essing Christ. This every careful interpreter of this
text will admit. Christ could easily have said: Upon thee will I build
My Church, if it had been His intention to say just that. And we imagine
on such a momentous occasion Christ would have used the plainest terms,
containing no figure of speech, no ambiguities whatever; for was he not
now introducing to the Church the distinguished person who was to
preside over its affairs? Catholics claim that when Christ spoke these
words, "upon this rock," He had extended His hand and was pointing to
Peter. That would help us considerably in the interpretation of the
text. The trouble is only that we are not told anything about such a
gesture of Christ, and if a gesture must be invented, it is possible to
invent an altogether different one, as we shall see. But if Christ, by
saying, "upon this rock," instead of saying, "upon thee," referred not
to Peter as a person, but to a quality in Peter, namely, to his firm
faith, then it follows that the Church is not built on the person of
Peter, but on a quality of Peter. This is the best that Catholics can
obtain from the interpretation which they have attempted. But if the
Church is built on firm faith, there is no reason why that faith should
be just Peter's. Would not every firm believer in the deity and
Redeemership of Christ become the rock on which the Church is built just
as much as Peter? Luther declared quite correctly: "We are all Peters if
we believe like Peter." Really, the Catholics ought to be willing to
help strengthen the foundation of the Church by admitting that the rock
would become a stouter support if, instead of the firm faith of one man,
the equally firm faith of hundreds, thousands, and millions of other men
were added to prop up the Church. In all seriousness, it will be
absolutely necessary to give Peter some assistants; for we know that the
job of holding up the Church was too big for him on at least two
occasions. What became of the Church in the night when Peter denied the
Lord? In that night, the Catholics would have to believe, the Church was
built on a liar and blasphemer. What became of the Church in the days
when Peter came to Antioch and Paul withstood him to the face because he
was dissembling his Christian convictions not to offend a Judaizing
party in the Church? (Gal. 2.) Was the Church in those days built on a
canting hypocrite?

But the greatest difficulty in admitting the Catholic interpretation