Your land, strangers devour it in your presence.
- Isaiah 1:7
When I was a kid, I remember going on a snipe hunt. A snipe, we were told, was this somewhat mysterious beast that came out at night, and it was our job to catch one. The problem was nobody seemed to really know what a snipe looked like. That’s a bit of a problem. Because if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you can’t recognize it, even if it’s standing right in front of you. Unsurprisingly, our search for the mythical snipe, while it was a lot of fun, ultimately proved fruitless.
The contemporary Protestant church is much like we kids were on our snipe hunt. Books are written about Antichrist and some people seem to know who he is or was. The preterists will tell you Antichrist has long since come and gone in the person of the emperor Nero. We have nothing to fear from him in the 21st century. The futurist school, which dominates in our own time, sees Antichrist as having not yet come. While preterism and futurism come to very different conclusions about the identity of Antichrist, they have this one thing in common, there is no current Antichrist.
Actually, preterism and futurism have something else in common: They were both developed by the Jesuits during the counterreformation to take the heat off the pope, whom the reformers almost to a man had identified as the Antichrist, man of sin, and son of perdition of the Scriptures. This stance, identifying the office of the papacy as the Antichrist, is one facet of the Protestant school of prophetic interpretation known as historicism.
Lux Lucet 