I grew up in the American South, and I was raised in a Protestant family. But when I was six or seven years old, my parents had some kind of disagreement with the elders of our church, and they stopped going. So after that, I was raised nominally Protestant, and we’d go to church only once or twice a year when we visited my grandparents.
When I was a teenager, I was involved in the New Age Movement, but I broke with that when I turned 18.
At age 20, I had a conversion to Christ, and I became a serious Christian—something I’ve been ever since. Following this conversion, I wanted to devote my life to teaching God’s word, and I planned to become a seminary professor and maybe a pastor.
But I still needed to figure out what church I should be part of.
In my hometown of Fayetteville, Arkansas, we have dozens of churches—all different kinds. But I realized that what church has services at a time I like is not a good test of whether that church’s doctrine is true. Neither is what church is in convenient driving distance. Or what church has a pastor I like, music I like, or a social group I like. So I shouldn’t let my decision of what church to join be influenced by any of those things, because figuring out what is true is the most important thing.
I thus worshiped in local Protestant churches—since that is how I’d grown up—but I made a point of studying the theology of all the different branches of Christianity.
I studied the different Protestant groups, like Anglicans, Lutherans, Calvinists, Methodists, Baptists, and Pentecostals. But I also studied the theologies of Eastern Orthodox Christians and even Catholics.
That was saying something, because the church I had my conversion in was very anti-Catholic, so I heard lots of anti-Catholic preaching and read lots of anti-Catholic material. But I still studied what they had to say—even if it was just so I could talk Catholics out of the Church better.
And then, one day, it happened.
I was reading a Catholic book—specifically, Evangelical Catholics by Deacon Keith Fournier. And it had a long quotation from Matthew 16 in it—you know, the “You are Peter” passage:
Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do men say that the Son of man is?”
And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?”
Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.
And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.
I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
Then he strictly charged the disciples to tell no one that he was the Christ (Matthew 16:13-20).
This was not a new passage for me. I’d read the Bible—or at least as much of it as I knew about—and I’d read the Gospel of Matthew multiple times. I’d also heard this passage dealt with by numerous Protestant preachers and in basic-level Protestant literature as well, and I had formed my views about it.
My views weren’t identical with what I’d heard from others, but I definitely did not understand Peter to be the rock. I argued that Peter was most definitely not the rock, and therefore the Catholic Church was misusing this passage to support the office of the pope.
Here’s how I reasoned: Jesus said to Peter, “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.” But in Greek, the word for Peter is petros, and the word for rock is petra. They’re two different words. Petros is masculine, whereas petra is feminine. Therefore, they must be referring to two different things, so Peter is not the rock.
According to this line of reasoning, petros meant a small stone, whereas petra meant a large rock. So what Jesus was doing was contrasting Peter with the rock. He was saying, in effect, “You may be a small stone, Peter, but on this other large rock, I will build my Church.”
That much was held by many of the people that I’d read on this passage. But what would the large rock be?
I’d seen many authors claiming that the rock was Peter’s faith. However, that never struck me as plausible, because Peter’s faith is not explicitly mentioned in the text. He obviously has faith, but the text doesn’t mention it.
What is mentioned in the text is Jesus’ identity. That’s the main subject of the text that prompts what Jesus says to Peter.
[Jesus] said to them, “But who do you say that I am?”
Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.”
First, Jesus says, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter says, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus declares Peter blessed, because flesh and blood has not revealed this to him, but Jesus’ father in heaven has. And then Jesus says, “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.”
So I held that the rock on which Jesus will build his Church is his own identity—the fact that he is the Christ, the Son of the living God.
What Jesus was saying was, in effect, “You may be a small stone, Peter, but on this great rock of my identity as the Christ I will build my Church.”
I thought this worked better as an interpretation, because Jesus’ identity as the Christ is mentioned prominently in the text. That made a lot of sense to me. The Church is obviously built on Christ. That’s something even Catholics acknowledge, and it’s taught in other passages in the New Testament.
So I had what I thought was a really good explanation of the passage. And—as a Protestant—I said to myself, “It’s a good thing that Peter is not the rock, because if he were, then he would be the chief apostle, and if he were the chief apostle, then he would be in charge once Jesus ascended to heaven.” That would support the idea of there being a pope.
But there were some things I didn’t yet know. One of them was that there was another way of taking the passage that had never occurred to me.
It’s obvious that there is parallelism between the two rocks in the passage. “You are petros” is parallel with “on this petra”—parallelism being a common feature of biblical poetry. It’s a common literary device in the Bible.
But there are two kinds of parallelism: synthetic parallelism and antithetic parallelism. Antithetic parallelism happens when the two things that are in parallel contrast with each other, like the righteous and the wicked in Proverbs 10:6:
Blessings are on the head of the righteous
but the mouth of the wicked conceals violence.
Here the righteous are contrasted with the wicked, so there is antithetic parallelism between them.
Synthetic parallelism is the opposite. In synthetic parallelism, the second thing in the parallel builds on the first, like the things the Lord hates in Proverbs 6:16:
There are six things which the Lord hates
seven which are an abomination to him.
Here the six things that the Lord hates in the first half of the parallel are amplified into seven things that the Lord hates in the second half, so this is an example of synthetic parallelism, where the second element builds on the first.
Now, I’d spotted the fact that in Matthew 16, petros and petra are in parallel with each other, but I’d made the mistake of simply assuming that I was looking at antithetic parallelism. It never occurred to me to consider the idea that the passage might be synthetic parallelism.
If you assume that petros means small stone and petra means large rock—and if the passage is antithetic parallelism—then Jesus would have been saying, “You may be a small stone, Peter, but on this other large rock, I will build my Church.”
But what happens if the passage is synthetic parallelism instead? In that case, Jesus would be saying, “You may look like a small stone, Peter, but on the large rock that you really are, I will build my Church.”
So the passage can be taken in more than one way. If it’s antithetic parallelism, Jesus is diminishing Peter. But if it’s synthetic parallelism, Jesus is building Peter up. This possibility just never occurred to me at the time.
There were other things that had never occurred to me about Matthew 16, and once I discovered them, I had to completely change my view.
That’s what I’ll tell you about next time.