Note to the Parish | August 28, 2026

In last Sunday’s 11 am Sermon I had occasion to reflect on the great Swiss Reformed Theologian Karl Barth’s work on the Epistle to the Romans. Among Barth’s more striking observations was that authentic authority arises when the Church serves as a “crater” formed by the explosion of God’s Word—never self-sufficient, always open to being questioned and purified by the very revelation it proclaims. A choice of imagery that challenged expectations both for traditional Protestant as well as Roman Catholic thinkers!

The late Bishop of Ely,  Dr Stephen Sykes actually developed this point in an ecumenical context to argue that Roman Catholicism’s initially surprising interest in Barth,  from the time of the Second Vatican Council onwards, stemmed from his implicit recovery as a Protestant of divine authority as residing in the Church – albeit that this was understood as God’s indwelling presence and action: “God’s presence makes the Church to be the Church… he is ‘the real I of the Church’.”¹  And Barth argued further that where the Church is, there is also the Church’s power—but only insofar as that power remains God-serving, not a power that “displaces and replaces God.” 

This last point was highly apropos given that last Sunday’s Gospel included the famous Petrine verse “upon this rock…”. And it was very striking that upon that basis, Barth could even say that, like Luther, he would have “no objection to kissing the Pope’s feet” if papal power was indeed thus understood in terms of a purely spiritual and God-serving role of service (as the traditional title was meant to imply proclaiming the Roman pontiff to be Servum servorum Dei Servant of the servants of God. 

This brings into focus some historically deeply contested terrain regarding authority in the Church and where it resides – upon which St Augustine,  whose Feast we commemorate this week,  had much of importance to say among the many important early church voices we do well to ponder.

Anglicanism has widely understood itself in terms of governance to be “conciliar” or “synodical,” with decision-making (albeit with varying degrees of weight) occurring in councils (synods) at diocesan, provincial, and global levels. The Anglican Communion’s “Instruments of Communion” (comprising the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Primates’ Meeting, and the Anglican Consultative Council) embody thus a global exercise of conciliarity. 

But it is also evident at this point that there is much which is currently contested. Ever since the Lambeth conference of 1998 questions have arisen with increasing stridency as to what point there is in such structures if the “mind of the whole” is not felt to be of sufficient moral weight to constrain those provinces which wish to act in ways directly contrary to that mind. At such times a consultative rather than juridical understanding of conciliar authority is clearly engaged which then brings into question what the cost is to the coherence and unity of Anglicanism of autonomous provinces in the absence as yet of any binding common canon law for the whole Communion. The emergence of various blocks of provinces within the Communion, such as those aligned with GAFCON or the Global South,  suggest a grave risk of effective fragmentation of the Communion as among the costs consequent on the manifest failure to pay the price needed to sustain overall unity. 

Theologically, Anglicans have historically affirmed that the Church is intrinsically conciliar: and that within it authority resides in the whole body of the faithful which has comet ot be  exercised through representative synodical bodies led by Bishops.  However, Anglican conciliarity was clearly shaped by Reformation principles. Hence Scripture is placed above such structures and no pope or church council is as ultimate in terms of authority (which is the practical application of sola Scriptura).  Even General councils are not considered infallible as such however weighty their pronouncements as Article XXI of the Thirty-Nine Articles states that councils “may err, and have erred.” And in another very Anglican element civil rulers were recognised historically as having had a significant place in convening councils (which again reflects the Reformation-era legacy of engagement between church and state). Anglican synods have also typically include three “houses” (bishops, clergy, laity), and decisions often require concurrent majorities, reflecting a balance between episcopal oversight and lay/clerical consent.

In the light of that long history it is fascinating now to see within the Roman Catholic church since the time of the late Pope Francis a major move to promote the concept of synodality which is clearly building in a new way upon the older concept of conciliarity. The word “Conciliarity” derives from the Latin concilium, “assembly for consultation” and “synodality” from Greek synodos, “way together”. And they have in the past been used with considerable overlap but in recent Catholic usage “synodality” seems to stress the shared Eucharistic and baptismal participation of the whole People of God as the basis for shared engagement in the structures of the church which is potentially of quite revolutionary import. 

The New Testament provides several “roots” for conciliar practice: the Jerusalem consultation in Acts 15 (which is often seen as a proto-synod), the promise that Christ is present where two or three are gathered in his name (Matt 18:20), and the Pentecostal gathering “all together in one place” (Acts 2:1). And these texts have been seen as grounding  later claims that the Spirit guides the church into truth through communal discernment – with a subtle implication that what may emerge could be different from what was accepted before – and if this is the case the outcomes could indeed be radical and could also rest uneasily with the whole notion of the jurisdictional sovereignty of the Papacy and indeed its relatively modern claim to Infallibility (only formally claimed since 1870)! 

