Explainer

Creed

Leading

14 March 2025

6 min read

Why’s there a pope in Rome?

A modern gathering sheds light on an ancient question: who brings the church together?

Jack Chisnall

Jack Chisnall is a former gag teller and Oxford Theology graduate, combining the two at Holy Fooling.

A pope wearing a white skull cap and white robe, viewed from behind

Coronel Gonorrea on Unsplash.

On 1st March, an event called Gather25 tried something which it described as “unprecedented”. It sought to unite, in a 25-hour worship broadcast, global Christianity. Each session was led by a different nation, and its top pastors sent out to bat. It was slickly organised, as well as technologically sophisticated; I wished the event well, and prayed for it. While in the more institutionalised church settings, people are waiting on new Archbishops of Canterbury, or praying for the Pope to recover, here was action.

It got me thinking, though: when can it be said that the Church has properly met? Who decides to meet? Who sends the invites? Who confirms the decisions? Anyone reading the Gather25 website will have noticed overtures about the ‘Council of Nicaea’. Nicaea was the first important gathering of the ancient Church, in 325 AD. By citing this, Gather25 positioned itself downstream of a very prestigious meetup. It perhaps hoped for itself that it would be similarly ecumenical (a Greek word to do with the whole household). Did Gather25 have the same Nicene status?

Sadly, no. Gather25 was openhearted and dynamic, but it was a very particular slice of Christianity meeting for a very historically specific form of worship. The difficulty is that it takes more than even the buzziest PR, or all our modern advances in communication and streaming, to truly summon something as untameable as the Church to order. What do we need to ensure we have a gathering at which the Church is truly represented, and able to officially act with the “mind of Christ” (as St Paul puts it)? Wouldn’t you need something, or someone, able to steer the entire thing?

At the Council of Nicaea in 325AD, nothing less than the most powerful man on the planet would do. The Emperor Constantine alone had the clout to draw in Christian leaders from around the world, make them sit together, and demand an official settlement of a difficult question: how exactly was God the Son, Jesus, linked to God the Father? Even with such heavyweight patronage, church leaders did not produce an absolutely finished answer at that time - it actually took a whole extra council, in Constantinople in 381 AD, to confirm the confession that is still known today as the Nicene Creed, and which begins “I believe in God, the Father Almighty”.

Yet a problem had been touched on. Should a Caesar really have this kind of upper hand over a sacred institution? Some lines of thought tried to think of the emperor as a kind of ‘living law’ who represents God to the Christian people he rules over. But this couldn’t jive with key parts of a tradition wherein Jesus had radically authorised servant leaders from among simple Galilean fishermen, known as the Twelve Apostles, or ‘sent ones’. Who should rule?

Was this a bit of overreading, designed to give a senior cleric a Scriptural trump card to play against a secular leader in a petty power showdown?

The problem has not really gone away. If we ignore this question of legitimacy, we are at the mercy of raw power. Either we seek an authoritative means of unifying Christians, or it becomes a case of who happens to have the most cash, or the most Instagram followers. It has never been the case that the Church has just organically ‘met up’ without a protos, a first name on the team sheet. Indeed, when has this ever happened, in any sphere of life? It would be like a parliament forming without the invitation of the sovereign.

It is against this bigger problem that the rise of the Christian leader in Rome must be viewed. Rome was, of course, the centre of an Empire during the first few Christian centuries, but it quickly gained distinctly Christian prestige. St Paul’s letter to the congregations there continues to be one of the most sizzling documents in the New Testament; he was also martyred there, along with his fellow leader St Peter, one of the original Twelve. Rome was a big deal, and sources from as early as the first century show the leading clergyman (or ‘bishop’) of Rome, a man called Clement, being asked to weigh in on a dispute over 600 miles away from his locale.

For Catholics like me, it is clear the Church was onto something. It would go on to discover that there was more to the Bishop of Rome than merely his occupation of a well-to-do area. There would be a development. Many church doctrines, after all, are the result of reflection, Scriptural deep dives, and the need for clearer unified doctrine and practice - the Trinity, for example.

