BY THE REV. D. BEATON, WICK.*
TO the Romanist the supremacy of Peter is a doctrine of vital importance. It is impossible to conceive of Romanism robbed of those commanding prerogatives endowing him and his so-called successors with the plenitude of power. For upon this doctrine that colossal institution which has dominated the consciences of millions of the human race has been built up and established. And when it is further remembered that the Vatican decree of papal infallibility, with all its far-reaching consequences, is but the culmination of a process of reasoning that began with assuming the grant of such prerogatives, until the daring height of papal infallibility was reached, it will at once be recognised that we are confronted with an interesting and important problem in interpretation, and a question of vital moment in dogmatic theology and church polity. This lecture is an attempt to deal with the question on purely scriptural ground, with the purpose of showing that Christ made no such grant to Peter; that His words, rightly interpreted, in Matthew’s Gospel give no foundation for such inferences as Romanists draw from them; and in proof of this position it will be shown that the Apostles were unconscious of such power having been granted to Peter. The closely-allied questions of Peter’s alleged residence at Rome and his episcopate there, with that of the transmission of his prerogatives to a successor or successors, will be discussed from the scriptural standpoint, and from their special bearing on the leading theme discussed in this lecture.
At the outset it is but right to state that Protestants, while denying the supremacy and prerogatives claimed for Peter by Romanists, willingly and heartily acknowledge a certain pre-eminency to the Apostle. No one reading the Gospels can fail to escape the commanding presence of Peter; his intense love, his zeal (though misdirected, it is true, at times), and his devotion to the cause of Christ, all help to impress us with the fact that we have before us the record of a man of no ordinary powers and individuality. But granting this, and even a great deal more, for argument’s sake, the fact remains that between all this and the claims of Rome there is a wide gulf. The pre-eminence that comes through outstanding ability and graces is an entirely different pre-eminence to that claimed by the Church of Rome. The one is personal, the other official; and this distinction, though finely drawn, is one of vast importance, and has a recognised place in the value we attach to the decisions of men. It need scarcely be recalled that at the election of the present Pope the
* Notes of a Lecture delivered to the Creich Protestant Association on 30th March, 1911.
were many in the College of Cardinals and in the Church of Rome who excelled him both in intellectual gifts and in the art of statesmanship, but his commanding position in the Vatican rests on none of these gifts, but on the prerogatives which have been granted to him by the suffrages of the Cardinals. It is such prerogatives as these that Rome claims from Peter—a pre-eminence coming not from any special gifts and graces but from the official position which he occupies. In support of this contention her apologists appeal to certain texts of Scripture, chief among which may be mentioned the remarkable confession of Peter and Christ’s memorable words to him, as recorded by Matthew. This text, they say, is “by itself decisive” (Lyon’s Christianity and Infallibility, page 122), and the L’Abbé Miel tells us “nothing can be more positive” (The Pope and the Scriptures, page 9). As the passage is of vast importance in this discussion it is here transcribed at length:—”When Jesus came into the coasts of Cæsarea Philippi he asked his disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I, the Son of man, am? And they said, Some say that thou art John the Baptist; some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets. He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona; for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee that thou art Peter (Greek, Petros), and upon this rock (Greek, petra) I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matthew xvi. 13-19).
From this text Romanists have drawn the most extraordinary inferences, and in order that it may be seen what these are, take the following sentences from a work by Dr. Murray, one of the Maynooth Professors:—”Peter,” he says, “was thus established by our Lord as the means of imparting to the Church indefectibility and unity, and of permanently securing those properties to her. Peter was invested with supreme spiritual authority to legislate for the whole Church; to teach, to inspect, to judge, to proscribe erroneous doctrine or whatever would tend to the destruction of the Church; to appoint to offices or remove therefrom, or limit or extend the jurisdiction thereof, as the safety or welfare of the Church would require: in one word, to exercise, as supreme head and ruler and teacher and pastor, all spiritual functions whatever that are necessary for the well-being or existence of the Church.” (Quoted in Salmon’s Infallibility of the Church, page 333.) No one reading the words as given by Matthew would ever imagine that they were capable of lending themselves to such an extraordinary interpretation. “It takes
one’s breath away,” says Dr. Salmon, “to read a commentary which finds so much more in a text than lies on the surface of it.” In discussing the Romish claims in connection with this text there are two incidents that should not be forgotten—(1) the words addressed to Peter by Christ and recorded in the same chapter, “Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me; for thou savourest not of the things that be of God, but those that be of men” (verse 23); (2) the threefold denial of Christ by Peter. It would seem that the Holy Ghost has left these matters on record that men might not delude themselves, and as one ponders over them the conviction is brought home to us that their rock is not as our Rock, our enemies themselves being witnesses.
