Commemorating the Reformation after 500 Years: Just a Misunderstanding?

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Adventist Theological Society

Dennis Pettibone

Martin Luther’s Views on the Antichrist

The attitude of American Protestants towards the Vatican has changed immeasurably during my lifetime.

1 example, when Harry Truman tried to appoint Mark Clark as an ambassador to the Vatican, It was the second most unpopular action of his administration.

Second only to the firing of General Douglas MacArthur.

He received a mountain of letters and telegrams overwhelmingly opposing it.

He even had a sermon from his pastor on how bad it was for Truman to appoint an ambassador to the Vatican.

And the heat was so great that Clark withdrew his nomination and nobody dared until the administration of Ronald Reagan to talk about appointing an ambassador to the Vatican again.

And when Reagan appointed an ambassador to the Vatican, nobody cared.

First of all, you have the cheerful, benign Pope John XXIII presiding over the Second Vatican Council, although he didn't live to see it finished, and referring to Protestants no longer as condemned heretics but separated brethren.

And then you have John Paul II playing a major role in the overthrow of communism in Eastern Europe.

And since American Protestants kind of saw communism as the Antichrist, maybe not literally, but that kind of an attitude, this was warmly received by many American Protestants.

But in the warm afterglow of Vatican II, it's no longer considered proper, no longer socially acceptable, to describe the papacy as the fulfillment of a collection of prophecies regarding a powerful spiritual tyranny.

However, a professor at Eastern University in Pennsylvania, a man named Dr.

Philip Carey, a person who describes himself as an ecumenically minded Lutheran, has made the statement that the Reformation wouldn't have happened without the conviction that the Pope was Antichrist.

And then he goes farther suggesting, you know, nobody believes that anymore.

But if the Pope isn't the Antichrist, he asks, what right do we have to be split?

Since Protestantism owes its very existence to Luther's conviction that the Pope was the Antichrist, It might be instructive to inquire why Luther held this view and under what circumstances he reached this conclusion.

We'll see that he came to this view slowly and reluctantly, driven by historical circumstances and theological reflection.

Luther was probably unaware of previous attacks on the papacy made by people like John Huss and John Wycliffe and others when he, in 1517, drafted his 95 Theses.

Moreover, his target at this time was not the papacy, but a greedy Dominican monk named Johann Tetzel, who was distorting Catholic doctrine by exaggerating the supposed benefits of indulgences.

Sylvester Priarius, the papal court's chief theologian, transformed the nature of the debate from a question of policy to 1 of authority.

He wrote, he who does not accept the doctrine of the Church of Rome and Pontiff of Rome as an infallible rule of faith from which the Holy Scriptures to draw their strength is a heretic.

And by the way it wasn't until 1870 that the Church of Rome officially said that the pontiff was infallible but Praerius centuries before that is making this statement.

He said whoever says the Church of Rome may not do what it's actually doing in the matter of indulgences as a heretic.

Well Luther was ordered to appear in Rome to defend himself, which would probably have been an immediate death sentence.

Friends intervened and got an agreement where he would face his accuser in a German city, Augsburg.

And there he was confronted with Cajetan's demand that he recant.

Luther asked for scriptural evidence on why he should recant.

He wasn't given any, he was just told recant.

He figured it wouldn't be safe for him to stay around and so he left early.

He didn't want to become another John Huss.

But with Thomas Cajetan But with Thomas Cajetan asking him to recant without giving any scriptural reasons and with Praerius' assertion of papal infallibility, Luther began to consider the possibility that these men were the servants of Antichrist.

He shared these suspicions with a few of his like-minded believers privately.

His suspicion that the Antichrist reigns in the court of Rome.

In July 1519, as we mentioned last night, Luther took the position that both Popes and church councils could err.

Now for Luther, everything stood under the judgment of Scripture and he was soon using Scripture to pass judgment on the Pope.

2 things that Luther read the following year weakened his hesitation about openly referring to the Pope as Antichrist.

1 was Lorenzo Valla's Treatise on the Donation of Constantine.

Donation of Constantine was a document that the Church had used throughout the high Middle Ages to say that it had authority over kings and rulers and basically the whole earth.

So much so that when the Americas were explored, they would actually park a ship off the coast and read in Latin to the Indians a document saying that the Lord had given the whole earth to Pope Alexander the sixth and he had divided it among the Spanish and the Portuguese, and so therefore they should listen to what the Spanish had to say because the ruler of the earth had so declared it, to paraphrase.

And Lorenzo Valla proved through his knowledge of linguistics that this document could not have been written in the time of Constantine.

So Luther began to see that the power the church was claiming was built on fraud.

The other document was a new edition of Praeorius' attack on Luther.

And in this, he revised, he repeated his idea that the Pope was infallible, and he went so far as to say the Pope had more authority than scriptures or church councils, and he quoted a passage from canon law that said, if the Pope, even if the Pope were so scandalously behave as to lead multitudes of souls to the devil, he still couldn't be removed.

Shocked at this extreme statement from Rome's chief theologian, Luther wrote to a friend, I think everyone in Rome has gone crazy.

Luther's treatise to the Christian nobility of the German nation concerning the reform of the Christian estate, June 13, 1520, repeatedly linked the papacy to Antichrist.

Referring to Priarius's appalling statement, Luther wrote, it must have been the very prince of devils who said what is written in canon law if the Pope was so scandalously bad as to lead souls in crowds to the devil, yet he could not be deposed." And then he said, "...is to be feared that this game, this is a game of Antichrist, or a sign that he's close at hand." Luther also attacked as works of Antichrist.

Papal claims to have power over earthly authorities and even over angels and in view of the fact that Jesus said my kingdom is not of this world, Luther bluntly said no vicar's rule can go beyond his Lord's.

