# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1861_S272
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

272 That the Pope at Rome is the Antichrist.

...prophecy has come not in Antiochus, but in the Pope. "The king shall do according to his will" — that is the Pope's insufferable tyranny: sic volo, sic jubeo! [thus I will, thus I command] "He shall exalt himself against everything that is called God" — that is the Pope, "who boasts in his decretals that he is above Holy Scripture," who has "set up much new worship," who "oppresses Christians with countless laws, and has instituted sin where God wants none." "He shall regard no love of women" — that is what the Pope does, in that he makes accursed the state of marriage which God has blessed. "He shall honor his god Mauzzim" — that is what the Pope does, who commands the sacrifice of the Mass to be worshiped. In the same manner Daniel 8 is also explained in that polemical tract "Revelation of the Antichrist," and here it seems to us above all important where Luther locates the strength of the papacy — in appearance and in gestures. "For it is a very different matter with the principality that the Pope has and with all the principalities in the whole world, which, be they good or bad, cannot do harm if one tolerates them. But the papacy is such a principality that it destroys faith and the Gospel, and sets up in their place gestures and proposals: gestures instead of faith, proposals instead of the Word or the Gospel." (loc. cit. p. 1876) "This king must be the Antichrist, that is, an adversary of Christ and his kingdom. For Christ is such a king as is mighty in truth and is fierce against appearance and outward form, as we see in the Gospel. But this one is such a king as is mighty only in gestures, and likewise fierce against the truth." (p. 1817) Luther lists, to make this clear, "how many kinds of appearance and gesture, phantom and hypocrisy are found in the Pope's most holy kingdom" (p. 1818 ff.): the pride of churchmen, the excess of ecclesiastical riches, the ostentation of dwellings, the special clothing and vestments of the clergy, extravagance in the building of churches and monasteries, the chanting of the hours, the false sacraments, the Mass with its pomp, the distinction of foods and of days, the celibacy of the clergy, the idolatrous worship of relics and holy places, the false wisdom of the universities. Thus Luther interprets As-panim (Dan. 8:23) as referring to the show-nature of the papacy; whereas he understands the word Chidoth as referring to the false and tyrannical lawgiving that contends against faith. "At last the Roman bishop gathered all of these (namely, the gestures that had arisen bit by bit) into a heap and turned them into hard and strict laws, and thereby suppressed Christian liberty, so much so that it is now, without any measure, a greater sin if someone sins against these gestures and laws than if he sins against God's commandment. Thus out of gestures came Chidoth, proposals, and laws; out of the Chidoth, proposals, or laws arose this king's power, and it is from that, then, that this desolation has been brought into the world." (p. 1862) And on this occasion reference is also made to Daniel 7:7-8, to the