Upon This Rock

This is the hardest page on this site to write fairly, because the author was raised in the church this page ends up questioning, and because the men who built the claim were not liars. So the rule here is stricter than usual: the Catholic case gets stated at its strongest, from the Fathers themselves and not from a summary, before anything is said against it. If the case against a position is only persuasive when the position is stated badly, the case is not persuasive.

One gap, declared up front. Bellarmine's On the Roman Pontiff is the best defence of the papacy ever written and it is not in our library; we hold eleven of his other works in translation, not that one. So the Catholic case here is built from Scripture and the Fathers, which is where Bellarmine builds it too, but a reader should know we are not answering his best book.

1. The verse, and it is a real verse

Peter has just confessed, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God," and Jesus answers:

Matthew 16:17-19

Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: 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, and upon this rock 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.

Protestants have a bad habit of reading this verse as though it were mostly about somebody else. It is not. Jesus is talking to Peter, He renames him, He gives him keys, and the promise of binding and loosing is here delivered to him in the singular. Anyone whose reading of Matthew 16 makes Peter unimportant has read it badly, and the plain sense is against them.

Nor is Peter's prominence confined to this passage. He is named first in every apostolic list. He speaks for the Twelve repeatedly. He preaches at Pentecost. Christ prays for him by name that his faith fail not, and tells him "when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren" (Luke 22:32). And after the resurrection, three times, "Feed my lambs… Feed my sheep" (John 21:17). A man who wants to argue that Peter was just one of twelve equals with no distinction is arguing against the text.

2. The Fathers who read it as Rome does

This is the part usually left out. Leo the Great, bishop of Rome in the fifth century, states the claim with no hedging at all:

…from him as from the Head wishes His gifts to flow to all the body: so that any one who dares to secede from Peter's solid rock may understand that he has no part or lot in the divine mystery. For He wished him who had been received into partnership in His undivided unity to be named what He Himself was, when He said: "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church."

St Leo the Great, Sermons

That is not a soft primacy of honour. Head, gifts flowing to the body, and secession from Peter's rock meaning no part in the divine mystery. And Leo is not a fringe figure; he is one of the two bishops of Rome the whole church still calls "the Great."

Augustine, who will be quoted on the other side in a moment, also supplies Rome with a genuine argument. Writing against the Donatists, he treats the unbroken line of Roman bishops as a decisive credential and lists them by name:

For if the lineal succession of bishops is to be taken into account, with how much more certainty and benefit to the Church do we reckon back till we reach Peter himself, to whom, as bearing in a figure the whole Church, the Lord said: "Upon this rock will I build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it!" The successor of Peter was Linus, and his successors in unbroken continuity were these—Clement, Anacletus, Evaristus…

St Augustine, Letter 53

He runs the list down to the pope of his own day. Whatever Augustine thought "this rock" meant, he plainly thought the Roman succession from Peter was real, traceable, and an argument that settled things.

The case, then. Christ singled out one man, renamed him, gave him keys, and told him to feed the sheep. That man went to Rome and died there. The bishops of Rome succeed him in an unbroken line the fourth century could already recite from memory. A pope in the fifth century says departing from that rock is departing from the mystery. If the church is a visible body and not an idea, it needs a visible head, and Scripture appointed one. That is a serious argument and it should be met, not sneered at.

3. What "this rock" meant to the men who spoke Greek

Now the other half of the record, and it is not a Reformation invention. It is in the same Fathers.

Chrysostom, preaching in Greek in the fourth century, reading the words in the language they were written in, glosses the phrase in five words:

"And I say unto thee, Thou art Peter, and upon this rock will I build my Church;" that is, on the faith of his confession.

St John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew

Not on Peter. On the faith of his confession. And Augustine, in a sermon, takes it a third way again:

Peter is from petra, rock, which rock is the Church: so that the name of Peter represents the Church. And who is safe, unless he build upon a rock?

St Augustine, Sermons

So three readings sit in the record before AD 500: the rock is Peter (Leo), the rock is Peter's confession (Chrysostom), and the rock is the Church that Peter's name stands for (Augustine). Augustine, remarkably, holds a version of the first and the third in different places without apparent embarrassment, which should slow down anybody who wants a clean patristic verdict in either direction.

The honest conclusion is the uncomfortable one: the early church did not read this verse one way, and neither side gets to claim the Fathers whole. A Catholic who says the Fathers unanimously read the rock as Peter is wrong about Chrysostom. A Protestant who says no early Father read it as Peter has not read Leo.

4. A textual problem worth being honest about

Cyprian's On the Unity of the Church, written around 251, is the other great early witness, and it comes down to us in two forms. One contains a passage giving the primacy to Peter and speaking of "one See." The other does not, and says instead that the other apostles were what Peter was, "endued with a like partnership both of honour and power."