I.—In interpreting the text it strikes one as a matter of some significance that Christ, in addressing the Apostle, says, “Thou art Petros (Peter), and upon this petra (rock) will I build my church.” Scholars have drawn a distinction between petros, a piece of rock, and petra, the solid rock itself; and while we do not wish to lay more weight on this point than it can bear, yet it does seem passing strange that if Christ meant Peter, that He should have used another word with a different and very significant shade of meaning. Would He not have said, “Thou art Petros (Peter), and upon this petros will I build my church”?
II.—However, in the interpretation of this text we are at liberty to appeal to the Church of Rome’s recognised canon of interpretation. In the Creed of Pius IV.—a creed which requires all those who subscribe it to “freely profess and sincerely hold this true Catholic faith, without which no one can be saved“—it is stated in the second article: “I also admit the Holy Scripture according to that sense which our Holy Mother, the Church, has held and does hold, to which it belongs, to judge of the true sense and interpretation of the Scriptures; neither will I ever take and interpret them otherwise than according to the unanimous consent of the Fathers.” Let us now proceed to apply this rule, and what is the result? According to Launoy (a French Roman Catholic), seventeen of the Fathers interpret the Rock as referring to Peter; forty-four as referring to his faith expressed in the confession; sixteen interpret the Rock as Christ; and eight hold that the Church was built on all the Apostles. And lest any fault be found with Launoy for his Gallicanism, there is the testimony of the Jesuit Maldonatus, whose Romanism is above suspicion. “There are,” he says, “among ancient authors some who interpret ‘on this rock,’ that is, ‘on this faith’ or ‘on this confession of faith, in which thou hast called me the Son of the living God.'” (Quoted in Salmon’s Infallibility of the Church, page 335.) No Romanist can possibly face these damaging facts with equanimity. The very canon of interpretation, which she considers so vital that without its acceptance no one can be saved, threatens to undermine the mighty fabric and lay it in a mass of ruins. Here are
the facts: out of ninety-five of the early Fathers only seventeen give an interpretation that can in any way be called favourable to Rome, but this is small comfort; for even these to make their interpretation of any value to Rome, it would be necessary to show that they held the honour which was granted to Peter was also meant for his successor or successors. Dr. Salmon has, in a very forcible way, presented the case in its true significance, and shown how Rome has come to disaster through the use of her own shield. “Here, surely,” he says, “if anywhere, we shall find that unanimous consent of the Fathers of which the Council of Trent speaks. I have already said that I do not refuse to attribute a certain weight to tradition in the interpretation of Scripture. I have owned that an interpretation of any passage has a certain presumption against it if it is clearly new-fangled; if it derive from the text a doctrine which the Church of the earliest times never found there. The more important the doctrine, the greater the presumption that, if true, it would have been known from the first. But certainly here is a case where, if the Fathers were ever unanimous, they could not fail to be so, if the Roman theory be true. This is no obscure text—no passing remark of an inspired writer—but the great charter text which, for all time, fixed the constitution of the Christian Church. If, in these words, our Lord appointed a permanent ruler over His Church, the Church would from the first have looked to that authority for guidance and for the composing of all disputes, and there never would have been any hesitation to recognise the meaning of the charter on which the authority was founded. Yet I suppose there is not a text in the whole New Testament on which the opinion of the Fathers is so divided; and you have to come down late indeed before anyone finds the Bishop of Rome there.”—(Infallibility of the Church, page 334.)
III.—Another point that merits our attention in connection with the great charter text is the fact that it is alone recorded in the Gospel according to Matthew. And it is to be carefully observed in this connection that it is not merely the absence of the text from the writings of the other Evangelists, but its absence notwithstanding the presence of the confession of Peter, from which it followed, and which is recorded in Mark and Luke and a similar one in the Gospel according to John. That is, while the Evangelists record the remarkable confession of Peter, they have not a word about the promise granting plenitude of power to him. To argue that this omission is to be accounted for by Peter’s modesty or to a prudential reserve on the part of the Evangelists, is unworthy of being met with a serious answer. Neither can it be here argued, as it has been done by Roman Catholics, that it is a parallel case to the Sermon on the Mount, which is only recorded in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The point to be emphasised here is that while the confessions are recorded by the four Evangelists, the promise is only recorded by one. The question naturally
arises: Why is it that four Evangelists, each guided by the Holy Spirit, should have set down for us the confession and only one make any mention of Peter’s commission, “though that commission followed it and arose out of it, and was meant to change the face of Christendom, to constitute a world-wide and perpetual and infallible sovereignty in the body of Christ, and to make a ‘brotherhood’ an ‘absolute monarchy’?”—(Contemporary Review, February, 1910, page 168.) For it is to be borne in mind that this text is of supreme importance to the Romanist. It is “the grant of a privilege; of dominion over the Apostles themselves; of a right to control the very thoughts of men; it concerned the very esse of the Church.”