In August 1520, Luther learned that Leo was sending a bull which threatened him with excommunication.

With this bull, Richard Marius observes, all ambiguity about the Antichrist evaporated from Luther's mind.

These views culminated in the book The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, which mentioned several reasons for calling the papacy antichrist, the claim that the Pope had the power to make laws withholding the communion cup from the laity, and the annulment of legitimate marriages.

And He said, unless they will abandon their laws and restore to Christ churches their liberty, they are guilty of all the souls that perish under this captivity, and the papacy is of truth the kingdom of Babylon, yea, of the very Antichrist.

Notice how he gets stronger and stronger as he's going along.

And his treatise from the New Testament, He said the Pope does not have a hair's breadth of power to change what Christ has made and whatever of these things he changes he does as a tyrant and an Antichrist.

Well the threatening bull, Excurge Domini, denounced 41 of Luther's published statements.

It condemned anyone holding or defending these positions and warned Luther that he must return to the bosom of the church within 60 days.

He replied to the bull in his defense and explanation of all the articles which repeatedly depicted the Pope as Antichrist.

Arguing that Christ was the rock of Matthew 16, 18, Luther wrote that interpreting this text to refer to the papacy was a lying device perverting God's Word.

He called the Pope Antichrist for giving people false assurance through indulgences, denying the belief that repentance was required for forgiveness of sins, spreading error around the world in exchange for monetary wealth and imposing on people the penitential system.

He said in both his commands and his prohibitions he's the direct opposite of Christ as befits a true Antichrist.

Luther also responded that the papist had burned the good Christians John Hus and Jerome of Prague as well as the godly man of Florence, Hierolamos of Avernarola, thus fulfilling the prophecies concerning Antichrist that he will cast Christians into the oven.

Luther promised that the Word of God would crush the Antichrist without violence.

Yet he fully expected that he would lose his life before this happened because, as he wrote to Georg Spoletan, Antichrist holds the kingdom of this world captive.

Nevertheless, at Vorms he courageously refused to retract anything he had written unless convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason.

Consequently, as we mentioned last night, he was declared an outlaw.

The fact that he survived despite the imperial ban was due to the intervention of Frederick of of Saxony who had him in protective custody at Vortburg.

The chief reason that the mature Lutheran described the Pope as Antichrist was because of Luther's opposition, Luther's opinion, that the Pope had usurped God's place as lawmaker, adding his own rules to those of the Bible, burdening consciences with human traditions, infringing on Christian freedom, sitting in judgment on God's Word, nullifying the text assuring of forgiveness of sin, and giving people a distorted picture of God.

The Pope also supplanted God's place by teaching that the scriptures derived their authority from the church rather than vice versa, and by claiming authority over not only the church, but the whole world.

According to Luther, persecuting people for following God's word was another way the Pope was asserting God's authority.

The false church is always a persecutor of the true Church, he wrote.

Central to Luther's understanding of the Pope as Antichrist, seizing God's place, was 2 Thessalonians 2, verses 3 and 4, noting that the villain in 2 Thessalonians 2 sits in God's temple and exalts himself above God, Luther said, the Antichrist took his seat in the church not to govern it with divine laws but with human commandments.

Luther also found predictions of Antichrist in the book of Revelation.

Interpreting Daniel 7, he wrote that the little horn arising out of the Roman Empire after its division was the papal Antichrist.

He believed that Daniel 8, 11, and 12 contained blended prophecies applying to both Antichrist and Antiochus the fourth.

Again he also found prophecies of the Antichrist in the book of Revelation, especially chapters 13 and 17.

In Revelation 13 it was the lamb-like beast appearing to be Christian yet preaching the doctrines of the dragon from hell.

Usurping Christ's role as High Priest, Luther set up his own clergy, claiming that he was imprinting on their souls an indelible character, when in actuality he was imprinting them with the mark of the beast.

Using the symbolism of Revelation 14, 17, and 18, Luther frequently referred to Rome as Babylon and the Scarlet Whore of Babylon.

He praised and thanked the Lord for rescuing him from the scarlet whore.

The Roman Antichrist, according to Luther, in effect negated Christ's sacrifice and mediation.

The doctrine of merit, he said, nullified God's grace and made Christ die to no purpose.

Luther said the papacy also negated Christ's sacrifice by proclaiming the Mass to be a sacrifice for obtaining forgiveness of sins as if Christ's sacrifice were of no value.

Luther insisted that Christ is still our only mediator and said he has not abdicated his high priestly office and he had not transferred it to the Pope.

Luther suggested that the time of judgment predicted in Daniel 7 verses 8 and 9 was taking place during his lifetime.

He found comfort in the prophecies that the last days would be shortened for the sake of the godly and that the church would be preserved and Antichrist would not encompass everything with error and falsehood.

He noted that in the second angels message of Revelation 14 the Gospel was followed by a voice predicting that Babylon, the spiritual papacy, would be destroyed.

At that time, those who cling to the papacy against the Gospel shall be cast into the winepress of God's wrath.

During the final year of his life, Luther described the Pope not only as Antichrist, but as the vicar of the devil.

In his last and most bitter attack on the Pope against the Roman papacy and institution of the devil, Luther referred to the Pope as the most hellish father 3 times.

He denounced him as a teacher of lies, blasphemies, and idolatries, an inciter to all kinds of bloodshed, a brothel keeper above all brothel keepers, and all vermin, and even a true werewolf.

He said we are incited to anger against the Pope, not by personal ambition, but by righteous jealousy and fervor of conscience, to vindicate and protect the glory of God.

He pointed out that Paul's attack on the false apostles were not slander, but judging them by Paul's apostolic authority.

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Martin Luther’s Views on the Antichrist

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