The Shape of Things to Come

From almost the beginning, Christianity has had its very own science fiction, fantasy epic genre: End Times Prophecy. As we all know, it’s a heady concoction, brewed from the apocalyptic teachings of Our Lord in the Gospels, the Book of Revelation, the Book of Daniel, and 2 Thessalonians chapter 2. And as we also all know, it all culminates in a mysterious and terrifying key figure, Antichrist: the crucial contribution of 1 John chapter 2. Countless writers, from Justin Martyr in the second century to Hal Lyndsey and others in our own times, have tried to turn this welter of prediction into a coherent programme of events and to work out, if possible, who the terrible figure of the Antichrist will be.

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If you and I had been Bible-believing Christians living in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, and maybe even later in some parts of these islands, we would have had no doubt whatever about the identity of Antichrist. On the Reformation view, his current incarnation is that peace-loving clerical gentleman from Argentina who goes about Rome in a white cape and a skullcap, known as Papa Francesco. Yes, the Pope was Antichrist and Antichrist was the Pope. As the excellent article on Antichrist in Dr William Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible, Volume I, 1875, says:

That the Pope and his system are Antichrist was taught by Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Melancthon, Bucer, Beza, Calixtus, Bengel, Michaelis, and by almost all Protestant writers on the Continent. Nor was there any hesitation on the part of English theologians to seize the same weapon of offense...The Pope is Antichrist, say Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, Hooper, Hutchinson, Tyndale, Sandys, Philpot, Jewell, Rogers, Fulke, Bradford. Nor is the opinion confined to these 16th century divines, who may be supposed to have been specially incensed against Popery. King James held it, as strongly as Queen Elizabeth.

It was not actually made an article of faith, but the ordinary person found it much easier to grasp than many of the obscurer of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. On 5 November every year an effigy of the Pope is still burnt alongside that of Guy Fawkes in Lewes (admittedly, an effigy of Paul V, the Pope in 1605, not Francis).

Now, there are some curious paradoxes involved in this. The first paradox is how odd it is, when you think about it, that something like this could become an accepted doctrine of the church. Doctrines are normally about timeless spiritual truths rather than the identity of  particular people. The Creeds mention only two people apart from the Lord: his mother Mary and his crucifier Pilate, and they are only there to support the doctrines of Christ’s Incarnation and Passion. There are no doctrines about Judas or Caiaphas or Herod or John the Baptist.

So why was the doctrine that the Papacy is Antichrist so attractive? There are two possible reasons. Firstly, the Reformers had boldly rejected a sizeable catalogue of Roman (Catholic) beliefs and practices. People might have taken these to be just a random set of misguided heresies that had accumulated over the centuries, and might have questioned whether there was any logic behind this wholesale rejection. The Reformers’ case would be greatly strengthened by the idea that they were an interconnected web of mischief all emanating from a single dark source, one foretold long ago, even before the coming of Christ. And secondly, there already existed a Catholic doctrine about an individual person: the doctrine that St. Peter was the Rock on which the global Church was built and the first Bishop of Rome and hence his successors were the head of the whole Church. Branding them as the Antichrist neatly disposed of that claim.

The second paradox is that whereas the Reformation sprang fresh from the New Learning of the post-medieval era, with its better understanding of the historical background of Scripture, the identification of the Pope with Antichrist is actually medieval. Joachim of Fiore first suggested that a Pope would be the Antichrist around 1200, and soon thereafter the idea that the Papacy itself was the Antichrist began to get about and became popular with many groups, some orthodox and others more or less heretical. So this particular article of belief was not a discovery of the Reformers—they borrowed it from medieval Catholics.

The third paradox was revealed to me in reading Dr Smith’s article already referred to. It takes all the relevant Biblical passages at face value—there’s not a hint of liberal theology or Biblical criticism. It works its way very clearly and convincingly to certain conclusions. John’s Antichrist is Paul’s Man of Sin, and is also the Second Beast of the Apocalypse, the false prophet. Daniel’s Little Horn is the First Beast of the Apocalypse; it is not a person but what Smith calls a ‘polity’; it lasts for three and a half ‘times’; it is in fact the corrupted church denoted by Paul’s ‘apostasia’ or ‘falling away’ (in 2 Thessalonians); it is not the Antichrist. Babylon is the harlot riding the First Beast (the references to the seven hills, among other things, make it clear that Babylon is indeed Rome), so Rome is seated upon the corrupted church. Don’t worry if you’re confused; what matters is Dr Smith’s conclusion: since Babylon is destroyed in Revelation 18, but the Antichrist, the Second Beast, is still active in Revelation 19, the harlot Rome cannot possibly be Antichrist.

Dr Smith says:

Indeed there is hardly a feature in the Papal system which is similar in its lineaments to the portrait of Antichrist as drawn by St. John, however closely it may resemble Babylon.

Whatever faults the Papacy may have or have had, being Antichrist is not one of them. All that trouble the Reformers gave us could have been spared if they had not followed their medieval predecessors so blindly!

So who does Dr Smith think the Antichrist will be? He says:

It would appear further that there is to be evolved from the womb of the Corrupt Church, whether after or before the fall of Rome does not appear, an individual Antichrist, who, being himself a scoffer and contemner of all religion, will yet act as the patron and defender of the Corrupt Church, and compel men to submit to her sway by the force of the secular arm and by means of bloody persecutions. He will unite the old foes superstition and unbelief in a combined attack on liberty and religion. He will have, finally, a power of performing lying miracles and beguiling souls, being the embodiment of satanic as distinct from brutal wickedness. How long his power will last we are wholly ignorant, as the three and a half times do not refer to his reign (as is usually imagined), but to the continuance of the apostasia. We only know that his continuance will be short. At last he will be destroyed together with the Corrupt Church, in so far as it is corrupt, at the glorious appearance of Christ, which will usher in the millennial triumph of the faithful and hitherto persecuted members of the Church.

So, an irreligious, lying scoffer, empowered by prejudice to attack liberty, and relying on the support of thousands of Christians whose lifestyle and attitudes are dubiously Christlike.

Does this remind you of anyone?