The Papacy

he papacy is the office and authority of the bishop of Rome, whom the Roman Catholic Church calls the Pope, the successor of Peter, and the Vicar of Christ. No other doctrine in Rome’s system carries so much weight, for every other claim rests on it. If the Pope is what Rome says he is, then his voice settles what the Scriptures mean, which traditions bind the conscience, and which churches are truly churches. If he is not, the whole structure stands on sand.

At last the Roman bishop, on the ground of his divine institution, and as successor of Peter, the prince of the apostles, advanced his claim to be primate of the entire church, and visible representative of Christ, who is the invisible supreme head of the Christian world. This is the strict and exclusive sense of the title, Pope.¹ Philip SchaffHistory of the Christian Church, vol. 3

The office did not arrive fully formed. It grew over many centuries, from the honor that the early churches paid to the congregation in the imperial capital, to the medieval claim of lordship over kings, and at last to the dogma of papal infallibility in 1870. The Reformers examined that growth and judged it by the Word of God. They found that the papacy had no foundation in Scripture, no continuous warrant in the ancient church, and no claim on the conscience of the believer. Peter was not the head of the apostles and the church, nor were the bishops the apostles’ successors. Therefore the Pope is not Peter’s successor. The Reformation recovered the position of the early church, that the rule of faith for the church is found not in a person but in sacred Scripture.

What Rome Claims

Rome’s claim has three parts. First, Christ made Peter the prince of the apostles and the rock on which the church is built. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “The Lord made Simon alone, whom he named Peter, the ‘rock’ of his Church. He gave him the keys of his Church and instituted him shepherd of the whole flock” (§881). Second, this primacy passes by divine right to the bishops of Rome. Third, the primacy is not an honor but a sovereign power: the Pope, “by reason of his office as Vicar of Christ, and as pastor of the entire Church has full, supreme, and universal power over the whole Church, a power which he can always exercise unhindered” (§882). He “enjoys, by divine institution, ‘supreme, full, immediate, and universal power in the care of souls’” (§937).

These sentences restate the decrees of the First Vatican Council. In 1870 the council taught that “whoever succeeds to the chair of Peter obtains by the institution of Christ himself, the primacy of Peter over the whole church,” and it pronounced anathema on anyone who denies “that blessed Peter should have perpetual successors in the primacy over the whole church; or that the Roman pontiff is not the successor of blessed Peter in this primacy.”² It bound clergy and faithful alike “to submit to this power by the duty of hierarchical subordination and true obedience, and this not only in matters concerning faith and morals, but also in those which regard the discipline and government of the church throughout the world.”³

The medieval papacy drew the conclusion plainly. In the bull Unam sanctam (1302), Boniface VIII declared that the church has “one body and one head, not two heads like a monster; that is, Christ and the Vicar of Christ, Peter and the successor of Peter,” and he closed with the words, “we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.”⁴ Rome has never retracted that definition. The question is therefore not one of church order only. It touches the gospel itself, for it makes submission to a man a condition of belonging to Christ. See also Table RCC8, which sets Rome’s claims about the head of the church beside the testimony of Scripture.

The Claim of Petrine Origin

Rome traces the papacy to Christ’s words to Peter. Yet the claim requires far more than the words themselves supply. Robert Reymond observes that the Roman apologist “must demonstrate the following things exegetically and not simply assert them dogmatically”: that “this rock” meant Peter “personally and exclusively”; that Peter’s apostolic authority, unlike that of the other apostles, could be and was handed on; that Christ meant his promise to reach Peter’s successors to the end of the age; and that it must be “restricted in its transmissibility to one bishop at a time, the bishop who ministers in one particular city among the many cities in which Peter ministered, namely Rome.”⁵ Each link must hold, or the chain breaks.

