Irenaeus on Eschatology

In my reading today of Manlio Simonetti's Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church, I was intrigued by the following statement, which discusses Irenaeus:

Pages 23-24: So too the unjust judge of Lk. 18:2ff. is also seen as a figure of the antichrist, while the widow, who, unmindful of God applies to him for help is a symbol of the earthly Jerusalem (V 25:4).  Just as the people of the Old Testament prefigure the Church here and now, so the present Church prefigures the Church of the end-times (IV 22:2).  

That reminds me of the Left Behind series, which says that the Anitchrist will make a covenant with the Jews to rebuild the Temple, then will turn on them.  I decided to check the reference---Against Heresies 5.25---to see what Irenaeus has to say.    Iraeneus doesn't appear to believe that the Antichrist will rebuild the temple, for he notes that II Thessalonians 2:4 calls it the temple of God, meaning it's made under God's direction.  That's a point my dad has made.  And Irenaeus thinks that many Jews will follow the Antichrist, for Jesus told them that they'd follow a man who came in his own name, after rejecting Jesus, who came in his Father's name (John 5:43).

Irenaeus also holds that the Antichrist will come from the Roman empire, which he discusses in Against Heresies 5.25 and 5.26.  Irenaeus wrote in the second century C.E., whereas the Roman emperor Julian emerged in the fourth century C.E.  Julian renounced Christianity and tried to rebuild the Jewish temple, so I can imagine Christians of that day considering him the Antichrist.  The only problem is that Julian never got to sit in the temple of God claiming to be God, for the temple never got rebuilt.

The part about the present church prefiguring the church of the end-times is interesting.  It reminds me of an argument Gregory MacDonald once made in support of Christian universalism: the New Testament's fulfillment of the Old Testament contained things that people did not expect, so maybe the future fulfillment of the New Testament will be the same way.  Perhaps God has something unexpected up his sleeve, such as the salvation of all humanity, MacDonald argues.

In any case, I'm curious as to how Irenaeus and Origen believed that the present church prefigures the one of the end-time.