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It seems as if Jesus wished to leave no possible doubt as to the intent and bearing of His words regarding the rock of the Church. He therefore completed them by explicitly committing the power of the keys and the supreme government of His Kingdom to that fundamental authority of the Church which He established in the person of Simon Peter. “And I will give thee the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven.” And here we must first of all clear up a contradiction which our “orthodox” controversialists ascribe to Jesus Christ. In order to eliminate as far as possible the distinction between Peter and the other Apostles, it is asserted that the power of the keys is nothing else but the power of binding and loosing; after saying, “I will give thee the keys,” Jesus is supposed to have repeated the same promise in other words. But in speaking of keys, the words “shut” and “open” should have been used, and not “bind” and “loose,” as in fact (to confine ourselves solely to the New Testament) we read in the Apocalypse: Ό εχων τεν κλειδα του ∆αυέιδ, ό ανοίγων και ουδεις κλείει, και κλείει και ουδεις ανοίγει. (He who has the key of David, who opens and no one shuts, and shuts and no one opens — Apoc. iii. 7.) A room, a house or a city may be shut and opened, but only particular beings or objects situated within the room or house or city can be bound and unbound. The Gospel passage in question is a metaphor, but a metaphor is not necessarily an absurdity. The symbol of the keys of the Kingdom (of the royal dwelling — beth-ha-melek) must necessarily represent a wider and more general authority than the symbol of binding and loosing.
The special power of binding and loosing, having been bestowed upon Peter in the same terms as those in which it was conferred later on the other Apostles (Matt. xviii. 18), it is plain from the context of the latter chapter that this lesser power only concerns individual cases (“if thy brother sin against thee,” etc.), which is in entire agreement with the sense of the metaphor used in the Gospel. Only personal problems of conscience and the direction of individual souls fall under the authority to bind and loose which was given to the other Apostles after Peter; whereas the power of the keys of the Kingdom conferred solely on Peter can only refer to the whole of the Church (if we are to follow not only the exact sense of our text, but general Biblical analogy) and must denote a supreme social and political authority, the general administration of the Kingdom of God on Earth. The life of the Christian soul must neither be separated from the organization of the Universal Church, nor confused with it. They are two different orders of things, though closely interconnected.
Just as the teaching of the Church is no mere compound of personal beliefs, so the government of the Church cannot be reduced to the direction of individual consciences or of private morality. Founded on unity of faith, the Universal Church as a real and living social organism must also display unity of action sufficient to react successfully at every moment of her historic existence against the combined attacks of those hostile forces which would divide and destroy her. Unity of action for a vast and complicated social organism implies a whole system of organic functions subordinate to a common center which can set them in motion in the direction desired at any given moment. As the unity of the orthodox faith is finally guaranteed by the dogmatic authority of a single individual speaking for all, so unity of ecclesiastical action is necessarily conditioned by the directing authority of a single individual bearing sway over the whole Church. But in the One Holy Church, founded upon truth, government cannot be separated from doctrine; and the central and supreme power in the ecclesiastical sphere can only belong to him who by divinely aided authority represents and displays in the religious sphere the unity of true faith.
This is why the keys of the Kingdom have been given to none other than him who is by his faith the Rock of the Church.
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