It has to be said in regard to the mutual relations between the Anglican Communion and the Roman Catholic Church as also between the Orthodox and Oriental Churches and the Roman Church – the whole matter of the Papacy remains a notable difficulty and this is worth more examination that it usually receives. So what then indeed about that passage “upon this rock….”?

In the case of the Oriental, Orthodox and Anglican churches the concern has never been to argue that Saint Peter lacked distinction among the apostles, or that Rome lacked honour and influence. Rather it has been to say that in the face of the evidence of history a monarchical and juridical papacy asserting universal jurisdiction simply lacks the needed warrant

The New Testament, the pre-Nicene Church, the ecumenical councils, and the major controversies of the first millennium all seem to suggest instead that a conciliar and collegial understanding of the church had from the first prevails which was fundamentally different from what emerged centuries later as the Roman Catholic doctrines of papal supremacy and papal infallibility. 

In other words, while St Peter clearly appears as a leading apostle and Rome appears as a principal see of apostolic status, neither held from the outset the universal, immediate, and irreformable jurisdiction later defined as “of faith” and explicitly required as a belief by all on pain of damnation, as  the First Vatican Council in the nineteenth century declared. 

Roman Catholic arguments commonly rest on three passages in the Bible that related to Peter. Matthew 16:18–20 which was in the Gospel of last Sunday –where Christ names Simon “Peter,” and speaks of building the Church upon “this rock,” and gives him the keys of the kingdom with the power to bind and loose. Luke 22:32, where Christ prays that Peter’s faith may not fail and commands him to strengthen his brethren. And then in John 21:15–17, where the risen Christ commands Peter three times to feed His sheep. Taken together, these texts have been held to be sufficient to establish a unique but also then transferable Petrine office, which was later somehow inherited by all subsequent Roman bishops in much the same way as occurs for hereditary monarchs

At this point it becomes essential to examine closely how the “rock” language of Matthew 16 has been interpreted from patristic times onward.

Was the “rock” in question,  

• Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Christ; 
• Christ Himself; 
• the Church founded upon that confession; or 
• Peter in a representative capacity, standing for the apostolic and episcopal office?

The mere fact of there being such a diversity in later interpretation across these options is telling. 

In very brief summary, Jerome and Augustine, among others, present non-exclusive readings of the passage, and it is also to be noted that St Peter himself applies “rock” language pre-eminently to Christ. All of which would suggest that while Peter was especially prominent this did not amount to an exclusive juridical prerogative which could then be handed down to a line of successors. 

Again, the command of Christ to “feed my sheep” would in the early church not have been seen as Peter’s installation as universal sovereign, but as proclaiming his restoration after his three fold denials of Christ before. (The threefold question, “Do you love me?” corresponding precisely to the threefold repudiation in the high priest’s courtyard.) 

And it has also been pointed out that St Peter’s grief at the repeated interrogation better fits a moment of penitential restoration than crowning elevation to a supreme office.  Indeed St John Chrysostom explicitly praises Peter’s pastoral vocation and interprets the command as a paradigm for all those who would serve to shepherd the Church for whom love of Christ is displayed in care for Christ’s flock.  Again, Christ’s prayer in Luke 22, concerns more Peter’s coming trial and restoration after failure, than declaring Peter or later Roman bishops to be immune from doctrinal error.

As we proceed on through the Biblical narrative the Acts of the Apostles again proves telling and illustrates how things stood at a sharply practical level. At the Council of Jerusalem, Peter speaks forcefully about the admission of Gentiles, yet James gives the concluding judgment: “Therefore I judge” that the Gentile converts should not be troubled beyond certain necessary requirements. Moreover,  the final decision is then communicated in the name of “the apostles and the elders,” and not as Peter’s personal decree. The narrative depicts apostolic deliberation, common discernment, and a synodal style of resolution. Peter is present and even prominent but not the dispository actor recognised as acting thus with infallible jurisdiction.

The later confrontation between St Paul and St Peter at Antioch repeats this pattern and in Galatians 2, Paul publicly rebukes Peter for withdrawing from table fellowship with Gentile Christians under pressure from certain Jewish Christians. Paul does not treat Peter as an unchallengeable earthly sovereign whose ministry must be channelled down through a unique jurisdictional process. Apostolic authority is exercised within mutual accountability. 

