Power Of The Keys

VIEW:18 DATA:01-04-2020

POWER OF THE KEYS.—In ecclesiastical history the phrase is associated primarily with the so-called ‘Privilege of Peter,’ upon which the dogma of papal supremacy has been built, but also with the delegated authority of an official priesthood to pronounce sentence of the absolution or the retention of sins.
1. The fundamental passage is Mat_16:18. When St. Peter at Cæsarea Philippi had made his great confession of Jesus as the Christ, Jesus blessed him and announced that upon this rock He would build His Church. Then He added,’ I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall he bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.’ That this double promise, like the one in the preceding verse, was made to St. Peter personally can hardly be doubted. The question is as to what it means. Evidently Jesus is carrying out the figure He has already used of a building founded upon a rock—the rock, viz., of belleving confession, of which the Apostle was the splendid type; and He now declares that as the reward of a confession which stamped him as the first true Christian, the bottom stone of the great edifice that was about to rise, he should have the privilege of wielding the keys of that Church of Christ which was to be realized in the Kingdom of heaven. There are some who think that by this gift of the keys St. Peter was appointed to the position of a steward in charge of his Lord’s treasuries, entrusted with the duty of feeding the household (Luk_12:42, cf. Mat_13:52). But from the use of the word ‘key’ by Jesus Himself in Luk_11:52, and from the analogy of Isa_22:22, Rev_3:7, it is probable that the keys are those not of the storehouse but of the mansion itself, and that the gift of them points to the privilege of admitting others into the Kingdom. The promise was fulfilled, accordingly, on the day of Pentecost, when St. Peter opened the doors of the Christian Church to the Jewish world (Act_2:41); and again at Cæsarea, when he, first of the Apostles, opened that same door to the Gentiles (Act_10:34-38; Act_15:7). But, as the two incidents show, there was nothing arbitrary, official, or mysterious about St. Peter’s exercise of the power of the keys on these occasions. It was his believing confession of Christ that had gained him the privilege, and both in Jerusalem and at Cæsarea it was by a renewed confession of Christ, accompanied by a testimony to the truth regarding Him as that had been made known in the experience of faith (Act_2:32-36; Act_10:36-48), that he opened the doors of the Kingdom alike to Jews and to Gentiles.
With regard to the second part of the verse, ‘Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven,’ some scholars have regarded it as merely explaining what is meant by the keys of the Kingdom, while others bold that it confers a privilege. The latter view is the more probable. And as we know that in the Rabbinic language of the time, to ‘bind’ and to ‘loose’ were the regular terms for forbidding and permitting, these words confer upon the Apostle a power of legislation in the Christian Church—a power which we see him exercising by and by, along with the other Apostles and the elders, at the Jerusalem Conference (Act_15:6-11; Act_15:22-28).
But now comes the question, Was this twofold promise, which was given to St. Peter personally, given him in any exclusive sense? As regards the second part of it, clearly not; for on a later occasion in this same Gospel we find Jesus bestowing precisely the same privilege on His disciples generally (Act_18:18; cf. Act_18:1 and also Act_18:19-20). Moreover, the later NT history shows that St. Peter had no supreme position as a legislator in the Church (see Act_15:13; Act_15:19, Gal_2:11 ff.). And if the power of binding and loosing was not given to him exclusively, the presumption is that the same thing holds of the parallel power of the keys. As a matter of fact, we find it to be so. Though St. Peter had the privilege of first opening the doors of the Kingdom to both Jews and Gentiles, the same privilege was soon exercised by others (Act_8:4; Act_11:19 ff; Act_13:2 ff.). By and by Peter falls into the background, and we find Paul and Barnabas rehearsing to the Church how God through their preaching had ‘opened a door of faith unto the Gentiles’ (Act_14:27). But this does not mean that the privilege was withdrawn from St. Peter; It means only that it was extended to others on their fulfilment of those same conditions of faith and testimony on which Peter had first received it.
2. In Mat_18:18 there appears to be no reference whatever to the remission and retention of sins. As in Mat_16:18, ‘whatsoever’ not ‘whomsoever’ is the word employed, and here as there the binding and loosing must be taken to refer to the enactment of ordinances for regulating the affairs of the Church, not to the discharge of such a purely spiritual function as the forgiveness of sins. In any case, the promise is made not to the Apostles, much less to an official priesthood deriving authority from them by an Apostolic succession, but to the Church’ (Mat_16:17).
3. In Joh_20:23 we find the assurance definitely given of a power to remit or retain sins. But the gift is bestowed upon the whole company present (cf. Luk_24:35) as representing the Christian society generally. That society, through its possession of the Holy Spirit (Luk_24:22), is thus empowered to declare the forgiveness or the retention of sins (cf. 1Jn_2:20, Gal_6:1; and see F. W. Robertson, Serm., 2nd ser. xi.).
J. C. Lambert.
Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible
Edited by James Hastings, D.D. Published in 1909

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