Antichrist Sentence Examples

In the same year the Lutheran reformation took hold of him, and he began to issue appeals in prose and verse against the Mass and against the pope as antichrist.

Abandoning the ancient Muscovite capital, where many influential personages were fanatically hostile to his innovations and not a few of the superstitious inhabitants regarded him with horror as Antichrist, he built at the mouth of the Neva a new capital which was to serve as " a window through which his people might look into Europe "; and laying aside the national St title of tsar he proclaimed himself (1711) emperor Peters- (Imperator) of all Russia - much to the surprise and indignation of foreign diplomatic chancelleries, which resented the audacity of a semi-barbarous potentate in claiming to be equal in rank with the head of the Holy Roman Empire.

To the conservatives, known subsequently as Old Ritualists or Old Believers, this marked the beginning of the reign of Antichrist (was not 666 the number of the Beast?); but they continued the struggle, conservative opposition to the Westernizing policy of the tsars, which was held responsible for the introduction of Polish luxury and Latin heresy, giving it a political as well as a religious character.

Lucifer, enraged at the spread of Christ's kingdom, convokes the fiends in council, and resolves to set up the pope as Antichrist.

The cruel persecutions instituted by the authorities with a view to securing conformity increased the number and fanaticism of the schismatics and heretics, and created among them a widespread belief that the reign of Antichrist, foretold in the Apocalypse, was at hand.

They still believe, as John did, in the return of Nero as the Antichrist; they still expect that after the first resurrection Christ will reign with his saints "in the flesh" for a thousand years.

They give descriptions of heaven and hell, and predictions of the Antichrist.

Newton and Dr Samuel Clarke is laid open, 1732; Glory or Gravity, 1733; The Religion of Satan, or Antichrist Delineated, 1736.

Throughout these later commentaries a strong antipapal interest which identified the pope with the Antichrist holds a central place - a doctrine which, as we have seen, goes back historically to the immediate disciples of Joachim and like-minded Franciscans.

Bousset has shown with much probability that it is part of the Antichrist legend.

Of the later stage, when the myth of Nero redivivus was fused with that of the Antichrist, we have attestation in xvii.

We find at least two stages of the Neronic and Antichrist myth in the Apocalypse.

For every one who shall not confess that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is antichrist; and whosoever shall not confess the testimony of the Cross is of the devil; and whosoever shall pervert the oracles of the Lord to his own lusts and say that there is neither resurrection nor judgment, that man is the first-born of Satan.

He had spoken disrespectfully of the church, it was said, had even hinted that Antichrist might be found to be in Rome, had fomented in his preaching the quarrel between Bohemians and Germans, and had, notwithstanding all that had passed, continued to speak of Wycliffe as both a pious man and an orthodox teacher.

Of the dogmatic works, that on Christ and Antichrist survives in a complete state.

Of the Academy's edition one volume was published at Berlin in 1897, containing the Commentaries on Daniel and on the Song of Songs, the treatise on Antichrist, and the Lesser Exegetical and Homiletic Works, edited by Nathanael Bonwetsch and Hans Achelis.

The primitive Christian eschatology was preserved in the West as it was not in the East, and in times of exceptional distress the expectation of Antichrist emerged again and again.

The historical figure who served as a model for the "Antichrist" was Antiochus IV.

This conception of the strife of God with the devil was further interwoven, before its introduction into the Antichrist myth, with another idea of different origin, namely, the myth derived from the Babylonian religion, of the battle of the supreme God (Marduk) with the dragon of chaos (Tiamat), originally a myth of the origin of things which, later perhaps, was changed into an eschatological one, again under Iranian influence?

Now it is possible that the whole conception of Antichrist has its final roots in this already complicated myth, that the form of the mighty adversary of God is but the equivalent in human form of the devil or of the dragon of chaos.

In any case, however, this myth has exercised a formative influence on the conception of Antichrist.

Without this assumption of a continual infusion of mythological conceptions, we cannot understand the figure of Antichrist.

