Tom Friess – Romanism and the Reformation Part 2

This is the continuation of Tom Friess – Romanism and the Reformation Part 1.

Transcription

Welcome to Inquisition Update. My name’s Tom Friess.

We’ve started a new book here entitled Romanism and the Reformation by Henry Grattan Guinness, one of the great Protestant preachers of the 19th century. This book was written in the late 1800s and is an icon among Protestant literature. And I’m very blessed by God to read this book.

Henry Grattan Guinness was a Protestant in the true sense of the word. That means he held to a historicist view of Bible prophecy and history.

In history, he saw the rise of the Antichrist, the man of sin, the son of perdition, the papacy, as did all the Protestant reformers and all true believers in Christ prior to the Protestant Reformation, all the way back to the Albigensians, all the way back to the Waldenses, all the way back to the first century church. This book is about Antichrist.

Remember, H. Grattan Guinness has given us a thumbnail sketch of the rise of Antichrist from the fall of the pagan Roman Empire and the Caesars, the restraining power that was holding back the rise of Antichrist. Once the Caesars and the old pagan Roman Empire was destroyed, up rose in its place the man of sin, the son of perdition, the biblical, historical, and prophetic Antichrist of the Bible, the papacy. Now we’ll continue where we left off, the last full paragraph on page 16.

After the conversion of Constantine, when Christianity became the established religion in the Roman world, the church passed rapidly from a state of persecution, poverty, and distress to one of honor, wealth, and ease, and it degenerated as rapidly from its early purity. Covetousness and avarice came in like a flood, and ecclesiastical power became an object of eager ambition even to ungodly men. The bishop was a wealthy, influential, worldly dignitary instead of a humble Christian pastor.

Opulence poured in upon the priesthood, alike from the fears and the affections of the converts, and their intellectual superiority over the barbarian nations had the effect of increasing still more their ascendancy. The time came when they alone retained any semblance of learning, or could prepare a treaty, or write a document, or teach princes to read. By a variety of sordid frauds, they contrived to secure to the church immense wealth and an enormous share of land.

But they recognized their own subjection to the secular power, and respected mutually each other’s independence. Claims to supremacy over other bishops began, however, before long to be advanced by the bishops of Rome, sometimes on one ground, and sometimes on another, but it was long before they were admitted. Papal authority, indeed, made no great progress beyond the bounds of Italy until the end of the sixth century.

At this period, the celebrated Gregory I, a talented, active, and ambitious man, was bishop of Rome. He stands at the meeting place of ancient and medieval history, and his influence had a marked effect on the growth of Latin Christianity. He exalted his own position very highly in his correspondence and intercourse with other bishops and with the sovereigns of Western Europe, with whom he was in constant communication.

Claims that had been previously only occasionally suggested were now systematically pressed and urged. He dwelt much on the power conferred on the bishops of Rome in the possession of the keys and the kingdom of heaven, which were committed to Peter and his successors. The Gothic nations were too ignorant to unravel the sophistries of this clever and determined priest, and they permitted him to assume a kind of oversight of their ecclesiastical matters.

His successor, Boniface III, carried these pretensions still higher. He was the last of the bishops of Rome and the first of the popes. In his days, the claim to supremacy over all other bishops was not only definitely made, but it was acknowledged by the secular power and confirmed by an imperial edict.

The wicked usurper focused to serve his own selfish purposes, conceded to Boniface III in AD 607 the headship over all the churches of Christendom. A pillar is still standing in Rome which was erected in memory of this important concession. This was a tremendous elevation, the first upward step on the ladder that led the bishops of Rome from the humble pastorate of a local church to the mightiest throne in Europe.

But still all that was claimed or granted was simple episcopacy, though of a universal kind. No thought of secular government existed in this period. The matter, however, did not stop here.

This supreme episcopal jurisdiction led to constant interferences of the Roman bishop in the affairs of various nations of Christendom and to ever-increasing pretensions to authority in matters secular as well as ecclesiastical until 500 years later in AD 1073, Pope Gregory VII took a great stride in advance and established a theocracy on earth. He was the first who claimed, as representative of deity, to be above all the kings in the world. This proud and self-exalting man strove and strove successfully, not only to emancipate the spiritual power from all control by the state, not only to secure for it absolute independence, but further, to subject the secular power of princes to the spiritual power of priests, and thus to establish at Rome, in his own person and in the succession of the Roman pontiffs, an absolute and supreme ruler of the world.

