PETER'S PRIMACY
By Father William Most
<16:13-20: Promise of the primacy to Peter>: Jesus did not ask
what people were saying out of ignorance - even without the
vision in His soul He would likely have known. But He was leading
up to the important question of who they said He was. Peter speaks
for the whole group, and says Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the
living God. Jesus says Peter knew this by revelation from His
Father.
How much did Peter really know? It is evident He knew Jesus
was the Messiah. But did Peter have the right notion of the
Messiah? His attempt to dissuade Jesus from suffering seems to
indicate Peter had the false idea, that of a military conqueror.
What did Peter mean by the "Son of the Living God."? This could
mean divinity, and many have thought so. Yet it would not have to
be such, even though Peter had a revelation. That revelation
might have given him some idea of the identity of Jesus without
being a full and clear picture. The fact that Peter denied Jesus
later would fit with this, although if Peter had learned by way of
an interior locution Peter might have had a clear message at the
start, which later, by the time of the death of Jesus, had faded,
and so Peter could deny Him. In an interior locution, it is as if
God touches the brain of the person and can convey even a large
amount of information at one touch. That seems to have been the
case with St. Paul on the Damascus road vision, for the words
spoken by the vision then were few, and did not cover all of basic
Christianity - yet later (Gal 1:12) Paul said He did learn
Christianity from that vision. About the possibility of fading
certitude - St. Teresa of Avila in her <Life> 25 wrote (I. p. 741,
<Obras Completas>, B. A. C. Madrid, 1951): When God speaks in this
way, "the soul has no remedy, even thought it displeases me, I
have to listen and to pay such full attention to understand that
which God wishes us to understand that it makes no difference if
we want it or not. For He who can do everything wills that we
understand, and we have to do what He wills." But in <Interior
Castle> 6. 3. 7 (ibid, II, p 426): "these words do not pass from the
memory after a very long time" but "When time has passed since
heard, and the workings and the certainty it [the soul] had that
it was God has passed, doubt can come." And so Peter might have
known the divinity of Jesus at this occasion, but later the
certitude had vanished.
Some Protestants even today try to claim verses 17-19 --
with the promise of primacy - were just a late interpolation, and
not part of the original text. There is simply no manuscript
evidence at all to support this notion. Rather, it shows how
clearly these Protestants perceive the real meaning of the
words, so that they feel driven to such an extreme as to propose,
without any foundation, a claim of interpolation.
Special attention in such a charge is given to the word
<Church>". Now the Greek <ecclesia> is rare in the Gospels, though
common in St. Paul. If we omitted this word, we would have a
Messiah without a messianic community - a thing unthinkable to
current Jewish ideas.
The <Anchor Bible> commentary on Matthew by W. F. Albright
and C. S. Mann, two good Protestants, rejects the interpolation
charge flatly, and admits a Catholic interpretation of the words
about the rock: . . "one must dismiss as confessional
interpretation [based on denominational views] an attempt to see
this rock as meaning the faith, or the Messianic confession of
Peter." The evangelical <Expositor's Bible Commentary> agrees
with Albright and Mann, but then tries to claim ( pp. 373-74)
that Peter was not given special authority - all Christians had
the same. And it asserts that "binding and loosing" meant merely
preaching the Lutheran error on justification by faith - that
would forgive sins. (similar comments by many Protestants on the
grant of power to forgive in John 20).
Their claims are very false. First of all, one should try to
see what the text means, not read things into it. They are reading
into Matthew the error of Luther. - This is <eisegesis>! - Luther
thought justification by faith meant just confidence that the
merits of Christ apply to me - then one could sin as freely as he
wanted, and no harm. Luther even said in Epistle 501 to
Melanchthon: "Even if you sin greatly, believe still more
greatly." And in another letter to Melanchton, August 1, 1521
(<Works> 48. 181-82) he said that even if one commits fornication
and murder 1000 times a day, it will not separate him from Christ.
Justification itself according to Luther made no change in a
person: he remained totally corrupt, with the merits of
Christ, like a cloak, thrown over him. But 2 Peter 1:4 says we are
made sharers in the divine nature, for we are sons of God (1
Jn. 3:2)and so partake of the nature of the Father. And 1 Cor 3:16
and 6:19 says we are temples of the Holy Spirit - who would not
dwell in total corruption. 1 Cor 13:12 He has already given us
the first payment, the Spirit, in our hearts (1 Cor 1:22). When
the veil of flesh is removed we will see Him face to face: 1 Cor
13:12 says in heaven we see God face to face. God has no face, the
soul no eyes, but it means we will know Him directly. When I see
you, I do not take you into my head, I take in an image of you. But
no image could show God as He is. So there must be no image - so
God joins Himself directly to the soul without even an image in
between. He would not do that with a totally corrupt soul. As
Malachi 3:2 says: "Who can stand when He appears? For He is like
a refiner's fire."