Finally, it must be mentioned that Antichrist receives, at least in the later sources, the name originally proper to the devil himself.3 From the Jews, Christianity took over the idea.

And while the originally Jewish idea led straight to the conception, set forth in Revelation, of the Roman empire or its ruler as Antichrist, here, on the contrary, it is probably the Roman empire that is the power which still retards the reign of Antichrist.

This version of the figure of Antichrist, who may now really for the first time be described by this name, appears to have been at once widely accepted in Christendom.

But this version of the idea of Antichrist, hostile to the Jews and better expressing the relation of Christianity to the Roman empire, was prevented from obtaining an absolute ascendancy in Christian tradition by the rise of the belief in the ultimate return of Nero, and by the absorption of this outcome of pagan superstition into the Jewish-Christian apocalyptic conceptions.

Later, the figure of Nero redivivus became, more especially in Christian thought, entirely confused with that of Antichrist.

In proportion as the figure of Nero again ceased to dominate the imagination of the faithful, the wholly unhistorical, unpolitical and anti-Jewish conception of Antichrist, which based itself more especially on 2 Thess.

Thus the prophecy of the sleeping emperor of the future is very closely connected with the Antichrist tradition.

Jewish apocalypse also awakes to fresh developments in the Mahommedan period, and shows a close relationship with the Christian Antichrist literature.

Then in the West the period arrived in which eschatology, and above all the expectation of the coming of Antichrist, exercised a great influence on the world's history.

In the contests between the rival powers and courts of the period, the prophecy of Antichrist played a political part.

Among the visionary Franciscans, enthusiastic adherents of Joachim's prophecies, arose above all the conviction that the pope was Antichrist, or at least his precursor.

For Wycliffe and his adherent John Purvey (probably the author of the Commentarius in Apocalypsin ante centum annos editus, edited in 1528 by Luther), as on the other hand for Hus, the conviction that the papacy is essentially Antichrist is absolute.

To write the history of the idea of Antichrist in the last centuries of the middle ages, would be almost to write that of the middle ages themselves.

For the later history of the legend, see Bousset, Antichrist, where will be found a more detailed discussion of nearly all the sources named; Bousset, "Beitrage zur Geschichte der Eschatologie," in Zeitschrift fiir Kirchengeschichte, xx.

Wadstein, Die eschatologische Ideengruppe, Antichrist, Weltsabbat, Weltende and Welgericht (Leipzig, 1896), which contains excellent material for the history of the idea in the West during the middle ages; W Meyer, "Ludus de Antichristo," in Sitzbericht der Miinchener Akad.

Their name for Antichrist is Dajjal, and they have a tradition that Jesus will slay Antichrist by the gate of Lydda.

According to the so-called Pseudo-Methodius there was a tradition 251 that Antichrist would be born at Chorazin, educated at Bethsaida and rule at Capernaum - hence the curse of Jesus upon these cities.

In Christian tradition he even appears as the mystic Antichrist, who was destined to come once again to trouble the saints.

He is also wrongly described as a relative of Archbishop Abbot, from whom he acknowledges very gratefully, in the first of his epistles dedicatory of A Hand of Fellowship to Helpe Keepe out Sinne and Antichrist (1623, 4to), that he had "received all" his "worldly maintenance," as well as "best earthly countenance" and "fatherly incouragements."

John XXII., however, condemned the doctrine and excommunicated its supporters, some of whom were so convinced of the necessity of evangelical poverty for a truly Christian life that they denounced the pope when he refused them leave to practise it as Antichrist.

These were immediately hailed as martyrs, and in the eyes of the exalted Franciscans at Naples and in Sicily and the south of France the pope was regarded as antichrist.

The first part of the Instructiones is addressed to the heathens and Jews, and ridicules the divinities of classical mythology; the second contains reflections on Antichrist, the end of the world, the Resurrection, and advice to Christians, penitents and the clergy.