Nor did he propound this new and startling doctrine as a theory only. With daring audacity, he excommunicated the German emperor Henry IV, releasing his subjects from allegiance to him, and forbade them to obey him as sovereign.

And here, the author gives us a note in regards to the excommunication of Henry IV. He says,

Wherefore, trusting in the justice and mercy of God, (these are words spoken by the Pope who excommunicated Henry, he says,) wherefore, trusting in the justice and mercy of God, and of his blessed mother, the ever-blessed Virgin Mary, on your authority, that of St. Peter and St. Paul, the above-named Henry, and all his adherents, I excommunicate and bind in the fetters of anathema. On the part of God Almighty and on yours, I interdict him from the government of all Germany and of Italy. I deprive him of all royal power and dignity. I prohibit every Christian from rendering him obedience as king. I absolve all who have sworn or shall swear allegiance to his sovereignty from their oaths.

This is from Milman in his work entitled History of Latin Christianity, Volume 4, page 121.

So this is how the Pope excommunicated Henry, the Emperor of Europe, and released all of his subjects from his authority. Now continuing with the text, he says,

He established also an undisguised and irresistible despotism over the national churches in other lands by enacting that no bishop in the Catholic Church should enter on the exercise of his functions until the Pope had confirmed his election, a law of far-reaching and vast importance by which perhaps more than by any other means, Rome sustained for centuries her temporal power as well as her ecclesiastical influence.

And now I will make a comment. This is where the Bishop of Rome created a shadow government in every land. When this Pope stripped away from the individual churches their power to elect their own bishops and took that power unto himself, the Pope began to elect bishops for all the churches that were first loyal to him and not to the nations or to the local churches. And if you can imagine the Pope usurping the place of Christ on earth as King of Kings and Lord of Lords, if he is allowed to pick the bishops for the church, he is allowed to interfere in all church affairs. And not only that, when this system of bishops grew all over the world, it became the structure for a shadow government in every nation of the world, not only to control the churches, but to control the governors.

All right, now I’ll continue with the text. It says,

Many of the constant quarrels between our early English kings and the Popes of Rome, as well as many similar feuds on the continent, arose out of this flagrant usurpation of national rights and invasion of national liberties.

Now I will ask the question, if this is true, how did it happen? Simply by allowing the Pope to pick the bishops. The quarrels began. These bishops were not loyal to their churches or their nations. They were loyal to a foreign potentate, the biblical King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the counterfeit Christ on the earth.

The papacy regards himself as the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, and he acts on that usurpation, and the bishops are his servants. Now as a result of that, flagrant usurpation of national and individual liberties were undertaken by the papacy, and therefore constant quarrels arose. Now continuing with the text, it says,

the Pope

During the interdict, the churches in a country were all closed, bells were silenced, the dead were unburied, no masses could be performed, no rites except those of baptism and extreme unction were celebrated. This state of things was so dreadful to a superstitious age that monarchs were obliged to yield, lest the people should revolt. The result of every such interdict was an increase to the power of the papacy, and they soon brought all refractory rulers in Europe to terms.

Alright, one more comment on this. When the Pope was given the power to elect the bishops for all the churches, and this shadow government was put in place, all of Europe was subject to the power of the Pope, and all the governments of Europe were subject to the power of the Pope.

He literally became, in all practical terms, the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. And it says,

Pope Innocent III in AD 1198.

The leading objects which the Roman pontiffs had steadily pursued for centuries seemed at last attained independent sovereignty, absolute supremacy over the Christian church, and full control over the princes of Europe. The historian Hallam says of this man, quote, he was formidable beyond all his predecessors, perhaps beyond all his successors. On every side, the thunder of Rome broke over the heads of princes.

And right here, the author gives us another note, he says,

“The three great sovereigns of Western Europe, the kings of Germany, and of France, and of England, had seen their realms under papal interdict, themselves under sentence of excommunication. But the papal power under Innocent not only inspired to humble the loftiest, hardly one of the smaller kingdoms had not already been taught, or was soon to be taught, to feel the awful majesty of the papacy. From the northern ocean to Hungary, and from Hungary to the Spanish shore on the Atlantic, Innocent is exercising what takes the language of protective or parental authority, but which in most cases is asserted by the terrible interdict.”

