"Peter in the New Testament"

THAT THE PAPACY is "the great est obstacle on the road to Ecumenism" was acknowledged by Pope Paul VI in an address to the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity on April 28, 1967. Yet several of the bilateral consultations in which the Roman Catholic Church is currently engaged have built up enough confidence to take on the most difficult question of the role of the Papacy in a reunited Christian church. ¹ At the time of this writing the U.S. Lutheran- Roman Catholic Consultation has published a 181-page report, Peter in the New Testament,² described by its editors as a "collaborative assessment by Protestant and Roman Catholic scholars." The study was sponsored by the United States Lutheran-Roman Catholic Dialog as a background for a forthcoming study of papal primacy.

Begun in 1965, in the aftermath of Vatican II, under the sponsor ship of the U.S. National Commit tee of the Lutheran World Federation and the Committee for Ecumenical and Inter-religious Affairs of the National (U.S.) Conference of Catholic Bishops, this dialog has had an unusual history of achievement. Its four volumes entitled Lutherans and Catholics in Dialogue record a general consensus reached on such basic topics as the Nicene Creed, baptism, the eucharist, and the ministry. In 1971, its members began discussion of one of the thorniest problems arising from the Reformation: the problem of ministry in the universal church, with special emphasis on papal ministry.

It was quickly recognized that in order to speed up the work of the consultation small groups ought to be commissioned to do specialized historical studies dealing with the emergence of the papacy in the Western church. Task forces of specialists were appointed to work on two particularly sensitive historical periods, namely the New Testament and the Patristic periods. Peter in the New Testament is the report prepared in a book form by the first task force, co-chaired by Father Raymond E. Brown of Union Theo logical Seminary, New York, and Dr. John Reumann of Lutheran Seminary, Philadelphia. Eleven scholars five Lutherans, four Catholics, one United Church of Christ, and one Episcopalian made up the whole study group.³ Convinced that the subject of the Petrine office and the papacy would be of interest to many different ecumenical dialogs, the co-chairmen had decided to invite two scholars from traditions other than Roman Catholic and Lutheran to join the members officially appointed by the National Dialog.

Peter in the New Testament

This report assesses every reference to Simon Peter in the New Testament, with strongest focus on passages that highlight the role of Peter in the spread of Christianity, the respective authority of Peter and James in Jerusalem, and Peter's relationship with Paul and the beloved disciple of the fourth Gospel.

Of particular interest, of course, is the study's pronouncement on a few verses in Matthew 16 that more than any others have figured in controversies about the role of Peter in the New Testament. In recent centuries the Matthew 16:16-19 passage has become the text cited by the Roman Catholic Church as scriptural basis for its concept of the authority of the papacy. Two verses are most crucial: " 'And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven' " (Matt. 16:18, 19, R.S.V.).

In its study of the passage the report mentions several possible ways of interpreting these verses⁴ and concludes its inquiry into the origin of the account by declaring that it is most probable that the setting of this crucial passage, "in whole or in part, was post-resurrectional." ⁵ That is, these words of Jesus stemmed from a post-resurrectional appearance of Jesus, which Matthew merely brought together and attached to the Lord's ministry in Caesarea Philippi.⁶ In so doing he produced a verse that gives Peter a very singular distinction, but has little if any historical value as such, for things did not happen as they are recorded, according to the report.

In fact, Peter's confession of Jesus as " 'the Son of the living God' " (verse 16), which evoked from Jesus the words contained in the passage under discussion, is itself regarded as a confession be longing more to the post-resurrectional faith of the early church than to the faith and trust that Jesus developed during His days in the flesh. ⁷

Major Departure

Some readers are bound to be surprised. For many of them, whether Roman Catholic or not, many conclusions expressed by the report constitute a major departure from past and traditional evaluations of Peter. The one dealing with the Matthew 16 passage is not alone in this category. The study affirms also that it is "difficult to delineate the borderline between history and theology in Acts 15," and to come to any firm conclusion as to the historical role that Peter, for instance, played at the Jerusalem council. ⁸

It is just as difficult to know whether Peter really was a spokes man for the intimate companions of Jesus during the Lord's ministry or whether the instances of such spokesmanship in the Gospels are not merely "the reflection of his later role as the spokes man for the twelve in the Jerusalem church." ⁹ As for the apostle's later life, while it is "most prob able" in the opinion of the task force that Simon Peter went to Rome late in his career and was martyred there, "the same cannot be said about the question of whether he served as local 'bishop' of the Roman community and whether he appointed his successors in the Roman bishopric." ¹⁰

Disconcerting as they may be, these conclusions are nevertheless the logical outcome of a series of presuppositions adopted by the members of the task force, and plainly spelled out in the second chapter of their report. The whole study of Peter's role in the New Testament presupposes, they assert, "the attitudes and methods common in contemporary biblical criticism" with regard to the nature as well as to the composition of the New Testament writings used in this study. ¹¹ In consequence, these writings "are not documents whose purpose is to present us with scientific history," ¹² nor are the Gospels and the book of Acts impartial records. They are "documents in which faith has shaped the presentation," ¹³ requiring that we discover, behind the scenes and sayings they record, the various sources and interpretations that influenced the evangelists them selves in recording them, when they did not simply create them. ¹⁴

