2 Thessalonians 3:7

αὐτοὶ γὰρ οἴδατε. For you know of yourselves—“without our needing to tell it again”: see notes on καθὼς οἴδατε, 1 Thessalonians 1:5 f., 2 Thessalonians 2:1, &c.

πῶς δεῖ μιμεῖσθαι ἡμᾶς, in what manner you ought to imitate us—“an abridged expression for πῶς δεῖ ὑμᾶς περιπατεῖν ὥστε μιμεῖσθαι ἡμᾶς” (Lightfoot). Πῶς (quali ratione, Bengel) qualifies μιμεῖσθαι rather than δεῖ (cf. 1 Thessalonians 4:1; Ephesians 5:15; 1 Timothy 3:15): not urging the grounds of this duty, but showing the direction in which it lies, the true line of imitation. For μιμεῖσθαι, see notes on 1 Thessalonians 1:6, and 2 Thessalonians 3:9 below.

ὅτι οὐκ ἠτακτήσαμεν ἐν ὑμῖν, for we did not act a disorderly part among you. Ἠτακτήσαμεν is misrendered in the Vulg. “inquieti fuimus”; Erasmus better, “praeter ordinem viximus”; Beza, “inordinate nos gessimus”; Calvin, “inordinate egimus.” Another meiosis (cf. οὐ πάντων ἡ πίστις, 2 Thessalonians 3:2; and θεῷ μὴ�, 1 Thessalonians 2:15): how far the Apostles were from conduct like this! Ἀτακτέω (= ἀτάκτως περιπατέω, 2 Thessalonians 3:6; cf. ἀτάκτους, 1 Thessalonians 5:14)—hap. leg. in N.T.—a military term, applied e.g. to soldiers out of rank: cf. Colossians 2:5, τὴν τάξιν ὑμῶν καὶ τὸ στερέωμα κ.τ.λ., “your order and the solid front of your faith in Christ.” Officers are as much subject to discipline as the rank and file; it was due to their Churches that the Apostles should set an example of a strictly ordered life; with this example before them, which bore exactly upon the point in question, the readers “know” what the nature of their “imitation” should be. Ὅτι governs along with οὐκ ἠτακτήσαμεν the following οὐδέ clause, which should have been included in the same verse, for it brings out the kind of disorder reproved:—

7. ANTICHRIST IN MODERN TIMES

It would occupy several pages barely to state the various theories advanced upon this mysterious subject in more recent times.
Not the least plausible is that which saw τὸ μυστήριον τῆς� in the later developments of the French Revolution at the close of the 18th century, with its apotheosis of an abandoned woman in the character of Goddess of Reason, and which identified ὁ ἄνομος with Napoleon Buonaparte. The empire of Napoleon was essentially a restoration of the military Cæsarism of ancient Rome. He came within a little of making himself master, like Julius Cæsar, of the civilized world. This unscrupulous despot, with his superb genius and insatiable egotism—the offspring and the idol, till he became the scourge, of a lawless democracy—is, surely, in the true succession of Antiochus Epiphanes and Nero Cæsar. Napoleon has set before our times a new and commanding type of the Lawless One, which has had, and may have hereafter, its imitators.

Nor is the godlessness of St Paul’s υἱὸς τῆς� wanting in a bold and typical modern expression. Following upon the negative and destructive atheism of the 18th century, the scientific, constructive atheism of the 19th century has built up an imposing system of thought and life. The theory of Positivism, as it was propounded by its great apostle, Auguste Comte, culminates in the doctrine that “Man is man’s god.” God and immortality, the entire world of the supernatural, this philosophy abolishes in the name of science and modern thought. It sweeps them out of the way to make room for le grand être humain, or collective humanity, which is to command our worship through the memory of its heroes and men of genius, and in the person of woman adored within the family. This scheme of religion Comte worked out with the utmost seriousness, and furnished with an elaborate hierarchy and ritual based on the Roman Catholic model. Although Comte’s religion of humanity is disowned by many positivists and has only come into practice upon a limited scale, it is a phenomenon of great significance. It testifies to the persistence of the religious instinct in our nature, and indicates the direction which that instinct is compelled to take when deprived of its rightful object (see the Apostle’s words in Romans 1:23). Comte would have carried us back, virtually, to the Pagan adoration of deified heroes and deceased emperors, or to the Chinese worship of family ancestors. Positivism provides in its Great Being an abstraction which, if it should once take hold of the popular mind, must inevitably tend to realize itself in concrete individual shape. It sets up a throne of worship within “the temple of God,” which the man of destiny will be found “in his season” to occupy.