Besides, the words "bind and loose" have no reference to such
a distortion. They were current in the days of Christ, and by them
the rabbis meant to give an authoritative decision on what was
right or wrong. And only the authorities could give such a
decision - not just every Christian as the Protestants would have
it.
Protestants like to add an appeal to Mt 18:18 to say the
power is given to all Christians. But in context, it speaks of a
decision of the church, the <ecclesia>, not of each individual. But
if we put it into the framework of a trajectory, the picture is
clear. We begin with Luke 10:16, "He who hears you hears me." It is
true, this was not spoken only to the Twelve. But as we said, the
trajectory clarifies the picture. Mt 18:18 on which we have
spoken cannot refer to all Christians precisely because there is
a question of authority to declare what is right and wrong -- in
Jewish thought, that belonged only to the Rabbis, not to all. At
the Last Supper, according to John 13:20, Jesus said: "Amen, amen, I
say to you, he who receives the one I send, receives me; he who
receives me, receives the One who sent me." The thought is like
that of Luke 10:16, but at the Last Supper there were only the
Apostles present. Then Mt 28:16-29 in which He says all power is
given Him in heaven and on earth, is explicitly spoken to the
Eleven, who are sent to teach or to make disciples. We could add
that the early Church definitely understood the grant of
authority to just the Apostles. In Acts 1:15-26 a replacement is
chosen for one of the Twelve, for Judas. Acts 2:42 reported that
the people "devoted themselves to the teaching of the
Apostles", and in Acts 5:13: "No one of the rest dared to join
himself to them [the Apostles] but the people magnified them."
The Protestants not only misunderstand things, but claim
that Matthew is entirely clear - all Scripture is entirely
clear, according to them. In that they contradict Scripture, for 2
Peter 3:15-16 tells us that in St. Paul's Epistles, "there are many
things hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist
as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction."
Protestant twisting of this passage surely fits what Peter's
Epistle said.
And of course from the start the Church has understood the
Scripture far differently from the Protestant distortion, as we
just saw in the verses from Acts. Then Pope Clement I, writing to
Corinth c 95 AD. claimed authority over Corinth. St. Irenaeus, who
had heard St. Polycarp tell what he heard from the Apostle
John, said that "the faithful who are everywhere must agree with
this church [Rome] because of its more important principality."
Very different from saying every Christian forgives sin by
preaching a false doctrine of "justification" - that leaves one
totally corrupt - by faith. In the early heresies it was the
Pope's decision that counted, e. g., at Ephesus in 431 AD. the
Bishops heard the decision of Pope Celestine, and replied "He
[Peter] lives even to this time, and always in his successors
gives judgment."
Some have tried to suppose verses 17-19 are retrojection,
something spoken after Easter, retrojected to this spot. We
distinguish. If they mean the whole passage was retrojected, that
would be impossible - for after the resurrection Jesus would not
ask who people say He is, nor would Peter merely say He was
Messiah -- an understatement by then.
If we were to suppose just verses 17-19 were retrojected,
that would not be impossible, but there is no evidence. What of
the fact that Mark does not have these words? We may conjecture:
Mark wrote from the preaching of Peter, as even Martin Hengel of
T�bingen admits (<Studies in the Gospel of Mark>, tr. J. Bowden,
Philadelphia, 1985, p. 29). As a matter of modesty, Peter might not
have preached at Rome about his own authority.
The word <rock> is merely a play on words. In Aramaic there
is no difference between the word for rock and Kepha, Peter.
The gates of hell could mean the gates of death, but more
naturally mean the powers of hell. They will not prevail. So if
the Church founded by Christ had taught the wrong way to
salvation for most of 1500 years, until Luther, the promises of
Christ would be practically worthless. Nor could one dodge and
say a few held on to the true meaning. No evidence at all for
that. And even so, the Church as such, as identifiable, would
have been in gross error until a grossly immoral Luther was sent
by God to correct it!
"Keys" of course signified power to rule, as is obvious.
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