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Five things to know about the Antichrist
Philip C. Almond, The University of Queensland
October 20, 2020 6.00am AEDT
In the history of the West over the last 2000 years, there has never been a time when someone hasn’t been predicting the end of the world.
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The Christian tradition tells us to be on the lookout for the Antichrist, who will appear shortly before the big finish. Vast amounts of Christian ink have been used to try and work out when he will come and just how we might identify him when he does.
Here, then, are five things to know just in case:
1. He is the Son of Satan
The Antichrist was the perfectly evil human being because he was completely opposite to the perfectly good human being, Jesus Christ.
Just as Christians came to believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, so they thought that the Antichrist was the Son of Satan. Jesus was born of a virgin. So the Antichrist would be born of a woman who was apparently a virgin, but was really a whore. Where Christ was God in the flesh, the Antichrist was Satan in the flesh.
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2. He is an earthly tyrant and trickster
By the year 1000, the main outlines of the first of two narratives about the Antichrist was in place thanks to a noble-born Benedictine monk and abbot named Adso of Montier-en-Der (c. 920-92) who wrote a treatise on the subject.
According to him, the Antichrist would be a Jew from the tribe of Dan and born in Babylon. He would be brought up in all forms of wickedness by magicians and wizards. He would be accepted as the Messiah and ruler by the Jews in Jerusalem. Those Christians whom he could not convert to his cause, he would torture and kill.
He would then rule for seven years before being defeated by the angel Gabriel or Christ and the divine armies, prior to the resurrection of the dead and the Final Judgement.
3. Past popes have been accused
By the year 1400, another narrative of the Antichrist had arisen. Now he was no longer the tyrant outside of the Church but the deceiver within it. In short, he was the Pope or even the institution of the papacy and the Church themselves.
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4. He is one and many
Within conservative Christianity over the last century, Antichrists have multiplied. “The Antichrist” has become a general category available for application to an array of individuals, collectives, and objects as the demonic “other”.
Generally, predictions of a tyrant outside the church now dominate the idea of a deceiver within it.
American presidents are well represented. When it comes to accusations of being the Antichrist, usually from the conservative religious right, Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, and Barack Obama have all been mentioned. Donald Trump is gaining popularity as a worthy candidate with ethics scholar D. Stephen Long suggesting he represents: “not a single person but a political pattern that repeats itself by taking on power to oppress the poor and the just”.
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5. He dies in the end
According to the Christian tradition, the Antichrist will finally be defeated by the armies of God under the leadership of Christ with the Kingdom of God (on earth or in heaven) to follow.
So, in spite of current appearances, Christianity holds firmly to the hope that evil will be finally overcome and that goodness will ultimately prevail.
The core idea of the Antichrist — of evil at the depths of things — lays upon all of us the ethical imperative to take evil seriously. Whether the end is nigh or not, we should work to minimise harm and maximise the good in the here and now.
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Philip C. AlmondEmeritus Professor in the History of Religious Thought, The University of Queensland
Philip C. Almond does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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Contrary to what social media posts claim, U.S. President Joe Biden did not receive his COVID-19 booster shot “666 days” after the COVID-19 outbreak began.
”Biden got tripple vaxxed 666 days after COVID began,” reads the tweeted by user @extracapsa ( here ) that has been replicated on Instagram, gaining at least 1,670 likes ( here ).
Some users note that the calculation is misleading, with comments like: ”That’s not even accurate…” and ”Wrong. Covid was 1st reported 12/31/2019. Stop putting fear in everyone’s minds”, but others appear to believe it is precise.
Some users attribute the alleged date to being “satanic” ( here here ). Comments include: ”Smh demons yo”, ”Please, Tell us again how the vacks ISN’T the mark of the beast,” and, ”They have it planned to a tea (sic) as always good find.”
It is unclear what the author of the post referred to with ”after COVID began”, but they set Dec. 1st, 2019 as the start of the count, which was 666 days to Sept. 27, 2019, when Biden got his third inoculation ( here ).
The calculation, however, is flawed because the origins of the virus are still being debated and investigated and therefore the exact date for when the virus originated remains unknown.
In May this year, Biden ordered aides to work to resolve disputes among intelligence agencies examining rival theories about how the novel coronavirus started, including a once-dismissed theory about the possibility of a laboratory accident in China, as well as that the virus originated naturally with animals, such as bats or birds ( here ).
As laid out by this Reuters timeline ( here ) , China alerted the World Health Organization (WHO) on Dec. 31, 2019, of 27 cases of “viral pneumonia” in the central city of Wuhan. A novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) was identified to be the cause on January 7, 2021.
On Jan. 27, 2020, the United States warned against travel to China, a day after five people who had been in Wuhan become the first confirmed cases in America.
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization referred to the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak as a pandemic for the first time ( here ).