All this leaves an overall impression from the New Testament of primacy as something exercised apostolically as collegial, rather than as monarchical over a subject apostolic body.

Again, as we look to the first three centuries of church history before Nicea we see nowhere a doctrine of Roman papal supremacy and infallibility as would surely have been evidenced had it been present amidst the many controversies of the pre-Nicene Church. Instead, Rome is repeatedly honoured, consulted, and  seen as influential, but not as possessed of universal                                       jurisdiction or an infallible teaching office.

Clement, writes from Rome to the Church of Corinth near the end of the first century, and is often treated as an early example of Roman intervention by a reigning pontiff. Yet the letter speaks in the voice of the Roman church, not in the personal name of Clement as “Bishop of Rome” or “successor of Peter.” It calls the Corinthians back to peace and obedience toward their local presbyters, but does not invoke a Petrine office or command submission to a universal Roman jurisdiction. The intervention can be understood therefore as an instance of fraternal responsibility exercised by a major apostolic church, perhaps reflecting Rome’s practical prominence within an emerging metropolitan order, without proving a doctrine of papal monarchy.

Ignatius of Antioch likewise offers a vigorous theology of episcopal authority. He repeatedly exhorts Christians to unity with their local bishop, presbyters, and deacons, but he never appeals to a universal bishop or a pope possessing authority over all local churches. His praise of the Roman church as “presiding in love” is entirely compatible with a primacy of honour, charity, or prestige, and is especially fitting in the context of being in the imperial capital. Again his statement that he does not command the Romans “as Peter and Paul” acknowledges those apostles’ association with Rome, but it does not establish a continuing Petrine jurisdiction unique to Rome’s bishop and deriving from St Peter alone.

When we come to Irenaeus of Lyons we come certainly to controverted terrain.

In opposing Gnosticism, he certainly appeals to apostolic succession and offers Rome’s episcopal succession as a conspicuous public example. He also makes a claim that was later much cited – namely that every church must be in “convenire” with Rome. Yet the meaning here is disputed: the word convenire may suggest agreement, but can also imply coming together with or being connected to a central church. 

Moreover the context is one where Irenaeus’s larger argument is about the public and collective transmission of apostolic tradition through the succession of bishops. He then traces Rome’s foundation jointly to Peter and Paul, but notably fails to do this setting out a doctrine regarding there being a singular, infallible Roman successor of Peter. Again, his account of Polycarp and Pope Anicetus, (who disagreed over the dating of Easter but remained in communion,) has been invoked as evidence that disagreement did not entail automatic juridical submission to Rome.

The Quartodeciman controversy under Pope Victor makes the point more sharply. Victor attempted to sever the Asian churches from communion over their observance of Pascha on the fourteenth day of Nisan. Polycrates of Ephesus resisted, appealing to the tradition he had received and declaring his duty to obey God rather than men. Other bishops, including Irenaeus, rebuked Victor’s severity and urged peace. The eventual settlement came not through a permanent papal decree, but through the conciliar ordering of the Nicene period. Rome exercised real influence and could provoke wide controversy, but its action was neither automatically received nor treated as the final constitutional act of the universal Church.

Cyprian of Carthage provides perhaps the most explicit early account of episcopal collegiality. He can say that a “primacy is given to Peter” as a sign of the Church’s unity, but he also insists that the episcopate is one and shared: each bishop holds his portion of the one episcopal office and is accountable to Christ. In the dispute with Pope Stephen concerning baptism administered by heretics, Cyprian rejected the notion that any bishop could be “bishop of bishops” or compel the judgment of his colleagues. Councils, rather than unilateral commands, were the appropriate means for resolving grave disputes. His willingness to regard a pope as mistaken in a matter touching faith and sacramental practice is difficult to reconcile with a later conception of inherent papal infallibility.

Councils and Conciliar Authority

The ecumenical councils of the fourth and fifth centuries will next become central to the argument because they show how the Church actually made binding decisions and this merits fuller treatment than can be attempted here.

But for the moment it can be said that at Nicaea in 325, Canon 6 recognizes the ancient regional jurisdictions of Alexandria, Rome, and Antioch. The canon is commonly read as acknowledging Rome’s established authority within its own region by analogy with Alexandria’s authority over Egypt and Antioch’s over its territories. It notably does not describe Rome as possessing universal jurisdiction. Its language belongs to an ecclesial order in which major sees exercise defined metropolitan or patriarchal responsibilities, while synods adjudicate disputes through common judgment.

