The primacy and infallibility of the Pope have long stood as roadblocks to fellowship between the Roman Catholic Church and other church bodies. Now, however, as many churches strive for greater ecumenical rapprochement and ecclesial unity, scholars from a variety of Christian traditions have been exploring together the possibility that church unity may indeed be well served by the ministry of St. Peter.

How Can the Petrine Ministry Be a Service to the Unity of the Universal Church?

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Copyright © 2010 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-4862-8

Contents

Preface James F. Puglisi, SA..............................................................................................................................ixIntroduction Peder Nrgaard-Hjen.........................................................................................................................1Petrine Ministry in the New Testament and in the Early Patristic Traditions John P. Meier.................................................................13The Petrine Ministry in the Early Patristic Tradition Archbishop Roland Minnerath.........................................................................34The Petrine Ministry in the New Testament and in Early Patristic Tradition John Reumann...................................................................49Protestant Reaction to the Post-Reformation Development of Papal Authority Gnther Gassmann...............................................................81Historical Development of Forms of Authority and Jurisdiction: The Papal Ministry — an Ecumenical Approach Hermann J. Pottmeyer.....................98Did Vatican I Intend to Deny Tradition? Hermann J. Pottmeyer..............................................................................................108Vatican I and the Development of Doctrine: A Lutheran Perspective Michael Root............................................................................124What Ecclesiology for the Petrine Ministry? Joseph A. Komonchak...........................................................................................145Papal Ministry in a Communication Ecclesiology: A Search for Some Possible Themes Sven-Erik Brodd.........................................................155The Future Exercise of Papal Ministry in the Light of Ecclesiology: An Orthodox Approach Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon........................169Infallibilitas Papae — Indefectibilitas Ecclesiae: A Systematic and Ecumenical Approach Johannes Brosseder..........................................180Is Papal Infallibility Compatible with Ecclesial Indefectibility? Peder Nrgaard-Hjen....................................................................194Introductory Considerations in the Ecumenical Dialogue on the Petrine Ministry from a Catholic Viewpoint Walter Cardinal Kasper...........................213Papal Primacy — a Possible Subject of Lutheran Theology? Harding Meyer..............................................................................225Universal Episkope and the Papal Ministry: A Critical Overview of Responses to Ut unum sint Peter Lning..................................................237Does the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification Have Any Relevance to the Discussion of the Papal Ministry? Andr Birmel.....................251A Ministry of Unity in the Context of Conciliarity and Synodality Eero Huovinen...........................................................................269A Primatial Ministry of Unity in a Conciliar and Synodical Context Geoffrey Wainwright....................................................................284Towards a Common Understanding of Papal Ministry: A Catholic Critical Point of View Herv Legrand, OP.....................................................310Towards a Common Lutheran/Roman Catholic Understanding of Papal Ministry Harding Meyer....................................................................335How Can the Petrine Ministry Serve the Unity of the Universal Church? Jared Wicks, SJ.....................................................................354

Chapter One

Petrine Ministry in the New Testament and in the Early Patristic Traditions

John P. Meier

Introduction

The theme of our symposium is posed as a question: How can the Petrine ministry serve the unity of the universal church? The focus of this first session is the Petrine ministry in the New Testament and the early patristic traditions. And the concrete context of our meeting here at Farfa is the mission of this International Centre to foster the unity of the church, especially within an emerging united Europe.

Granted therefore this question, this focus, and this context, I would like to preface my own presentation with a general observation. In the last hundred years or so, Christianity in Western Europe and North America has faced a relatively new phenomenon: the mass education of the Christian — or post-Christian — laity. While knowledge of history on the part of the general population is not what one would wish — especially in the United States — still, the general populace is imbued, at least in a vague way, with a historical-critical sensibility. Hence a church's theological claims about its past history will not receive today the same sort of uncritical acceptance by the laity that such claims might have received from medieval or early modern peasants. This modern critical sensibility as a product of mass education will no doubt spread increasingly to Eastern Europe as the European Union expands and matures.

