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.