How To Pick a Christian Tyrant

How to get a profile of the Antichrist that the Bible foretells:

1. Find every passage in the Bible that talks about "the false leader" or "the false prophet" or "the false teacher".

2. Steadfastly ignore the fact that the First Amendment did not exist at the time the passages were written, and so authors might have had reason to refer to bad leaders they knew (and bad leadership they were exercising) in generic terms; insist instead that they all must refer to the future Antichrist.

3. Steadfastly ignore the fact that the Antichrist is never a singular person in the Bible, anywhere.  (The noun is always a common noun, and usually in the plural.)

4. Steadfastly ignore any similarities these leaders you've found described in Scripture have to historical leaders of the past, like Nebuchadnezzar, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, or any Roman ruler over any domain in the empire.

5. Reconcile the contradictions with the fervor of a Star Trek fan.  (This will be hard, but think of it as challenging to a "real, true" fan who's unfraid to take the Holy Writ "at its word".)

On one level, this can be a pretty fun game -- and has been for lots of Christians ever since the currently-fashionable method of understanding future events in the Bible came into existence about a century ago, with its insistence that the world would one day be ruled by a single tyrant just before Jesus returned as He promised to.

But it also seems to me that this game has done some damage, because these games allow us to turn a blind eye to deep things that the Bible has to say about bad leadership generally.  Pretending that all these passages are about someone else (and someone irredeemably evil who certainly isn't us) permits us to avoid turning these passages on ourselves, and asking whether or not we exhibit the qualities of false leadership that the Bible wrote about over and over in all sorts of different places from all sorts of different perspectives.

It honestly seems to me that if we had turned those passages on ourselves, and used them to examine the sway that we Christians have had over society over the centuries (and now), we would have avoided a lot of damage and pain and suffering that took place (and is taking place) by our words and at our hands.

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