And the Bishop of Rome’s role developed in a particular setting: while the figure of the emperor loomed ever larger in the East, a parallel momentum would gather around the leading cleric of a city where St Peter had passed on his mantle. For St Peter had, after all, been singled out by Jesus in his earthly ministry. In the Bible, the Gospel according to St Matthew depicts Jesus giving “the keys to the kingdom” to his follower Simon, who he then renames ‘Peter’, meaning rock, upon which he vows to build his church. Not only this - Peter is to strengthen his brothers (St Luke 22:32); to feed the Lord’s sheep (John 21). The Bishop of Rome was increasingly thought to have this Peter-like quality.

Was this a bit of overreading, designed to give a senior cleric a Scriptural trump card to play against a secular leader in a petty power showdown? It is an accusation hard to shake off completely, sinful humanity being what it is. In the Middle Ages, a decree was conveniently ‘discovered’ by the Roman Emperor that handed over all his power to the Bishop of Rome, the new pontifex maximus - it was, of course, a complete phoney designed to assert church power over secular rulers. But for Catholics, despite patchy moments, there has always been more to be said for the Pope (from Papa, ‘father’) as a legitimate consolidation of Jesus’ vision for the leadership of the Church he founded: a brotherhood, headed by a type of St Peter, the rock on which the Church is built.

Not headed by St Peter’s successor as a flawless demigod, it should be said. For it is also part of Christian tradition about St Peter that he was capable of tremendous human weakness - he betrayed Jesus on the night of his arrest and trial, and denied he ever knew him. Some Popes have sadly been downright wicked or self-serving. Nor is it headed by the Pope as a tyrant. St Peter confirms early doctrinal pronouncements for the Church - he declares that food laws should not prevent Israelites from enjoying table fellowship with other ethnic groups, for example. But he is also frankly challenged by other leaders during early meetings in Jerusalem. The Pope teaches not as a lone ranger, but always within a bigger fraternity of fellow bishops.

In 2024, a Vatican department released a new document pondering what role the Pope could play in bringing together the separated brethren of world Christianity. I hope this offer is taken seriously. Because what remains compelling for Catholics is a figure who makes it possible, at the most foundational level, to say that the Church is One, as per Jesus’ prayer in John 17:21, and all without needing to rely on good digital marketing. It is not just pious sentiment for a Catholic to say that they are genuinely connected to a global family of as many as 1.4 billion people, because they share a pastor who claims to serve the whole thing, the ‘servant of the servants of God’. Any critique of the Papacy - and there are many intelligible ones, raking over the sordid moments or disputing the Scriptural evidence - must, though, rankle with that: what really keeps us together, then? The Catholic insistence has always been that saying ‘Jesus’ or ‘the Holy Spirit’ really amounts to saying: “what I think Jesus wants; what I think the Holy Spirit is saying” - and that is, in effect, actually many popes instead of just one.

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Article

Belief

Christmas culture

Creed

Wisdom

16 December 2024

5 min read

How to have a philosophically happy Christmas

Raise a glass to the invasion of history by the author of history.

Charles Foster

Professor Charles Foster is a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and a member of the Oxford Law Faculty.

A fish eye lens view of a person standing silhouetted, looking up to a colourful night sky with the Milky Way across it

Greg Rakozy on Unsplash.

A few years ago, I had dinner with a well-known philosopher. Knowing that he is no friend of religion, and curious how he’d respond, I set about mocking the credulity of Christians and parroting the lines I’d so often heard: superstition degrades and obfuscates; let’s act and think like grown-ups, not craven children; we’re free to write our own rules, and we can write better rules than barbarous Levantine goat-herders; we’re brave enough to say that when we die we rot. And so on. The standard fare.

He looked at me over the top of his glass. ‘Have you never been taught’, he said acidly, ‘that if you destroy the premises of an argument, the argument collapses? The same is true of history.’

I’ve slowly learned that he was right.

‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’, asked John Cleese, as the leader of the People’s Front of Judea. He’s famously answered by his troops. The modern version of the question, which is just as embarrassing, is ‘What have the Christians ever done for us?’ The historian Tom Holland, not (as far as we know) himself a professed Christian, has made a good living by providing a long and meticulously documented list. I’m not going to review it here. My own personal list would include Chartres Cathedral, Paul’s tectonic notion that there is ‘neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female’ (and hence universal human dignity and suffrage), and Christmas.

