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The New Bible Commetary gets it absolutely spot on with the commentary on Matthew 16:18:-
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The debate rages over whether ³the rock´ on which Christ will build His church is Peter, or
Peter¶s confession that Jesus is ³the Christ, the Son of the Living God (Matt 16:16). The
grammatical construction allows for either view. The first view is that Jesus was declaring that
Peter would be the ³rock´ on which He would build His church. Jesus appears to be using a play
on words. ³You are Peter (patrols) and on this rock (Petra) I will build my church.´ Since Peter¶s
name means rock, and Jesus is going to build His church on a rock ± it appears that Christ is
linking the two together. God used Peter greatly in the foundation of the church. It was Peter
who first proclaimed the Gospel on the day of Pentecost (Acts u:14-47). Peter was also the first
to take the Gospel to the Gentiles (Acts 10:1-48). In a sense, Peter was the rock ³foundation´ of
the church.

3
Churches of the Protestant Reformation chose to either reject the Catholic view or accept Peter
as the Rock in the more general sense that the church was built on the foundation of the apostles
and prophets with Jesus as the chief cornerstone (Eph. u:u0). Some believe that Peter is shown to
be the foundation of the church by his possession of the "Keys of the Kingdom" and the fact that
he was the first to bring the gospel message on the day of Pentecost (to the Jews) and later to
Cornelius (the Gentiles). Some Greek lexicographers such as Vincent argue that the sentence
structure will not allow any other interpretation than Peter as the Rock. Barnes states that  
 
  
 
  


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   If Jesus is not the Christ then His
church does not exist and without this confession anyone calling himself a Christian does not
hold on to the foundation and falls away into infidelity. Of the eighty-five ancient commentators
mentioned earlier, 44 held the view.4 The Roman Catholic Church argues that Jesus was saying
that he would build his church on Peter, a position that has led to the dominance of the papacy.
Evangelical scholars prefer to interpret the rock not as Peter himself, but as the confession, he
made.

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Gregory I, the Great ( 40-604), was one of the greatest leaders that the Roman church has ever
had. Coming on the scene at a time of widespread political confusion with its consequent effects
on the life and organization of the church, he became a stabilizing political influence and was
largely responsible for the creation of the medieval papacy. Born into a noble, wealthy, and
devout family, Gregory early turned to the monastic life as a way to glorify God.

6
He was instructor in dialectics and rhetoric, studied law, entered the civil service, gained the
confidence of the Emperor Justin, and received (about 74) the dignity of a preceptor urbis.
However, he also studied the Fathers of the Western Church, Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome.
His family was markedly religious and his mother, Sylvia, and his two paternal aunts, have been
canonized. The deepest instincts of his own nature revolted against the luxury and ambition of
his office. He become a monk and employed the immense wealth left to him by his father¶s death
to found six Benedictine monasteries in Sicily, and a seventh in his own house in Rome. Later,


4
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,(Africa, Word Alive Publishing,u006)p.1143
Gregory the Great,/
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,(The Liturgical press,1986),p.87
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,(American,Libray of Congress Cataloging in
Publication,1984),p. 3
he became a monk himself; and so severe were the ascetic exercises he practiced, that his health
became impaired, and even his life was in danger. At this moment the Pope, Pelagius II.,
interfered, dragged him out of the monastery by ordaining him a deacon ( 79), and sent him to
Constantinople as 


. This mission he fulfilled with great ability; and while in
Constantinople, he began his celebrated work '1


 in Job or !
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XXXV. After
his return to Rome ( 8 ), he continued to take a leading part in all the business of the curia; and
after the death of Pelagius II. He was unanimously elected Pope, by the clergy, the senate, and
the people, and felt compelled to accept. The first pope to indicate the real potential of the
papacy is Leo I, who has an unusual span of twenty-one years in office. He uses his time well,
not only in the papal duty of restraining heretics but also in rehearsing other roles to be played by
Rome. These include defining Catholic orthodoxy (his epistle called  is widely accepted by
his contemporaries in this context), and the assertion of the pope's authority over other bishops
by the power of the keys, granted by Jesus to Peter and supposedly passed on to his successors: 'I
will give you the keys of the kingdom of Heaven. What you forbid on earth shall be forbidden in
heaven, and what you allow on earth shall be allowed in heaven.' Gregory is commonly
accredited with founding the medieval papacy and so many attribute the beginning of medieval
spirituality to him.

