# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1861_S275
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

That the Pope at Rome is the Antichrist. 275

...withdraw from the Antichrist's kingdom, and curse it. Matt. 7:15; Titus 3:10; 2 Cor. 6:14." (Hase, p. 347 ff.)

We are now by no means minded to let fall again this knowledge inherited from the fathers; rather we confess freely and openly that we hold the Roman Pope to be the Antichrist, convinced by the arguments of the Reformers, as Melanchthon, for instance, has assembled them in the passage last cited.*) The only remaining question is: how does the Roman Antichrist relate to the apocalyptic beast?

The apocalyptic beast has seven heads, and according to the Apocalypse's own interpretation these are seven kings who successively hold world dominion (Apoc. 17:9-10). We even learn that in John's time five heads had already fallen, the sixth was reigning, and the seventh had not yet come. The sixth head is thus Rome, the world power of that time, the Roman Caesar, as Daniel describes him as the fourth monarchy. Counting backward there follow Greece, Medo-Persia, Babylon — these are Daniel's four beasts — Assyria, Egypt, and so John goes further back into Old Testament history than Daniel does. The seventh head, following upon Roman world dominion, is the ten-fold rule of the Germanic tribes, indicated by the ten toes of Daniel's image and by the ten horns of the apocalyptic beast. But this head seems to us to be, properly speaking, the antichristian one neither in Apoc. 13 nor in Apoc. 17; for, to leave the latter chapter aside for the moment, the number 666 is assigned to the Antichrist, which we, with Irenaeus (Against Heresies V, 30), resolve by the word Λατεῖνος [Lateinos, "the Latin"].**) In the Latin, in the Roman, in the sixth head

*) Düsterdieck's attacks on the church's faith need not be considered here, since we do not stand with him on the same ground regarding the concept of inspiration. Auberlen and Floerke are already prevented, by the principle necessary to their view of pushing the Antichrist as far as possible into the future, from thinking of the Roman Caesar and the Roman Pope — Floerke scarcely even grants the existence of an "antichristian tendency" (the papacy) prior to the "antichristian person" (p. 67). Ebrard, to be sure, thinks of the papacy in connection with the apocalyptic beast of chapter 13, but has the Antichrist, distinguished from it, appear only at the end of days. So then it would be Hengstenberg alone — who, like us, places the thousand-year kingdom and the reign of Antichrist in the past — who would need to be considered, with his denial that the Pope is the Antichrist. To go into all his objections (II, 1, p. 70 ff.) would take us too far afield here; but the main points on which we cannot agree with him are the following: 1. he underestimates the ungodliness of the papacy; 2. he overlooks the intimate connection between heathen and papal Rome; 3. he himself gives so forced an interpretation of Apoc. 13 and 17 that his reading is impossible. Chief among these is the claim that the healed head is the Roman Caesar, whereas no mortal wound at all had yet been dealt to him through Christ's atonement — as is also the case with the complete omission of the eighth king, in whom, chronologically, after the fall of the seventh king, the beast is represented. — Against Hengstenberg, Althaus has already spoken from a churchly standpoint (The Last Things, in the Neues Hannoversches Zeitblatt, 1856), without, however, attempting a chronology.

**) See Düsterdieck, p. 456: λ=30, α=1, τ=300, ε=5, ι=10, ν=50, ο=70, ς=200. The sum, therefore, =666.