Have We Met the Anti-Christ?

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Evil is good at making us more conscious. Meditate on evil and you delve into the limitations of being human. Explore evil and you wonder if there can be a force opposed to Creation or perhaps whether the origin of evil exist within the Creator itself. The story of Job certainly suggests that God can be in cahoots with evil. Then again, maybe evil is an illusion, a result of a limited way of looking at life.

I have learned from my students, however, that people easily become uncomfortable talking about evil, almost as if they sense the presence of some alien awareness eavesdropping on their conversation. "Shouldn't we surround ourselves with light before we talk about evil?" someone asks. So we say a prayer and surround ourselves with light to protect us from the evil one. Afterwards, I point to my own heart and ask, "could there be any evil in here? Does surrounding ourselves with light protect us from what's inside?" My question raises perceptibly the level of discomfort in the classroom. Now we are under the spell of evil.

Evil is good at creating a sense of magic. From the beginning, the ambiguity about whether evil originates outside ourselves or from within us has been part of its mystique. In these latter days, when the world's future seems to wait upon the revealing of the script secretly written by divine destiny (or perhaps our own choices), evil becomes a hot topic. According to Bernard McGinn, author of Anti-Christ: Two thousand years of the human fascination with evil (Harper Collins), the ultimate reason for the existence of evil is to remind us of the importance of our choices. It is a supreme paradox that even within a history that may be divinely governed, our own choices matter.

The author is immanently qualified to pass judgment upon the role of the embodiment of evil within the history of our spiritual imagination. He is the Naomi Shenstone Donnelley Professor of Historical Theology and the History of Christianity at the University of Chicago and editor of the 80-volume series, Classics of Western Spirituality. In this current work, he takes us on the journey of evil from Day One to the Last Day. It is a history of theological debate within the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

I was fascinated to learn of the origins of the Anti-Christ legend within Jewish history and of the important role the Essenes played by their portrayal, within the Qumran scrolls, of the followers of Belial. I learned the meaning of more technical terms (millenarianism, premillenarianism, apocalyptic eschatology, fundamentalist apocalypticism, post-tribulationist) than I ever imagined existed surrounding the role of evil in the destiny of history.

This history revolves around two important issues surrounding the Anti-Christ, about which McGinn attempts to set the record straight.

The first concerns the character of the Anti-Christ. It is not, as most imagine, someone who worships chaos and pain and blatantly inflicts these torments upon others (such as a Hitler or a Saddam Hussein). As dramatic as this image may be, the tyrant role is more a secondary aspect than the essence of the Anti-Christ. Primarily, the Anti-Christ is the perverter of good. It is the Deceiver. It is someone who appears to stand for good, but actually does bad in the name of good. McGinn points out that the projection of a false image, of worshipping image over substance, has quite powerful and sinister implications in our age of global electronic communications.

The second issue concerns the identity of the Anti-Christ. Many people find fascination in the anticipation of a specific historical figure who will gain international prominence and become the final adversary in a climactic battle. Here we have myth disguised in historical terms, a key dimension to apocalyptic thinking. The fundamental identity of the Anti-Christ, however, according to the bulk of theological history, is that it is an inner figure. That is, the Anti-Christ lives within each of us.

What is this aspect of ourselves which would oppose the Christ? McGinn offers as a definition of evil, "saying no to love." He concludes that the Anti-Christ is essentially a force of self-deception opposed to love. The best candidate for this attribute, he proposes, is our tendency to worship doctrine rather than to practice love. The sin of self is the self-importance that our ideas of truth can readily attain if we are not careful. The true Christ spirit is not a law that holds fast in all situations, but a unique creative response from love that is a step beyond predictability. The Anti-Christ can manifest widespread horror in the name of an "ism" or wound a person's soul through the application of an "ology."

In a time of chaos and rapid change, we are naturally more tempted to cling to a particular belief system. When we use that security blanket as a weapon to coerce someone to conform to our image of how things should be, we are enacting the Anti-Christ. If the results of this hurtful tendency enables us to see how we've missed the mark, and motivates us to return to the mystery of love, then evil has served some good.

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