Reuters has repeatedly debunked other allegations ( here , here , here ) that linked to a Christian conspiracy theory that the coronavirus vaccines contain the “mark of the beast”, signifying the biblical End Time, when the Antichrist will allegedly force people to get his mark and worship him ( here , here , here )
VERDICT
False. Posts claiming Biden got his COVID-19 third shot 666 days after COVID-19 “began” are baseless.
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Donald Trump: The End-Times President
How fundamentalist Christians who believe in the apocalyptic myth of “the rapture” could be shaping Trump’s agenda — and American life
- ALEX MORRIS
Last month, as infernos raged across the West Coast and President Trump countered scientific consensus on climate change, saying, “I don’t think science knows, actually,” Americans of various persuasions got a glimpse of the apocalypse. For many on the left, the fires presented Armageddon in microcosm, proof of the destructive, ongoing processes that imperil humans and the planet alike. For many on the right, however, the fires were a different sort of sign, and Trump’s comment was a dog whistle reassuring those in the know that science would be allowed to imperil neither God-given profits nor God’s plan for his own creation and how it might come to an end. Not with Trump in charge, anyway.
It would be hard to decisively connect the dots here if you weren’t raised, as I was, to believe in a very specific idea of Armageddon. Well before I learned the history of all of America’s actual wars, my conservative Presbyterian church taught me about the battle that would bring about the end times. I was taught that the 38th chapter of the Book of Ezekiel prophesized that one day — any day now, really — a “place in the far north” (interpreted, naturally, to be Russia) would team up with “many nations” (certainly including Iraq and Iran) to attack a “peaceful and unsuspecting” Israel. This would lead to a cosmic battle in which God would come to Israel’s defense, true Christians would be “raptured,” or spirited away to heaven, and the wicked of the Earth would be left to suffer the trials and tribulations of God’s wrath during a horrific seven-year period when the Antichrist would reign supreme and a totalitarian world government called the New World Order would be established. Finally, Jesus and his raptured church would return, vanquishing the Antichrist and ushering in a thousand-year golden age, at the end of which Satan would be permanently defeated and all Christians would live in glory in a newly created heaven and Earth. “The generation that saw Israel become a state will witness Jesus’ return,” I was repeatedly told by those who saw, in the tea leaves of recent history, the end times drawing near. Sometimes, if my house was especially quiet, I’d momentarily panic that everyone had been raptured up without me.
These ideas have been called heretical by Catholics and mainline Protestants (of which, it should be said, I am now one). But to the roughly 80 million evangelicals in the U.S., they have become a dominant — one might even say the dominant — strain of the faith. According to the Pew Research Center, 41 percent of Americans think that Jesus will definitely (23 percent) or probably (18 percent) return to Earth by the year 2050. A full 58 percent of white evangelicals hold this view. The Left Behind series, a collection of novels by Jerry B. Jenkins and the late fundamentalist minister Tim LaHaye that dramatizes this theology, has sold more than 80 million copies (as of 2016) and has been made into multiple feature-length films. “When I first started researching, I had this idea that I would be studying a subculture,” says Amy Frykholm, senior editor at The Christian Century and author of Rapture Culture. “And then Left Behind happened, and I was like, ‘I don’t think this is a subculture. This may be the dominant American culture, and the rest of us are subcultures.’ I mean, this is mainstream.”
And never has it been more mainstream in American politics than under the Trump administration. Unlike Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, Trump does not appear to believe in end-times theology or even in Christianity in general, but his lack of apparent belief in anything has freed him up to seek out and uniquely cater to whatever group would show the most allegiance. It’s therefore unsurprising that he has filled his administration with fundamentalists, whose devotion to his presidency may be based on a conviction that they’re playing for the highest of possible stakes — that their actions on the political stage could play a role in bringing about the Second Coming and that their fight for Christian values affects how God will judge them when that day comes.
Read the rest here:
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EXPLAINER AUG. 21, 2019
Here’s How We’d Really Know That Trump Is the Antichrist
By Sarah Jones
“I am the chosen one,” Donald Trump told reporters on Wednesday. He looked up to the heavens as he said this, CNBC reports, so perhaps he truly believes that God anointed him to win a trade war with China, which he also started. This analysis is supported by two uniquely cursed presidential tweets, which he unleashed before he spoke to reporters. In them, he quoted remarks by conservative commentator Wayne Allyn Root, who has assigned Trump a lofty and troubling designation.
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People had questions.
So could Trump be the Antichrist? Look, anything is possible. I will tell you what my father once told me. Satan walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. (For the record, I don’t recommend saying this to a child, especially not after she tells you that she had a dream about a witch who eats people.) The point is that Satan is devious, and his works can be found anywhere. Trump could indeed be his agent, and that would make him an antichrist, if not the Antichrist.
Read the rest here:
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End times and presidents
Claude Fischer, professor of sociology | March 16, 2012
The heated controversies around President Obama – the questioned birth certificate, the supposed Muslim connections, his seeming foreignness – have generated more than a whiff of fire and brimstone. Snopes.com, the website devoted to fact-checking common rumors, felt compelled in 2011 to fact-check whether the president was the antichrist. They decided he was not.
