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And I say to thee that thou art Peter . . . ” Of the three attributes represented in this crucial passage as belonging by divine right to the prince of the Apostles — (1) the call to be the foundation of the Church by the infallible confession of the truth, (2) the possession of the power of the keys, (3) the power of binding and loosing — it is only the last that he shares with the other Apostles. All Orthodox Christians1 are agreed that the apostolic power of binding and loosing was not conferred upon the Twelve as private individuals or in the sense of a temporary privilege, but that it is the genuine source and origin of a perpetual priestly authority which has descended from the Apostles to their successors in the hierarchy, the bishops and priests of the Universal Church. But if this is true, then neither can the two former attributes connected particularly with St. Peter in a still more solemn and significant manner be individual or accidental prerogatives;2 the less so, in that it was with the first of these prerogatives that our Lord expressly connected the permanence and stability of His Church in its future struggle against the powers of evil.
If the power of binding and loosing conferred on the Apostles is not a mere metaphor nor a purely personal and temporary attribute, if it is, on the contrary, the actual living germ of a universal permanent institution comprising the Church’s whole existence, how can St. Peter’s own special prerogatives, announced in such explicit and solemn terms, be regarded as barren metaphors or as personal and transitory privileges? Ought not they also to refer to some fundamental and permanent institution, of which the historic personality of Simon Bar-Jona is but the outstanding and typical representative? The God-Man did not establish ephemeral institutions. In His chosen disciples He saw, through and beyond all that was mortal and individual, the enduring principles and types of His work. What He said to the college of the Apostles included the whole priestly order, the teaching Church in its entirety. The sublime words which He addressed to Peter alone created in the person of this one Apostle the undivided sovereign authority possessed by the Universal Church throughout the whole of its life and development in future ages. The fact that Christ did not see fit to make the formal foundation of His Church and the guarantee of its permanence dependent on the common authority of all the Apostles (for He did not say to the apostolic college: “On you I will build My Church”) surely goes to show that our Lord did not regard the episcopal and priestly order, represented by the Apostles in common, as sufficient in itself to form the impregnable foundation of the Universal Church in her inevitable struggle against the gates of Hell. In founding His visible Church, Jesus was thinking primarily of the struggle against evil; and in order to ensure for His creation that unity which is strength, He crowned the hierarchy with a single, central institution, absolutely indivisible and independent, possessing in its own right the fullness of authority and of promise: “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church: and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.”
All arguments in support of the supreme central authority of the Universal Church would, in our view, have but little weight if they were only arguments. But they rest upon a divine-human fact which remains essential to the Christian faith despite all the artificial interpretations by which men have attempted to suppress it. It is not for us to demonstrate the abstract necessity of an institution to which Christ has given a living actuality. The arguments of Eastern theologians demonstrating that the whole hierarchical system is essential to the Church would not suffice to convince us, were it not for the original fact recorded in the Gospels, namely, the choice of the twelve Apostles to teach all nations to the end of time. Similarly, when we wish to prove that an indivisible center is essential to this same hierarchy, it is the fact of the special choice of Peter to serve as a human point d’appui for the divine truth in its constant struggle against the gates of Hell — it is the fact of this unique choice which provides a firm foundation for all our arguments.
If “the Church” is taken to mean the perfect union of mankind with God, the absolute reign of love and truth, then there is no place in the Church for any power or authority. All the members of this heavenly Kingdom are priests and kings and, as such, equal with one another, and the one and only center of unity is Jesus Christ Himself. But it is not in this sense that we speak of the Church, for it is not in this sense that Christ spoke of it. The perfect Church, the Church triumphant, the kingdom of glory — all this implies that the power of evil and the gates of Hell are finally vanquished, and yet it is to contend with the gates of Hell that Christ builds His visible Church and gives it a center of unity which is human and earthly, though always divinely assisted.
If we would avoid the two opposite pitfalls of blind materialism and ineffectual idealism, we must admit that the needs of actual existence and the demands of the ideal coincide and harmonize in the order established by God. In order to show forth in the Church the ideal of harmony among men, Jesus Christ founded as the prototype of conciliar government the college or original council of the twelve Apostles, equal with one another and united by brotherly love. In order that this ideal unity might be effectually realized in every age and place, that the council of the hierarchy might always and everywhere prevail over discord and gather up the multiplicity of private opinions into uniform public decrees, that discussion might issue in the living manifestation of the unity of the Church, secure from the hazards to which the assemblies of men are exposed — in a word, that His Church might not be built upon shifting sands, the divine Architect revealed the firm impregnable Rock of ecclesiastical monarchy and set up the ideal of unanimity while basing it upon an actual living authority.
Christ, we are told, is the Rock of the Church. That is true; no Christian has ever disputed it. But it is hard to see the reasonableness, even if we admit the sincerity, of those who in their zeal to defend Christ from an imaginary insult persist in ignoring His express will and in repudiating the order which He established in so explicit a manner. For He not only declared that Simon, one of His Apostles, was the Rock of His Church, but in order to impress this new truth more forcibly upon us and to make it more evident and striking, He gave to Simon a distinctive and permanent name derived from this very call to be the Rock of the Church.
