I was thinking about the book of Revelation today – perhaps the most controversial book in that library of books that we know as the Bible. I grew up in a kind of religion that took this book and used it as a lens to understand world events, particularly (but not exclusively) what has happening in the middle east.

This was before all the current madness, stemming from things like the Left Behind series of books, and all the American Christian Zionism.

Back then, we had people like Hal Lindsay and The Late Great Planet Earth. It was the same stuff and it earned him a fortune.

I still know people who live within this bizarre world view, in which world events are viewed through a particular, modern, Capitalist and elitist interpretation of scripture. In some ways this is the first and ultimate of conspiracy theories- ground zero. All the ingredients are there- the special secrets that will open your eyes to ‘reality’, the sense of being part of a special selection, the cataclysmic alternatives, the network of others who see things like you do and constantly reinforce your world view.

There is also the unforunate side effect of how these ideas, now almost mainstream in the US, have made victims out of already oppressed people and become a wierd distraction for many at best, perhaps actually morally corosive.

Perhaps these ideas are even antichrist.

I will not be deconstructing end times eschatology in this post. If you are interested in digging deeper into this, then I would recommend this podcast;

Keith Giles – Ending the End Times (N264)

Back to my cogitations on Revelation. I was thinking about how we might (as with Keith Giles’ account) better approach this book as a confusing veiled analogy of the danger of Empire.

How powerfull, charismatic and despotic individuals can first seem like messiah, but then turn out to be beasts.

We do not have to look far to see examples of these kind of individuals. Ones for whom death, destruction, exploitation and subjugation are just political tools, used casually for personal power and profit.

But I will not name any person ‘Antichrist’. I have heard Christians name many people this way over the years. The Pope, Gorbachev, Putin to name but a few.

What I think I can call antichrist are those things that are against the teachings of Jesus – those things that are contrary to a movement towards goodness otherwise known as ‘the Kingdom of God’.

There seems to be a particular kind of antichrist-ness that uses the Bible as a means to achieve its aim. I find myself loathing this most of all – Jesus did the same. He seemed to reserve a special kind of anger for the religious people who were users, profiteers, division-creators, victim-blamers and hate dealers. Think about these examples;

• The Sermon on the Mount:Jesus directly challenges the teachings of the Pharisees by emphasizing the importance of inner motives and true righteousness over outward actions. 
• “Woes upon you, scribes and Pharisees”:In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus delivers a series of pronouncements condemning the religious leaders for their hypocrisy and self-righteousness. 
• Cleansing the Temple:A dramatic act where Jesus drove out those selling animals and money in the temple, criticizing their commercialization of a sacred space. 

There is danger here of falling into that same old dualistic us/them, good/bad, holy/profane trap in which we retire into a trench built of sandbags full of our own rightness. But despite this danger, after conversations this week I am going to say this. Christians have no monopoly on Christ. We are all capable of being antchrist. This is true in the small things and the big things.

Lets subjugate everything to love, to kindness and to compassion – particularly towrds the weak, the poor, the broken. Anything else is empire. Anything else is antichrist.

Things like this