Chapter XXV. Of the Church

What changed, and when. In 1903 the northern Presbyterian church of the United States replaced the paragraph with the one quoted above, which still rejects the Papacy but no longer identifies it with the Antichrist. The southern church adopted a similar wording, which still calls that claim "anti-Christian". The Orthodox Presbyterian Church (1936) and the Presbyterian Church in America adopted neither of the two: they kept the paragraph of 1647 and confined themselves to striking out of it the words in bold.

Why. As in the case of the oath, we know of no official statement of reasons for this particular change. In our judgment three things weighed:
1) The climate of rapprochement between communions, which was to issue in the ecumenism of the twentieth century.
2) The idea, very popular from the first half of the nineteenth century onward, that the Antichrist is only a future figure, a world ruler who is to appear shortly before the Second Coming of Christ.
3) The decline of the temporal power of the Papacy, which in 1870 lost its States.

What the text of 1647 rested on. The Assembly cites Matthew 23:8-10, 2 Thessalonians 2:3,4,8,9 and Revelation 13:6.

What this change shows. The text of 1903 still rejects the papal claim, but now in terms which offend no one. It is the tone of an age which begins to hold as a want of charity what its fathers held as faithfulness: calling things by the name which Scripture gives them.
The serious objection is not that of ecumenism, but this: that to identify a particular historical office with the man of sin is an exegetical conclusion, not an article of faith, and that the apostle John speaks of "many antichrists" (1 John 2:18). To the first it may be answered that the Confession does not speak of the person of each pope, but of the office, and for a precise reason: the claim to be head of the Church in the place of Christ, which is exactly what 2 Thessalonians describes. The text of 1903 itself calls that claim a "usurpation". To the second, that the existence of many antichrists does not exclude that of a principal one, and the same verse supposes it. As to the historical fact, this was the reading of the Reformers, almost without exception, and it is taken up by the confessions of the seventeenth century: that of Westminster, the Savoy Declaration of the Congregationalists, and the Baptist Confession of 1689; before them, the National Covenant of Scotland already spoke of "that Roman Antichrist". It remains striking that most modern evangelicals have abandoned it without having examined it.
The abandonment is not only American. The Church of Scotland, which has never changed a word of the Confession, dissociated itself in 1986 from this passage and from three others which touch Rome. That other method is the subject of the last article of this section.