A Doctrine Once Universal
It was once the settled conviction of virtually the entire Protestant world that the Pope of Rome was the Antichrist. This was not a fringe opinion held by extremists on the margins of Protestantism. It was mainstream, confessional, officially codified doctrine — embedded in the most authoritative doctrinal standards of the Lutheran, Reformed, and Presbyterian traditions — and shared equally by the Baptist churches that had never been part of Rome at all. To hold this conviction in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was, among other things, to believe that the papacy was the antichristian system described in 2 Thessalonians 2 and Revelation 13 and 17.
Today that conviction has been almost entirely abandoned by the major Protestant denominations. Lutherans meet with the Pope in Sweden to commemorate the Reformation together. Presbyterian and Reformed bodies have quietly excised the relevant clause from the Westminster Confession. Evangelical leaders sign joint declarations with Rome affirming a common gospel. And the election of a new Pope is greeted by prominent Protestant figures with warm congratulations rather than Scriptural warning.
What changed? The answer, as this article will show, is not that Rome changed. Rome’s dogmas stand precisely where the early Protestants and Baptists confronted them, confirmed and hardened at the Council of Trent and the two Vatican Councils that followed. What changed was Protestantism — through a combination of ecumenical pressure, political pragmatism, theological dilution, and a growing embarrassment at what its own fathers had plainly taught.
Historical Forerunners: Before Luther
The identification of the papacy with antichrist did not begin with Martin Luther. It had deep roots in the pre-Protestant period, among men who paid for their convictions with their lives. Jan Hus, the Bohemian theologian from Prague, was among the first to state it plainly: As for antichrist occupying the papal chair, it is evident that a pope living contrary to Christ, like any other perverted person, is called, by common consent, antichrist. Hus was called to the Council of Constance in 1414 under a promise of safe conduct, tried for heresy, and burned at the stake on the 6th of July 1415.
John Wycliffe before him, the English theologian known as the Morning Star of the Reformation against Rome, had made the same identification. So had the Waldensians, those long-persecuted believers of northern Italy and southern France who had maintained an independent gospel witness for centuries before Luther was born. They endured massacre after massacre at Rome’s hands precisely because they would not submit to papal authority — and they knew why they would not.
Luther’s Conclusion — and the Baptist Witness
Martin Luther did not begin his protest with the intention of identifying the Pope as Antichrist. His early instinct was to seek reform from within — to appeal to the Pope himself against the abuses of indulgences and the corruption of the Roman clergy. That changed decisively when the Pope responded not with reform but with persecution. When Leo X issued the bull Exsurge Domine in 1520, threatening Luther with excommunication unless he recanted, and when the full weight of Rome’s power was brought to bear against the gospel, Luther drew his conclusion: the man in Rome was not the head of the church of Christ but the Antichrist foretold in Scripture.
He stated it without equivocation in the Smalcald Articles of 1536, one of the foundational confessional documents of Lutheranism: This teaching shows forcefully that the Pope is the very Antichrist, who has exalted himself above, and opposed himself against Christ, because he will not permit Christians to be saved without his power, which, nevertheless, is nothing, and is neither ordained nor commanded by God. Philip Melanchthon, Luther’s closest collaborator, wrote in the Apology of the Augsburg Confession (1531): If our opponents defend the notion that these human rites merit justification, grace, and the forgiveness of sins, they are simply establishing the kingdom of Antichrist… the papacy will also be a part of the kingdom of Antichrist if it maintains that human rites justify.
It is important here to draw a distinction that ecumenical history has blurred. The Baptists were not Protestants in the strict historical sense. Protestantism emerged from the protest of those who had been members of the Roman Catholic Church — Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and the magisterial Reformers — and who broke from Rome at the Reformation. The Baptists traced their lineage through a separate stream altogether: the Anabaptists, the Waldensians, and the various dissenting bodies that had maintained a gospel witness entirely outside of Rome throughout the medieval period. They had never been part of Rome. They had never submitted to the Pope. They had suffered Rome’s persecutions for centuries precisely because they refused to do so.
