Theopedia

Antichrist

Who is a liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son.

— 1 John 2:22

Definition

Antichrist (Greek antichristos, “against Christ” or “in place of Christ”) names both a spirit of opposition to Christ already at work among false teachers (1 John 2:18-22; 4:3; 2 John 7) and a specific “man of sin” whose self-exaltation “above all that is called God” precedes Christ’s return (2 Thess. 2:3-4). This man of sin is the papacy of Rome: no pope can be head of the church, but is instead “that Antichrist, that Man of sin, and Son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the Church against Christ.”1

Confessional Definition

The confession states the identification directly, in its chapter on the church:

“The Lord Jesus Christ is the Head of the Church, in whom by the appointment of the Father, all power for the calling, institution, order, or Government of the Church, is invested in a supream and soveraigne manner; neither can the Pope of Rome in any sense be head thereof, but is that Antichrist, that Man of sin, and Son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the Church against Christ, and all that is called God; whom the Lord shall destroy with the brightness of his coming.”1

The clause borrows its language directly from 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4 and 2:8, applying Paul’s “man of sin,” “son of perdition,” and “brightness of his coming” to the papal office as such, not to any one pope personally. The paragraph ties the two claims together: because Christ alone holds “all power for the calling, institution, order, or Government of the Church,” a human claimant to that same headship is what the confession names Antichrist.

Biblical Basis

Two distinct New Testament pictures stand behind the confession’s identification: a general “spirit of antichrist” already active in the apostolic church, and a specific “man of sin” whose rise Paul places before Christ’s return.

A spirit already at work

John writes that “even now are there many antichrists,” identifying the antichrist not with one figure but with anyone who “denieth that Jesus is the Christ” or “denieth the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:18, 22). The same letter calls “every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh… that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world” (1 John 4:3), and 2 John 7 applies the same word to “many deceivers… entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.” Mastricht reads this “spirit of antichrist” as naming “everyone who teaches perverse things in the business of religion,” a pattern rather than a single figure.2

The man of sin

Paul warns the Thessalonians against being “shaken in mind” by the belief that the Lord’s return was already at hand: “that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; who opposeth and 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” (2 Thess. 2:3-4). Hodge reads “the temple of God” here as Paul’s own ordinary term for the church, not the literal Jerusalem temple, so that the passage describes a power that rises within Christendom and claims churchwide authority, not an outside persecutor.3 Paul adds that “the mystery of iniquity doth already work” even in his own day (2 Thess. 2:7), restrained for a time by someone or something Paul expects the Thessalonians to recognize without further explanation (2 Thess. 2:6-7).

Historical Development

Patristic reception: identifying the restrainer

Hodge reports “the almost unanimous judgment of the early fathers” that the power restraining Antichrist’s revelation in Paul’s own day (2 Thess. 2:6-7) was the Roman Empire: so long as imperial authority stood, no single ecclesiastical power could rise to become virtual sovereign over the whole church. As that authority declined, papal authority grew.4

The Reformation: Calvin’s identification

Calvin states the identification at length in the Institutes, arguing it is not personal invective but a direct application of Paul’s own words:

“To some we seem slanderous and petulant, when we call the Roman Pontiff Antichrist. But those who think so perceive not that they are bringing a charge of intemperance against Paul, after whom we speak, nay, in whose very words we speak.”5

Calvin traces the same marks Paul gives: Antichrist “sit[s] in the temple of God” (2 Thess. 2:4), reigns “with great swelling words of vanity” (Dan. 7:25, read of Antiochus as Antichrist’s type), and is known chiefly because “he would rob God of his honour and take it to himself,” which Calvin argues the papacy does in claiming Christ’s own headship over the church and the power to forgive sin.5 He also states that the “mystery of iniquity” Paul describes “was neither to be introduced by one man, nor to terminate in one man,” the same institutional reading Hodge would later argue at greater length.5

