That Spirit of Antichrist

Introduction

In order to talk about the spirit of antichrist intelligently, we need to clear away some debris first. That word antichrist is found in Scripture, and so we do need to learn how to handle it properly, but at the same time, there is a steep uphill climb involved. This is because of all the popular misconceptions that are conjured up any time someone refers to this shadowy figure, or even when a random purchase at the store comes out to $6.66. But all of this is wildly wide of the mark.

Making a Distinction

In the popular imagination, the Antichrist is the theological equivalent of a Bond villain, only he comes at the end of the world, and he does a lot of evil stuff at that time, deploying his wicked deeds at terrific levels. This figure is widely and mistakenly identified with the Beast of Revelation, and is assumed to be the dark messiah who does the bidding of Satan on earth. The Beast and the Antichrist are supposed to be the one great eschatological Bad Guy.

But in fact there is no basis for identifying the Beast and the Antichrist as the same person at all. They are entirely different. In Scripture, a beast is a persecuting tyrant in the civic realm—a king or an emperor, one who savages the people of God. Nero was a beast. Domitian was a beast. And while there is a great need for teaching on how to deal with such contemporary beasts (for they are not just an ancient phenomenon), that is not our topic here.

By way of contrast, an antichrist is a false teacher within the church who denies the Incarnation of Christ. So put in modern terms, a beast would be someone like President Xi of China, and an antichrist would be a liberal Methodist bishop. They are not the same kind of figure at all. Stalin was a beast. Paul Tillich was an antichrist.

What Scripture Says About It

The word antichrist only occurs in two places in the New Testament, in 1 and 2 John respectively. Believe it or not, the antichrist makes no appearance in the book of Revelation at all.

This is what John teaches us about antichrist here. An antichrist was certainly coming, and his arrival would be the culmination of the “last time.” This was not the last time on earth, but rather the last time of the old creation, the Judaic order. In fact, in his day, there were already multiple antichrists out in the world, which is how John knew that the “last time” was already upon them. These antichrists used to be part of the churches that John was responsible for, but they had gone out from them. In this departure, they were demonstrating that they never had been truly numbered with the Christians. But it is important to note that these antichrists had at one point been a faction within those churches. It was necessary that these antichrists would eventually be manifested and revealed for what they were, and this had already happened.

The believers that John was exhorting had an anointing from the Holy One, and consequently they knew the truth about all these things. John was not writing them because he thought they lacked the truth. He knew that they had the truth, and he knew that they rejected the lies that were parading around pretending to be the truth. Who is the liar, he asks, but the one who denies that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ of God? This liar, this antichrist, is the one who denies the Father and the Son. This anti-incarnational spirit, this antichrist, had been active in the first century church until it had been forced out.

The second use of antichrist is found in 2 John.

The commandment for us to love one another was a command that had been given from the very beginning. And love here is described as walking after his commandments. This is important to emphasize because many deceivers have gone out into the world. These deceivers refuse to confess that Jesus Christ came down to us in the flesh. They denied the Incarnation. This kind of deceiver, John says, is an antichrist. John tells them to guard themselves lest they lose what they have already attained. He wants them to receive their full reward. If someone transgresses, refusing to abide in the doctrine of Christ, he does not have God. This doctrine of Christ is clearly the one just mentioned, which is that Jesus Christ was incarnate in the flesh. The one who abides in this doctrine of the Incarnation has both the Father and the Son. And it follows that a denial of this essential truth is a denial of both Father and Son.

There were many antichrists at that time already, but the most likely candidate for the antichrist was a false teacher named Cerinthus. He denied the virgin birth, and taught that Jesus was a mere man, upon whom the Christ descended at His baptism, and departed from him at the crucifixion. What we know about this false teacher comes from Irenaeus (second century), Hippolytus (second/third century), and Epiphanius of Salamis (fourth century).

