In the October 30 edition of the Minnesota Daily, Courtney Blanchard reports an incident during a debate for a congressional seat:
Pat Kessler from WCCO asked Bachmann, a Republican state senator, about the role of religion in her campaign.“The church you belong to is affiliated with the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Senate (sic, Synod), which it says regards the Roman Catholic pope as the Antichrist. Is this true?” he asked.
Bachmann refuted the statement as “absurd” and said she consulted her pastor, who agrees.
I think were I to get this question in a debate, I would have turned the discussion on her Roman Catholic opponent, asking if she follows her Roman Catholic teaching of the condemnation of non-Roman Catholics in the Council of Trent. I would then note that legislation concerning the banning or restriction of Antichrist wasn’t on the current agenda, so anybody’s particular views on Antichrist should not figure into one’s qualifications. I would finish by reiterating the U.S. Constitution’s prescription under Article VI, that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”
The Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod have as part of their confessional subscription the Defense of the Augsburg Confession, which contains the following in Article XV:
If the adversaries defend these human services as meriting justification, grace, and the remission of sins, they simply establish the kingdom of Antichrist. For the kingdom of Antichrist is a new service of God, devised by human authority rejecting Christ, just as the kingdom of Mahomet has services and works through which it wishes to be justified before God; nor does it hold that men are gratuitously justified before God by faith, for Christ’s sake. Thus the Papacy also will be a part of the kingdom of Antichrist if it thus defends human services as justifying.
Given this theological context, if the journalist really wanted to get into the issue, we are all anti-Christ or Antichrist if we deny justification by faith alone through grace alone delivered by Christ alone. Insofar as someone believes that grace is merely the enabler for justification by our good works, someone believes in synergism where God cooperates with man to justify him, or someone believes that there is a way other than Christ’s death on the cross to get into heaven, he or she is Antichrist. This is a much wider net that catches not just Leo X or Benedict XVI (who still officially affirms Trent), but Bishop Schori of the Episcopal Church and others including Mahomet/Mohammed.
aaronmosesbro on 
Dan