This distinction matters because it means that the Baptist identification of the papacy as antichrist was not the conclusion of men leaving a system they had once belonged to. It was the conviction of men who had always stood outside that system and had always been persecuted by it. Roger Williams, the first Baptist pastor in America, held this view. John Bunyan — whose Pilgrim’s Progress contains pointed allusions to Rome as the monster against which Christian must struggle — held it. The English Particular Baptists, the Strict Baptists of the nineteenth century, and the Independent Baptists of the twentieth century have maintained it as a matter of Scriptural conviction across four centuries, not because they inherited it from Luther, but because they read the same Bible that Luther read and arrived at the same conclusion.
The Scriptural Basis
The early Protestants did not arrive at this identification carelessly. They grounded it in a systematic reading of Scripture — particularly 2 Thessalonians 2, Daniel 7 and 11, Revelation 13 and 17, and the epistles of John. Their case rested on three interconnected arguments.
The first was doctrinal. Paul writes in 2 Thessalonians 2:3–4 of a man of sin, a son of perdition, who exalteth himself above all that is called God or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God. They saw this fulfilled in the papal claims to be the Vicar of Christ on earth — to hold the keys of heaven and hell, to speak infallibly on matters of faith and morals, to be called Holy Father, His Holiness, and the Vicar of Christ. These titles, they argued, were precisely the kind of self-exaltation Paul described.
The second argument was soteriological. The Council of Trent (1545–1563) formally condemned the doctrine of justification by faith alone with a series of anathemas that have never been lifted. Canon 9 of the Tridentine Decree on Justification reads: If anyone says that the sinner is justified by faith alone, meaning that nothing else is required to cooperate in order to obtain the grace of justification, and that it is not in any way necessary that he be prepared and disposed by the action of his own will: let him be anathema. To these men, any system that placed man’s works alongside God’s grace in justification was not merely erroneous — it was the very denial of Christ’s finished work, and therefore antichristian in its essence.
The third argument was historical and blood-stained. The Roman Catholic Church had tortured, burned, and massacred hundreds of thousands of believers — the Waldensians, the Hussites, the victims of the Spanish Inquisition, the martyrs of England under Bloody Mary — for refusing to submit to Rome. William Tyndale, who gave the English people their Bible, was strangled and burned at the stake in 1536 on Rome’s urging. The Duke of Alva’s campaign in the Netherlands in the 1560s and 1570s executed tens of thousands of Protestants. Revelation 17:6 described a woman drunk with the blood of the saints — and Bible-believing Protestants and Baptists alike looked at the history of Rome and believed they could see her plainly.
The Confessions Speak
So settled was this conviction across the Protestant world that it was written into their most authoritative confessional standards. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), the doctrinal standard of English and Scottish Presbyterianism and subsequently of Reformed churches worldwide, states in Chapter 25, Section 6:
The Lutheran Smalcald Articles, written by Luther himself and included in the Book of Concord, state the same. The Second Helvetic Confession, the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (in their original interpretation), the Belgic Confession, and the Irish Articles of 1615 all either explicitly identified the Pope as Antichrist or provided the doctrinal framework from which that identification necessarily followed.
The conviction was shared across centuries and across the full breadth of gospel Christianity. John Knox in Scotland, Thomas Cranmer and Hugh Latimer in England (both burned at the stake under Mary Tudor), John Bunyan, John Owen, the Puritans as a body, John Wesley — who declared that the whole succession of Popes from Gregory VII are undoubtedly Anti-Christ — Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and Dr D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones all held and expressed variations of this conviction. Roger Williams, the first Baptist pastor in America, held it. Cotton Mather, the Congregational theologian, held it. Sir Isaac Newton devoted substantial writings to the identification of the papal system with the prophetic beast. This was not a marginal view. It was the Protestant consensus.
Rome’s Dogmas Have Not Changed
Before tracing the Protestant shift, it is essential to establish a point that is almost universally overlooked in ecumenical discussion: Rome has not changed. The dogmas that early Protestants and Baptists identified as antichristian remain in force, confirmed and in many cases hardened, by the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church.