And again, an interdict is issued by the papacy upon nations and peoples to close down all the churches so that no one can be baptized, so that no one can be married, so that no one can participate in the mass, so that no one can be buried, no one can be given extreme unction. These were all vitally important, according to Roman Catholic Church teaching, for the salvation of every Roman Catholic. So when the Pope closed the churches, he literally closed heaven.

And so, this being the case, the Roman Catholics of every nation would eagerly rise up to overthrow whatever king the Pope was unhappy with. And this is how the Pope ruled the kings of the earth. They were always under threat of interdict and excommunication from the church, and always under threat of overthrow by its own people at the behest of the papacy.

No one was able to make war against the papacy, because the papacy held a spiritual grip over the people. Now, continuing with the text, he says,

King John of England and Philip II of Aragon were both constrained to resign their kingdoms and receive them back as spiritual fiefs from the Roman pontiff, who claimed also the right to decide the election of the emperors of Germany by his confirmation or veto.

Quote, The noonday of papal dominion extended from the pontificate of Innocent III, inclusively, to that of Boniface VIII, or in other words, throughout the thirteenth century. Rome inspired during this age all the terror of her ancient name. She was once more the mistress of the world, and kings were her vassals.

That’s a quote from the work from Hallam entitled History of the Middle Ages, page 368 in the fourth edition. Now Pope Innocent III claimed also the right to dispense with both civil and canon law when he pleased, and to decide cases by the plentitude of his own inherent power. He dispensed also with the obligation of promises made on oaths, undermining thus the force of contracts and treaties.

The military power of the papacy dates also from this man, as the Crusades had left him in possession of an army. Systematic persecution of so-called heretics began also in this papacy. The corruptions, cruelties, and assumptions of the papacy had become so intolerable that protests were making themselves heard in many quarters.

It was felt these must be silenced at any cost, and a wholesale slaughter of heretics was commenced with a view to their extermination. The Inquisition was founded. The Albigenses and the Waldenses were murderously persecuted, and superstition and tyranny were at their height. From this century, papal persecution of the witnesses for the truth never ceased until the final establishment of Protestantism at the end of the 17th century.

In A.D. 1294, Pope Boniface VIII became pope, and by his superior audacity, he threw into the shade even Innocent III. He deserves to be designated the most usurping of mankind, as witnessed his celebrated bull, Unum Sanctum.

In this document, the full claims of the papacy come out. We have noted several ever-increasing stages of papal assumption already, but now we reach the climax, the claim which, if it were a true one, would abundantly justify all the rest. We reach the towering pinnacle and topmost peak of human self-exaltation.

What was the claim of Boniface VIII? It was that the pope represents God upon the earth. As this claim is the most extraordinary and audacious ever made by mortal man, I will state it, not in my own words, but in the words of the highest papal authority.

In A.D. 1294, Boniface VIII became Pope, and by his superior audacity, he threw into the shade even Innocent III. He deserves to be designated the most usurping of mankind, as witnessed his celebrated bull Unum Sanctum.

Now, I’ll stop and interject that a bull, at this time in history, a papal bull was the most authoritative writing that a pope could utter. A papal bull was equated to thunder from the papacy. Everyone heard it, and everyone heeded what he said.

Now, in this celebrated papal utterance, this thunder from the papacy called a bull, was named Unum Sanctum, and in this document, the full claims of the papacy come out. We have noted several ever-increasing stages of papal assumption already, but now we reach the climax, the claim, which, if it were a true one, would abundantly justify all the rest. We reach the towering pinnacle and topmost peak of human self-exaltation.

What was the claim of Pope Boniface VIII? It was that the pope represents God upon the earth. As this claim is the most extraordinary and audacious ever made by mortal man, I will state it not in my own words, but in the words of the highest papal authority.

In the summary of things concerning the dignity, authority, and infallibility of the pope, are these words,

“The Pope is of so great dignity and excellence that he is not merely man, but as if God and the Vicar of God. The Pope alone is called Most Holy, Divine Monarch, and Supreme Emperor, and King of Kings. The Pope is of so great dignity and power that he constitutes one and the same tribunal with Christ, so that whatsoever the Pope does seems to proceed from the mouth of God. The Pope is as God on earth.”

That which was claimed by Pope Boniface VIII in the 13th century has been claimed ever since by a succession of Popes down to Pope Pius IX and Leo XIII in the 19th century. The Pope speaks today as the Vicar of Christ, as God’s Vicegerent. The great ecumenical council of 1870 proclaimed him such, and declared him to be infallible.