Calvin pressed the last link hardest. Grant for argument’s sake that the primacy was given to Peter to remain by perpetual succession, “Still how will they prove that his See was so fixed at Rome, that whosoever becomes Bishop of that city is to preside over the whole world? By what authority do they annex this dignity to a particular place, when it was given without any mention of place?” Christ himself, he noted, died at Jerusalem, yet no one claims the primacy for Jerusalem on that account.⁶

History offers the claim no firmer footing. That Peter died in Rome is an ancient tradition, and Calvin did not dispute it, but he could not believe that Peter was bishop there, “particularly for a long period.”⁷ Jerome’s report that Peter presided over the Roman church for twenty-five years cannot be fitted to the New Testament. Paul wrote to the Romans and greeted many friends by name, yet said nothing of Peter. He later wrote from Rome as a prisoner, sending greetings from many, yet never mentioned Peter; instead he lamented, “all men forsook me” (2 Timothy 4:16). “Where then was Peter?” Calvin asked.⁸ Irenaeus and Eusebius name Linus, not Peter, as the first bishop of Rome, and Reymond concludes that if Peter reached Rome at all, “he would have arrived there only shortly before his death.”⁹

Nor did the early church know of a universal bishop. Calvin quotes Cyprian, who told his fellow bishops in council, “None of us styles himself bishop of bishops, or forces his colleagues to the necessity of obeying by the tyranny of terror.”¹⁰ Luther pointed out that the bishops of the ancient church called the Roman bishop “brother and fellow bishop and colleague, as Cyprian addressed Cornelius and Augustine addressed Boniface.”¹¹ In the Smalcald Articles he added that “there was a holy Church without the Pope for at least more than five hundred years, and that even to the present day the churches of the Greeks and of many other languages neither have been nor are still under the Pope.”¹²

“Upon This Rock”: Matthew 16:18

At Caesarea Philippi Jesus asked his disciples, “But whom say ye that I am?” Peter answered for the Twelve, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus replied that flesh and blood had not revealed this to him, “but my Father which is in heaven,” and continued, “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” (Matthew 16:15–19). The words “Tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo Ecclesiam meam” are written around the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, for Rome treats them as the charter of the papacy. Four observations show what the text does and does not say.

The name was not new. When Andrew first brought his brother to Jesus, the Lord said, “thou shalt be called Cephas, which is by interpretation, A stone” (John 1:42). At Caesarea Philippi, Reymond notes, Jesus “was not giving to Peter for the first time a new name or title,” but explaining his earlier act of naming. Jesus doubtless intended a play on Petros and petra, but Reymond cautions that nothing should be built on the shift from the masculine to the feminine form, since Jesus probably spoke Aramaic and used kêpā in both places.¹³

The rock is the confession, and the Christ confessed. Peter had said, “Thou art the Christ”; Jesus answered, “thou art Peter.” Reymond suggests that the Lord may have been answering title with title: “You are a rock!” And he did not say, “upon you,” but “upon this rock.” The church’s bedrock, Reymond concludes, is “the fact of Christ’s own messianic investiture and his ontological existence as the Second Person of the Godhead,” just as Paul wrote, “For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:11).¹⁴ Peter is the rock only as the confessing apostle. The proof lies a few verses later, where Jesus calls the same man “Satan” (Matthew 16:23). Reymond, following Edmund Clowney, reasons that “Peter is Satan as he speaks for Satan,” and therefore “Peter is the rock as he speaks for God.”¹⁵

The keys were given to all the apostles. What Christ promised to Peter in Matthew 16:19, he granted to all the Twelve two chapters later: “Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven” (Matthew 18:18). On the evening of his resurrection he breathed on the disciples and said, “Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them” (John 20:23). Calvin defined the keys as the preaching of the gospel, by which heaven is opened, and concluded that “nothing is here given to Peter that was not common to him with his colleagues.” He cited Augustine, who said that Peter “both spoke for all, and received in common with all, being, as it were, the representative of unity.”¹⁶ The church is “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone” (Ephesians 2:20), and the wall of the New Jerusalem bears “the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb” (Revelation 21:14), not one name alone.

The fathers did not read it Rome’s way. Reymond cites a study prepared for the First Vatican Council by Archbishop Peter Richard Kenrick, who counted five ancient interpretations of the rock. Seventeen fathers took it to mean Peter; eight, all the apostles; forty-four, the faith Peter confessed; sixteen, Christ himself; and a few, all believers. The view that became Rome’s dogma was therefore held by only about a fifth of the early fathers.¹⁷ Augustine wrote, “I will build thee upon Myself, not myself upon thee,” and again, “Peter [was] built upon the Rock, not the Rock upon Peter.”¹⁸

