, the passage was about the Church, as a “permanent, visible, universal institution:
Jesus’ true followers were ‘set on a hill’ to be seen by all.”
67 The Catholic
argument is simple: Jesus appears to be promising perpetual visibility to his Church,
and Protestant communities cannot plausibly apply that to themselves. After all,
“since Protestants first appeared in the 1500s—since they had been effectively
nonexistent, invisible, unknown, or unseen for over a millennium—how could
they argue that they were descended from the life and teachings of Christ?”
68
Some seventeenth-century Puritans and some modern Baptists argue that there
is an unbroken line of visible Protestant (or even specifically Baptist) churches
throughout the last two thousand years, but that argument doesn’t stand up to
historical scrutiny. We’ll leave those claims for chapter 12. By far the more
common response to the problem of Matthew 5:14 is to just reinterpret Jesus’
meaning about the city on a hill. Catholics say the Catholic Church is the city on
a hill of which Jesus speaks. Protestants have instead suggested “that this church
or that town, this people or that place, had become, for a time, ‘like unto’ a city
on a hill.”
69
It was this watering down of the meaning of the passage that let “city
on a hill” go from being about the Catholic Church to being about the United
States of America, since a nation as well as a parish could claim to be “like” a city
on a hill.
70 But clearly, Jesus had something more in mind when he told that first
generation of Christians that “you are the light of the world” and “a city set on a
hill cannot be hid.”
Reclaiming the meaning of Jesus’ words should be our starting point. The
Church that Jesus founded is both a light and a city. The visibility of the Church
isn’t incidental to these descriptions—the entire point is that the light shines
“before men,” and the city on a hill “cannot be hid.” As the light of the world,
the Church is an extension of Christ its head, who elsewhere says, “I am the light
of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the
light of life” (John 8:12). The Church’s task is to proclaim “the light of the gospel
of the glory of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:4). As a city, the Church is a visible, structured
society. These two images are meant to go together: the visibility of the Church
is key to the effectiveness of its proclamation of the gospel, “that they may see
your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” But as John
MacArthur notes, this is impossible with an invisible Church: “People in the
world cannot detect the invisible church of real Christians. They see only the
visible church of those who profess to be Christians.”
71 So Jesus’ words can’t be
directed at this imaginary, invisible Church, somewhere out there in the
noumenon. Rather, the city on a hill that he’s speaking of is by definition of the visible Church.
The visible society
So what does the society of this city look like? One of the clearest writers to take
up this question is St. Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), a strong opponent of any
theories of the Church that made the “true Church” invisible or cut too sharp a
divide between the invisible and the visible. Bellarmine points out that any theory
of the Church that requires “internal virtues to constitute a man ‘within’ the
Church” thereby makes “the true Church invisible,” leading to the numerous
problems we looked at in the prior chapter.
72 As God reminds the prophet
Samuel, “man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart”
(1 Sam. 16:7). Bellarmine offered this understanding of the Church instead:
But it is our teaching that there is only one ecclesia [Church], and not two, and
that this one and true Church is the assembly of men bound together by the
profession of the same Christian faith and the communion of the same
sacraments, under the rule of the legitimate pastors, and especially that of the
Roman pontiff, the one vicar of Christ on earth.
73
Given these three things, Bellarmine argued that “it is easy to infer which men
belong to the Church and which do not belong to it. . . . For the Church is an
assembly of men, as visible and palpable as the assembly of the Roman people, or
the Kingdom of France, or the Republic of the Venetians.”
74
This description of the Church has proven extremely controversial, even among
modern Catholics. The French theologian Christian Salenson writes that “the
Church no longer recognizes itself in the definition of Robert Bellarmine, who
thought that the Church was like the Republic of Venice, an organized and
hierarchical society.”
75 The heterodox
76 Catholic priest Hans Küng goes farther,
claiming that “no Catholic today who believes in the real Church would bluntly
take the line of that champion of Counter-Reformation theology, Cardinal
Bellarmine, and consider the Church to be as visible as the Republic of
Venice.”
77
Instead, Küng argues that “the believer who holds no office is a
Christian and member of the Church of Christ; a man who holds office without
faith is no Christian and not a member of the Church.”
78 Küng’s first point is
uncontroversial. Even Bellarmine’s description (that a true Christian is “under the
rule of the legitimate pastors”) presupposes a layman, not a pastor. As for his
second point, Küng has fallen back into the error of John Wycliffe, trying to
exclude Judas from the Church that Jesus includes him in.
Both of these critics badly misunderstand Bellarmine’s argument.
79 Building on
the theology of St. Augustine, Bellarmine argues that “the Church is a living
body, in which there is a soul and a body. And the internal gifts of the Holy
Ghost, faith, hope, charity, and the rest are the soul. The external profession of
the faith and the communication of the sacraments are the body.”
80 He freely
admits that “some are of the body and not of the soul”—that is, faithless members
of the Church. These, Bellarmine compares to “hairs or fingernails or evil liquids
in a human body.” In other words, yes, they are members of the body of Christ,
but no, they’re not living members of the body. His point is not that they are
saved, but that they are members of the Church. Bellarmine is defining the body
of Christ but acknowledging that membership in the body is worthless without
also sharing in the soul of Christ. On this point, Scripture clearly sides with
Bellarmine, not Küng. Jesus gives the following parable:
Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net which was thrown into the sea and
gathered fish of every kind; when it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down
and sorted the good into vessels but threw away the bad. So it will be at the
close of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the
righteous, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and
gnash their teeth (Matt. 13:47–50).
In other words, the Church on earth contains both good fish and bad, both the
saved and some measure of the unsaved. We will not be able to fully sort out
who is who here on earth—that’s the place of the Final Judgment. Such a vision
of the Church is a direct refutation of any theology that says everyone in the
Church will be saved or that the Church is just the cross-section of the saved.
No, this visible society clearly includes some who are Christians on the level “of
the body and not of the soul.”
Bellarmine also readily acknowledges that there are some (he mentions
catechumens and even excommunicates!) who might be in the opposite situation,
connected to the Church at the level of the soul but not the body. Here, too,
Scripture is on his side. As St. Paul says, “If the foot should say, ‘Because I am not
a hand, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the
body” (1 Cor. 12:15). The plain suggestion is that the body of Christ includes
even some people who think of themselves as on the outside.
81
In other words,
it’s easy to say where the fullness of Christ’s Church is, but it’s impossible to find
the outer boundaries. It’s better to be united to the Church in soul than in body.
That is, it’s better to be a devout believer outside the visible bounds of the
Church than a faithless member within it. But it’s better still to be a full member,
body and soul.
Contrary to a popular myth,
82
such an idea is not new in Catholic thought.
When the crowds on Pentecost were “cut to the heart” by St. Peter’s preaching,
they asked, “Brethren, what shall we do?” and Peter answered, “Repent, and be
baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your
sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:37–39). At this,
“those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day
about three thousand souls” (41). From this, we can see both that baptism is
important for salvation and that it’s the normal doorway into the Church. Those
who are baptized are saved (invisibly) and brought into union with the Church
(visibly). But this gets complicated when Christians break off from the visible
Church and continue to baptize new members. Are those new members
somehow part of the Church that the schismatics broke off from? The Catholic
Church has repeatedly said “yes.” More than 400 years before Bellarmine, the
Fourth Lateran Council said that “the sacrament of baptism is consecrated in
water at the invocation of the undivided Trinity—namely Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit—and brings salvation to both children and adults when it is correctly
carried out by anyone in the form laid down by the church.”
83 The Council of
Trent, rather than denying this Church teaching, elaborated on it, to make it
perfectly clear that all trinitarian baptisms are valid, even if administered by
heretics.
84
This means that even though the Church is a visible body, there are still some
who are connected to it invisibly. And indeed, that is completely consistent with
Bellarmine’s description of the Church as a visible society like the Republic of
Venice. At any given moment, a society will have members outside its visible
boundaries and foreigners and visitors within. For three years, I studied theology
in Rome. Bodily, I was in Italy, but I was still an American at heart and in a very
real sense. I was, if you will, invisibly connected to a visible society, the United
States. Likewise, we can coherently talk about people behaving in an “unAmerican” way, just as we can talk about Christians behaving in an un-Christian
way. But it doesn’t follow from this that there is one visible America and another
invisible America, or that the “true America” just lives in our hearts or in the
mind of God.
85
As a visible society, the Church is also an orderly society, not simply a spiritual
anarchy. This is another critique some modern Catholics have levied against
Bellarmine’s view of the Church. For instance, Loyola Marymount’s Jeffrey
VanderWilt accuses Bellarmine of placing undue emphasis “upon the hierarchy,
the domination of the clergy over the laity, and legalistic understandings of grace
and reconciliation.”
86 Anyone who reads Bellarmine can see that nothing of the
sort is true. He describes the Church as a visible society, and although the idea of
a society includes government, it isn’t reducible to it. Nor is the government the
most important, or vital, part of a society. And these same charges could be levied
(equally unjustly) against Paul, who writes to Timothy about qualifications for
bishops (1 Tim. 3:1–7) and deacons (8–13), and then explains that “I am writing
these instructions to you so that, if I am delayed, you may know how one ought
to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the
pillar and bulwark of the truth” (14–15). To Paul, and to Bellarmine, the true
Church is at once the household of God, the pillar and foundation of the truth,
and a place in which household governance is handled by clergy.
Israel and the Church
It may be helpful to think of the Church not in analogy to the Kingdom of
France or the Republic of Venice, but in its relationship with the Kingdom of
Israel. After all, if we want to know what it looks like for God to organize a
people, this is an undeniable example of it. God establishes Israel as a visible
society with its own land, with borders and boundaries (Num. 34), and
subdivided into tribes (Gen. 49). It has a class of ordained priests (Num. 1:47–54)
and a governing authority provided by God (cf. Judg. 2:16–19, 3:9; 2 Sam. 2).
God even orders Moses to take a census to number the inhabitants of Israel
(Num. 1:1–46). Israel was not just every bit as visible and structured as France or
Venice, but visible and structured in precisely the same ways.
Yet there is more to Israel than its visibility or structure lets on. To understand
Israel, consider God’s opening words to Abraham, the father of the Jewish
people: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the
land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless
you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those
who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse; and by you all the families of
the earth shall bless themselves” (Gen. 12:1–3). This is the entire history of the
Jewish people in three verses. This is the promise that gives the “promised land”
its name, and connected to this land is the promise of making a “great nation,”
Israel. The mission ad gentes, to the nations, to all “the families of the earth,”
begins here.
This is the paradox of Israel. On the one hand, the Hebrew word qadash means,
“to set aside, to consecrate, or to make holy.”
87 The strict dietary code, for
instance, exists precisely to set the Israelites aside from the other nations, that they
may be holy. The Psalmist even laments that “they did not destroy the peoples, as
the Lord commanded them, but they mingled with the nations and learned to do
as they did” (Ps. 106:34–35). And yet, God simultaneously is calling Israel to play
a role in bringing those nations back to him. Rahab is converted and saved; Jonah
goes to preach to the Assyrian Ninevites, and they repent; and “Ruth the
Moabitess” (Ruth 1:22) gets an entire book of the Old Testament. Something of
this paradox is captured brilliantly in Psalm 87. It begins with an ode to Zion,
Jerusalem, as might be expected. But then the psalm takes a stark twist (4–6):
Among those who know me I mention Rahab and Babylon; behold, Philistia
and Tyre, with Ethiopia—“This one was born there,” they say. And of Zion it
shall be said, “This one and that one were born in her”; for the Most High
himself will establish her. The Lord records as he registers the peoples, “This
one was born there.”
In the midst of praising Zion, the inspired Psalmist numbers as native sons the
faithful of some of Israel’s historic oppressors and fiercest enemies. The idea seems
to be that God sees even them as what St. Paul would later call Jews “inwardly”
(Rom. 2:29).
Christians sometimes think there was no evangelism among the Jews of the Old
Testament, but that isn’t entirely right. When Paul and Barnabas arrive in
Antioch of Pisidia, they encounter “many Jews and devout converts to Judaism”
(Acts 13:43). Throughout the Old Testament, there’s an ever-growing sense that
something new is about to happen that will somehow relate to the Gentiles. The
prophet Jeremiah reveals that “the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will
make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah” (Jer.
31:31), and the prophet Isaiah makes it clear that this new covenant will
incorporate the Gentiles in a radically new way. Through Isaiah, God promises,
“I am coming to gather all nations and tongues; and they shall come and shall see
my glory” (Isa. 66:18). And so faithful Israelites knew that more was to come,
and that God’s arrival would involve the gathering in of the nations.
When Jesus arrives as Israel’s long-awaited Messiah, he applies the beginning of
Isaiah 61, the messianic prophecy beginning “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,”
to himself (Luke 4:18–22).
88 As if to point them toward the need for the Messiah
to gather together the nations, he interprets Isaiah 61 “by reference to 1 Kings 17
and 2 Kings 5. In both these passages, God’s messengers or prophets showed that
God was the God of foreigners as well as of Israel. In 1 Kings 17 Elijah is saved by
the sacrifice of a Sidonese widow, and in 2 Kings 5 Elisha heals an enemy army
general.”
89
Immediately, the congregation turns on him and wants to kill him.
But Jesus is simply pointing out that the Messiah prophesied by Isaiah is the
Savior of the Gentiles as well as the Jews. It’s time to gather in the nations.
Israel as the Church
With Israel, then, God created a visible, structured people of God. But what does
that have to do with the Church? How we understand Jesus’ relationship with
the Old Testament will color how we understand the Church’s relationship with
Israel. This has been a source of confusion from early on in the history of the
Church. One of the earliest heresies was that of Marcion of Sinope (A.D. 85–
160), who claimed that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New
Testament were different gods.
90 This heresy has perhaps never entirely
disappeared: we hear echoes of it when Richard Dawkins claims that “the God of
the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction”
91 or
when Friedrich Nietzsche complains that the New Testament spoiled the spirit of
the Old.
92 Even among today’s Christians, it’s not uncommon to hear some
version of this contrast, which is why The West Wing’s fictional President Josiah
Bartlett (presented as a Catholic on the show) answers a senator’s struggles with
believing in the God of the Old Testament by saying, “I’m more of a New
Testament man, myself.”
93 But Marcion was at least more intellectually consistent
than these “neo-Marcionites.” His Bible had no Old Testament, and even the
New Testament was so gutted that St. Epiphanius of Salamis (c. 310–403) called
it a gospel “without beginning, middle, or end,” a “cloak full of moth holes.”
94
Why? Because you cannot read far into the New Testament without hearing
about how the Old is being fulfilled.
A second way we can misunderstand the relationship between the Old
Covenant and the New Covenant is dispensationalism, a “novel method of
biblical interpretation” invented by an ex-Anglican priest named John Nelson
Darby in the nineteenth century.
95
If you’re familiar with the best-selling Left
Behind series or the idea of the “Rapture” (as an event apart from the Second
Coming of Christ, in which believers are collectively taken up into heaven), then
you’ve encountered dispensationalism. By the mid-twentieth entury,
“dispensationalism was overwhelmingly the most dominant and influential system
of biblical interpretation among conservative Protestant churches and groups.”
96
The crux of dispensationalist theology is the idea that “God had two completely
different plans operating in history: one for an earthly people, Israel, and the
other for a heavenly people, the church.”
97 C.I. Scofield (1843–1921), who
popularized dispensationalism in America, began his most famous book (tellingly
titled Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth) by explaining that “whoever reads the
Bible with any attention cannot fail to perceive that more than half of its contents
relate to one nation: the Israelites,” while there is “another distinct body, which
is called the church. This body also has a peculiar relation to God and, like Israel,
has received from him specific promises. But similarity ends there, and the most
striking contrast begins. . . . Comparing, then, what is said in Scripture
concerning Israel and the Church, he finds that in origin, calling, promise,
worship, principles of conduct, and future destiny that all is contrast.”
98
It is hard to overstate just how radical was the break Scofield saw between Israel
and the Church. He went so far as to say that Christians need not worry about
the moral law of the Old Testament, including the Ten Commandments, arguing
that “it is not, then, a question of dividing what God spoke from Sinai into moral
law and ceremonial law—the believer does not come to that mount at all.”
99
James Borland, former president of the Evangelical Theological Society, argues
that “the church is not found in the Old Testament. Rather, the Old Testament
anticipates [the] Messiah’s kingdom. . . . But when the Jewish leaders and people
rejected Christ’s offer of the kingdom, especially as seen in Matthew 11–12, Jesus
announced something new—the church.”
100
In this view, the Church isn’t the fulfillment of God’s plan for Israel so much as
his back-up plan. But while God’s plan for the Church was a radical break from
his plan for Israel, the plan for Israel remains in place.
101 Liberty University’s
Thomas Ice argues that “the church is unique in the plan of God and separate
from his plan for Israel. The church partakes of the spiritual promises of the
Abrahamic covenant as fulfilled through Christ, but Israel—and not the church—
will fulfill its national destiny as a separate entity.” As a result, these
dispensationalists believe in a “church age” running from Pentecost until the
Rapture, after which point “the church has no earthly prophetic destiny.”
102 This
poor ecclesiology partially accounts for the overwhelming support for the modern
state of Israel among (particularly older) American Evangelicals.
103 The core
problem here is that it treats Christ and the Church not as the fulfillment of God’s
promises to Israel, but as something radically distinct, two completely different
religions duct-taped together, or running independently, alongside one another.
This is a sharp contrast from the way the Bible speaks of the New Covenant
fulfilling the Old, or the way Jesus speaks of the gathering-in of the Gentiles, or
the way St. Paul speaks of the ingrafting of the Gentiles. Paul describes Israel as an
olive tree and says that “some of the branches were broken off,” while these
Gentile converts “were grafted in their place to share the richness of the olive
tree” (Rom. 11:17). He reminds his Gentile readers, “They were broken off
because of their unbelief, but you stand fast only through faith. So do not become
proud, but stand in awe. For if God did not spare the natural branches, neither
will he spare you” (20–21). Paul is clearly not describing the wholesale
replacement of one covenant people with another, nor is he describing two
separate plants, one Jewish and one Gentile (it’s hard to understand how anyone
could read the epistle to the Romans and come away with that message). Instead,
he’s saying he continues to prune and maintain the olive tree, the People of God
that began with Israel. With the arrival of Christ and the formation of the
Church, you have not the disregarding of Israel, but the pruning: those Jews who
reject Christ are cast off, and those Gentiles who accept him are grafted in.
This understanding of ingrafting is critical for understanding the Church. It’s for
this reason that Church Fathers like St. Augustine can speak of the body of Christ
as existing “from Abel the just right up to the end of the world.”
104 And this is
what Jesus means when he warns the chief priests and Pharisees that “the
kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing
the fruits of it” (Matt. 21:43). He means nearly the antithesis of the popular
dispensationalist view that “the kingdom of God does not exist at all during the
church age because it has been removed from Israel and will be reestablished on
earth at Christ’s second coming.”
105 Rather, the hardhearted Pharisees and chief
priests are broken off the olive tree that is the kingdom, while faithful Gentiles
will be grafted in.
Jesus isn’t throwing out Israel; he’s just evicting some of the faithless tenants and
inviting in new ones. This means that the Church is still Israel, simply
reorganized. After all, the New Covenant is made between God and “the house
of Israel” (Heb. 8:8–12). This is why Paul can say that “he is a Jew who is one
inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart, spiritual and not literal”
(Rom. 2:29) and can end his letter to the Christians of Galatia by saying, “Peace
and mercy be upon all who walk by this rule, upon the Israel of God” (Gal.
6:16). The Church isn’t God’s “plan B” after (some of) the Jews rejected Jesus.
106
It’s the full expression of the New Covenant that he’d been promising all along.
This informs how we approach the question of the Church as a visible society.
As we’ve seen, Israel has always been a visible society, and throughout this
process of ingrafting, as Israel fulfills its destiny in becoming the Church, opening
its doors to the Gentiles, there’s no transition in which it suddenly turns invisible.
Quite the contrary: Jesus says, “I have other sheep, that are not of this fold; I
must bring them also, and they will heed my voice. So there shall be one flock,
one shepherd” (John 10:16). In other words, the ingrafting occurs by gathering the
Gentiles together. If he merely meant that there would continue to be God-fearing
Gentiles and God-fearing Jews, but that their identities would be known only to
him, that was already true. For his promise to be meaningful, there must be some
way in which the Gentiles and Jews are visibly gathered together in one place: the
flock of Christ.
Not only is this New Covenant community visible, but it’s structured as well.
In a sermon preached against the Catholic priesthood, John MacArthur claims:
We don’t need any priests. Revelation 1, “You are a kingdom of priests.” We
only need one high priest and it’s not the pope. We have one mediator, the
man Christ Jesus. The veil is torn. We go right into the Holy of Holies. You
are a priest and I am a priest unto God.
107
It’s clear that MacArthur is comfortable affirming that there are no priests, that
we’re all priests, and that only Christ is a priest. The one position he rejects is that
some of us are priests, because “the reformers rejected completely the idea of a
special priesthood.” But this is exactly what God promises about the New
Covenant, when he says of the faithful Gentiles, “Some of them also I will take for
priests and for Levites” (Isa. 66:21).
The Israel in the Old Testament was “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation”
(Exod. 19:6) that still had a sacrificial priesthood consisting of some of the
members of the tribe of Levi. One of the Levites, Korah, turns against this special
priesthood, saying, “All the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the
Lord is among them; why then do you exalt yourselves above the assembly of the
Lord?” (Num. 16:3). Korah and his followers are then swallowed into the earth
in a literal schism when they attempt to offer sacrifice on their own (32).
Likewise, the “Israel of God,” the Church, is “a royal priesthood, a holy nation”
(1 Pet. 2:9), that nevertheless has a sacerdotal priesthood. This priesthood fulfills
the prophecy through Malachi that “in every place incense is offered to my
name, and a pure offering; for my name is great among the nations, says the Lord
of hosts” (Mal. 1:11). St. Jude warns against those in the Church who “reject
authority” and “perish in Korah’s rebellion” (Jude 1:8, 11).
In the last chapter, we saw how treating the Church as the invisible collection
of the saved is both untenable and contrary to Scripture. In this chapter, we
looked at some of the evidence pointing to the Church being a visible, structured
society, a city on a hill, and the fuller blossoming of Israel. The question that
remains for the rest of this book is this: if this is true, what role (if any) does Jesus
entrust to Pope St. Peter and his successors?
CHAPTER 4.
SERVANT OF THE SERVANTS OF
GOD
PERHAPS THE CLEAREST teaching on the papacy is at the Last Supper. That may
surprise some readers. After all, there’s an all too common misconception that the
Catholic claim for the papacy boils down entirely to Jesus’ words to Peter in
Matthew 16:18 (“upon this rock, I will build my church”) and the identification
of the rock with Peter himself. To be sure, we’ll cover that ground later in this
book, but it’s more important to start with the Last Supper. It’s there, after all,
that we find the Twelve arguing (once again) over which of them is the greatest.
Here Jesus spends a great deal of time imparting final words of wisdom to the
Twelve before his passion and death. In other words, given the context, this is
precisely where we would expect to find Jesus talking about structures of authority
within the Church.
Some Protestants find the fact that Jesus is still having to answer these questions
as a sort of argument from silence against the papacy. One author objected,
“Why did the disciples even ask the question if Jesus had already established Peter
as the authority? Obviously, they did not understand Jesus’ statement about the
rock, as recorded in Matthew 16, as referring to Peter as the head of the
church.”
108 This much is surely true. At this point, the Twelve still don’t have a
full and clear understanding of the papacy. But this is hardly an argument against
the papacy. After Jesus prophesied his death and resurrection, we find the Twelve
quietly “questioning what the rising from the dead meant” (Mark 9:10), so the
confusion of the Twelve is no indication that Jesus had been silent on this point.
And this isn’t even the first time that Jesus has had to answer the question about
which of them is the greatest (cf. Luke 9:46–48). So the mere fact that the
Twelve are asking which of them is the greatest is hardly evidence that Jesus
hasn’t already answered the question.
A related objection is that if the papacy is true, we might expect to hear about it
from Jesus here. In the words of a nineteenth-century Protestant poet:
When the twelve had a strife, who should greatest be made,
And this on the night when their Lord was betrayed,
Why did not Christ tell them, to quiet the strife
“I’ve made Peter Prince, I’ve crowned him for life;
And when I depart, he my vicar shall be,
And you all must submit unto him as to me.”
109
What the poem gets right is that we should expect to see something related to
the papacy in Jesus’ response. What it gets wrong, as with the other Protestant
critiques, is that it’s imagining a funhouse distortion of what Catholics believe
about the papacy. In other words, it’s not the Catholic belief that the pope is to be
a tyrant king viewed as equal to Christ. As we’ll see, Jesus does “crown” Peter,
but with a different sort of leadership.
The Kingship of the Apostles
Before we get to what Jesus said to Peter, it’s important to understand the setting.
The Twelve are debating over greatness once again, and Jesus responds in a new
way. In the past, Jesus called their attention to the heights of holiness by placing a
child in their midst and saying, “Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is
the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:4). But here at the Last Supper,
he will speak of a different sort of greatness: authority. “The kings of the Gentiles
exercise lordship over them; and those in authority over them are called
benefactors. But not so with you; rather let the greatest among you become as
the youngest, and the leader as one who serves” (Luke 22:25–26).
In contrasting the authority of the Twelve with that of the “kings of the
Gentiles,” Jesus’ comparison presupposes that the Twelve have some kind of
royal authority, but of a different kind from what they were accustomed to
among the Gentiles. Indeed, the word he uses that’s translated here as “leader” is
hēgeomai, the same word used to describe the “ruler who will govern my people
Israel” (Matt. 2:6) and the same word St. Stephen uses to describe Joseph as
“governor over Egypt” (Acts 7:10). A few verses later, the implicit kingship being
promised the Twelve is made explicit: “As my Father appointed a kingdom for
me, so do I appoint for you that you may eat and drink at my table in my
kingdom, and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Luke 22:29–30).
Craig A. Evans is probably correct that “judging” here is not punitive (like
condemning), but “administrative and judicial.”
110
It is remarkable that this
promise has received so little commentary, and has gone so little-noticed among
Christians, because it ought to revolutionize the way in which we revere the
apostles.
There is a view popular among some Protestants that God is jealous of his glory,
such that he would never share it with Mary or the saints. Such objections are
regularly raised against the Catholic practice of venerating the saints. Some of this
distorted view of God arose from a misreading of a single Bible verse, stripped of
context: in this case, Isaiah 42:8, which says “I am the Lord, that is my name; my
glory I give to no other, nor my praise to graven images.” The context there is
pretty clearly that God doesn’t share his glory with any other gods.
Whatever the origin, we find this distorted view of God and glory put forth by
several prominent Evangelicals, including former megachurch pastor James
MacDonald, who claims, “God won’t share his glory, and it’s folly to seek it.”
111
Jesus says the exact opposite. In a prayer to the Father at the end of the Last Supper,
he says, “The glory which thou hast given me I have given to them, that they
may be one even as we are one” (John 17:22). Indeed, he criticizes those who
don’t seek this glory that comes from God: “How can you believe, who receive
glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only
God?” (5:44). St. Paul promises “glory and honor and peace for every one who
does good,” and that “to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and
honor and immortality, he will give eternal life” (Rom. 2:10,7). So seeking God’s
glory isn’t folly; it’s salvific.
It’s for this reason that Paul can say to the Corinthians that “we all, with
unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his
likeness from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18), and why he can
challenge them, “And would that you did reign, so that we might share the rule
with you!” (1 Cor. 4:8). To St. Timothy, he promises that “if we endure, we
shall also reign with him” (2 Tim. 2:12), just as the book of Revelation proclaims
that Christ has made the ransomed Christians into “a kingdom and priests to our
God, and they shall reign on earth” (Rev. 5:10). Christ promises that “he who
conquers and who keeps my works until the end, I will give him power over the
nations, and he shall rule them with a rod of iron” (2:26–27). This is a sharing in
Christ’s own divine governance, as Revelation 12:5 and 19:15 make clear. And
although there is a sense in which every Christian is called to share in this, a
special place is foretold for the Twelve and for the mother of God (cf. Rev. 12).
There are two starkly contrasting visions of glory being put forward here. The
first, a view found within various forms of Protestantism, is one in which God
jealously guards his glory, refusing to share it with us. In the words of one
megachurch pastor, “Salvation is a work of God and only God. There is glory to
be given for this incredible work. It is not going to be a glory given to man in
any way, shape, or form because all things are ultimately for the glory of God.”
112
This view of glory is zero-sum, meaning that if God gives us glory, he has a little
less. But the other view, the one preached by Jesus Christ and the apostles (and
with a special emphasis by Paul) is that God calls us to pursue heavenly glory and
to share in it. It’s why Paul considers present afflictions merely as “preparing for us
an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor. 4:17). The problem
with the binary view is that it imagines us as rivals to God rather than his
children. A parent is glorified when his son excels. It’s why we can honor our
father and mother, and praise the well lived lives of the saints, without offending
or diminishing God’s supreme honor. Ultimately, as one nineteenth-century
priest pointed out, “all honor redounds to God, because without his grace the
greatest saint that ever lived might have been the greatest sinner.”
113
This is true of the honor of office as well as the honor of sanctity.
Understanding this is key to making sense of an apparent biblical contradiction.
Jesus tells us to “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the
things that are God’s” (Luke 20:25), yet everything belongs to God. Plus, doesn’t
he warn us that “no one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one
and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other”
(Matt. 6:24)? How can we harmonize these two sayings? Jesus does it for us
before Pilate, when he says, “You would have no power over me unless it had
been given you from above” (John 19:11). Paul likewise teaches that everyone
should “be subject to the governing authorities,” for “there is no authority except
from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God,” such that “he who
resists the authorities resists what God has appointed” (Rom. 13:1–2; Peter says
something similar in 1 Pet. 2:13–14).
What does this have to do with the papacy? A great deal. Many of the
arguments against the papacy are rooted in this binary view—that Jesus or Peter is
the rock, and that if Peter has any authority, honor, or glory, it must come at
Christ’s expense. But if we are to have any chance of understanding Jesus’ words
at the Last Supper, to recognize the kingship of the Twelve generally and Peter
specifically in the plan of Christ, then we need to be free from the blinders of the
binary view.
The Eternal Role of the Church
Another aspect of Christ’s words worth noting is the eternal perseverance of the
Church. Certain Protestant theologians, particularly those influenced by
dispensationalism, will sometimes speak (as Grace to You’s John MacArthur does)
of “the time between the first and second comings of Christ” as “the church
age.”
114
We see this view rebutted in Christ’s words to the Twelve. To the Twelve, a
small band of faithful Jewish believers, he says, “You are those who have
continued with me in my trials; as my Father appointed a kingdom for me, so do
I appoint for you that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and sit
on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Luke 22:28–30). It’s a witness to
the fact that the Church isn’t an instrument in the hands of God fit to be disposed
and replaced, or an unintended “parenthesis” or divine plan B. Rather, St. Paul
speaks of the Church as the body of Christ and the Bride of Christ, mystically
united to Christ (Eph. 5:23–32), and most shockingly as his “body, the fullness of
him who fills all in all” (1:23).
This is important context for understanding the papacy in the plan of Christ.
Many Protestants approach the question as if, after centuries of carefully preparing
Israel, creating particular offices and commanding specific structures, and
generally cultivating a specific model of leadership, God suddenly became
indifferent to the nature and structure of the Church, leaving it up to us to decide
for ourselves. This runs directly contrary to both the letter and spirit of Christ’s
promise: “I will build my church” (Matt. 16:18). A good test is this: what would
Christianity look like if Christ didn’t establish the Church? After all, if Christ
hadn’t established the Church, we would still expect to see Christians organizing
(just as the followers of many of the world’s great religious and moral figures have
formed schools of thought during their leaders’ lifetimes or after their deaths).