The same pattern appears in the First Council of Constantinople in 381. Canon 3 gives Constantinople “the prerogative of honour after the Bishop of Rome” because it is “New Rome.” The basis offered is the city’s political and imperial status, not a theological claim that Roman primacy follows exclusively from Peter’s succession. No papal legates attended the council, yet it came to be received in East and West as ecumenical. This reception is used to challenge the claim that a council’s authority depends simply upon papal initiative, presidency, or unilateral ratification.

Pope Julius I, writing during the Arian controversy, also uses strikingly collegial language. He presents his position as shared with bishops in Italy and neighbouring regions, and urges that justice be determined “by all.” Pope Liberius, pressured during the same crisis, temporarily condemned Athanasius and entered communion with bishops associated with the Arianizing party. Whatever qualifications are offered about coercion and the precise status of his acts, the episode does not readily serve as a straightforward instance of an unerring Roman teaching office. Athanasius’s concern for the position of Hosius of Cordoba further suggests that the wider Church did not regard the Roman bishop as the sole decisive center of orthodoxy.

Further Patristic testimony can be presented as affirming Peter’s dignity without granting exclusive and perpetual Roman sovereignty. 

Cyril of Jerusalem praises Peter, yet can speak of Peter and Paul together as rulers of the Church. Chrysostom extols Peter’s zeal and leadership, but interprets the keys as given to all the apostles in Peter’s person, and identifies James as exercising chief authority in Jerusalem, and also depicts major ecclesial decisions as collective. 

St Augustine (of whom more will be said at another time), has often been invoked on account of his maxim Roma locuta, causa finita, but he does not treat that phrase as a general doctrine that a papal pronouncement ends all inquiry by its own force. In the Pelagian controversy, the matter had reached a point at which successive judgments and appeals had exhausted ordinary avenues of dispute. Elsewhere Augustine grounds unity in Scripture and recognizes the capacity of councils to examine and correct prior decisions, including decisions associated with Rome. His varied interpretations of Matthew 16—including the view that Christ is the rock—also resist reducing the text to a single papal conclusion.

Ephesus in 431 and Chalcedon in 451 furnish particularly important historic examples for consideration

Ephesus accepted Pope Celestine’s condemnation of Nestorius only after the assembled bishops examined the controversy and judged the Roman teaching consonant with the faith. The council rejoiced that Celestine was “of one mind with the Synod,” a formulation that suggests agreement between Rome and the council rather than mere papal command followed by passive reception. 

Chalcedon treated Pope Leo I’s Tome with comparable seriousness and reverence. The Fathers acclaimed that “Peter has spoken through Leo,” but only after scrutinizing the Tome and finding it consistent with the creeds of Nicaea and Constantinople and with the teaching of Cyril. In other words, Leo’s authority was acknowledged not as sui generis but because his confession was orthodox; it was not presumed irreformable simply because it proceeded from Rome.

Chalcedon’s disciplinary canons reinforce this constitutional picture. Canons 9 and 17 recognize Constantinople as a regional appellate authority, while Canon 28 assigns it privileges equal to those of Rome in relevant ecclesiastical matters because both cities possessed imperial standing. Leo protested Canon 28, but his own argument appealed substantially to the Nicene order and established ecclesial privileges, not to a plainly articulated claim of unrestricted, divinely guaranteed jurisdiction over every church. The controversy therefore reveals an unresolved and contested structure of primacy, not an already accepted Vatican I model.

The Fifth Ecumenical Council provides an even more difficult case for papal absolutism. In the dispute over the Three Chapters, Pope Vigilius initially resisted the course taken by the council. The council proceeded, and Vigilius’s name was removed from the diptychs until he eventually accepted its decisions. Whatever the political complexities of the episode, it shows a council acting as capable of judging and disciplining a pope. Such a practice appears incongruent with the notion that the Roman pope is, by divine institution, the unappealable and supreme judge of the whole Church.

Infallibility, Gregory, and Honorius

While the doctrine of Papal Infallibility is separate from that of Primacy and very much later in terms of promulgation (as it only goes back to 1870) it is nonetheless closely caught up in the modern understanding of the Papacy for which evidence from the earliest times has been eagerly sought.Yet the historic case against papal infallibility is readily developed through reference to episodes in which popes appear either to have erred, reversed themselves, or been corrected by councils. 