7
Comments made by Pope Gregory the Great (or Pope Gregory I, who reigned from 90-604) in
letters to John the Faster (Bishop or Patriarch of Constantinople at the time) that are seized upon
often by Evangelical Protestant apologists in an attempt to argue against the Papacy of the
Catholic Church. The objection or charge made is that Pope Gregory was denying his own papal
authority as visible head of the Church in rejecting the term "universal bishop." "In every age
there have been those who considered the claims of a single bishop to supreme authority to be a
sure identification of the corruption of the church, and perhaps even the work of the Antichrist.
Pope Gregory I (A.D. 90-604) indignantly reproached Patriarch John the Faster of
Constantinople for calling himself the universal bishop; Gregory did so to defend the rights of all
the bishops, himself included, and not because he wanted the title for himself." The main


7
Geisler/MacKenzie, page u06 citing Brown, (Ô



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question that should be asked in considering what I'll call the "universal bishop" controversy is:
What did Gregory the Great precisely  by the terms "universal" and "universal bishop" in
his letters to the Patriarch of Constantinople? Evangelical apologists do not stop to ask that
question, nor have they done much research into Pope Gregory's actual writings which are full of
his claims to papal authority and universal jurisdiction. If he really was denying his own papal
authority, 8Gregory I was indefatigable...in upholding the Roman primacy, and successfully
maintained Rome's appellate jurisdiction in the east: Gregory argued that St. Peter's commission
(e.g. in Matthew 16:18f) made all churches, Constantinople included, subject to Rome" Indeed,
most Protestant (and Orthodox) scholars concede that Pope Gregory was one of the first real
Popes, and believed himself to have universal jurisdiction and authority over the Catholic
Church.Was Gregory then directly contradicting himself in rejecting the title "universal bishop"?
A careful examination of his writings and his use of the term "universal bishop" answers the
question: No, Pope Gregory knew that he was Pope and said so explicitly and constantly in his
writings.

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The practice of kings and others appointing church an official was to be end. In the eleventh
century, many of the reforms sought by the Cluniac movement were institute by reforming
popes. In 10 9, Pope Nicholas II (10 9-1061) decreed that the College Of Cardinals, which had
served as assistants to the pope, were to elect new popes. The idea was to free the papacy from
the control of political officials. When Hildebrand, who was a monk from a Cluniac monastery,
became Pope Gregory VII (1073-108 ), the papacy itself came to be an outpost of the
movement. Success brought wealth and deep involvement in the political system. By the middle
of the twelfth century, the Cluniac order was itself in need of reform.9 The most ambitious



8
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M.W.Baldwin"






 



 
,(New York: Harper and Row,1970),p.18u-183
advocate of church reform was Pope Gregory VII (1073-108 ), who claimed unprecedented
power for the papacy. Gregory held as his ideal the creation of a Christian commonwealth under
papal control. In the Dictates Papae, ("Dictate of the Pope") Gregory claimed.
The Roman
pontiff alone is rightly call universal which he alone has the power to depose and reinstate
bishops and may use the imperial insignia that all princes shall kiss the foot of the pope alone.
He has not only the power to depose emperors but also he can judge by no one. No one can be
regard as catholic who does not agree with the Roman church that he has the power to absolve
subjects from their oath of fealty to wicked rulers. The centralization of papal legislative and
judicial power in the eleventh century had introduced far-reaching changes in how ecclesiastical
justice functioned. The (


