Brief Meditation on the Antichrist

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We hear over and over again from the school of premillenial dispensationalism that the Antichrist is a literal man who will come at the end of the age and wage war against God. Hal Lindsey can be credited (or accused) of making this theory very popular in the '70's and '80's with some very spurious biblical interpretations. But these interpretations simply go unnoticed by the casual observer as flawed because the rhetoric is so alarmist and points to a clear reason for the existence of human suffering. So without going into these arguments I want to look at one little word that does not get mentioned very often at all in the New Testament that if interpreted differently kind of messes up the entire theory that Lindsay, LaHaye and others who seem to go on TBN and CBN consistently bashing this into the heads of unsuspecting needy people. What I want to discuss is the theory that this is a man.In actuality the term Antichrist in Greek is "antichristos". The way that we interpret the prefix "anti" often perhaps comes from the Latin which more of less means "in opposition to" (that's just a guess since my Latin is very weak, so if someone else can clarify that would be helpful at least to me!). However, in Greek this prefix is clearly one that indicates "along side of, or against". The meaning is actually one of something being in parallel where we often read "against" as something perpendicular in literal opposition to something else. The the spirit of the Antichrist is anything that looks like Christ, but is in fact not!

While the Hebrew scriptures are clearly anthropomorphic in order to describe God and the power of God as a literal person, the New Testament loses some of that imagery in favor of more spiritual imagery in association with those anthropomorphic interpretations. This is very true in the words of Jesus and is especially true the Gospel of John. So we cannot just assume based on 2 Thessalonians that the Antichrist is a man when John told us that this spirit is already among us. Making the spirit fit the supposed man is making two passages fit together in terms of an argument that does not even exist in the bible itself or is even implied anywhere.

This is why is is absolutely central for any claim of Christianity to frame any statement in terms of God's radical event of forgiveness and the overcoming of death in the cross. Without that event as a lens to interpret all of the Gospels, we lose the significance of why Jesus lived among us in the first place!

This is also why I am not a fan of proselytizing. We cannot "get" people to respond to God's love, but can only witness the significance of that love as a world altering event in the person of Jesus. This means helping those who could care less about what we have to say, and it means finding a means to love everyone including our enemies in the same way that Christ loved the Church. This means helping others to find that path of love rather than, as one person in another board told me, to hold them accountable to Scripture. Holding someone accountable to Scripture is more or less something that makes sense in Islam where the Qu'ran is the literal Word of God. But for Christians, Christ is the Word of God and the Scripture is a witness to that, a damn good one to be sure, but a witness nonetheless that does not deserve our allegiance. To place one's interpretation of Scripture ahead of the cross is a subtle but very powerful form of idolatry that we see active everywhere today and is the central cause, I would argue, for any surge of atheism because it must limit the radical nature of God's own activity in the world to a set of clear propositions held prior to what God's activity can actually be!

Remember that unbelievers were not the ones who would support the crucifixion of Jesus. These were the believers whose faith was a firm understanding of the law and how they were applying it just as God told them to. Jesus reveals to them that their understanding was fundamentally flawed and reveals to us that the cross is our point of reference for what happens to those who place anything other than the radical love of God in the cross at the center of their faith. The truth is that practice of Christ's love will result in persecution just as Christ said. But this will not just be a persecution at the hands of unbelievers for that much is very clear. It will also be persecution from those who think they have got it right and have boiled the Gospel down to a few clear propositions they have developed to simplify the message into palatable bits which limit the radical nature of God's love.

Once our laws and traditions become on par with the event of the cross, we are commiting the most heinous act of idolatry by placing ourselves and our interpretations ahead of the free and radical nature of the love of God. This, I submit, is the true nature of the Antichrist. It is a very powerful and deceptive force luring millions of people today into believing that they are following the one true God, when in reality they are following regurgitations of men who are in self-made positions of authority to proclaim the truth they they have fabricated, and worship the witness of Scripture rather than the very Word of God to which scripture is a witness!

Related posts:

1. the word of god became human…
2. ken silva's reading problem