Peter & Succession (Understanding the Church Today)

Editor's note: This is the second half of a chapter titled "The Primacy of Peter and Unity of the Church." The first half examines the status of Peter in the New Testament and the commission logion contained in Matthew 16:17-19.

The principle of succession in general

That the primacy of Peter is recognizable in all the major strands of the New Testament is incontestable.

The real difficulty arises when we come to the second question: Can the idea of a Petrine succession be justified? Even more difficult is the third question that is bound up with it: Can the Petrine succession of Rome be credibly substantiated?

Concerning the first question, we must first of all note that there is no explicit statement regarding the Petrine succession in the New Testament. This is not surprising, since neither the Gospels nor the chief Pauline epistles address the problem of a postapostolic Church—which, by the way, must be mentioned as a sign of the Gospels' fidelity to tradition. Indirectly, however, this problem can be detected in the Gospels once we admit the principle of form critical method according to which only what was considered in the respective spheres of tradition as somehow meaningful for the present was preserved in writing as such. This would mean, for example, that toward the end of the first century, when Peter was long dead, John regarded the former's primacy, not as a thing of the past, but as a present reality for the Church.

For many even believe—though perhaps with a little too much imagination—that they have good grounds for interpreting the "competition" between Peter and the beloved disciple as an echo of the tensions between Rome's claim to primacy and the sense of dignity possessed by the Churches of Asia Minor. This would certainly be a very early and, in addition, inner-biblical proof that Rome was seen as continuing the Petrine line; but we should in no case rely on such uncertain hypotheses. The fundamental idea, however, does seem to me correct, namely, that the traditions of the New Testament never reflect an interest of purely historical curiosity but are bearers of present reality and in that sense constantly rescue things from the mere past, without blurring the special status of the origin.

Moreover, even scholars who deny the principle itself have propounded hypotheses of succession. 0. Cullmann, for example, objects in a very clear-cut fashion to the idea of succession, yet he believes that he can Show that Peter was replaced by James and that this latter assumed the primacy of the erstwhile first apostle. Bultmann believes that he is correct in concluding from the mention of the three pillars in Galatians 2:9 that the course of development led away from a personal to a collegial leadership and that a college entered upon the succession of Peter. [1]

We have no need to discuss these hypotheses and others like them; their foundation is weak enough. Nevertheless, they do show that it is impossible to avoid the idea of succession once the word transmitted in Scripture is considered to be a sphere open to the future. In those writings of the New Testament that stand on the cusp of the second generation or else already belong to it-especially in the Acts of the Apostles and in the Pastoral Letters—the principle of succession does in fact take on concrete shape.

The Protestant notion that the "succession" consists solely in the word as such, but not in any "structures", is proved to be anachronistic in light of what in actual fact is the form of tradition in the New Testament. The word is tied to the witness, who guarantees it an unambiguous sense, which it does not possess as a mere word floating in isolation. But the witness is not an individual who stands independently on his own. He is no more a wit ness by virtue of himself and of his own powers of memory than Peter can be the rock by his own strength. He is not a witness as "flesh and blood" but as one who is linked to the Pneuma, the Paraclete who authenticates the truth and opens up the memory and, in his turn, binds the witness to Christ. For the Paraclete does not speak of himself, but he takes from "what is his" (that is, from what is Christ's: Jn 16: 13).

This binding of the witness to the Pneuma and to his mode of being-"not of himself, but what he hears" -is called "sacrament" in the language of the Church. Sacrament designates a threefold knot-word, witness, Holy Spirit and Christ-which describes the essential structure of succession in the New Testament. We can infer with certainty from the testimony of the Pastoral Letters and of the Acts of the Apostles that the apostolic generation already gave to this interconnection of person and word in the believed presence of the Spirit and of Christ the form of the laying on of hands.

The Petrine succession in Rome

In opposition to the New Testament pattern of succession described above, which withdraws the word from human manipulation precisely by binding witnesses into its service, there arose very early on an intellectual and anti-institutional model known historically by the name of Gnosis, which made the free interpretation and speculative development of the word its principle. Before long the appeal to individual witnesses no longer sufficed to counter the intellectual claim advanced by this tendency. It became necessary to have fixed points by which to orient the testimony itself, and these were found in the so-called apostolic sees, that is, in those where the apostles had been active. The apostolic sees became the reference point of true communio. But among these sees there was in turn–quite clearly in Irenaeus of Lyons–a decisive criterion that recapitulated all others: the Church of Rome, where Peter and Paul suffered martyrdom. It was with this Church that every community had to agree; Rome was the standard of the authentic apostolic tradition as a whole.