The Council of Trent’s anathemas against justification by faith alone were never lifted. They were reaffirmed. The First Vatican Council (1870) added the dogma of papal infallibility — a claim that goes beyond anything even the medieval papacy had formally asserted. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, published in 1992 and described as an authoritative expression of the faith, teaches that the Mass is a propitiatory sacrifice in which Christ is offered again to the Father, that the sacraments are necessary means of grace, that purgatory is a place of purification after death, and that Mary is the Mediatrix of All Graces whose intercession is necessary for salvation. None of these teachings are modified, qualified, or withdrawn.
The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification signed by the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church in 1999 was widely hailed as a breakthrough. But a careful reading reveals that Rome conceded nothing. The document uses language vague enough that each side can read its own meaning into it, while the Tridentine anathemas against Lutheran doctrine remain formally in place and were explicitly not withdrawn. As one theologian noted, what the document achieved was not agreement on justification but agreement on ambiguity — which is precisely what ecumenism requires and what the gospel forbids.
The Shift Begins: 1789 and Beyond
The first significant institutional retreat came earlier than most people realise. A mere 143 years after the Westminster Confession of Faith was adopted, the American Presbyterians adopted the Westminster Standards in 1789 — with the explicit identification of the Pope as Antichrist omitted. The stated reason was to avoid offending Roman Catholics in the new republic. What had been a matter of doctrinal conviction became, under the pressures of political life in a pluralist society, an inconvenience to be quietly removed.
Lutheran synods in America made similar moves across the nineteenth century, as the desire for respectability and social integration gradually eroded the sharper edges of their historic testimony.
The Jesuit Counter-Reformation: How Rome Moved the Target
The single most consequential event in reshaping Protestant prophetic interpretation — and the one least acknowledged in evangelical histories — was not anything that happened within Protestantism at all. It was a deliberate strategy developed within the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) in the sixteenth century, in direct response to the Protestant identification of the papacy as the antichristian power of Scripture.
Rome understood perfectly well what the prophetic identification meant. If the papacy was the Antichrist of 2 Thessalonians 2 and Revelation 13, then the Pope was not the head of the true church but the head of the false one — and every soul in his communion was in mortal spiritual danger. This was not merely offensive rhetoric. It was a theological weapon of the first order. Rome needed to answer it. The Jesuit response was to produce an alternative system of prophetic interpretation that would move the Antichrist away from Rome — either backward into the distant past, or forward into the distant future.
Francisco Ribera (1537–1591), a Spanish Jesuit priest and theologian, published a lengthy commentary on the book of Revelation in 1590 in which he proposed that the prophecies of Revelation applied not to Rome but to a future individual Antichrist who would arise at the end of time. Under Ribera’s scheme, only the first few chapters of Revelation applied to pagan Rome. The bulk of the prophetic material — the three and a half years, the rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple, the denial of Christ, the abolition of Christianity — all referred to a single future figure who had not yet appeared. Ribera’s system is the direct ancestor of what is today called futurism in prophetic interpretation.
Manuel Lacunza (1731–1801), another Jesuit priest, took the futurist system further. Writing under the pseudonym Juan Josafat Ben-Ezra — concealing his Jesuit identity behind a name designed to suggest a Jewish-Christian author — he produced The Coming of the Messiah in Glory and Majesty, published posthumously in 1812. In this work, Lacunza elaborated the futurist scheme in great detail, relocating the Antichrist entirely to the end of time and presenting what became the framework for a literal, future, rebuilt Temple, a future personal Antichrist, and a dispensational separation of Israel and the church.
The channel through which these Jesuit ideas entered mainstream Protestantism was the Plymouth Brethren movement, particularly through John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), who developed from futurist foundations the elaborate prophetic system now known as dispensationalism. Edward Irving (1792–1834), a Scottish Presbyterian minister, had already translated Lacunza’s work into English in 1827 and promoted it widely. From Darby, dispensationalism passed to Cyrus Ingerson Scofield, whose Scofield Reference Bible (1909) embedded its footnotes into the text of Scripture and placed the system in the hands of millions of readers who had no idea they were reading Jesuit-derived prophetic speculation printed alongside the King James Bible.