The difference is that we wouldn’t expect those manmade organizations, wellmeaning though they may be, to be unified or to interpret their leader in the
same way. Peter Kreeft poses the question well:
Suppose he had not established a single, visible church with authority to teach
in his name. Suppose he had left it up to us. Suppose the Church was our
invention instead of his, only human and not divine. Suppose we had to figure
out the right doctrine of the Trinity, the two natures of Christ, the sacraments,
Mary, and controversial moral issues like contraception and homosexuality and
euthanasia. Who then could ever know with certainty the mind and will of
God? How could there then be one Church?
115
Instead, Kreeft argues, we would expect in such a world to find numerous
Christian denominations teaching contrary doctrines. The implication is clear:
Protestantism looks as though it’s not established by Christ. That is, it looks and
acts like a group of people creating their own church as a way of honoring Christ,
rather than what we would expect to see if Christ had built his own church. If
the Church is manmade, then we shouldn’t spend much time debating its
organization or structure. On the other hand, if we understand the Church to be
something that (a) has been part of the plan of Christ from the beginning, (b) is
mystically united to Christ as his body and Bride, and (c) will exist forever, even
in heaven, then we should care a great deal about the Church’s nature and
structure.
Strengthen Thy Brethren
Our Lord now turns his attention from the Twelve to St. Peter, saying: “Simon,
Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat,
but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned
again, strengthen your brethren” (Luke 22:31–32). In and of itself, this is a
remarkable passage, although much is lost in translation. The Enduring Word
biblical commentary remarks on this verse that “Satan wanted to completely
crush and defeat Peter.”
116 But this fundamentally misunderstands the verse. It’s
about Satan’s plan to crush and defeat not Peter, but all of them...or all of us.
The error here is simple. Unlike Hebrew and Greek, today’s English lacks a
formal “you-plural.” As a result, we miss an important shift in Jesus’ words from
you-plural to you-singular in this passage. Fortunately, there are still plenty of
regional or slangy options: depending on where you’re from, you might use y’all,
youse, yinz, you guys, you lot, or something else. The passage is clearer if we plug
in a you-plural so we can understand what’s going on. Now it reads, “Simon,
Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you all, that he might sift all of you like
wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have
turned again, strengthen your brethren.” Now we can see the important shift
that’s obvious in the Greek but lost in the English—that Satan is out for all twelve
(and, more broadly, all of Jesus’ followers), and that Jesus responds by praying for
one of them, Peter, and then commissioning him to strengthen the others.
How Might a Protestant Respond?
What might Protestants say in response to this passage? Keith Mathison, in The
Shape of Sola Scriptura, writes that Peter
overestimates his own faith despite Jesus’ warning. That is an especially
dangerous place for any believer to be, and therefore Jesus, because of his love
for Peter, prays especially for him. . . . This text in Luke 22 is a beautiful picture
of our Lord’s love and concern for Peter. It has absolutely no bearing on the
question of the papacy.
117
To be sure, part of what’s going on here is that Peter’s going to deny Christ
three times. But that doesn’t really explain the phrase “strengthen your brethren.”
This isn’t as much exegesis as a hand-waving dismissal. The problem with
Mathison’s read is clear from John Calvin’s commentary on the passage, in which
he notes that all of the Twelve are described as making similar boasts, and all are
described as falling away. “Peter said to him, ‘Even if I must die with you, I will
not deny you.’ And so said all the disciples” (Matt. 26:35). Calvin rightly notes that
the fact that they should do this even “after Peter had been reproved” shows
“how little they knew themselves.”
118 And Jesus warns that all of the Twelve, not
just Peter, are about to fall away: “You will all fall away because of me this night”
(31). Sure enough, after Jesus’ arrest, “all the disciples forsook him and fled” (56).
So why do we focus on Peter’s denial? Two reasons. One is simply that Peter
doubles back and “followed him at a distance” (Matt. 26:58), while most of the
Twelve are nowhere to be found. Only he allows himself to be put into harm’s
way again, either out of love of Christ or an overestimation of his own strength,
or both. The second is that Peter is consistently held to a higher standard
throughout the Gospels. When all of the Twelve fall asleep in the Garden, it’s
only one who gets rebuked: Peter (Matt. 26:40; Mark 14:37). Jesus explains this
principle expressly: “Every one to whom much is given, of him will much be
required; and of him to whom men commit much they will demand the more”
(Luke 12:48). Why is more expected of Peter? Because more has been entrusted
to him.
By itself, then, Luke 22:31–32 is a remarkable passage, and it seems to say Peter
has a unique commission among the apostles. All of the Twelve are boasting of
their fidelity to Christ, Satan plans to sift all of them like wheat, and they will all
fall away. Jesus’ response is to fortify one of them, St. Peter, by praying for him
specifically, and commissioning him to “strengthen your brethren.” He gives this
commission to Peter alone, in front of the other apostles. Now connect it to the
broader scriptural context. The Twelve have just been arguing about who the
greatest is, and Christ has explained to them that the leader is to be “as one who
serves” (Luke 22:26), giving himself as the perfect model: “For which is the
greater, one who sits at table, or one who serves? Is it not the one who sits at
table? But I am among you as one who serves” (27). He then calls Peter to serve
the other apostles.
Understood within this context, Jesus is calling Peter to leadership, but of a
specific kind: what we might call servant leadership. This is an important counter to
many of the arguments against the papacy. Broadly speaking, there are two
categories of “disproofs” of the papacy—when popes seem to act arrogantly and
when they don’t. In the first category, the objection is simple: if Peter and
subsequent popes are called to be servant-leaders, to strengthen their brothers,
what do we make of popes who don’t live like this (at least by our own
assessment)? We’ll look at this problem more closely in the chapter on “bad
popes,” but for now, perhaps it will suffice to say this: Jesus is saying how Church
leadership ought to look. He says to “let the greatest among you become as the
youngest, and the leader as one who serves” (Luke 22:26) while giving himself as
the model leader, but he never says, “The leader loses his authority if he fails to
live up to my example.” St. Paul likewise calls husbands to “love your wives, as
Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25), but it doesn’t
invalidate the marriage when husbands fail to meet this standard.
St. Peter, Fellow Presbyter
A stranger objection is at the opposite extreme. Some Christians (both Catholics
and Protestants) have a sort of distorted mental image of the papacy, in which the
pope is supposed to decide everything and supposed to throw his authority around.
This is never what biblical headship looks like, whether we’re talking about a
family, a nation, or a church. But nevertheless, we find certain Protestant authors
who will object (in essence) that because Peter was humble, he couldn’t have
been pope. A key passage in this debate is 1 Peter 5:1, in which Peter says, “I
exhort the elders among you, as your fellow elder and witness of the sufferings of
Christ.” Peter’s humility here parallels St. Paul’s usage of terms like “my fellow
prisoner” (Philem. 1:23), “our beloved fellow worker” (1), “my brother and
fellow worker and fellow soldier” (Phil. 2:25), “my kinsmen and my fellow
prisoners” (Rom. 16:7), and “my partner and fellow worker in your service” (2
Cor. 8:23), and his self-description as a “servant of Christ” (1 Cor. 3:5; 2 Cor.
11:23).
After all, Peter could cite his authority but doesn’t. There’s no question that
apostles and elders are distinct: the two orders are distinguished no fewer than five
times within Acts 15 alone. And there’s no question that Peter is an apostle (Matt.
10:2), not merely an elder. But just as Paul forwent some of his rights as an
apostle (cf. 1 Cor. 9), we see Peter declining to explicitly invoke his apostolic
authority. In approaching his readers in this way, Peter can be read as leading
with humility and rooting his spiritual counsel in shared experience rather than
the authority of his office.
119 The Baptist theologians Michael S. Wilder and
Timothy Paul Jones rightly note that Peter “is not denying the importance of his
apostolic role when he refers to himself as a fellow elder. If anything, he is
deepening our understanding of what it meant to be an apostle. We should
understand that the apostolic office included the work of an elder.”
120
But some Protestant apologists view this servant leadership as somehow
debunking Peter’s role as the first pope. For instance, CARM’s Matt Slick objects
that “if Peter was supreme among the apostles, why does he state that he is a
fellow elder instead of asserting his supremacy?”
121 The English Methodist John
Benson (1749–1821) likewise argues:
So Peter, the first, and one of the chief, though not the head, of the apostles,
appositely and modestly styles himself. Commentators justly observe, that if
Peter had been the prince of the apostles, as the Papists affirm, he would in this
place, and in the inscription of his two epistles, certainly have assumed to
himself that high prerogative.
122
So if Peter is an apostle, but doesn’t insist upon his office, that’s apposite and
modest, and helps us to better understand the servant leadership to which apostles
are called. But if Peter is a pope, but doesn’t insist upon his office, that somehow
disproves the papacy. It should be clear that this double standard is rooted in a
false vision of the papacy, one incompatible with humble leadership. In this view,
any time that Peter or his successors act in the way that Christ called them to act,
they’re repudiating their office. One might just as well ask why Jesus washed the
feet of the Twelve at the Last Supper, instead of “assum[ing] to himself that high
prerogative.” The simple answer is that the papacy doesn’t, and shouldn’t, look
like an overbearing boss, or a Gentile emperor, or whatever strawman vision of
the papacy these critics are assuming.
Strikingly, the early Christians understood what Slick and Benson fail to grasp:
that “fellow presbyter” is a great way of understanding the pope’s role as a servant
of the servants of God and a co-laborer in the vineyard. In the year 397, a local
council of North African bishops assembled to discuss the canon of Scripture—
that is, which books belong in the Bible. The canon that they agreed upon is the
same one used today by the Catholic Church (and, strangely, is often cited
favorably by Protestants who seem unaware that their own Bible lacks seven of
the books included by Carthage).
123
In 419, a copy of this biblical canon was sent
to Pope Boniface with the inscription: “Let this be made known to our brother
and fellow-priest Boniface, or to other bishops of those parts, for the purpose of
confirming that canon, because we have received from our fathers that those
books must be read in the Church. . . . Let it also be allowed that the Passions of
Martyrs be read when their festivals are kept.”
124 Referring to Pope Boniface as
“fellow-priest” should be read as intentionally evoking Peter’s self-description as
“fellow presbyter.”
125
This is the meaning behind Jesus’ words to Peter at the Last Supper. Yes, he is
to be a leader of sorts for the apostles, but he’s to be a servant leader, who leads in
order to strengthen his brother bishops and fellow priests. It’s the clearest of many
biblical indications that the Petrine office exists not for the pope, but for the good
of the Church.
CHAPTER 5.
THE GOOD SHEPHERD CALLS A
SHEPHERD
WHAT DOES IT take to become a pastor? According to the popular Protestant site
9Marks,
126 “There seems to be no biblical indication that the New Testament
office of elder or pastor requires a special ‘calling.’”
127 Such a view is controversial
even within Protestantism. A better biblical interpretation comes from Erwin
Lutzer, pastor emeritus of the nondenominational Moody Church in Chicago,
128
who says, “God’s call is an inner conviction given by the Holy Spirit and
confirmed by the word of God and the body of Christ.”
129
In other words, the
question is whether being a pastor is an occupation (“a being employed in
something”) or a vocation (a “spiritual calling,” from the Latin vocare, “to call”).
130
The biblical evidence is clear that pastoral leadership within the Church is a
vocation to which one must be called by God, not simply an occupation to be
pursued. This is the clear model of leadership throughout Scripture, from God’s
calling of Abraham as the first patriarch (Gen. 12:1; Isa. 51:2) down to the Jewish
priesthood. As the epistle to the Hebrews notes, “Every high priest chosen from
among men is appointed to act on behalf of men in relation to God, to offer gifts
and sacrifices for sins,” and “one does not take the honor upon himself, but he is
called by God, just as Aaron was” (Heb. 5:1, 4). This was also the case for the
prophets. As the Lord says to Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I
knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a
prophet to the nations” (Jer. 1:5). Even in the selection of kings, we find a need
for God’s calling. Part of the reason seems to be, as the Lord said through Samuel
in choosing King David, that “the Lord sees not as man sees; man looks on the
outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Sam. 16:7).
131
Does God quit calling leaders in the New Testament? Not at all. Through
Jeremiah, God had also promised, “I will give you shepherds after my own heart,
who will feed you with knowledge and understanding” (Jer. 3:15). In other
words, New Testament shepherds (which is what the word “pastors” means, after
all) are given by God, not simply by their own ambition or by popular acclaim.
This is illustrated throughout the New Testament. After spending the night in
prayer, Jesus “called his disciples, and chose from them twelve, whom he named
apostles” (Luke 6:13). Or as St. Mark puts it, Jesus “went up into the hills, and
called to him those whom he desired; and they came to him. And he appointed
twelve, to be with him, and to be sent out to preach and have authority to cast
out demons” (Mark 3:13–15).
After Judas’s death, St. Peter quoted Psalm 108 (“His office let another take,” cf.
Acts 1:20) to announce that one of the men “who have accompanied us during
all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the
baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us—one of these men
must become with us a witness to his resurrection” (Acts 1:21–22). The
assembled brethren then choose two men who meet these qualifications: “Joseph
called Barsabbas, who was surnamed Justus, and Matthias” (23). But the acclaim
of the people is not enough. They all then turned to prayer, and the casting of
lots, to let the Lord have the final say (24–26).
This need for a calling isn’t limited to the apostles in the New Testament
Church. According to Jesus, one of the critical distinctions between a true pastor
and a “thief and robber” is whether or not the man has a calling from Christ
(John 10:1–5):
Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but
climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber; but he who enters by
the door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him the gatekeeper opens; the sheep
hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When
he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him,
for they know his voice. A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from
him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.
Lest there be any confusion, he adds, “I am the door of the sheep” (John 10:7).
So the man who simply declares himself to be a pastor, then, is no true shepherd.
He is merely a “thief and a robber,” stealing sheep from the flock of Christ. The
true shepherd must be called by Christ himself.
How do we know if a man is called by Christ, instead of being a robber or a
thief? Erwin Lutzer proposes three criteria: first, “an inner conviction,” which he
distinguishes from “feelings and hunches” which can come and go; second,
scriptural confirmation of the call, ensuring that “a person has the qualifications
listed in 1 Timothy 3”; and finally, “the body of Christ helps us understand
where we fit within the local church framework.”
132 Although 9Marks is leery of
a “special, supernatural, subjective call from God,” the site also points to the
attributes listed in 1 Timothy 3 as the qualifications needed and affirms that the
man “should also have a local church’s affirmation of his gifts and character.”
Neither Lutzer nor 9Marks goes so far as to say the Church can refuse ordination
to an objectively qualified candidate who desires to become a pastor. That’s a
contrast from the Church of the New Testament. By all accounts, Barsabbas was
objectively qualified to replace Judas as an apostle. Nothing in Scripture gives us
any reason to doubt either his “gifts” or “character.” Indeed, there were likely a
great many of the 120 assembled brethren who met the criteria laid out by Peter
in Acts 1:21–22. But only one man, St. Matthias, was chosen.
A better understanding of pastoral calling comes from St. Francis de Sales
(1567–1622), who points out that whenever the Lord sends anyone, he does so in
one of two ways. The first way, which he called “immediate” or “extraordinary”
mission, is “when God himself commands and gives a charge, without the
interposition of the ordinary authority which he has placed in the prelates and
pastors of the Church.”
133 He gives the examples of Jesus sending the apostles
(Matt. 28:19) and God sending Moses to Pharaoh (Exod. 3:10) and points out
that anyone claiming to be sent directly from God should be able to “prove it by
miracles: for I pray you, where should we be if this pretext of extraordinary
mission was to be accepted without proof?”
134
But the ordinary way that God sends people isn’t through this kind of
miraculous revelation. It’s through the body of Christ, the Church. More
specifically, it’s a top-down process. Although qualified candidates might be
suggested by the Christian people, they must ultimately be ordained by the laying
on of hands. In selecting the first deacons, Peter urged the brethren to “pick out
from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom,
whom we may appoint to this duty” (Acts 6:3). But although seven qualified
candidates were put forward by the brethren, it was still left to the apostles to do
the actual appointing and ordaining: “These [men] they set before the apostles,
and they prayed and laid their hands upon them” (6). And this laying on of hands
isn’t automatic or a mere formality. St. Paul, who reminds St. Timothy “to
rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands” (2
Tim. 1:6) also warns him, “Do not be hasty in the laying on of hands,” but “keep
yourself pure” (1 Tim. 5:22). Paul likewise tells St. Titus that the reason “I left
you in Crete” was “that you might amend what was defective, and appoint elders
in every town as I directed you” (Titus 1:5).
Besides direct divine revelation (extraordinary sending) and ordination through
the leadership of the Church (ordinary sending), there’s no third option. Nothing
in Christianity permits you to simply go and start your own church because
you’re a gifted speaker or preacher. Indeed, so thoroughly does the Bible (in both
the New and Old Testament) reject such an approach that when Paul speaks of
the need for evangelization, he asks, “But how are men to call upon him in
whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom
they have never heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher? And how
can men preach unless they are sent?” (Rom. 10:14–15). It’s unthinkable, in his
mind, that a man would just go to preach because he felt as though the job
needed doing, or because he felt personally qualified. That’s not enough. Instead,
the preacher must first be sent.
This is a different Paul from the caricature one sometimes hears of a rogue
apostle, operating entirely independently of the Twelve and the visible structure
of the Church. The Paul of the Bible presents himself as one who had an
extraordinary sending by Jesus Christ (Gal. 1:11–17), which he nevertheless
confirmed with Peter (1:18) and then the other apostles (1–10). Ultimately, it was
the Holy Spirit who said through the church at Antioch, “Set apart for me
Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them” (Acts 13:2; cf.
13:9). And so we find Paul being sent by Christ, by the Church, and by the Spirit
speaking through the Church.
We see this relationship with the Church on full display when Paul and
Barnabas run into a group of men teaching a contrary doctrine. In Acts 15:1, Paul
encounters these so-called “Judaizers.” By the next verse, we read that “when
Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and debate with them, Paul and
Barnabas and some of the others were appointed to go up to Jerusalem to the
apostles and the elders about this question” (Acts 15:2). It turns out, it was these
other men who were preaching without authorization, and the resultant Council
of Jerusalem laments “that some persons from us have troubled you with words,
unsettling your minds, although we gave them no instructions,” and remedies the
situation by sending Paul, Barnabas, and two other men (24–27).
In other words, part of the problem that the Church recognized wasn’t just that
there were men preaching false doctrines. It was that these were men who tried
to send themselves to preach, and to disastrous effect. The solution was therefore
not merely a theological one, correcting the doctrine. It was also an ecclesial one,
sending Church-commissioned orthodox preachers to replace the self-appointed
heretical ones. Paul would later identify these two distinct problems in his
description of the Judaizers as “insubordinate men” as well as “empty talkers and
deceivers” (Titus 1:10). Their insubordination was rejecting the authority of the
visible Church by assuming for themselves the mantle of preacher.
This biblical view, that a pastor or preacher must be sent either miraculously or
through the leadership of the visible Church, is ultimately fatal to the Protestant
position. Amazingly, Martin Luther seemed to recognize this. In a homily on
John 10, in which Jesus contrasts the shepherds called by Christ from robbers and
thieves, Luther explained:
No one should step into the office and preach from his own presumption and
without a commission from those having the authority. But under present
conditions, if we should wait until we received a commission to preach and to
administer the sacraments, we would never perform those offices as long as we
live.
135
In other words, Luther recognized that what he was doing was the sort of
presumptuous behavior condemned by Christ in the gospel he was preaching.
But he reasoned that just this once, the evil was necessary, since otherwise, he
wouldn’t ever get to perform the office. But that’s the whole point: Christ leaves
the Church with the ability to refuse pastoral office to those whom the Church
chooses. To say the other party’s consent is important unless it keeps you from
getting what you want is merely another way of saying that you don’t really care
about consent.
Moreover, it’s never just this once. Once you decide it’s okay to ignore the
order set up by Christ when it won’t get you what you want, you’ll find more
and more reasons to do so. After all, it would be absurd to require the second
generation of Protestants to obey the commandments that the first generation of
Protestants disregarded. Moreover, how could those who were never sent in the
first place be tasked with passing on the ministry to the next generation? If the
first generation of Reformers were “thieves and robbers,” the mere passage of
time doesn’t turn them into proper gatekeepers. And it’s precisely in this way that
we end up today with a situation in which neither Lutzer nor 9Marks has much
of a role for the Church other than to confirm an aspiring pastor’s gifts and talents
and to help him understand where he fits “within the local church framework.”
It’s a sheepfold without a gate, because so many successive generations of pastors
have grown accustomed to climbing in “by another way” (John 10:1).
Contrast this with the call of Peter. We know that Peter, as one of the apostles,
was called to be a shepherd over the People of God. This is clear from Matthew’s
account:
When [Jesus] saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were
harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his
disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; pray therefore the
Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” And he called to him
his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them
out, and to heal every disease and every infirmity. The names of the twelve
apostles are these: first, Simon, who is called Peter (Matt. 9:36–10:2).
Jesus’ language of “sheep without a shepherd” is an Old Testament allusion.
When Moses neared death, he prayed for a successor “that the congregation of
the Lord may not be as sheep which have no shepherd” (Num. 27:17), and it was
in response to this prayer that Joshua was chosen to succeed Moses. Compare that
with what happens in the New Testament. Peter and the other disciples are
“successors” of Jesus in a different way from how Joshua was a successor of
Moses. Moses wasn’t going to be there to assist Joshua, whereas Christ (being
God as well as man) promised, “I am with you always, to the close of the age”
(Matt. 28:20). So the apostles don’t replace Christ in this way, but there is
nevertheless a sense in which they are called to continue the mission of Christ in
shepherding his people.
In addition to Peter’s calling simply as one of the Twelve, there’s also biblical
evidence for a particular calling to be shepherd over the flock of Christ. As we’ll
see in greater depth in chapter 7, these pastoral images are connected to fishing
images. When Simon Peter expressed astonishment at Jesus performing a
miraculous catch of fish through him, Jesus replied to him, “Do not be afraid;
henceforth you will be catching men” (Luke 5:10). We’ll explore the deeper
meaning of this calling in the next chapter, but for now, suffice it to say that it
connects with Jesus’ image of the kingdom of God as a net of good and bad fish
(Matt. 13:47–50), and that the risen Jesus deliberately recalls this image via a
second miracle in John 21:6. When the disciples made it back to Jesus on the
shore, they discovered “a charcoal fire there, with fish lying on it, and bread”
(John 21:9). Each element of the breakfast is significant and evocative. We then
find this exchange between Jesus and Peter:
When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon, son of
John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know
that I love you.” He said to him, “Feed my lambs.” A second time he said to
him, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you
know that I love you.” He said to him, “Tend my sheep.” He said to him the
third time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” Peter was grieved because
he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord,
you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my
sheep” (15–17),
This doesn’t appear to be simply a generic apostolic mission. During his public
ministry, Jesus had already “called to him his twelve disciples and gave them
authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and
every infirmity.” It’s in this sending that Matthew goes from calling them
“disciples,” which means students, to “apostles,” which means messengers (e.g.,
Matt. 10:1–2). In this apostolic mission, the Twelve were sent to proclaim that
“the kingdom of heaven is at hand” and to “heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse
lepers, cast out demons” (Matt. 10:7–8).
Something different is happening here, something specific to Peter. How do we
know that? Because Jesus has finished breakfast with several of the Twelve (John
21:2 records that “Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in
Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples were together”) and
then singled out one of them, Simon Peter. He then addresses Simon by his
family name, as it were: “Simon, son of John.” And he doesn’t simply ask Peter,
“Do you love me?” He asks, “Do you love me more than these?” That is, he’s
quite explicitly asking something from Peter that he wouldn’t and couldn’t ask
from any of the others (since it would be impossible for each of the disciples to
love Jesus more than the others do).
If Jesus had meant to call the Twelve in this way, or even to call the seven
disciples gathered for breakfast, he could easily have done so. But instead, he
draws Peter apart from the rest, asks him for more than the rest, and then tells
him (and only him), “Feed my sheep.” Understood against the backdrop of the
Old Testament, this is a clear call to headship and leadership over the whole
people. Recall the Lord’s call to David, upon his royal anointing: “You shall be
shepherd of my people Israel, and you shall be prince over Israel” (2 Sam. 5).
Like Moses before him, this call to lead the people of God came while David was
tending sheep (1 Sam. 16:11; cf. Exod. 3:1–2). As the Psalmist would later
recount, the Lord “chose David his servant, and took him from the sheepfolds;
from tending the ewes that had young he brought him to be the shepherd of
Jacob his people, of Israel his inheritance” (Ps. 78:70–71).
The early Christians in both the East and the West understood the significance
of this calling. Pope St. Gregory the Great, in a letter to the Emperor Mauricius
Augustus, explained, “For to all who know the gospel it is apparent that by the
Lord’s voice the care of the whole Church was committed to the holy apostle
and prince of all the apostles, Peter. For to him it is said, ‘Peter lovest thou me?’
‘Feed my sheep.’”
136 St. Augustine likewise explained that “to Peter did Christ
commend his lambs to be fed, who fed even Peter himself.”
137 This distinction
neatly captures the difference between Peter, as shepherd over the whole flock,
and Jesus, the Good Shepherd who pastors even Peter himself. St. John
Chrysostom, one of the most important Church Fathers in the East, likewise
explained that Christ shed his blood “that he might win these sheep which he
entrusted to Peter and his successors.”
138
How Might a Protestant Respond?
Whether you approach John 21 via a straightforward reading, or through the lens
of the Old Testament, or by listening to what the early Christians had to say
about it, the conclusion is the same: Jesus is calling St. Peter uniquely to shepherd
the entire flock of Christ, the Church. Or to put it another way, Jesus entrusts his
entire flock to be fed by Peter.
How might a Protestant respond to this? The most popular way is what’s called
the reinstatement theory.
139 According to this theory, “there can be little doubt but
that the whole scene is meant to show us Peter as completely restored to his
position of leadership.”
140 Or as D.A. Carson puts it, “These verses deal with
Peter’s reinstatement to service, not with his elevation to primacy.”
141
John
Calvin argues that this passage exists to show how “Peter was restored to that
rank of honor from which he had fallen.”
That treacherous denial, which has been formerly described, had, undoubtedly,
rendered him unworthy of the apostleship; for how could he be capable of
instructing others in the faith, who had basely revolted from it? He had been
made an apostle, but it was along with Judas, and from the time when he had
abandoned his post, he had likewise been deprived of the honor of apostleship.
Now, therefore, the liberty, as well as the authority, of teaching is restored to
him, both of which he had lost through his own fault.
142
According to Calvin, this also explains why Jesus’ words are addressed
exclusively to Peter:
Namely, that being free from every disgraceful stain, he might boldly preach the
gospel; and the reason why Christ thrice appoints him to be a pastor is, that the
three denials, by which Peter had brought on himself everlasting shame, may be
set aside, and thus may form no barrier to his apostleship, as has been judiciously
observed by Chrysostom, Augustine, and Cyril, and most of the other
commentators. Besides, nothing was given to Peter by these words, that is not
also given to all the ministers of the gospel.
143
Give this explanation the credit that it deserves. Protestants are right to see
parallels between Peter’s threefold denial of Christ and his threefold affirmation of
Christ. Simon Peter had declared his superior love for Christ by boasting, “Even
though they all fall away, I will not” (Mark 14:29). Jesus responds by warning
him, “Before the cock crows, you will deny me three times” (26:75). That night,
he does just that, denying Christ in response to three different people’s questions,
while warming himself by a “charcoal fire” (John 18:18). So now Jesus has
prepared a charcoal fire (21:9, in the only other time Scripture mentions charcoal
fires), and has asked Peter three times to affirm his love for him. And it’s true that
St. Cyril of Alexandria comments that this is Christ’s way of succoring the erring
disciple, giving Peter a change to provide “compensation, as it were, to
counterbalance his error and set things right. Anyone would grant that a verbal
transgression forms the basis of a merely verbal accusation against him, and it can
be wiped out in the same way.”
144
But there are important differences between the Church Fathers’ views and the
reinstatement view. Calvin invokes St. John Chrysostom, St. Augustine, and St.
Cyril of Alexandria. The first two of those, as we’ve just seen, read this passage
very differently from how Calvin does. So does Cyril. At the moment of Peter’s
threefold denial, Calvin speaks of Peter having “brought on himself everlasting
shame,” while Cyril describes the “incomparable fervor and admirable zeal of his
love toward Christ” that Peter showed even in swimming out to Christ before
the others (John 21:7). One reason for these contrasting views of Peter is that the
Fathers believed that Peter was already forgiven by this point. Augustine speaks of
his being “elated by his presumption, prostrated by his denial, cleansed by his
weeping, approved by his confession,” and finally “crowned by his suffering,” as
Jesus predicted (18).
145
Cyril sees the forgiveness coming even earlier. At the Last Supper, when Jesus
says to Peter, “When you have turned again, strengthen your brethren,” Cyril
comments that Peter “had not yet sickened with the malady of faithlessness, and
already he has received the medicine of forgiveness: not yet had the sin been
committed, and he receives pardon: not yet had he fallen, and the saving hand is
held out: not yet had he faltered, and he is confirmed.”
146 But whether Peter was
forgiven pre-emptively or not until his repentant tears (Matt. 26:76), the point is
that the Church Fathers aren’t actually arguing for the reinstatement view.
That’s because the reinstatement view cannot sustain a careful reading of
Scripture. Peter was not the only one who declared, “Even if I must die with
you, I will not deny you,” after all. St. Matthew points out that “so said all the
disciples.” And it wasn’t only Peter who failed to live up to these presumptuous
claims: “All the disciples forsook him and fled” (Matt. 26:35,56). If Calvin is right
that Peter’s betrayal of Christ means he is no longer an apostle, it would seem to
follow that none of the Twelve remains an apostle. Fortunately, Scripture teaches
otherwise. When the women return from the empty tomb, they go and proclaim
the Resurrection to “the eleven” (Luke 24:9), a numbering that includes Peter
(but not Judas) among the disciples on Easter morning. When they heard this,
“Peter then came out with the other disciple, and they went toward the tomb”
(John 20:3). But how could John be “the other disciple” if Peter’s not also a
disciple?
Between this moment and the appearance to the disciples that evening, Jesus
appears just to Peter (1 Cor. 15:5). St. John Chrysostom explains this by saying
that Christ appeared first to “the leader of the whole company and the most
faithful: since indeed there was great need of a most faithful soul to be first to
receive this sight,” so that “he that first confessed him to be Christ was justly also
counted worthy first to behold his resurrection.”
147 And so, when the two
disciples who encounter Christ on the road to Emmaus return to Jerusalem, “they
found the eleven gathered together and those who were with them, who said,
‘The Lord has risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon!’” (Luke 24:33–34). As
they are saying this, Jesus appears to the disciples, calls them his “witnesses,” and
says, “Behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you; but stay in the city,
until you are clothed with power from on high” (48–49). This is a significant
moment, because by Calvin’s telling, Peter has not yet been “reinstated,” which
Calvin claims he needs to be in order to “boldly preach the gospel.”
