Antichrist: Romanist and Protestant Views Examined
By John Nevins Andrews
The Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge in treating upon Antichrist tells us how the Romanists set aside the prophecies of the New Testament on this subject. It also states the views which are held by Protestants. Finally, it shows that Protestants themselves have some share in the iniquity of Antichrist. J. N. A. The papists imagine they view, in the prophetical picture of Antichrist, imperial Rome, elated by her victories, exulting in her sensuality and her spoils, polluted by idolatry, persecuting the people of God, and finally falling like the first Babylon; whilst a new and holy city, represented by their own communion, filled with the spotless votaries of the Christian faith, rises out of its ruins and the victory of the cross is completed over the temples of paganism. This scheme has had its ablest advocates, at the head of whom may be placed Bossuet, bishop of Meaux, Grotius, and Hammond. But in order to establish the resemblance, they violate the order of time, disregard the opinions of the primitive Christians, and overlook the appropriate descriptions of the apostles. After the point had been maturely debated at the council of Gap, held in 1603, a resolution was taken thereupon to insert an article in the confession of faith, whereby the pope is formally declared to be Antichrist. Pope Clement VIII. was stung with this decision; and even King Henry IV. of France was not a little mortified to be thus declared, as he said, an imp of Antichrist. With respect to the commonly received opinion, that the church of Rome is Antichrist, Mede and Newton, Daubuz and Clarke, Lowman and Hurd, Jurieu, Vitringa, and many other members of the Protestant churches, who have written upon the subject, concur in maintaining that the prophecies of Daniel, St. Paul, and St. John, point directly to this church. This was likewise the opinion of the first reformers; and it was the prevalent opinion of Christians in the earliest ages, that Antichrist would appear soon after the fall of the Roman Empire. Gregory the great, in the sixth century, applied the prophecies concerning the beast, in the Revelation, the man of sin, and the apostasy from the faith, mentioned by St. Paul, to him who should presume to claim the title of universal priest, or universal bishop, in the Christian church; and yet his immediate successor, Boniface III., received from the tyrant Phocas the precise title which Gregory had thus censured. At the synod of Rheims, held in the tenth century, Arnulphus, bishop of Orleans, appealed to the whole council, whether the bishop of Rome was not the Antichrist of St. Paul, “sitting in the temple of God,” and perfectly corresponding with the description of him given by St. Paul. In the eleventh century, all the characters of Antichrist seemed to be so united in the person of Pope Hildebrand, who took the name of Gregory VII., that Johannes Aventinus, a Roman historian, speaks of it as a subject in which the generality of fair, candid, and ingenuous writers agreed, that at that time was the reign of Antichrist. And the Albigenses and Waldenses, who may be called the Protestants of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, expressly asserted in their declarations of faith, that the church of Rome was the whore of Babylon. . . An important question, however, says Mr. Jones, still remains for inquiry, “Is Antichrist confined to the church of Rome? The answer is readily returned in the affirmative by Protestants in general; and happy had it been for the world were that the case. But although we are fully warranted to consider that church as “the MOTHER of harlots,” the truth is, that, by whatever arguments we succeed in fixing that odious charge upon her, we shall, by parity of reasoning, be obliged to allow all other national churches to be her unchaste daughters; and for this plain reason among others, because, in their very constitution and tendency, they are hostile to the nature of the kingdom of Christ. All national establishments of Christianity must, in their very nature, be antichristian; because they are opposed to the spirit of the doctrines of Christ, and to the nature of his kingdom, which he himself has declared to be not of this world.