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There’s a famous hymn that says, “The Church’s ONE foundation is Jesus Christ, her Lord.”
This is a common sentiment. Some people cite verses to support this idea and show that Jesus COULD NOT have founded his Church on St. Peter.
In this eye-opening video, Jimmy Akin shows you what the New Testament actually teaches and how its authors envision the Church as having FIVE different kinds of foundations.
TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
SINGER: The Church’s one foundation
Is Jesus Christ her Lord;
She is his new creation,
By water and the word.
Let’s get into it!
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Howdy, folks!
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The Church’s One Foundation?
Last week, in Episode 36 of The Jimmy Akin Podcast, we looked at a discovery I made years ago.
I was reading a quotation from Matthew 16—the “You are Peter, and on this rock, I will build my Church” passages—and I realized that structural features in the text require that Peter be the rock.
You can listen to that episode to hear all about it.
And this discovery led to my conversion to Catholicism.
But not everyone thinks that Peter is the rock that the Church is built on.
We began today’s episode with part of a hymn called “The Church’s One Foundation.”
Pay careful attention to the first line of its lyrics.
SINGER: The Church’s one foundation
Is Jesus Christ her Lord
So, according to this hymn, the Church has one foundation—not more than one—and that one foundation is Jesus Christ.
The hymn was written in 1866 by an Anglican priest named Samuel John Stone—which is a bit ironic given that we’re talking about rocks, stones, and foundations today.
This particular hymn was part of a set of hymns he wrote about the Apostles’ Creed in response to a schism in the Anglican Church of South Africa, so it wasn’t a commentary on Catholic teaching—at least, not directly.
However, some in the Protestant community do emphasize Jesus Christ as the foundation of the Church and say that Peter cannot be the rock on which the Church is built.
Rhetorically, that can sound very high minded. “Jesus Christ is obviously more important than Peter, so—of course—he’s the foundation of the Church.”
“How dare anyone suggest a mere man like Peter is what the Church is built on! That would be both ridiculous and blasphemous.”
And today, there’s a substantial amount of rhetoric suggesting that Jesus Christ is the Church’s one and only foundation—to the exclusion of St. Peter and anybody else.
But is that what the Bible says?
1 Corinthians 3:10-11
The passage perhaps most often cited to show that Jesus Christ is the foundation of the Church is 1 Corinthians 3:10–11. St. Paul writes:
Like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and another man is building upon it. Let each man take care how he builds upon it. For no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 3:10-11).
Here St. Paul is speaking of the foundation of a local church—specially, the church at Corinth—because he says “I laid a foundation.”
He says that another man is now building upon this foundation.
And then he identifies that foundation as Jesus Christ.
He even says that no other foundation can be laid.
So St. Paul laid the foundation of the church of Corinth, which is Jesus Christ. Nobody can lay any other foundation, but now another man is building on this foundation in Corinth.
That’s the literal sense of the text.
But we can go beyond the literal sense. Many would propose that we can extend the principle Paul articulates here beyond the local church at Corinth—and beyond any local church.
Shouldn’t we be able to apply the same principle to the universal Church?
Yes, I think we can. There is an obvious sense in which Jesus Christ is the foundation of the whole, universal Church.
And he’s irreplaceable as that foundation. In the sense in which St. Paul is speaking, Jesus Christ is the unique foundation of the whole Church.
So far, so good.
But are there other ways in which we can conceptualize the matter.
We’re about to see that there are, because there are at least five places in the New Testament that can be understood as speaking of the foundation of the Church, and they each use a different metaphor.
1 Peter 2:5-6
Perhaps the second most popular of the five passages is 1 Peter 2:4-6, where St. Peter writes:
As you come to him [i.e., the Lord Jesus Christ], a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
For it stands in Scripture:
“Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone,
a cornerstone chosen and precious,
and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.”
The Scripture St. Peter is quoting is Isaiah 28:16, where Isaiah prophesies that God will lay a cornerstone in Zion.
In the New Testament, this cornerstone is identified as the Lord Jesus Christ, which is who Peter identifies it with here.
A cornerstone is part of a building’s foundation. In fact, it’s also known as a foundation stone or a setting stone, because it is usually the first stone to be set in place.
What you do is set the cornerstone first and then you extend the rest of the building’s foundation from it.