The concern on the religious right about a president’s satanic connections is not new. Historian Matthew Avery Sutton, in the Journal of American History (here; and podcast) describes the rise of similar suspicions about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s. Given the events of the day, the suspicion probably fit FDR better then than it does Obama today. Sutton also argues that the connection that developed in the 1930s between millennialism – anticipating the End Times – and politics lay the groundwork for today’s religious right militancy.
Global anxieties
Protestant fundamentalism arose in late 19th- and early 20th-century American cities in reaction to modern trends such as Darwinism and women’s movements. (Fundamentalism is not really the “old time religion.”) Fundamentalists were much concerned with preparing for Christ’s return. Ministers interpreted certain biblical texts as foretelling a period of global political unrest that would bring forth redemption: Evil empires would emerge in the East; Jews would return to the Holy Land; a promising but ultimately false leader, the antichrist, would arise; true Christians would be “raptured” to Christ’s side in heaven; and after the battle of Armageddon Christ’s forces would triumph and bring in the glorious millennium.
The 1920s and ‘30s seemed full of signs. World War I had devastated nations and England had retaken Jerusalem from the Muhammadans. The Depression wreaked suffering. Evil empires arose in the East — Stalin in Russia, Hitler in Germany, and notably Mussolini in the capital of Catholicism, Rome. Jews fled the Nazis to return to Palestine. (A Boston minister said that Hitler was “an instrument in the hand of God” for this purpose.) The end of days drew nigh.
FDR’s moves inflamed these visions. He was utopian; he was building another strong nation-state and expanding his personal power (including eventually running for third and fourth terms); he took anti-traditional stances such as opposing Prohibition; he recognized the Soviet Union; and he tried to join the World Court. It didn’t help that in the initial balloting of the 1932 convention that nominated him he got 666 votes (a number associated with the antichrist). If he was not the antichrist, his moves seemed to support the antichrist, perhaps Stalin or Mussolini.
For the deeply believing, working against FDR became part of the resistance to the antichrist. Even if their efforts failed and the apocalypse came as was foretold, at least the believers would have been tested and found worthy of salvation. (The same Boston minister said, “We labor as though Christ would not come for a millennium. We live as though he were to come to-night.”)
Lasting anxieties
Protestant fundamentalists and their ministers were not initially political and, when political, were often Democrats. Opposing FDR, Sutton argues, changed that; it initiated alliances of fundamentalists with secular conservatives and with businessmen hostile to the New Deal — although leading evangelists such as Billy Graham took care to stay bipartisan. In the late 1970s, a new generation of fundamentalist ministers, younger but still rooted in the earlier experiences, sealed the political realignment by energetically supporting the Republican party. Ronald Reagan, by the way, had a serious interest himself in End Times prophecy.
Sutton concludes that the fundamentalists of the 1930s “maintained both that the rise of the antichrist was immanent and that it was never too late for revival. Every generation since has heeded this message. While most fundamentalists never really believed that Roosevelt was the antichrist, they felt sure that he had moved the United States one enormous step closer to Armageddon.”
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Cross-posted from Claude Fischer’s blog, Made in America: Notes on American life from American history.
https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2012/03/16/end-times-and-presidents/
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‘Obama the Antichrist’ and end-times doctrine
Fri 18 Nov 2011 19.29 GMT
Alleged presidential assassin Ortega-Hernandez reportedly called Obama ‘the Antichrist’. So who put that idea in his head?
Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, a 21 year old from Idaho Falls, Idaho was charged this week with attempting to assassinate Barack Obama by firing rifle shots at the presidential residence at the White House. The president, Ortega-Hernandez reportedly maintained, is the Antichrist.
Whatever Ortega-Hernandez’s actual motive or mental health, and regardless of whether he truly believes the president is the pivotal figure in an apocalyptic end-times scenario, the idea that Obama might be the Antichrist (or that President Clinton before him, or any unnamed president of the European Union) is a durable one in the evangelical imagination. As the historian Matthew Avery Sutton has noted, such apocalyptism “was fringe among conservatives 150 years ago” but “is now mainstream. It’s just the air they breathe.”
The Antichrist, as depicted in the end-times imaginings of prominent American evangelists, is the demonic figure who deceives the world with false promises of peace, but instead, installs a “one-world government”, “one-world economy”, and a “one-world religion”, captivating the planets’ inhabitants before Jesus returns with the Truth and vanquishes the Antichrist at Armageddon.
That, in turn, has fuelled a dizzying parade of conspiracy theories. Might the Antichrist be gay? Jewish? European? The instigator of peace between the Israelis and Palestinians? A Georgia man has even sued his employer over its firing of him for refusing to wear a sticker that showed his factory had been accident-free for 666 days, because that number is the mark of the Antichrist. In the apocalyptic imagination, the Antichrist is a deceiver, so who knows?
Read the rest here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/nov/18/obama-antichrist-end-times-doctrine
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