The Christians say that Christmas is the commemoration of a historical fact: an invasion of history by the author of history; of creation by the creator.

This is too much for many to swallow. If that’s true for you, is it dishonest to celebrate Christmas?

A mathematician friend works on imaginary numbers. An imaginary number is a real number multiplied by the ‘imaginary unit’, i. i2 = -1, and so i = √-1. Think about it. It’s an impossibility. It’s absurd. Descartes talked about ‘imaginary numbers’ only to laugh at the idea. But they are enormously useful in real life. You are reading this on a phone or computer screen courtesy of imaginary numbers. Sometimes it’s worth suppressing, or at least muting, a contemptuous laugh. Tom Holland’s list, and mine, depend on theological and historical numbers that might (or might not) be imaginary. You don’t have to stop dubbing the numbers ‘imaginary’ – don’t stop having to call them ludicrous – to carry on reading your screen.

Christmas, for me, is a celebration not only of family, gluttony and intoxication, but of four facts (if the Christians are historically correct) and four principles which are generated by those facts - whether the facts are real or imaginary. The principles work, just as my computer screen does.

First: human agency is cosmically colossal. The invasion I mentioned above was invited (so preventing it from being rape) by a Palestinian Jewish girl. She could have said ‘No’, and so scuppered the whole project.

Second: Christmas drafts a completely new account of power. In the Christian story of Easter, all the powers of darkness are disarmed by one broken man dying on a piece of wood between dying criminals. It was a continuation of the story that began at Christmas: the birth, in a shitty stable, to a teenage mother accused of fornication, of a child soon to be a refugee, driven to another country to escape the murderous authorities. It’s all about the subversion of political and military power by the irresistible power of the powerless.

Third: the universe is surprising. Nobody predicted the invasion. Yes, I know the Christians say, with the confidence given by the retrospectocope, that there were hints in the Hebrew scriptures, but they weren’t seen at the time, and the most learned Jews today, even with the retrospectoscope, still don’t see them. Yes, I know that the ancient world was awash with tales of the impregnation of mortals by gods, and with virgin births (think of Dionysos, Attis, Romulus and Remus and many others). But they didn’t look remotely like this. Those tales were told to prop up conventional claims to power, not explode them. Bethlehem burst onto the blind side of history, injecting unforeseen possibility. The virgin conception smashed pre-conceptions. A new way of being had gestated. If that was possible, what wasn’t?

Fourth: The most revolutionary thing about Christmas, perhaps, is that it shows that mythos is real – part of the web and weave of reality.

After dinner at Magdalen College, Oxford, on 20 September 1931, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Hugo Dyson walked together along Addison’s Walk, part of Magdalen’s grounds. They were discussing the resurrection of Jesus. Lewis knew all about the ubiquitous tales of dying and rising gods. The Christian resurrection stories were no different, he said. They were poetically resonant, no doubt, but essentially ‘lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver.’

‘No’, said Tolkien. ‘They are not lies,’ There was a sudden rush of wind in the still night. In Lewis’s rooms the conversation continued into the early hours. The stories were indeed myths, Tolkien contended, but true myths.

This conversation propelled Lewis finally into Christianity.

The Christmas story suggests that Tolkien was right (and those notoriously mystical quantum physicists – some of the most adept handlers of imaginary numbers, by the way - are right): there is no robust boundary between history and legend, between physics and metaphysics, between matter and spirit. This, in fact, is our working assumption, whether we’re explicitly religious or not. However icy our reductionism, we think that we matter, that there is more than matter, and that whatever that ‘more’ is, it is heavier and more enduring than matter, and matters more than matter. We love our children far more than reciprocal altruism or kin selection suggests we should. However sturdy our atheism we dab our eyes at the St Matthew Passion and put flowers on our parents’ graves.

It is reassuring to have a festival which enjoins us to lift our glasses and toast the way we live when we’re being the kind of people we urge our children, our friends and our politicians to be. It commands us to admit mystery to the dining table, and to celebrate being as mysterious as we know we are.

Christmas, authentically celebrated, is part of the foundation on which rest Chartres cathedral, freedom, suffrage, dignity and many things we innocently and dangerously take for granted. Like it or not, that foundation, as the austere philosopher observed, is the premise of the argument for the civilization that until recently succoured us before we replaced it with – well, with what?