What the cornerstone does is serve as a reference point to keep all of the other stones in the foundation in line with each other, so your foundation doesn’t go askew.
In fact, the cornerstone also serves to orient the stones you use to build upward, so it determines the orientation of all the stones in the building.
That’s why cornerstones are important.
And for some who oppose the idea of Peter being the rock, this is irresistible. “Man, that’ll preach, brother; that’ll preach! Peter himself declares Christ to be the rock!”
But there are a few things to notice about this passage.
First, Peter uses a different word for rock than Jesus does when he speaks of Peter.
When Peter describes Jesus as a living stone, he uses the Greek word lithos, which is the common word for stone in first century Greek.
But when Jesus refers to Peter as the rock, he uses the words petros and petra.
So that’s noteworthy.
But notice something. As the name suggests, a cornerstone is at the corner of a building. It’s not the whole foundation—only part of it.
The cornerstone may be the most important part of the foundation, but it’s not the whole thing.
And this is even more obvious in St. Peter’s Greek than it is in English, because cornerstone isn’t a single word. Instead, St. Peter uses the phrase lithon akrogóniaion to refer to this concept.
We already heard that lithos is the word for stone, and as the Bauer-Danker-Arndt-Gingrich Greek-English Lexicon, akrogóniaios is an adjective that means “lying at the extreme corner.”
Similarly, the Liddell-Scott Greek-English Lexicon lists akrogóniaios as meaning “at the extreme angle.”
This makes it very clear that Peter—based on Isaiah—is conceptualizing Jesus as a stone at the corner of a larger structure.
So here we see Peter using a metaphor that is different from the one Paul was using in 1 Corinthians.
There, Paul depicted Jesus Christ as the whole foundation, but here Peter depicts him as just the cornerstone of the Church. So this is a different metaphor
Ephesians 2:19-21
What do we find when we turn to a third passage in which the New Testament speaks about the foundation of the Church?
This one is found in Ephesians chapter 2, where St. Paul says:
You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord (Ephesians 2:19-21).
Here Paul compares the Church to a holy temple, and he identifies two components of the temple’s foundation.
He says that Christ Jesus himself is the cornerstone, so that’s the same metaphor we saw in 1 Peter, which is based on Isaiah’s prophecy.
But he also says that the temple is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets.
You might wonder if Paul is referring to the Old Testament prophets here, but he does not appear to be.
If that were the case, then we would expect the prophets to be mentioned first since they preceded the apostles in time. Paul would say “built on the foundation of the prophets and apostles.”
The fact he lists the prophets second suggests that these are New Testament prophets—like Agabus, who we read about in the book of Acts 11:27-28. These prophets had less authority than the apostles, and so the expression “apostles and prophets” represents a hierarchy.
This understanding is confirmed by the fact that Paul mentions prophets two other times in Ephesians.
The first is in chapter 3, verse 5, where Paul contrasts how the Christian message had not been disclosed in the Old Testament period with how:
The mystery of Christ . . . has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit (Ephesians 3:5).
So this is a reference to the New Testament prophets.
The second passage is in chapter 4, verse 11-12, where Paul says that:
[Christ] gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ (Ephesians 4:11-12).
So here again, Paul is thinking of New Testament prophets.
Thus for several reasons, we should understand Paul as saying that—with Christ as its cornerstone—the Church is built on the foundation of the apostles and New Testament prophets.
And note that this letter is written by the same St. Paul who wrote 1 Corinthians, which shows us that he was capable of using different metaphors on different occasions.
In 1 Corinthians, he portrays Jesus as the irreplaceable foundation of the local church, but here he portrays Jesus as the cornerstone of the Church with the foundation being completed by the apostles and New Testament prophets.
The fact that even St. Paul himself can shift metaphors about the foundation of the Church indicates that we must interpret each passage on its own and not try to shove material from another passage into it.
Revelation 21:14
A fourth passage that speaks of the foundation of the Church is Revelation 21:14, where St. John sees the heavenly city New Jerusalem and tells us:
And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb (Revelation 21:14).
Here, Christ is not mentioned at all—either as the Church’s one, unique foundation, as in 1 Corinthians 3, or as the cornerstone of a foundation, as in 1 Peter 2 and Ephesians 2.
Neither are the New Testament prophets from Ephesians 2 part of the foundation.
