Tech tycoon Peter Thiel is in Rome giving a series of private lectures about the antichrist. He actually doesn’t have to leave his hotel suite. All he has to do is look in the mirror. He won’t see horns, a pitchfork, or 666 tattooed on his forehead. Just a misguided MAGA moneyman who should dish out for a decent study Bible so he can do a better job proclaiming the good news.
The antichrist gets five Bible mentions, all in the letters of John, thought to have been written late in the first century. The passages describe a mere human, perhaps an otherwise well-meaning member of an heretical sect, who denied that God’s love for the world was incarnate in Jesus Christ. The New Testament contains many such prejudicial references to losers in the struggle to clarify the orthodox faith. Influential figures in the second and third centuries first associated the antichrist with the beast in the book of Revelation. The beastie boys were probably especially notorious Roman emperors such as Nero whom Revelation’s writer was loath to name.
In our time, it’s become fashionable to say the antichrist was the pope, John Lennon, or any charismatic political leader with a vision of global conquest such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. We don’t know what Thiel will say in his secret lectures. But he has already proclaimed that the antichrist isn’t necessarily a person. It could be a world government, he says, that gathers power by exploiting panic about climate change or AI.
This is false teaching in the spirit of the antichrist. The modern Bible reader is not required to accept the unwarranted connection between John’s letters and Revelation and should probably repudiate it. Fake exegesis has us searching for villains in all the wrong places. It’s bad enough to distort the true meaning of the birth, life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ from within his own movement.
Some false teachers claim that empathy is a sin, others that we don’t need the merciful Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount right now. Vance teaches that the gospel means that we are to love our family first and our neighbor last. Respectable pastors encourage Hegseth’s claims that God favors Trump and Israel’s stupid, illegal war, which has already extinguished 2,000 lives, even though Iran posed no immediate threat to either nation. They try to seduce our brave volunteers to the foul idea that they are the foot soldiers of the battle of Armageddon.
Some even promote Trump as a modern-day Cyrus, the marauding Persian king who freed Judea’s religious elites from their Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BCE. Their discernment about why they got a second chance inspired prophecies of justice and love that led to the Christ event. Reckoning Trump as a Cyrus figure accounts for his shortcomings, since Cyrus had no idea what he was setting in motion. We can only hope that this prediction, at least, will come true as, in spite of himself, Trump augurs a renaissance of decency and peace.
True Christian values and statecraft are often in conflict. Faithful leaders sometimes have to give awful orders for the sake of national defense. Pope Leo recently said that those who do so should be sure to go to confession. The ostensible Christians in charge of our government see no need for repentance. They and their house theologians sanctify the killing in the name of Jesus. “Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ?” we read in 1 John 2:22. “This is the antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son.” For the spirit of the antichrist in our time, look for anyone who denies that God is love, love never insists on its own the way, Christ is the Prince of Peace, and the law and the prophets add up to doing to others only as we would have others do to us.