Some Protestants challenge the Catholic claim of Peter’s headship by appealing to 1 Peter 5:1, where St. Peter refers to himself as “a fellow elder.” They argue that if Peter is a fellow elder, then he must not have had the superior authority that Catholics say he had.
But this conclusion would be mistaken; just because someone refers to himself by a rank that makes him equal to others does not mean he has only that rank.
For example, in 1980, Ronald Reagan drafted a speech on strategies for obtaining worldwide peace, where he addressed his audience as such:
I’d like to speak to you for a few moments, not as a candidate for the presidency, but as a fellow American, a parent—in fact, a grandparent—who shares with you the deep and abiding hope for peace.
Reagan said this as a high-ranking politician. And you can imagine him saying the same thing as president. Yet, we wouldn’t conclude from this that he’s merely another American citizen, without superior authority or power.
We find other instances of this in Scripture as well. St. Paul refers to himself as a deacon (1 Cor. 3:5; 2 Cor. 11:23), but that doesn’t mean Paul views himself as merely a deacon. He’s an apostle, and he argues for such in Galatians 2.
Thus, Peter referring to himself as “a fellow elder”—a rank which places him equal to others—does not exclude him from possessing a distinct or superior authority. So, why does he refer to himself as an elder, then, and not someone with greater authority?
The subsequent verses in this passage help to answer this. In 1 Peter 5:5, he writes, “clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another.” This suggests that humility is the lens through which we should interpret Peter’s statement. By addressing himself as a fellow elder, Peter is attempting to model humility and express solidarity with his fellow elders.
Even those who disagree with Peter’s supremacy can acknowledge this. As Nicholas Koulomzine, an Eastern Orthodox theologian and professor, comments in his book The Primacy of Peter:
These are words of shining humility…they prove just the opposite—that his real title as Christ’s Apostle placed him in a much higher position than that of a mere elder in a local church (pg. 23).
The idea, then, is that Peter is exercising the very humility that he exhorts his fellow elders to practice. And that, in fact, is a true characteristic of a leader.