The Reformers spoke with one voice. In 1518, before the papal legate at Augsburg, Luther stated the thesis that “By these words one cannot prove that the Roman Church has a higher rank than other churches in the entire world.”¹⁹ Calvin wrote that Peter “had confessed in his own name, and that of his brethren, that Christ was the Son of God (Mt. 16:16). On this rock Christ builds his Church, because it is the only foundation.”²⁰ Zwingli answered the charge that the Reformers departed from the natural sense: “we find that Christ alone is the rock, Christ alone is the Head, Christ alone is the vine in which we are held secure.”²¹ Tyndale put the whole matter in a sentence:

Lo, saith antichrist, the carnal beast, Peter is the rock whereon the church of Christ is built; and I am his successor, and therefore the head of Christ’s church: when Christ meant by the rock the confession that Peter had confessed, saying, “Thou art Christ, the son of the living God,” which art come into this world. This faith is the rock whereon Christ’s church is built.²² William TyndaleThe Practice of Prelates, 1530

“This faith is it,” Tyndale continued, “against which hell-gates cannot prevail. This faith is it, which saveth the congregation of Christ; and not Peter.” Christ builds his church; men do not. He builds it on himself, as confessed by Peter and by every believer who, like Peter, receives that confession from the Father.

Why Rome Rose

If the primacy did not come from Christ, how did the Roman church gain its standing? Calvin, who did not deny that “the early Christians uniformly give high honour to the Roman Church,” gave three reasons. The opinion had spread that Peter had founded that church. Rome was the seat of the empire, where learned and able men were most likely to be found. And while the churches of the East, Greece, and Africa were troubled by controversy, the church of Rome “was calmer and less troubled,” so that bishops driven from their sees often took refuge there.²³ Irenaeus spoke of the Roman church’s “more powerful origin,” and its bishops benefited from the political importance of the city.²⁴

Rome’s honor was the honor of a great church, not the authority of a single bishop. Yet the temptation to turn the one into the other appeared early. About 190, Victor of Rome excommunicated the churches of Asia Minor over the date of Easter. Schaff notes that “a century later the bishop of Rome was substituted for the church of Rome,” and that “the Asiatic churches” refused to be intimidated.²⁵ Cyprian of Carthage, the first to give Matthew 16 a papal sense, nevertheless resisted Pope Stephen on the baptism of heretics “and persisted in this protest to his death.”²⁶ In 381 the Council of Constantinople ranked the five great sees as Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. After the last three fell under Muslim rule, Rome contended with Constantinople alone, and, as one recent survey observes, “Rome’s spiritual authority rested more on its position as the ancient imperial capital than on anything else.”²⁷

How the Papacy Developed

Leo and Gregory. Leo I (440–461) was the first great architect of papal claims. He took the old pagan title pontifex maximus and told another archbishop that he merely “participated in” a “fullness of power” reserved to the Pope.²⁸ Yet the Council of Chalcedon (451), over the protest of Leo’s legates, passed its twenty-eighth canon raising Constantinople to equality with Rome.²⁹ A century and a half later, John of Constantinople took the title “universal bishop.” Gregory I (590–604) condemned it in terms his successors would later have to forget:

I speak with confidence, for every one that calls himself, or desires to be called, universal priest, is by his pride a forerunner of Antichrist, because he acts proudly in preferring himself to others.³⁰ Gregory ILetters, bk. 7, ep. 154

When Eulogius of Alexandria addressed him as “Universal Pope,” Gregory rebuked him: “I do not regard that as honour by which I see that the honour of my brethren is diminished.”³¹ Luther made the same point before Cajetan: “until the time of St. Gregory, the Roman pope was not addressed as the universal bishop.”³² Yet in 607 the emperor Phocas, who had murdered his predecessor, granted Boniface III what Gregory had refused, “that Rome should be the head of all the churches.”³³

Temporal power and forged documents. In 754, after the Lombards threatened Rome, the Frankish king made the Pope the secular ruler of central Italy. These Papal States endured until 1870.³⁴ Papal claims were then supported by forgeries. The pseudo-Isidorian decretals of the ninth century represented the earliest bishops of Rome as ruling over a church “unconditionally subordinate to the pope.”³⁵ The Donation of Constantine, which claimed that the first Christian emperor had given the Pope rule over Rome and the West, was proved a forgery by Lorenzo Valla in 1440. Luther called it “That impossible lie” and said the forgers had made it so clumsily “that I should imagine any drunken peasant could lie more adroitly and skillfully.”³⁶