If the words of the text conveyed such power to Peter, we would naturally expect that the Apostles would be cognisant of the fact, for it was no ordinary privilege that was conferred upon him. It is as conceivable that the archbishops and bishops of the Church of Rome should be ignorant of the position and power of the Pope, as it is to conceive the Apostles to be ignorant of the power which Romanists say Christ bestowed upon Peter. What has Scripture to say to this aspect of the question? Let us turn to Mark ix. 33-37, and read: “He [i.e., Jesus] came to Capernaum, and being in the house, he asked them, What was it that ye disputed among yourselves by the way? But they held their peace; for by the way they had disputed among themselves who should be the greatest. And he sat down and called the twelve, and saith unto them, If any man desire to be first, the same shall be last of all and servant of all. And he took a child and set him in the midst of them; and when he had taken him in his arms, he said unto them, Whosoever shall receive one of such children in my name receiveth me; and whosoever shall receive me, receiveth not me but him that sent me.” But this was not the only dispute for primacy, for at the Last Supper, when Christ made the announcement that one of them was to betray Him, “they began to inquire which of them it was that should do this thing. And there was also a strife among them, which of them should be accounted the greatest” (Luke xxii. 24). Here we have two particular occasions on which there was a contest for primacy among the Apostles—contests which appear inexplicable if Peter was the prince of the Apostles and endowed with plenitude of power; and if such commission had been given by Christ, how easily could He have silenced them by reminding the Apostles of the power and place He had given to Peter. Is it too much, therefore, to say that the Apostles were unaware of such power, and that Christ Himself, when the opportunity came of asserting these prerogatives, did not do so because they had never been bestowed?
Further, we are told by Mark that James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came unto Him, saying, “Master, we would that thou shouldest do for us whatsoever we shall desire. And he said unto
them, What would ye that I should do for you? They said unto him, Grant unto us that we may sit, one on thy right hand and the other on thy left hand in thy glory” (chap. x. 35). If James and John were conscious of Peter’s pre-eminent position among the disciples would they have made such a request, and if Christ had bestowed such a position upon him, would He not have answered that He had already bestowed that privilege upon Peter?
Paul, also, seems to have been entirely unaware of any such privilege belonging to Peter, for in mentioning the “pillar” Apostles (James, Cephas, and John), Peter’s name comes second. He further tells us that James, Peter, and John gave him and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship when they perceived the grace that God had given unto them, and that it was agreed among them that the former would go unto the circumcision and the latter to the uncircumcision—an agreement that confined Peter’s activities to a certain sphere. Then there is the incident at Antioch, when Paul withstood Peter to his face because he was to be blamed. “We hear a great deal,” said the late Bishop Ryle, “of what Peter did at Rome, but very little of what he did at Antioch.” Throughout the Acts of the Apostles the one great dominating figure is that of Paul—a fact scarcely in keeping with the claims made by the Church of Rome for Peter. In purposing to visit Rome, Paul, writing to the Christians there, says: “For I long to see you, that I may impart unto you some spiritual gift, to the end ye may be established” (Romans i. 11), words which seem strange if Rome was the peculiar province of Peter, and the place from which he exercised his power. In writing to the Corinthians he reminds them of his sufferings and labours, adding—”Besides those things that are without, that which cometh on me daily, the care of all the churches” (2 Cor. xi. 28). If the care of all the churches was Peter’s, was Paul not incurring unnecessary trouble and interfering with matters in which he had no concern? When one considers his manifold labours, his high-souled devotion, his intense love to his Lord and Master, can we deny to him what he justly claimed for himself—that “he was not a whit behind the very chiefest apostles.” The foregoing evidence seems to clearly establish the fact that Paul had no knowledge of any special prerogatives bestowed upon Peter.
At the Council of Jerusalem, when matters of serious moment to the early Church were to be decided, we find that the decrees were not issued in Peter’s name, but in the name of the apostles, elders, and brethren (Acts xv. 23), a proceeding not in keeping with the position claimed for him by the Church of Rome.
But, strangest of all, it would appear that Peter himself had no knowledge of such supremacy as is claimed for him, for in the whole of the New Testament writings where his name is mentioned, he makes no such claim. On the other hand, he uses language that runs in the face of the exalted position claimed for
him. In his First Epistle he writes:—”The elders which are among you I exhort, who am also an elder [lit., a fellow-elder, sumpresbutores], and a witness of the sufferings of Christ” (chap. v. 1).
The evidence of this part of our argument leads us inevitably to the conclusion that the Apostles, including Paul and Peter, were entirely ignorant of any pre-eminency such as Rome claims for him. The evidence is cumulative in its effect; that is, taken as a whole, its testimony is most conclusive, and goes to prove that a doctrine of such vital importance to the Church of Rome was unknown to the early Church.