The Papacy

The papacy is one of the most distinct, obvious ways that Catholicism is lived out.  The figure of the pope, treated as a special agent of God by Catholics and shunned by many Protestants as an unbiblical addition to the church, is a controversial one, as is practically everything in philosophy.  Evangelical protestantism is thoroughly steeped in the unbiblical (and more importantly, irrational) traditions of extensive legalism and fitheism, but the Catholic insistence on having or respecting a papal figure is something that cannot be derived from the Bible, and it would actually be contrary to Biblical theology to think that having or submitting to a pope is obligatory.

Catholics often point to Matthew 16:18, where Jesus makes the popular statement that Peter is the rock on which he will build the church, as strong evidence that the papacy is prescribed or at least encouraged by God, with Peter being the first pope or proto-pope.  It is very clear to anyone who does not make assumptions that that it does not logically follow at all from anything in Matthew 16:18 that a papacy is called for.  That Peter was one of the original members of the early church does not mean that he was in any sense a papal figure.  Even after the ascension of Jesus, there is never anything in the Biblical history of the early church that in any way supports this, much less proves it is a part of Christian theology.

This is merely an attempt to interpret something irrelevant as support for an idea they have already committed to.  In other words, this is not logical-Biblical proof that a papacy is obligatory or even helpful, but a biased analysis of the Bible in a retrospective attempt to "justify" an arbitrary belief that is irrelevant--and in some ways, antithetical--to Christian theology.  There is no papacy even hinted at as a moral, ecclesiological, or epistemological (Catholicism treats papal statements and the ideas behind them as true or authoritative based on the identity of the pope) necessity in the Bible, in Matthew 16 or elsewhere.  All moral commands of the Christian worldview are either given by God or one of his appointed spokespersons in the Biblical narrative or recognized via strictly logical deduction from Biblical prescriptions, and even a pope who goes beyond this errs (Deuteronomy 4:2).

Catholicism has much in common with evangelical Protestantism, despite all that the groups that claim these ideologies might object with: they are both built on legalistic, contradictory (self-contradictory, in contradiction with rationalism, and in contradiction with genuine Biblical theology) assumptions that have nothing but sheer preference and delusion "supporting" them.  Catholicism, like evangelicalism, is built on nothing but sophistry, assumptions, and distortions of the Biblical text.  Centuries of tradition are philosophically meaningless; the supposedly well-meaning but asinine approach adherents of Catholicism have to everything from basic epistemology to moral coherence to Biblical analysis reduces to nothing but assumptions or errors.  In fact, their assumptions usually contradict themselves!

The papacy and its alleged moral authority, which throughout history has contradicted itself and the actual Bible it is supposed to represent, would at best amount to an unnecessary irrelevance even if it was never expressed or revered in irrational, unbiblical ways.  Tradition is the fallacious epistemological position to which fools might retreat when they have nothing else to appeal to, either when trying in vain to demonstrate the veracity or probability of ideas to themselves or others.  Since Catholicism is entirely based on extra-Biblical tradition in direct violation of commands like that of Deuteronomy 4:2, it is irrational to treat it as anything else.  The approval of multiple generations of people does not make assumptions into certainties or contradictions into truths or even possibilities.