The age of papal monarchy. In the tenth century the papacy became the plaything of the Roman nobility. The emperor Otto I had John XII deposed in 963 for “murder, blasphemy, and all kinds of lewdness.”³⁷ Reform came from the monks of Cluny, who believed only a strong papacy could rescue the church. Leo IX (1049–1054) reasserted Rome’s claims over the whole church, and the East’s refusal led to the schism of 1054; in 1059 the election of popes was given to the cardinals.³⁸ The Dictatus papae entered in the register of Gregory VII in 1075 claimed “That the Roman pontiff alone can with right be called universal,” “That of the pope alone all princes shall kiss the feet,” “That it may be permitted to him to depose emperors,” and “That he himself may be judged by no one.”³⁹ The popes of this age adopted the title “vicar of Christ,”⁴⁰ Innocent III (1198–1216) presided over the Fourth Lateran Council, and Boniface VIII defined submission to the Pope as necessary for salvation.

Captivity, schism, and councils. From 1309 the popes lived at Avignon under the shadow of the French crown. Edward III of England complained, “The successor of the Apostles was commissioned to lead the Lord’s sheep to pasture, not to fleece them.”⁴¹ A disputed election in 1378 produced two popes, and the Council of Pisa in 1409 produced a third. Each excommunicated the others, and each half of Europe accused the other of invalid sacraments. The Council of Constance deposed John XXIII on fifty-four charges in 1415, received Gregory XII’s resignation, deposed Benedict XIII, and elected Martin V in 1417.⁴² The council claimed authority over popes, but the Council of Florence (1438–45) reversed the principle and placed the Pope above councils.⁴³ See The Great Schism of the Papacy.

From Trent to the Vatican. The Reformation cost Rome much of northern Europe, and the Council of Trent (1545–63) answered with discipline and dogma. In the nineteenth century the Ultramontane movement, which looked “beyond the mountains” to Rome for authority, carried the day. Pius IX made it the program of his pontificate, and the First Vatican Council defined papal primacy and infallibility in 1870.⁴⁴ The Second Vatican Council (1962–65) placed new emphasis on the college of bishops, but it did not retract the claims of the first.⁴⁵ Schaff summed up the long development: “the papacy, as a historical fact, or so far as it has been acknowledged, is properly nothing more than the Latin patriarchate run to absolute monarchy.”⁴⁶

Papal Infallibility

The First Vatican Council defined the doctrine on July 18, 1870:

We teach and define as a divinely revealed dogma that when the Roman pontiff speaks EX CATHEDRA, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole church, he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals. Therefore, such definitions of the Roman pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the church, irreformable.⁴⁷ First Vatican CouncilPastor aeternus, chap. 4, 1870

The council added, “should anyone, which God forbid, have the temerity to reject this definition of ours: let him be anathema.” The Catechism repeats that such definitions “must be adhered to with the obedience of faith” (§891). The idea was old long before it was defined. The Dictatus papae had claimed “That the Roman church has never erred; nor will it err to all eternity, the Scripture bearing witness.”⁴⁸ Luther met it in 1520, when the defenders of Rome tried “to persuade us that the pope cannot err in matters of faith, regardless of whether he is righteous or wicked. Yet they cannot point to a single letter.” “Has the pope not erred many times?” he asked.⁴⁹

Peter erred. Rome rests the doctrine on Christ’s prayer for Peter, “that thy faith fail not” (Luke 22:32). Luther answered that the words “cannot be applied to the pope, since the majority of the popes have been without faith,” and that Christ prayed “also for all apostles and Christians” (John 17:9, 20).⁵⁰ Peter himself, after Pentecost, compromised the gospel at Antioch, and Paul “withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed” (Galatians 2:11). “Where is the infallibility,” Reymond asks, “and the guarantee of the purity and continuity of the gospel in this man?”⁵¹

Popes erred. Pope Honorius I (625–638) was condemned by the Sixth General Council (680–681) for the Monothelite heresy, and his condemnation was confirmed by Pope Leo II. In 1590 Sixtus V issued an edition of the Vulgate “By the fullness of apostolic power” to be held as “true, lawful, authentic, and unquestioned”; it was so full of errors that it had to be revised two years later. Rome replies that these were not ex cathedra definitions, but Norman Geisler observes that the doctrine then suffers “death by a thousand qualifications.” “If we can’t ever be sure, then what good is the doctrine of infallibility?”⁵² Indeed, the only pronouncements generally agreed to meet the conditions are the dogmas of Mary’s Immaculate Conception (1854) and bodily Assumption (1950), and, as one evangelical dictionary notes, “Both lack scriptural or historical warrant.”⁵³ See Mary and Roman Catholic Dogmas.