Pope Innocent I’s teaching on infant communion, as reported in Augustine, is offered as one such problem. If Innocent taught that infants require both baptism and Eucharistic communion for eternal life, and if that teaching was later rejected in the Western Church, the question arises as to whether an authoritative papal doctrinal position can be reconciled with subsequent conciliar discipline and theology. 

Pope Zosimus’s initial favorable response to Celestius raises a parallel difficulty: if he temporarily treated a Pelagian-associated figure as orthodox before African episcopal pressure led to a reversal, then the extent of papal doctrinal protection becomes contested. The difficulty is structural as a theory of infallibility broad enough to affect ordinary doctrinal history risks encountering historical counterexamples; while a theory narrow enough to avoid them may become almost inert in the lived history of the Church.

The Filioque controversy can be explored in a similar way. 

Ephesus forbade the composition or introduction of another faith beside the Nicene confession, and Cyril of Alexandria insisted on the inviolability of the creed’s language. Pope Leo III opposed adding the Filioque to the Creed itself and reportedly had the original text displayed in Greek and Latin at St. Peter’s. His stated reluctance to place himself above the authority of ecumenical councils stands in marked contrast to the later Latin liturgical addition, associated in Rome with Pope Benedict VIII in 1014. 

The issue here is not simply the theology of the Filioque, which requires its own careful trinitarian treatment, but the constitutional question of whether a pope may alter the universal creed unilaterally. If Leo III’s position was protected by infallibility, then a later alteration creates an apparent contradiction; if it was not, the scope of infallibility again becomes severely restricted.

Pope Gregory the Great offers a still more direct challenge to the language of universal papal monarchy. When Patriarch John the Faster of Constantinople employed the title “Ecumenical Patriarch,” Gregory protested vociferously but he did not claim that “universal bishop” was a title belonging uniquely to Rome. Instead, he condemned the very aspiration to such a title, warning that one who calls himself universal bishop, or seeks to be so called, displays a pride associated with the precursor of Antichrist. Evidently and all too tellingly for the later position claimed for the papacy Gregory feared that a title apparently absorbing the episcopate into one office would diminish the honour and proper authority of other bishops.

Gregory certainly did recognize a Roman primacy and a responsibility to intervene in certain episcopal disorders. But that this was not the same as Vatican I’s claim that the pope possesses supreme, ordinary, and immediate jurisdiction over every church and every bishop. A disputed passage in Gregory’s letters speaks of the “See of the Prince of the Apostles” possessing supreme authority, yet its fuller context can plausibly be held to describe Peter’s see as existing in three places—Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch. On this reading, Gregory’s Petrine theology is one of shared and patriarchal rather than exclusively Roman and monarchical power, moreover his refusal to accept the title “universal pope” even when offered honorifically is evidence that he did not conceive the Roman bishop as the universal bishop in the later juridical sense that evolved after him

The case of Pope Honorius I forms perhaps the sharpest historical challenge. 

During the Monothelite controversy, Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople sought Honorius’s support for speaking of “one will” in Christ. Honorius responded in language that appeared to endorse the formula, reasoning that Christ’s assumed human nature was without sinful opposition. The theological intention and exact culpability of Honorius continue to be debated, but his letters were later condemned by the Sixth Ecumenical Council, Constantinople III in 680, which anathematized him by name for following Sergius and confirming impious doctrines. Pope Leo II confirmed the condemnation, faulting Honorius for failing to extinguish heresy and allowing it to spread.

What is telling here is not that every papal statement is equivalent to an ex cathedra definition, but that the early Church plainly believed that a pope could be judged, condemned, and anathematized in connection with doctrinal controversy. And it has to be noted that the condemnation was not a fleeting local embarrassment: it was received by later popes, remembered in ecclesiastical tradition, and accepted at the Seventh Ecumenical Council. The early Church’s operative assumption was thus not that “Rome has spoken; the case is closed,” but that Roman teaching, however weighty, remained subject to the rule of apostolic faith as discerned by the whole Church in council. 

A view to which most Anglicans would indeed subscribe !

Needless to say there is much more history to be reviewed and many more possible arguments to be made but this very rapid survey of some of the initial history may suffice to show that defenders of absolutist sovereign claims for universal jurisdiction for the Roman papacy are bold indeed ! At a very minimum it must be hard to assert that only those accepting such a claim can have any hope of eternal life. To put unnecessary impediments in the path salvation can only be a matter of deep gravity.

1. See, Stephen W. Sykes,  Karl Barth on the Heart of the Matter, Gregorianum, 1986, Vol. 67, No. 4 (1986), pp. 679-691