   of Pope Gregory VII stipulated, "no one shall dare to
condemn one who appeals to the apostolic chair´. Appeal from the decision of an ordeal the
judgment of God was logically impossible. The inexorable logic of the pope's dictum demanded
that the old systems of proof not be use.
As the papal court became the court of last resort, ecclesiastical procedure had to adapt to a
system of proof that was base on evidence. Papal letters of the twelfth century pullulate with
references to witnesses and their testimony. In 107 , Gregory VII formally prohibited lay
investiture and threatened to excommunicate any nonprofessional who performed it and any
ecclesiastic who submitted
to it. This drastic act virtually declared war against Europe's rulers,
since
lay investiture had been employ since the Emperor Constantine's time. The
climax to the
struggle occurred in Gregory's clash with the German emperor
Henry IV. Henry was accused of
simony and lay investiture in appointing his
own choice to the archbishopric of Milan and was
summon to Rome to explain
his conduct. Henry's answer was to convene in 1076 a synod of
German bishops,
which declared Gregory a "false monk" and unfit to occupy the office of pope.
In retaliation, Gregory excommunicated Henry and deposed him, absolving his subjects from
their oaths of allegiance. At last, driven by a revolt among the German nobles to make peace
with the pope, Henry appeared before Gregory in January 1077 at Canossa, a castle in the
Apennines. Dressed as a penitent, the emperor is through to have stood barefoot in the snow for
three days and begged forgiveness until, in Gregory's words: "We loosed the chain of the
anathema and at length received him into the favor of communion and into the lap of the Holy
 10
Mother Church." This dramatic humiliation of the emperor did not resolve the quarrel, nor do
contemporary accounts attach much significance to the incident public penance was not rare in
those days, even for kings. After the episode at Canossa, Henry returned to Germany and crushed
his opponents; in the short term, the whole incident cost Gregory the support of the German
nobility. Yet the pope had made progress toward freeing the church from lay interference and
increasing the power and prestige of the papacy. The problem of lay investiture was settled in
11uu by the compromise known as the Concordat of Worms. By the terms of this agreement, the
church maintained the right to elect the holder of an ecclesiastical office, but only in the presence
of the king or his representative. The candidate, such as a bishop, was invested by the king with
the scepter, the symbol of his administrative jurisdiction, after which he performed the act of
homage and swore allegiance as the king's vassal. Only after this ceremony had taken place did
the ring and pastoral staff symbolize the candidate consecrated by the archbishop, who invested
him with his spiritual functions, as. Since the kings of England and France had earlier accepted
this compromise, the problem of lay investiture ended.
11
"Innocent III (1198 - 1u16), arguable the most powerful of the medieval popes, took advantage
of the chaos that followed Henry's untimely death to undermine the link between Germany and
Sicily. Germany was push into civil war when Otto of Brunswick challenged the leading
Hohenstaufen candidate for the imperial throne, Philip of Swabia, Henry VI¶s brother. Although
Innocent crowned Otto in 1198, the latter's attempt to control Sicily prompted the pope to
excommunicate him. "At the urging of the French king, Philip Augustus, Innocent recognized
the hereditary claim of Henry's son, Frederick II, as king of the Romans (and hence emperor-
elect) in 1u1u. Philip's victory over Otto at Bovines (1u14) decided the struggle in Frederick's
favor, though Frederick continued to fight with the popes over Sicily for the rest of his reign.
"Innocent enhanced papal authority by issuing numerous decrees that spelled out the pope's
powers in clear legal terms. The "plenitude of power" that he asserted (as had Pope Leo the
Great) did not entail a claim to temporal world power but to supreme spiritual sovereignty,
including the right to intervene in secular affairs when the faith or morals of the church were
affected. Monarchs rightly reigned, in his view, only if they devoutly served the pope as Christ's
vicar.


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J.H.Robinson3 

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)&,(Boston: inn and Co.,1904),p.u83
11
Margaret Deanesly,A, .

 
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"4*2+&222,(London 197u)p.141
"As we have seen, he acted on these principles when he humbled England's King John over a
disputed election for the archbishop of Canterbury. In a quarrel that lasted two decades, he
finally forced King Philip Augustus of France to take back his Danish wife after Philip had
rejected her the day following their wedding. Innocent strengthened the church in numerous
other ways, including approval for the establishment of new religious orders and attention to the
restoration and decoration of various churches´. Under Innocent III (1198-1u16), a new type of
administrator-pope, papal power reached its zenith. Unlike Gregory VII and other earlier reform
popes, who were monks, Innocent and other great popes of the late twelfth and thirteenth
centuries were lawyers, trained in the newly revived and enlarged church, or canon law. Innocent
was like Gregory VII, but in holding an exalted view of his office. The Lord Jesus Christ has set
up one ruler over all things as His universal vicar, as all things in heaven, earth and hell bow the
knee to Christ, so should all obey Christ's vicar, that there are one flock and one shepherd. So
successful was Innocent III in asserting his temporal and spiritual supremacy that many states
formally acknowledged vassalage to the pope.