The Particular Baptist tradition: Gill’s account

Writing a century after Calvin, in the generation just after the 1689 confession itself, Gill treats the identification as settled and adds a specific historical trigger for the papacy’s rise: Antichrist “lay greatly hid for a while, and was let and hindered from a more open appearance by the Roman emperor; yet, upon his removal from Rome to Constantinople, way was made for him to take his seat, and show his power.”6 Reading Daniel 7:25’s “time, and times, and the dividing of time” as 1,260 years, Gill notes that dates fixed for Antichrist’s fall, including the very year in which he preached this sermon, had failed to arrive, and states that Antichrist’s ruin will come partly through the ordinary spread of gospel preaching and partly through “the pouring out of the seven vials of God’s wrath” (Rev. 15-16).6

Systematic defense: Hodge

Hodge, writing in 1873, gives the fullest single case for reading Antichrist as an institution rather than an individual. Prophetic idiom regularly personifies kingdoms as one figure, as Daniel’s beasts represent nations rather than particular men, and Antichrist’s assigned work “extends over far too long a period to be accomplished by one man.”7 The designations “man of sin” and “son of perdition” are religious rather than political, and Antichrist’s rise is “after the working of Satan, with… signs and lying wonders,” not the ordinary means by which worldly rulers gain power.7 Applied to the papacy, Hodge lists a claimed supreme authority over the faith of all Christians, a claimed power to forgive sin and remit purgatorial punishment, a persecuting record (he names the Thirty Years’ War, the massacres of the Piedmontese, the Duke of Alva’s campaign in the Netherlands, the Spanish Inquisition, and the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day in France), and a self-exaltation “above all that is called God” through claims to infallibility and to authority effectively superseding Scripture.8 “If such pretensions as these do not constitute the power which makes them Antichrist,” Hodge concludes, “then nothing more remains.”8

Opposing Views

A general antichristian spirit, not one power or person

Hodge describes a reading, alongside his own, that takes 1 John’s “many antichrists” as the whole of what the term names: any person, teaching, or power that denies Christ, rather than one culminating figure or institution.9 On this reading, the New Testament’s antichrist language describes a recurring pattern across church history, present already in the apostolic age and continuing since, rather than a single identifiable subject the church should expect to name.

A future individual world ruler

Others read Antichrist as a single person still to come. Hodge describes this as “the view generally adopted by Romanists and by many eminent evangelical Protestant theologians,” and quotes Bishop Charles John Ellicott’s statement of it: Antichrist as “one single personal being, as truly man as He whom he impiously opposes,” yet to be revealed, and “the concluding and most appalling phenomenon” of the great apostasy Paul describes.10 On this view, the papacy at most anticipates or foreshadows a still-future figure rather than exhausting the prophecy itself.

Objections and Responses

Objection: Paul calls Antichrist “the man of sin,” singular, which names one person rather than an institution. Hodge answers that this follows ordinary prophetic usage: Daniel’s beasts symbolize kingdoms, not individual men, and Scripture regularly speaks of nations or institutions under one figure. Even those who insist Antichrist is a single man must concede that the “restrainer” of 2 Thessalonians 2:6-7 is a power rather than a person, since no one candidate for an individual Antichrist has ever been removed to make way for another individual’s rise.7

Objection: the papacy has never literally sat in a physical temple in Jerusalem, so Paul’s picture does not fit. Calvin and Hodge both read “the temple of God” as Paul’s own ordinary term for the church, which he elsewhere calls God’s temple, rather than the literal building in Jerusalem.3 On that reading, a claim to supreme, churchwide headship fulfills the prophecy without requiring a literal seat in a rebuilt temple.

Objection: identifying a specific historical institution as Antichrist is polemical name-calling, not sober exegesis. Calvin’s own answer is that he is not inventing an insult but applying Paul’s own stated mark for Antichrist, that “he would rob God of his honour and take it to himself,” to the papacy’s own claims of headship over the church and authority to forgive sin, “in whose very words we speak.”5

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” para. 4. ↩ ↩2

  2. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), 633. ↩

  3. Charles Hodge, “Second Advent,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 787-834, at 810-811. ↩ ↩2

  4. Hodge, 817-818. ↩

  5. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 4, chap. 7, 384-385. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  6. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book V, chap. 14, “Of the Spiritual Reign of Christ.” ↩ ↩2

  7. Hodge, 811-812. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  8. Hodge, 812-814. ↩ ↩2

  9. Hodge, 808-809. ↩

  10. Hodge, 816-817. ↩