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When Protestants say Peter can't be 'the rock,' they have it exactly backwards
I grew up in the American South, and I was raised in a Protestant family. But when I was six or seven years old, my parents had some kind of disagreement with the elders of our church, and they stopped going. So after that, I was raised nominally Protestant, and we’d go to church only once or twice a year when we visited my grandparents.
When I was a teenager, I was involved in the New Age Movement, but I broke with that when I turned 18.
At age 20, I had a conversion to Christ, and I became a serious Christian—something I’ve been ever since. Following this conversion, I wanted to devote my life to teaching God’s word, and I planned to become a seminary professor and maybe a pastor.
But I still needed to figure out what church I should be part of.
In my hometown of Fayetteville, Arkansas, we have dozens of churches—all different kinds. But I realized that what church has services at a time I like is not a good test of whether that church’s doctrine is true. Neither is what church is in convenient driving distance. Or what church has a pastor I like, music I like, or a social group I like. So I shouldn’t let my decision of what church to join be influenced by any of those things, because figuring out what is true is the most important thing.
I thus worshiped in local Protestant churches—since that is how I’d grown up—but I made a point of studying the theology of all the different branches of Christianity.
I studied the different Protestant groups, like Anglicans, Lutherans, Calvinists, Methodists, Baptists, and Pentecostals. But I also studied the theologies of Eastern Orthodox Christians and even Catholics.
That was saying something, because the church I had my conversion in was very anti-Catholic, so I heard lots of anti-Catholic preaching and read lots of anti-Catholic material. But I still studied what they had to say—even if it was just so I could talk Catholics out of the Church better.
And then, one day, it happened.
I was reading a Catholic book—specifically,
Evangelical Catholics by Deacon Keith Fournier. And it had a long quotation from Matthew 16 in it—you know, the “You are Peter” passage:
Continued below.
Protestants will insist that Peter is a contrast to the ‘rock’ on which Jesus built his church. But the truth is the exact opposite.
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