Lux Lucet

In his book The Incarnation, Gordon Clark criticized the Council of Chalcedon for its failure to define the terms it used in the famous creed it produced.  “Discard or define,” was Clark’s slogan. 

John Robbins put the same thought this way, if you define your terms, you don’t know what you’re talking about. 

So in the spirit of Gordon Clark and John Robbins, I’d like to take time to define the terms used in the title of this talk.

Antichrist

My definition of Antichrist is that which was accepted by nearly all Protestants before the 20^th century.  Antichrist is the office of the papacy.  The original language of the Westminster Confession of Faith summed up this view quite nicely in Chapter 25.6.  It reads, “There is no other head of the church but the Lord Jesus Christ: nor 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.” But this language was altered in the 1903 revision of the Confession by the Presbyterian Church USA to remove the language identifying the pope as “Antichrist,” “man of sin,” and “son of perdition.” 

Two of the best Presbyterian theologians of the 20^th century did not offer much in the way of objection to the removal of this language from the Confession.  Writing in the November 28, 1936 issue of the “Presbyterian Guardian,” J. Gresham Machen commented that the edition of the Confession adopted by the Presbyterian Church of America[1] was the same as the doctrinal standards that existed in 1902, “except that two brief statements – one declaring the Pope to be Antichrist and the other declaring it to be sinful to refuse an oath when the civil magistrate requires it, are omitted.”[2]

B.B. Warfield noted in his article “The Confession of Faith as Revised in 1903” that “The motive of the revisers seems to have been to avoid calling the Pope of Rome ‘that antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the church against Christ and all that is called God” – which does seem rather strong language.  Why the revisers wished to avoid applying these terms to the Pope of Rome we can only conjecture.  But their avoidance of it need not imply that they – some or all of them – felt prepared to deny that the Pope of Rome is the Antichrist of Scripture.”[3]  As do many Bible-believing Presbyterians, I count myself an admirer of B.B. Warfield, but these comments from him are disappointing.  The most likely reason that the revisers excised the language identifying the Pope of Rome as Antichrist, man of sin, and son of perdition is the very one Warfield denies was their motive, that they – some or all of them – were prepared to deny that the Pope of Rome was the Antichrist of the Scriptures.  The history of the American Presbyterian church since 1903 substantiates this reasoning, as even highly educated Presbyterians from that day to the present have become increasingly willing to deny that the Pope of Rome is the Antichrist of the Scriptures, something that was once clearly understood even by the plowboy with a Bible.   

But what the revisers did by striking the Confession’s language about the identity of Antichrist was something far worse than merely sowing confusion about who Antichrist is.  By denying that the Pope of Rome is the Antichrist, the revisers of the Confession also denied the entire Protestant system of prophetic interpretation known as historicism, of which system the identity of Antichrist as the papacy is a key component.[4]

It seems to this Presbyterian in the Year of Our Lord 2023 that the removal of the Confession’s language on the identity of Antichrist, while it may have appeared minor to observers at the time, opened the floodgates for the false Jesuit eschatologies of Preterism and Futurism – both of which deny a present Antichrist, instead placing him far in the past or at a time still to come – to come pouring into Protestant church, thus blinding, as it were, even the elect to the work of Antichrist taking place right in front of their noses.

One of these works, I argue in this paper, is the flooding of America with illegal aliens, many of them Roman Catholics, for the purpose of subverting our Protestant Republic, capturing the nation for Rome, and incorporating it into Rome’s planned system of world government. 

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