The Ante-Nicene Fathers edition we quote from prints the first passage in brackets and calls it "beyond all question spurious." That editorial note is itself a nineteenth-century Protestant judgement and should not be repeated as though it were neutral. The scholarly view since has moved: many now hold that Cyprian wrote both versions, revising his own text, which would make both genuinely his. What can be said without picking a side is this: the strongest early Roman proof text from Cyprian is textually contested, everyone in the argument knows it, and a page that quoted the primacy passage without saying so would be cheating.

5. What the New Testament does after Matthew 16

Here is the step that decides most of it for this site, and it is not a clever argument. It is just reading forward.

Paul corrects Peter publicly, and reports it. "But when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed… I said unto Peter before them all" (Galatians 2:11-14). Not a private word. Before them all, over the gospel itself, and Paul writes it into Scripture where the churches would read it aloud. Whatever office Peter held, it was not one that put him beyond correction by a brother on a point of truth.

At the council in Jerusalem, Peter speaks but James renders the decision. Peter gives decisive testimony (Acts 15:7-11), and then: "And after they had held their peace, James answered, saying, Men and brethren, hearken unto me… Wherefore my sentence is, that we trouble not them, which from among the Gentiles are turned to God" (Acts 15:13-19). The letter goes out from "the apostles and elders and brethren." If there is a model here for how the church settles a disputed question, it is a council that hears Peter with weight and then decides together.

Peter describes his own office, and it is not a throne. "The elders which are among you I exhort, who am also an elder… Feed the flock of God which is among you, taking the oversight thereof, not by constraint, but willingly; not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind; neither as being lords over God's heritage, but being ensamples to the flock" (1 Peter 5:1-3). Who am also an elder. A fellow-elder, warning elders against lording it. That is Peter's own account of what he is, in a letter he wrote, and it is the last word we have from him on the subject.

6. What actually happened, told fairly

The development was not a conspiracy and it was not absurd. Rome was the capital. Rome held the graves of Peter and Paul. Rome had money and stayed doctrinally steady while eastern sees tore themselves apart over Arianism, and when a bishop elsewhere was in trouble he wrote to Rome and Rome usually answered well. A primacy of honour and of appeal grew because Rome earned it, and for centuries the East granted it without conceding that it meant supreme jurisdiction.

The break comes when honour becomes jurisdiction and jurisdiction becomes a doctrine of the faith. That is a long road, and its milestones are datable: the Photian dispute in the ninth century, the mutual excommunications of 1054, and finally the definition of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council in 1870, which is not an ancient claim but a modern one about an ancient office. Between Leo saying the Roman see is the head and a council defining that the pope teaching ex cathedra is preserved from error, there is a real distance, and it took fourteen centuries to cross.

And the historical record contains episodes that any theory of the office has to absorb. Pope Honorius was condemned by name as a heretic by the Sixth Ecumenical Council in 681, an ecumenical council anathematising a pope. There were three simultaneous claimants during the Western Schism. There were popes whose lives were a scandal to Christendom, which Catholics say more sharply than Protestants do. None of that disproves the office; the office does not claim popes are good men. But it does put pressure on a claim of unfailing preservation.

Where this lands

Peter was first. That is in the text and nobody should pretend otherwise. He was given keys and told to feed the sheep, and Christ prayed for him by name. A church with no first chair is not the church of the New Testament.

What the New Testament does not show is that first chair holding a final word. Peter is corrected in public by Paul; James pronounces at the council; Peter calls himself a fellow-elder and forbids lording. And the Fathers who read Matthew 16 did not agree on what the rock was, which means the verse was not functioning in the early church as the deed to an office.

So the position of this site is neither the sneer nor the submission. There is a real primacy in Scripture and it is Peter's. There is a real debt to Rome in history and it should be paid out loud. And there is a real difference between the man who speaks first and the man who cannot be answered, and it is that difference, not Peter, that the Reformation was contesting.

What the argument costs, said plainly: if Rome is right, the rest of us are in schism from the visible church, and that is not a small charge. If Rome is wrong, then a claim was made in the name of Christ that Christ did not make, and that is not a small charge either. This page does not think the question is trivial or that either answer is cheap. It thinks the evidence, read whole, shows a first among brethren who could be told he was wrong, and that a church built on that man's confession is the church the gates of hell will not prevail against.

Related: The Authority of Scripture and The Canon, the other half of the authority question, Scripture Alone, and What That Was Meant to Mean, Bind and Loose, The Church, The Church, One Story, Who Believes What, Lines Drawn, and Bellarmine in translation. Fathers quoted verbatim from the public-domain Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers; Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub. Bellarmine's On the Roman Pontiff is not in our library and is not answered here.