Naming the Antichrist: Ancient and Medieval Views
Who is the antichrist? The beast? The man of lawlessness? Today on episode 666 of the podcast, Stephen Nichols explores how several church fathers and medieval theologians wrestled with these questions—and whom they named as the antichrist.
Welcome back to another episode of 5 Minutes in Church History. With this episode, we have reached what you might say is an eschatological milestone. We are at episode number 666, and I could not resist the temptation to explore a fascinating piece of church history, that is, the history of interpreting and naming and identifying the antichrist. Well, we begin with Scripture. The word “antichrist” appears three times in the singular in 1 John and also over in 2 John, and then one time in the plural, back in 1 John at chapter 2, verse 18. There's also in 2 Thessalonians chapter 2 the reference to the Man of Lawlessness. Then we move on to Revelation 13, we're introduced to the beast, and that chapter ends with identifying the mark of the beast, and that is 666.
Well, let's start in the early church with the interpretation, the naming of the antichrist, and we'll first go to the church father Polycarp. Polycarp sticks with 1 John. He doesn't jump over to 2 Thessalonians, does not jump over to Revelation, just sticks with 1 John and the focus on the antichrist. And he zeroes in on John's teaching that the antichrist, and also the plural antichrist, and also the spirit of antichrist, as John says, is alive and well in the first century, and it is anyone who denies that Jesus has come in the flesh. So for some of these early church fathers, the Docetists, those adherents to the heresy that Jesus only appeared to be human, which is the Greek word “dokeo,” “to appear,” so Docetism is the name of the heresy. They denied the incarnation, they denied the truly human nature of Jesus, and that was enough for Polycarp, and he left it at that.
As we move on into the later church fathers, we have to stop at Augustine. Augustine is crucial for all sorts of things in the history of interpretation. He not only links the mentions of Antichrist in the epistles of John to Thessalonians and to Revelation, he also goes back to Daniel. And so Augustine tells us that John is about to describe and designate the antichrist, “We shall soon see who they are, and everyone must question his own conscience whether he be such.” So initially, Augustine is following suit with the other church fathers and seeing it as those who have false views of Christ. And he's even calling on his own congregation to do a little soul searching to see if they have a little bit of the spirit of antichrist in them. But then Augustine also teaches, however, that the Antichrist “is the focus of a yet future individual,” and he pulls in these other texts to do so. Well, Hippolytus follows Augustine, and he actually identifies the antichrist as Jewish, and he additionally identifies John's two anonymous witnesses in Revelation 11 as Enoch and Elijah. And so the early identities of the antichrist were seen as Jewish. Then it switched over to Roman emperors, and then it switched over to Muslims, once Islam came on the scene.
Following Hillary of Poitier, who said that the antichrist would come from within the church, we will soon have the candidate that eclipses all of the others for the identity of the antichrist. And that, of course, is the Pope of Rome and the Roman Catholic church. Well, to see this historically, we have to go back to the 12oos. The Holy Roman Emperor was Frederick II, and he got involved in a conflict with the Pope at the time, Gregory the IX. Gregory had promised to join Frederick on a crusade and bring the papal armies with him, but Pope Gregory pulled out of that deal, and then Gregory turned around and excommunicated the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. He called him the “Imperial Antichrist” and the “Beast Arising from the Sea.” Gregory's successor Innocent IV continued naming Frederick as the Antichrist, but Frederick turned the tables and he started calling Innocent IV, the Pope at the time, the antichrist. And so begins a rich tradition of identifying the papacy as the antichrist. And we'll have to pick up this story on our next episode. That's naming the antichrist, part 1. And I'm Steve Nichols and thanks for joining us for 5 Minutes in Church History.
