Sambungan
Setahu saya ajaran resmi gereja anda mengatakan Petrus adalah Paus pertama bukan Uskup pertama.
Apakah anda tidak paham bedanya tingkatan didalam jabatan gereja anda seperti Paus,Kardinal,Uskup dll.
Kalaupun misalnya Petrus sebagai Paus kepala seluruh gereja dunia apakah itu masuk akal kalau dia hanya menjabat sebagai uskup Roma seperti keterangan anda ?
Bagaimana keterangan gereja anda bisa dipercaya kalau sepanjang ribuan tahun sejarahnya terus menerus mengumandangkan kebohongan belaka ?
Kalau anda ngotot terus tanpa fakta sejarah maka menarik kalau anda mencoba menjawab 25 pertanyaan berikut ini mengenai Petrus :
25 Questions That Catholics Must Answer about Peter As The Foundation of the Church "...the attempts of the Roman Catholic hierarchy to establish its authority from Scripture are astonishingly weak...The assertion that the Roman Catholic bishops are the apostles' successors is based upon the thinnest of implications....we must conclude that the power of the Pope and bishops does not come from God." (James G. McCarthy, The Gospel According to Rome [hereafter "GAR"], page 260, 261)
1 - If Peter was assigned the position of leader of the Church why did Jesus declare emphatically: “. . . do not call anyone on earth ‘father’, for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor are you to be called ‘teacher’, for you have one Teacher, the Christ” (Matthew 23:9, 10)?
Note: The context indicates that the reference is to the final authority vis-à-vis spiritual questions. No man can assume this role.
2 - If Peter and the disciples had understood the words of Christ in Matthew 16:18 as establishing Peter’s supremacy and leadership position, why a little later the disciples disputed who would be the greatest amongst them?
Note: They would rather be disputing the number 2 position, not the number 1, since that would have been already assured to Peter by Jesus.
3 - If Peter was the head of the Church, why wasn’t he who presented the final decision of the Jerusalem Council, but James (see Acts 15)?
Note: He only delivered an introductory speech, but James was the Christian leader who spoke on behalf of the body of apostles, which can be concluded reading carefully the entire chapter, especially verses 12ff.
4 - If Peter was the head of the Church, why was he sent by the Church to Samaria with John (see Acts 8:14)? As the No. 1 leader of the Church, he would be sending missionaries.
5 - If Peter was the head of the Church, the “rock” of its foundation, why did he himself attribute to Christ the role of the basic rock, and never claimed to himself or mentioned any special leadership role in the Church (see 1 Peter 2:6-8)?
6 - If Peter was the head of the Church, the “rock” of its foundation, why didn’t Paul confirm this in 1 Corinthians 10:4, as he assured that Christ is the rock?
7 - If Peter was the first Pope, how could Paul reprimand him so severely because he acted in a wrong way (see Galatians 2:11-14)?
Note: Nowhere in the writings of Paul does he confer any primacy to Peter whatsoever. On the contrary, when he had the opportunity to call Peter the Rock of the Church, Paul said that there's no other foundation other than Christ. I Cor 3:11.
8 - If Peter was the first Pope, why does Paul say that the Church is built on the human foundation of the apostles and prophets, without discriminating Peter as the most important of these (see Ephesians 2:20)?
Note: Christ in this text is presented again as the Church’s cornerstone.
9 - If Peter was the first Pope, why didn’t Paul discriminate Peter as the principal one, as he made reference to Peter, together with James and John as the columns of the Church (see Galatians 2:9)?
Note: He mentions James in the first place.
10 - If Peter was the first Pope, why didn’t the final authority of the Jerusalem church remain with Peter, but with the apostles, later substituted by “elders”?
Note: Besides having been “the apostles” who sent Peter to Samaria (Acts 8:14) to supervise the new Christian communities, they also did the same sending Barnabas to Antioquia (Acts 11:22), later Judas and Silas to the same place (Acts 15:22-27).
11 - If Peter was the first Pope, why were “James and the elders” the ones who recommended that Paul submitted himself to a purification rite in the Temple (Acts 21:18, 23-24)?
12 - If Peter was the first Pope, why does Paul make clear in Galatians that he did not consider Jerusalem a divinely appointed administrative center for all the congregational activity?
Note: After his conversion Paul did not go to Jerusalem, to seek guidance from Peter and the leadership of the Church there, but to Damascus.
13 - If Peter was the head of the Church, the “rock” of its foundation, why did Paul, after his conversion, receive divine instructions through a native of Damascus, called Ananias, and not through Peter?
Note: In Galatians 1: 16, 17 he says clearly that after his conversion he did not resort to any human source of authority.
14 - If Peter was the first Pope, why did Paul travel to Jerusalem only three years later and declared that he only saw Peter and James, and no other apostle in his fifteen-day sojourn there?
15 - If Peter was the head of the Church, the “rock” of its foundation, why did Paul set Antioch as the base of his operations, and although that city was near Jerusalem he did not see a reason to address himself to the capital of the Judea?
16 - If Peter was the first Pope, why don’t the stories of Paul’s missionary trips ever indicate that he undertook them under the recommendation of any “administrative board”, and with a route duly approved by an ecclesiastical leader (Acts 13, 15, 20, etc.--especially 15:36)?
17 - If Peter was head of the Church, the “rock” of its foundation, why did Paul go back up to Jerusalem only after fourteen years, accompanied by Barnabas and Titus and not Peter, and that because he had a “revelation” from the Lord (see Gal. 2: 1, 2)?
18 - If Peter was the first Pope, why the only Biblical manuscripts after the fall of Jerusalem, from the apostle John, written decades after the desolation of Jerusalem, don’t ever mention any Church leader [or Pope] or Christian administrative center in his days, having a Peter as the top leader?
Bersambung