The church cannot judge. If the Pope’s definitions are irreformable “of themselves, and not by the consent of the church,” then the church has lost the right the Bereans exercised when they “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11). Luther wrote, “if the article, ‘I believe in one holy Christian church,’ is correct, then the pope cannot be the only one who is right. Otherwise, we would have to pray, ‘I believe in the pope at Rome.’”⁵⁴ Reymond adds that Rome reasons in a circle, making the primacy of the Roman bishop “the basis for its claim that it alone is justified in proclaiming any dogma whatsoever, including the Roman bishop’s primacy over the entire church.”⁵⁵

Other Theological Problems

It takes the headship that belongs to Christ. God “gave him to be the head over all things to the church, which is his body” (Ephesians 1:22–23), and “he is the head of the body, the church” (Colossians 1:18). Rome answers that the Pope is only a ministerial head under Christ. Calvin replied that this “cannot avail them, until they previously show that this office was ordained by Christ.” When Paul describes the gifts of the ascended Christ, he names apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers (Ephesians 4:11). “Why does he not say, that one presided over all to act as his substitute? The passage particularly required this, and it ought not on any account to have been omitted if it had been true.”⁵⁶ The Lutheran confession states that the Pope is not, “according to divine law or according to the Word of God, the head of all Christendom (for this name belongs to Jesus Christ solely and alone), but is only the bishop and pastor of the Church at Rome.”⁵⁷

It obscures the one High Priest. The Pope calls himself pontifex maximus, supreme pontiff. Calvin noted that the high priest of Israel was a type of Christ, and that the office passed “certainly not to the Pope, as he dares impudently to boast when he arrogates this title to himself, but to Christ, who, as he alone holds the office without vicar or successor, does not resign the honour to any other.”⁵⁸ Christ “hath an unchangeable priesthood” and “ever liveth to make intercession” (Hebrews 7:24–25). Zwingli’s seventeenth article states “That Christ is the only eternal high priest, from which it follows that those who have called themselves high priests have opposed the honor and power of Christ, yes, cast it out.”⁵⁹

It misreads the vicarage of Christ. Christ promised to send “another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever” (John 14:16), who “will guide you into all truth” (John 16:13). The Spirit, not a bishop, is Christ’s presence with his church. Luther saw that the papacy had reversed the meaning of the title it claims:

The pope is not a vicar of Christ in heaven but only of Christ as he walked the earth. Christ in heaven, in the form of a ruler, needs no vicar, but sits on his throne and sees everything, does everything, knows everything, and has all power. But Christ needs a vicar in the form of a servant, the form in which he went about on earth, working, preaching, suffering, and dying. Now the Romanists turn all that upside down.⁶⁰ Martin LutherTo the Christian Nobility, 1520

It binds salvation to a man. Luther charged that the papal bulls cry “that no Christian can be saved unless he obey him and be subject to him in all things that he wishes, that he says and that he does,” which is as if to say, “although you believe in Christ, and have in him everything that is necessary to salvation, yet nothing profits you unless you regard me your god, and be subject and obedient to me.”⁶¹ This is why the Reformers would not accept even a papacy held by human right. The church, Luther wrote, “can never be governed and preserved better than if we all live under one head, Christ, and all the bishops, equal in office (although they be unequal in gifts), be diligently joined in unity of doctrine, faith, sacraments, prayer and works of love.”⁶²

It exalts itself above all that is called God. The Reformers did not apply the name “Antichrist” to the papacy lightly. Calvin rested it on Paul’s description of one who “opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God” and “sitteth in the temple of God” (2 Thessalonians 2:4), whose tyranny is “more over souls than bodies” and who “abolishes not the name either of Christ or the Church, but rather uses the name of Christ as a pretext.”⁶³ The Westminster divines confessed, “There is no other head of the church but the Lord Jesus Christ: nor can the Pope of Rome in any sense be head thereof; but is that antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the church against Christ, and all that is called God.”⁶⁴ The judgment concerned the office and its claims, not every man who held it.