In its final chapter, the document concludes that in New Testament thought Peter is viewed in the images of "great Christian fisherman," pastor, martyr, the "receiver of special revelation," confessor, and guardian of true faith, and a "weak and sinful man." ¹⁵ These images are part of the "Petrine trajectory," a trajectory that eventually "outdistanced the other apostolic trajectories," even Paul's. ¹⁶ Although the fact remains that in the early church. Peter did not for that matter function "in solitary splendor," but was frequently associated with other prominent disciples. ¹⁷

Consequently, the report questions whether the New Testament evidence justifies Christians in concluding that there is a function of guidance and leadership applicable to the entire church and attached to a single person Peter or whether the latter's function was not merely one among the whole complex of different forms of leadership through which the early church was administered. ¹⁸

Ecumenical Implications

The study is unquestionably basic. Its ecumenical implications are obvious. Not only is it remark able that, granting the history of Martin Luther's relationship to the papacy, a group of scholars officially representing the Lutheran and Roman Catholic traditions could reach a common agreement on as divisive an issue, but Roman Catholics are in fact invited to reflect on how the Roman pontiff might relate in a reunited church to Protestants whose attitude to ward the papacy has been radically different from their own during the past four hundred and fifty years. Is there enough flexibility in the papacy for the pope to function along new lines? Could he possibly speak as a clear voice and a visible leader for Christians of all traditions? Father Brown, one of the study's co-chairmen and its chief editor, thinks that such "structural changes" are possible, and has indicated recently that "there's a lot that's adaptable in the papacy." ¹⁹

What strikes me as even more significant and more distressing too is of a somewhat different nature. I am referring to the basis on which the Lutheran-Catholic agreement expressed in this document has been reached. The basis for the publication of this collaborative effort was not total agreement, of course, but, as stated in the first chapter of the report, "a consensus about the reasonable limits of plausibility." ²⁰ The end product itself is described as having been achieved "not so much by way of mutual compromise and concession, but by way of mutual and creative discovery. ²¹

What kind of creative discovery? There is no doubt that some Protestants may have found out that they perhaps paid too little attention to Peter, while some Roman Catholics may have come to recognize that the New Testament does not provide them with as much support to uphold their claims of Petrine primacy as they used to think.

But this was not apparently the only finding. Both sides seem to have come to the same attitude toward the historical value and authority of the Scriptures, or should we say, their lack of such. I trust that some of my readers have been shocked to hear that the Gospels and the book of Acts, for instance, are no longer to be regarded as reliable historical sources of the ministry of our Lord or the life of the early church. These are no longer to be treated as "straight history," reporting in every case things "as they really happened." ²²

The document concedes, to be sure, that the delineation of source material with which it concerned itself is problematical, that much of what one discovers that way depends on inference. ²³ I still question, however, both the propriety and the reliability of this critical approach to Biblical re search. Its limitations in reaching final theological conclusions, I fear, have not sufficiently been underlined in this study.

At Variance With Luther's Views

In any event, we find ourselves today very much at variance with Luther's own appreciation of the Scriptures as the infallible divine Word and the only source and norm of the Christian faith and life. Luther's identification of God's Word with the Scriptures, his manifest teaching that the Bible, as a whole or in all its parts, is the very Word of God is unambiguous: "No other doctrine should be proclaimed in the Church than the pure Word of God, that is, the Holy Scriptures," declared the father of the Reformation. ²⁴

It is true that Luther distinguished between the various Bible books as to their relative importance for the generation and preservation of saving faith, but to him, above all else, the one great objective aid in his attempt at dis covering truth was the Scriptures, because he regarded them as the written record of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. It seems clear that four hundred and fifty years later some of his spiritual descendants, impressed by the conclusions of a particular approach to Biblical criticism, are unable to turn to the Scriptures with Luther's simplicity. On this point Roman Catholic theologians and their Lutheran colleagues seem to have eventually converged to so great an extent that the consideration of the sola scriptura issue, of the absolute validity and authority of the Scriptures alone, is no longer a dividing factor.

Interestingly enough, this "discovery" may mean little harm to the Roman Catholic position. In earlier times the inability to affirm the absolute historicity of Peter's deeds and words would have deprived much of the scriptural material of any value, since the debate about such problems as Peter's role in the early Christian church always centered on what had really happened during Christ's ministry or in the early history of the Christian church. This is no longer true, no longer indispensable, the Lutheran- Catholic study suggests. Even when we are sure that we are not dealing with exact history of genuine sayings, or even if we are to conclude that Jesus did not, after all, say, "You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church," that would no longer settle the issue according to this viewpoint. Whether historical or not, what the New Testament writers report about Peter represents at least what the early church believed had happened and therefore the role that was being recognized as be longing to Peter at that time. ²⁵ And this, they feel, is of major importance.

Such reasoning may be of decisive importance for Roman Catholic theology, but what is left of the Reformation's historic stand if the historicity and the authority of Scriptures as the sure Word of God is taken away from it?

This study originated from a desire to come up with a thorough reassessment of the role of Peter in the New Testament writings as background for ecumenical discussions of the role of the papacy in a reunited Christian church. It has "discovered" the importance of the "trajectory" traveled by Peter in the New Testament writings. In subsequent studies the Catholic- Lutheran National Dialog will pursue this trajectory in the Patristic period and later church history. It will be most interesting to find out, as they develop this line of reasoning, the extent to which Peter's subsequent trajectory was determined by the New Testament material itself, and the extent to which they will decide that it was determined by the accidents of later history.