148
John describes what seems to be the same Easter evening resurrection
appearance and tells how Jesus appeared to “the disciples” and said, “Peace be
with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I send you” and then breathes on
them, saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are
forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (John 20:19–23). An
“apostle” is one who is sent (from the Greek apostolos, meaning “messenger” or
“one who is sent on a mission”). And here Jesus is, explicitly sending them on
mission. Are we to believe that at this point Jesus still hasn’t forgiven Peter and is
unwilling to send him as an apostle?
Finally, look at John 21 itself. The chapter begins: “Jesus revealed himself again
to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias” and that “Simon Peter, Thomas called the
Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his
disciples were together” (John 21:1–2). Based on the chronology of John 20, we
know that the events of John 21 happened at least a week after Easter (perhaps
much later—the Evangelist’s transition is simply “after this” in John 21:1). For
the reinstatement theory to be correct, Peter must not be a disciple or an apostle
between his threefold betrayal of Christ on Holy Thursday and his alleged
restoration. Yet we find Peter repeatedly numbered among the apostles,
repeatedly described as a disciple, and given (along with the others) an apostolic
mission to be a witness to Jesus Christ. All of this happens before his alleged
restoration to ministry.
D.A. Carson is right to see the two possibilities in this passage as either “Peter’s
reinstatement to service” or else “his elevation to primacy.”
149 But since Peter’s
apostolic “reinstatement” isn’t chronologically or theologically tenable, and since
Scripture repeatedly speaks of him as an apostle and a disciple in the period in
which Protestant exegetes claim that he wasn’t, it’s clear that it’s not the first of
these two interpretations. That leaves the second. If Peter is already an apostle
when Jesus is talking to him, then it’s clear that Calvin is wrong in saying that
“nothing was given to Peter by these words, that is not also given to all the
ministers of the gospel.”
150 Peter is addressed by name amid a group of seven
disciples and given the task of caring for the entire flock of Christ. It’s reasonable
to conclude that Jesus meant to address these words not to each of the seven
disciples gathered, or each of the eleven remaining disciples, or all ministers
everywhere, but specifically to “Simon, son of John” (John 21:15–17).
CHAPTER 6.
JESUS TETHERS PETER TO
HIMSELF
ONE OF THE most remarkable interactions between God and man, and one of the
most revealing, happens in a small, strange Gospel passage that we typically
overlook. It’s a short scene from the life of Jesus, six verses in total, and found
only in the Gospel of Matthew. In fact, it’s fitting that St. Matthew should be the
only one to record the event, both because of his interest in showing Jesus’
Jewishness and because Matthew was himself a tax collector. Understanding the
meaning of this miracle will involve our understanding something about the
twelve tribes of Israel and about the way the tax system worked in those days.
The passage in question is from Matthew 17 and begins this way (22–25a):
As they were gathering in Galilee, Jesus said to them, “The Son of man is to be
delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him, and he will be raised on
the third day.” And they were greatly distressed. When they came to
Capernaum, the collectors of the half-shekel tax [didrachma] went up to Peter
and said, “Does not your teacher pay the tax?” He said, “Yes.”
Jesus is with some or all of the disciples (see Matt. 17:19). They have returned
to Capernaum, where Jesus lived (4:13), and it is here that they—or more
specifically, St. Peter—are approached about the temple tax.
151 The tax was
known in Hebrew as “the half-shekel” or “half-shekel tax” and comes from
Exod. 30:13, which says that “each who is numbered in the census shall give this:
half a shekel according to the shekel of the sanctuary (the shekel is twenty gerahs),
half a shekel as an offering to the Lord.”
152
It is worth noting that the tax collectors go to Peter to find out Christ’s
opinion, and it is striking that Peter feels comfortable answering on Christ’s behalf
in this way. Given this, we might expect that Christ would be annoyed with
Peter for his impudence, but that’s not what we find at all (Matt. 17:25b–27):
And when he [Peter] came home, Jesus spoke to him first, saying, “What do
you think, Simon? From whom do kings of the earth take toll or tribute? From
their sons or from others?” And when he said, “From others,” Jesus said to him,
“Then the sons are free. However, not to give offense to them, go to the sea
and cast a hook, and take the first fish that comes up, and when you open its
mouth you will find a shekel; take that and give it to them for me and for
yourself.”
The Scandals of Jesus and Peter
Jesus’ miracles aren’t magic tricks. His supernatural feats always have a
pedagogical component—that is, they’re always revealing something about God’s
power, not just reminding us that he has power. In the miracle of the
multiplication of loaves (John 6:1–14), for example, we see God’s providence for
us and his attentiveness to our daily needs, empowering us to pray, “Give us this
day our daily bread” (Matt. 6:11). It also draws the crowds to connect Jesus with
Moses, who provided the manna in the desert (John 6:31). Further, it shows the
crowd that Jesus has the authority to miraculously go beyond the natural physical
limitations of ordinary bread, vital context for Jesus’ teaching on the Eucharist the
next day (25–71).
So what is the significance of this miracle with the coin in the fish’s mouth?
Jesus explains that it is so as “not to give offense to them” by not paying the tax.
This translation obscures something shocking in the Greek: the verb there,
(skandalisōmen), is in the first-person plural, so a better translation is “lest we offend.”
What’s so shocking about that? Try to recall another time where Jesus uses “we”
like this. Jesus repeatedly speaks of himself as radically distinct from those around
him. There are dozens of instances in which Jesus refers to “my Father” or “your
Father,” but no instances of him referring to “our Father.” John 20:17 is the most
blatant example. While speaking to Mary Magdalene, Jesus calls the Father “my
Father and your Father,” and “my God and your God,” notably avoiding saying
“our Father” or “our God.” Even in the “Our Father” prayer, the “our” is not
“Jesus and us.” Jesus specifies that the prayer is for “when you pray” (Matt. 6:5–9;
Luke 11:1–2). There are no instances of him praying it with the disciples, simply
teaching it to them.
This would be clearer in a language with clusivity. If you tell me, “We’re having
dinner at six,” does that mean I’m invited? It’s unclear in English (and Hebrew
and Greek) without further context. This is in contrast to languages (such as
Chechen) that have clusivity—meaning a different “we” for “us and you” and
“us, but not you.”
153 So pay attention any time you see Jesus using a “we,” and
you’ll see he consistently uses the “exclusive we,” meaning not you. Jesus
repeatedly takes pains to distinguish himself from his listeners. To the Samaritan
woman, he says, “You worship what you do not know; we worship what we
know, for salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22). It’s “we” language, but clearly
excluding her. It’s okay if the Samaritan woman (rightly) associates him with the
Jews, but before a Jewish audience, Jesus will remind them that Jesus’ distinction
still exists. And so, to Nicodemus he says, “We speak of what we know, and bear
witness to what we have seen; but you do not receive our testimony” (3:11).
154
The “we” here clearly excludes Nicodemus and seems to include only himself
and the Holy Spirit. He immediately adds that he is revealing heavenly things,
and that “no one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven,
the Son of man” (3:13).
Why is this? Because Jesus shares our human nature, but he is radically unlike
us, and his relationship with the Father is different in kind, not just degree, from
our relationship with the Father. These carefully worded expressions from his lips
don’t allow us to forget his humanity in the face of his divinity, or his divinity in
the face of his humanity. So it’s shocking that Jesus should break from his own
apparently deliberate pattern in such a dramatic way in this one instance,
explaining to Peter that the miracle is done “lest we offend.” Who is this “we”?
Just Jesus and Peter. Jesus doesn’t extend this even to the other disciples. Notice
that the miracle provides only a shekel so that Peter can “take that and give it to
them for me and for yourself” (Matt. 17:27). Certainly, Jesus could have
miraculously filled the fish’s mouth with enough shekels to cover all of the
disciples or the crowds or all Capernaum. But no, the miracle gives just enough
coinage “for me and for yourself.”
It is no coincidence that this miracle requires Peter to catch a fish. Jesus could
have caused the coins to materialize out of thin air or chosen any number of
more predictable ways of miraculously producing money. But he chooses to send
Peter fishing for a miraculous catch yet again. As we shall see in the next chapter,
this is a recurring image that Jesus uses to show Peter his unique role as a “fisher
of men” (Matt. 4:29; Mark 1:17; Luke 5:10). So not only is the miraculous
amount specific to Peter, but so is the personalized mode of the miracle. Is there
any way to read this and not conclude that Peter has a special relationship as the
vicar of Christ? The term vicar comes from the Latin vicarius, meaning “a
substitute, deputy, or proxy.” It’s someone who is authorized to speak or act on
another’s behalf. In this instance, we see Peter doing just this for Christ,
representing him in relation to the payment of the tax. Rather than rebuking him
or reminding him of the infinite chasm between God and man, Jesus draws Peter
to himself, tethering him, if you will, by speaking of them as a “we.”
The passage is yet richer in the Greek. We’ll take a closer look at this verbiage
in chapters 8 and 9, but for now, recognize that there is some multilayered
wordplay occurring here in Matthew 16–17. Jesus renames Simon
“Peter”—Petros, the masculine form of the Greek word for rock (petra). He then
says, “Upon this rock (petra), I will build my church” (Matt. 16:18). A few verses
later, when Peter rebukes Jesus, Jesus calls him a skandalon (23). The word
skandalon (the root of our English word scandal) literally means something that
you trip over, like a “trap-stick” or a “stumbling stone.”
The pun is a prophecy for the sometimes scandalous nature of the papacy, as
Cardinal Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) acknowledged: “Has it not
remained this way throughout all church history, that the pope, the successor of
Peter, has been petra and skandalon, rock of God and stumbling stone all in
one?”
155 Peter later uses this same wordplay back toward Jesus, describing him as
“a stone that will make men stumble [lithos proskommatos], a rock that will make
them fall [petra skandalou]” (1 Pet. 2:8). So there are only two men referred to in
the New Testament as petra and skandalon: Jesus and Peter. And Jesus recalls this
wordplay in Matthew 17 by saying the miracle is being performed “lest we
offend” (skandalisōmen)—that is, lest others should stumble over the rock of Jesus
and the rock of Peter.
The Priestly Tax Exemption
Just what would be the cause of scandal? Jesus’ claim that he and Peter are
exempt from the temple tax. He claims that the two of them are exempt because
“the sons are free” not to pay the tax. The common mistake is to think this
means “sons of Israel.” But that isn’t right. The sons of Israel weren’t exempt from
the temple tax. Quite the opposite. The tax was introduced in Exodus in this
way: “When you take the census of the people of Israel, then each shall give a
ransom for himself to the Lord when you number them, that there be no plague
among them when you number them” (Exod. 30:12). So it is nearly only the sons
of Israel who are paying the tax (along with converts and freed slaves). We also
know that Jesus isn’t exempt on account of being God. This would explain his
own tax exemption, but it wouldn’t explain Peter’s. So what exemption is Jesus
claiming? That he and Peter are sons of the temple—that is, priests. The Jerusalem
Talmud
156
illuminates the four groups exempted from the temple tax:
From whom did they demand collateral? Levites, Israelites, converts, and freed
slaves. But not from women and slaves and minors. And any minor whose
father had begun to donate the half-shekel on his behalf—he may not stop
paying. They did not demand collateral from priests, for the sake of peace.
157
There were rabbinical disputes over whether or not the priests should also be
required to pay the tax, but it is clear that they were at least sometimes exempted,
and for good reason (beyond simply keeping the peace). Both the priests and
Levites lived off of the tithes of the people (Heb. 7:5), but the priests collected “a
tithe of the tithe” even from other Levites (Num. 18:21,26).
158 This tithing
exemption at least extended to a priestly exemption from paying the temple tax,
which “was meant to support the operation of the Jerusalem temple” and is
therefore distinct from a strict tithe.
159 This seems to be Jesus’ point in Matthew
17, and it is the only clear exemption that would apply to him (as he is certainly
not a woman, slave, or minor). So if he is exempt (as he claims), it must be
because of his priestly status. How can Jesus Christ claim such an exemption? As
the epistle to the Hebrews explains, it is because he is “a merciful and faithful
high priest in the service of God,” “the apostle and high priest of our confession,”
and a priest of a higher order than that of the Levitical priests of old (Heb. 2:17,
3:1, 7:11).
If this is what he is claiming, it is no surprise that he should quickly add that the
temple tax would nevertheless be miraculously paid, so as “not to give offense to
them” (Matt. 17:27). Christ, being free from the strictures of the Law,
nevertheless freely submits rather than claiming his rightful tax exemption.
There’s even a precedent for this from his infancy. The Virgin Mary paid the “sin
offering” upon the birth of Jesus (Luke 2:22–24; Lev. 12:1–8), despite his
sinlessness and virginal conception.
160 But what is remarkable is that he claims this
exemption not for himself alone, but for Peter as well. Neither Peter nor Jesus is
a son of Aaron, or even Levi. And so either Jesus is wrong to claim himself and
Peter as exempt from the temple tax, or else he’s presenting himself as the “high
priest of the good things that have come” (Heb. 9:11), and claiming that Peter
somehow participates in this priesthood.
How Might a Protestant Respond?
John Calvin, in his exegesis of Matthew 17:24–27, makes several claims. First,
rather than viewing Peter as serving as Christ’s vicar, speaking on his behalf, he
claims that he’s making “une excuse bien modeste et honneste,” that is, “a very
modest and civil excuse” on Christ’s behalf.
161
In other words, instead of Peter
speaking on behalf of Christ, Calvin depicts him as covering for Christ, as if the
Lord were a deadbeat with outstanding debts.
Calvin next speculates: “That they address him [Peter] rather than the other
disciples was, as I conjecture, because Christ lived with him; for if all had
occupied the same habitation, the demand would have been made on all alike.”
162
This is pure conjecture, as he admits, although it is likely true that Jesus lived
with Peter. (Surely, the fact that Jesus chose to live with Peter points more to
Peter’s unique role rather than less.) Ultimately, Calvin is treating the miracle as if
it were simply happenstance. Jesus pays for himself and Peter, because the two of
them happened to be together when the taxmen came calling. But even if the
two men lived together, Jesus could have easily paid the tax for each of his
disciples. The text shows that Jesus is explicit that the miracle covers only Jesus
and Peter. It’s not some oversight because the others didn’t happen to be there.
Besides this, it is not clear that Peter was alone. A few verses earlier, we read
that “the disciples came to Jesus privately” (Matt. 17:19). Afterward, “they were
gathering in Galilee” (22). Between these two events, when “they came to
Capernaum, the collectors of the half-shekel tax went up to Peter” (23). The text
suggests that the group went to Capernaum, whereupon Peter is approached. If
Peter is the only one present when the taxmen call, it is only because Jesus
wanted it that way, just as earlier in the chapter we hear how “Jesus took with
him Peter and James and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain
apart” (1).
Calvin’s explanation for Christ’s exemption from the tax is that, “as he is the
only Son of God, he is also the heir of the whole world, so that all things ought
to be subject to him, and to acknowledge his authority.”
163 Therefore, Calvin
opposes both the Catholic and the Anabaptist interpretations of the passage:
The pope has not less foolishly than successfully abused this passage to exempt
his clergy from the laws; as if the shaving of the head made them sons of God,
and exempted them from tributes and taxes. But nothing else was intended by
Christ than to claim for himself the honor of a king’s son, so as to have at least a
home privileged and exempted from the common law.
And therefore it is also highly foolish in the Anabaptists to torture these words
for overturning political order, since it is more than certain, that Christ does not
say any thing about a privilege common to believers, but only draws a
comparison from the sons of kings, who, together with their domestics, are
exempted.
164
Calvin is right that Jesus is the Son of God and the king of kings, but he is
wrong to view this as the basis Jesus is claiming. That would only explain Jesus’
tax exemption, not Peter’s. As Calvin says, Jesus “is the only Son of God” in the
order of nature (our adopted sonship is of a different order). Yet Jesus says that
“the sons,” plural, are exempt (Matt. 17:26), and singles out himself and Peter. So
that leaves only the Catholic interpretation (that this is the priestly exemption) or
else the “tortured” Anabaptist position that would view all Christians as exempt.
Neither Calvin nor the Anabaptists seem familiar with the particulars of the
temple tax, under which the sons of Israel (the predecessors of Christians) were
not exempt, but only the priestly sons of the temple.
From his own series of unfounded conjectures, Calvin concludes that “it is
therefore very ridiculous in the Papists, on so frivolous a pretense, to make Peter
a partner in the dignity of Christ.” But this partnership (not equality) is provided
by Jesus himself, in making the two unlike men a single “we.” Calvin claims it
would be equally logical to “make all swine-herds vicars of Christ, for they paid
as much as he did.” But of course, the Catholic claim isn’t that Peter is the vicar
of Christ simply because he paid the temple tax. If Jesus spoke of a swineherd as a
“we” with him, if he miraculously paid for just his and that swineherd’s tax, and
if he paid for it by having the coins appear in the mouth of a pig after declaring,
“You will be a swineherd of men,” Christians would logically conclude that that
swineherd was being deputized in a special way by Jesus. But he didn’t tap a
swineherd as his shepherd; he chose a fisherman.
To recap, then, we see Jesus treating Peter as his vicar in this passage. We see
him performing a miracle just for himself and Peter, tethering the two together in
a special way. We see him—in a remarkable departure from his normal speaking
style—using the “inclusionary we” to describe himself and Peter. Where else does
God Incarnate speak of himself and a sinful man as “we”? All of this is in the
context of Jesus both sending Peter out to catch fish, representing his evangelical
role, and being a priestly son of the temple.
CHAPTER 7.
THE FISHER POPE
WHAT IS A MIRACLE, and how does it differ from magic? Both “miracle” and
“magic” are notoriously hard concepts to define, and differing religions demarcate
their respective limits differently. The closest we get to a biblical answer is in
Moses’ and Aaron’s encounter with “the wise men and the sorcerers” of Pharaoh
(Exod. 7:8–13). At the Lord’s instruction, Aaron “cast down his rod before
Pharaoh and his servants, and it became a serpent.” The “magicians of Egypt”
then did likewise, but “by their secret arts,” rather than by obedience to God
(10–11). This suggests that the chief distinction between miracle and magic,
within the framework of Scripture, is that “magic is manipulative; miracle, which
is an aspect of religion, is supplicative.”
165 That is, miracles rely on God, whereas
magic seeks an occult means of getting around him.
But there is another, more subtle, dimension to biblical miracles. In the New
Testament, Jesus’ miracles are “living parables,” illustrating and animating his
teachings. This is a stark contrast from the way that Jesus is sometimes depicted in
false gospels. For instance, in the so-called “Infancy Gospel of Thomas,” the
young Jesus is presented as striking another child dead in a fit of irritation after the
running child bumped into his shoulder.
166
It’s raw power, with no meaning
beyond “I can do this.” The biblical miracles, in contrast, have more to them. It’s
for this reason that we see the Jesus of the Bible exercising his divine power, not
by killing people, but by healing and even raising them from the dead.
Commenting on the three instances in which the New Testament records Jesus
raising people from the dead, St. Augustine notes that “surely the Lord’s deeds are
not merely deeds, but signs. And if they are signs, besides their wonderful
character, they have some real significance.” In these cases, he suggests, the
deeper meaning is that “every one that believes rises again.”
167
The scriptural way of describing this dimension of miracles is calling them
“signs” or “signs and wonders” (cf. Deut. 6:22; John 2:11; Acts 6:8; etc.). With
any of the biblical miracles, we should ask, “What was the meaning of this
miracle?”
168 For instance, although Jesus doesn’t kill an innocent boy in the New
Testament, he does cause a fig tree to shrivel up and die (Matt. 21:18–22). In
Why I Am Not a Christian, The British philosopher Bertrand Russell said that the
“curious story” had “always rather puzzled me.” Indeed, he cited this as a “moral
problem” within Christianity that showed Christ’s inferiority to teachers like the
Buddha and Socrates.
169 But Jesus isn’t behaving in an insensible or ill-tempered
way. Recall that John the Baptist had prepared the way for Christ by calling his
listeners to “bear fruit that befits repentance,” since “every tree therefore that
does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” (3:8,10). Jesus
continued with this imagery, comparing the spiritual fruitlessness of Israel to a
barren fig tree (Luke 13:6–9), drawing upon the prophetic language of Isaiah 5.
When Christ causes the fruitless fig tree to shrivel, he’s not having an emotional
outburst or “punishing” the tree as if it were a moral agent capable of knowing
right from wrong. Instead, it’s as if Jesus is enacting the parable of the fig tree.
What, then, are the three miracles involving a miraculous catch of fish, and why
is St. Peter closely involved in all three? Part of the meaning is that the
miraculous catches remind us of the need to trust in God, a lesson that fishing
itself teaches. Building upon the theology of St. Athanasius and other Church
Fathers, C.S. Lewis describes miracles as “a retelling in small letters of the very
same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some
of us to see.”
170 The supernatural events in the Bible tend to build upon, and in
some way resemble, natural events. And as the nineteenth-century Baptist
preacher Charles Spurgeon observed, “a fisher is a person who is very dependent,
and needs to be trustful.” Since he cannot see the fish, every act of fishing “is an act
of faith.”
171 The Reformed theologian and pastor Tim Challies likewise suggests
five ways that evangelization resembles fishing: both require going; expertise;
diligence; dependence upon providence; and confidence.
172
All of this is true, but we shouldn’t miss the obvious: these miracles are also
personalized for Simon, who was a fisherman by trade (Matt. 4:18; John 21:3).
They’re also, as we shall see, closely connected with Jesus’ description of the
kingdom of God on earth (Matt. 13:47). In other words, these are the sort of
miracles we shouldn’t be surprised to find, if Jesus intended to entrust the Church
to the care of the “fisher pope,” Peter.
The First Miraculous Catch of Fish
With that in mind, consider the first miraculous catch of fish, recounted in Luke
5:1–11. This miracle occurs prior to Christ’s calling of the apostles in general
(Luke 6:13), and Simon Peter in particular (John 21:15–17), which we considered
back in chapter 4. But it’s another instance in which we find Jesus calling Simon
Peter in a personal way, and the setting for it is remarkable. As Jesus was teaching
by the “lake of Gennesaret” (that is, the Sea of Galilee), “the people pressed upon
him to hear the word of God.” Seeing two fishing boats docked on the shore
while their owners washed the fishing nets, Jesus climbed “into one of the boats,
which was Simon’s,” and “asked him to put out a little from the land. And he sat
down and taught the people from the boat” (Luke 5:1–3).
On the surface, this seems like a chance encounter, as if Jesus chose the boat at
random, but the broader context shows otherwise. Simon appears to be already
familiar with Jesus and refers to him as “master,” and (depending on which
Gospel chronology you’re following), it may have happened after the healing of
Simon Peter’s mother-in-law.
173
With Jesus is a large crowd, “pressed upon him to hear the word of God” (Luke
5:1). With Simon are Andrew, James, and John, each of whom will also be called
as disciples (Luke 5:10; Mark 1:16). But Jesus speaks directly to Simon Peter,
telling him to “put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch” (Luke
5:4–5). Obeying, “they enclosed a great shoal of fish,” a catch so large that “their
nets were breaking,” and they needed to enlist the help of their fishing partners
(6–7). Upon seeing the miraculous catch of fish, Simon Peter falls down before
Jesus, crying out, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord,” and both he
and “all that were with him” are described as being “astonished” (8–9).
The meaning of this miracle is spelled out for us by Christ. As St. Luke
recounts, “Jesus said to Simon, ‘Do not be afraid; henceforth you will be catching
men’” (Luke 5:10). It would be no exaggeration to say this miracle is for Simon
Peter. These words are not addressed to the crowds, or even to the other future
apostles. Rather, they are addressed “to Simon.” In some unique way, different
from the general way he calls all believers, or the specific way that he calls the
other apostles, Christ is calling Simon Peter to be the fisher of men.
The Second Miraculous Catch of Fish
The second miraculous catch of fish, the one recounted in Matt. 17:24–27, is also
intended specifically for Simon Peter. As we saw in the last chapter, Jesus has
Simon Peter miraculously catch a fish that suffices to pay the temple tax for Jesus
and Simon, and no others. The particularity of the miracle is unavoidable.
Recall C.S. Lewis’s earlier point that miracles build upon the natural world in
some way, which Lewis calls the “family style” of the Father and the Son. To
illustrate this, he points to the feeding of the five thousand and observes that
“bread is not made there of nothing. Bread is not made of stones, as the devil
once suggested to our Lord in vain.” Instead, “a little bread is made into much
bread,” just as “every year God makes a little corn into much corn.”
174
John
Calvin’s suggestion of applying the miraculous catch of fish to a swineherd, the
Infancy Gospel of Thomas’s idea of Jesus using his divine power to kill a running
boy, and even the devil’s idea to turn stones into bread all reveal the same
blindness. Each misses the idea of a miracle as living parable, treating it only as a
show of power.
The Third Miraculous Catch of Fish
The third miracle involving a miraculous catch of fish comes after the
Resurrection (John 21:1–14). By this point, the apostles and other disciples know
of the resurrection of Christ. Seven of them, led by Simon Peter, are out on the
Sea of Tiberius—that is, the Lake of Galilee. As before, they spend all night
fishing and catch nothing. Jesus appears to them on the shore, although they
don’t originally know it’s he. In the first miracle, he found them on the shore and
told Peter to cast out into the deep. This time, he finds them already on the
water, and he tells them to “cast the net on the right side of the boat, and you
will find some” (6). At this point, the Beloved Disciple realizes that the man on
the shore is “the Lord,” and he informs Peter, who dresses, jumps into the water,
and swims to Jesus (7–8).
Arriving on shore, Peter and the others discover “a charcoal fire there, with fish
lying on it, and bread” (John 21:9). We might already suspect that this miracle is
going to involve Peter, given that he is named five times in John’s brief telling,
and that it’s a miraculous catch of fish. The mention of a “charcoal fire” confirms
this. The one other mention of a “charcoal fire” in all of Scripture is earlier in the
Gospel of John. After Jesus’ arrest, “the servants and officers had made a charcoal
fire, because it was cold, and they were standing and warming themselves; Peter
also was with them, standing and warming himself” (18:18). That is, it was beside
a charcoal fire that Peter denied Jesus three times. And so now Jesus has prepared
another “charcoal fire,” and upon it he already has fish.
These are clearly not the fish that the apostles just miraculously caught, because
“they were not able to haul it in, for the quantity of fish,” and had opted to
simply drag the nets behind the boats toward shore after Peter jumped ship (John
21:6,8). No, these fish are there when they arrive. If the apostles’ initial failure to
catch fish was a reminder that apart from Christ, they can do nothing, this would
seem to drive home the inverse: that Christ can do everything, with or without
them (or us). And yet he sends them to fish anyway. Jesus says to them, “Bring
some of the fish that you have just caught” (10). That is, Christ chooses to work
through these human intermediaries, even though he need not. This point applies
to the apostles generally and also to one of them in particular. It’s Simon Peter
alone whom we see responding to Christ’s calling, as he “went aboard and hauled
the net ashore, full of large fish, a hundred and fifty-three of them; and although
there were so many, the net was not torn” (11).
175
There seem to be three aspects to this third miraculous catch: the first, the catch
itself; the second, that the net was not torn; and the third, that at the Lord’s
command, Peter was able to singlehandedly bring the catch in. After all, recall
that all of the others were incapable of doing so, even working together. The
detail about the net is a striking contrast to the first miraculous catch of fish, in
which the “nets were breaking” because of the size of the catch (Luke 5:6). So
why don’t the nets tear this time?
To understand these details, it’s important to recognize what this miracle
signifies, in what way it’s a living parable. Both early Christians and modern
scholars have treated this scene (and indeed, the entire final chapter of John) as
about the Church. One reason to believe this is the broader structure of John’s
narrative. There are two chapters in the Gospel of John dedicated to appearances
of the risen Christ. The first of these, John 20, tells about the disciples’ initial
encounter with Jesus, and their coming to believe in him. John tells us that
whereas “Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples” that remain
unwritten, these signs “are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ,
the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:30–
31). As St. Augustine noted, this passage “indicates, as it were, the end of the
book; but there is afterward related how the Lord manifested himself at the Sea of
Tiberias.”
176
In other words, John 21 reads as a sort of epilogue to the Gospel. And the
miraculous catch of fish it describes isn’t for the purpose of bringing the disciples
or us to faith in Christ, or in the Resurrection.
177 By this point, the disciples
know Jesus has risen from the dead. John tells us that this “was now the third
time that Jesus was revealed to the disciples after he was raised from the dead”
(John 21:14), so the purpose doesn’t seem to be to convince any doubting
Thomases. Instead, this chapter “expresses a strong and continuing interest in
disciples of the second generation.”
178
Just as Luke writes both his Gospel
(describing the life, death, and resurrection of Christ) and the Acts of the Apostles
(describing what comes next), the final chapter of John’s Gospel begins to point
to what comes next. Augustine sees in the miraculous catch of fish “special
reference to the mystery of the Church,” particularly as it will stand at the Last
Judgment.
179
As Pope St. Gregory the Great (540–604) explained, the ship of the Church
passes along on the sea of this “present world, which is in a constant state of
upheaval, through the tumultuousness of its affairs and the passing waves of this
transitory life,” journeying toward Christ, who has “now passed beyond the
transience of fleshly life,” and who stands on the shore, signifying “the enduring
state of eternal rest.”
180 Now that he has risen, he is no longer in the boat in the
same manner that he once was, but through his miraculous power, he shows his
ongoing presence in the Church. Read in this light, the nets and fish in this
“living parable” are all about evangelization and the Church. The miraculous
catch is a sign, as St. Cyril of Alexandria (378–444) says, of “the work of Christ,
who gathers the multitude of the saved by his own power into the apostolic net,
as it were, the church on earth.”
181 And this is exactly what we hear from Christ
elsewhere, when he describes the kingdom of God on earth as “a net which was
thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind,” until the good and bad fish
(the saved and the damned) are separated by angels at the close of the age (Matt.
13:47–50).
If this is a miracle about the Church, what does it have to say about Peter? At
the outset, it is Peter who says, “I am going fishing,” to which the other disciples
reply, “We will go with you” (John 21:2–3). Peter is called to be a fisher of men;
the others are called to be fishers of men with Peter. When Christ sends them to
bring in the catch, Peter acts alone, but on behalf of the whole. He is capable, at
Christ’s urging, of doing what the other apostles were incapable of doing:
bringing the catch home to the eternal shores without tearing the net. If we are
the fish, and the kingdom is the net, Peter is given a unique role in leading that
net toward the shore, to ensure that it doesn’t tear. The Greek word used here
for “torn” is from schisma, where we get our word schism. Peter’s role is to bring
the Church to the eternal shore without letting it rupture through schism.
The last piece necessary to understand this third miracle is what comes right
after it. The late British Evangelical F.F. Bruce notes that “there is more in it than
meets the eye” in the third miraculous catch, and “something of its inner
significance is unfolded in the discourse that follows.”
182 The discourse in
question is the one we discussed back in chapter 5, in which Jesus thrice asks
Peter, “Do you love me?” Just as the meaning of the first miraculous catch was
made clear by Jesus’ invitation to Peter, “Do not be afraid; henceforth you will be
catching men” (Luke 5:10), so in this final catch, the meaning is made clear by
Jesus’ instructions to Peter: “feed my lambs,” “tend my sheep,” and “feed my
sheep” (John 21:15–17). As a fisher of men, he is called to reach those who are
not yet evangelized, and in this, he is joined by all those who can say with the
apostles, “We will go with you” (2–3). As shepherd, Peter is called to care for
both the lambs and the sheep, both those new to the faith and those more
advanced.
183
How Might a Protestant Respond?
Broadly speaking, there are three types of Protestant exegetes: first, those who
understood that something is being said in these miracles about Christ’s plan for
the Church; second, those who understand that something is being said about
Christ’s plan but miss any connection to the Church; and finally, those who miss
any deeper significance, treating it only as Jesus once again proving to the
disciples that he is risen.
