From the Middle Ages to Michele Bachmann: The Papacy and Anti-Christian Accusations

Last year American presidential candidate Michele Bachmann was attacked because the confessions of her church declared that the office of the papacy was Antichristian / The Pope was Antichrist.  This position is hardly shocking to those familiar with the history of the churches of the Protestant Reformation.  Declaring the Pope as antichrist was not merely a tradition of Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anabaptists however, it is a part of a much larger tradition that includes even those medieval figures declared “Doctors of the Catholic Church” like St. Bernard of Clairvaux.

Perhaps the most vehement proponent of Pope-as-AntiChrist in the middle ages, was a French (Gallican) Archbishop named Arnulf.  He wrote the vitriolic words:

“a very monster of iniquity, reeking with the blood of his predecessor, mounts the throne of Peter. True, he [Pope Boniface VII] is expelled and condemned; but only to return again… What would you say of such a one, when you behold him sitting upon the throne glittering in purple and gold? Must he not be the ‘Antichrist, sitting in the temple of God, and showing himself as God’? Verily such a one lacketh both wisdom and charity; he standeth in the temple as an image, as an idol, from which as from dead marble you would seek counsel.

But the Church of God is not subject to a wicked pope; nor even absolutely, and on all occasions, to a good one. Let us rather in our difficulties resort to our brethren of Belgium and Germany than to that city, where all things are venal, where judgment and justice are bartered for gold. Let us imitate the great church of Africa, which, in reply to the pretensions of the Roman pontiff, deemed it inconceivable that the Lord should have invested any one person with his own plenary prerogative and judicature, and yet have denied it to the great congregations of his priests assembled in council in different parts of the world… Why should he not be subject in judgment to those who, though lowest in place, are his superiors in virtue and in wisdom? Yea, not even he, the prince of the apostles, declined the rebuke of Paul, though his inferior in place, and, saith the great pope Gregory, ‘if a bishop be in fault, I know not any one such who is not subject to the holy see; but if faultless, let every one understand that he is the equal of the Roman pontiff himself, and as well qualified as he to give judgment in any matter.'” – Archbishop Arnulf of Reims A.D. 991

Whether or not such a belief is affirmed or attacked, it must at least be understood as a historic Christian position nonetheless, not cooked up by Michele Bachmann or backwoods American Lutherans.