But—and here we come to the last question—have we not to deal here with a purely personal relation of St. Peter to the Church? The passage of St. Matthew and the conviction of the early Church testify to the precedence of St. Peter. Can we claim their testimony for his successors also? Do they support the exclusive precedence of the Bishop of Rome?

A negative answer to this question can be given only by those who consider the scriptural texts in isolation and do not view them in relation to the divine Person of Jesus and His intentions. But those who really believe in Jesus, in His divine Personality and in the necessarily imperishable character of His ideas and His works, in Jesus the Master and Lord of the future, cannot regard any of His works as transitory, or any of His words as spoken only for yesterday and today. All His words are instinct with eternal might, they are words of life, of creative power, they are promises which do not die until they are fulfilled.

And this is true of Matthew xvi, 18-19. What Jesus said and did on that occasion for His generation and His disciples, He said and did for all times, until He shall come again. When Jesus spoke the words: Tu es Petrus, He spoke them out of His triumphant messianic consciousness that His Person and His work were imperishable. True, He Himself is now at the threshold of death, the “gates of hell”; but before His divine gaze all the dark shadows of death melt away. Down the long vista of time He sees the radiant picture of His eternal Church. Peter’s confession gives Him the occasion to designate Simon and none other as the rock of His Church and to found His imperishable Church upon this imperishable rock. This Church will never perish, since it will always be a Church founded on a rock. There will always be a living Peter, whose faith will confirm his brethren. It lies at the basis of His words that His Church will never be without that strong foundation which He gave it at Caesarea Philippi, because its continuance depends upon this foundation. And so the continuance of St. Peter’s office is derived immediately from the triumphant quality of the messianic consciousness of Jesus. Because Jesus is sure that His Church, the most special creation of His messianic consciousness, will never be overcome by the gates of hell, therefore the original Petrine form, with which He connected this imperishableness expressly and emphatically, Peter’s office as “rock,” must last on until He comes. So every successive generation of the disciples will have, like the first generation, its living Peter, its rock, which will enable it to triumph over all the assaults of the gates of hell.