Theopedia

Papacy

Definition

The papacy is the office of the bishop of Rome as universal head of the Roman Catholic Church, holding, by Roman Catholic doctrine, the full jurisdiction and, when speaking ex cathedra, the infallibility that Christ is said to have committed to Peter and, through him, to Peter’s successors.1 The Reformed and Baptist confessions deny that any man holds Christ’s headship of the church and identify the papal claim itself with the “man of sin” of Paul’s prophecy, who “exalteth himself in the church against Christ.”2

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states, in its chapter “Of the Church”:

The Lord Jesus Christ is the Head of the church, in whom, by the appointment of the Father, all power for the calling, institution, order or government of the church, is invested in a supreme and sovereign manner; neither can the Pope of Rome in any sense be head thereof, but is that antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the church against Christ, and all that is called God; whom the Lord shall destroy with the brightness of his coming.2

The Westminster Confession states the same denial in its own chapter on the church, word for word except for minor phrasing.3 The Savoy Declaration and the 1742 Philadelphia Confession of Faith, the American Baptist adoption of the 1689 text, both carry the identical paragraph in their own chapters “Of the Church,” down to the same numbering.4 This is not a Baptist distinctive: it is the settled judgment of the whole Reformed confessional tradition, restated by Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Baptists alike.

Biblical Basis

The confessions ground the denial of papal headship in Christ’s own, exclusive headship of the church. Paul calls Christ “the head over all things to the church, which is his body” (Eph. 1:22-23) and calls him “the head of the church” again elsewhere (Eph. 5:23; Col. 1:18), language the New Testament nowhere extends to any apostle or apostolic successor.

Jesus himself forbids a hierarchical title of spiritual fatherhood or mastery among his disciples: “call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven. Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even Christ” (Matt. 23:9-10), and rebukes the disciples’ own dispute over who should be greatest by pointing to servanthood instead of lordship (Luke 22:24-26). Peter himself, addressing fellow elders, calls them to shepherd God’s flock “not as being lords over God’s heritage, but being ensamples to the flock” (1 Pet. 5:1-3), and Paul records that he “withstood [Peter] to the face, because he was to be blamed” over Peter’s conduct at Antioch (Gal. 2:11-14), a rebuke of one apostle by another that the tradition claiming Peter’s exclusive primacy has to explain away.

Paul’s prophecy of a “man of sin,” who “exalteth himself above all that is called God” and “sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God” (2 Thess. 2:3-4), is what the confessions apply to the papal office itself as Antichrist, not to any one occupant of it.

Historical Development

Patristic origins (second and third centuries)

The earliest bishop lists for Rome, preserved in Hegesippus, Irenaeus, the Muratorian Fragment, Hippolytus, Tertullian, and Epiphanius, still show Peter and Paul jointly founding the Roman church and charging Linus with its episcopate; at the end of the second century and into the beginning of the third, Peter was not yet reckoned a bishop of Rome in his own right.1 Only under Victor I or Zephyrinus (180-217) did the tradition shift, so that Paul increasingly lost his share in founding the church at Rome and Peter alone was pictured as its first bishop; it was at this point that the legend of a twenty- to twenty-five-year Petrine episcopate began to circulate.1 Bavinck concludes: “The whole edifice of Rome’s primacy, of papal authority… [is] based on a historical probability that can at any moment be nullified by new witnesses.”1

The growth of Roman authority (fourth to sixth centuries)

Calvin traces Rome’s rising influence to the fourth-century Arian controversy, when Athanasius, driven from his see in the East under the Arian-sympathizing emperors Constantius and Constans, appealed to Bishop Julius of Rome, who received him and enlisted the West in his defense; the orthodox came to lean on Rome’s communion as a mark of standing, and “it was deemed ignominious to be excommunicated by it.”5 Rome’s authority grew further through appeals: Eutyches, condemned by his own bishop Flavian of Constantinople, appealed to Leo, who took up his cause against Flavian; African bishops, facing the same pattern of condemned clergy running to Rome, eventually decreed that no one could carry an appeal overseas on pain of excommunication.5