Moreover, Eusebius of Caesarea organized the first version of his ecclesiastical history in accord with the same principle. It was to be a written record of the continuity of apostolic succession, which was concentrated in the three Petrine sees Rome, Antioch and Alexandria-among which Rome, as the site of Peter's martyrdom, was in turn preeminent and truly normative. [2]

This leads us to a very fundamental observation. [3] The Roman primacy, or, rather, the acknowledgement of Rome as the criterion of the right apostolic faith, is older than the canon of the New Testament, than "Scripture".

We must be on our guard here against an almost inevitable illusion. "Scripture" is more recent than "the scriptures" of which it is composed. It was still a long time before the existence of the individual writings resulted in the "New Testament" as Scripture, as the Bible. The assembling of the writings into a single Scripture is more properly speaking the work of tradition, a work that began in the second century but came to a kind of conclusion only in the fourth or fifth century. Harnack, a witness who cannot be suspected of pro-Roman bias, has remarked in this regard that it was only at the end of the second century, in Rome, that a canon of the "books of the New Testament" won recognition by the criterion of apostolicity-catholicity, a criterion to which the other Churches also gradually subscribed "for the sake of its intrinsic value and on the strength of the authority of the Roman Church".

We can therefore say that Scripture became Scripture through the tradition, which precisely in this process included the potentior principalitas–the preeminent original authority–of the Roman see as a constitutive element.

Two points emerge clearly from what has just been First, the principle of tradition in its sacramental form-apostolic succession—played a constitutive role in the existence and continuance of the Church. Without this principle, it is impossible to conceive of a New Testament at all, so that we are caught in a contradiction when we affirm the one while wanting to deny the other. Furthermore, we have seen that in Rome the traditional series of bishops was from the very beginning recorded as a line of successors.

We can add that Rome and Antioch were conscious of succeeding to the mission of Peter and that early on Alexandria was admitted into the circle of Petrine sees as the city where Peter's disciple Mark had been active. Having said all that, the site of Peter's martyrdom nonetheless appears clearly as the chief bearer of his supreme authority and plays a preeminent role in the formation of tradition which is constitutive of the Church-and thus in the genesis of the New Testament as Bible; Rome is one of the indispensable internal and external- conditions of its possibility. It would be exciting to trace the influence on this process of the idea that the mission of Jerusalem had passed over to Rome, which explains why at first Jerusalem was not only not a "patriarchal see" but not even a metropolis: Jerusalem was now located in Rome, and since Peter's departure from that city, its primacy had been transferred to the capital of the pagan world. [4]

But to consider this in detail would lead us too far afield for the moment. The essential point, in my opinion, has already become plain: the martyrdom of Peter in Rome fixes the place where his function continues. The awareness of this fact can be detected as early as the first century in the Letter of Clement, even though it developed but slowly in all its particulars.

Concluding reflections

We shall break off at this point, for the chief goal of our considerations has been attained. We have seen that the New Testament as a whole strikingly demonstrates the primacy of Peter; we have seen that the formative development of tradition and of the Church supposed the continuation of Peter's authority in Rome as an intrinsic condition. The Roman primacy is not an invention of the popes, but an essential element of ecclesial unity that goes back to the Lord and was developed faithfully in the nascent Church.

But the New Testament shows us more than the formal aspect of a structure; it also reveals to us the inward nature of this structure. It does not merely furnish proof texts, it is a permanent criterion and task. It depicts the tension between skandalon and rock; in the very disproportion between man's capacity and God's sovereign disposition, it reveals God to be the one who truly acts and is present.

If in the course of history the attribution of such authority to men could repeatedly engender the not entirely unfounded suspicion of human arrogation of power, not only the promise of the New Testament but also the trajectory of that history itself prove the opposite. The men in question are so glaringly, so blatantly unequal to this function that the very empowerment of man to be the rock makes evident how little it is they who sustain the Church but God alone who does so, who does so more in spite of men than through them.

The mystery of the Cross is perhaps nowhere so palpably present as in the primacy as a reality of Church history. That its center is forgiveness is both its intrinsic condition and the sign of the distinctive character of God's power. Every single biblical logion about the primacy thus remains from generation to generation a signpost and a norm, to which we must ceaselessly resubmit ourselves. When the Church adheres to these words in faith, she is not being triumphalistic but humbly recognizing in wonder and thanksgiving the victory of God over and through human weakness. Whoever deprives these words of their force for fear of triumphalism or of human usurpation of authority does not proclaim that God is greater but diminishes him, since God demonstrates the power of his love, and thus remains faithful to the law of the history of salvation, precisely in the paradox of human impotence.