Corruptions of the Papacy

The Reformers did not rest their case on the sins of popes, for a true office is not overthrown by an unworthy holder. Yet the history of the papacy bore out what Scripture warns about power that “exercise[s] lordship” (Luke 22:25). In the twelfth century Bernard of Clairvaux, a loyal son of Rome, complained that the ambitious and avaricious “flocked from all quarters of the world to Rome,” and he told Pope Eugenius, “By thus acting, you prove that you have the fulness of power, but not the fulness of righteousness.”⁶⁵

The record that followed was worse. The papacy of the tenth century was so corrupt that historians call it the “pornocracy.”⁶⁶ During the Great Schism, Urban VI had cardinals who urged him to step down arrested, tortured, and killed, and the Pisan pope John XXIII was charged with being “a pagan, an oppressor, a liar, a buyer of church office, a traitor, a lecher, and a thief.”⁶⁷ On the eve of the Reformation Alexander VI made the papal court a byword, and Leo X financed St. Peter’s with the indulgence traffic that Luther challenged. Luther described the Rome of 1520 in words of fire: “There is buying, selling, bartering, exchanging, trading, pretense, deceit, robbery, theft, luxury, whoring, knavery.”⁶⁸

Tyndale explained how such a power grew from small beginnings, using the picture of ivy climbing a tree:

Even so the bishop of Rome, now called pope, at the beginning crope along upon the earth; and every man trod upon him in this world. But as soon as there came a christian emperor, he joined himself unto his feet and kissed them, and crope up a little with begging now this privilege, now that; now this city, now that.⁶⁹ William TyndaleThe Practice of Prelates, 1530

The ivy, Tyndale wrote, climbs until it is “at the top and above all,” and at last it “sucketh the moisture so sore out of the tree and his branches, that it choaketh and stifleth them.” Such was the papacy: a power that rose by the favor of princes and ended by smothering the church it claimed to shelter.

The Plain Teaching of Scripture

Christ alone is the foundation. “For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:11). Israel “drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:4). Peter himself called Christ “a living stone” and called all believers “lively stones” built up into “a spiritual house” (1 Peter 2:4–5). He knew no other rock.

Christ alone is the head and chief Shepherd. Peter wrote to the elders as “also an elder,” not as their prince. He forbade them to act “as being lords over God’s heritage,” and he pointed them to the day “when the chief Shepherd shall appear” (1 Peter 5:1–4). Christ is “that great shepherd of the sheep” (Hebrews 13:20) and “the head, even Christ” (Ephesians 4:15).

The apostles were brethren, not subjects. When the disciples argued over who should be greatest, Jesus did not name Peter. He said, “The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them . . . But ye shall not be so” (Luke 22:25–26). “Be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren. And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven” (Matthew 23:8–9). The apostles sent Peter to Samaria (Acts 8:14); the church called him to account over Cornelius (Acts 11:2–18); James presided at Jerusalem (Acts 15:13–21); and Paul counted Peter one of three who “seemed to be pillars” (Galatians 2:9).

Christ alone is the Mediator and High Priest. “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). He needs no vicar on earth, for he sends his Spirit, and he rules his church by his Word.

Scripture alone binds the conscience. “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works” (2 Timothy 3:16–17). The Word does not need a pope to make it sufficient; it makes the man of God sufficient. As Zwingli put it in his first article, “All who say that the Gospel is nothing without the approbation (confirmation) of the Church err and cast reproach upon God.”⁷⁰ See Scripture Alone and Christ Alone.

Calvin ended his examination of the Petrine texts with a sentence that may serve as the verdict of the whole Reformation: “Let the Romanists, therefore, seek their primacy somewhere else than in the word of God, which gives not the least foundation for it.”⁷¹ The liberating light of the gospel was left behind when men built new arrangements in the name of Christianity, and departure from God’s Word means entrance into darkness. The way back is the way the Reformers took: to the Word, to the one Head, and to the one Rock, Christ.

Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.

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