When Protestants say Peter can't be ‘the rock,’ they have it exactly backwards...

*You are in the Catholic forum*

Permission to post in full

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.

jas3 said:

@Michie looks like you accidentally posted a link to the New Advent home page instead of the article

Matthew 16 and a Parallel for Peter

Protestants will insist that Peter is a contrast to the ‘rock’ on which Jesus built his church. But the truth is the exact opposite.

www.catholic.com

Just read the whole thing, I'm kind of surprised he held on to the idea that Petros means "small stone." I guess his spin on it being synthetic parallelism could be a good apologetic tactic for someone who's convinced that the name Petros must mean something different from the word petra, but the real answer is that Peter's name is masculine because men's names in gendered languages are masculine. He couldn't have been named Petra. That leaves aside too the argument that kepha in Aramaic would have been used in both places.

Click to expand...

I fixed it. Thanks! Been kind of a hectic day.