The Movement Continues: Antichrists Among Us

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How many of you know the name Nicolae Carpathia? For those who don’t know, this is the name of one of the characters in the Left Behind book series, written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. The series, which tells the story of the rapture and the end times, has enjoyed enormous success, reaching the top of the New York Times bestseller list, selling over 65 million copies, and spawning five different movies, 40 young adult novellas, and even a video game series!

What drives the plot is basically a rebranding of a 19th-century theological theory of the end times called Dispensationalism. This theological model takes pieces from around the Bible—from Revelation and Daniel and a few phrases from the Gospels and the Epistles of John—the topic of our current series—and it “Frankensteins” them together into a singular universal mythos. This theological theory really exploded in popularity near the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s, when a dispensationalist named John Darby and a Bible publishing magnate named Cyrus Schofield systematized and publicized this model. The ends of centuries tend to be times when people think about things like the end of the world, and conspiracies around destructive world orders, and powerful evil people who are trying to exert their will over powerless good people. So, perhaps it is not a surprise that in the late 1800s and early 1900s, systematized by Darby and publicized by Schofield in what he called the Schofield Reference Bible, these ideas took hold in the larger culture.

Fast forward 100 years into the late 1990s. Once again, it was the end of a century. And again, people were talking about the end of the world…remember Y2K? There was political turmoil in the United States and around the world, viscerally witnessed in the 9-11 attacks in 2001. There was fear that these attacks were a part of a grand conspiracy, and that the US government was in on it from the beginning. In this context, the first book of the Left Behind book series came out in 1995. For 12 books over 12 years, they told the story of a guy who rose to world power and demonic domination through cunning and charisma, causing widespread tribulation and terror, and terrorizing faithful Christians. His title in the books was “The Antichrist.” His name was Nicolae Carpathia.

And he scared the crap out of us! Carpathia, The Antichrist, terrorized Christians, leading the world into a dispensation of destruction. Those of us who read the books, or even those of us who didn’t, found ourselves looking everywhere for dark forces working through the government and culture to bring about global destruction. Every president and world leader got labelled as “The Antichrist.” Every pope got called “Antichrist.” Religious leaders. Business leaders. Popular celebrities. We were on the lookout everywhere for “The Antichrist” out there…coming to get us!

 

Here is the problem: that is not at all the way that the Bible actually talks about an “antichrist.” Again, dispensationalism takes these ideas from different books of the Bible and conflates them to a new, overarching narrative. The problem I have with this conception is that the Bible does a pretty good job telling its own story! We don’t need to rewrite it! Instead of taking a phrase from over here, and a concept from over here, and then making up words and ideas to fill the gaps, what if we looked at what the text actually says, and try to understand how their world connects to our world, and then discern how the work of God in that moment helps us see the work of God in our moment?

Now, I don’t mean to shame anyone for reading the Left Behind books, or for talking about the ideas in them. I think that they bring up some Biblical points about how political and religious power can be married in dangerous ways. Look at the book of Daniel, or Revelation, or even the Gospel of John and the ways that Judean political power was married to religious power to crucify Jesus! But if we are going to use this Biblical word, we should at least know how the Bible uses it. Because the Biblical idea of an “antichrist” is absolutely relevant to us and our world, even if it isn’t talking about Nicolae Carpathia.

The word “antichrist” appears four times in the whole Bible, and all of them are in I and II John. And in none of those references does it look like Nicolae Carpathia. Or the pope. They reference people within the congregation, not world leaders. They reference multiple “antichrists,” not THE Antichrist as if there is only one. And they are talking about specific theological concerns, namely the denial of Christ as human.

Last week, we talked about the fact that in this Johannine congregation—or community of congregations—where these letters were used, there were these four different theological factions. And one of them was heavily influenced by Greek or Hellenist ideology. Now, if you remember your high school English class, and the mythos around Greek and Roman gods, there are several stories of gods who appear in human form. They aren’t really human, but they look like humans. And their goal is usually to test us, or manipulate or punish us, or just because it is fun for them to mess with us. For some Hellenist Christians, this mentality impacted their theology of Christ, many of them suggesting that Jesus was not really human, but a god-man who only appeared human.

This next part is really important. This mentality also impacted the way that they looked at human bodies. If Jesus was really God-with-us, fully human, then it means that human bodies are valuable and important to God. What happens with our bodies, and what we do with our bodies, and how we treat the bodies of others deeply matters. But if God was just “faking it,” it says something different about what God thinks of humanity. Our bodies become devalued. So bringing this mentality to the church caused serious damage to the theology and language of a fully human Christ. It was, in fact, considered, “antichrist.”

So, in the community where I and II John were circulated, an “antichrist” was not just one powerful person, but any person who denied the embodied humanness of Jesus and thus denied the value our own human bodies. Thus, in these two books, and thus whenever in the Bible the word “antichrist” is used, it is really talking about “anti-incarnation.” That is a five-dollar theological word that basically refers to how God enters our world. When we capitalize it, “The Incarnation,” we talk about Christmas theology: God comes to earth as a baby in a manger. Emmanuel. God-with-us. Not God pretending to look like a human, but God showing up for real…in swaddling clothes. But we also use the same word with a lower-case “i” to talk about times when we see God becoming real in our physical world. In creation. Through our bodies. When we talk about “incarnational ministry” it is about feeding people and housing them and meeting their physical, bodily needs.