We have here, then, two equally indisputable truths: Christ is the Rock of the Church, and Simon Bar-Jona is the Rock of the Church. But the contradiction, if there be one, does not stop here. For we find this very Simon Peter, despite the fact that he alone received from Christ this unique prerogative, declaring in one of his epistles that all the faithful are living stones in the divine-human building (1 Pet. ii. 4, 5). Jesus is the one and only Rock of the Church; but, if we are to believe Jesus, the prince of the Apostles is the Rock of His Church par excellence; and again, if we would believe Peter, every true believer is the Rock of the Church.
Confronted with the apparent inconsistency of these truths, it is enough for us to observe their actual agreement in logic. Jesus Christ, the unique Rock of the Kingdom of God on the purely religious and mystical plane, sets up the prince of the Apostles and his permanent authority as the fundamental Rock of the Church in the social order for the Christian community; and each member of this community, united to Christ and abiding in the order established by Him, becomes an organic individual element, a living stone of this Church whose mystical and (for the time being) invisible foundation is Jesus Christ, and whose social and visible foundation is the monarchical power of Peter. The essential distinction between these three factors only serves to throw into stronger relief the intimate connection between them in the Church’s actual existence, in which Christ, Peter, and the multitude of the faithful each play an essential part. The notion of such a threefold relationship can appear inconsistent only to those who presuppose such inconsistency by interpreting the three fundamental factors in an absolute and exclusive sense which is entirely inappropriate to them. What they forget is that the expression “rock (i. e., foundation) of the Church” is a relative expression, and that Christ can only be the Rock of the Church in that definite union of Himself with mankind which forms the Church; and since this union is primarily brought about in the social order through a central point of contact which Christ Himself associated with St. Peter, it is obvious that these two Rocks — the Messiah and His chief Apostle — so far from being mutually exclusive, are simply two inseparable factors in a unique relationship. As regards the rock or stones of the third order — the multitude of the faithful — though it is said that each believer may become a living stone of the Church, it is not said that he may do so by himself or in separation from Christ and the fundamental authority set up by Him.
The foundation of the Church, speaking in general terms, is the union of the Divine and the human. This foundation (the Rock) we find in Jesus Christ inasmuch as He unites the Godhead hypostatically with sinless human nature; we find it also in every true Christian inasmuch as he is united to Christ by the sacraments, by faith and by good works. But is it not clear that these two modes of union between the Divine and the human (the hypostatic union in the person of Christ, and the individual union of the believer with Christ) are not in themselves sufficient to constitute the specific unity of the Church in the strict sense of the word — that is, as a social and historic entity? The incarnation of the Word is a mystical fact and not a social principle; nor does the individual religious life provide an adequate basis for Christian society; man may remain alone in the desert and live a life of holiness. And yet, if, in the Church, besides the mystical life and the individual life, there exists the social life, this social life must have a definite form based upon a unifying principle peculiar to itself. When we maintain that this specific principle of social unity in the Church is in the first place neither Jesus Christ nor the mass of the faithful, but the monarchical authority of Peter, by means of which Jesus Christ has willed to unite Himself to man as a social and political being, we find our opinion confirmed by the remarkable fact that only in the case of the prince of the Apostles has the attribute of being the Rock of the Church carried with it the title to a distinctive and permanent name. He alone is the Rock of the Church in the special and strict sense of the term, that is to say, the unifying basis of the historic Christian society.
Three times only in the whole of sacred history recorded in the two Testaments did it happen that the Lord Himself changed a man’s name. When Abraham by an act of unlimited faith vowed himself to the living God, God changed his name and pronounced him to be the father of all believers (“father of the multitude”). When Jacob in that mysterious struggle pitted the whole spiritual energy of man against the living God, God gave him a new name which marked him out as the direct parent of that peculiar and unique race which has striven and still strives with its God. When Simon Bar-Jona, the descendant of Abraham and Jacob, combined in himself the powerful initiative of the human soul and the infallible assistance of the heavenly Father in the affirmation of the divine-human truth, the God-Man changed his name and set him at the head of the new believers and the new Israel. Abraham, the type of primitive theocracy, represents humanity in devotion and self-surrender to God; Jacob, the type of the national theocracy of the Jews, represents humanity beginning its struggle with God; and lastly Simon Peter, the type of universal and final theocracy, represents humanity making its response to its God, freely avowing Him and cleaving to Him in mutual and indissoluble adherence. That boundless faith in God which made Abraham the father of all believers was in Peter united to that active assertion of the power of man which distinguished Jacob-Israel; the prince of the Apostles reflected in the earthly mirror of his soul that harmony between the Divine and the human which he saw brought to perfection in his Master; and he became thereby the first-born and principal heir of the God-Man, the spiritual father of the new Christian race, the foundation-stone of that Universal Church which is the fulfilment and perfection of the religion of Abraham and of the theocracy of Israel.
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1. And, among non-Orthodox, all writers who are in good faith; for instance, the eminent Jewish thinker Joseph Salvador in his book Jesus-Christ et son œuvre.
2. This conclusion is wholeheartedly accepted by the notable Jewish writer already referred to. He sees in the primacy of Peter the keystone of the edifice of the Church as designed and founded by Christ Himself.
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