184 Thankfully, most Protestants recognize that at least the
first and third of these miraculous catches of fish are telling us something about
the Church. The first miracle is almost too plain to miss. You can scarcely see
Christ causing a miraculous catch of fish, hear the call for Peter to become a
“fisher of men,” and fail to connect the two. And so, when we see the two
similar miracles, it’s only logical to ask if these are picking up where the first left
off. Indeed, with a few outliers, “most interpreters agree that symbolism pervades
the description” of the third miracle, with “the act of fishing, the role of Peter,
and the drawing of the unbroken net” being “relatively easy to interpret.”
185
To be sure, there are a handful of commentators who don’t get even this much.
John MacArthur, for instance, is the pastor of a Southern California megachurch
and host of the popular Grace to You radio program, and he was named the fourth
most influential Protestant pastor in America by a sample of more than 1,000
other Protestant pastors.
186
In MacArthur’s commentary on John 21, he seems
capable of seeing nothing more than meets the eye. D.A. Carson, the Reformed
theologian upon whom MacArthur relies, has said that in the image of the untorn
net, “it is hard not to see an allusion to Luke 5:1–11, where the nets were
torn.”
187 MacArthur, in contrast, finds it “surprising” that the nets are untorn but
thinks it nothing more than “the type of detail that an eyewitness would note,
especially a fisherman like John.” MacArthur fails to connect this to the tearing of
the net in Luke 5:6 (a Gospel written by not a fisherman, but a physician) or to
see any deeper meaning suggested. In the catch where John says there were
exactly 153 fish, MacArthur finds only evidence of the veracity of the recording
(the “simple, obvious explanation” is that “this was the actual number of fish they
had caught”) and finds explanations seeing significance in the number
“fanciful.”
188 He understands that the passage has something to say about “selfeffort” and “spiritual power” but fails to mention the Church even once in his
chapter analyzing the passage.
Most Protestant exegetes fare better. Martin Luther, for instance, recognized the
boats and net in the first miracle as a symbol of the Church, with the two boats in
Luke 5 representing the Jews and Gentiles; with no sense of self-awareness, he
suggested that the tearing of the nets represented those “who establish sects and
factions of their own,” who “may not and cannot continue with the true band of
God’s people in the assembly of the Church.”
189 Charles Spurgeon likewise
understood the net in both Luke 5 and John 21 to be connected to Church unity
and schism. Noting that some lamented that “in the visible Church the net
breaks,” he said, “I do not at all grieve over it.” Indeed, his own Metropolitan
Tabernacle broke away from the Baptist Union, becoming the largest church in
the world to be unaffiliated with any denomination. Spurgeon justified this
attitude by claiming that it was really just “the invisible Church—the Church
within the Church” that was one. The important thing was not to avoid external
schism, but to “take care that you are not a schismatic in your heart.”
190
Unfortunately, even those Protestant commentators who recognize that this
passage is about the Church typically pay little attention to the special role that
Peter is playing in these miraculous catches. Some exegetes eliminate Peter’s
individuality entirely. Martin Luther treats Peter’s role as a mere stand-in for
conscience, a “figure of those who should believe in the eternal possessions” in
the first miraculous catch, while more modern exegetes suggest that Peter simply
“represents the disciples as a character group” in the third miraculous catch.
191
But Peter is mentioned by name repeatedly, and in ways that single him out from
the other disciples.
192 This suggests that he is neither just another apostle nor just
another person with a conscience, even if he is meant to be a model for others.
In understanding the third miraculous catch, two questions are worth
considering. First, how is it that Peter alone brings in the catch of fish in John
21:11, when the rest of the apostles had been incapable of doing so in John 21:8?
John Calvin offers no answer. He comments on verses 10 and 12 but passes over
11.
193
John MacArthur does comment on it, saying there was “a book and a
movie when I was a little kid called The Big Fisherman, and I used to ask, ‘Why
does everybody think Peter is big?’ This is it right here, because six guys have
been dragging this thing in, the other disciples in verse 8.”
194 Carson likewise
views this simply as evidence that Peter is “a physically strong man,” apparently
stronger than the other six apostles combined.
195 Charles Spurgeon fares slightly
better in using Peter’s strength here to argue that “in the invisible Church, God
will make his servants just strong enough—just strong enough to drag their fish to
shore.”
196 Spurgeon’s explanation has the advantage that it recognizes something
out of the ordinary here, without turning Peter into the Incredible Hulk, or
totally ignoring the passage. But he still fails to answer the question. If Peter’s
strength is miraculous, what’s the meaning of the miracle?
Second, how should we understand the relationship between the miraculous
catch of fish in John 21:1–14 and the conversation between Jesus and Peter in
John 21:15–19? The two events seem to be obviously connected (cf. John 21:15),
but many Protestants read vv. 15–19 in ways that seem to contradict their own
readings of vv. 1–14. For instance, MacArthur sees the description of Peter at the
start of John 21 as “indicating his general leadership of the apostles,” as does
Carson.
197 Spurgeon, as we’ve seen, sees his actions as indicative of a miraculous,
supernatural strength. Yet immediately after describing Peter as the leader of the
apostles in John 21:1–14, each of these Protestant exegetes claims that Peter isn’t
even one of the apostles by John 21:15–19. Carson views Christ’s special
commissioning of Peter as dealing “with Peter’s reinstatement to service, not with
his elevation to primacy.”
198 MacArthur likewise reads this as a “restoration” so
Peter can share in “the same responsibility given to every pastor.”
199 Spurgeon
claims that “Peter was in peculiar need of a reordination,”
200 a nonsensical
proposition if “the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable,” as St. Paul says in
Romans 11:29. In their attempt to avoid the plain, “papal” reading of the text,
these exegetes contort themselves into self-contradiction—first singling Peter out
as a leader of the apostles and then denying his leadership and even his
apostleship.
Contrast this with how early Christians read the passage. Pope St. Gregory the
Great (540–604) recognized the interconnectedness of the miraculous catch of
fish and Jesus’ three questions to Peter, saying, “Why was Peter the one who
brought the net to land? Our holy church had been entrusted to him. It was to
him individually that it was said, ‘Simon, son of John, do you love me? Feed my
sheep.’ What was afterward disclosed to him in words was now indicated to him
by an action.”
201
Immediately, we can see why Peter would be at the heart of
Jesus’ three miracles involving multiplication of fish; why he is depicted as leading
the other apostles at the start of John 21; why he is the one depicted as bringing
the net to land; and why Jesus’ words to him are not a “reinstatement” to the
office he was already exercising, but a special calling to him as the leader of the
apostles.
CHAPTER 8.
PETER AND THE ELEVEN
THERE’S A DETAIL, perhaps so small that you didn’t notice it, in some of the biblical
passages that we’ve looked at: Peter has a literal primacy. For instance, in St.
John’s account of the third miraculous catch of fish, he says, “Simon Peter,
Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and
two others of his disciples were together” (John 21:2). Is it significant that Peter is
listed first?
It turns out that this is something of a pattern. Each of the synoptic Gospels
gives us a list of the twelve apostles (Matt. 10:2–4, Mark 3:16–19, and Luke 6:13–
16). There’s also a list of the Twelve, minus Judas, given in Acts 1:13. Comparing
these four lists reveals some remarkable similarities and dissimilarities. Each of
these lists begins with Peter, and each list ends with Judas. By itself, this might be
unsurprising: perhaps the Evangelists were copying an earlier list, some “Q
source” now lost to history?
202 The difficulty with such a theory is that between
Peter and Judas, there is less of a clear pattern. John MacArthur (whose exegesis I
criticized in the last chapter) does an excellent job of summarizing these four lists:
In all four biblical lists, the same twelve men are named, and the order in which
they are given is strikingly similar. The first name in all four lists is Peter. He
thus stands out as the leader and spokesman for the whole company of twelve.
The Twelve are then arranged in three groups of four. Group one always has
Peter at the head of the list, and that group always includes Andrew, James, and
John. Group two always features Philip first and includes Bartholomew,
Matthew, and Thomas. Group three is always led by James the son of Alphaeus,
and it includes Simon the Zealot; Judas son of James (called “Thaddaeus” in
Mark and “Lebbaeus, whose surname was Thaddaeus” in Matthew); and finally,
Judas Iscariot. (Judas Iscariot is omitted from the list in Acts 1 because he was
already dead by then. In the three lists where Judas’s name is included, it always
appears last, along with a remark identifying him as the traitor.)
203
Within these groups, the ordering appears to matter little. After Peter, Mark
names Andrew. Matthew and Luke name John. Acts (written by Luke) names
John. Who was in the spots between Peter and Judas apparently mattered so little
to Luke that he lists them in different orders between his Gospel and the book of
Acts.
In terms of biographical details, we find something similar. Certain details are
included, apparently at the whim of the Evangelist. St. Matthew refers to himself
as “Matthew the tax collector,” whereas the others just say “Matthew.” St. Mark
tells us Jesus nicknamed James and John Boanerges or “Sons of Thunder,” a detail
not found in the others. St. Luke tells us (both in his Gospel and in Acts) that
Simon was called “the Zealot,” whereas the other two refer to him simply as
“Simon the Cananaean.”
204 There’s no discernible pattern.
But when it comes to Peter and Judas, the synoptic lists are remarkably similar.
Matthew’s list begins with “Simon, who is called Peter,” and ends with “Judas
Iscariot, who betrayed him” (Matt. 10:2–4). Mark’s list begins with “Simon
whom he surnamed Peter” and ends with “Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him”
(Mark 3:16–19). Luke’s list begins with “Simon, whom he named Peter” and
ends with “Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor” (Luke 6:13–16).
205
In other
words, it’s not only that the lists begin and end with the same two people each
time. It’s that the same explanations are given for why they’re listed where they
are: Simon is first, because he’s Peter, the rock; and Judas is last, because he’s the
traitor who betrayed Christ.
Peter and the Pillars
MacArthur mentions that Peter is the head not only of the Twelve, but of a
cluster of four apostles that he labels “group one.” The second, third, and fourth
spots on every biblical list of the Twelve are filled by James, John, and Andrew,
albeit in no particular order. In the case of Andrew, the reasoning seems to be
that he is “Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother” (John 1:40, 6:8). But in the case of
James and John, it’s that they, alongside Peter, are the three apostles whom St.
Paul describes as the ones “reputed to be pillars” (Gal. 2:9). In other words, Peter,
James, and John appear to have a special place within the Twelve.
One of the ways we see this is that Jesus repeatedly separates them from the rest
of the apostles. For instance, when Jesus went into the house of Jairus to raise his
daughter from the dead, he “allowed no one to follow him except Peter and
James and John the brother of James” (Mark 5:37). Likewise, at the
Transfiguration, “Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up
a high mountain apart by themselves” (Mark 9:2; cf. Matt. 17:1, Luke 9:28).
They weren’t simply apart from the crowds; they were apart from the other
apostles. And it’s Peter and John who are tasked by Jesus with instructions for
preparing the Last Supper (Luke 22:8).
These three “pillars,” along with Peter’s brother Andrew, are the ones who
approach Jesus to speak with him “privately” about the destruction of the temple
and the end of the world (Mark 13:3–4). Jesus appears to open up to these men
more than he does to even the rest of the Twelve. All of this is physically on
display on Holy Thursday, in the garden of Gethsemane. Upon arriving, he said
to his disciples, “Sit here, while I pray” (Mark 14:32). But then he “took with
him Peter and James and John, and began to be greatly distressed and troubled.
And he said to them, ‘My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and
watch’” (Mark 14:33–34). Once more, the other disciples are left outside,
whereas the “pillars” are drawn farther in.
Two things are notable about this. The first is that Peter and the other pillars
were not simply, as some Protestant exegetes suggest, the “natural leaders” of the
apostles.
206 That is, they did not just naturally rise to the top based on their innate
personality traits. Instead, we find Jesus repeatedly drawing them aside, to the
exclusion of the rest of the apostles. To approach the question from the opposite
angle, the exclusion of the other eight apostles is not simply due to a lack of
ambition on their part, but because Jesus does things like forbid them to enter the
house of Jairus with him and tells them things like “sit here” while he takes the
pillars with him deeper into the garden of Gethsemane. This is significant, since it
undermines many of the Protestant arguments against the papacy. For instance,
the nineteenth-century Anglican William Dexter Wilson argued that the
authority given to St. Peter first was given “afterward to all the apostles equally
and alike” and that St. Matthias (who replaced Judas) and Paul “seem to have had,
and exercised, equal authority with the original twelve.”
207 But the idea that all of
the Twelve were all called to the identical and equal office is rebutted by the
existence of these three “pillars,” evidence of a sort of call within the call, an
inner circle of apostles handpicked by Jesus Christ.
The second notable detail is that, even among the three “pillars” or the four
members of “group one,” Peter is clearly the leader. In describing the
Transfiguration, St. Luke refers to the three pillars as “Peter and those who were
with him” (Luke 9:32). And after Jesus goes to pray in the garden of Gethsemane,
“he came and found them sleeping, and he said to Peter, ‘Simon, are you asleep?
Could you not watch one hour?’” (Mark 14:37). After separating the pillars from
the rest of the Twelve, Jesus has singled one of the pillars out, apart from the
others. Peter is held to a higher standard than the others, since “everyone to
whom much is given, of him will much be required; and of him to whom men
commit much they will demand the more” (Luke 12:48). This should be
understood as part of a broader pattern: Jesus “withdrew with his disciples” from
the crowds, although “a great multitude from Galilee followed” (Mark 3:7).
From within this group of disciples, “he appointed twelve” (14). From the
multitudes, he draws the disciples; from the disciples, he draws the apostles; from
the apostles, he draws the pillars; and from the pillars, he calls Peter.
The Protestant theologian James B. Jordan makes a fascinating connection
between the pillars and the Old Testament.
208 Back in the book of Exodus, God
called “Moses and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel”
to come to the mountain, where “they saw the God of Israel” (Exod. 24:9–10).
This prefigured the Transfiguration, in which Jesus both leads the pillars up the
mountain to see God and is the God that they see. But Moses went with the
priests, represented there by three men: the high priest Aaron and his sons Nadab
and Abihu. Jesus went with Peter, James, and John. If this analogy holds, Peter is
in the role of “high priest” to Jesus. Indeed, Jordan sees this in other places in the
New Testament. When Peter denies Christ, he is in “the courtyard of the high
priest” (Matt. 26:58), at the moment that Christ is before the Jewish high priest,
Caiaphas. Indeed, John makes a point of sharing that “Peter stood outside at the
door. So the other disciple, who was known to the high priest, went out and
spoke to the maid who kept the door, and brought Peter in” (John 18:16). This
seemingly trivial detail is the only place in John’s Gospel that we see a fulfillment
of Christ’s words, that “he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep,”
and “to him the gatekeeper opens” (10:2–3). After the death and resurrection of
Christ, when Peter and John arrived at the empty tomb, John “reached the tomb
first” but “did not go in” (20:4–5). Why? Because, Jordan argues, “it makes sense
to see the tomb as a holy of holies, which only the high priest might enter. John
instinctively holds back.”
209 But then “Simon Peter came, following him, and
went into the tomb” (6). It’s only at this point that John, “who reached the tomb
first, also went in, and he saw and believed” (8).
The Spotlight and the Shadow
When Luke is telling in Acts how “many signs and wonders were done among
the people by the hands of the apostles,” he explains that “more than ever
believers were added to the Lord, multitudes both of men and women, so that
they even carried out the sick into the streets, and laid them on beds and pallets,
that as Peter came by at least his shadow might fall on some of them” (Acts
5:12,14–15). It’s a telling remark. All of the apostles are working miracles, “and
they were all together in Solomon’s Portico” (12), yet the people are striving to
place themselves where Peter’s shadow will fall upon them. Does this sound as
though the early believers considered the apostles to have held authority “equally
and alike”?
At this point, “the high priest rose up and all who were with him,” and they
arrest the apostles (Acts 5:17–18). After their arrest, they are brought before the
high priest, who orders them to cease preaching in the name of Jesus. In response,
“Peter and the apostles answered, ‘We must obey God rather than men’” (29).
It’s not simply that Peter spoke on behalf of the other apostles, as happened so
many other times. Instead, apparently, all of the apostles gave a defense, but this
defense is described as coming from “Peter and the apostles,” in language perhaps
reminiscent of “the high priest” and “all who were with him.” Strikingly, Luke
doesn’t say Peter and the other apostles. He goes beyond this and says “Peter and
the apostles,” as if Peter is something more than simply an apostle.
“Peter and the Eleven”
The “Peter and the apostles” language of Acts 5, treating Peter as something
beyond an apostle, is common in the New Testament. At the empty tomb, the
angel tells Mary Magdalene to “tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before
you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you” (Mark 16:7). John Calvin
argued that this distinction of Peter from the others was “not because he was at
that time higher in rank than the others, but because his crime, which was so
disgraceful, needed peculiar consolation to assure him that Christ had not cast
him off, though he had basely and wickedly fallen.”
210
In other words, Calvin’s view is that the “apostles and Peter” language is to
show that Peter is not above, but below (or believes himself to be below) the
apostleship. But this explanation fails to account for Pentecost, where “Peter,
standing with the eleven, lifted up his voice” and preached to the crowds (Acts
2:14). Are we to assume that Peter, after having organized the other apostles to
choose a successor to Judas (1:12–26), was unsure whether or not he was an
apostle, even as he was filled with the Holy Spirit and preaching to the crowds?
211
Indeed, Calvin’s exegesis doesn’t even account for Easter Sunday. When the
women arrived to share this story with the apostles, “these words seemed to them
an idle tale, and they did not believe them. But Peter rose and ran to the tomb”
(Luke 24:11–12). Rather than Peter shamefully avoiding the empty tomb, Luke
describes him as the first to believe the women’s account. Luke goes on to say
that “stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; and he went
home wondering at what had happened.” Where the Evangelist sees wonder,
Calvin sees something more cynical, claiming that “the great insensibility under
which [Peter] still labored is evident from the fact that he again fled trembling to
conceal himself, as if he had seen nothing, while Mary sat down to weep at the
grave.”
212 Where the Bible depicts Peter as running toward the tomb, Calvin
describes him as running away from it. There’s not a word of how Peter “fled
trembling” anywhere in the Gospels. John’s Gospel says only that “the disciples
went back to their homes” (John 20:10).
These exegetical (or eisegetical) backflips are in service of Calvin’s false
reinstatement theory—the idea that Peter was no longer an apostle by Easter
morning. The thinness of his argument is clear from the lengths to which he has
to exaggerate or distort the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection. For instance, he
argues that “God denied [Peter] the honor, which he shortly afterward conferred
on the women, of hearing from the lips of the angel that Christ was risen.”
213 But
this is straining out gnats and swallowing camels. St. Paul tells us Jesus “appeared
to Cephas, then to the Twelve” (Acts 15:5). Cephas is the Aramaic name for
Peter, and Paul is saying Christ’s first appearance, even before he presented
himself to the Twelve, was to St. Peter. Note here, too, that Paul speaks of both
“Cephas” and “the Twelve,” recognizing Peter both as part of the apostles and as
somehow distinct from the others.
Paul makes a similar distinction elsewhere, referring to “the other apostles and
the brethren of the Lord and Cephas” (1 Cor. 9:5). Here, Calvin’s commentary is
quite different, saying, “We confess that Peter was acknowledged as first among
the apostles, as it is necessary that in every society there should always be some
one to preside over the others.”
214 This concedes the point Calvin strained so
hard to deny in his Easter morning exegesis: that Peter is both “first among the
apostles,” but even “preside[s] over the others,” like the ruler of a society.
CHAPTER 9.
UPON THIS ROCK
“NOW WHEN JESUS came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his
disciples, ‘Who do men say that the Son of man is?’” (Matt. 16:13). So begins the
most famous biblical passage related to St. Peter and the papacy. The oddness of
St. Matthew’s narration is lost on modern readers, because we are ignorant of the
geography being described. As one scholar has noted, “If we can judge by the
place designations in [Mark’s] Gospel, most of Jesus’ ministry was done in a tenmile stretch along the Sea of Galilee’s western shore and extending about five
miles inland.”
215 When Jesus does leave the area around Capernaum in Galilee,
it’s usually to journey to Jerusalem in the south, perhaps via Samaria. But here,
for some reason, he’s taken his disciples some 55 miles north of Galilee,
completely in what we would consider the “wrong direction.”
Something has drawn Jesus and the Twelve this far away from their normal
ministry, and it seems to be wrapped up in the question Jesus asks: “Who do men
say that the Son of man is?” (Matt. 16:13). In the ensuing conversation, Jesus will
say to Peter, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church” (18). Jesus
then makes three promises to Peter: that the Church he’s about to found “upon
this rock” will not be overcome by the gates of hell; that he will give Peter the
“keys of the kingdom of heaven”; and that “whatever you bind on earth shall be
bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven”
(18–19). To all appearances, this passage seems to be Jesus promising Peter that
Jesus going to build the Church upon Peter, with Peter in a special way at the
forefront.
You might wonder why I’ve saved this most famous passage for last. I have four
reasons. The first is precisely that it’s the most famous, therefore it’s the area in
which I’m least likely to say anything useful. The second is that there’s one
particular part of the passage that’s confusing: who or what does Jesus mean by
the “rock” when he says, “On this rock I will build my church”? The Church
Fathers read the meaning of this phrase in several different ways, and “many
Fathers (e.g., Origen, Hilary, Jerome, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine) happily
employed more than one throughout their careers.”
216 St. Augustine
acknowledges that in an earlier book, “I said about the apostle Peter: ‘On him as
on a rock the Church was built,’” but that later, he argues that it should be
“understood as built upon him whom Peter confessed.” Ultimately, he concludes
by inviting the reader to “decide which of these two opinions is the more
probable.”
217
The third reason I delayed in addressing this passage is that there’s a caricature of
the Catholic position in which it’s claimed that everything comes down to this
one passage, and specifically down to the question of the identity of the rock.
Evangelical critics of Catholicism often promote this strawman version of the
Catholic position: the late theologian Norman Geisler called this passage the
“chief biblical text used to support” the doctrine of the papacy and shared an
essay on his site claiming that the Catholic Church “interprets everything about
the Church through the lens of the above verse.”
218 Dave Hunt likewise claims
that “the pope’s authority today and the Catholic religion over which he presides
stand or fall” upon the “assertion” that Christ’s statement to Peter made him the
rock.”
219 Keith Mathison is slightly more guarded but still calls it the “primary
proof-text for the doctrine of Roman supremacy.”
220 Yet Mathison also argues
that before the Reformation, “this passage was very rarely used to support papal
claims,” without considering how both of these claims could be true, given that
the papacy existed before the Reformation.
221
The final reason is that the passage has a lot of imagery that needs unpacking:
besides the questions “Who is the ‘rock’?” and “What’s the meaning of Simon’s
new name?” there are also the questions “What does Jesus mean by the ‘keys of
the kingdom’” and “What does Jesus mean by ‘binding and loosing’”? For this
reason, I’ve decided to break an examination of this passage up over two chapters.
In this chapter, we’ll look at the first two questions. When Jesus says, “You are
Peter, and on this rock I will build my church,” is he promising to build the
Church on Peter, on Peter’s confession, on himself, or on something else? In the
next chapter, we’ll unpack the other promises he makes, with the keys and the
binding and loosing.
Abram and Simon, Abraham and Peter
To begin unpacking what happened at Caesarea Philippi, it’s important to set the
scene against its Jewish background. Jesus asks who the crowds think he is, and
the answers are contradictory and unsatisfactory. Then he asks the Twelve, “But
who do you say that I am?” Only one of them, Simon Peter, answers. This in
itself is notable. In response to Jesus’ first question about popular opinion,
Matthew shares what “they said” in response. But here, there’s no apostolic
“they” speaking. When it comes to giving the right answer, they fall silent, and
only Peter speaks. What he says is inspired: “You are the Christ, the Son of the
living God” (Matt. 16:16). Jesus’ response is “Blessed are you, Simon bar-Jona!
For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.
And I tell you, you are Peter” (Matt. 16:17–18).
In other words, after Simon correctly confesses Jesus’ identity, Jesus reveals
Simon’s own identity to him. Jesus is the Christ, and throughout Scripture, the
names “Jesus,” “Jesus Christ,” and “Christ” are used interchangeably for the same
person. Simon is Peter (the rock), and throughout Scripture, the names “Simon,”
“Simon Peter,” and “Peter” are used interchangeably for the same person. Both
“Christ” and “Peter” are sometimes used as titles, and sometimes used as if they
were proper names. Throughout this book, I’ve used all three names for Peter
(since that’s what we know him as today), but it’s important to recognize that he
was just Simon prior to this point. Jesus is giving him a new name.
Anyone familiar with Scripture is aware of how crucial the changing of names
is.
222 Adam’s responsibility in the Garden of Eden is to name the animals (Gen.
2:19), and in doing so, he enters into a new kind of relationship with them.
When there’s a change in God’s relationship with man (for instance, in the
creation of a covenant), we often see a change in names. Perhaps the most famous
of these is the change in Abram’s name to Abraham, which occurs after God tells
Abram, “I will make my covenant between me and you, and will multiply you
exceedingly” (17:2). Abram falls on his face, and God declares:
Behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of
nations. No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be
Abraham; for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations. I will make
you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come
forth from you. And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your
descendants after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant,
to be God to you and to your descendants after you. And I will give to you, and
to your descendants after you, the land of your sojournings, all the land of
Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God (4–8).
The pattern is the same as at Caesarea Philippi: God draws his people to himself
in a new way, through one man, by changing that man’s name, and by bestowing
certain promises upon both him and those who will come after him. And the
new name isn’t given randomly. In Abram’s case, the new name is “Abraham,” a
name meaning “father of a multitude of nations,” which is precisely what God
promises to make him. The “explanation for the new name of Abraham defines
his destiny.”
223 That is, the name change doesn’t just mark the covenant. The
promises of the covenant are a sort of revealing of the meaning of the name, of
what it would mean to become an “Abraham.”
In Matthew 16, Jesus is revealing the new way that God will draw his people to
himself, and he reveals it through a personal blessing on Simon, by changing his
name, and bestowing certain promises upon him. The new name, Petros (meaning
“rock”), is intentional, the promises in the rest of the passage are a way of
revealing the meaning of this name change. D.H. Williams notes the argument
that “Peter was too unstable to be regarded as a ‘rock,’”
224 but it’s worth
recognizing that at the time God changes Abram’s name to Abraham, Isaac hasn’t
even been born. The name change is a promise, not simply a description of
present realities.
Reading the Caesarea Philippi passage in this way offers three advantages: first,
it’s consistent with God’s behavior in the Old Testament. Second, it offers a
greater consistency to the passage. Read in this light, all of Matt. 16:13–23 is a
way of answering the twofold questions “Who is Jesus?” and “Who is Simon?”
Recognizing this dimension of the passage reveals the folly of what can be called
the “impersonal” interpretations. By this, I mean the interpretations that treat
Peter as merely a symbol, a sort of stand-in for us, and not as a person, or at least
not as a particularly important person. There’s a certain type of Protestant exegete
who interprets virtually everything in the New Testament as a sort of platitude
about how believers need to have faith. For instance, MacArthur’s explanation of
this passage is that “Jesus’ words here are best interpreted as a simple play on
words in that a boulder-like truth came from the mouth of one who was called a
small stone.”
225 When Christ gives Peter the keys of the kingdom, MacArthur
contends that “these represent authority, and here Christ gives Peter (and by
extension all other believers) authority to declare what was bound or loosed in
heaven.”
226 This interpretation reduces the binding and the loosing, the keys of
the kingdom, and even the name change of Simon to Peter as essentially three
different opaque ways of saying, “Believe in Jesus.” Such a denuded
interpretation would be like reading God’s promises to Abraham as a simple
expression of the joys of fatherhood or faithfulness without recognizing that
actual promises are being made to an individual man.
The Personal Nature of the Blessing
The problem with interpreting Peter out of this passage is that he is at the center
of Jesus’ words. The Anglican R.T. France concluded that the “rock” in
Matthew 16:18 is Peter, because “the word-play, and the whole structure of the
passage, demands that this verse is every bit as much Jesus’ declaration about Peter
as v. 16 was Peter’s declaration about Jesus.”
227 A careful examination will reveal
that France is correct. Jesus begins the blessing by saying “blessed are you,” and
the “are you” is the second-person singular Greek. John Calvin claims that “this
was not spoken in a peculiar manner to Peter alone,” but it quite explicitly was,
with Jesus blessing Simon in the singular, in the presence of the others.
228 He then
addresses Simon by his birth name. He adds to this address the title “bar-Jona,”
which literally means “son of Jonah,” and normally serves as something like a
family name.
However, there are a few reasons to believe that something different is
occurring here. First, from John’s Gospel, we know that Simon’s father is actually
named John (“YHWH is a gracious giver”), not Jonah (“dove”). Jesus refers to
him as “Simon, son of John” some four times (John 1:42, 21:15,16,17).
229
Second, the title “son of” (bar) is often used in non-literal contexts within
Judaism: most famously, the Jewish bar mitzvah ceremony literally means that one
becomes a “son of the commandment,”
230 and Jesus refers to James and John as
“sons of thunder” (Mark 3:17). Finally, Jesus has just spoken a few verses earlier
about how “an evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign shall be
given to it except the sign of Jonah” (Mt. 16:4).
If the two references to Jonah in Matthew 16 belong together, then we cannot
understand why Peter is “bar-Jona” unless we understand what Jesus means by
the “sign of Jonah.” There seem to be three dimensions to this sign, two of
which Jesus suggests. First, Jonah spent “three days and three nights in the belly
of the whale,” just as Jesus would spend “three days and three nights in the heart
of the earth” in his passion, death and resurrection (Matt. 12:40). Second, Jonah
preached, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” causing the
Ninevites to repent (Jon. 3:4–5). Jerusalem does not follow Nineveh’s example
and is destroyed by the Romans forty years thence. Thus, “the men of Nineveh
will arise at the judgment with this generation and condemn [this generation]; for
they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than
Jonah is here” (Luke 11:32). But there’s a third dimension as well. Nineveh was
the capital of the hated Assyrian Empire, and God was sending Jonah to preach
salvation to the Gentiles. Thus, Jonah fled from Nineveh not because he was
afraid that they would reject his preaching, but because he was afraid that they
would accept it and be saved. He explains to God that he tried to flee to
Tarshish, “for I knew that thou art a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger,
and abounding in steadfast love, and repentest of evil” (Jon. 4:2).
Understood in this light, we can see why Peter would be a “son of Jonah” in
the Christological sense. After all, he is the first public preacher of the passion,
death, and resurrection of Christ (Acts 2:14–41), and he does so by entreating the
people, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation” (40). And it is through
Peter that God definitively opens the door of salvation to the Gentiles (10–11). In
the household of Cornelius, Peter proclaims that “God shows no partiality, but in
every nation any one who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him”
(10:34). As he preached, the Holy Spirit came upon even the Gentiles, to the
shock of Peter’s companions (44–45), leading to the baptism of the first Gentile
converts. As Peter would later remind the Council of Jerusalem, “Brethren, you
know that in the early days God made choice among you, that by my mouth the
Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe” (15:7).
The Anglican C.S.C. Williams is one of only a handful of scholars to notice that
“the commission of Peter to go to Cornelius, his initial reluctance to do so but
his subsequent obedience, leading to the gift of the Holy Spirit being conferred
on the Gentiles, had its counterpart in the commission of Jonah to the heathen at
Nineveh.”