The appearance of Antichrist, identified with Nero and the Man from the East, is expected at an early date.

A bad pope, and most popes were bad, was the true Antichrist, since he was always overruling the divine law of the scriptures by his human ordinances.

When he proceeded to deny the doctrine of transubstantiation, to assert the all-sufficiency of the Scriptures as a rule of life, to denounce saint-worship, pilgrimages, and indulgences, and to declare, the pope to be Antichrist, he frightened his old supporter John of Gaunt and the politicians of the anti-clerical clique.

In works of contemporary art Averroes is at one time the comrade of Mahomet and Antichrist; at another he lies with Arius and Sabellius, vanquished by the lance of St Thomas.

His Dialogues philosophiques, written in 1871, his Ecclesiastes (1882) and his Antichrist (1876) (the fourth volume of the Origins of Christianity, dealing with the reign of Nero) are incomparable in their literary genius, but they are examples of a disenchanted and sceptical temper.

Both Increase and Cotton Mather follow suit in naming the pope as antichrist.

So he presided at the trial of John Claydon, Skinner and citizen of London, who after five years' imprisonment at various times had made public abjuration before the late archbishop, Arundel, but now was found in possession of a book in English called The Lanterne of Light, which contained the heinous heresy that the principal cause of the persecution of Christians was the illegal retention by priests of the goods of this world, and that archbishops and bishops were the special seats of antichrist.

If the church, and not the state, was regarded as Babylon, and the pope declared to be the Antichrist, these were legitimate inferences from the ancient traditions and the actual position of the church.

The above method was adopted by Bousset in his work Der Antichrist in der Uberlieferung des Judenthums, des Neuen Testaments, and der alter Kirche (1895), in which he sought to show that a fixed tradition of the Antichrist originating in Judaism can be traced from New Testament times down to the middle ages, and that this tradition was in the main unaffected by the Apocalypse, though in chap. xi.

The book closes (chap. xvi.) with exhortations to steadfastness in the last days, and to the coming of the "world-deceiver" or Antichrist, which will precede the coming of the Lord.

Paul's eschatology is not free of obscurities and ambiguities; and in the New Testament eschatology generally we are forced to recognize a mixture of inherited Jewish and original Christian elements (see Antichrist).

He not unnaturally expressed his amazement when that very juvenile reformer Olavus Petri confidently informed him that the pope was antichrist.

Petri (Petri apostoli apocalypsis per Clementem), the late Syrian apocalypse of Ezra (Bousset, Antichrist, 45 &c.), the Coptic (14th) vision of Daniel (in the appendix to Woide's edition of the Codex Alexandrinus; Oxford, 179 9), the Ethiopian Wisdom of the Sibyl, which is closely related to the Tiburtine Sibyl (see Basset, Apocryphes etlziopiennes, x.); in the last mentioned of these sources long series of Islamic rulers are foretold before the final time of Antichrist.

But I warn you, if you don't tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist--I really believe he is Antichrist--I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer my 'faithful slave,' as you call yourself!

His love for Natasha, Antichrist, Napoleon, the invasion, the comet, 666, L'Empereur Napoleon, and L'russe Besuhof--all this had to mature and culminate, to lift him out of that spellbound, petty sphere of Moscow habits in which he felt himself held captive and lead him to a great achievement and great happiness.

And who is it that lies behind the spirit of the antichrist?

To the latter belong views of the Antichrist, of the heathen worldpower, of the place, extent, and duration of the earthly kingdom of Christ, &c. These remained in a state of solution; they were modified from day to day, partly because of the changing circumstances of the present by which forecasts of the future were regulated, partly because the indications - real or supposed - of the ancient prophets always admitted of new combinations and constructions.

The new society of the Jesuits, as being the forerunners of Antichrist, also met with his violent opposition; and he was not grateful to them when, after attending the council of Trent in 1545, he was sent, by their influence, in 1552, as bishop of the far-off see of the Canaries.