Being as Advent is about to begin and the Church is invited to ponder Last Things in this period as we contemplate both the First and Second Comings of Christ, it seems suitable to address the perennial Christian habit of Hunting for Antichrist.
One sample of this is making the rounds in some circles in the current hour:
The Antichrist? Certainly not. And he will prove that by having a coronary or a stroke in a couple of years and ridding the world of himself.
That said, he is, very obviously an antichrist and that is clear from the way he, ‘ow you say?, “checks all the boxes. That should not fill us with any more apocalyptic forebodings than the existence of any other enemy of God. John, after all, says antichrists are a dime a dozen even in his own time:
Children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come; therefore we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but they went out, that it might be plain that they all are not of us. But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all know. I write to you, not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and know that no lie is of the truth. Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son. (1 Jn 2:18–22)
In Catholic understanding, the Last Hour was inaugurated by the death and resurrection of Jesus. Nobody has ever known when that hour will be consummated, though zillions have attempted to figure it out, despite Jesus’ solemn assurance that this is so deeply hidden in the counsels of God that even the Son does not know when it will be (Matthew 24:36: a confession of ignorance that no Christian would have invented and placed on the lips of their God).
Likewise, in Catholic understanding, the concept of the Man of Sin–The Antichrist–is foreshadowed again and again by lots of little men of sin down through history. The counsel of the gospel is not to speculate on whether the current New Hotness is The Antichrist, but to live in the present moment and keep our eyes fixed on Christ, not on the current candidate. In this, we are to be like Treasury agents, who learn to spot counterfeit bills, not by studying every permutation of a fake bill, but by learning exactly what the real thing looks like. Learn Christ, and you will spot the fake immediately.
More than this, learning Christ equips us to living in the present as we confront the little antichrists, rather than training us to take evil seriously only if we think it is Ultimate Evil. The millions of victims of Hitler are not much consoled by the fact that he didn’t turn out to be The Antichrist. He was antichrist enough in his day. Trump is antichrist enough in ours.
And that why he matters. Not because he is the Beast of Revelation, but because (sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof) he has trained millions of people who should have been disciples of Jesus to be liars, racists, cruels, and enemies of the least of these. The far graver danger of Trump is that his cultic legacy not dies with him, because those folks are a movement of dangerous, toxic people hungry for the next demagogue to give them permission to kill their enemies. And the next one may be smart.
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One Response
After Trump came along, I heard from some in the Evangelical circles that the Bible predicted TWO messiah’s for the end times – a political one and a religious one. The religious one was obviously Jesus. They decided that the political one was Trump. I even saw a few Catholics fall in with this idea.