For with the same realism with which we declare today the sins of the popes and their disproportion to the magnitude of their commission, we must also acknowledge that Peter has repeatedly stood as the rock against ideologies, against the dissolution of the word into the plausibilities of a given time, against subjection to the powers of this world.

When we see this in the facts of history, we are not celebrating men but praising the Lord, who does not abandon the Church and who desired to manifest that he is the rock through Peter, the little stumbling stone: "flesh and blood" do not save, but the Lord saves through those who are of flesh and blood. To deny this truth is not a plus of faith, not a plus of humility, but is to shrink from the humility that recognizes God as he is. Therefore the Petrine promise and its historical embodiment in Rome remain at the deepest level an ever-renewed motive for joy: the powers of hell will not prevail against it . . .

Endnotes:

[1] Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition, 2d ed. (198 1), 147- 51; cf. Gnilka, 56.

[2] For an exhaustive account of this point, see V. Twomey, Apostolikos Thronos (Münster, 1982).

[3] It is my hope that in the not-too-distant future I will have the opportunity to develop and substantiate in greater detail the view of the succession that I attempt to indicate in an extremely condensed form in what follows. I owe important suggestions to several works by 0. Karrer, especially: Um die Einheit der Christen. Die Petrusfrage (Frankfurt am Mainz, 1953); "Apostolische Nachfolge und Primat", in: Feiner, Trütsch and Böckle, Fragen in der Theologie heute (Freiburg im.Breisgau, 1957), 175-206; "Das Petrusamt in der Frühkirche", in Festgabe J. Lortz (Baden-Baden, 1958), 507-25; "Die biblische und altkirchliche Grundlage des Papsttums", in: Lebendiges Zeugnis (1958), 3-24. Also of importance are some of the papers in the festschrift for 0. Karrer: Begegnung der Christen, ed. by Roesle-Cullmann (Frankfurt am Mainz, 1959); in particular, K. Hofstetter, "Das Petrusamt in der Kirche des I. und 2. Jahrhunderts", 361-72.

[4] Cf. Hofstetter.

". . . experienced in finding the Protestant anti-Catholics who belong to Churches of the Almighty Dollar. Tell me, what affiliation does your "church" have?"

----- It's certainly not affiliated with the Church of the Almighty Dollar. It doesn't own 20% of the realestate of Spain and have massive cathedrals and land holdings throughout the world and run a financial empire out of its headquarters in Rome that exceeds that of all Protestant denominations put together.

----- It's more like the Church of the Almighty God who gave us the incorruptible Word of God. You can join the church for free if you just open that Bible in your closet, or invest $29.95 for a good reliable one and open it regularly. Is that too much for you? Is that too much for the hope of eternal life????

Ah, like so many anti-Catholics you're unable or unwilling to name the denomination to which you belong. What are the beliefs of the church? Do they have a statement of faith?

Far too many attack the Catholic Church and then dodge questions about their own church. Why is this?

My assumption is that it's fear.

Fear of having their own faith challenged.

Fear of having their own "pastor" exposed.

Fear of finding that there's much more Truth in Catholic teachings than that of Bubba's House of Fire-n-Brimstone.

Ahhhh --- spoken like a true Catholic.

It's an open Bible church, one of those churches that the Vatican has lobbed all of those anathemas from the Council of Trent at. If you want to talk about "fear", you should first look inward, and ask "why does the Vatican fear those Bible believers so much that it has to pontificate anathemas against them"??????

Body and Christ only had one Body, not many. Also, since the Church is Christ's Bride (Ephesians 5:29), can Christ be married to more than one wife (essentially a spiritual form of the the sin of polygamy)? No, Christ can only have one wife (i.e., one Church, not many).

Jesus has

1Co 7:17 But as God hath distributed to every man, as the Lord hath called every one, so let him walk. And so ordain I in all churches. churches everywhere...

And if there ever was a pope, it had to have been Paul...

2Co 11:28 Beside those things that are without, that which cometh upon me daily, the care of all the churches.

Paul's in charge of the Christian church(s)...

Also, since the Church is Christ's Bride (Ephesians 5:29), can Christ be married to more than one wife (essentially a spiritual form of the the sin of polygamy)? No, Christ can only have one wife (i.e., one Church, not many).

When was the wedding??? And the Marriage Supper of the Lamb???

No such thing, Chip.

Afraid to identify the "church?"

That's fine. It's clear that you're not comfortable posting a statement of faith from that "church." Do they even have a website?

You see, Chip, our brethren who've moved away from the Catholic Church have a great unwillingness to be challenged. This is why they hide their doctrine and "theology."

We Catholics have ours completely available for the world to see.

I find it quite funny that an "evangelical" protestant congregation would be unwilling to share information on their beliefs.

If the beliefs are good, accurate and faithful -- they sharing them would bring in more believers, would it not?