A professor of history in the Roman University, writing on the council of 1870, uses the following language, which strikingly expresses the papal ideal.

The treasures of revelation, the treasures of truth, the treasures of righteousness, the treasures of supernatural graces upon earth have been deposited by God in the hands of one man who is the sole dispenser and keeper of them. The life-giving work of the divine incarnation, the work of wisdom and of love and of mercy, is ceaselessly continued in the ceaseless action of one man, thereto ordained by providence. This man is the Pope.

This is evidently implied in his designation itself, the Vicar of Christ, for if he holds the place of Christ upon the earth, that means that he continues the work of Christ in this world and is in respect of us what Christ himself would be if he were here below, himself visibly governing the church.

“Do you hear these words? Do you take them in? Do you grasp the thought which they express? Do you perceive the main idea and central principle of the papacy? The Pope is not simply man, but, quote, as if God, unquote, and, quote, the Vicar of God, unquote, as God on earth.

No wonder the sentence is addressed to every Pope on his coronation,

“Know thou art the father of princes and kings and the governor of the world. No wonder that he is worshipped by the cardinals and archbishops and bishops, by priests and monks and nuns innumerable, by all the millions of Roman Catholics throughout the world. No wonder that he has dethroned monarchs and given away kingdoms, dispensed pardons and bestowed indulgences, canonized saints, remitted purgatorial pains, promulgated dogmas, and issued bulls and laws and extravagance, laid empires under interdicts, bestowed benedictions, and uttered anathemas. Who is like unto him on earth? What are great men, philosophers, statesmen, conquerors, princes, kings, and even emperors of the earth compared to him? Their glory is of this earth, earthy. His is from above. It is divine. He is the representative of Christ, the creator and redeemer, the Lord of all. He is as Christ. He takes the place of Christ. He is as God, as God on earth.

This blasphemous notion is the keystone of the entire papal arch. It is the stupendous axis upon which the whole papal world has rotated for ages and is rotating at this hour.

But to complete this very brief sketch of the history of Romanism, I may just remind you that the long and checkered decline of papal dominion may be dated from the pontificate of Boniface VIII from the end of the 13th century. Early in the next century, Clement V took the strange and fatal step of removing the papal government from Rome to Avignon, France, where it remained for 70 years, greatly to the detriment of its authority and power. There it was to some extent depended upon the court of France, and it also lost the affections of Italy and the prestige of Rome.

Then came the great schism, which seriously weakened and discredited the papacy. And now this is in reference to the schism of 1054, when the eastern sect of the Roman church broke away, that called the Orthodox Church. The eastern church broke away and divided the Catholic church in two. And I believe this represents to the two iron legs as depicted in Daniel’s vision. Nonetheless, I’ll continue. It says,

Before long, Wycliffe, the morning star of the Reformation, arose. And at last came the blessed movement itself, with Martin Luther and the rest of the reformers, which delivered Germany, England, and other lands from the papal yoke, dividing Christendom into two camps, Romanism and Protestant. Vainly did Rome seek with frantic efforts to arrest or reverse this movement.

Hecatombs (a large-scale sacrifice or slaughter) of martyrs, oceans of blood, centuries of war could not stop it. At the beginning of the 16th century, Rome boasted that not a single heretic could be found. Now, Christendom contains 150 million of those whom the papacy calls heretics, and whom it would exterminate by fire and sword if it could.

But it succeeded in crushing out the Reformation movement in France, Spain, and Italy by awful inquisitional tortures, by bloody massacres, by cruel wars, by the revocation of the Edict of Nance, by the deeds of such men as Philip of Spain with his armada, the Duke of Alba and his cruelties in the Netherlands. Rome recovered some of the grounds she lost in the Reformation, and she still exercises spiritual power over 180 million of mankind. Though her temporal power was overthrown for a time in the French Revolution, and the joy of Italy brought to an end in 1870, her claim to it is in no wise abated, nor her pretension that she has a right to rule the world.

The religion of Rome has so disgusted the continental nations that, knowing nothing better, they have drifted into practical infidelity, and with one consent, they have to a large extent despoiled the Roman Catholic Church of her revenues, secularized her property and her religious houses, and repudiated her interference in their respective governments. For the last 500 years, the authority of the papacy has been declining, quote, slowly and silently receding from her claims to temporal power. The Pontiffs hardly detect their dilapidated citadel from the revolutionary concussions of modern times, the rapacity of governments, and the growing aversion to ecclesiastical influence.