231
In promising that the “evil and adulterous generation” will receive
the “sign of Jonah,” Jesus is foretelling his death and resurrection, his rejection by
Israel, and his acceptance by the Gentiles. And in calling Peter “Simon bar-Jona,”
he’s foretelling the particular role that Simon Peter will play in all of that, by
being the first to proclaim Christ to Jerusalem and the Jewish pilgrims on
Pentecost, and then being the first to preach salvation even to the Gentiles.
After invoking Simon as “bar-Jona,” Jesus commends his confession of faith and
tells him God the Father “revealed this to you” (Matt. 16:17). Here again, we
find Peter being addressed in the second-person singular, this time with the
dative. This is the same word used a verse later, when Jesus says, “I tell you” (or
“I say to you”). And what does Jesus then say to Peter, singularly, in the presence
of the Twelve? That “you [singular] are Peter.”
232 So personal is this address that
both Peter (1 Pet. 1:1) and others (Mark 5:37, Acts 1:13, etc.) use it as if it were
Peter’s personal name. All of the existing historical evidence suggests that the
name Peter was coined by Jesus Christ specifically for Simon Peter.
233 This new
name means “rock,” and Jesus immediately adds, “And on this rock I will build
my church” (Matt. 16:18), which he promises will not be overcome by the gates
of hell. It looks very much like when God invented the name Abraham and then
immediately explained what it meant (Gen. 17:5).
Jesus then makes three promises to Peter, each of which is again in the secondperson singular: (1) “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven,” (2)
“Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven,” and (3) “Whatever you
loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matt. 16:19). In case you’ve lost count,
this marks at least ten distinct times that Jesus specifically addressed Simon Peter
individually, using the second-person singular, in the span of three verses. And he
did so deliberately, in the presence of the rest of the Twelve. This hasn’t stopped
Protestant scholars like Baylor’s D.H. Williams from arguing that Peter merely
“exemplifies every believer who has moments of great perception as well as a
tendency toward self-centeredness and loss of divine understanding.”
234 This is a
recurring theme among those who don’t want Peter to be the rock: they tend to
interpret the passage in ways that make Peter entirely extraneous or merely one
believer whom Jesus happens to be addressing in a passage meant for us all. At
some point, it’s reasonable to ask what more Jesus could have said to emphasize
the personal nature of the blessing, or if any amount of explicit evidence would
be enough to change the opinion of these exegetes.
235
How Might a Protestant Respond?
A distinction should be made between what’s believed by Protestant scholars who
have studied Matthew 16 and what’s held at a popular level by preachers and the
lay faithful. Among scholars, there is actually a great deal of consensus (cutting
across confessional lines) that the “rock” (petra) is Peter. Lund University’s Chrys
C. Caragounis (who personally disagrees with the scholarly consensus)
summarizes the state of scholarship by saying that “after centuries of disagreement
it would appear that Protestant and Catholic are at last united in referring the
rock upon which the Church according to Mt. 16:18 is to be built, to the apostle
Peter,” although he adds that “most Protestant exegetes who refer [petra] to Peter
do so under the assumption that the passage is inauthentic,” the work of some
later redactor trying to score theological points by putting these words in the
mouth of Jesus.
236
In other words, Protestant scholars are now concluding that the
rock is Peter, but rather than accepting Peter, many are rejecting the scriptural
text.
There’s a different debate going on at the popular level. The popular Protestant
interpretation of Matthew 16:17–19 is, in essence, “anything but that” exegesis.
In other words, Protestants will come to all sorts of contrary conclusions about
the meaning of Matthew 16:17–19, or simply conclude that they don’t know
what it means, but they’ll all agree that it just can’t mean the straightforward
Catholic interpretation. For example, Southern Baptist preacher A.T. Robinson
(1863–1934) explains the passage away thusly:
Jesus makes a play upon the name Peter (Rock). It is not perfectly clear how
Jesus means the figure to be applied. He could mean himself (Christ) by “this
rock,” if he pointed to himself. . . . Jesus could mean Peter himself by “this
rock,” as representative of the twelve and as confessing his faith in Christ. . . .
Or Jesus could mean the confession of trust made by Peter as the rock on which,
in truth, the kingdom is built. The matter can never be settled for all minds.
237
According to Robinson, it’s not clear what Jesus means, but he obviously
doesn’t mean what he appears to be saying—namely, that Peter is the rock upon
which the Church is going to be built.
I saw this sort of “anything but that” exegesis on display in an online forum
once. Two Catholics presented the standard Catholic interpretation of Matthew
16, that Jesus is speaking of building the Church upon Peter the rock. They were
quickly banned from the forum, and three different Protestants jumped in to
correct them. The only problem was, none of them agreed with each other! The
first said that “it is clear Christ was referring to the foundation of his Church,
which is what Peter means, i.e. rock. He wasn’t building his Church on Peter,
but on the meaning of Peter’s name, rock.” The second Protestant then corrected
her, saying, rather, “The rock upon which the Church was (is) built . . . is Peter’s
confession of faith, not the man Peter.” A third Protestant then corrected them
both to say: “It was not Peter or his confession upon which Christ built the
church. Christ is the cornerstone rejected by the Jewish leaders. He is the rock of
refuge and the firm foundation of everything that will pass through the fires of
judgment.”
My immediate thought was how well these feuding Protestants proved Christ’s
point in Matthew 16, the passage they were all attempting to interpret. Like the
confused believers Jesus asked about, some were saying John the Baptist, others
Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets (Matt. 16:14), wandering
about like sheep without a shepherd. It’s in direct response to this that Jesus says
he’s going to establish his Church upon Peter. Today, we see a Protestantism in
which some say the rock is Christ himself, some say Peter as a representative of
the Twelve, and some say Peter’s confession of faith, and the existence of this
theological chaos and biblical confusion points to the continued need for Peter
and his successors. With that said, here are a few of the particular doctrinal points
in dispute.
Is the “Rock” Jesus?
As I noted at the start of the chapter, A.T. Robinson says Jesus “could mean
himself (Christ) by ‘this rock,’ if he pointed to himself.”
238 Likewise, if we imagine
that Jesus was holding construction plans, pointing to where he was going to
build a chapel, we could interpret “this rock” as referring to a particular physical
location. But neither interpretation is any good. Why? Because any biblical
interpretation that turns on the existence of some never-mentioned detail (like
Jesus holding construction plans, or pointing to himself) is bad exegesis.
Furthermore, this interpretation butchers the metaphor, as the Presbyterian
minister Marvin Richardson Vincent explains:
The reference of [petra] to Christ is forced and unnatural. The obvious reference
of the word is to Peter. The emphatic this naturally refers to the nearest
antecedent; and besides, the foundation is thus weakened, since Christ appears
here, not as the foundation, but as the architect: “on this rock will I build.”
239
Nothing within the text itself supports interpreting it as saying “Christ will built
the Church upon Christ.” Instead, the major reason for viewing the “rock” as
Jesus is that other parts of Scripture use “rock” language to refer to God (and
sometimes specifically to Jesus). For example, a few chapters later in Matthew’s
Gospel, Jesus will apply to himself Psalm 118:22, “the very stone which the
builders rejected has become the head of the corner,” thereby describing himself
as the cornerstone.
This has led some Protestants to make sweeping, false statements, like that “God
himself is clearly described as the unfailing ‘rock’ of our salvation throughout the
entire Old Testament. . . . In fact, the Bible declares that God is the only rock” or
that “any first-century Orthodox Jew familiar with the Tenach (what Jews call
the Old Testament scriptures), like Peter or Paul, knew that the God of Israel
identified himself as the ‘rock’ of salvation in Israel’s divine history, and would
never have taken it to mean anything else.”
240 These claims are simply untrue.
Although the Old Testament typically applies the “rock” imagery to God, Isaiah
51:1–2 applies it to Abraham:
Hearken to me, you who pursue deliverance, you who seek the Lord; look to
the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were
digged. Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you; for when he
was but one I called him, and I blessed him and made him many.
Joseph Benson, one of the early Methodist ministers, explains that in this Isaiah
passage, God “compares the bodies of Abraham and Sarah unto a rock, or pit, or
quarry, out of which stones are hewn or dug; thereby implying, that God, in
some sort, actually did that which John the Baptist said he was able to do,
(Matthew 3:9,) ‘even of stones to raise up children unto Abraham.’”
241
In other
words, when John the Baptist warns the Pharisees and Sadducees, “Do not
presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father’; for I tell you,
God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham” in Matthew 3:9,
he seems to be building upon this image of Abraham as the rock. If it’s okay to
refer to Abraham as the “rock” in the Old Covenant, there’s no good reason to
pretend it’s blasphemous to call Peter the “rock” in the New Covenant,
particularly given the parallels in the covenantal language used for the two men.
One obvious problem with these objections is that they rely on overextending
metaphorical language. There’s no reason why a metaphor must always mean the
same thing each time it’s used or must always be applied to the same person or
referent.
242 For instance, Jesus is described both as a shepherd (John 10:11) and as
a lamb (1:29), and he sends out his followers “as lambs in the midst of wolves”
(Luke 10:3) and calls upon Peter to “feed my lambs” (John 21:15). In Matthew
16, Christ is the builder, building upon “the rock.” But in 1 Corinthians 3:10, St.
Paul refers to himself as “a skilled master builder” who “laid a foundation” among
the Corinthians; this time, Jesus is the foundation, not the builder.
John MacArthur says the Catholic interpretation of Matthew 16 is
“presumptuous and unbiblical, because the rest of the New Testament makes
abundantly clear that Christ alone is the foundation and only head of his
Church.”
243 Here, again, we have a false argument premised upon overextending
metaphorical language. It’s true that Paul says that “no other foundation can any
one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 3:11), but taking
this overly literally misses the point...and contradicts the rest of Scripture.
Revelation 22:14 says that “the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on
them the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.” Paul refers to the
Christians at Ephesus as “fellow citizens with the saints and members of the
household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ
Jesus himself being the cornerstone” (Eph. 2:19–20). This time around, Christ is
the cornerstone, the apostles are the foundation, and the rest of us make up the
house built upon this apostolic and Christological foundation. MacArthur knows
this, acknowledging that this passage “equates the apostles with the church’s
foundation” and that this is how the earliest Christians understood the Church’s
foundation:
Ignatius (c. A.D. 35–115) in his Epistle to the Magnesians, spoke in the past tense
of the foundation-laying work of Peter and Paul. Referring to the book of Acts,
Ignatius wrote, “This was first fulfilled in Syria; for ‘the disciples were called
Christians at Antioch,’ when Paul and Peter were laying the foundations of the
Church.” Irenaeus (c. 130–202) referred to the twelve apostles as “the twelvepillared foundation of the church.” Tertullian (c. 155–230) similarly explained
that “after the time of the apostles” the only doctrine that true Christians
accepted was that which was “proclaimed in the churches of apostolic
foundation.” Lactantius (c. 240–320) in his Divine Institutes likewise referred to
the past time in which the apostolic foundations of the church were laid.
244
In short, arguments based on the idea that all metaphors involving a “rock” or a
“foundation” must refer to God alone are bad arguments that both misunderstand
the nature of metaphors and are contradicted by Scripture itself. Since this is the
primary argument behind the theory that the “rock” of Matthew 16 is Christ,
that interpretation should be judged weak.
Is the “Rock” Peter’s Confession of Faith?
A stronger case can be made for the idea that the “rock” of Matthew 16 is Peter’s
confession of faith. After all, Jesus’ words to Peter are certainly in direct response
to Peter’s confession of faith. And so there is a limited sense in which it’s right to
connect the “rock” with Peter’s confession as the rock. In the aftermath of
Barack Obama’s re-election, a tech article explained that “it wasn’t the superexpensive ads on the national networks that won the election, but the very
careful micro-targeting of messages tailored to each reader.”
245 You could say,
without contradiction, that either “Barack Obama won the election” or “good
messaging won the election.” One of those tells you who, and the other tells you
how or why. The way to express both ideas is to say Obama won re-election
because of his strategy of targeted messaging. Likewise, the Southern Baptist
Theological Seminary’s Gregg Allison is right that we can say that “the rock is
Peter by virtue of his confession.”
246
If people connecting the “rock” with Peter’s
confession mean only this, they are right.
The trouble, as Allison realizes, is that oftentimes Peter’s confession “is then
shorn of any connection with the person of Peter: it is the confession itself, not
Peter as confessor, that is emphasized as the foundation of Messiah’s church.”
247
It
becomes just another Protestant interpretation of this personalized blessing that
removes Peter from the moment in which he is given a new name. Such a view
drives “a wedge between the person of Peter and his divinely revealed
confession,” and Peter’s confession of faith quickly becomes simply any confession
of faith. This is also the case for those who say the rock is about Peter, but as
“representative of the Twelve.”
248
In one sense that’s perfectly true: Peter is
speaking and acting on behalf of all of the apostles, and even all of the Church,
just as the pope speaks and acts for the episcopacy and the Church today. No gifts
are given for our private benefit, but are given “for the work of ministry, for
building up the body of Christ” (Eph. 4:11–13). But often, those who argue for
“Peter as a representative” really mean that Peter isn’t particularly important and
that Jesus meant these words for all of us.
This tendency to strip Peter of his blessing is explicit in the first Protestant
Reformers. Martin Luther interprets Jesus’ “upon this rock” as meaning “upon
thy confession of faith, which makes thee a rock and upon this doctrine I will
build my church.”
249 But Peter is quickly sidelined, as Luther concludes that
“Christ permitted Peter to fall, that we should not regard him as the rock, nor
build upon him,” and that “we also should all be called Peters (rocks).”
250
John
Calvin’s reading goes farther, suggesting that even the words “you are Peter”
extend “no doubt, to all believers, each of whom is a temple of God,” and that
“the name Peter comes to be applied both to Simon individually, and to other
believers.”
251 At this point, nothing is personal to Peter, not even his name. Every
Christian is Peter.
By this reasoning, we should expect to see a whole lot of Christians in the New
Testament getting their names changed to Peter. But we see only one: Simon
Peter. At the very least, if Luther and Calvin were correct, we should see Jesus
changing the name of the first person to correctly confess him as the Christ. But
we see nothing of the sort. This is most apparent if we look at the first chapter of
John’s Gospel. There, John the Baptist proclaims, “Behold, the Lamb of God,
who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). Recognizing that “this is he
of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks before me, for he was before
me,’” John concludes that “this is the Son of God” (John 1:30,34). One of John’s
disciples, Andrew, leaves John the Baptist to follow Christ. He brings with him
his brother, Simon, to whom he says, “We have found the Messiah,” a title that
the Evangelist reminds us means “Christ” (1:41). Another disciple, Philip, tells
Nathaniel that “we have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the
prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph” (1:45). After encountering
Jesus, Nathaniel is then led to confess, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are
the King of Israel!” (1:49).
If Luther’s or Calvin’s argument is correct, we should see Jesus changing the
names of John the Baptist, Andrew, Philip, and Nathaniel to Peter. Nathaniel’s
confession of faith in particular is remarkably similar to what Simon Peter will
confess much later, in Matthew 16. But Jesus doesn’t do that. In the span of these
twenty-one verses, there’s only one person named who isn’t depicted as
confessing Christ, and that’s Simon. Although he’s mentioned by name in the
passage, John doesn’t describe him saying anything remarkable. And yet right in
the midst of this passage, Jesus says to Simon, and not to any of these others, “So
you are Simon the son of John? You shall be called Cephas,” a name that John
helpfully translates for us as “Peter” (John 1:42). If the “rock” were simply
“confession of faith,” everyone other than Peter would be the rock in John 1. But
Jesus clearly sees things differently.
Do Petros and Petra Mean Different Things?
Underlying nearly every Protestant rejection of Peter as the “rock” of Matthew
16 is the supposed difference between the Greek Petros and petra. After all, if
Petros and petra mean the same thing, it seems quite clear that Jesus intends each
to refer to Simon Peter: “You are Rock, and upon this rock I will build my
church,” with the only difference being that in the first case, “rock” is being used
as a proper name or a title.
252
And so we regularly find Protestants claiming that Petros means a small rock,
even a pebble, whereas petra means a boulder or an immovable rock.
253 William
Cathcart (the nineteenth-century president of the American Baptist Historical
Society) writes that “Petros is a stone, a movable stone; petra is a rock, a mass of
rocks, a cliff. The one, such a stone as a maid-servant in the hall of judgment
might upset; the other was the Rock of Ages—the confession that Peter made
that Christ was the Son of the living God.” According to Cathcart, the fact that
Matthew used both Petros and petra meant that Petra “MUST refer to something
different from Peter.”
254
In 1980, John MacArthur reworded Jesus’ declaration to Peter this way: “You
are petros—‘you are a pebble Peter, you are a boulder’—but upon this petra
—‘rock bed foundation’—I will build my church.”And what was that “rock bed
foundation”? Peter’s “confession of faith.”
255 Notice that MacArthur’s
interpretation has Jesus saying, “You are Peter but upon this rock I will build my
church,” whereas Jesus actually says, “You are Peter and upon this rock I will
build my church.” This understanding of the passage requires introducing an
opposition between petros and petra not actually found in the text, and so, eight
years later, we find him arguing against his old interpretation, saying that “it
seems more likely that, in light of other New Testament passages, that was not
Jesus’ point.”
256
At this point, he decides that “Jesus addressed Peter as representative of the
Twelve,” even though the Twelve are there present, and that “the use of the two
different forms of the Greek for rock would be explained by the masculine petros
being used of Peter as an individual man and petra being used of him as the
representative of the larger group.”
257 He continues to hold to the position that
“it was not on the apostles themselves, much less on Peter as an individual, that
Christ built his Church.”
258 Anything but that.
The problem with this line of argumentation can be seen in an old, probably
apocryphal account of the building of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. As the
story goes, Sir Christopher Wren’s design was chosen because it was “the most
awful and artificial.” Later versions of the story have it that the design was chosen
because it was “amusing, awful, and artificial.”
259 The punchline is that back in
1675, amusing, awful, and artificial were all words a church architect would love to
hear, meaning “amazing,” “awe-inspiring,” and “artistic,” respectively, but these
words had come to mean something quite different by the twentieth century. I
bring this up simply to point out the obvious: the meaning of words can shift,
often dramatically, over the course of centuries. This is no less true of Greek than
of English, which is why it’s problematic that Protestants arguing for a sharp
distinction in meaning between petros and petra are basing their arguments on
poetry from centuries earlier.
Protestant exegetes who examine the matter closely tend to admit that there was
actually no clear difference between petros and petra at the time of Christ, and so I
will confine myself to only Protestant scholarship for the remainder of this
section. The Lutheran theologian Oscar Cullman admits that “the difference in
meaning between the two Greek words is not fixed.”
260 Furthermore:
The idea of the Reformers that he is referring to the faith of Peter is quite
inconceivable. . . . For there is no reference here to the faith of Peter. Rather,
the parallelism of “thou art Rock” and “on this rock I will build” shows that
the second rock can only be the same as the first. It is thus evident that Jesus is
referring to Peter, to whom he has given the name Rock. He appoints Peter,
the impulsive, enthusiastic, but not persevering man in the circle, to be the
foundation of his ecclesia.
261
D.A. Carson
262 goes farther, arguing that “if it were not for Protestant reactions
against extremes of Roman Catholic interpretation, it is doubtful whether many
would have taken ‘rock’ to be anything or anyone other than Peter.”
263 One of
the reasons Carson holds this is that “although it is true that petros and petra can
mean stone and rock respectively in earlier Greek, the distinction is largely
confined to poetry.”
264
At this point, you may well be frustrated. With scholars saying opposite things
about first-century Greek, how can a reader who doesn’t know ancient Greek
possibly know which side to believe in this debate? Fortunately, the evidence is
quite clear by looking to other ancient Greek writings. For example, Apollonius
of Rhodes, a Greek poet from the third century B.C., wrote the Argonautica, the
now famous epic of Jason and the Argonauts and their quest for the Golden
Fleece. At one point, he describes how Jason “seized from the plain a huge round
boulder, a terrible quoit of Ares Enyalius; four stalwart youths could not have
raised it from the ground even a little.”
265 The word he chose for this “huge
round boulder,” so large that four men couldn’t budge it? Petros.
266 Does that
sound like a “pebble” to you? And so we see that petra and petros had already
come to mean the same thing even hundreds of years before Christ.
Caragounis finds some equivalency in meaning between petros and petra in
ancient Greek texts, adding that “in later literature this interchangeability
becomes more frequent, until finally [petros] falls into disuse” and “[petra] comes
to signify ‘stone.’”
267 Once petros and petra come to mean the same thing, Greek
speakers stop using the now-redundant petros. At this point, they use lithos or
stones, which can be anything from a pebble to a boulder. It’s lithos that St.
Matthew uses for everything from the stone you wouldn’t hand to your child
(Matt. 7:9) to the “great stone” over the Tomb of Christ (27:60). Neither he nor
any other New Testament author ever uses petros in the way Protestant exegetes
claim they should. Instead, the only time petros is used is to refer to Peter.
One final point to consider is that Jesus refers to himself as “the very stone
which the builders rejected,” which becomes the cornerstone (Matt. 21:42). If
Jesus was trying to make a subtle theological argument based on the alleged
difference in meaning between “small rock” and “big rock,” he certainly seems
to undercut it when he refers to himself as a “stone,” using the word lithos. The
obvious conclusion is that he was never making such a distinction, but instead
meant exactly what a first-century speaker would understand him to mean: “You
are Rock, and upon this rock I will build my church.”
Did Jesus Say These Words in Greek?
The whole argument about what Jesus meant in saying Petros and then petra
presupposes that Jesus said these words to Peter in Greek. But we know that this
isn’t true. Although the New Testament was written in Greek, it records and
translates conversations that would have been primarily in Aramaic. But how can
we know for certain that Matthew 16 was in Aramaic, rather than Hebrew or
Greek? There are three ways. First, because Jesus’ “denoting of Peter’s father by
bar-Jona,” which is a Semitic expression, not a Greek one.
268 Second, because St.
Paul nearly exclusively refers to Peter as Cephas (pronounced like “Kephas,” not
like “Sephas”), which is a transliteration of the Aramaic Kefa.
269 Why would he
translate a Greek name like Petros into Aramaic and then transliterate it back to
Greek?
The third reason why we know that the new name was originally given in
Aramaic is that St. John tells us so. “Jesus looked at him, and said, ‘So you are
Simon the son of John? You shall be called Cephas’ (which means Peter)” (John
1:42). John’s account here is important for harmonizing the New Testament,
because he’s letting us know that when Paul speaks of “Cephas,” it’s the same
guy whom the Evangelists call “Petros,” or Peter. And John is clear that Simon’s
name is originally Aramaic, and is translated into Greek as Petros.
Why does this matter? Because the original name Jesus gave Peter means
“rock.” D.A. Carson explains that “the Aramaic which underlies the Greek,
means ‘(massive) rock.’”
270 So Jesus didn’t actually say “Petros . . . petra,” but
seems to have said “kepha . . . kepha.” Cullman notes that “the pun can be fully
appreciated only in Aramaic, which has the same word kepha both times, not
petros [and] petra as in Greek.”
271
In other words, “You are Rock, and on this
rock, I will build my church.”
But if the Aramaic says kepha both times, why doesn’t Matthew say petra both
times? Because, unlike Aramaic or English, Greek words have genders. It’s
common to hear Catholics say Matthew chose to translate Peter’s name as Petros
because petra is feminine, and he didn’t want to give him a girl’s name. But that’s
not quite right. By the time Matthew wrote his Gospel, everyone knew Peter as
Petros. When the angel appears to Cornelius, he tells him to “send men to Joppa,
and bring one Simon who is called Peter [Petros]” (Acts 10:5). Paul refers to him
either as Cephas (from the Aramaic) or as Petros (Gal. 2:7–8). Most importantly,
Petros is how St. Peter introduces himself in 1 Peter 1:1 and 2 Peter 1:1. In that
case, why not use petros both times? Because petros was no longer a regular part of
ordinary Greek vocabulary.
272 As noted above, in the dozens of references to
rocks and stones in the New Testament, we find lithos used 60 times, petra used
15 other times, and petros never used at all, except as a name for Peter. By the
time St. Matthew writes his Gospel, Petros is how Peter introduces himself, but
petros isn’t a commonly used word for rock anymore, so Matthew translates the
Aramaic using the best options open to him: by using the commonly used Greek
name for Peter and the commonly used Greek word for a large rock.
All of this is to say that the most accurate English translation of Matthew 16:18
would be, “And I tell you, you are Rock, and on this rock I will build my
church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.”
273 Rendered that way,
it’s transparent that the “rock” in both cases is Simon Peter, Jesus’ addressee. It’s
understandable why this meaning wasn’t as transparent to those, like St.
Augustine, who spoke neither Greek nor Aramaic. But this is one area in which
centuries of scholarship around the Greek and Aramaic, around the Jewish
meaning to these phrases, and around the structure of the passage have actually
proven helpful in moving scholars toward a consensus that yes, Peter is the rock
upon which Jesus built the Church.
CHAPTER 10.
YOU ARE PETER
PERHAPS YOU’RE unconvinced by the prior chapter about the “rock” being St.
Peter, or still uncertain. That’s fine! There’s a reason why scholars favor the
reading I just described, and it’s got a wealth of biblical and patristic support, but
it’s also true that great saints have interpreted the “rock” in a different way. Let’s
set that question aside now, because there’s a lot more in this passage that often
gets overlooked as everyone focuses on the meaning of “rock.” Even if you
elided over the “rock” section entirely, you would still have Jesus saying to Peter,
“Blessed are you, Simon bar-Jona!” ascribing his confession of faith to divine
revelation, and giving him the keys to the kingdom and the power to bind and
loose sins. And these parts of the passage have the great advantage that they are
unmistakably said to, and about, Simon Peter. So let’s see what else this passage
has to tell us.
The Four Models of Church Governance
In ascending order of polity, there are essentially only four models of Church
governance: congregational, presbyterial, episcopal, and papal.
274 The lowest two
of these polities are democratic, as “democratic ecclesiologies typically result in
congregational or representative churches with no bishops (e.g., the
Presbyterian).”
275 The first of these, congregational governance, is “direct
government of the church by the people who make up the congregation,” and it
“comes close to being pure democracy in action.”
276 Nearly all Baptist churches
are congregational. Presbyterian congregations are “governed by a group of
presbyters elected by the congregation and known as the session.”
277 Without
denying the legitimate authority of the laity, presbyterianism argues for a higher
authority. If congregationalism is “pure democracy,” presbyterianism is akin to
republican democracy.
Above this is episcopal governance, “the form of church government that is
carried out by means of bishops.”
278
In American Episcopalianism, bishops are
elected, but in England, they’re “designated.”
279 The importance here is not only
that authority resides with a smaller group of leaders, but that this is top-down
leadership. Continuing the political metaphor, this model is akin to something
like an aristocracy, not in the pejorative sense of “snob,” but in the original sense
in which Aristotle used the term: as “rule of the few (but of more than one
person).”
280
The most hierarchical is the papal model found in the Catholic Church.
Although there are various levels of authority, the buck stops with one man, the
pope. This understanding of Church governance is expressly monarchical, and
not simply in a metaphorical way. As one political science textbook describes it:
“A truly global church with a hierarchical structure headquartered in its own
sovereign nation (Vatican City), the Catholic Church is literally the oldest
continuously functioning institution in the world.”
281
From an American perspective, this monarchical character of the Catholic
Church has always been something of an embarrassment. Liberal Catholics like
Paul Lakeland lament (and not without cause) that “it is ironic that a culture of
participatory democracy like that of the United States should be served by a
group of bishops who collectively seem to be allergic to the democratic
process.”
282 The advantages of a representative and democratic system are
relatively clear to most of us in the West, and the pitfalls of clericalism, secrecy,
cronyism, and a lack of accountability are painfully clear at present in the Catholic
Church in America and around the world. What may be less clear are the
advantages of a hierarchical system, or the disadvantages of a democratic church.
Fortunately, Jesus seems to highlight them in his conversation at Caesarea
Philippi.
Consider the discussion in light of the alternative models of church governance.
Jesus’ first question is, as it were, a democratic one: “Who do men say that the
Son of man is?” (Matt. 16:13). Right away, the problem becomes clear, as the
apostles respond, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others
Jeremiah or one of the prophets” (14). Left to our own devices, we are prone to
come to contradictory theological opinions. This is true not just of the crowds in
general, but of Christians as well. These contradictory opinions are not from the
people who believed Jesus was a charlatan or a false prophet. It was those who
believed in him who still weren’t sure just what they believed about him or who
they thought he was.
Martin Luther taught that “nothing whatever is left obscure or ambiguous” in
the Bible, but instead that “all things that are in Scripture, are by the Word
brought forth into the clearest light, and proclaimed to the whole world.”
283 The
idea is simple—Scripture is so clear that we don’t need the pope, or the Church,
or Tradition, or anything else to interpret its meaning. But if this were true, we
should find all serious Christians in a single denomination and in total agreement
on doctrine. At the very least, we should expect, as time went on, to find fewer
and fewer Protestant denominations. But we see the exact opposite: as the Bible
becomes easier and easier to access, as theological resources become more
abundant, as a library that would have stunned the scholars of old is available for
free at the fingertips of anyone with a computer or a library card, we find that
there is more disagreement and that the number of denominations is growing
rather than shrinking. “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah” turns out to
be a perennial and inescapable problem. You and I will simply not interpret the
Bible the exact same way. Multiply that disagreement by the world’s 2.18 billion
Christians, and you can see the size and scope of the problem.
Denominationalism is the natural result of a democratic church. There is no
religious authority that all parties trust other than Scripture, and it’s on the
interpretation of Scripture that they disagree. (Failure to grasp this basic
distinction is how you end up with John MacArthur calling biblical
interpretations he disagrees with “unbiblical.”) Those who believe that Jesus is
John the Baptist disagree with those who believe he’s Elijah, or Jeremiah, etc.,
and eventually they’ll part company. The scholars Craig Atwood and Roger
Olson (a Moravian and a Baptist, respectively) have explained that “the old
Reformation slogan of ‘Scripture alone’ produced a cornucopia of denominations
in the United States as ordinary individuals took up the challenge of interpreting
the Bible and judging religious authorities,” leading to “a bewildering variety of
Protestant groups” within America.
284
But it’s not just that the crowds come to contradictory conclusions. They’re also
all wrong. The crowds speculate that Jesus is John the Baptist, or Elijah, or
Jeremiah, or “one of the prophets,” but none of them ventures a guess that he
might be “the Christ,” or the Second Person of the Trinity. In eliciting the
answer to his first question, Jesus shows the folly of the democratic slogan vox
populi, vox dei (the voice of the people is the voice of God). Indeed, the first
recorded instance of this phrase is actually from St. Alcuin of York (735–804)
explaining to Charlemagne what a foolish idea it is:
The people in accordance with divine law are to be led, not followed. And
when witnesses are needed, men of position are to be preferred. Nor are those
to be listened to who are accustomed to say, “The voice of the people is the
voice of God.” For the clamor of the crowd [vulgi] is very close to madness.
285
What makes democracy work in the political realm is that there’s no reason to
believe that any voter, or any politician, or any party has really figured out the
absolute truth in politics.
286 We’re free to disagree because, to some extent, we
know we’re all guessing: guessing at how the politician will be if elected, or how
well the policy will work if passed, etc. But Christianity is built on the idea that
we aren’t just left with our best guesses about God. Instead, God enters history
and reveals himself to us. And so we need not, and should not, be left with just
“some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the
prophets.” It’s possible to know the truth, but it won’t be from the populi.