In the case of King John of England, a struggle developed over the election of the archbishop of
Canterbury, and Innocent placed England under interdict for five years and excommunicated
John. Under attack from his barons, John capitulated to Innocent by becoming his vassal,
receiving England back as a fief, and paying him an annual monetary tribute. Innocent forced
Philip Augustus of France to comply with the church's moral code by taking back as his queen
the woman he had divorced with the consent of the French bishops. As for the Holy Roman
Empire, Innocent intervened in a civil war between rival candidates for the throne, supporting
first one, then the other. In the end, Innocent secured the election of his ward, the young
Hohenstaufen heir Frederick II, who promised to respect papal rights and to go on a crusade. The
universality and power of the church rested not only upon a systematized, uniform creed but also
upon the most highly organized administrative system in the West. At the head was the pope, or
bishop of Rome. He was assist by the Curia, the papal council or court, which in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries developed an intricate administrative system. Judicial and secretarial
problems were handling by the papal Chancery, financial matters by the Camera, and
disciplinary questions by the Penitentiary. Special emissaries called legates, whose powers were
superior to those of the local churchmen, carried the pope's orders throughout Europe the
church was ahead of secular states in developing a system of courts and a body of law. Church or
canon law was base on the Scriptures, the writings of the church Fathers, and the decrees of
church councils and popes. In the twelfth century the church issued its official body of canon
law, which guided the church courts in judging perjury, blasphemy, sorcery, usury (the medieval
church denounced the taking of interest), and heresy. Heresey was the most horrible of all crimes
in medieval eyes. A murder was a crime against society, but the heretic's disbelief in the teaching
of Christ or His church was considering a crime against God.

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The crusade that was launch at the end of the eleventh century was an unprecedented event in
the history of the world Christian movement. Pope and the bishop too had long been involved in
the temporal affairs of the state and were not averse to the use of arms. A new theological
justification to armed force that made it is possible for a war to occupy a place at the very heart
of the church¶s understanding of its task on earth. This justification can found in part within the
conceptual framework of the Gregorian reformers of the eleventh century. Leo IX, Humbert,
Gregory VII, and Urban II did not separate the secular realm from the sacred in a Christian
society. Accordingly, war waged at the pope¶s bidding acquired a sacred meaning that
significantly transcended immediate material and political ends. The call to crusade was support
by the weighty spiritual resources the popes commanded regarding penance. According (Matt
16:19), the pope had ultimate authority to grant forgiveness for actual sins committed by
Christian on earth. Pope exercised this authority to declare that God would release anyone who
undertook of a crusade from punishment. The goal of the crusade was to free them from Muslim
control and restore them to Christian rulers. French, German, and English knights were expect to
go on crusade in Palestine, while Spanish and Portuguese knights were, expect to crusade at
Home. Christendom" has referred to the medieval and renaissance notion of the Christian world
as a sociopolitical policy. In essence, the earliest vision of Christendom was a vision of a




Sunquist W.Scott and Irvin T.Dale.

 
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,(U.S.A,Orbis
Books,Maryknoll,u001),p.39 -396
Christian theocracy, a government founded upon and upholding Christian values, whose
institutions are spread through and over with Christian doctrine. In this period, members of the
Christian clergy wielded political authority.13 The specific relationship between the political
leaders and the clergy varied but, in theory, the national and political divisions were at times
subsuming under the leadership of the church as an institution. This would tempt Church leaders
and political leaders alike throughout the time in European history. Emperor issued the Edict of
Milan in 313 proclaiming toleration for the Christian religion, and convoked the First Council of
Nicaea in 3u whose Nicene Creed included belief in "one holy catholic and apostolic Church´.
Christianity became the state religion of the Empire in 39u when Theodosius I prohibited the
practice of pagan religions.