Even so, a bishop of Rome could still reject the very claim later popes would make central to the office. Gregory the Great, bishop of Rome from 590 to 604, refused the title “universal bishop” when it was proposed for the see of Constantinople, and rejected it just as firmly for his own see: “None ever wished to be called by such a name; none arrogated this rash name to himself, lest, by seizing on the honour of supremacy in the office of the Pontificate, he might seem to deny it to all his brethren.”5

Modern dogmatic definitions (nineteenth century)

Papal authority reached its most explicit dogmatic form in the nineteenth century, alongside a broader Roman Catholic revival of scholastic theology: the 1854 definition of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, the 1864 Syllabus of Errors, and the First Vatican Council’s 1870 definition of papal infallibility, followed in 1879 by Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris restoring Thomas Aquinas as the church’s teaching doctor.6

Opposing Views

Roman Catholic doctrine states the office in its own terms. The Tridentine Profession of Faith, sworn by the Roman Catholic clergy, binds the swearer to

promise and swear true obedience to the Roman bishop, the successor of St. Peter, prince of the apostles, and vicar of Jesus Christ,7

a clause the Sacred Congregation of the Council amended in 1877 to add explicit assent to “the primacy and infallible rule of the Roman Pontiff” as defined at Vatican I.7 The Council’s own decree defines that doctrine directly:

The Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, when in discharge of the office of pastor and doctor of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme Apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the universal Church, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, is possessed of the infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed that his Church should be endowed… and that therefore such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are irreformable of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church.8

On this view the pope, as “shepherd and teacher of all Christians,” holds the “full and supreme power of jurisdiction in the universal church,” a power binding on every believer “on peril of losing salvation.”1 Bavinck records the maxim in which Roman Catholic theology summarizes this: ubi papa, ibi ecclesia, “where the pope is, there the church is,” and notes that Boniface VIII’s bull Unam Sanctam (1302) had already made submission to the pope a condition of salvation centuries before Vatican I made the claim to infallibility formal.1

Objections and Responses

The historical case for an exclusive Petrine succession at Rome does not hold up. The earliest witnesses to the Roman church’s founding name Peter and Paul together, not Peter alone, and do not yet call Peter its bishop; the exclusively Petrine account only appears a century and a half later.1 Calvin presses the same point from another angle: even granting Peter a personal primacy among the apostles, nothing ties that primacy to the city of Rome rather than wherever Peter happened to have served first, which by the papacy’s own histories was Antioch, not Rome.9

Peter’s own conduct in Scripture contradicts a claim to hierarchical primacy over the other apostles. Paul “withstood him to the face” over his conduct at Antioch (Gal. 2:11), a rebuke that is difficult to square with Peter holding jurisdiction over Paul as his ecclesiastical superior.

A bishop of Rome himself once rejected the title later popes made central. Gregory the Great called the title “universal bishop” a “rash name” that no predecessor had ever wanted, on the ground that for one bishop to claim it would deny honor to all his brethren.5 Later Roman Catholic doctrine did not merely revive that title; it grounded the pope’s ordinary jurisdiction and, eventually, his infallibility in it.

The Vatican Council’s declaration of papal infallibility authorizes itself. Bavinck presses the circularity: the council’s own declaration that the pope is infallible is not itself an infallible statement by the council’s own premises, since only the pope, not an ecumenical council, is said to speak infallibly; the doctrine has no outside ground to stand on beyond its own assertion.1

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” para. 4. ↩ ↩2

  3. The Westminster Confession of Faith (London, 1647), chap. 25, “Of the Church,” para. 6. ↩

  4. A Declaration of the Faith and Order Owned and Practised in the Congregational Churches (London, 1658), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” para. 4; Philadelphia Baptist Association, A Confession of Faith (Philadelphia, 1742), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” para. 4, reproducing the 1689 text. ↩

  5. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 4, chap. 7, 366-388. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  6. Bavinck, chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology.” ↩

  7. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 7, “Creeds and Confessions,” 121. ↩ ↩2

  8. Hodge, chap. 5, “Rule of Faith and Practice,” 82-93, quoting the “Dogmatic Decrees of the Vatican Council,” chap. 4. ↩

  9. Calvin, book 4, chap. 6, “Of the Primacy of the Romish See,” 353-364. ↩