If it was addressed earlier, can someone point me to the development of this doctrine? How did it come to be understood as time passed? Is it continuous teaching with fuller understanding, or were the statements simply disowned by later generations of Lutherans? Either way, no problem, you believe what you believe. But it seems to me that a Church founded in Christ can follow a continuity in Christ.
In Catholicism we can look at earlier Church pronouncements like Unam Sanctam, take the full context into account, and follow the continuous development of understanding.
I think this article is a good starting point:
wlsessays.net/files/ToppeSmalcald.pdf
It describes Luther’s initial attitude towards the Pope, and how he comes to believe he is the anti-Christ, and has some recent statements as to some Lutheran bodies that still subscribe to this teaching and charge.
This is from the last page of the article:
*Protestantism, generally, rejects the doctrine of the Antichrist even when there may be more evidence that the Roman church is the church of the Antichrist today than in Luther’s day, even when the papacy is now heaping more humiliation on the world’s Redeemer than it did in the Reformer’s day. Today historical criticism, for example, is destroying even the fundamentals of Christian truth. In Luther’s day the Roman church still professed faith in the Trinity, the inspiration of Scripture, and the deity of Christ, because Scripture declared these truths. Today “Roman Catholic scientific biblical scholarship operates with all the tools of historicalcriticism, form history, and redaction history in the production of commentaries and translations.”lxxxvi Today,
Thomas Sheehan reports: “In Roman Catholic seminaries, for example, it is now common teaching that Jesus of Nazareth did not assert any of the divine or messianic claims the Gospels attribute to him and that he died without believing he was Christ or the Son of God, not to mention the founder of a new religion.” “Today,
Sheehan contends, ‘one would be hard pressed’ to find a Catholic biblical scholar who maintains that Jesus was the divine Son of God, or who believes in the doctrines of the Trinity, the virginity of Mary, the miracles, the founding of the Church by Jesus, the Resurrection, or immortal life.”lxxxvii
.
The concern for the salvation of society is displacing the concern for the salvation of souls. The introduction to The Documents of Vatican II states: “Taken as a whole, the documents are especially noteworthy for their concern with the poor, for their insistence on the unity of the human family and therefore on the wrongness of discrimination, for their repeated emphasis on the Christian’s duty to help build a just and peaceful world, a duty which he must carry out in brotherly cooperation with all men of good will.”lxxxix If this sounds like a quotation from NCC literature of 50 years ago, it is because the Catholic Church in America has belatedly appropriated the social gospel of liberal Protestants, just as it has contracted the virus of its historical criticism.
In the crisis generated by Vatican II, papal Rome has been forced to reexamine its posture, its role, and its very essence, but it has only confirmed its antichristian teaching and practice. It has strayed even farther from the truth it still possessed when this century began. It has been weighed in the balance of the three great solas and has been found wanting. Above the God-revealed sola scriptura it still elevates tradition—the experience and the mind of the “Church.” To the God-given sola gratia it still adds its sine qua non of human merit. To the God-ordained sola fide it still opposes its mandate of obedience to “the commandments of God and of the church.” If anything, despite its professed allegiance to Christ, despite its “Lord, Lord,” it has become even more “Christ-less” than before. If anything, it has added its weight and prestige to the forces that are building up to dissolve Christian faith and Christian confession in our day. If anything, there is even more reason to declare, “Papam esse ipsum verum Antichristum,” and even more reason to pray that the confidence of Luther’s closing prayer will abide with us: “Of this we should be certain and animate ourselves with the hope that Christ, our Lord, has attacked His adversary, and he will press the attack home both by His Spirit and coming. Amen.”
*
And this was in 1989. We catholics indeed are looked at an adherents of the Anti-Christ…to this day.