Instead, the heavenly city—which is a symbol of the Church—has not one foundation but twelve of them.
Each of the foundations has the name of one of the twelve apostles written on it, indicating that the Church is founded on the twelve apostles.
This group is a subset of the overall group of people who were called apostles in the first century.
The twelve were originally selected by Jesus, but after the suicide of Judas, his position was filled by Matthias in Acts 1:26.
However, there were other apostles. For example, both Paul and Barnabas are said to be apostles in Acts 14:14, but neither of them was a member of the twelve.
So in Revelation we have a different metaphor than any we have encountered previously, and the Church is envisioned as based not on the apostles in general but specifically on the twelve.
If a structure has more than one foundation, the foundations are presumably stacked on top of each other, which suggests that there is an order to the names written on them, with one member of the twelve’s name on the top foundation and another member of the twelve’s name on the bottom foundation.
So which of the twelve has his name on the bottom one—the most foundational of foundations?
There is no way to answer this question from Revelation. John does not tell us, and the vision he saw may not have answered this question.
Visions are dreamlike experiences, and so like in a dream, John may have just known that the twelve foundations had the names of the twelve on them, but without seeing specific names attached to specific foundations.
However, there is one passage in the New Testament that is at least suggestive.
Matthew 16:18
The fifth and final passage we will look at is, of course, Matthew 16:18, where Jesus tells Peter:
And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock, I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it (Matthew 16:18).
Here Jesus identifies another and fifth sense in which we can speak of the Church’s foundation, and he identifies St. Peter with that foundation, telling him “you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.”
In Episode 36, we saw that this statement is part of a larger speech that Jesus makes to Peter. This speech contains three statements about Peter, each one of which has three parts, for a total of nine.
We also saw that there are structural elements in the speech that demand that Peter be the rock.
Jesus is not talking about Peter’s faith, nor is he talking about himself as the foundation. He is talking about Peter. And you can go back and watch Episode 36 for an explanation of why.
It’s therefore a mistake to try to take material from a different passage—like 1 Corinthians 3—and shove it into Matthew 16. That would distort the meaning of the text instead of reading what Jesus said on its own terms.
So does this passage tell us anything about the passage in Revelation 21 and who the most fundamental apostle is?
Well, Matthew 16 is certainly suggestive, but we can’t be dogmatic here. It’s possible that Peter should be understood as the most fundamental apostle in Revelation, but we can’t say that for certain.
The passage in Revelation does not answer this question, and it may be a mistake to try to make it answer this question.
As we’ve just said, we should read each passage on its own and not try to shove material from one passage into another.
Just as it’s a mistake to try to shove 1 Corinthians 3 into Matthew 16, so it would be a mistake to shove Matthew 16 into Revelation 21.
Instead, we need to be careful and stick with what we can say with confidence.
Conclusion
What we can say with confidence is that there are at least five passages where the New Testament speaks about the foundation of the Church, and each one of them uses a different metaphor:
- In 1 Corinthians 3, Christ is the foundation of the local Church.
- In 1 Peter 2, Christ is the cornerstone of the Church.
- In Ephesians 2, Christ is the cornerstone, with the apostles and New Testament prophets as the foundation.
- In Revelation 21, the foundation is the Twelve.
- And in Matthew 16, the foundation is Peter.
Each of these passages contains a metaphor that communicates a truth about the Church, so we can speak about the foundation of the Church in different senses.
To understand the Bible accurately, we must read each passage in its own context, discern its meaning, and avoid trying to import material from one passage into another.
For non-Catholics to take 1 Corinthians 3—or any passage—and stuff its meaning into Matthew 16 would be just as much a mistake as it would be for Catholics to take Matthew 16 and stuff its meaning into the other four.
So is it true that . . .
SINGER: The Church’s one foundation
Is Jesus Christ her Lord
Sure! But that’s only one of the five metaphors for the foundation of the Church that are used by the New Testament authors themselves.
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If you like this content, you can help me out by liking, commenting, writing a review, sharing the podcast, and subscribing
If you’re watching on YouTube, be sure and hit the bell notification so that you always get notified when I have a new video
And you can also help me keep making this podcast—and you can get early access to new episodes—by going to Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast
Thank you, and I’ll see you next time
God bless you always!
VIDEO SOURCE:
Christ Church Bellingham’s version of the hymn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKRmncbUMps