On October 27th, David Rem, former candidate for U.S. Congress, spoke prior to Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump’s taking the stage during a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden. In his speech, Rem called Vice-President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, “the Antichrist” and “the Devil.” In using these words, Rem was attempting to speak especially to U.S. Christians who are millennialists (not to be confused with the “millennials” or Generation Y) and dispensationalists of various stripes. Their interpretation of Scripture, especially apocalyptic literature such as the Book of Revelation, can be traced to the early 19th century to an Irish Anglican priest named John Nelson Darby, whose idea of “the Rapture” and whose view of Revelation 13:18’s “number of a person” influenced Cyrus I. Scofield (of the Scofield Reference Bible), Lewis Sperry Chafer, John F. Walvoords (both father and son), C.C. Ryrie, Hal Lindsey, who popularized this view with his The Late, Great Planet Earth (1970), and Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins with their Left Behind series of novels (1995-2007). Of course, Hollywood, with such films as the Omen series, further disseminated this misconception of “the Antichrist.” However, as Teresa Malcolm accurately wrote in a 2001 article, this interpretation of Revelation is not in keeping with Catholic and most other Christian biblical scholarship. It is, as she later put it, “bad theology” — and, I would add, dangerous theology.

Although a cradle Catholic, after my parents’ divorce I was temporarily “adopted” during my high school years in the early 1980s by an Assemblies of God church, where my father, stepmother and several close friends attended. At the time, I voraciously consumed the standard (and often anti-Catholic) fare about the so-called Rapture and the Antichrist. I feared that I might be left behind were the Rapture to happen and that the Antichrist (at the time, Mikhail Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush, amongst others, were viewed as candidates) would persecute us during the Tribulation. To refer to someone as “the Antichrist” was to regard them as evil incarnate, as satanic. They were no longer considered to be human, and they were to be opposed. Accordingly. Rem’s calling Harris “the Antichrist” and “the Devil” is a rallying cry that could have violent implications, just as when other Christian-nationalist leaders have referred to Harris as a “Jezebel spirit,” a term with harmful racist and misogynist connotations.

When I was in divinity school, I audited a semester-long course on Revelation that was taught by James M. Efird (1932-2021), whose books on the subject were very helpful: End-Times: Rapture, Antichrist, Millennium (Abingdon Press, 1986); Revelation for Today: An Apocalyptic Approach (Abingdon Press, 1989). Another book I highly recommend is by J. Nelson Kraybill, Apocalypse and Allegiance: Worship, Politics, and Devotion in the Book of Revelation (Brazos Press, 2010), which I reviewed favorably. As each of these authors (along with many others) notes, the word “Antichrist” does not appear in the Book of Revelation (nor does “Rapture” appear there). Rather, the word “antichrist” appears only twice in the entire Bible — in the Johannine epistles!

According to 1 John 4:1-4, “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. And this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming; and now it is already in the world” (NRSV, italics added). Similarly, according to 2 John, verse 7: “Many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh; any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist!” (italics added). In each of these, note that more than one person can be an antichrist, and that such persons deceive others by teaching that Jesus was not truly human. A Gnostic precursor to what would come to be called the heresy of Docetism, these influencers denied the incarnation.

What about the alleged connection with Revelation 13? In this chapter, John of Patmos warns about “a beast arising out of the sea” (13:1). In apocalyptic writing, evil governments and empires are portrayed as beasts that come from the chaotic waters. This beast is granted power from “the dragon” (13:2) who is “the Devil” or “Satan” and “who deceives the whole world” (12:9; italics added; see John 8:44). As Efird notes, “Evil exercises its authority over people by deception” (Revelation for Today, 89). One of the “heads” or rulers of this beast is mortally wounded, but then is healed (13:3, 12). At the time, this was a way of saying that someone had returned or had been reborn. Most scholars observe that Domitian (81-96 AD) would have been viewed as another Nero (54-67 AD), who also had persecuted Christians. Like a number of other Roman emperors, both claimed to be divine, an image (eikōn) of god. Domitian was called “our lord and god” (“Dominus et Deus noster“). John, however, was urging Christians to refuse to take the “mark of the beast” (13:16), a mark that granted economic privileges for unquestioned political loyalty, and instead to remain loyal to their Lord Jesus Christ. Using a technique called gematria, in which numbers refer to letters and names (for example, as found on a wall in a house in Pompeii, “I love her whose number is 545”), John writes that “it is the number of a person,” which is 666 (in some manuscripts; in some others, 616). Most reputable scholars identify either of these with Neron Caesar (666) or Nero Caesar (616). As Efird put it, “Since Nero was the first Roman emperor to persecute the Christians, any later emperor who did so could easily be depicted as Nero reborn” (94).

Although originally written for an audience nearly two thousand years ago, Kraybill argues that Revelation’s message has significance for us today. “We may need Revelation,” he writes, “to jolt us out of our slumber, to open our eyes to see idolatry and injustice that pervade globalization and empire today” (137). Instead of “using Revelation as a horoscope for predicting the future,” Kraybill suggests that we should understand it “as a handbook for radical Christian living in the present” (190).

A part of that radical Christian discipleship, according to the one who we believe is “fully God and fully human,” involves refusing to insult others (Matthew 5:22). Jesus, moreover, warned his followers to beware of “false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves” (Matthew 7:15). As he said, we “will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16). Not only should we be vigilant regarding deceivers and “fake news,” so too must we be on guard against false prophets and false gospels (i.e., “fake good news”).

It seems that many Christians today are a long ways from the 1980s, when I still identified with dispensationalist Christianity and when I began reading Catholic moral theology. Back then, as “pro-life” Christians, we worried not only about abortion, but also about a growing relativism that, in response to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate’s question to Jesus, “What is truth?” (John 18:38), answers that there is no truth. Indeed, this was one of the main problems that Pope John Paul II’s 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor addressed, including in connection with fundamental goods, how we treat human persons, and evil acts that follow from this mentality: “And since the human person cannot be reduced to a freedom which is self-designing, but entails a particular spiritual and bodily structure, the primordial moral requirement of loving and respecting the person as an end and never as a mere means also implies, by its very nature, respect for certain fundamental goods, without which one would fall into relativism and arbitrariness” (no. 48).

So, I sincerely ask, and I hope for honest answers: Who comes to mind when we think of arbitrary arbiters of truth at this time? Who questions truth and then asserts that their truth is the truth? Who deceives others the most? To be sure, as St Paul observed, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). I know I have, and one of the sins I have committed many times over the years is to insult others. In my view, when someone calls someone else an abominable appellation such as “the Antichrist,” this should give us pause and, to say the least, raise some serious questions.

Art: Signorelli, Antichrist with the devil, from the Deeds of the Antichrist, Wikimedia Commons