Since the time of Hugo Grotius (1583–1645 A.D.), the famous Dutch Protestant scholar, theologian, and statesman, numerous attempts have been made to demonstrate the fulfilment of N.T. prophecy within the Apostolic or post-Apostolic days, upon the assumption that the παρουσία of Jesus was realized in the judgement falling upon the Jewish nation and by the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70 A.D. This line of interpretation was adopted by Romanist theologians, as by Bossuet in the 17th century and Döllinger in the 19th, partly by way of return to the Patristic view and partly in defence against Protestant exegesis. These prœterist theories, restricting the application of St Paul’s prediction to the first age of the Church, in various ways strain and minimize his language by attempting to bring it within the measure of contemporary events. Or else they assume, as rationalistic interpreters complacently do, that such prophecies, proceeding from a subjective stand-point and being the product of the passing situation, were incapable of real fulfilment and have been refuted by the course of history. Almost every Roman Emperor from Caligula down to Trajan—some even of later times—has been made to serve for the Man of Sin, or the Restrainer, by one or other of the commentators; Nero has figured in both capacities; so has Vespasian[10]. Others hold—and this theory is partly combined with the last, as e.g. by Grotius—that Simon Magus, the traditional father of heresy, was ὁ ἄνομος; while others, again, see τὸ μυστήριον τῆς� in the Jewish nation of St Paul’s time[11]. Outside the secular field, the power of the Holy Spirit, the decree of God, the Jewish law, the believing remnant of Judaism, and even Paul himself, have been put into the place of τὸ κατέχον by earlier or later authorities. But none of these suggestions has obtained much acceptance. A small group of critics—Bahnsen, Hilgenfeld, Pfleiderer—who date 2 Thessalonians in the reign of Trajan and after the year 100 (see Introd. p. xlv.), explain τὸ μυστήριον τῆς� as the heretical Gnosticism of that period, and τὸ κατέχον as the Episcopate, or the like. Apart from the assumed date, Bahnsen’s interpretation is a return to the view of Theodore and Augustine.

[10] On the relation of contemporary Emperors to 2 Thessalonians 2:3 ff., see Askwith’s Introduction to the Epp. to the Thessalonians. pp. 130 ff.

[11] So Lightfoot: “It seems on the whole probable that the Antichrist if represented especially by Judaism” (Smith’s DB., art. 2 Thessalonians).

The tendency of recent critical interpretation is to ascribe to this passage, and to the prophetic eschatology of the N.T. generally, a purely ideal or “poetic” and parænetic value[12]. The rise of Antichrist, along with the παρουσία of the Lord Jesus and the judgementscene of the Last Day, are taken to be no literal occurrences of the future, but “super-historical” events of the kingdom of God—in other words, to be imaginative representations, under their symbolic Biblical dress, of spiritual conflicts and crises which will find their issue in modes determined by conditions remote from those existing in the first ages and far beyond the horizon of the New Testament. The N.T. fulfilment, it is pointed out, set aside in what appeared to be essential particulars the concrete terms of O.T. prophecy, so that the interpreters of the latter were thrown quite off the track in their forecast of the Messianic days; and the like fate, it is said, will overtake the expositors of N.T. eschatology, who moreover are at complete discord amongst themselves. No doubt, the Apostles expected, and that shortly, a visible return of the glorified Jesus and the gathering of mankind in judgement before Him. But this mode of conceiving the consummation belonged to the mental furniture of their times; it was supplied them by the prophetic imagery of the Old Testament and by Jewish Apocalyptic; only the spiritual ideas expressed under this conventional dress were truly their own, and are essential to the Christian faith and of unchanging worth.

[12] C. L. Nitzsch (in his Essays De revelatione, 1808) was the first to give this theory systematic expression. The following sentences, quoted by Bornemann, indicate his position: the παρουσία “est factum ideale, non certo loco ac tempore, sed ubicumque et quandocumque opus fuerit ad confirmanda pietatis studia, cum fiducia exspectandum.” The prediction of the parousia is “mere moralis qua masteriam, et poetica qua formam … Apostolus, cum illa scriberet, parum curavit aut sensiit discrimen quod poeticæ rerum divinarum descriptionicum histora intercedit. Ex instinctu morali ac divino docebat omnia, accominidate ad usum practicum; non ut scholæ præceptis atque ita ut theologicis usibus inserviret.” As to the Man of Sin: “Homo iste malus cujus futura revelatio describitur, nusquam quisquam fuit nec in posterum futurus esse videtur.” As much as to say, the Apostle Paul aimed at edification in his prophecies, with very little regard to fact and truth!