So much for the democratic idea of church governance. Christ’s second
question is to the Twelve about themselves. Recall again that aristocracy, in its
original meaning, just meant “rule of the few (but of more than one person).”
287
That seems to be a good description of the Twelve, those to whom Christ said,
“You are those who have continued with me in my trials; as my Father
appointed a kingdom for me, so do I appoint for you that you may eat and drink
at my table in my kingdom, and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel”
(Luke 22:28–30). Jesus asks these Christian “aristocrats” about their own views:
“But who do you say that I am?” (Matt. 16:15). The question is addressed to all
twelve of them, and that “you” is in the second-person plural. But whereas
“they” were happy to answer the first question about the crowds (cf. Matt.
16:14), all but one suddenly fall silent when asked for their own views. Were it
not for St. Peter speaking out, guided by divine inspiration, it’s not clear that the
question would have been answered by any of the others.
This apostolic silence is a feature of the Eastern Orthodox Church. As Bishop
Ware explains, “there is in Orthodoxy no one with an equivalent position to the
pope in the Roman Catholic Church.”
288 The highest-ranking bishop, the
Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, has an office that better “resembles that
of the Archbishop of Canterbury in the worldwide Anglican Communion.” The
result is a “decentralized system of independent local Church.”
289 One
consequence of this decentralized system is comparative silence on the theological
and moral challenges buffeting the Church. After the eleventh-century schism
between the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, there are no
more councils within Orthodoxy that are recognized by all the Orthodox.
Without Peter, the other apostles fall relatively silent. Earlier in the Gospel of
Matthew, Jesus has compassion on the crowds because “they were harassed and
helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matt. 9:36). Without the leadership of a
shepherd, we are not only prone to contentious disputations. We’re also left
unprepared, helpless to handle the challenges we face as a church.
Even today, the Eastern Orthodox Church still “has never defined its official
position on the scriptural canon in any ecumenical or Pan-Orthodox council.”
290
That is, there’s still no official consensus within Orthodoxy as to which books
belong in the Bible. Perhaps needless to say, there are also no clear Orthodox
answers on more recent moral and bioethical questions. On its website, the Greek
Orthodox Church in America’s article on “The Stand of the Orthodox Church
on Controversial Issues” explains that “very few claims to uncontroverted
teaching can be made” on issues like “artificial insemination, artificial inovulation,
in vitro fertilization, sterilization, genetic counseling and genetic screening as well
as genetic engineering” and that the Orthodox are only in “the earliest stages in
the process of dealing with controversial issues.”
291
If the answer to Jesus’ first question showed the difficulties with a purely
democratic system of Church governance, the general silence to his second
question showed the difficulty with a purely-aristocratic polity. What is needed is
one “aristocrat” capable of answering for the rest, one apostle able to speak on
behalf of all of the apostles, even able to speak on behalf of the entire Church.
And this is exactly what we find when Simon Peter answers on behalf of the rest,
declaring, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16). This is
not simply Simon Peter’s natural impetuousness. It is instead his openness to the
promptings of providence. As Jesus says in reply, “Blessed are you, Simon barJona! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in
heaven” (16:17).
This is not to say that Peter is all that the Church needs—only that his
individual role is integral. Christ calls all twelve, but the Father gives the answer
through one of them in particular. Long before the Great Schism between
Catholicism and Orthodoxy, this was expressed in a beautiful way in the East.
We see a strong affirmation of the papacy from St. John Chrysostom (349–407),
who refers to Peter as “the chosen one of the apostles, the mouth of the disciples,
the leader of the band,” into whose hands Jesus places “the chief authority among
the brethren.” But the nuanced beauty of John’s expression is lost in the
translation from Greek. Behind the “leader of the band” language is the Greek
word coryphaeus, which referred to the chorus leader in ancient Greek theater.
The role was a complex one:
The leader of the chorus, or coryphaeus, had several roles that required him to be
a skilled dancer and musician. He assisted with rehearsals and arranged the
chorus in formation. As the lead dancer, he cued the chorus to enter the stage
and begin the dance. Onstage he tapped his feet to keep time. Sometimes he
was given a short solo in the dithyramb.
292
The task of the coryphaeus was a difficult one, and it required a certain humility.
After all, a leader who treated the rest of the chorus as irrelevant (or a threat to his
glory) would fail to lead effectively. And so, Peter is the leader, but one called to
enable the rest of the “chorus” of apostles to rise to new heights of excellence.
That’s the Peter we see here in Matthew 16, answering on behalf of the Twelve,
in such a way that they are all given a new insight into Christ’s glory.
The Rock and the Stumbling Block
By the structure of Matthew 16, Jesus seems to be showing the necessity of the
papal polity over the weaknesses of a silent aristocracy or a self-contradictory
democracy. But he shows the problems with a papal system as well. Immediately
after this, Jesus tells his disciples about how he must suffer, die, and rise from the
dead, and Peter “took him and began to rebuke him, saying, ‘God forbid, Lord!
This shall never happen to you’” (Matt. 16:22). The pope’s attempt to rebuke the
living God does not go well. Jesus says to him, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a
hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men” (23). When
Peter proclaims Jesus as the Christ, it’s because Peter has been led into this by the
Father; when he starts trying to tell Jesus how to conduct his ministry, it’s because
he is thinking as a man rather than being on the side of God.
This complexity in Peter’s character is captured by clever wordplay.
293
Jesus has
just called Peter the “rock.” Now he calls him a skandalon, meaning a
“hindrance,” or better yet, a “stumbling stone.” For “no sooner does Jesus make
Peter the rock of his Church than Peter makes himself a stumbling stone to Jesus.
The figurative sense of ‘stone’ in skandalon stands in direct contrast to Peter as
‘rock’ and foundation of the Church.”
294 Peter is both the rock upon which Jesus
will build the Church and (through the sinfulness of Peter and all of his
successors) that rock on the path that scandalizes the faithful, causing them to
stumble. Indeed, it’s from this word skandalon that we get the English scandal. So
Peter is at once both the rock and the stumbling stone.
In a 1969 essay, Fr. Joseph Ratzinger says we are too “accustomed to make a
clear distinction between Peter the rock and Peter the denier of Christ,” with
Peter as denier of Christ being the pre-Easter Peter and Peter as the rock being
the post-Pentecost Peter, “the Peter of whom we have constructed a singularly
idealistic image.”
295 For in reality, Ratzinger says, “he was at times both of these.”
After all, it was the “pre-Easter” Peter who proclaimed the beautiful words,
“Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we have
believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God” when
other disciples were abandoning Christ (John 6:68–69). On the other hand, it was
the “post-Easter” Peter whom St. Paul had to rebuke in Galatia for undermining
his own teaching about the equality of the Gentile Christians (Gal. 2:11–14). The
future pope concluded, “Has it not been thus throughout the history of the
Church that the pope, the successor of Peter has been at once Petra and Skandalon
—both the rock of God and a stumbling block?”
296
Understanding this complex dimension of both Peter and his successors is
critical to understanding the real (as opposed to exaggerated) case for the papacy.
Consider John Calvin’s arguments against a papal interpretation of Luke 22:
The thing is too childish in itself to need an answer: for if they insist on
applying everything that was said to Peter to the successors of Peter, it will
follow, that they are all Satans, because our Lord once said to Peter, “Get thee
behind me, Satan, thou art an offense unto me.” It is as easy for us to retort the
latter saying as for them to adduce the former.
297
But this is exactly the point. Jesus doesn’t promise that the popes (or even the
apostles) will be holy or brilliant. But he picks them anyway. As I have written
elsewhere:
Several times in history, the papacy has endured seemingly despite the pope.
We might want a papacy in which every pope is sinless, or at least a future saint.
But the papacy was founded by Jesus, who once said of his handpicked apostles,
“Did I not choose you, the Twelve, and one of you is a devil?” (John 6:70).
298
Too many Catholic arguments in favor of the papacy turn a blind eye to the real
hindrances that popes (past and present) have proven to be in the promulgation of
the gospel. Jesus suffers from no such blindness. God chooses to work through
Peter, despite knowing full well that he’s a hindrance as well as a rock. Winston
Churchill popularized the quip that “democracy is the worst form of government
except for all those other forms that have been tried.”
299 We can likewise
conclude from Matthew 16 that the papacy is the worst form of church
governance . . . except for all those other forms that have been tried.
The Keys to the Kingdom
After Simon confesses Jesus as the Christ, Jesus responds by calling Simon “Peter”
and declaring “on this rock I will build my church.” But then he says, “I will
give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 16:19). Consider that St.
Matthew earlier summarized Jesus’ public ministry by saying he taught, “Repent,
for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (4:17). Now this same Jesus is giving the
keys to that kingdom to one man, Simon Peter (and yes, the grammar is all in the
singular here, lest there be any confusion). What could such a gift possibly mean?
According to Luther, and many Protestant exegetes after him, very little. In
response to those who say the keys are given to Peter alone, Luther points out
that the binding and loosing is given to the whole Church in Matthew 18.
Assuming (without explanation) that the keys and the binding and loosing are the
same gift, Luther concludes that, therefore, “nothing special was given to St.
Peter for his own person.” These days, the Evangelical scholar Robert Gundry
argues that “the figure of keys represents Jesus’ words just as the figure of bedrock
does,” and “to use the keys will be to teach these words to future disciples.”
300
And “the Great Commission will expand the authority to use these keys to
include the others along with Peter just as [Matt.] 18:18 will also expand the
authority to bind and loosen to include all of them together.”
301
Christ warns against the elders “making void the word of God through your
tradition which you hand on” (Mark 7:13). But what would nullify the word of
God more effectively than to say Jesus means nothing by giving these gifts to
Peter? This exegesis makes the rock, the keys, and the binding and loosing
redundant, so that the three gifts are really just one (the ability to proclaim the
gospel), and then views Jesus as giving gifts to the whole Church that render his
gifts to Peter redundant. A helpful question: If this passage were removed from
the Bible, what would be lost? If the exegesis of Luther, Gundry, and so many
other Protestants is correct, seemingly nothing.
Far better is the exegesis of the early Methodist minister Joseph Benson, who
saw in the keys
a significant emblem of the power of opening and shutting, or binding and
loosing, of letting inferiors into an office, or putting them out of it; whence the
delivering of the keys of a house or city in a person’s hands signifies the giving
him the power and possession of it, or the confirming to him of such a grant.
302
To better understand the meaning of the “keys,” though we need to recover
the Jewish backdrop to Jesus’ words. For this, we should turn to the book of
Isaiah, where God says to the self-serving Shebna:
I will thrust you from your office, and you will be cast down from your station.
In that day I will call my servant Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, and I will clothe
him with your robe, and will bind your girdle on him, and will commit your
authority to his hand; and he shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and
to the house of Judah. And I will place on his shoulder the key of the house of
David; he shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall
open. And I will fasten him like a peg in a sure place, and he will become a
throne of honor to his father’s house.(Isa. 22:19–23).
If we want to understand what it means for Jesus to give the keys to Peter, it
might help to understand what it means for God to give the key to “Eliakim the
son of Hilkiah.” We are assisted in understanding this by looking at the Targums,
which are “the Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible done by Jews during
the rabbinic period.” To the Aramaic-speaking Jewish congregations, “the
Targum is Scripture.”
303 The Targum of Isaiah explains that this is “the key of the
sanctuary house and the rule of the house of David.”
304
In other words, what’s
promised in the bestowing of the key upon Eliakim is at once royal and priestly.
The first-century Jewish historian Josephus says Eliakim was “the high priest,”
for reasons we’ll get to in a moment.
305 But it’s clear that Eliakim is not only the
high priest; he is also an important part of the royal government. In 2 Kings 18,
the Assyrian king Sennacherib and his troops come up to Jerusalem, and “when
they called for the king, there came out to them Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, who
was over the household, and Shebnah the secretary, and Joah the son of Asaph,
the recorder” (2 Kings 18:18). It’s Eliakim who acts in the person of the king,
with the now-demoted Shebnah and the recorder Joah (Asaph’s son) alongside
him.
306
This understanding of Eliakim as a sort of priest-king is shocking, but as the
University of Copenhagen’s Frederik Poulsen notes, the portrait of Eliakim in
Isaiah 22 is itself “astonishing,” since “as has often been noticed, the royal and
priestly imagery brings the character closer to a king or high priest than a
steward.”
307 Poulsen highlights six important details we might otherwise miss.
First, God refers to Eliakim as “my servant,” a term of honor usually reserved for
the religious and political leaders of Israel. Second, there’s the imagery of the
“robe” and the “girdle,” which were the priestly vestments (see Exod. 28:4–5,40;
Lev. 8:7). Third, Eliakim is to be “a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to
the house of Judah” (Isa. 22:21). Fourth, “the key of the house of David” is to be
placed “on his shoulder.” Both the government upon the shoulders and the
image of fatherhood are royal images, evoking the coming messianic king,
promised earlier in the book with the words that “the government will be upon
his shoulder, and his name will be called ‘Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace’” (9:6).
God promises to fasten Eliakim “like a peg in a sure place” (Isa. 22:23), a
symbol of security for the land and the people. The dependence of “the whole
weight of his father’s house, the offspring and issue” is compared to “every small
vessel, from the cups to all the flagons” hanging from Eliakim the peg.
308 This
again is priestly imagery; upon the table of the bread of presence in the temple
were “the vessels of pure gold” and the “bowls and flagons with which to pour
libations” (Exod. 37:16). Finally, in the most obviously royal language, he is
described as “a throne of honor to his father’s house” (Isa. 22:23).
309
How do we make sense of this picture of Eliakim, given that we know he is not
the king but follows orders from the true king, Hezekiah (2 Kings 18:36–37)?
Here, we must dig deeper into the Old Testament. After Joseph interprets
Pharaoh’s dream, Pharaoh responds by declaring, “You shall be over my house,
and all my people shall order themselves as you command; only as regards the
throne will I be greater than you” (Gen. 41:40). Joseph is ritually enrobed and
made second to Pharaoh, and he seems to be in charge of much of the actual dayto-day administration of the empire (cf. Gen. 41:42–43). So it is not an
exaggeration to say Pharaoh “set him over all the land of Egypt” (Gen. 41:43),
even though Pharaoh’s throne remains greater. Likewise, when Jotham was coregent alongside his father Azariah, before he became king, he too was described
as ruling “over the household, governing the people of the land” (2 Kings 15:5).
So it is with Eliakim: he is the one “who was over the household” of David, but
he is such as a vicar of King Hezekiah.
And so it is with Peter, who is given the keys, not simply to the “household of
David,” but to the kingdom of heaven. Peter testifies that we “are a chosen race,
a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people” (1 Pet. 2:9). We all share,
in some sense, in the royal and the priestly office of Christ. But if Peter is the new
Eliakim, and the recipient of the keys, then Jesus is making him both the top
priest in the Church and its top administrator, both offering sacrifice for the
kingdom and governing its earthly affairs.
310
To Bind and to Loose
What does it mean when Jesus gives Peter the ability to “bind on earth” and to
“loose on earth” (Matt. 16:19)? Mark Allan Powell, New Testament professor at
Trinity Lutheran Seminary, points out that Martin Luther and others “thought
the terms referred to the church’s authority to forgive or retain sins.” But as the
Jewish Encyclopedia notes, Luther’s interpretation was “quite different” from the
“Judaic and ancient view.”
311
It’s true that Jesus also gives that authority to the
Church (in the person of the Twelve) in John 20:22–23, when he breathes the
Holy Spirit upon them after the resurrection. But that’s not going on here.
Instead, as Powell explains, “a majority of scholars now recognize that the terms
‘to bind’ and ‘to loose’ are best understood with reference to a practice of
determining the application of scriptural commandments for contemporary
situations.”
312
To see what “binding” and “loosing” meant in a first-century context, look at
what the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (A.D. 37–100) had to say about the
Pharisees under Queen Alexandra. When the queen came to power around 76
B.C., Josephus tells us that a group of “Pharisees joined themselves to her, to
assist her in the government.” Little by little, they became “the real administrators
of the public affairs: they banished and reduced whom they pleased, they bound
and loosed [men] at their pleasure; and, to say it all at once, they had the
enjoyment of the royal authority” to the extent that the queen “governed other
people, and the Pharisees governed her.”
313
This authority of governance included with it the ability to determine what was
or wasn’t acceptable theologically, morally, and ceremonially. The Babylonian
Talmud thus encourages readers to “procure for thyself an understanding heart to
hear the words of those who declare unclean and the words of those who declare
clean, the words of those who bind and the words of those who loose, the words
of those who disqualify and the words of those who pronounce ceremonially
pure.”
314
It was an enormous authority over the moral lives of the people. And it
seems clear from Matthew 23 that this is exactly what Jesus has in view, for he
says (Matt. 23:2–4):
The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; so practice and observe
whatever they tell you, but not what they do; for they preach, but do not
practice. They bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men’s
shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with their finger.
It’s telling that the Pharisees bind but don’t loose. They restrict, but they don’t
permit. But even as they abuse this authority, Jesus recognizes that they have the
authority, because they “sit on Moses’ seat.” And it’s striking that in the
theological debates between the Pharisees and the Sadducees described in Acts
23:8, the Pharisees were right on all counts. This concept of the seat (cathedra, in
Latin) is critical for understanding this grant of authority: it’s not about personal
holiness or orthodoxy, but about protecting the faith of the people from
corruption.
There is some scholarly debate about whether the binding and loosing should
be understood as giving Peter the authority to define doctrine or the authority to
communicate and excommunicate, but there’s no reason to oppose these two.
Gundry explains that “in rabbinic literature, binding and loosing usually signify
interpretative decisions of prohibition and permission; but they also signify
condemnation and acquittal in disciplining members of the synagogue who
disobey the interpretative decisions.”
315 After all, the ability to define orthodoxy
and the ability to police heresy go hand in hand.
How Might a Protestant Respond?
Yale’s Richard H. Hiers sums things up neatly when he says Protestant
commentators on Matthew 16 “tend to argue that the sayings either are
inauthentic, since found only in Matthew, or else must surely mean something
other than that Jesus bestowed sacerdotal authority on Peter or other apostles.”
316
Hiers himself is no exception: he argues that “the terms ‘binding’ and ‘loosing’
refer to the binding of Satan or satanic beings (e.g., demons) and the loosing of
such beings or their erstwhile victims.”
317 Besides the fact that, even by Hiers’s
admission, neither Matthew 16 nor Matthew 18 has anything to do with demons
or exorcisms, there’s another glaring difficulty: why would anyone want to loose a
demon? As Joel Marcus notes, Hiers has no good answer to this question: “At
one point he asserts that the reference is not to the demon but to the human
being who is loosed when the demon is bound, while at another point he
interprets the loosing as referring to the demon, but as being totally
hypothetical.”
318
A more plausible and popular theory is articulated by Malcolm Yarnell, who
teaches systematic theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Yarnell cites Martin Luther as support for the idea that “although the preacher of
the Word is instrumental and necessary, the work of binding and loosing is
reserved for God.”
319 You might notice that this is a strange conclusion to draw
from the promise that “whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and
whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” But that’s because this
exegesis isn’t really starting with the biblical text. It’s starting with a theological
presupposition and forcing it onto the text, even where the text seems to say the
exact opposite. The support Yarnell cites is Luther’s 1545 screed Against the
Roman Papacy, an Institution of the Devil, in which he says, “To retain or forgive
sins is the work of the divine majesty alone.”
320
(Contrast this with Jesus’ words in
John 20:22–23, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are
forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”)
So how can these exegetes come to conclusions so much at odds with what the
text actually says? The first way is by reversing the meaning of the passage by
changing the wording. Most Bibles, including Protestant translations like the
KJV, NKJV, RSV, NRSV, ESV, NIV, and NLT, have the verbiage in the future
tense: that whatever Peter binds on earth will be bound in heaven. But there are a
handful of Protestant scholars who argue that this should actually read that
whatever Peter binds on earth “shall have been bound” to ensure that “heaven’s
prior decision is later ratified by the church.”
321
Jonathan Leeman explains that
“both translations may be technically legitimate, but Protestants have feared that a
simple future translation suggests that the church can confer salvation.”
322
In other
words, it’s Protestant theology driving the translation of the Scripture.
For a while, the Protestant argument seemed like a strong one, grammatically,
on the basis that the verbiage wasn’t in the future tense (“I will do it”), but in the
future perfect tense (“I will have done it”). But the future perfect isn’t actually
what is being used here. Indeed, the future perfect tense isn’t actually used anywhere
in the New Testament.
323
Instead, the verbiage here uses what’s called the
“periphrastic future perfect.” Ernest DeWitt Burton, the Protestant biblical
scholar who served as president of the University of Chicago, wrote an entire
book on the “moods and tenses” of New Testament Greek and found only four
instances of the “periphrastic future perfect” being used. In each case, the verb
was simply “expressing a future state.”
324
In other words, the traditional rendering
“whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven” is the one most consistent
with the language of the New Testament.
But even while admitting that the grammatical case was worse than was once
thought, Protestant exegetes like Grant R. Osborne continue to cling to the
“shall have been bound” translation for theological reasons:
The more recent appraisal of the perfect tense shows that it often does not have
past time sense but rather is stative in force, thus emphasizing the present and
future aspect (“will be bound/loosed”). So some make God’s decision
subsequent, thus ratifying Peter’s/the church’s decision. Surely, this cannot be
correct, as if God is bound to accept the church’s decisions.
325
Osborne is refreshingly clear. He holds to his position not because of what the
Bible actually says. He holds to it because he refuses to accept even the possibility
that Jesus might give such an audacious gift to Peter or the Church. Yarnell
likewise makes his argument on purely theological, rather than grammatical or
scriptural grounds:
If a person is loosed from sin upon earth through faith in the proclamation of a
Christian disciple, it is because God is applying his grace at a spiritual level. It is
only the disorderly hubris like that of some medieval popes that would demand
that a spiritual leader on earth automatically obligates divine application and
human salvation.
326
D.A. Carson favors a future perfect reading but admits that “scholars have at
times tried to bleed a bit too much theology out of their grammatical
conclusions.”
327 The attempts to retranslate Matthew 16:19 and 18:18 are
transparently motivated by a desire to preclude the papal reading. But Carson also
recognizes that this motivated retranslating doesn’t succeed:
For instance, if the tense is translated as a future (“shall be bound”), the passage
could be taken to justify some form of extreme sacerdotalism without
unambiguous defense elsewhere in the NT. But if it is translated as a future
perfect (“shall have been bound”), it could be taken to support the notion that
the disciple must therefore enjoy infallible communication from God in every
question of “binding and loosing,” a communication that is the role of the socalled charismatic gifts.
328
Carson is wrong to think infallibility involves some kind of special
“communication from God,” but he’s right to point out that whether you say the
pope will always agree with God or that God will always agree with the pope,
you haven’t really avoided a reading suggestive of infallibility. And it’s possible
that the whole chicken-egg debate is meaningless, as well, since it treats God as
an act inside time, rather than acting from all eternity.
329
Given everything Carson points out about the weakness of the Protestant
arguments against the heavenly ratification of binding and loosing, how does he
avoid the conclusion himself? Simple: by assuming that Jesus doesn’t mean this
literally. As he puts it, “to press the ‘whatever’ absolutely not only misunderstands
the context but fails to reckon with Jesus’ tendency to use absolutist language,
even when he cannot possibly mean to be taken that way.”
330
In other words,
when Jesus says, “Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven,” he
doesn’t really mean “whatever.” R.J. Rushdoony argues that “it is the law of
God, not the church which binds or looses men, and only as the church faithfully
declares the law is there any true binding or loosing. Whenever the church
attempts to bind or loose men’s conscience and conduct apart from the law-word
of God, it is itself bound, that is, it is itself under judgment.”
331 Or as Benjamin
Merkle says, “The church’s binding and loosing is only authoritative when it
corresponds with the divine will.”
332
In other words, the Church is right if it happens to agree with God. You’ll
notice that this is less of a promise and more a basic logical axiom. Suppose
someone tells you, “You’re going to watch two people perform. The one you
rate highest shall be the winner.” That’s a pretty clear delegation of authority:
you’re being made the judge of some kind of competition. But let’s say this
someone comes back and says, “Oh, by that we mean, the one you rate highest
will have already won, and that’s why you’ll have rated him the highest.” At this
point, you may conclude that your time is being wasted, but at least the person is
praising you by assuming that you have the good taste to spot a winner from a
loser, even if your vote doesn’t actually turn out to count. But now let’s say that
this someone comes back and says, “Well, actually, your decision as to who wins
and who loses is ‘authoritative’ only if it matches up with what the judges already
decided.” At this point, you would be right to ask, “What on earth did you mean
when you said, ‘The one you rate highest shall be the winner’?” Now not only
are you not the judge, but you’re not even a reliable observer. The original words
to you have been stripped of any meaning.
So it is here. In a desire to avoid reading Jesus as giving Peter real, binding
authority, these Protestant exegetes have redefined Christ’s promise to him in
Matthew 16:19 into meaninglessness. If all Jesus meant was that Peter’s decisions
are right when they correspond with the divine will, that’s another way of saying
Peter is right when he’s right and wrong when he’s wrong. If that was all Jesus
meant to say, he could have saved his breath, and St. Matthew could have saved
his ink.
Instead, the full weight of the grammar, the context of the passage being a
blessing, and the meaning of these words from a Jewish framework all point to
one thing: that Jesus gave to Peter the ability to define the boundaries of the
Church, including both who is within the boundaries and which beliefs are within
the boundaries. But these Protestant critics are right to recognize that this
interpretation entails Jesus promising Peter infallibility. That’s true, so we’ll turn
to that next
CHAPTER 11.
WHATEVER YOU BIND ON EARTH
ONCE WE UNDERSTAND Jesus’ words to Peter in the framework of their Jewish
background, the meaning of the binding and loosing become clear. The Lutheran
professor Tord Fornberg explains that “Peter stands out as a kind of Chief Rabbi,
who binds and loosens, in the sense of declaring something to be forbidden or
permitted.”
333
In support of this interpretation is the promise Jesus gives with the
authority. Not only is Peter given the ability to bind and loose, but “whatever
you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth
shall be loosed in heaven” (Matt. 16:19).
This promise of heavenly ratification is extremely Jewish. Hans Bayer, a
Presbyterian theologian, concedes that in rabbinic usage, “binding” and
“loosening” signify that “various decisions especially of the Sanhedrin,” primarily
interpreting the law or including or excluding members from the community,
were “viewed as subsequently sanctioned by God.”
334 As Rabbi Kauffman Kohler
explains:
The various [rabbinical] schools had the power “to bind and to loose”; that is,
to forbid and to permit; and they could bind any day by declaring it a fast-day.
This power and authority, vested in the rabbinical body of each age or in the
Sanhedrin . . . received its ratification and final sanction from the celestial court
of justice.
335
For instance, the rabbis taught that the liturgical year was set by the earthly
authorities and that this calendar was then ratified in heaven.
336
It’s within this
context that we can understand the prophet Joel’s admonition to the priests to
“sanctify a fast” and “call a solemn assembly” (Joel 1:13–14). Such an authority
might sound trivial today, but the Jewish people centered their lives on the
liturgical calendar. We get hints of this in the New Testament. When Jesus
returned to Galilee, “the Galileans welcomed him, having seen all that he had
done in Jerusalem at the feast, for they too had gone to the feast” (John 4:45). A
few verses later, Jesus returns to Jerusalem, because “there was a feast of the Jews”
(5:1). The religious leaders capable of setting these feasts thus wielded a
tremendous amount of authority over the daily lives of the people.
This authority wasn’t limited to liturgical determinations. It also included the
ability to settle disputes about the interpretation of Scripture. The Levitical priests
were traditionally the authoritative interpreters of the Torah, which is why God
laments that for “a long time Israel was without the true God, and without a
teaching priest, and without law” (2 Chron. 15:3).
337
If there were questions
about “one kind of legal right and another,” if a case became “too difficult for
you,” then you could bring it to the priests, whereby “you shall consult them,
and they shall declare to you the decision,” and whatever “the decision which
they pronounce to you, you shall do; you shall not turn aside from the verdict
which they declare to you, either to the right hand or to the left” (Deut. 17:8–
13; cf. 2 Chron. 19:8–11). This commandment is shocking, since the language
mirrors the fidelity we owe to God’s own commands: “You shall be careful to do
therefore as the Lord your God has commanded you; you shall not turn aside to
the right hand or to the left” (Deut. 5:32).
The priest, and particularly the high priest, was viewed as being divinely
protected with a sort of infallibility, in the particular context of binding and
loosing. It’s for this reason that, when Jesus and the apostles are arrested, they are
brought before the high priest and the Sanhedrin (John 18:19–40; Acts 5:17–
52).
338 At first blush, this seems to be the most obvious counter-example to the
idea of any sort of high priestly infallibility: how could the high priest Caiaphas
have been infallible in any context, given how he treated Jesus? But that’s not
how the Evangelists saw it. A few chapters earlier, when the Sanhedrin were
debating whether or not to arrest Jesus in the first place, St. John presents the
pivotal moment in this way:
One of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You
know nothing at all; you do not understand that it is expedient for you that one
man should die for the people, and that the whole nation should not perish.”
He did not say this of his own accord, but being high priest that year he
prophesied that Jesus should die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but
to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad (John 11:49–
52).
The Holy Spirit was working through the high priest, enabling him to speak
prophetically, perhaps even in spite of himself, because he was “high priest that
year.” What’s fascinating is that at one and the same moment, you see the evil of
the man and the orthodoxy of what he’s teaching. It was evil of Caiaphas to want
Jesus dead. But it was true (and, John tells us, prophetic!) for him to say Jesus
should die for Israel and the whole people of God.
If Jesus means his words to Peter in the way a Jewish listener would understand
them, then he seems to be giving him something like infallibility, by promising
that the Holy Spirit will work through Peter to ensure that he doesn’t teach
anything contrary to divine law and that his earthly decisions will be ratified in
heaven. To readers who are approaching this from a Protestant background, this
might all seem shocking. Keith Mathison speaks for many a Protestant when he
warns that “if the church is infallible, appeals to history, tradition, and Scripture
are superfluous.”
339 After all, didn’t the Jewish leaders nullify the word of God by
imposing their manmade tradition (Mark 7:13)?
It’s a reasonable objection, but it begs the question. The whole point of
infallibility is that the pope won’t (and can’t!) contradict God, so a question that
begins by asking what happens when he does is a bit like “disproving” the
inerrancy of Scripture by asking, “But what do you do when Scripture is
wrong?” In fact, far from rendering Scripture superfluous, infallibility is the only
way of living out full obedience to what Christ commands in Scripture. That’s a
big claim, but I think that it can be proven through four relatively
uncontroversial points.
Point #1: Christ Demands Church Unity
St. Paul tells the Philippians to “stand firm in one spirit, with one mind striving
side by side for the faith of the gospel,” and to have “the same love, being in full
accord and of one mind” (Phil. 1:27, 2:2). He’s clearly calling them to a unity
that is both exterior and interior. And that’s Jesus’ prayer for all of us, as we see
from John 17:20–23:
I do not pray for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their
word, that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee,
that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent
me. The glory which thou hast given me I have given to them, that they may
be one even as we are one, I in them and thou in me, that they may become
perfectly one, so that the world may know that thou hast sent me and hast loved
them even as thou hast loved me.