Irenaeus tells the story of how the apostle John was going into the bathhouse at Ephesus, and upon discovering that Cerinthus was in there, he turned around and left. “Let us fly, lest even the bath-house fall down, because Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is inside!” Irenaeus got this account from Polycarp, who had been a student of John’s and was martyred when Irenaeus was twenty-years-old.

In short, Cerinthus was a heretical false teacher in Ephesus, and an opponent of John the apostle. He was a Gnostic heresiarch, and he certainly denied that Jesus was God come in the flesh. Notice that John teaches that there was a particular antichrist coming, but that there was a general spirit of antichrist that was also motivating a number of others. For various reasons, we are still dealing with this problem today. The spirit of antichrist has not been eradicated from the Christian world.

Enter the Gnostics

It is my contention that the early church fought and defeated the explicit heresies of Gnosticism, leaving us the great stone Ebenezers of the Nicene Creed and the Definition of Chalcedon. In this we rejoice and are glad. But the fact that Joshua obtained a great victory against the Amorites at Jericho did not mean that there were no Amorites to deal with later on (1 Kings 9:20-21). We may rejoice that the church rejected Gnosticism proper, and we do rejoice. But that does not mean that we don’t have to deal with pestilential flare-ups of the spirit of antichrist from time to time. In many ways, this is a perennial temptation for the West. Gnosticism has not yet been entirely eradicated. There is still plenty of residue.

In my larger argument, I am arguing that our contemporary Malthusian commitment to zero-sum thinking is the soil in which our modern antichrists grow and flourish. Because this Malthusian set of assumptions has spread widely in the church, this makes us particular vulnerable to the spirit of antichrist, which is a spirit of other-worldly pietism.

In the passage from 2 John, notice the close connection between a refusal to walk in love and a denial of the Incarnation. The traffic should go the other way as well. High doctrine and loving interactions go together. All those who affirm that the Second Person of the Trinity took on human flesh at Bethlehem should be in the forefront of embracing what it means to love our brothers and neighbors in material ways.

I italicized in material ways there for a reason, which I hope will become increasingly clear as this argument unfolds. We do not love one another by radiating invisible love rays from our heart, the way that heat radiates out from a wood stove. Our love for one another is mediated through stuff. Our love for one another needs to be communicated by incarnational means. What good is it to say that we love if we refuse to give in tangible ways? Our incarnational loving is to be imitative of the great gift, the central mystery, the great Incarnation. The two must go together, and so this means that any denial of the Incarnation is part of a plan to throw off the responsibility of loving one another the way God requires. And going the other direction, any denial of the goodness of giving tangible gifts is preparation for a denial that God gave us a tangible gift in the coming of Christ. And this is the seedbed of all antichrist thinking.

How Is This Plausible?

Now given these realities, what makes the Gnostic appeal plausible? The central issue is not that the Incarnation is too great a miracle for God to perform. God is all-powerful and can do what He wants. The Gnostic appeal comes from the fact that the material world is presumed to be tawdry and dirty, and that therefore it would be unworthy of God to take on human flesh. The Incarnation is therefore not a challenge to His power, but rather to His character.

Now what I am describing is a characteristic of the Hellenistic outlook generally. When this perspective is pronounced and developed, and starts making specific dogmatic claims, we call it Gnosticism. But there is a general intellectual framework that contributes to the whole thing. The specific Gnostic errors were certainly conducive to the Hellenistic mind generally. Plato wasn’t a Gnostic, but it is also clear that he and the Gnostics had some assumptions that they shared in common.

The assumption is that the cosmos has an upper story reality and a lower story reality. The lower story reality is tainted and polluted, by the very nature of things. It was the task of the philosopher (someone like Plato) to escape this lower realm, and grasp the nature of this upper story reality by means of reason. This upper story was pure, rational, spiritual, and had no dirt on the floors at all. It was a pristine life in Euclidville, in other words. And it was the task of an enlightened religious teacher (which the Gnostic claimed to be) to grasp the nature of this upper story by means of the secret knowledge that had somehow been bequeathed to him. The Greek word for knowledge is gnosis, which is how Gnostics got their name.