Now all this is to the good. Only an ecclesiastical leader who felt insecure about the historical veracity of his own tradition would be threatened by this increase of a historical sensibility on the part of the general population. At the same time, we would be nave to ignore the challenge that this heightened historical sense creates. In the early modern period, the churches of Western Europe had to struggle to find an effective way to proclaim the Christian faith to educated elites in the Age of Reason, then in the Enlightenment, and then in an age marked by ever-accelerating scientific, social, and economic developments. For the last hundred years or more, this challenge has become ever more severe as the churches have had to address no longer just an educated elite but an educated general population knowledgeable of history.

I mention this widespread and obvious challenge in order to frame a more specific challenge posed by this state of affairs to the Roman Catholic Church. The challenge is this: Granted the phenomenon of mass education and the general knowledge of history that such education instills, how is the Roman Catholic Church today to articulate a historically responsible account of the origins of the papacy to a laity that is better educated than any laity in the first 1800 years of the church's history? A papacy that cannot give a credible historical account of its own origins can hardly hope to be a catalyst for unity among divided Christians.

Fortunately, progress has already been made in this area. For decades now, ecumenical studies like Peter in the New Testament (1973), produced by biblical scholars in the United States, and serious monographs by Catholic scholars such as Rudolf Pesch's Simon-Petrus (1980) and Joachim Gnilka's Petrus and Rom (2002), have prepared the way on the academic front. One cannot and should not expect that all of this scholarship would immediately be taken up by Catholic authorities into official documents of the magisterium. In my opinion, though, it is not without significance that neither the Catechism of the Catholic Church nor Pope John Paul II's groundbreaking encyclical Ut unum sint employed certain problematic assertions like "St. Peter was the first Pope." Granted, academics may smile at such an assertion, yet it is still often heard in the popular media, to say nothing of homilies and catechetical instruction. Hence it is at least noteworthy that some recent authoritative documents of the Roman Catholic Church have avoided certain types of claims that would not hold up under the scrutiny of critical historical research.

The question I pose in my presentation this morning is whether this experiment in nuance, in historically responsible articulations of Rome's claims, can be pursued further by the Roman communion. To rephrase my own question in light of the grand question of our meeting: How can the Petrine ministry serve the unity of the universal church by presenting to educated persons of the twenty-first century an account of the origins of the papacy that is both historically credible and faithful to Catholic convictions?

I would suggest that one approach would be for the Roman church to adopt a catechesis that honestly presented the multiple historical matrices out of which the phenomenon of the papacy arose. Such an admission and explanation of these multiple matrices would demonstrate to an educated audience, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, that, while insisting on the essential importance of the Petrine ministry for the life of the church, Rome was not engaging in historical obfuscation or in some historical fantasy labeled "tradition."

In making this suggestion, I use the word "matrix" rather than words like "source," "influence," "factor," or "origin" to stress an organic, generative process that may in some ways be likened to procreation, gestation, and full birth. The image of "matrix" avoids the notion that the papacy suddenly appeared on the scene or was created all at once within a given day or year or decade. Like any other grand and long-lived historical institution, its coming to be or coming to birth involved a laborious process. At the same time, the image of "multiple matrices" is purposely paradoxical. The developed papacy arises not from a single source but from the interaction of several sources over the span of a century or more. Needless to say, as a Catholic I view this century-long process not as some historical accident or mistake but as the expression of God's will and providence active in history, as he directs the course of events according to his saving purpose over the centuries. We need not be surprised that, just as Rome was not built in a day, neither was the Roman papacy.

What, then, are the multiple historical matrices that give birth to the papacy? While different scholars would no doubt offer different enumerations, for the sake of convenience I distinguish — however artificially — the following six matrices: (1) the Simon of history; (2) the Peter of faith presented in the canonical books of the New Testament; (3) the continuing memory of Simon Peter, as reflected in the earliest patristic literature, which gives us the first indications of the prominence and/or leadership of the church of Rome; (4) the rise of the monepiscopate in the Roman church sometime in the second century; (5) the striking assertion of Roman leadership by its bishop Victor toward the end of the second century; and (6) at the end of the second century, the beginning of theological reflection on and argument about the key Petrine texts of the New Testament.

