Two things it may be wise to know before picking up this relatively short and surprisingly cheerful brand spanking NEW biography of the Antichrist: (1) the meaning of the word ‘eschatological’ (it’s fairly critical); (2) the fact that the Antichrist is not the devil (a common misapprehension). The Antichrist is actually the son/spawn of the devil, and Philip C. Almond has already provided us with a perfectly serviceable biography of the Prince of Darkness himself (also NEW, even though, um, a few years old now).
As a religious/cultural figure the Antichrist was actually a bit of a slow starter. The earliest and most comprehensive text about him, Adso’s A Little Book About the Antichrist (essentially 990 AD’s answer to our present-day The Little Book of Calm) was conceived as a kind of roundabout response to a couple of critical dilemmas facing the fledgling Christian church. The first focused on the question of evil: why did evil continue to blight human experience if Christ had truly died to save us from our sins? Almond argues that
the Antichrist became… a key component of a Christian providentialism that demanded, in spite of the redemption of Christ already effected, a final resolution of cosmic and human evil.
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