THE APOCALYPTIC TRADITION

Among the many themes prominent in anti-papal writings of the early modern period, few strike a more jarring note to modern ears than the claim that the pope was Antichrist. Nevertheless, as recent historians have demonstrated, the identification of the pope as Antichrist commanded an unchallenged orthodoxy and substantial doctrinal importance in the Elizabethan Church. Indeed, it has been suggested that it was ‘the most important component of the “ideological filter” through which British reformers and reformed viewed the church of Rome and its supporters’. A whole genre of sermons, treatises and popular manuals written to prove the pope to be the Antichrist prophesied by Scripture developed during this period, and extended well into early Stuart times. It has been estimated that between 1588 and 1628 over 100 systematic expositions of the Romish Antichrist were published in England, or by British authors, while the doctrine's appearance in the marginal notes to the Geneva Bible and in Foxe's Acts and Monuments spread such apocalyptic ideas still further. As historians have emphasized, this doctrine was not the preserve of an extreme millenarian minority, but rather cut across theological boundaries, and embraced all the Protestant archbishops of Canterbury from Thomas Cranmer through to George Abbot. The doctrine was also regularly defended in the Universities.Even the collapse of the military threat to England from Spain after 1588 and the drive against presbyterianism did not lead to the marginalization of this tenet. Rather, the doctrine reached its zenith,as an important article of belief upon which puritans and establishment divines could unite.