There are a few things worth noting here. First, this is one of Jesus’ final prayers
before his passion—that’s how important it is. Second, as far as I can tell, it’s the
only time he explicitly prays for us, the future generations who come to believe
through the testimony of the apostles. Third, the only thing he prays for is that
we’ll be united. Fourth, he describes this unity as crucial to the success of the
gospel. We need to be one, not just because it feels good to be united, but “so
that the world may know that thou hast sent me and hast loved them even as
thou hast loved me.” Conversely, then, when we Christians are at each other’s
throats, we make nonbelievers skeptical of Jesus’ claims, and we even make them
doubt God’s love for his people. Christian unity, in other words, is not some
optional bonus, or a goal to be achieved once we’re done with bringing everyone
to Christ. It’s a necessary condition for the success of the Great Commission.
And to be sure, Christian unity is broader than the healing of the scandal of
denominationalism: two Catholics who hate each other are acting contrary to the
gospel as well. But certainly we can say that, at a minimum, having multiple
denominations teaching contrary doctrines is a failure to live out what Christ
desires for his Church. The Methodist scholar Ben Witherington is right to say
that Jesus’ words here “raise disturbing questions of whether the theology of
denominationalism, which, after all, is a late invention caused originally by the
Protestant Reformation, is biblically valid and whether the modern ecumenical
movement is the way to bring about church unity.”
340
Factionalism is destructive, both personally and collectively. On a personal level,
Paul warns that enmity, strife, dissension, and “party spirit” are “works of the
flesh,” and that “those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God”
(Gal. 5:19–21). But it’s not just ourselves whom we’re destroying, or our
evangelical mission. A church that tears itself apart has little to offer the world and
ultimately cannot endure. In Greek mythology, Erysichthon dies after being
cursed with an insatiable hunger that causes him to devour everything around
him, until eventually the “wretch consumed his body / feeding upon a shrinking
self.”
341 To take a more Christian image, the Church is “the household of God”
(1 Tim. 3:15), but “if a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot
stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand”
(Mark 3:24–25).
Point #2: Christ Demands Orthodoxy
Jesus’ message is bracingly clear: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). So an ecumenism that obscures
or minimizes the truth obscures Christ and makes the way to the Father harder
for searchers to find. The consequences are fatal. St. Peter warns that “there will
be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even
denying the master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift
destruction,” and that “because of them the way of truth will be reviled” (2 Pet.
2:1–2). Peter describes the ones creating heresy and division as “bold and willful,”
saying they “despise authority” (10).
St. Paul likewise tells Titus that a bishop “must hold firm to the sure word as
taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to
confute those who contradict it,” and that Titus himself must “teach what befits
sound doctrine” (Titus 1:9, 2:1). Paul warns him that “there are many
insubordinate men, empty talkers and deceivers, especially the circumcision
party,” who “must be silenced, since they are upsetting whole families by
teaching for base gain what they have no right to teach.” He instructs Titus to
“rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith” (1:10–13).
Point #3: This Creates a Catch-22 for Protestantism
Given that, as we’ve just seen, Christ calls his people to both unity and truth, is it
possible for Protestantism to answer this call? A 2017 article in the Atlantic asks,
“Why can’t Christians get along, 500 years after the Reformation?” and answers
that “while relations among Christians are far more peaceful today than they were
500 years ago, the tension between theological particularity and yearning for
universal fellowship is still just as complicated.”
342
In other words, the last 500
years have shown the inherent pitfall of denominationalism: constantly pitting
truth and unity against one another. Ben Witherington, the Methodist theologian
I quoted earlier, does a good job of showing that Protestantism must inevitably
choose to disobey Christ in one or the other of these commandments:
There is always a tension in the Church between unity among believers and
truth as it is understood and held by believers. Protestantism has tended to
uphold Truth, with a capital T, while intoning unity with a lowercase u, with
the end result that Protestant churches and denominations have proved endlessly
divisive and factious. On the other hand, Catholicism and Orthodoxy have held
up Unity with a capital U, and at least from a Protestant viewpoint this has been
at the expense of truth. In other words, no part of the church has adequately
gotten the balance between truth and unity right, it would seem.
343
If there’s no such thing as an infallible authority to interpret the Bible, then
we’re all left to interpret it to the best of our own abilities. And no two Christian
denominations (indeed, perhaps no two Christians), left to their own devices,
interpret the Bible the exact same way. If they did, there probably wouldn’t be
distinct denominations.
In the early days of the Reformation, there were Reformers who were
convinced that if everyone just read the Bible, unshackled by the authority of the
Catholic Church, the plain truths of Christianity would be transparent for all to
see. Martin Luther declares to Erasmus that “if you speak of the external clearness
[of Scripture], nothing whatever is left obscure or ambiguous; but all things that
are in the scriptures, are by the Word brought forth into the clearest light, and
proclaimed to the whole world.”
344 Coupled with this external clarity, Luther
argues, is an internal clarity, brought about by the Holy Spirit, since “the Spirit is
required to understand the whole of the Scripture and every part of it.”
345
In
other words, instead of the Holy Spirit leading the Church corporate, or the
leadership of the Church, into the fullness of truth, Luther’s view is that the Holy
Spirit leads each individual believer to understand every part of Scripture. In place
of papal infallibility, Luther has declared himself (and all Spirit-led believers)
infallible.
If Luther is correct, we should find exactly one Protestant denomination, since
all of the Spirit-led believers will naturally agree on everything. But of course, we
find the exact opposite. The Evangelical group Focus on the Family explains on
its website that the result of the Protestant Reformation “was a veritable
explosion of new ideas and conflicting opinions about the interpretation of
various biblical passages.”
346 Most of these Protestants agree that we should
believe what’s taught within the Bible alone and even agree with each other that
there are only sixty-six books that make up this Bible. But they can’t agree on the
meaning of these texts. Five hundred years after the fact, Protestants sometimes
imagine that the controversy at the heart of the Reformation was over whether
or not to follow the Bible. It wasn’t. It was about how to interpret the Bible.
Martin Luther himself acknowledged that “both we and our opponents, the pope
and the other sects, are appealing to the same Scripture and laying claim to one
gospel and word of God.”
347
Centuries earlier, St. Jerome warned the heretics of his day not to “flatter
themselves if they think they have Scripture authority for their assertions, since
the devil himself quoted Scripture, and the essence of the scriptures is not the
letter, but the meaning.”
348 You can twist Scripture to support almost any
position, and even readers trying their best to understand the meaning won’t
always do so accurately unassisted. Scripture itself bears witness to this fact. St.
Peter warns that St. Paul’s writings have “some things in them hard to
understand” (2 Pet. 3:16). When St. Philip approaches the Ethiopian eunuch
reading the book of Isaiah, he asks him, “Do you understand what you are
reading?” to which the man humbly replies, “How can I, unless some one guides
me?” (Acts 8:30–31). The eunuch was not arrogant enough to assume that the
Holy Spirit was going to internally guide him personally into all truth. He needed
the guidance of the visible Church.
Left without the guidance of the Church, these conflicting Protestant sects
eventually hardened into the denominational families we know today. Catholics
often misunderstand Protestants by assuming they believe everything their
respective denominations teach. But the truth is much stranger than that. Baptists
don’t go around preaching, for instance, that their particular church has
everything right. Even moderately self-aware Protestants will admit that their
denominations may well be wrong on a wide swath of issues. As Focus on the
Family notes, the denominations we know today emerged simply as “a collection
of people who more or less agreed on what they considered the major points of
the faith.”
349 Even the question of which are the “major points of the faith” has
proven endlessly divisive. Is it important to believe in (or reject) infant baptism?
Young-earth Creationism? Saturday (or Sunday) worship? The dual natures of
Christ? Pacifism? Dispensationalism? Trinitarian theology? Male-only ordination?
Sola fide? A particular eucharistic theology? And most importantly, who gets to
decide?
350
In practice, it’s up to each individual believer, even within his own
denomination, to decide how much truth to sacrifice for unity or how much
unity to sacrifice for truth.
The point here isn’t merely historical. Suppose that a Baptist, after carefully
studying Scripture, concludes that his own denomination is wrong to reject infant
baptism. And suppose that, at the same time, his Presbyterian neighbor has arrived
at the opposite conclusion. What are they to do? Should they stay in their
original denominations out of respect for Christian unity? Should they switch to
one another’s denominations in pursuit of the truth? Should each of them create
his own denomination, to avoid having to compromise on the truth at all? This
leads to a catch-22. The internal logic of Protestantism is forcing each of these
men to choose either heresy (submitting to teachings that he knows or believes is
false) or schism. Whichever he chooses, he’s disobeying some part of Christ’s call
to unity in the truth.
Nor is this merely a matter of disobedience. It’s also a matter of disbelief. Christ
prays that his followers “may become perfectly one, so that the world may know
that thou hast sent me and hast loved them even as thou hast loved me” (John
17:23). In other words, Christ’s teaching is that the oneness of the Church is an
essential part of the proclamation of the gospel, and “capital U” unity is necessary
for the conversion of the world to “capital T” truth. We cannot believe Christ on
this point and still insist that there is “always a tension” between truth and unity.
Point #4: Infallibility Offers the Only Way Out of This Catch-22
Whether or not you believe that the Church or the pope is infallible, hopefully
you can at least see that if infallibility is true, it solves this apparent contradiction.
Witherington even implicitly concedes this when he describes the tension
between truth and unity as existing within “a Protestant perspective.” If
infallibility is true, then it’s possible to “obey your leaders and submit to them; for
they are keeping watch over your souls, as men who will have to give account”
(Heb. 13:17). If we can know that the official teaching of the Church is true,
then the closer we draw to that teaching, the closer we’ll draw both to the truth
and to one another. If the Protestant view that Witherington describes so well is
unity against truth, the Catholic view is unity in truth.
It’s worth noting that the New Testament clearly presupposes unity in truth.
When Paul writes to the Philippians, he hopes they will “stand firm in one spirit,
with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel,” and “complete
my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and
of one mind” (Phil. 1:27, 2:2). They aren’t forced to choose between “the faith
of the gospel” and being “of one mind.” The two go hand in hand. But without
infallibility, this kind of unity in truth is impossible, since you cannot place that
kind of trust in any merely human leadership. That’s the heart of C.S. Lewis’s
objection to Catholicism, after all, as we saw back in the first chapter:
The real reason I cannot be in communion with you is not my disagreement
with this or that Roman doctrine, but to accept your Church means, not to
accept a given body of doctrine, but to accept in advance any doctrine your
Church hereafter produces. It is like being asked to agree not only to what a
man has said, but what he’s going to say.
351
If you can’t trust that the Church will continue to teach the truth tomorrow,
then you’re unable to enter fully into communion with it, even if you don’t yet
have a theological objection. Lewis’s witness demonstrates this reality. Without
infallibility, we can therefore never have a lasting unity in truth. Yet that’s
precisely what Christ calls us to, and what the New Testament presupposes. So
infallibility doesn’t render the New Testament superfluous. It makes the New
Testament model of truth in unity workable.
The Spirit of Truth
I mention these last four points about unity in truth versus unity against truth to
explain what I understand to be the why behind Jesus’ promise of infallibility. But
it’s worth hearing his promises from his own lips. Unlike the keys, which are
given only to Peter, Jesus gives the infallible “binding and loosing” both to Peter
specifically and to the Church collectively. In addressing controversies among
believers, the highest court of appeal is the Church, and if a sinning brother
“refuses to listen even to the Church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax
collector. Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in
heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matt.
18:17–18).
Couple this with Jesus’ words to the seventy, that “he who hears you hears me,
and he who rejects you rejects me, and he who rejects me rejects him who sent
me.” To the Twelve, he goes farther, promising that “when the Spirit of truth
comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own
authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the
things that are to come” (John 16:13). This Holy Spirit “will teach you all things,
and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you” (14:26).
And so when the Church acts in the New Testament, it does so with the full
assurance of being guided by the Holy Spirit. This is most clearly seen in Acts, in
the discussion of the so-called “Judaizer controversy” and the subsequent Council
of Jerusalem. In Acts 10, Peter is led by God to dine with a Gentile named
Cornelius. Cornelius and those with him hear the gospel and are converted. Peter
then commands that these Gentiles be baptized, creating the first non-Jewish
Christians in history (Acts 10:47–48). This is immediately controversial, with
Jewish Christians complaining, “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat
with them?” (11:3). Peter recounts what happens, and even the objectors rejoice,
saying, “Then to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance unto life” (18).
But an important question is left unanswered. Given that Gentiles can be saved,
do they have to follow the Jewish law to do so? And so Acts 15 opens on a group
of preachers teaching that “unless you are circumcised according to the custom of
Moses, you cannot be saved” (15:1).
As you might expect, this leads to a huge theological spat, and Paul and
Barnabas (who had “no small dissension and debate” with these preachers)
quickly send the problem to Jerusalem. The problem is big for two reasons. One,
from an evangelical standpoint, the spread of Christianity is going to be stunted if
grown men are required to be circumcised in order to be saved. But two, these
preachers have what appears to be a scriptural case. When God speaks to
Abraham, he says, “This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and
you and your descendants after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised”
(Gen. 17:10). Twice, he describes this to Abraham as an “everlasting covenant”
(7,13–14). The New Testament hasn’t been written. If the early Christians had
believed in sola scriptura, it’s likely that the Judaizers would have won, or at least
that the two groups would never have come to any sort of agreement and
eventually formed separate denominations.
Thankfully, none of that happens. Instead, “the apostles and the elders were
gathered together to consider this matter” at what we now call the Council of
Jerusalem (Acts 15:6). Exercising its binding and loosing authority, the assembled
Church declared that “it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay
upon you no greater burden than these necessary things” (28). Unlike the
Pharisees, who used their binding and loosing authority to “bind heavy burdens,
hard to bear” (Matt. 23:4), the Church was conscious not to lay too heavy a
burden. Simultaneously, it clarified the theological controversy at hand, rebuking
those who were teaching “although we gave them no instructions” (Acts 15:24)
and spelling out the proper doctrine. This is what it looks like to act in an
infallible way, to bind and to loose. And Christ gives this to Peter specifically, as
well as to the Church generally.
What Infallibility Is and Isn’t
The logical case for infallibility, laid out above, is also important in dispelling
many of the common misconceptions about just what it means to say Peter (or
the Church, or subsequent popes) is infallible. It’s probably not an exaggeration
to say the biggest objection to infallibility is simply not understanding what’s
meant by the term. We also saw in the prior chapter D.A. Carson’s description of
it as a sort of hotline from God, in which God tells the pope the right answers.
Mathison makes a helpful threefold distinction: “whereas God himself is the
author of an inspired utterance, an infallible word remains the word of man
although it is preserved from the possibility of error. In addition, infallibility does
not mean impeccability. God may give the gift of infallibility to wicked men.”
352
So infallibility isn’t saying the pope is divinely inspired or that the pope is holy.
Indeed, infallibility isn’t even for the pope’s own benefit. St. Paul tells us all of
the gifts of God are
for the equipment of the saints, for the work of ministry, for building up the
body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge
of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the
fullness of Christ; so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro and
carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of men, by their
craftiness in deceitful wiles (Eph. 4:12–14).
Infallibility is not at all different. The gift isn’t a special hotline to God or a
promise of the pope’s salvation. It’s a protection of the “unity of the faith” from
the false doctrine and deceitful wiles of cunning men. The best way to understand
infallibility is simply this: believers will never have to choose between
membership in the visible Catholic Church and fidelity to the gospel. We’ll never
have to choose schism or heresy.
This also reveals the “boundaries” of infallibility. If you’re wondering if a
particular statement is protected from error, ask this: am I required to believe this to
be a faithful Catholic? If so, then you can be assured that the statement is infallible,
for the simple reason outlined above: if the statement is heretical and you’re
required to believe it, then you’re put in an impossible position, and God never
commands the impossible.
Catholics are guilty of often overstating papal infallibility, as if every word that
comes from the mouth of the pope is without error. The result is needless
vexation and spiritual gymnastics. It’s not just Pope Francis; there are countless
examples of popes thinking and saying silly and even sinful things, and Protestants
are right to be skeptical of any kind of whitewashed or triumphalist Church
history.
Far better is the witness of the nameless Catholic cardinal who is alleged to have
responded to Napoleon’s threat to destroy the Church by saying, “Your majesty,
we, the Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the Church for the last
1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.”
353 Or if you prefer,
there is Hilaire Belloc’s famous line: “The Catholic Church is an institution I am
bound to hold divine—but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found
in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish
imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.”
354 These statements are not glib; they’re
expressing the profound truth that papal infallibility is an expression not of the
greatness of the Church’s shepherds, but of the need to protect us from the worst
of their sinfulness and brokenness.
At the outset of the book, I presented the question that had vexed me: what do
we do with Pope Francis’s comments about the Zika virus, in which he seemed
to suggest both that contraception might be okay and that the Ten
Commandments might contradict each other? And what does it mean for papal
infallibility? We’ve now come to a point where we can answer both of those
questions in the same way: very little.
Pope Francis neither changed Church teaching nor stated it accurately. If you
want to know what the Church teaches, that’s not something determined by
offhand comments in airplane interviews. That contraception is contrary to
natural law is something the Church teaches authoritatively,
355 and even the
popes who have spoken on it in an authoritative way do so by stressing it as
something already known. In describing marital contraception as intrinsically evil,
Pope Pius XI stresses that he is merely reaffirming “the uninterrupted Christian
tradition” and points to support from both Scripture and St. Augustine (Casti
Connubii 55–56). And as for the idea that some extreme circumstance, like Zika,
might justify it, Pius explains that “no difficulty can arise that justifies the putting
aside of the law of God which forbids all acts intrinsically evil,” but this too
comes from the explicit teaching of the Council of Trent, which condemns the
opinion that “there are precepts of God impossible for the just to observe.”
356
The Church’s teaching on this matter is well known, and those who depart from
it dissent from the fullness of the faith to which they’ve been called.
Time and time again, the pope or Church councils have taken up the moral
questions related to the nature of marriage, the difficulty of living out the
commandments of God, and the impermissibility of contraception. These
teachings, given authoritatively, all point in one direction. Pope Francis’s
comments point, or at least seem to point, in the opposite direction, but he’s not
even pretending he’s defining some doctrine as pope. A Catholic can (and in this
case should) respectfully disregard his comments without dissenting from the
Faith. In saying this, I’m not downplaying the scandal of a pope who seems to
contradict Catholic teaching or who presents Church teaching so vaguely that it
becomes a full-time job trying to make sense of what’s even being said. But I’m
also trying to ensure that we don’t exaggerate the severity of it.
After all, by no means did this problem begin with Pope Francis. It goes directly
back to the first pope, St. Peter. We’ve already seen that it was through Peter that
God opened the doors of the Church to the Gentiles in a definitive way (Acts
10), and Peter was the first to preach that the Gentiles could be saved (Acts 11).
But he didn’t always practice what he preached. Paul recounts his famous
confrontation with Peter at Antioch (Gal. 2:11–14):
But when Cephas came to Antioch I opposed him to his face, because he stood
condemned. For before certain men came from James, he ate with the Gentiles;
but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the
circumcision party. And with him the rest of the Jews acted insincerely, so that
even Barnabas was carried away by their insincerity. But when I saw that they
were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before
them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can
you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?”
The same Bible that says Peter was in the wrong at Antioch also contains two
inspired epistles from him, 1 and 2 Peter. Both Catholics and Protestants have to
come to grips with the fact that Peter’s teaching is infallible (and more than that,
divinely inspired), but his personal witness and pastoral leadership weren’t. And
it’s not just that Peter sinned, but that he was leading the other Jewish Christians
badly here. Nothing in our understanding of either papal infallibility or divine
inspiration prevents that from happening. If we can harmonize that for Peter,
then it’s easy to understand how we can respect Peter as pope without blindly
following every word that comes forth from his mouth.
How Might a Protestant Respond?
One way that Protestants might respond is to find a different reason to accept 1
and 2 Peter while rejecting St. Peter’s conduct at Antioch. Got Questions, a
popular Protestant website that serves as a kind of theological FAQ, claims that
“the Bible does not teach that the apostles were infallible, apart from what was
written by them and incorporated into Scripture.”
357 Nothing in Scripture
supports this idea. In fact, St. Paul says the opposite: “So then, brethren, stand
firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of
mouth or by letter” (2 Thess. 2:15). Paul is clear about the binding nature of the
traditions he passed along both orally and in writing, and there’s no way to
faithfully interpret this as saying that it’s only “what was written” that was
considered to have this authority. Beyond this, much of the book of Acts is St.
Luke writing down what the apostles said. For instance, when the apostles are
before the Sanhedrin, Luke tells us what “Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said
to them” (Acts 4:8). And so the attempt of Got Questions to get around the
problem of Peter doesn’t pass muster.
The broader Protestant objection is that we don’t need infallibility since we
have inspired Scripture. Some variation of this position goes back to Martin
Luther’s defense at the Diet of Worms in 1521: “Unless I am convinced by
Scripture and plain reason—I do not accept the authority of the popes and
councils, for they have contradicted each other—my conscience is captive to the
word of God.”
358
Keith Mathison puts the argument this way: “Unlike Scripture, no one claims
that everything found in tradition is inspired, or that every writing of every
Church Father is inspired or that every official utterance of the Church is
inspired. . . . Even if there were inspired traditions, all would have to admit that
these inspired revelations are mixed with fallible uninspired human dross.”
359
In
other words, even granting that there are capital-T Traditions out there, how can
we distinguish them from manmade, lowercase-t traditions? If we can’t, Mathison
concludes, then “the traditions, the Fathers, and the Church are all inherently
fallible standards,” whereas Scripture alone can claim “verbal and plenary
inspiration.”
360 That argument makes sense: if there really were no way of
distinguishing fallible from infallible tradition, or fallible from infallible Church
teachings, that would render infallibility meaningless.
But let’s take the argument one step forward. “Scripture” just means “writing,”
and just as not every tradition is a capital-T Tradition, so not all scripture is
capital-S Scripture. To be able to believe that the inspiration of Scripture is
“plenary” (that is, unqualified and absolute), Mathison has to believe that there’s
some way that we can know exactly which books are which. But nowhere in
Scripture are we given a divinely inspired table of contents. Historically speaking,
the Bible was assembled by the Catholic Church, and Christians could know that
the Bible was trustworthy because of the Holy Spirit’s ongoing protection of the
Church.
But that explanation doesn’t work for Protestants. If you can trust that the Holy
Spirit is guiding the visible Church, then there’s no reason to split off and form a
separate body. But if you can’t trust that the Holy Spirit is guiding the visible
Church, and if you believe that the Church has actually erred on important
questions regarding the faith, then how can you trust that the Church got the
Bible right? Short answer: you can’t, which is why R.C. Sproul says that “the
historic Protestant position shared by Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians,
Presbyterians, and so on, has been that the canon of Scripture is a fallible
collection of infallible books.”
361
What’s more, it’s a fallible collection that the Reformers think the Church got
wrong. Most Protestant Bibles today are seven books shorter than the earliest
Bibles, since the Reformers called into question the canonicity and inspiration of
seven of the Old Testament books (known as the Deuterocanon or
“Apocrypha”). But that was just the tip of the iceberg. In his German translation
of the Bible, Martin Luther doesn’t number Hebrews, James, Jude, or Revelation
among the New Testament books, owing to his doubts about their inspiration or
canonicity.
362 His contemporary Andreas Karlstadt goes farther, questioning
whether 2 Peter, 2 John, and 3 John belonged.
363 What does it mean to say you
believe in “Scripture alone” if no one knows which books are and aren’t
Scripture?
And so the standard Protestant position is that the Church got the canon of
Scripture wrong, that the Holy Spirit isn’t guiding the process, and that we can’t
know for sure which books do and don’t belong in the Bible. There’s no reliable
way to tell which books are divinely inspired Scripture and which ones are
“fallible uninspired human dross,” and the consensus of the early Christians can’t
be trusted. By Mathison’s own reasoning, this reduces Scripture to the level of a
fallible authority, since there’s no good way to know whether a particular Bible
verse is from an inspired book or not.
Put more positively, you can have infallible Scripture only if you have some
way of knowing which books of Scripture are infallible, which requires an
infallible Church. Mathison tries to counter this point by saying that “despite the
fallibility of the Old Testament Jews, they managed to preserve the canon of Old
Testament Scripture.”
364 But anyone informed on the history of the Jewish canon
knows that this isn’t true. At the time of Christ, there was a shorter “Hebrew or
Palestinian canon,” corresponding to the Protestant Old Testament, but there was
also a longer “Alexandrian or Septuagint canon” used by Greek-speaking Jews,
corresponding to the longer Catholic Old Testament.
365 The New Testament
mostly cites to the Septuagint version, and most early Christians use this as the
basis for the Old Testament. But in addition to these two canons, there were too
many variations to list.
For instance, the Sadducees accepted only the Torah, the first five books of the
Bible, as inspired, and so all of Jesus’ scriptural citations to them come exclusively
from the Torah.
366 This is particularly obvious in their debate with Jesus over the
bodily resurrection, in which Jesus proves the resurrection by pointing to Exodus
3:6 (in which God calls himself “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the
God of Jacob”) rather than more explicit, but un-recognized, texts like Daniel
12:2 (“many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to
everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt”) or 2 Maccabees
12:43 (“in doing this he acted very well and honorably, taking account of the
resurrection”).
As for the Samaritans, they also accepted only the Torah, but it was their
version of the Torah, with a significantly different text and even a different set of
Ten Commandments.
367 The biblical canon used by the Qumran community
(who may have been Essenes) is downright mystifying: Rice University’s
Matthias Henze says that “of the close to 900 Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in
eleven caves between 1947 and 1956, about a quarter, or 222, are biblical scrolls,
whereas approximately 670 are nonbiblical.”
368 But he quickly notes that even
this terminology is anachronistic, since there didn’t seem to be any sort of closed
biblical canon at the time, making it impossible to know which of the books
were and weren’t treated as inspired. As the University of Edinburgh’s Timothy
Lim explains, “The closing of the Jewish canon may be seen as part of the Jewish
reaction to knowledge of books of the New Testament and the increasing
influence of Christianity.”
369
In other words, the Jewish canon isn’t solidified
until after the time of Christ, and largely in opposition to Christians, so it’s bizarre
that so many modern Protestants think this is a good foundation for the Christian
Old Testament.
370
Only someone oblivious to the serious canon problems facing first-century
Judaism could posit that they got along just fine knowing the contours of the
biblical canon without an infallible authority. And so we’re back where we
started: if we want the infallibility of the Bible, we need the infallibility of the
Church.
How Might an Eastern Orthodox Respond?
The bulk of this book is aimed at objections coming from within Protestantism—
mostly (but not entirely) mainstream, conservative Protestantism. But it’s worth
addressing one of the major Eastern Orthodox arguments against papal infallibility
because of how closely it mirrors the Protestant argument we just saw. Archpriest
Victor Potapov, rector of the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St. John the
Baptist, argues for in the infallibility of ecumenical Church councils, since “for the
whole Church to err would be tantamount to her spiritual death, but, by virtue
of the Savior’s promise, she cannot die.”
371 But he argues against the infallibility
of the pope, claiming that “the pope of Rome began to attribute the privilege of
ecclesiastical infallibility to himself alone and, after long efforts, finally secured the
recognition of his absurd pretension at the Vatican Council of 1870.”
372
Potapov’s argument looks sound on its face, but it raises several problems. First,
what role do ecumenical councils play? David Bentley Hart, perhaps the most
famous living Orthodox theologian, argues that “Orthodoxy’s entire dogmatic
deposit resides in the canons of the seven ecumenical councils” but feels
comfortable disregarding the authority of the Fifth Ecumenical Council on the
question of Origenism and universal salvation.
373 Second, what makes a council
an infallible ecumenical council? As Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia, Timothy Ware,
explains:
This is a more difficult question to answer than might at first appear, and though
it has been much discussed by Orthodox during the past hundred years, it
cannot be said that the solutions suggested are entirely satisfactory. All Orthodox
know which are the seven councils that their Church accepts as ecumenical, but
precisely what it is that makes a council ecumenical is not so clear.
374
There are plenty of Orthodox theologians (and armchair theologians) who have
theories about how to know which are and aren’t the true councils, but the truth
is, the Orthodox Church itself doesn’t know. The third problem is even more
fundamental: how many ecumenical councils are there? It turns out that even the
idea that there are only seven councils isn’t something that “all Orthodox know.”
In 1848, the Orthodox patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and
Jerusalem wrote a scathing denunciation of Pope Pius IX, in which they referred
to the so-called “Fourth Council of Constantinople” of 869–870 as the “eighth
ecumenical council.”
375 Other influential theologians, including Fr. John S.
Romanides, speak even of a ninth ecumenical council from sometime in the
fourteenth century.
376
But even if we assume that there are only seven, we’re left with a difficulty. In
449, in between the universally accepted Third Ecumenical Council (Ephesus,
431) and Fourth Ecumenical Council (Council of Chalcedon, 451), the Roman
emperor Theodosius II convened a council, to be called “Second Ephesus.” The
would-be council was presided over by the Patriarch Dioscorus of Alexandria and
attended by approximately 150 voting members.
377 From an exterior perspective,
it seems to be an ecumenical council. But there’s a huge problem: its declarations
were heretical. It was advancing a Christology that muddled Christ’s humanity
and divinity.
In the providence of God, one word changed the course of this would-be
council. As everything was drawing to a close, “while the orthodox bishops stood
by trembling and silent, Hilary, the deacon of the Roman Church cried,
‘contradicitur,’” meaning simply “I object.”
378 That was all he said, and all he
needed to say. As Cara Berkeley describes it, “Hilary pronounced the one word
‘Contradicitur’ and in the confusion escaped from Ephesus.”
379 “Escaped” is
probably not an exaggeration, as the “council” is remembered for its “tyranny
and violence.”
380 The French historian Alain Besançon paints the picture
beautifully: “At that moment it was certainly not the cowering silent crowd of
Orthodox Easterns which represented the Church of God. All the immortal
power of the Church was concentrated in that simple, legal word spoken by the
Roman deacon: contradicitur.”
381
All of the imperial pomp that the Byzantine Empire had to offer, the whole
assembly of scores of patriarchs, metropolitans, and bishops, and all of the external
trappings of an ecumenical council were no match for a single word from the
deacon Hilary. Why? Because Hilary was the pope’s legate, one of his only
representatives at the council, and he was invoking the pope’s own authority to
object to the unsavory proceedings. Amazingly, neither Catholics nor Orthodox
consider “Second Ephesus” to be a true ecumenical council, and it is mostly
remembered today (if at all) by the scathing nickname Pope Leo the Great gave
it: the “Robber Council.”
382
The clear lesson seems to be that the consent of the pope is required for an
ecumenical council to be an ecumenical council, in a way that no other bishop’s
consent is. For instance, after hearing news of the Robber Council, Leo the Great
immediately demanded that a true council be called to set things right. The
emperor refused but then died abruptly in a riding accident.
383 The new emperor,
Marcian, quickly called the Council of Chalcedon, with the result that many of
the same bishops who had signed on to a Christological heresy two years earlier
now publicly repented and declared the orthodox faith. Pope Leo sent along a
letter accurately declaring orthodox Christology, called the “Tome” of Leo, and
the council received it by declaring, “Peter has spoken through the mouth of
Leo.”
384
But something else happened at Chalcedon: Dioscorus, the patriarch of
Alexandria who had presided at the Robber Council, was deposed and exiled.
And apparently, he couldn’t just say “contradicitur” and nullify the proceedings,
suggesting that the Orthodox understanding of ecumenical councils only makes
sense if the pope, and the pope alone, can approve or veto their proceedings.