The result was a catastrophic reshaping of the Protestant prophetic imagination. Within two generations, the identification of the papacy as Antichrist — which had cost Jan Hus his life, which Luther had written into the Smalcald Articles, which the Westminster Assembly had embedded in the Confession — was replaced in vast swathes of Protestantism and Baptist life by a future, individual, political Antichrist who would arise after a secret rapture of the church. Rome had been removed from the prophetic frame. The strategy devised by Jesuit theologians in the Counter-Reformation had succeeded beyond anything its authors could have imagined — not through persecution, which had failed to silence the Protestant witness, but through the infiltration of Protestant theological education with ideas that bore Rome’s own intellectual fingerprints.
Vatican II and the Ecumenical Embrace
The single most transformative event in the Protestant-Catholic relationship of the twentieth century was the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). Before Vatican II, the Catholic Church had formally prohibited its members from participating in ecumenical dialogues with Protestants. Vatican II reversed this policy completely and placed ecumenism at the heart of Rome’s public agenda. Rome began speaking of Protestants not as heretics but as separated brethren — a phrase warm enough to encourage rapprochement while carefully leaving unresolved every doctrinal question that caused the separation.
Many Protestant leaders received this overture with uncritical enthusiasm. For denominations that had already quietly dropped their confessional objections to Rome, Vatican II provided cover for a full institutional embrace. Every major Protestant tradition — Lutheran, Anglican, Reformed, Methodist, Baptist — established official commissions and dialogue conferences with Rome in the decades that followed. The language of the discussions was carefully managed to maximise apparent agreement and minimise the appearance of division.
Two other factors accelerated the process. The first was the Cold War and its aftermath, which created a broad political alliance between conservative Catholics and conservative Protestants around shared concerns — communism, abortion, family values, religious liberty — that made theological distinctives seem petty by comparison. The second was the charismatic movement, which from the 1960s onwards created informal bonds between Catholic and Protestant charismatics that cut across confessional boundaries and made doctrinal precision seem like an obstacle to spiritual experience.
Evangelicals and Catholics Together: 1994
The watershed moment in the evangelical world came on March 29, 1994, with the publication of Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium — a twenty-five page joint declaration drafted by Chuck Colson and the Catholic priest Richard John Neuhaus. The list of evangelical signatories was remarkable: Pat Robertson, J.I. Packer, Os Guinness, Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ, Mark Noll of Wheaton College, and heads of the Home Mission Board and Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.
The document explicitly called for evangelicals and Catholics to cease treating each other as mission fields, declaring that it was improper to proselytise one another’s adherents. It spoke of a common gospel and a shared Christian witness, while carefully sidestepping the central questions that had divided Rome from gospel Christianity for five centuries. Colson himself acknowledged that part of what had prompted the initiative was embarrassment at evangelicals who called the Pope the Antichrist and the Catholic Church the Whore of Babylon — language he regarded as an obstacle to cooperation rather than a faithful expression of Protestant conviction.
The reaction among confessionally serious Protestants was immediate and sharp. John MacArthur, Michael Horton, R.C. Sproul, and others publicly repudiated the document, arguing that it amounted to a surrender of the gospel’s central claim — that justification by faith alone is the article by which the church stands or falls, and that no system which denies it can be regarded as a Christian church. Sproul was perhaps the most pointed: Rome, he insisted, had not changed; it was the evangelical signatories who had changed, and they had changed in the wrong direction.
Subsequent documents followed through the 1990s and 2000s — The Gift of Salvation (1997), Your Word is Truth (2002) — each deepening the apparent convergence while leaving Rome’s official positions precisely as they were. Billy Graham’s cooperative evangelism model, which had long welcomed Catholic churches as sponsors for his crusades and directed Catholic converts back to their parishes rather than to evangelical churches, provided a practical template that ECT codified at the institutional level.
The Drivers of the Shift — None of Them Doctrinal
It is worth pausing to examine what actually drove the Protestant retreat from the papal antichrist doctrine — because none of the drivers were theological in character.
Social respectability. In a pluralist democracy, publicly identifying the head of a billion-member church as the Antichrist carries serious social costs. It is considered bigoted, offensive, and unchristian. The pressure to conform to the norms of polite society has been immense, and most Protestant denominations have found it easier to drop the doctrine than to defend it.
