"Tight lines" is a blessing fishermen offer each other, a wish for lines taut with the weight of good fish. May God grant that the lines written here be taut with His blessings.
Tuesday, 19 August 2008 | |||
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Taking Hell | |||
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Protestants always read
Matthew 16:13-20, especially verse 18, while looking over their
shoulders at Rome. Since the Reformation, we've been afraid that a pope
is going to crawl out of this text and bite us on the rear. There's a popular interpretation that illustrates the proverb that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It makes a big deal out of the fact that the Greek for Peter's name in verse 18 is petros, while the Greek for the rock on which Jesus will build His Church is petra. Then it's pointed out that petros means a little stone, while petra denotes a big rock. Thus they can't refer to the same thing and Jesus is not actually saying that He will build His Church on Peter, but on something else (on Himself, or on Peter's confession, anything except Peter!). This surprisingly frequent misunderstanding falters on the fact that the only way petra can be a masculine name in Greek is to have an os ending and on the fact that in Aramaic, the language Jesus was actually speaking, there is absolutely no difference between Cephas, Peter's name and cephas, the word for "rock." So Jesus said He was going to build His Church on Peter. That's the fact, and almost all serious Protestant and evangelical commentators agree that it's the fact. If we want to escape those papal teeth in our hindquarters, it will have to be through our theological and historical understanding of what it means for the Church to have been built on Peter, not by some half-baked, semi-Greek-literate exegesis. I've always been more intrigued by the last part of verse 18, which says that the Church founded upon Peter will be such that "the gates of Hades ("Hell" in the KJV) will not overcome it." I still remember a sermon from my boyhood which suggested that, while the promise of not being overcome pictures the Church on the defensive, the image of "gates" in front of the evil realm implies the Church is on the offensive, storming the very portals of Hell itself. Once again, some serious scholarship suggests that the interpretation is not as simple as a marching, militant Church attacking Hell's gates. It seems that the biblical usage of "gates" is simply as representative of the whole realm of Hell or Hades. The Greek word is hades, and is often taken to mean, as it did for the Greeks, the general realm of death, equivalent to sheol in the Old Testament. So one way to understand this text is that the powers of death will not overcome the Church (and that's how the RSV translates it). I confess that I still like the notion of the Church on the offense. At least one commentator allows that it's at least possible that Christ's image here is of His Church breaking down the gates of death and freeing those entrapped by it. I like that because it fits nicely with a much-ignored doctrine found in the Apostles' Creed, Christ's descent into Hell (or Hades) or "the harrowing of Hell," in a phrase I enjoy. The biblical basis is mostly Acts 2:27, 31 and I Peter 3:19-20 and 4:6. It's interesting that all those verses are written or spoken by Peter. As the Church founded on the rock of the first person to confess Jesus as Messiah and Son of God, we continue our Lord's mission to free those bound in the power of death, knowing that together, as His Church, we will not be overcome by that power. | |||
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Profile |
I am the pastor of Valley Covenant Church in Eugene, Oregon. I love to flyfish and hike along the beautiful rivers in our area. I welcome your comments as I share sermon work in progress and occasional other thoughts.
Thank you for visiting this blog. I invite you also to visit my web page.
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