The Six Historical Matrices of the Papacy

Within the time allotted, I can sketch only briefly the nature and interaction of these six matrices:

The Simon of History

If scholars rightly distinguish between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith — however that distinction is more precisely defined — then they likewise should distinguish between the Simon of history and the Peter of faith. The New Testament writings present us with a portrait of Peter shaped by Christian faith and history, and the same methods used to construct a hypothetical historical Jesus can be used to construct a hypothetical historical Simon as the starting point of our inquiry. If the impact of Jesus Christ on all subsequent history is due at least in part to the fact that faith in Jesus Christ is not faith in a timeless deity or mythic hero but in a historical Palestinian Jew of the first century, the same is analogically true of Simon Peter. We are not dealing with shadowy figures like Philip or Bartholomew, whose names were hijacked by later Christian apocrypha.

In volume three of my series, A Marginal Jew, I try to lay out what can be reasonably affirmed of the historical Simon. Simon (or "Shimeon," to use the Hebrew form of his name) was a first-century Galilean fisherman who, perhaps like his brother Andrew, originally came from the town of Bethsaida east of the Jordan. Simon seems to have settled with his wife and mother-in-law in the Jewish town of Capernaum on the northwest coast of the lake. He may have first come to know Jesus of Nazareth when both spent some time in the circle of the disciples of John the Baptist. Around A.D. 28, Jesus called Simon away from his fishing business to follow Jesus as a permanent disciple. Interestingly, all the various gospel stories present Simon as being called to discipleship not in splendid isolation but as part of a larger group being called at the same time. Nevertheless, Simon did function as the spokesman and/or leader of the inner circle of disciples established by Jesus, namely, "the Twelve." Presumably this is why all four New Testament lists of the Twelve, for all their differences, always name Simon first.

At some point during the public ministry, Jesus conferred or confirmed Simon's second name or nickname or title, i.e., Kep' in Aramaic (transliterated as Kephas in Greek and translated as Petros). The Aramaic noun kep' means "rock," "rocky crag," or "stone," and is attested around the time of Jesus in the Dead Sea documents. Scholars sometimes miss the point that kep' was not a proper name in first-century Jewish Palestine; rather, it was simply a common noun meaning rock or stone. Unlike the name Boanerges, given by Jesus to the sons of Zebedee, Kep' turned out to have a long and fateful history. In this it resembled the Aramaic word ms ("anointed one"), which was applied to Jesus and which in Greek was both transliterated as Messias and translated as Christos. As Christos became Jesus' second name in Greek, so did Petros for Simon. So important was the Aramaic title in each case that its meaning as well as its Aramaic form had to be preserved.

Not a great deal more can be said about the historical Simon during the public ministry. As spokesman of the Twelve, Simon Peter made a powerful profession of faith in Jesus at some critical moment in the public ministry. Yet Peter's role in the inner circle was not all positive. We have an isolated saying in which Jesus assails Peter with the withering rebuke, "Get behind me, Satan, for your mind is set not on divine but on human things." This chiaroscuro picture of Peter, worthy of Caravaggio, continues into the last days of Jesus (around the year 30) and into the early days of the church. Peter was present at the Last Supper and at Jesus' arrest in Gethsemane. When questioned about his relationship with Jesus, Peter panicked and denied he ever knew Jesus. Yet not many days later, this discredited Peter claimed that he had seen the risen Jesus. Within short order, Peter regathered the scattered disciples and became the leader of a nascent group of "Messianic Jews" or "Nazoreans" in Jerusalem. His leadership soon involved journeys around Judea and Samaria. During the 30s and early 40s, Peter's activity as leader attracted the unhealthy attention of other-minded Jewish leaders, including the high priest and King Herod Agrippa I. After a couple of incarcerations in Jerusalem, Peter apparently found it expedient to spread the Christian gospel at a greater distance.