Those who know what Rome has once been are best able to appreciate what she is. Those who have seen the thunderbolt in the hands of the Gregories and the Innocents will hardly be intimidated at the sallies of decreptitude, the important dart of Priam amid the crackling ruins of Troy.

So wrote Henry Hallam in the early part of this century, and while the fall of the temporal power has since taken place and carried to low watermark that steady ebb tide of papal influence which he alleges, yet there has been during the last half century a revival of Roman influence in Protestant nations, which Hallam probably did not expect.

Milman’s History of the Latin Christianity is here on the table. It occupies nine octavo volumes and would take weeks to read. Ranke’s History of the Popes is in three volumes and does not cover the whole subject. Dubigny’s History of the Reformation is in five volumes and takes up only one episode of the long story. The papacy has existed for 13 centuries, has had to do with 40 or 50 generations of mankind in all the countries of Christendom. Its history is consequently extremely complicated and various.

It embraces both secular and ecclesiastical matters, and has more or less to do with all that has happened in Europe since the fall of the old Roman Empire. The time is long, the sphere vast, the story exceedingly complex. I want to tell it all, in outline at least, in a narrative that you can read in less than five minutes or write in ten.

You must bring in every point of importance, the time and the circumstances of the origin of the papacy, its moral character, its political relations, its geographical seat, its self-exalting utterances and acts, its temporal sovereignty, and a comparison of the extent of its dominions with those of other kingdoms of Europe, its blasphemous pretensions, its cruel and long-continued persecutions of God’s people, the duration of its dominion, its present decay, and the judgments that have overtaken it. And you must moreover add what you think its end is likely to be, and explain the relation of the whole history to the revealed plan of divine providence. You must get all this in, not in the dry style of an annual time summary of the events of the year, but in an interesting, vivid, picturesque style that will impress the facts on the memory so that to forget them shall be impossible.

Can you do it? I mightly safely offer a prize of any amount to the person who can solve this puzzle and write this story as I have described. But hard, even impossible as it would be for you to do this, even if you perfectly knew the history of the last 13 centuries, how infinitely impossible it would be if that history lay in the unknown and inscrutable future instead of the past and the present.

Now I’m going to stop and comment here. Here is the first salvo that H. Grattan Guinness launches against that which is universally taught in the churches today, called Futurism. The idea that Antichrist does not come until the last seven years before Christ’s return. Futurism is a lie.

Historicism as believed and taught by H. Grattan Guinness and all those in the Christian world who preceded him were historicists. They saw in the papacy the fulfillment of the Bible prophecies regarding Antichrist, past, present, and future. There’s one and one only Antichrist in the world and he arose shortly after the restrainer was taken out of the way, the old Roman Empire and the Caesars that governed it.

The papacy is, was, and always will be the biblical, historical, and prophetic Antichrist of the Bible. And those who, like myself in past years, who believe in Futurism have believed a lie, a great delusion that has deceived the whole world and prepared them to receive a false Antichrist and a false Christ. It is the papacy who proposes to present himself to the world as Christ himself on the earth.

That has been its history all the way back to its formation and that will be its end. Again, H. Grattan Guinness says,

Now this is precisely what the prophet Daniel, by inspiration of the omniscient and eternal God, has done. He told the whole story of the papacy 25 centuries ago. He omitted none of the points I have enumerated and yet the prophecy only occupies 17 verses of a chapter which can be read slowly and impressively in less than five minutes. This is because it is written in the only language in which it is possible thus to compress the ancient multitudes of history, the ancient language of hieroglyphics.

God revealed the future to the prophet Daniel by a vision in which he saw not the events but living, moving, speaking hieroglyphics of the events. These Daniel simply describes and his description of them constitutes the prophecy written in the seventh chapter of his book. Our consideration of this remarkable prediction we must however postpone for the present as we have already claimed your attention long enough for one lecture.

That concludes the first lecture in a series of lectures contained in this book, Romanism and the Reformation by H. Grattan Guinness and we’ll only be beginning lecture two before we run out of time. I implore each one of my listeners that after this program when you have quiet time to go back and read this first lesson over again. Romanism and the Reformation.