The above mode of treating N.T. prophecy falls in with the spirit of our times, and escapes the difficulties pressing on those who maintain a belief in definite prediction. But, in consistency, it must be applied to the words of our Lord as well as to those of His Apostles, and to the thoughts which lay behind His words. The Day of the Lord and the Second Coming were matter of positive expectation on His part. However mistaken Jewish eschatology had been in respect to the circumstances of His first coming, that proved a matter-of-fact event and not a mere regulative or edifying idea; it realized in historical form the deeper sense and true burden of O.T. prophecy. Ancient Israel was right in the main fact. The Church should be wiser by the experience of Judaism; it has been cautioned by the failure of so many presumptuous deductions from the words of Christ and His Apostles respecting the last days. To evacuate their predictions of all definite meaning because that meaning has been overdefined, to suppose that what they foresaw was a mere exaggerated reflexion of the circumstances of their own age and is without objective warrant or reality, is an act of despair in the interpreter. The ideal and the abstract, if they be living forces, are bound to take a real, determinate shape. History requires another coming of Jesus in His glory to crown human development, and to complement His first coming in lowliness and for rejection. On the other hand, the powers of evil at work in humanity tend, by a secret law, to gather themselves up at one crisis after another into some dominant and representative personality. The ideal Antichrist conceived by Scripture, when actualized, will mould himself upon the lines of the many Antichrists whose career the Church has already witnessed.

Like other great prophecies of Scripture, this word of St Paul has a progressive fulfilment. It is carried into effect from time to time, under the action of Divine laws operating throughout human affairs, in partial and transitional forms, which prefigure and may contribute to its final realization. For such predictions are inspired by Him who “worketh all things after the counsel of His own will”; they rest upon the principles of God’s moral government, and the abiding facts of human nature. We find in Antiochus IV. and in Gaius Cæsar examples, present to the minds of inspired writers, of autocratic human power animated by a demonic pride and a desperate spirit of irreligion. We accept, with Chrysostom, an earnest of the embodiment of St Paul’s idea in the person of Nero, who furnished St John with an apt model for his more extended and vivid delineations. We recognize, with the later Greek Fathers and Melanchthon, plain Antichristian tokens and features in the polity of Muhammad. We recognize, with Gregory I. and the Protestant Reformers, a prelude of Antichrist’s coming and conspicuous traits of his character in the spiritual despotism of the See of Rome; and we sorrowfully mark throughout the Church’s history the tares growing amid the wheat, the perpetuation and recrudescence in manifold forms of “the apostasy” which prepares the way of Antichrist and abets his rule. We agree with those who discern in the Napoleonic idea an ominous revival of the lawless absolutism and worship of human power that prevailed in the age of the Cæsars; while positivist and materialistic philosophy, with sensualistic ethics, are making for the same goal[13].

[13] The following extract from Comte’s Catéchisme Positiviste is a striking proof of the readiness with which scientific atheism may join hands political absolutism: “Au nom du passé et de l’svenir, les seviteurs théoriques et les serviteurs pratiques de L’HUMANTITÉ viennent prendre digement la direction générale des affaires terrestres, pour construire enfin la vraie providence, morale, intellectualle, et matérielle; en excluant irrévocablemment de la suprématie politique tous les divers esclaves de Dieu, Catholiques, protestantes, ou déistes, comme étaut à la fois arriérés et perturbateurs.”—The true Pontifical style! It is not a very long step from these words to the situation which the Apostles describe in 2 Thessalonians 2:4 and Revelation 13:16 ff. It is significant that Comte issued his Catechism of the new religion just after the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon, whom he congratulates on “the happy crisis”! In the same preface he glorified the Empreoe Nicholas I. of Russia, as “the sole truly eminent chief of which our century can claim the honour, up to the present time.” Comte’s ignorance of politics is some excuse for these blunders; but the conjuction remains no less portentous. Faith in God and faithe in freedom are bound up together. See Arthur’s Physical and Moral Law. pp. 231–237; and his Religion without God, on positivism generally.

The history of the world is one. The first century lives over again in the twentieth. All the factors of evil co-operate, as do those of good. There are but two kingdoms behind the numberless powers contending throughout the ages of human existence, that of Satan and that of Christ; though to our eyes their forces lie scattered and confused, and we distinguish ill between them. But the course of time quickens its pace, as if nearing some great issue. Science has given an immense impetus to human progress in almost all directions, and moral influences propagate themselves with greater speed than heretofore. There is going on a rapid interfusion of thought, a unifying of the world’s life and a gathering together of the forces on either side to “the valley of decision,” that seem to portend some worldwide crisis, in which the glorious promises or dark forebodings of revelation, or both at once, will be anew fulfilled. Still Christ’s words stand, as St Augustine said, to put down “the fingers of the calculators[14].” It is not for us to know times or seasons. What backward currents may arise in our secular progress, what new seals are to be opened in the book of human fate, and through what cycles the evolution of God’s purpose for mankind has yet to run, we cannot guess.

[14] “Omnes calculantium digitos resolvit”; on Matthew 24:36.