Political alliance. The alignment of conservative Catholics and Protestants around shared moral and political causes — abortion, traditional marriage, religious liberty — has made theological precision feel like a luxury that tactical unity cannot afford. The result, as one analyst noted, is an ecumenism of the trenches: people who fight alongside each other stop asking whether their fellow soldiers hold the same faith.
Prophetic novelty of Jesuit origin. The rise of dispensationalism — rooted in the futurist system devised by the Jesuit Francisco Ribera and popularised through Lacunza, Irving, and Darby — moved the Antichrist from the present papacy to a future world ruler. Most Protestants who embraced this system had no idea of its Counter-Reformation origins. Once the eschatological framework shifted, the doctrinal conclusion followed: if the Antichrist was a future figure, the papacy could not be the Antichrist, and the historic Protestant identification was abandoned not on Scriptural grounds but on the grounds of a prophetic framework that Rome’s own theologians had constructed for precisely this purpose.
Emotional ecumenism. The charismatic movement, Billy Graham’s cooperative evangelism, and the broadly therapeutic culture of modern religion have all privileged felt unity and shared religious experience over confessional precision. If a Catholic and a Protestant both report encountering God in their respective traditions, the question of whether one system is antichristian feels harsh and uncharitable.
Theological amnesia. Successive generations of Protestant ministers trained in seminaries that no longer read the original confessions, no longer take their own standards seriously, and no longer regard the history of Rome’s persecution of the saints as relevant to present-day ecumenism have simply forgotten what their own tradition said and why it said it.
The Faithful Remnant: Smaller Churches Unmoved
Not all have moved. Among the smaller, confessionally serious, and often despised churches of the sovereign grace and Independent Baptist tradition, the historic Protestant identification of the papacy with the antichristian system of Revelation 13 and 2 Thessalonians 2 has remained unchanged — not out of bigotry or ignorance, but out of faithfulness to Scripture and to the men who shed their blood to recover it.
The Free Church of Scotland (Continuing), the Reformed Presbyterian Church, strict and particular Baptist congregations in Britain and America, and various Independent Baptist churches have maintained the position of the Westminster Confession without apology. They have done so not because Rome has done anything new to provoke them — Rome has done nothing new; it simply continues as it always has — but because Scripture has not changed, history has not changed, and the reasons given for their identification remain as compelling as they ever were.
These churches observe that the titles claimed by the papacy remain identical to those that provoked Luther’s condemnation: Holy Father, His Holiness, the Vicar of Christ. The Mass continues to be offered as a propitiatory sacrifice. Purgatory is still taught. Mary is still venerated as Mediatrix and Co-Redemptrix. The Tridentine anathemas against justification by faith alone stand unrevoked. And the Pope still claims the right to speak infallibly and to govern the entire visible church of Christ. If these things made the papacy antichristian in the sixteenth century, they make it antichristian now — for the simple reason that antichrist is defined by what he teaches and claims, not by what century he lives in.
What the Scripture Says
The question is not ultimately a historical or sociological one. It is a Scriptural one. Does the Roman Catholic system, as it stands today, fit the description of the antichristian power described in the New Testament? The answer given by Protestants and Baptists alike was yes — not as a personal insult to individual Catholics, but as a sober exegetical and doctrinal conclusion. Their answer has not been disproved. It has merely become unfashionable.
The Roman Catholic system does not deny the name of Christ. It appropriates it. But a system that denies his finished atonement by offering him again on ten thousand altars; that denies his sole mediatorship by directing prayer to Mary and the saints; that denies the sufficiency of his righteousness by requiring human merit for justification; that denies the authority of his Word by placing the traditions of men alongside or above it — such a system is against Christ in its very substance, whatever name it wears on its banner.
The mainstream Protestant world has made its peace with Rome. It has done so not because it found Rome’s doctrines to be in accord with Scripture, but because it found the price of maintaining the historic Protestant position to be too high. The smaller churches that have not made that peace are not relics of a bygone age. They are heirs of men who died rather than bow to Rome — and they are right to stand where those men stood.