What or who is the Antichrist?
What are the biblical prophecies about him?
Is the Pope the Antichrist?
Does it matter?
I recently had the seriously joyful experience of receiving Essays Critical and Historical in two volumes, being collected essays written by St J.H. Newman when he was an Anglican. These are volumes 13 and 14 of the Newman Millennium Edition. They are most professionally edited by Nicholas Schofield. I have had occasion to comment unfavourably on some lazy editing in previous editions. No such charge can justly be made against the work of Fr Schofield’s hands. The front covers, featuring the Westmacott bust of 1841, are simple but effective.
The first essay I read from this rich collection is The Protestant Idea of Antichrist, vol. II, pp.133-223, written in October 1840, and originally published in The British Critic, which Newman was then editing. It was a wide-ranging review of a recent book on the Antichrist prophecies, by one J.H. Todd, little known today. Now, when young, Newman had read a Protestant interpretation of the prophecies which depicted the Pope as the Antichrist. This was a standard Protestant attack on Catholicism from the time of the first so-called Reformers. Some had stated the Pope to be the Antichrist, others had identified “Rome” or even Catholicism as a whole with the spirit of Antichrist (since he was usually taken to be a man). Although he rejected the idea, the stain it made on his imaginations stayed for a long time. This was important to him: it was an example of how even if we reject false concepts their effect on our attitudes can continue – they change our tastes and sensibilities. Now, in his review, St JHN assumes a lot of knowledge about the Antichrist, after all, the readers of The British Critic were well-instructed in religious matters. So, in this instalment, I will begin by setting out some of the background.
Who Is the Antichrist?
A short, but misleading definition of the “Antichrist” comes from the New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, “The Antichrist is the adversary of God and Christ that comes in the end times” (I.175). As we shall see, that is not the concept in Scripture, and although it is the concept in some later Christian literature, it is not the view that St JHN was referring to in this essay. Rather, that idea of Antichrist as the adversary of the last days is an artificial one formed by fusing together two different concepts which can and probably should be taken separately. This is an important point, because if we have the wrong idea of Antichrist, and the wrong idea is what I might call the dramatic Hollywood idea, then we will not understand Antichrist rightly and benefit from the true teaching. Even worse, people with the hysterical idea get caught up in fantasies which resemble nightmares – contagious nightmares – more than anything else.
The word appears in the first letter of St John (1 John 2:18 and 22; and 2 John 7). That concept of the Antichrist was later conflated with the prophecy of “the man of lawlessness” mentioned by St Paul (2 Thessalonians 2:1-3), the Beast in the Book of Revelation (Apocalypse 13:1-10), and the tyrant prophesied in the Book of Daniel (chapters 7 and 8). Our Lord also prophesied about the end of history, and the coming of False Messiahs (e.g. Matthew 24 and Mark 13).
I think that what we have here are two different things: a warning by St John that a spirit of opposition to true Christian teaching but cloaking itself as orthodox, is abroad is the world; and second, a prophecy of the end times. It is very difficult to say very much about the prophecies, because Our Lord told us in unambiguous terms that we do not and cannot know when the end will be (Matthew 24:36 and 25:13). His warning was that we should therefore keep watch. This is basically the same lesson which St John draws from the spirit of denial which he calls out.
It is impossible to stress this too much: if not even the angels and the Son of Man know when the end will be, how can we expect to? If you do not know when in the night a thief will come, what do you: go to bed or stay up ready and watching? Obviously, you won’t let yourself sleep. This is the point of the teaching of Our Lord of the end times, and of St John concerning the Antichrist, except that St John is warning that the attitude of denial is here, and it will infect us if we are not careful.
Let us start with the Epistles of St John: “Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that the Antichrist is coming, even now many Antichrists have come, by which we know that it is the last hour. … Who is a liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? He is Antichrist who denies the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:18 and 22)
A little later, he adds: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. And this is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard was coming, and is now already in the world” (1 John 4:1-3)
So, in chapter 2, St John speaks as if the Antichrist is human: in fact, there are many Antichrists. How can this be? The answer comes when chapters 2 and 4 are read together: the spirit of Antichrist is the denial of the truth that Our Lord Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. So anyone who is moved by the “Antichrist spirit” is an Antichrist but not THE Antichrist. This does not mean that the end of the world is upon us: St John wrote over 1900 years ago. But the end of our world is always close at hand: we never know when we will die.
The prophecies in Daniel, St Paul and the Apocalypse about a specific enemy of God, who raises the final challenge, are clearly not the same as warnings about false doctrines and false Messiahs. And the great danger, the one which St JHN confronted in his essay was this: we can be so busy looking for a specific sign of the last days that we miss what is of far more real and immediate importance to us – the faithful practice of the true faith.
We are now in a position to examine St JHN’s essay in more detail, in the next part.