"Again--you are being quite personal and sarcastic as well. "

---- and you're not being personal and accusatory?

Was sarcasm ever used by the prophets, the disciples, the apostles, ........ Did Jesus use sarcasm? Do you use sarcasm? ...... oh just not on Sunday?????

No, I don't use or relish sarcasm.

It is Sunday and I hold Sunday to be a very special day. It is the day when I meet with my fellow Catholics at my parish to worship and to praise our God.

I also am lucky that I can be there on weekdays, too...as are many of my fellow Catholics.

It's quite natural that as a practicing Catholic (convert to the Church) that I don't like it when people acting as provocateurs come on threads that are Catholic subjects, and begin needling the Catholics with anti-Catholic posts.

The moderator here has made it clear that it's OK to do this on the open forum, and that if we have a rebuttal to make, to make it, but not to get personal.

It's very difficult to respond to posts that are openly condescending of my Faith and yet to respond in third person form or to try to get beyond the obvious in order to speak the truth in love.

Since I am not hard-wired for this kind of fighting, I am content to say that I withdraw and leave it to my Catholic brethren, those to whom God has given the gift for this kind of debate. I am grateful for them and to them.

I acknowledge that I can't contribute positively and effectively, though I wish that I could.

I ask God to bless you on this holy Sunday, this special day in the week.

And now I'm on my way to Mass.

"Protestants cannot explain the fact that the early Church, spread all over the known world, held to the same Catholic faith."
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You've confused me with another poster who didn't want to answer questions and then accused me of ad hominen attacks.

The point I was trying to get across was the idea that Christianity was totally unified is a myth. There have been all types of different sects, including RC, from the beginning. Tertullian is just one example, he is not a St. in the RCC because he became a Montanist (similar to Pentecostals) later in his life.

The same mythology applies to the idea that Peter was some kind of "super" Apostle, or the belief that the RCC founded the Canon.

No such thing, Chip. Afraid to identify the "church?"

----- I just did.

That's fine. It's clear that you're not comfortable posting a statement of faith from that "church." Do they even have a website?

----- I'm not sure if there is a website. But I will tell you the one that it's teachings are closest to: Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa. They have a website.

You see, Chip, our brethren who've moved away from the Catholic Church have a great unwillingness to be challenged. This is why they hide their doctrine and "theology."

----- There is nothing hidden about true Christian Churches and the Scriptures that they believe in. The RCC knows exactly what they believe. My goodness, ask them. They've been trying to silence them since the 5th century, and with earnest since the Reformation.

We Catholics have ours completely available for the world to see.

----- That's not really true, unless you can see into the minds of your Magisterium.

I find it quite funny that an "evangelical" protestant congregation would be unwilling to share information on their beliefs. If the beliefs are good, accurate and faithful -- they sharing them would bring in more believers, would it not?

----- We share them all the time by encouraging people to receive the Word of God in its simplicity --- to believe the truth according to the Scriptures not the elusive and unseen minds of a magisterium.

I didn't realize that Tertullian had been denied sainthood.
Does that mean that he is not considered part of the patriarchal tradition of the RCC? How many other early Christian writers are also excluded from the RCC's list of acceptable patriarchs?

What bothers me about the Roman Catholic Church are the new ICEL hegelian dialectics of retranslated Scripture. I end up having to confess as "the Word of God" that which cannot be found in any Bible on the face of the earth. It comes as little surprise that 'ecclesiastical freemasonry' has entered the Church as is looking to destroy the Faith from within. The Jesuits and the Opus Dei are filled with illuminati elements whose objectives are to 'dumb down and destroy' the true beauty of what the Church really teaches masked in the relativism of New Age philosophies.

Act 17:10 The brethren immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea, and when they arrived, they went into the synagogue of the Jews. Act 17:11 Now these were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so.

Apparently, they had something more to go on than just "word of mouth".
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I think your absolutely right that they were compiling writings. The Torah was already established and they had copies of the OT writings that made up the Talmud. I also think it is safe to believe that every church that received a letter made copies and these were passed on as well. The point I was trying to make was that until St. Athansius, on his own initiative, put together a definitive list we do not have a completed Canon. I have yet to find any historical record of the Canon being established and fixed prior to this date. Thus, the myth that the RCC established the Canon is debunked. The RCC affirmed a deed that was already done.

"I didn't realize that Tertullian had been denied sainthood.
Does that mean that he is not considered part of the patriarchal tradition of the RCC? How many other early Christian writers are also excluded from the RCC's list of acceptable patriarchs?"
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Great question. I don't know. I'm just guessing, but they don't disregard Augustine and he also changed his thinking later in life.

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