This papal authority doesn’t replace conciliar authority, just as the authority of
the Church doesn’t replace the authority of the Bible. Rather, the two work
hand in glove. Without the pope, there’s no good explanation of how many
ecumenical councils there are, or why “Second Ephesus” is a false council, and
Chalcedon is a true one, just as without infallibility, you cannot reliably say
which books belong in the Bible.
CHAPTER 12.
THE POST-PETRINE PAPACY
THE SCOPE OF this book has been intentionally narrow. Rather than answering
every possible objection against Catholicism, or even every question about the
papacy, I’ve tried to answer only one: whether or not Jesus established the papacy
with St. Peter. The three major questions left to be answered are these: did the
Church that Christ founded fall into apostasy? If not, why doesn’t the Church
today look like the Church back then? And finally, how do we know that the
papacy was ever intended to last beyond Peter? Let’s consider each of those.
By way of an overview, it is worth considering that there are ultimately only
three possibilities. The first is that the Catholic Church isn’t the Church that
Christ founded, but a later imposter. If that’s the case, we should be able to trace
the Church to its origins. If not Peter, then who was the first pope? The second is
that the Catholic Church is the Church that Christ founded but fell into apostasy.
Christ’s promises seem to preclude this option. The third is that the Catholic
Church is the Church that Christ founded and remained faithful. If this is true,
then we should all be part of the Church.
The Gates of Hell Will Not Prevail
Nobody before the Protestant Reformation was a Protestant. That seems like a
simple enough proposition, but it creates an “apostasy” problem for Protestants.
Should the pre-Reformation Church, and all of the Christians before 1500, be
treated as apostates? After all, the seventeenth-century Puritan John Owens
described the Catholic Church as “a Church under a degenerating apostasy.”
385
Such an attitude goes back to the start of the Reformation. In the Treatise on the
Power and Primacy of the Pope, part of the Lutheran Book of Concord, we hear that
“it is manifest that the Roman pontiffs and their adherents defend godless
doctrines and godless forms of worship, and it is plain that the marks of the
Antichrist coincide with those of the pope’s kingdom and his followers”
386 and
that “it is necessary to resist him as Antichrist.”
387 This is an attack on not just the
pope, but all of those centuries of Christians who accepted Church teaching, or
even just didn’t resist the pope.
The trouble is, if you take this view, it doesn’t leave you much in the way of
Christian history. John Milton, best known for his Paradise Lost, argues that the
Church can be found in its purity only in “the most virgin times between Christ
and Constantine.”
388 But it turns out that even the Christians before Constantine
are Catholic, and Milton is left lamenting “the foul errors, the ridiculous wresting
of Scripture, the Heresies” that he perceives in “the volumes of Justin Martyr,
Clement, Origen, Tertullian, and others of eldest time.”
389 We really are dealing
with the “eldest time” here: Justin Martyr lived from A.D. 100 to 165 and died
for the Faith. If even he can’t be trusted not to be a heretic, where can
Protestants find what they would accept as orthodox Christianity in the 1,500
years between the apostles and Martin Luther?
On the other hand, if the pope isn’t the Antichrist, and Catholicism isn’t an
apostate counterfeit Christianity, why in the world does Protestantism exist? The
Protestant theologian Stanley Hauerwas points out that the Catholic Church has
actually made most of the reforms that the Reformers hoped for, which should
logically end the Reformation. Instead of returning to the Church, Hauerwas
laments:
Protestantism has become an end in itself, even though it’s hard to explain from
a Protestant point of view why it should exist. The result is denominationalism
in which each Protestant church tries to be just different enough from other
Protestant churches to attract an increasingly diminishing market share. It’s a
dismaying circumstance.
390
Besides admitting or denying it, there’s a third way of responding to the
“apostasy” problem: simply ignoring it. Gavin Ortlund, a Baptist pastor, admits
that “we contemporary evangelicals have a tendency to neglect” Church history
before the Reformation, “acting as if the important stuff basically skipped from
the first to the sixteenth century.” He asks rhetorically, “How many Christians
between the apostle John and Martin Luther do you think today’s average
American evangelical can name?”
391 Nor is this a problem for only the laity:
Gregory Jackson tells the story of a Baptist seminary whose course on Church
history skipped “from the apostolic era to the Reformation, as if nothing
worthwhile had happened in the fourteen centuries between.”
392 This is nothing
new. One hundred seventy-five years ago, St. John Henry Newman suggested
that this “long neglect of ecclesiastical history” was at least somewhat
intentional.
393 The habit “of dispensing with historical Christianity altogether, and
of forming a Christianity from the Bible alone” was an implicit admission that “to
be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant” since “men never would have
put it aside, unless they had despaired of it.”
394
But what does the Bible have to say about the idea of an apostasy? We’ve
looked a lot at Jesus’ promises to Peter in Matthew 16 in this book, but there’s
one part we haven’t really examined. After Jesus says, “You are Peter, and on this
rock I will build my church,” he then says something that the RSV:CE translates
as “and the powers of death shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). What he
actually says is that the “gates of Hades” will not prevail against it. Once again,
Jesus’ promise to Peter uses language that is evocative of God’s covenants with
Abraham, this time to his promise that “your descendants shall possess the gate of
their enemies” (Gen. 22:17). Christ fulfills this but directs us toward the real
enemy: not the Canaanites, but Hades itself. The imagery of the “gates of Hades”
recalls man’s three enemies: sin, death, and Satan. Milton, despite his views on
the Church, recognizes this; in Paradise Lost, he says that “within the gates of Hell
sit Sin and Death,” while their “great author,” Satan, seeks the downfall of
man.
395
It’s these three enemies that Jesus promises won’t overcome his Church.
Although the early Christians are “far more concerned about the hermeneutical
possibilities in the concept of the Church’s being built on the rock (Peter) than
on implications of the gates of Hades not prevailing against it,” they “are agreed
that the ongoing permanency of the Church is promised.”
396 And so it is: if the
Church falls into apostasy, then sin prevails over the Church. If it simply fades
away through lack of conversion, then death prevails. In either case, Satan and
the gates of Hades triumph. And this is the case even if the Church is eventually
restored. Judges 6:2 says that “the hand of Midian prevailed over Israel,” and it
didn’t matter that Israel was later rescued. Christ’s promise is that the gates of
Hades will not prevail, not that they will prevail for only 1,500 years.
To be protected from Satan, sin, and death prevailing is the natural result of the
Christian vision of the Church. St. Paul describes the Church as Jesus’ “body, the
fullness of him who fills all in all” (Eph. 1:23), and describes the “great mystery”
of Christ and the Church by connecting it to God’s promise in Genesis that “a
man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall
become one flesh” (5:31–32). Christ has won the victory, and the apostasy of the
Church would strip that victory from him.
Nebuchadnezzar’s Messianic Dream
Another reason we can safely reject any theory of apostasy is that the messianic
promises including the promise of a kingdom of God on earth that will have no
end. The clearest example of this is from the prophet Daniel’s interpretation of
King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. The dream was of a giant image, in which “the
head of this image was of fine gold, its breast and arms of silver, its belly and
thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay” (Dan.
2:32–33). Each part of the statue represents a different kingdom, starting with
Nebuchadnezzar himself (36–43).
Numbering and naming these four kingdoms is where things get complicated,
but there are generally two views: a “Greek” view and a “Roman” view. The
Greek view numbers the four kingdoms as Babylon, Media, Persia, and Greece.
Daniel speaks of the fourth kingdom as “a divided kingdom,” and this reading
takes that to be a reference to the partition of the Greek Empire after Alexander’s
death. It was Antiochus IV Epiphanes (whose title means “God Manifest”) who
inherited part of Alexander’s empire and who cruelly persecuted the Jews, setting
up “a desolating sacrilege upon the altar of burnt offering” (1 Macc. 1:54).
397
But there are some real problems with the Greek view. The first is that many of
its adherents hold to it because they suppose (contrary to Matt. 24:15) that Daniel
is writing history or current events, not really prophecy. As one scholar puts it,
“It is clear from the abundant historical allusions that the book of Daniel was
written in response to the crisis at the time of Antiochus IV.”
398 According to
proponents of this view, the alleged interactions between Daniel and
Nebuchadnezzar in the sixth century B.C. are really a narrative device used to
talk discreetly about the horrors of Antiochus in the second century B.C. But the
second problem is internal to the text. The Median-Persian Empire has often
been treated as one empire, rather than two (just as the Seleucid Empire of
Antiochus IV is often treated as part of the Greek Empire). In a later prophecy,
Daniel sees a ram with two horns fighting a he-goat (Dan. 8:1–8). The angel
Gabriel explains the vision by saying, “As for the ram which you saw with the
two horns, these are the kings of Media and Persia. And the he-goat is the king of
Greece” (20–21). In other words, the numbering of the Greek view is wrong:
Media and Persia are treated as one kingdom within the book of Daniel.
That points to the other major view, the “Roman” view. St. Jerome identified
the four kingdoms as Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar, the Persian-Mede Empire,
the Greek Empire under Alexander, and the Roman Empire.
399
Jerome was
hardly alone in this. This is also the view taken by non-canonical Jewish sources
like “4 Ezra” and “2 Baruch.” As John Bergsma and Brant Pitre explain, this is
one of the reasons that “there was great eschatological expectation among Jews
during Jesus’ earthly ministry”: they knew they were living in the fourth
kingdom that Daniel prophesied about.
400
Jesus, his disciples, and the crowds are living in the fourth kingdom. And what
happens then? In King Nebuchadnezzar’s vision, “a stone was cut out by no
human hand,” and it struck the statue, destroying it, and “the stone that struck
the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth” (Dan. 2:34–35).
Daniel explains to the king that this means that “in the days of those kings the
God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed, nor shall its
sovereignty be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms
and bring them to an end, and it shall stand for ever” (44).
This is the promise Jesus fulfills in building his Church: the creation of the
kingdom of God on earth, a kingdom that “shall stand for ever,” outlasting the
Roman Empire and all successive empires. It’s a guarantee that even though we
may fall away from the Church, the Church will never fall away. And whether
you love or hate the Catholic Church, it’s hard to deny that this prophecy has
been fulfilled in the Church. As a sheer historical fact, “the papacy is the world’s
oldest continuously functioning institution.”
401
The Apostasy Free-for-All
If the entire Church founded by Jesus Christ could go wrong for several
centuries, until a German monk like Luther or a French lawyer like Calvin
restored orthodoxy, is there any particular reason to believe that orthodoxy even
exists today? Norman Fox, a nineteenth-century Baptist professor, became
convinced that everybody was wrong about the meaning of the Lord’s Supper
other than himself. In his book on the subject, he anticipates the obvious
response: “Do you really mean to say that the whole church has been in error for
so many centuries?”
402 But Fox is sly. He sees that there is no way a Protestant
could seriously object to this. After all:
The Baptists do not hesitate to declare that nearly the whole church fell into
error regarding the subjects of baptism; the Presbyterians affirm the same
regarding orders in the ministry, and the Congregationalists make the same
assertion concerning church government.
403
If it’s believable that Christ let his entire Church fall into error for 1,500 years,
why not 2,000? Or, for that matter, why not 30,000? And if it’s believable that
the whole Church could err on the structure of the Church, why couldn’t the
whole Church be wrong about the Trinity or any other doctrine?
Indeed, believing that we’re still in a state of apostasy would be more coherent
than believing the standard Protestant views offered. As implausible as it is that
Jesus allowed his Church to almost immediately fail, it’s a great deal less plausible
that he then allowed it to be restored by a German monk (Luther), a French
lawyer (Calvin), etc. Mormon apologists have been quick to point this out. Since
Jesus himself founded the early Church, they reason that the founder of the
restored Church must at least be a prophet, so it makes more sense to follow
Joseph Smith than Martin Luther.
James E. Talmage, regarded as an “apostle” within Mormonism, points out that
“the weakness of the Protestant sects as to any claim to divine appointment and
authority is recognized by those churches themselves.”
404
In other words,
Protestant denominations don’t even pretend to be the Church of Jesus Christ.
Whereas “the Roman Catholic Church is at least consistent in its claim that a line
of succession in the priesthood has been maintained from the apostolic age to the
present,” the Protestant denominations “are by their own admission and by the
circumstances of their origin, manmade institutions, without a semblance of the
claim to the powers and authority of the holy priesthood.”
405 The point here isn’t
that Mormonism is right—it isn’t. But Talmage is right about this much: the idea
that the whole visible Church fell into apostasy makes more sense if you’re
arguing for Mormonism than if you’re arguing for Protestantism.
Remnant Theories
Since apostasy theories are theologically untenable, some Protestants instead opt
for “remnant” theories. The idea here is that the Church did survive, but not as
the Catholic Church. In short, these tend to be different ways of denying the fact
that nobody before the Protestant Reformation was Protestant. The first and
strongest is the theory that Protestantism has “forerunners,” pre-Reformation
Catholics who said and taught many of the same things the Protestant Reformers
and their followers would later say and teach. The validity of this argument
depends on the topic: not everything that Protestantism taught was brand new. But
much of it was, and the supposed “forerunners” tend to be (upon actually reading
more than cherry-picked quotations) at radical odds with the Reformers. For
instance, the Evangelical Anglican theologian Alister McGrath points out that
“the theological question about which the Reformation turned is that of
justification.” But he concedes that the Protestant Reformers executed a
“complete reversal of the accepted teaching on the nature of justification,” and
there “are no Forerunners of their doctrines of justification.”
406
The second is the claim by certain Baptists that there is an “unbroken line of
faithful Christians” that can be traced from the time of the apostles to modern
Baptists, consisting of “Montanists, Donatists, Cathars, Waldensians, and
Anabaptists.”
407 This theory was popularized by J.M. Carroll’s The Trail of Blood,
in which he claims that during the “Dark Ages,” 50 million Anabaptists were
martyred, but “great numbers” of them “still existed” by 1500.
408
(For the record,
“by 700 or so, neither Rome nor Paris nor any other population center in
Western Europe had more than 20,000 people in it, and those numbers were
rare,”
409 and even by 1500, the total population of all of Europe stood at only
around 60.9 million.
410
) As for those alleged pre-Reformation “Baptists,” it might
help to read their actual writings. For instance, the Cathars taught that “sex is
bad, marriage worse, and reproductive sex the worst of all,” based on their belief
in a “dualist view of the material world as created by the devil.”
411 Even the
Baptist historian Albert Henry Newman “could find no common ground
between modern Baptists and such early movements as Montanism, Novatianism,
and Donatism or such later movements as the Paulicians and the Cathari.”
412
The third is that there’s always been an invisible remnant out there, and we just
don’t know who or where. This is Luther’s own position. He challenges Erasmus
to “show me a single bishop discharging his office under the kingdom of the
pope” or “a single council at which they dealt with matter of religion.”
Nevertheless, “Christ has preserved his Church, though not so as to be called the
Church. How many saints do you think the Inquisitors alone have in time past
burned and killed for heretical perversions, such as John Hus and those like
him?”
413 Luther’s position is like that of the Baptists above, but with even fewer
details. The Baptists point to the heretics that they think are Baptists, and
historians quickly dispel the identification. Luther points to no one, save Jan Hus,
and just supposes that maybe these people existed.
What all these remnant theories have in common is that the more detailed they
try to get, the more quickly actual historians disprove them. Besides being
historically false, they’re also theologically unsound. As we saw in chapter 3,
Christ founds the Church to be a city on a hill and a light to the nations. If the
Church’s own members can’t find it anywhere in history, that’s a good sign that
this isn’t the Church Christ promised. Instead, we should be looking for a much
larger church.
The Mustard Seed and the Missing Child
One of the most famous converts on the abortion issue is Bernard Nathanson,
who was the co-founder of NARAL (the National Association for the Repeal of
Abortion Laws) in 1969 and was once the director of the nation’s largest
freestanding abortion clinic. As he would later recount, his conversion on the
issue only occurred after ultrasound technology “for the first time threw open a
window into the womb.”
414
It’s not that the science was unclear before that point. As neuroscientist Michael
Gazzaniga concedes, scientifically speaking “a specific human life begins at
conception.”
415 We’ve known this for a long time. But a one-day-old embryo
looks very little like a newborn, so it can still be hard to believe that they’re the
same species. Of course, the same can be said for comparing newborns to adults
—so what’s different? With newborns, you can watch them develop, day-by-day,
into adults, and you can see that it’s the same human being throughout. The
ultrasound, as a “window into the womb,” changed the debate about abortion by
finally letting us do this for the development of the embryo into a newborn. In
Nathanson’s own words:
Although we had a mound (literally) of empirical data attesting to the fact that a
living human being had been destroyed in the act of abortion, it was not until
after the advent of ultrasound technology that a true paradigm change took
place. With ultrasound technology, we could not only know that the fetus was a
functioning organism, but we could also estimate its age, watch it swallow and
urinate, view it in its sleeping and waking states, and watch it move itself as
purposefully as a newborn.
416
Something similar is true with the Church. If all you know is the Church
described in the book of Acts and the Catholic Church of today, perhaps it’s hard
to imagine that it’s the same church. They look different, which is exactly what
we should expect from Jesus’ own words:
The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and
sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the
greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make
nests in its branches (Matt. 13:31-32).
Seeing just the mustard seed, you wouldn’t recognize the mustard tree. Many of
the things that the Catholic Church is criticized for, including its wealth, its
often-incompetent bureaucracy, and the like, are unavoidable (or at least difficult
to avoid) side effects of the growth Christ promises. Take a corporate example.
According to Steve Jobs’s biographer, Apple Computers didn’t actually start in his
garage; it started even smaller, with Jobs building computers in his bedroom.
417
Had the company stayed in his bedroom, there would be no costly overhead, no
stacks of compliance paperwork, no bureaucracy. But he never intended for it to
stay in his bedroom. Its growth into something that required leaving the bedroom
for the garage and then for ever-increasing buildings wasn’t a mark that the
company had been lost, but that it was flourishing. So, too, with Jobs’s shift away
from the work of actually building computers and into the work of running a
massive computer company. Something similar is true for the Church. It starts
out small, capable of meeting in a single room, but it’s tasked with the mission to
“go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19), not to stay in the
Upper Room to make sure it never has to grow. Is there more infrastructure now
than there was in the early Church? Absolutely, and for the same reasons why
there’s more infrastructure at Apple today than in 1976.
In fact, it would be a serious problem if the Church today looked like the
Church of the first century. Imagine a family whose seven-year-old son goes
missing. They put up posters, even put his picture on the side of milk cartons, but
for twenty years, they hear nothing. Then, after two decades, a neighbor brings
them a seven-year-old who looks remarkably like how their boy used to look.
“See,” the neighbor says, “I’ve found your son!”
But unless this is part of a show about time travel, he can’t be their son. That he
looks like a seven-year-old disproves the identification. Twenty years have passed.
His parents are not looking for a seven-year-old boy anymore; they’re looking for
a man of twenty-seven. So it is with the Church: any group priding itself on still
looking exactly like the first-century Church is announcing to the world that it
can’t possibly be the true Church. We’re looking to find not a first-century
Church anymore, but that same Church grown up. Twenty centuries have
passed. Likewise, it’s no argument against the papacy that Pope Peter doesn’t look
like a medieval or modern pope. Of course he doesn’t: he was never meant to.
A Church in the Center of the World
The analogy of the lost boy doesn’t go quite far enough, for the Church was
never “lost” in the first place. As St. Paul said in explaining Christianity to King
Agrippa, “For the king knows about these things, and to him I speak freely; for I
am persuaded that none of these things has escaped his notice, for this was not
done in a corner” (Acts 26:26). The history of the Catholic papacy can be traced
through history in general. Even before he arrives in Rome, Paul praises the
church there, “because your faith is being reported all over the world” (Rom.
1:8). Remember that Rome was the capital of the Roman Empire at the time.
The growth of the Catholic Church “was not done in a corner.” Indeed, an
ancient monument in the middle of the Roman Forum proudly declared itself
umbilicus mundi, the center of the world (literally, “the navel of the world”).
418
Particularly if folks like Ian Paisley are going to claim that the Catholic Church
is a “synagogue of Satan” and “the mother of harlots and the abominations of the
earth” of which Revelation 17 warns us, it shouldn’t be too much to ask where
this imposter church came from, and when and how it replaced the Church
Christ founded.
419
I’m reminded here of a meme I came across years ago, warning
against “false prophets” and quoting 1 John 4:1 (“Beloved, do not believe every
spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets
have gone out into the world”). The meme consisted of six small images,
arranged as a collage, depicting the six alleged false prophets and their associated
religious systems:
1. “Joseph Smith, Mormonism”
2. “Charles T. Russell, Jehovah (sic) Witness”
3. “Mary Baker Eddy, Christian Science”
4. “Ellen G. White, Seventh Day Adventist”
5. “The Papacy, Roman Catholic Church”
6. “Muhammad, Islam”
Clearly, one of these things is not like the others. Five of these “false prophets”
were the founders of religious systems, and we can tell the genesis of each of the
religions (or denominations) associated with them.
420 So for five of these six
religious systems, we can trace them to the “false prophet” who founded them.
But that leaves one obvious outlier. For Catholicism, the meme simply blames
“the papacy.” Where the other five images were of particular religious founders,
the image for Catholicism was of a generic pope.
421 But obviously, “the papacy”
didn’t found the Catholic Church, any more than “the presidency” founded the
United States. So whose name belongs here, and when did he start the Catholic
Church?
But even Protestants who don’t think the Catholic Church is the “synagogue of
Satan” tend to think of it as one more manmade denomination. I was reminded
of this in reading Your Church Is Too Small by John H. Armstrong. Lamenting the
scandal of denominationalism, Armstrong says that “denominations are clearly not
found in the Bible, and it is time everyone admits this fact.”
422 This would seem
to be an argument for returning to the visible Church that Christ did found, but
Armstrong goes in a different direction. Pointing to Paul’s admonition to the
Corinthians (1 Cor. 1:11–13), in which he warns them not to separate into
factions (“I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,” or “I belong to Cephas,”
or “I belong to Christ”), Armstrong says:
Perhaps the only biblical analogue that comes close to our current situation is in
Paul’s discussion about worldliness in the church at Corinth. One could
compare Paul’s language to our modern context and hear people saying, “I
belong to John Calvin. I belong to John Wesley. I belong to Benedict XVI.”
423
But again, one of these is not like the others. John Calvin started Calvinism, and
John Wesley started Methodism, but Pope Benedict XVI didn’t start Catholicism.
So once more, who would be an analogous denominational founder for Catholics?
As I said, the growth of the Catholic Church didn’t happen in a corner. It
happened in the heart of the empire. St. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, explains that
while St. Matthew was writing his Gospel, “Peter and Paul were preaching at
Rome, and laying the foundations of the Church.”
424 This corresponds to what
we know of even earlier authorities: in St. Ignatius’s letter to the Roman church,
which dates to c. A.D. 107, he includes the caveat, “I do not, as Peter and Paul,
issue commandments unto you,” as if this church was used to being instructed by
those two apostles.
425 And although Paul eventually comes to Rome, he is
delayed in doing so because of his desire “to preach the gospel, not where Christ
has already been named, lest I build on another man’s foundation” (Rom. 15:20–
22). So who was the “other man” who laid the foundation of the Church of
Rome? Peter, of course. This is reflected in Acts 2, where the listeners converted
by Peter’s Pentecost sermon include “visitors from Rome, both Jews and
proselytes” (Acts 2:10).
Nor does our knowledge of the early history of the Church stop there. Irenaeus
also says that “we are in a position to reckon up those who were by the apostles
instituted bishops in the churches” and to trace “the succession of these men to
our own times.”
426 Despite being the bishop of Lyons, he chooses to trace the
apostolic lineage of a different church, “the very great, the very ancient, and
universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the two most
glorious apostles, Peter and Paul,” and he explains that his reasoning is because “it
is a matter of necessity that every Church should agree with this Church, on
account of its preeminent authority.”
427 And so he does, tracing each successor of
St. Peter from his immediate successor Linus (who died c. A.D. 76) all the way
down to Eleutherius, who was pope in the year A.D. 180, the time that Irenaeus
is writing. To give you some sense of how early this is, Irenaeus is writing about
a year before the word Trinity “is first found in the writings of Theophilus,
Bishop of Antioch, in the year 181 A.D.”
428
D.A. Carson argues that there are “insuperable exegetical and historical
problems” with believing that Christ built the papacy to last, particularly the fact
that “after Peter’s death, his ‘successor’ would have authority over a surviving
apostle, John.”
429 So what does history have to say on this score? Irenaeus tells us
that Sts. Peter and Paul, “having founded and built up the Church, committed
into the hands of Linus the office of the episcopate. . . . To him succeeded
Anacletus; and after him, in the third place from the apostles, Clement was
allotted the bishopric.”
430
It’s Clement whom we want to give a closer look.
Irenaeus says that “this man, as he had seen the blessed apostles, and had been
conversant with them, might be said to have the preaching of the apostles still
echoing [in his ears], and their traditions before his eyes.”
431 Around the year
A.D. 95, while the apostle John is still alive, Clement writes a letter to the
Corinthians, settling an internal dispute that the local church there was having
about its clergy.
432
Speaking on behalf of the Roman church, Clement begins by admitting that,
owing “to the sudden and successive calamitous events which have happened to
ourselves, we feel that we have been somewhat tardy in turning our attention to
the points respecting which you consulted us.”
433 Clement’s response makes clear
that both he and the Corinthians view the episcopal structure of the Church as
established by the apostles, and he describes rebelling against the legitimate clergy
as “shameful and detestable.”
434 But in some ways, the most striking thing about
the letter isn’t what he says, but that he’s saying anything at all. While the apostle
John is alive, and not terribly far from Corinth, the Corinthian church faces
“sedition” in the form of lawless laity. To address this problem, they write a letter
to the pope in Rome and await his reply. And this happened so early in the life of
the Church that a response in A.D. 95 could be considered “somewhat tardy.”
How do the other early Christians respond to this? If they were Protestants,
they would probably denounce the papal intrusion into the affairs of the local
church, or into affairs that could be left to an apostle. But instead, the ensuing
conversation is over whether or not Clement’s letter (the first known papal
encyclical after 1 and 2 Peter) should be regarded as Scripture. Even by the time
of St. Jerome, centuries later, we find that the encyclical “in some places is
publicly read” within the liturgy.
435
It’s easy to mythologize the distant past, but it’s a lot harder to invent a recent
past, for the simple reason that living people were there for it. This is one of the
reasons why we believe in the historicity of the Resurrection. And it’s the reason
why we should believe what these same Christians tell us about the history of the
church in Rome. Ignatius in particular has little room to invent the story of Peter
and Paul being in Rome, since he’s writing to the Christians of Rome, only about
forty years after the martyrdom of the apostles. So there’s a fair amount of
historical evidence that the episcopal governance of the Roman church was
founded by Peter, alongside Paul, and not a whole lot of evidence of any kind to
support the Protestant argument (or more often, the Protestant assumption) that
someone else started it.
The DNA of the Church
Returning to the image of the mustard tree, we’re not looking for a body that
still looks like the first-century Church, but we are looking for a body that is that
Church, all grown up. To put it another way, we’re looking for a Church with
the same structure built by Christ, a sort of “DNA” of the Church. There’s a
parallel here to the debates over the nature and meaning of marriage. Back in
chapter 2, I compared this to marriage. Just as our job is not to invent new forms
of marriage, but to discover God’s own design, so, too, our job is not to invent
new forms of “Church,” but to discover God’s own design.
There’s another parallel between marriage and the Church as well. In explaining
why Christian marriage views the husband as the “head,” C.S. Lewis begins by
asking why there needs to be a head at all. He explains that marital disputes can
ultimately be resolved in only one of two ways:
Either they must separate and go their own ways or else one or other of them
must have a casting vote. If marriage is permanent, one or other party must, in
the last resort, have the power of deciding the family policy. You cannot have a
permanent association without a constitution.
436
Spouses will not always agree, so the only effective deterrent is for there to be
headship. This doesn’t mean the husband should be imperious. In calling the
husband “the head of the wife,” St. Paul calls upon husbands to “love your wives,
as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25). And we’ve
already seen what that looks like: self-sacrificial love from the one who said that
he came “not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many”
(Mark 10:45). But this is servant leadership: the buck stops with the husband.
This plan of headship, of having the buck stop with one person, turns out to be
God’s design throughout history. It starts with Adam, the head of the first family,
and it continues onward through Abraham and the Patriarchs. Moses has an
entire administrative and judicial structure underneath him that handles small
cases, but he’s the highest authority and the court of last appeal (Exod. 18:25–26).
Not long after this, Israel descends into anarchy, for “in those days there was no
king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes” (Jdg. 17:6, 21:5).
But this isn’t God’s design or desire, and so he raises up a whole series of judges,
individuals he calls to lead his people. Eventually, we get to the monarchy: to
Saul, David, Solomon, and the rest. By this point, both the priesthood (with the
high priest) and the royal governance of Israel (with the king) have some one
individual who is finally accountable for doing things according to God’s design.
In other words, God’s design for a healthy marriage looks an awful lot like his
design for a healthy tribe, or a healthy nation, or a healthy kingdom. This is also
God’s design for a healthy church: that the Church built by Christ has one
individual who is ultimately accountable when things go well or when they go
poorly. We see this repeatedly through the New Testament. To take just one
example, when all of the apostles fall asleep in the Garden, only one of them is
called to task for it (Matt. 26:40). The Reformed theologian D.A. Carson
concedes that the “rock” of Matthew 16 is Peter but argues that “the text says
nothing about Peter’s successors, infallibility, or exclusive authority.”
437 The
weakness of this argument should be clear: why would God go to all the trouble
of setting up this structure repeatedly if he wanted us to abandon it as soon as the
apostles died? And if the papal structure of the Church was intended to be
destroyed with the death of the apostles, then perhaps Christ would have been
better off promising that the gates of Hades would prevail and were intended to.
At the very least, it must be conceded that the Church maintaining the structure
Christ established is the safest and most faithful course of action. We see from
history that it did, in fact, maintain this structure, and apparently thought of it as
necessary. St. Optatus, a North African bishop writing against the Donatist heresy
around the year 370, reminds his readers that “you cannot then deny that you do
know that upon Peter first in the City of Rome was bestowed the Episcopal
Cathedra”—that is, seat of authority—so that “in this one Cathedra, unity should
be preserved by all, lest the other apostles might claim—each for himself—
separate Cathedras,” since anyone doing so “would already be a schismatic and a
sinner.”
438 Optatus’s argument for the Church is the same as Lewis’s argument for
the family: if it is going to survive, there needs to be one person in a position of
headship.
If you were to make an argument for the traditional, biblical understanding of
marriage, you would be foolish to begin by pretending every marriage is healthy,
that all husbands love their wives “as Christ loved the church and gave himself up
for her” and that all wives are “subject in everything to their husbands” (Eph.
5:24–25). Not only is that untrue, but you would be setting your listener up for
disappointment when he discovered the sometimes painful truth about what
marriage can be like, in real life. Instead, you would hopefully confine yourself to
a simpler goal: to show that the sacrament of matrimony is established by Jesus
Christ, for the good of his people, and that it’s better than any of the alternatives
we’ve found.
So it is here. The Church right now is going through a period of crisis at least in
part because of bad papal and episcopal leadership. The “household of God, which
is the church of the living God” (1 Tim. 3:15), is going through the roughest
patch it’s seen in centuries. Pretending otherwise is dishonest, and it sets nonCatholics up for disappointment. Not every pope or bishop lives up to his calling,
just as not every parent does. But the truth is, as with the sacrament of
matrimony, the papal structure of the Church is founded by Jesus Christ. It exists
for the good of his people. And it is better than any alternative.
