Calvin cancels Nero as Antichrist and points to Satan and the Papacy

koot van wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD)

Kyungpook National University

Sangju Campus

South Korea

Conjoint lecturer of Avondale College

Australia

15 August 2010

The Antichrist is known from chapter 7:25 and 8:10-12 of the book of Daniel and from a number of places in the New Testament, especially the book of Thessalonians.

Seventh Day Adventists have identified the Antichrist by its number 666 in Revelation 13 by counting the Latin numbers of the Papacy title: VICARIUS FILII DEI together and ending with exactly 666. It also means "substitute for the Son of God". This title is reserved in the Bible only for the Holy Spirit but in a number of places and events in the Catholic Church this was claimed for the papacy. Recently they have modified the title to read VICARIUS CHRISTI which is the same but in a slightly modified form. There is a tiara that actually reads VICARIUS CHRISTI.

This identification is cardinal to the understanding of the Scriptures by Seventh Day Adventists and prophets explained it in the similar way. The 1260 years persecution period mentioned in both Daniel 7 and Revelation 12 started in 538 CE and lasted until 1798. It was the period of the Holy Roman Empire. The papacy played the main role during this period.

In 1798 the papacy and the catholic church received a "deadly wound" if we are to use the words of Revelation 13 but that wound was healed around 1928 when the Vatican city was properly installed again. But then Vatican II came and the Catholic church changed its modus operandi and image to that of pluralism, an openness to ecumenism, trying to follow the mixed constitution approach of the USA. It has the fake appearance that for the sake of common good, and global peace, tolerance to differences, distinctions are primary and anyone or any group trying to emphasize the differences should be viewed with concern. There is a greater role to inclusiveness, pluralism, ecumenism, multi-religions, multi-gods and this humanism approach, even to the exclusion of biblical foundational principles, causes some liberal Seventh Day Adventists, also embedded with humanism and secularism, to try to remove the VICARIUS FILII DEI = 666 identification from the papacy and the catholic church.

So Adventists identify the papacy as the antichrist. Did they? Let us ask John Calvin in the book of Thessalonians who the Antichrist is.

Says Calvin:

“It was said of Nero that he was taken up from the world and would return to persecute the Church by his tyranny. This was nothing but an old wife's fable. And yet, the minds of the ancients were so bewitched that they believed that Nero would be Antichrist. Paul however, is not speaking of one individual but of a kingdom seized by Satan for the purpose of setting up a seat of abomination in the midst of God's temple. This we see accomplished in popery"  (John Calvin, Epistle to the Thessalonians, John Calvin Commentaries, Vol. 4 [1960]: 399).

When Seventh Day Adventists happen to agree with John Calvin here, or John Knox, or Martin Luther, or John Wycliff in his De Papa [1379], it is not because they are following the interpretation of these reformers. It is because their method of interpretation with historicism brought them to the same understanding or end-result as all these men.

If an Adventist will present this position at the Society of Biblical Literature, all scholars will frown on him/her and think it is not conventional. There was a time when it was conventional: the Reformation.

In the preface of Vitae Romanorum Pontificum  (Basle, 1535), A5, we find the words of Henry VIII [or is it Robert Barnes?] in this translation into English by N. S. Tjernagel of Henry VIII and the Lutherans, page 148, "though I was not at first historically well informed, I attacked the papacy on the basis of Holy Scripture. Now I recognize heartily to see that others have attacked it from another source, that is, from history. I feel I have truimphed in my point of view as I note how clearly history agrees with Scripture. What I have learned and taught from Paul and Daniel, namely that the Pope is the Antichrist, that history proclaims, pointing to and indicating the very man himself".

This position is as Seventh Day Adventist as you can get. The only difference is that they probably attacked the papacy with a philosophy of a mixture of politics and religion, as is the modus operandi in Islam, Buddhism, Catholicism and most other religions, whereas in Seventh Day Adventism, politics and religion are separated and cannot be mixed. Thus, there is no civil right activism, labor unionism, demonstrations, Christian politicizing for or against the pope in Seventh Day Adventism.

So how did modern conventionalism succeed in making Reformers non-Reformers? Julius Wellhausen's JEDP theory evolved into Historical Criticism of the Bible and ripped it to pieces and Brevard Childs' canonical approach did the same, but just starting from the whole canon (Childs) and not single books (Wellhausen), with so-called Relecturing [re-reading] Methods since 1980. Adventism also emphasize the acceptance of the whole Scripture as starting point, but with the original authors as the original authors, no concoctions and fabrications theories of a Wellhausinian type or the types suggested by Childs and the other relecturing scholars following him currently. Secondly, the modern conventionalism glorified James Barr for crying in his books against Fundamentalism, Biblicism. Literalism, and preventing scholars of nurturing the Word of God, it is easier to make Reformers follow currently sola opinion  rather than sola scriptura. Modern Seventh Day Adventists are more Reformational than any of the seminaries of the current Reformed tradition(s). Therefore, a Seventh Day Adventist that is honored at the SBL, is evidence of a shift, either of the SDA scholar from Reformational conventions to non-Reformational conventions, or a shift by scholars of the Reformed tradition from non-Reformational conventions to Reformational conventions of a Calvinistic and other type.