So, look at this morning’s text again through this incarnational lens. Four verses in particular drill down on this idea of incarnational faith:

• 4.2: “By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God…” This is different than what Paul says about the flesh…in the Johannine conception, “fleshly” is a good thing. Remember John 1? “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” An embodied Christology.

• 3.17: “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?” This sounds a lot like Matthew 25: when we meet the needs of the least of these, that is where we see Jesus. Again, practical, incarnational ministry is where we see God.

• 3.23: “And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us.” Sometimes these two get separated…we can believe in Jesus OR care for our neighbor. But not in I John…if you believe, you practice incarnational ministry. That’s how you do it.

• Finally, perhaps the best-known verse in today’s text, and one that echoes the text from the Gospel of John I read earlier. 3.16: “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers and sisters.”

Scholar Ronald Cole-Turner interprets this verse for our context: “Sometimes self-sacrifice can mean physical death….More often, the stakes are lower. But the principle is the same. Laying down our lives, at its core, can mean any number of ways in which we lay aside our claim to own our own lives. We lay down our lives when we put others first. We lay down our lives when we live for the good of others. We lay down our lives when we make time for others….When we lay down the completely normal human desire to live for ourselves, and when instead we allow the love of God to reorient us toward the needs of others, we are laying down our lives.” This is what it looks like for us to lay down our lives for our sisters and brothers.

One last verse from the passage brings us home: “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.” The Johannine community was not worried about antichrists out there…but those with anti-incarnational theology in their own midst. The antichrists among them. They told folks then to “test the spirits.” To pay attention to the messages present in your congregation. To pointedly ask whether you are honoring the humanity of Christ by valuing the human bodies in front of you. Test the spirits. Test your hearts. Test your priorities and your annual budgets and the things that you want to focus on as you enter Life After Debt! This is practical, real-world stuff. Test to see whether you are operating out of an antichrist, anti-incarnational, spirit. Or out of a Christ-like, body-honoring spirit:

• Do our spirits proclaim through our actions that bodies don’t matter, so we can treat ourselves and others in ways that suggest that they aren’t actually made in God’s image?

• Or do our spirits proclaim, in the words we tell ourselves when we look in the mirror, or the words we tell our children about their bodies, that they and we are fearfully and wonderfully made?

• Do our spirits consider what we put into our bodies, listening to the marketing departments of food companies, ingesting toxins and substances that cause our bodies harm?

• Or do our spirits seek to put into our bodies things that have healthy, organic, body-sustaining ingredients?  

• Do our spirits treat children, and women, and LGBTQ folk, and those with black and brown bodies in ways that presume that their bodies are irrelevant and thus disposable?

• Or do our spirits recognize the very image of God in every body, even those that the world chooses to devalue?

• Do our spirits deny school lunches for children, or affordable housing, or medical and health care for those who cannot afford it? I John asks, “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?”

• Or do our spirits proclaim freedom from the captivity of disease and illness, through food and housing, and quality, affordable, accessible medical care for all?

• When we test the spirits, do we find a spirit that is “antichrist” in nature, but “Christ-like” in nature? Incarnational. Body-honoring. Neighbor-honoring.

Claudia Highbaugh: “[I John] calls for the people who have resources and goods to open their hearts to the people who have need. Love, then, is an activity of movement and response, not so much a doctrine, a sermon, or a legal document….Love is not only a word; it is a deed.” When we test the spirits, and it looks like that, perhaps we are on the right track.

Did anyone see the sermon title about antichrists on Mother’s Day and think, “It’s official! He has totally lost it this time?” But within this Scriptural understanding of “antichrist,” perhaps Mother’s Day is the best time to talk about this stuff.

After all, mothers incarnate the love of Jesus in some pretty powerful ways. Think about the physical healing and wholeness that Mothers bring. Out of an embodied, Christ-as-human world, comes the woman who reminds you to eat your vegetables. Or wear a jacket. Or who  kisses the boo-boo on your knee when you fall. A mother’s love is so often an embodied love. It was, after all, your mother who carried you for 9 months in her body. To deny that embodied, incarnational maternal love is to serve an “antichrist” spirit. But to embrace it is to live in the most Christ-like way possible.

So let us remember that the love proclaimed in the everyday, embodied love of our mothers and grandmothers and mother-figures…and nurses and teachers and caregivers…is same the embodied love proclaimed on Christmas in a manger. The same love proclaimed on Good Friday by a God who laid down his life for us, and showed us how to lay down our life for others. The same love proclaimed on Easter with a risen Christ with a fully resurrected body who ate breakfast on the beach. May we join in that proclamation, from the tips of our tongues, to the bottoms of our feet!