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At the time Alcasar wrote, the Protestant Reformers considered the Papal system of the Roman Catholic Church to be the end-time antichrist. The Reformers were nearly unanimous in identifying the Papacy as the Great Harlot of Revelation 17. “For Martin Luther,” a representative of this view, “the Catholic Church was nothing more or less than Babylon — ‘it would be no wonder,’ he wrote in 1520, ‘if God would rain fire and brimstone from heaven and sink Rome into the abyss, as He did Sodom and Gomorrah of old’ — and the pope the Antichrist. ‘If he is not,’ Luther exclaimed, ‘then somebody tell me who is!’”(2) Hundreds of years of Protestant anti-Catholic rhetoric could fill a small library.
For centuries the papacy was the unanimous antichrist candidate.(3) The papal system was identified as “both the ‘man of sin’ and the Babylonian whore of which Scripture speaks (2 Thess. 2; Rev. 17–18). In the conviction of the sixteenth-century Protestants, Rome was the great anti-Christ, and so firmly did this belief become established that it was not until the nineteenth century that it was seriously questioned by evangelicals.”(4) For example, the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) included the following in Chapter 25 section 6:
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.(5)
The antichrist designation was removed in 1789 in the American edition. The revised article 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.”
