Hi,
Is it possible the "Antichrist" or "Man of Lawlessness" is a French Canadian-Chinese ?
Oddly specific...
It's not clear that St. Paul's "man of lawlessness" is the same thing as "Antichrist"; though this connection has frequently been made by Christian commentators and interpreters for the last two thousand years.
The difficulty is that there has never been a definitive Christian understanding of "Antichrist". The only places in the Bible this word is found comes to us in the first two epistles of St. John. And he, writing to his audience, says, "You have heard antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come" and then goes on to identify these antichrists as heretics who claim to be "of us" but are not, for they deny and oppose Christ in their heresy.
St. John is likely talking about the early proto-Gnostics known as Docetists. Docetism was a very ancient heresy that said that Jesus only seemed to be human (from the Greek
dokeo meaning "to seem" or "to appear like"). The Docetists taught that Jesus wasn't human, He had no physical body; instead Jesus was a purely divine apparition, a formless spiritual entity. In one of the most famous Docetic writings of antiquity, the Acts of John (which was probably originally an orthodox work that was later changed to be more Gnostic), there is a passage in which the writer claims that Jesus would walk on the sand and leave no foot prints, that Jesus would occasionally appear and disappear, that when someone tried to touch Jesus their hand would pass right through.
The 1st and 2nd Epistles of St. John directly and explicitly condemn this heresy, and speak of it as antichrist, being of the spirit of antichrist, and those promoting it as antichrists.
And what will the Antichrist/Man of Lawlessness do ? Set up a "New World Order" ?
The idea of a "new world order" is a very modern idea that that has no real basis in Scripture. And it depends a great deal on what one believes about these things, and many other things.
Is there a figure that shows up at some point near the end of history, a final antagonist to God's people? This is what many imagine when they hear or read the word "antichrist", and again frequently in the history of Christianity this has been a popular belief and idea. But it's not something the Bible actually just comes right out and says, but requires a particular way of reading, and comparing different passages of Scripture to tease this kind of idea out.
Will there be an ultimate bad guy--The Antichrist? Maybe. But it's hardly a certainty.
Which basically means that, generally, everyone and their uncle has an opinion on the subject, some of those opinions have more historical merit than others--but it's all basically just opinion. There is no definitive answer to the following questions:
Who or what is the Antichrist?
What will the Antichrist do?
Is there a final, end-of-the-world Antichrist?
The idea that a final end-of-the-world Antichrist will bring about a new world order is a very recent innovation among certain groups of Christians--usually the sort who also engage in wide-eyed conspiracy theories about microchips, the United Nations, the European Union, etc.
These things are beliefs held by [some] Christians; but these are not Christian beliefs. That is, there are Christians who believe this, but it is not official Christian teaching.
To offer some helpful insight on this, in the 16th century the Protestant Reformers came to regard and identify the institution of the papacy as "the Antichrist". Because they saw in the opposition from Rome, and Rome's claims of special papal authority to reject and oppose what the Reformers were saying as being the work and spirit of antichrist. It wasn't about the human individual himself sitting on St. Peter's chair as the bishop of Rome, but with the papacy as power and institution acting contrariwise to the Gospel. As such, in Lutheranism the papacy is specifically called "antichrist" in the Lutheran Confessions. Is the papacy exclusively antichrist? Well no. Fundamentally
anything that vehemently opposes Christ and His Gospel is antichrist. But this was also a time when the charge of "antichrist" wasn't uncommon. The Pope called Martin Luther "antichrist" as well, because from Rome's perspective Luther was an egotistical monk drunk and full of himself, and saw him as trying to divide the Church.
-CryptoLutheran
