Two different posts in the last few days from fellow Essex boys have attacked Tesco, the largest British supermarket chain. Vicar Sam Norton posted a sermon Thou shalt not shop at Tesco, and cartoonist Dave Walker, in a comment on the new Church Times blog, writes that when I buy £3 jeans from Tesco
surely you *know* the person making the jeans isn’t being paid fairly.
No, Dave, I don’t *know* this or even know it. Continue reading
It is always strange to me when Christian speakers and authors refer to the Antichrist in the singular, often with a capital letter. Even Pope Benedict seems to have done this, in the passage from him I quoted in a recent post, so I can hardly blame those who commented on that post for following his lead.
Of course it is fun to speculate about which political, religious or media figures might be the Antichrist – perhaps Tony Blair as I suggested tongue in cheek last year, or one of the various suggestions made in the more recent comment thread here.
But in fact there is nothing in the Bible to suggest that there will ever be an individual identifiable as the Antichrist. This is teaching from outside the Bible. It is so ancient that John, the author of the letters of John traditionally identified with the Apostle John, knew it, but he did not teach it. His teaching, which is the only biblical teaching on this subject, is that there are many antichrists, and that some of them had already come in his time.
Welcome to thousands of new readers of this blog!
Perhaps I should have anticipated your arrival. Linking “Pope Benedict” and “Antichrist” in the title of a blog post has brought you here, it seems. Yesterday this post attracted 2143 views, and today already at 6 pm that total has been surpassed with 2267 views. The well over 3000 total visits to the blog on each of these two days dwarfs my regular 200-300 visits per day.
And all this without me making any suggestion that Pope Benedict is the Antichrist, indeed I wrote the opposite! I am not a Roman Catholic, but I have a lot of respect for His Holiness.
Of course one problem with this is that it has attracted a few people commenting with their own theories of which individual the Antichrist might be. That was not the point of my post at all. Rather, I was suggesting that there is not and will not be any single figure called the Antichrist, as suggested by 1 John 2:18.
In fact the great majority of you new visitors reached me from just one site, Spirit Daily, apparently a Roman Catholic news site which linked to my post.
Nick Norelli continues his discussion of eternal subordinationism in the Trinity, which I reported earlier, by posting a link to a critique of Kevin Giles’ work by Phantaz Sunlyk (a.k.a. Matt Paulson). In fact the link that Nick posts is incorrect; this is the correct link.
Sunlyk’s paper is long and complex. I have skimmed a large part of it, although I skipped most of part III and part VI. At this point I can make the following necessarily provisional comments. To summarise, Sunlyk has made some telling criticisms of Giles’ work, although he fails to understand its thrust because of his unfamiliarity with the viewpoint Giles is interacting with. But in fact Sunlyk upholds Giles’ main point concerning the Trinity, that the relationship between the Father and the Son should not be understood in terms like “The Father commands, and the Son obeys.”
No, I am not going to break my rule on this blog that I don’t speculate about the end times. But I was struck by the extract from Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth, about the temptation of Jesus, quoted by Michael Barber. Here is part of it (typos corrected):
The devil proves to be a Bible expert who can quote the Psalm exactly. The whole conversation of the second temptation takes the form of a dispute between two Bible scholars. Remarking on this passage, Joachim Gnilka says that the devil presents himself here as a theologian. The Russian writer Vladimir Soloviev took up this motif in his short story ‘The Antichrist.’ The Anitchrist receives an honorary doctorate in theology from the University of Tübingen and is a great Scripture scholar. Soloviev’s portrayal of the Antichrist forcefully expresses his skepticism regarding a certain type of scholarly exegesis current at the time. This is not a rejection of scholarly biblical interpretation as such, but an eminently salutary and necessary warning against its possible aberrations. The fact is that scriptural exegesis can become a tool of the Antichrist. Soloviev is not the first person to tell us that; it is the deeper point of the temptation story itself. The alleged findings of scholarly exegesis have been used to put together the most dreadful books that destroy the figure of Jesus and dismantle faith… [T]he Antichrist, with an air of scholarly excellence, tells us that any exegesis that reads the Bible from the perspective of faith in the living God, in order to listen to what God has to say, is fundamentalism; he wants to convince us that only his kind of exegesis, the supposedly purely scientific kind, in which God says nothing and has nothing to say, is able to keep abreast of the times. The theological debate between Jesus and the devil is a dispute over the correct interpretation of Scripture…
Well said, Your Holiness. These days I try (not always successfully) not to get involved in disputes with Bible scholars of this Antichrist kind.
With the apostle John in 1 John 2:18, I refuse to identify any single Antichrist but think in terms of multiple antichrists. These may include the liberal Bible scholars Pope Benedict has in mind. But ironically it is not just theological liberals who want to limit what God has to say by “supposedly purely scientific” exegesis. I often come across an essentially similar approach from those who call themselves evangelical Bible believers, but in practice hold that “God says nothing and has nothing to say” beyond the interpretations of the Bible by certain typically 16th and 17th century teachers. So I also wonder if among the antichrists are some evangelical scholars who are so sure of their traditional interpretations that they refuse to read the Bible “in order to listen to what God has to say”.