As an example, take your author's claim that in Greek and Latin the name given to Peter (petro, petrus) is masculine gender, while the Rock referred to by Christ is feminine (petra). This minor disjunct is somehow taken to demonstrate that there is no distinct connection between Christ calling Peter petro and immediately after referring to the petra on which he founds his Church. On the face of it, that's an extremely outlandish conclusion. But the clincher is that in Aramaic, the language Christ spoke, the words are identical (cepha). To discover this all you would have to consult is the online Catholic Encyclopedia page on the Pope. As a result, one has to wonder how much homework you did on this man's claims.
This is a good argument. Christ would have indeed said "cepha" in both instances in Aramaic. However, the Gospel of Matthew was written in Greek (it was possibly written in Hebrew as well, but this version as been lost to us). This is stated in the Catholic Encyclopedia. Why did the original author of the Gospel of Matthew (possibly Matthew himself, possibly others) see it fit to make a distinction between the two "rocks"?
First, I should correct an important inaccuracy in your reply. Tradition holds that the Gospel of Matthew was originally written in Aramaic, not in Greek. This comes to us by way of St. Irenaeus, as well as of Eusebius and Origen -- two of the Fathers whom you quoted, thus whose authority on this one assumes you would be inclined to respect. So it is inaccurate to say that the Gospel was written in Greek; instead, we should say that the earliest extant copies are in Greek. However that may be, in a sense it’s immaterial to us, since we don’t have the original Aramaic.
So that leaves us to ask why the Greek copies make this distinction. It must serve some purpose in the economy of Revelation, since nobody can believe that Providence would leave us with a misleading and inaccurate Gospel. I am not certain what that purpose is, but what is self-evident is that even with the petrus/petra distinction, the passage still obviously affirms the primacy of Peter. If
petra can be said to refer to faith, or to Christ himself, it nevertheless remains that God the Father singled out Peter from the others by inspiring him to be first in the confession of faith:
Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona: because flesh and blood hath not revealed it to thee, but my Father who is in heaven. And it is equally clear that God the Son consequently singled out Peter from among the Apostles, first by naming him after this petra, and second by giving to him the keys of the kingdom of heaven. To summarize, the distinction may exist to help us better perceive that Peter heads the Church by being first in the confession of Christ; and that, as the Catechism of Trent tells us, Peter is the visible head, while Christ is the invisible; but it assuredly does not exist to show us that Peter was not really first among the Apostles: that is simply grasping at straws.
You quote three Church Fathers that appear to make a claim for the Papacy. Let me quote six Church Fathers which appear to make a claim against the Papacy.
It would require no mental effort to multiply quotations from Church Fathers, so I propose to avoid doing that.
Regarding the quotations you provide, the first thing I want to point out is that since Scripture is multi-valent, it does not follow, from the fact that one meaning is drawn from it to illustrate a certain point, that this is to the exclusion of other possible meanings. In other words, if for example St. Chrysostom on occasion speaks of the rock as referring to faith in Christ, or to Christ himself, this can’t be taken to mean that he does not also understand the rock to refer to Peter and his primacy. Scripture has different senses, and these interpretations are not mutually exclusive. So when St. Chrysostom says this:
And I say unto thee, Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church’; that is, on the faith of his confession.
and also this:
Peter, that head of the Apostles, the first in the Church, the friend of Christ, who received the revelation not from man but from the Father....this Peter, and when I say Peter, I mean the unbroken Rock, the unshaken foundation, the great apostle, the first of the disciples, the first called, the first to obey.
we do not conclude that here is a foolish or hypocritical man, incapable of consistency, who at one time holds the opinion that the rock is faith, and another time holds that it is Peter; we conclude that he holds both of these things at once, since in no way are they mutually exclusive. It
is the case that Peter was first in confessing the Rock that is Christ, and it
is also the case that this makes him and his successors the Rock of the Church. For this reason I’m not going to respond to each quotation you’ve provided from him; for he’s so clearly an adherent to the Bishop of Rome that it follows, of necessity, that you’ve misunderstood these passages.
In passing, the remainder of the first quotation you made from Chrysostom clearly supports the papacy:
Hereby He signifies that many were on the point of believing, and raises his spirit, and makes him a shepherd...For the Father gave to Peter the revelation of the Son; but the Son gave him to sow that of the Father and that of Himself in every part of the world; and to mortal man He entrusted the authority over all things in Heaven, giving him the keys; who extended the church to every part of the world, and declared it to be stronger than heaven.
A parallel argument can be made with respect to your quotation from St. Ambrose, who states that Peter’s primacy is of confession of faith, not honour:
He, then, who before was silent, to teach us that we ought not to repeat the words of the impious, this one, I say, when he heard, ‘But who do you say I am,’ immediately, not unmindful of his station, exercised his primacy, that is, the primacy of confession, not of honor; the primacy of belief, not of rank.
But elsewhere he states this:
Because he alone of all of them professed [Christ] he was placed above all.
Once more, the simplest conclusion is that the two statements are in harmony. Once more, the remainder of the quotation you provided supports the papacy:
This, then, is Peter, who has replied for the rest of the Apostles; rather, before the rest of men. And so he is called the foundation, because he knows how to preserve not only his own but the common foundation...Faith, then, is the foundation of the Church, for it was not said of Peter’s flesh, but of his faith, that ‘the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’
Regarding the Origen, who despite being a Father, is notoriously problematic and difficult to interpret. (For the sake of space I won’t quote it again in this reply. If necessary, please refer to Alex’s post.) He seems to take the passage from the Gospel of Matthew in the anagogical sense, whereby each of us becomes a rock through our confession of Christ, and in each of us God builds his Church. This mystical meaning shouldn’t be taken at the expense of the literal sense, which makes, among us, St. Peter
the rock. It shouldn't be taken that way because, if it is, then Protestant individualism is the final conclusion of his logic. Every man can possess for himself the very keys of the kingdom of heaven, so what use is there for popes, or for that matter, priests? This interpretation would undermine Orthodoxy as much as it would Catholicism. In other words, the quotation is dynamite, and I don’t advise you to huck it around like that.
Sadly, I don’t have time this evening to pick through all the rest. By now I believe I’ve gone far enough to expose several of your fundamental misunderstandings, both of what the Fathers are saying and of what the Church teaches regarding the papacy. Again, let us accept the petrus/petra distinction made in the Greek, although this did not exist in the original Aramaic. The Catechism of Trent accepts this distinction implicitly, when it quotes St. Basil:
Peter is made the foundation, because he says: Thou art Christ, the Son of the Living God; and hears in reply that he is a rock. But although a rock, he is not such a rock as Christ; for Christ is truly an immovable rock, but Peter, only by virtue of that rock. There is no difficulty – none whatsoever – in squaring this distinction with the perennial understanding of the Church, at last formally defined in Vatican I, that knows Peter to be the Vicar of Christ.
I hope you find these arguments as good as the last one. You're right that it will take time to respond to the other questions, so thanks for your patience.
Topic: Mithrandylan, but about allegedly traditional Catholic forums in general. (Read 58885 times)