The Pitiful Prototype

Consideration of the Apostle Peter figures significantly in two discourses within Kierkegaard’s Christian Discourses. This paper exegetes these discourses in order to understand the respects in which Kierkegaard regards Peter as a “pitiful prototype” who was, on the one hand, “the imitator of Christ who resembled him most,” and on the other, a “traitor” in his three-fold denial of Christ. The paper further proposes reading Kierkegaard’s construction in terms of what Paul Ricoeur has termed a “hermeneutics of appropriation” that places its emphasis on the dimension of selfcritique, and raises the question of a plurality of biblical models of witness. Among early Christian witnesses, the apostle Peter – along with the apostle Paul – has enjoyed a certain priority in reception history. Jesus’ call to “Simon who is called Peter and Andrew his brother” to follow him and become “fishers of men,”1 together with the en route conversion of Paul (then Saul) to “the Way,”2 are undoubtedly two of the most well-known stories in the New Testament. The New Testament accounts of these prominent apostles do not always fully inform popular impressions of them, however. It is not uncommon, for example, to encounter expressions of surprise from individuals hearing – apparently for the first time – that Paul never actually met Jesus faceto-face. And the status frequently accorded Peter as ‘first among the disciples’ does not square with the Fourth Gospel account in which, for instance, Peter is neither the first disciple to be called, nor the first 1 Mark 1:16; Matthew 4:18. Cf. Luke 5:1-11 2 Acts 9:1-19 272 Joel D. S. Rasmussen in importance to the Johannine community.3 What accounts for the enduring prominence of these two apostles, therefore, is not so much a widespread familiarity with the divergent pictures found in scripture but, instead, a sometimes vague sense of the roles each has been made to play as a symbolic counter in Christian history. It is likely often the case that an individual’s ecclesial commitment – or one’s inherited affiliation, if ‘commitment’ is too strong a word here – influences his or her impression of each apostle. Historically, Roman Catholics have emphasized “the Petrine foundation of papal authority” which Jesus invests in Peter, and which Catholicism maintains through a tradition of apostolic succession.4 Protestants, on the other hand, have claimed that Peter’s personal response in faith cannot be transmitted in this successive fashion, and have argued that a more authentic concept of apostolic authority is seen in the figure of Paul, in whom authority is seen as vested through a gift of the Spirit, and not as a humanto-human transfer.5 The ecclesial rapprochement of the second half of the twentieth century has gone a long way toward mitigating this polarization, however, with the productive consequence that contemporary scholars of these New Testament figures now regularly collaborate across the denominational line. With respect to Peter especially, perhaps, the yield of such collaborative assessments as the work Peter in the New Testament, has not been a unified, generic view but rather a greater recognition of the diversity of New Testament portraits: Peter in the Pauline Letters, Peter in the Book of Acts, Peter in the Gospel of Mark, in Matthew, Luke, and in 3 In the Gospel According to John, “Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother” is identified as one of two disciples of John the Baptist who become followers of Jesus. After spending the day with Jesus, Andrew goes and finds Simon Peter and brings him to Jesus as well (John 1:35-42). The importance of “the Beloved Disciple” within the Johannine tradition will be addressed in later sections of this paper. 4 Pheme Perkins Peter: Apostle for the Whole Church, Minneapolis: Fortress Press 2000, p. 3. The foundational text for this position is Matt. 16:15-20: “[Jesus] said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.’ And Jesus answered him, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter [Gk Petros] and on this rock [Gk petra] I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.’” 5 Ibid., p. 4. See also Hans von Campenhausen Ecclesiastical Authority and Spiritual Power in the Church of the First Three Centuries, trans. by J. A. Baker, Stanford: Stanford University Press 1969, pp. 31-53. The Pitiful Prototype 273 John, and Peter in the Petrine epistles.6 In the light of such scholarship, the New Testament scholar Pheme Perkins has recently written, “The figure of Peter need not be the rallying point for the primacy of one communion over the others. Precisely because there is not an exclusively Petrine tradition in the New Testament, the apostle might serve as a unifying figure for diverse forms of Christianity.”7 This genial celebration of harmonious diversity constitutes an interesting historical twist, I think, since Perkins, a leading Roman Catholic scholar of Christian origins, traces the influences on her scholarship to the pioneering historical-critical work of the nineteenth-century Protestant scholar, Ferdinand Christian Baur. But this twist is noteworthy not simply because it attests to the productive dialogue across time and across ecclesial traditions. It is also interesting because, while Baur’s emphasis on the necessity of reading the New Testament texts as products of divergent and conflicting theological commitments has contributed to an ever-deepening recognition of the diversity of New Testament views on Peter (and on Paul, as well as other biblical figures), Baur himself understood the divergence in earliest Christianity in terms of a stark dichotomy between Petrine and Pauline forms of Christianity.8 Baur’s dichotomy was “a staple element” in nineteenth-century Protestant church history, influencing the views of – among other notables of the era – Søren Kierkegaard.9 This distinction between Petrine and Pauline forms of Christianity underwrites Kierkegaard’s criticism of Martin Luther, for example, on grounds that Luther modified authentic New Testament Christianity through his overemphasis on the Pauline epistles and their theology of grace, to the relative neglect of the gospel stories of Christ and his disciples.10 And, con6 Peter in the New Testament: A Collaborative Assessment by Protestant and Roman Catholic Scholars, ed. by Raymond E. Brown, Karl P. Donfried, and John Reumann, Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers 1973. 7 Perkins Peter: Apostle for the Whole Church, p. 5. 8 Craig C. Hill offers an informative analysis of the far-reaching and enduring effects of Baur’s dichotomy in Hellenists and Hebrews: Reappraising Division within the Earliest Church, Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1992, pp. 5-17. 9 Perkins Peter: Apostle for the Whole Church, p. 4. Kierkegaard owned three of Baur’s works: F. C. Baur Die christliche Gnosis oder die christliche Religions‐Phi‐ losophie, Tübingen 1835 [ASKB, 421]; Das Christliche des Platonismus oder Soc‐ rates und Christus, Tübingen 1837 [ASKB, 422]; and Die christliche Lehre von der Versöhnung, Tübingen 1838 [ASKB, 423]. 10 Luther effects “a modification of the essentially Christian,” Kierkegaard writes, because he “onesidedly draws Paul forward and uses the gospels less” (JP 3:2507 /