God: Why Only One?

I'm History Channel fan, both because I'm a history nut and because it is a non-pharmaceutical cure to Amybear's occassional bouts of insomnia. While I watched an show on Dracula's castles last night, I didn't catch the one on the Anti-Christ. Paul Smith did though:

In it, historians speculated on past historical figures who had been identified, however incredibly, as the Anti-Christ. Names suggested included Hitler, Mussolini, and Ronald Reagan (!).

I often wonder how useful or accurate "end times" theology is. It seems like there are major differences in points of view (a-, pre-, post-millenial, etc.). Some of the big concepts that have impacted our culture are either vaguely mentioned or created by inferring information from multiple disconnected sources and prophecies. For instance the word Anti-Christ comes from John's letters like here in 1 John 2:18:

Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come.

You'll note that while the Anti-Christ is often referred to as a singular figure John uses the plural. Why does everyone today talk about the anti-christ as if there were only one of them and try to analyze the Bible in the same way. 1 John 2:22 continues his discussion on the subject.

It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a man is the antichrist—he denies the Father and the Son.

And in 2 John 1:7...

Many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist.

So we talk about the Anti-Christ figure, but really we're combining aspects of "The Beast" from Revelations along with sections of the book of Daniel. Perhaps that is appropriate, but perhaps not. Oddly enough we're rarely talking about 1st and 2nd John which are the only places the word "antichrist" really shows up in the Bible.

To go back to Paul's point, I also think our conception of evil is biased towards the flashy. Yes Hitler was evil and killed lots of people. But frankly I'm more concerned with John's anti-christs, those slowly eroding the foundation of the Gospel and the difficult truths therein with easy "liberating" lies.