DAY 101
CHALLENGE
“The pope is the Antichrist.”
DEFENSE
This claim does not fit the biblical evidence; it is based on unbiblical polemics.
Although the Antichrist is sometimes associated with figures like the “man of sin” (2 Thess. 2:3–10) and the beast of Revelation (Rev. 13:1– 18), there are only four passages in the New Testament that explicitly speak of the “antichrist”: 1 John 2:18, 22, 4:3, and 2 John 7. To under- stand the role of the Antichrist, we must look to these passages.
According to them, the Antichrist “denies the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:22), the “spirit of antichrist” “does not confess Jesus” (1 John 4:3), and the Antichrist does “not acknowledge the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh” (2 John 7).
These passages indicate that the Antichrist denies the coming of Jesus in the flesh. This could be construed several ways: (1) Jesus was a mere man and not God Incarnate (the early heresy known as Ebion- ism), (2) the humanity of Jesus was only an illusion (the early heresy known as Docetism), or (3) Jesus was not the Messiah (as in non- Christian Judaism).
None of these descriptions fit the popes, who have consistently maintained that Jesus was the Messiah, that he was God, and that he was fully God and fully man. Even a cursory reading of papal teach- ing provides abundant evidence for this. In fact, the popes have been among the most vigorous defenders of orthodoxy on these points.
The evidence is so extensive that it is amazing anyone could make the papal Antichrist claim, and its existence calls for an explanation.
The ultimate explanation is one of necessity: Prior to the Protestant Reformation, it was universally recognized in Western Christendom that the Catholic Church was the Church of Christ, governed by the pope as the authentic representative of Christ. Critics of the papacy thus needed to provide an alternative explanation of what the pope’s role was and how he could achieve such prominence if he were not Christ’s representative. They, therefore, asserted that he was the arch-enemy of Christ, the Antichrist (Smalcald Articles 2:4:10, 14; Westminster Confession 25:6).
This may have been a polemically useful claim, but it does not fit the biblical data—a fact most Protestant scholars recognize today.