Peter Thiel & Sam Wolfe First Things
Unfortunately Jesus never imagined an Antichrist.
Jesus was an eschatological prophet for whom there was hardly enough time left to repent, follow him, and escape the imminently coming last judgment, let alone enough time for any more history to unfold and a figure to arise such as an Antichrist, or even a Paul to predict an Antichrist's coming.
Jesus' son of perdition was Judas (John 17:12).
But Peter Thiel would rather talk about Paul's son of perdition, a fantastic boogeyman from II Thessalonians 2:3, whose ticket to power, amusingly, will be the promise of totalitarian peace and safety (I Thessalonians 5:3 lol), as if the world has never had any of either, and as if Paul wasn't already living and thriving in such a period of peace and safety of his own when he wrote those very words, a totalitarian one even.
We Americans hardly know or care about the 100-year Pax Britannica of 1815-1914. We were too busy with Manifest Destiny and Civil War and The Gilded Age.
Most have never heard of the 300 years of peace in East Asia known as the Confucian Peace of 1598-1894, let alone of the 200 year Pax Romana from 27BC to 180AD.
A more reflective Paul might have expressed what a gift the latter had been to the success of his own Christian missionary activity, but instead he was consumed with visions and revelations of the Lord.
Like Jesus Paul misread his own time as the end of the world, as most people misread their own times, when its peace still had roughly another 130 years left in it.
The Lord is at hand.
-- Philippians 4:5
Paul was writing when the Pax Romana was in its 78th year. The Enlightenment Peace of 1715-1789, another one we know nothing about, and are damn proud of it, too, lasted only 74 years.
No Antichrist brought these periods of peace and safety
to the world, and when they ended the world did not end.
Our own Long Peace since 1945 matters less and less to us with every
passing year, consumed as we are with our own prosperity and decadence. But it is in its 81st year. The odds that it won't last much longer are pretty good considering that human nature doesn't change.
But American institutions are notable for curbing human nature, and for dividing power so that no single one can have its way for very long. Any radical change to them means the odds of the peace ending only increase. A president who flouts their standards is particularly troubling, even more so when his party does nothing about it, and even more so yet when an opposition party openly runs on dismantling the institutions.
You don't have to be a religious fanatic to figure out that our days are numbered. You just have to pay attention.
But the world will still be here, pace Thiel.
And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.
While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.
-- Genesis 8:21f.