While he was still in Jerusalem, Peter was visited for two weeks by Saul alias Paul after the latter had become a Christian (Gal. 1:18). For a while in Jerusalem, Peter formed a kind of troika with James the brother of Jesus and John the son of Zebedee; it was with this troika in particular that Paul, around the year 49, brokered the agreement that acknowledged his circumcision-free mission to the Gentiles (Gal. 2:6-10). Some time later, during a visit to Syrian Antioch, Peter was embroiled in a dispute with Paul over table fellowship between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians (Gal. 2:1114). After that, with the possible exception of a sojourn in the church at Corinth in the early 50s, the historical Peter, as far as he is knowable from the pages of the New Testament, disappears from view,

The Peter of Faith

Closely interconnected with this first matrix and not always distinguishable from it is the second matrix, the faith portraits of Simon Peter presented by various New Testament books. The pattern of light and dark that we found in the historical Simon continues in the Peter of faith. His high profile in the gospels and epistles is not always a positive one. Mark and Matthew go out of their way to make him a negative archetype of failed discipleship in a number of scenes. The "Get behind me Satan" logion is positioned right after Peter's profession of faith in Jesus' messiahship. Jesus' walking on the water is paralleled by Peter's sinking into the same. The embarrassing historical fact of Peter's denial becomes a dark drama of Jesus' dire prophecy at the Last Supper, fulfilled by Peter's triple denial in the courtyard of the high priest just as Jesus is confessing the truth.

All the more startling, then, are the various ways in which the gospels give Peter unparalleled prominence in a positive sense. Even stark, dark, laconic Mark makes Peter, along with Andrew, the first to be called by Jesus. Peter is the first absolutely in the list of the Twelve and the first disciple to understand the dangerous half-truth of Jesus' messiahship during the public ministry. Even the young man at the empty tomb in Mark 16 gives the former denier special attention as he orders the women: "But go tell his disciples and Peter...."

Much more weighty are the three distinct solemn charges that Jesus gives Peter, charges found respectively in Matthew, Luke, and John. Perhaps sufficient reflection is not given to the paradox that all three evangelists include a special saying about Peter and yet each saying is strikingly different from the other two. The most famous of the three, Matthew 16:17-19, which Matthew situates near Caesarea Philippi during the public ministry, felicitates Simon Bar Jona as the recipient of a special revelation from Jesus' heavenly Father. Just as Simon has conferred the titles Messiah and Son of God on Jesus, so Jesus reciprocates by conferring the title Petros on Simon and by declaring that on this rock Jesus will build his church, firmly established against the powers of sin and death. Like the major-domo Eliachim in Isaiah 22:22, Peter is invested with the keys to the king's palace and so with the divinely ratified power to declare actions licit or illicit.

Quite different is the charge of the Lucan Jesus to Peter at the Last Supper (Luke 22:31). As the prelude to Jesus' prediction of Peter's denial, Jesus reveals that Satan has sought from God the power to throw all the apostles into a crisis of faith as the eschatological struggle between good and evil reaches a climax in Jesus' passion and death. Faced with this threat to all the apostles, Jesus considers it sufficient to pray for Simon alone, that his faith may not fail completely. Once Simon repents and turns from his denial of Jesus, he is charged with the duty of strengthening the brethren in general.

The Fourth Gospel places its special Petrine logion in a resurrection appearance, after the miraculous catch of fish, in which Peter exercises a leading role. Within the overarching symbolic context of a worldwide mission, of a church whose unity is strained by so many various members, and of a meal with eucharistic overtones, the risen Jesus three times gives a charge to Simon, who denied Jesus three times. Peter is to be the shepherd who feeds, tends, and guides (poimaine) the sheep of Jesus — even to the point of laying down his life in martyrdom like Jesus. This pastoral charge is all the more startling because the Fourth Evangelist insisted in chapter 10 of his gospel that Jesus alone is the Good Shepherd, no one else. The final redactor, to whom we probably owe chapter 21, is willing to have Peter continue this role of Jesus in the church, provided he also imitates Jesus' death for the flock. In all this, there is a curious echo of the Petrine tradition found in 1 Peter 5:1-2, where Peter, or more likely a disciple writing in his name, charges his fellow presbyters to shepherd (poimanate) the flock of God in a context of suffering and possible death.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from How Can the Petrine Ministry Be a Service to the Unity of the Universal Church? Copyright © 2010 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.