By way of contrast, the biblical doctrine is that God Himself created the material world, and when He had done so, He repeatedly pronounced it good (Gen. 1: 4 ,10, 12, 18, 21, 25 ), and then very good (Gen. 1:31). The entry of sin meant that this good created order was fallen, which is not the same thing as saying that it is essentially corrupt. Mankind has been corrupted by sin, and he is standing in the middle of a debris field—a shattered world, with pieces all over. But the actual pollution is in the heart of man. The material order is still, in essentials, good. There cannot be anything inherently tainted about the mere fact of having a material body because . . . because of the Incarnation. The Holy One of God took on a material body. The ramifications of this are enormous. Jesus did not take on sinful flesh, although He did take on the likeness of sinful flesh (Rom. 8:3). If there was anything essentially corrupt about matter, the Logos could not have been united with it.

Because of our sin, we want to flip this around. We want to claim that man is basically good, and that our problems come from the environment around us, that the creation is somehow bad. But it is the other way around. We are bad, and sex is good, alcohol is good, food is good, wealth is good, chocolate is good, and technology is good. We are bad, and we must be put right. This is why the message of the Christian faith boils down to repent and believe. It does not consist of “turn over a new leaf,” or “change your surroundings,” or “try to eat healthy.” It is repent and believe.

Antichrist Hates Anything Made Out of Molecules

In our sin and folly, we want to believe that we are good, and that this broken world is somehow trespassing upon our patience. We want the world to be the problem, and ourselves the victim. In actual fact, we are the problem, and the world is the victim.

So in this cosmos, the fundamental spiritual antithesis is ethical, not metaphysical. To be spiritual is to be obedient, not to be a spirit. The devil is a spirit, and yet everything about him is unspiritual. And recall that if we present out bodies as a living sacrifice to God (Rom. 12:1-2), that is our spiritual worship. But within a Gnostic framework, to be fallen is to be embodied. Our materiality is the problem, and a spiritual enlightenment within (gnosis) is what is supposed to release us from the matter that is clogging up that inner spirituality. If it were not for all these molecules slowing us down like this, like wet Georgia clay on our boots, we could really soar.

Now some might question this, saying that the widespread licentiousness of our generation does not seem to indicate any kind of Gnostic commitment to that upper story. All the sexual shenanigans down here seem to indicate a pretty thorough commitment to the lower story. But this is actually not inconsistent this whole framework either. There were two factions among the Gnostics. There were the “live simply” sort, who wanted to minimize their dependence on material things. They went the ascetic route—they were the ancients with a small carbon footprint. They wanted to get their heads into that upper story, and they bent all their energies in that direction.

But there were other Gnostics, more cynical, who said that what mattered really was your knowledge (gnosis) of what was going on, and if you had that, it did not much matter what you did with your body. As long as you were in this world, that taint was going to be a constant. If you swam down to the other end of the pool, you were not going to get any wetter. And so they gave themselves over to unbridled licentiousness.

And the thing that we believers should remember is that the lying spirits who set up this elaborate trap for us are not numbered among those who exult in the goodness of God’s created order. They hate God’s created order, and they hate us. The bait in the trap is certainly set to look alluring, but that is not the end of the story. In the heyday of the sexual revolution decades ago, they told us all that the “girl next door” could take off her clothes for Playboy, and this would enable us to see how natural and wholesome and life-affirming it all was. But traps do tend to get sprung, and things look very different after that happens. How’s it going for the girl next door now? Well, her granddaughter lives with her, still next door. She is a single mom, has had both breasts cut off, has a silver hoop in her nose, is on antidepressants, and sees her therapist a lot. She is one miserable human being.

What lessons would seducing spirits teach? What doctrines would devils promulgate? Given half a chance, their message would be a message of abstinence. They sear consciences. They forbid. They say no. That is their end game.