The Church gradually became a defining institution of the Empire. As the Western Roman
Empire disintegrated into feudal kingdoms and principalities, the concept of Christendom
changed as the western church became independent of the Emperor and the Christians of the
Eastern Roman Empire. The Byzantine Empire came to see them as the last bastion of
Christendom. Christendom would take a turn with the rise of the Franks, a Germanic tribe who
converted to the Christian faith and entered into communion with Rome. On Christmas Day 800
AD, Pope Leo III made the fateful decision to switch his allegiance from the emperors in
Constantinople and crowned Charlemagne, the king of the Franks, as the Emperor of what came
to be known as the Holy Roman Empire. This empire created a alternative definition of
"

 in contrast to the Byzantine Empire. The question of what constituted
 
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 would occupy political and religious leaders up into the modern era. After the
collapse of Charlemagne's empire, the southern remnants of the Holy Roman Empire became a
collection of states loosely connected to the Holy See of Rome. Tensions between Pope Innocent
III and secular rulers ran high, as the pontiff exerted control over their temporal counterparts in
the west and vice versa. The pontificate of Innocent III is considering the height of temporal
power of the papacy. The Corpus Christianum described the then current notion of the
community of all Christians united under the Roman Catholic Church. In the East, Christendom
became more define as the Byzantine Empire's gradual loss of territory to an expanding Islam



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and the Muslim conquest of Persia. This caused Christianity to become important to the
Byzantine identity. After the East-West Schism, which divided the Church religiously, there had
been the notion of a universal Christendom that included the East and the West. The Byzantines
divided themselves in the Byzantine rite of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the eastern rite of
the Catholic Church. The political reunion with the west, after the East-West schism, was put
asunder by the Fourth Crusade when Crusaders conquered the Byzantine capital of
Constantinople and hastened the decline of the Byzantine Empire on the path to its destruction.

With the breakup of the Byzantine Empire into individual nations with nationalist Orthodox
Churches, the term Christendom described Western Europe, Catholicism, Orthodox Byzantines,
and other Eastern rites of the Church. Christendom ultimately was led into specific crisis in the
late Middle Ages, when the kings of France managed to establish a French national church
during the 14th century and the papacy became ever more aligned with the Holy Roman Empire
of the German Nation. Known as the Western Schism, western Christendom was a split between
three men, who were driveled by politics rather than any real theological disagreement for
simultaneously claiming to be the true pope. The Avignon Papacy developed a reputation of
corruption that estranged major parts of Western Christendom. The schism was end by the
Council of Constance. Before the modern period, Christendom was in a general crisis in the time
of the Renaissance Popes because of the moral laxity of these pontiffs and their willingness to
seek and rely on temporal power as secular rulers did. The Renaissance Church became a secular
institution in this period, shedding its spiritual roots, with insatiable greed for material wealth
and temporal power.

The Italian Renaissance produced little of what could be considering great ideas or institutions
by which men living in society could be holding together in harmony. The Roman Church fell
into neglect under the Renaissance popes, whose fall from spiritual grace sparked Reformations.
The Reformation and the ensuing rise of independent states caused the term "Christendom" to
take on a more general meaning in Western Europe signifying countries that were predominantly
Christian as opposed to Islamic or pagan countries. Catholics at the time advocated
Christendom's restoration and argued that, with the division of Protestantism into many
denominations, Christendom could only apply to the civilization of Catholic nations that
espoused the doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ the King. The Catholic nations did represent
a large portion of European Christians and the Corpus Christian initially was composed of the
Christian community of these nations, rather than all Christians worldwide. But developments in
western philosophy and European events were critical in the change of the notion of the "
"


 The Hundred Years' War accelerated the process of transforming France from a
feudal monarchy to a centralized state. The rise of strong, centralized monarchies denoted the
European transition from feudalism to capitalism. By the end of the Hundred Years' War, both
France and England were able to raise enough money through taxation to create independent
standing armies. In the Wars of the Roses, Henry Tudor took the crown of England. His heir, the
absolute king Henry VIII established the English church.