About Newman
Advent Sermons on AntiChrist by St. John Henry Newman
August 15, 2026
Films and novels about the end of time and the Antichrist draw people’s attention. In 2023, Fathom Events brought Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist to American screens — the latest entry in a franchise built on Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ bestselling novels, in which the Rapture empties the world of its Christians overnight and a charismatic statesman named Nicolae Carpathia rises to fill the vacuum, revealed by degrees as the Antichrist. The film’s central theological claim is an old one: that Antichrist is a single, identifiable man, and that his rise coincides with a great falling-away from the faith. Audiences still find that story compelling.
Scripture speaks of the fallen angels and of a mysterious figure, the Antichrist, arrayed against God’s kingdom in history. But unlike Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism, Christianity does not treat good and evil as equal, opposing powers locked in an open contest: these forces are no match for God, and have already been definitively defeated.
The Evangelical Inheritance
That prophecy culture, in Newman’s own day, went further than any modern film would dare: it did not merely say Antichrist would be a man, but that he had already arrived — in the person of the Pope. This “historicist” reading, descending from the Reformers and kept current by works like Bishop Newton’s Dissertations on the Prophecies and the prophecy conferences Henry Drummond hosted at Albury Park in the late 1820s, held that Rome was Babylon and the Papacy the Beast of the Apocalypse, fulfilled prophecy in the present tense. It was no fringe view — it fed the “No Popery” agitation around Catholic Emancipation in 1829, and Newman himself had been raised on it, reading Newton’s Dissertations at fifteen and coming away convinced.
After reading the Church Fathers, though, Newman reached a different conclusion. In Advent 1835 he climbed into the pulpit of St Mary’s, Oxford, and preached four sermons on the Antichrist and the end of time. In them he builds a counter-argument from patristic sources — Antichrist as a still-future individual, “he is not come yet” — a reasoned case against identifying the Pope with Antichrist.
He published the sermons in 1838 as Tract 83, “Advent Sermons on Antichrist” (a separate work of his, on the scriptural proof of Church doctrine, appeared alongside it as Tract 85). In 1872, as a Catholic, Newman folded both tracts, unaltered, into Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects, his collected late-career prose — a reprint, not a revision.
A Change of Mind, Traced in the Apologia
The Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) explains, more candidly than the tracts do, how he got there. Convinced at fifteen that the Pope was Antichrist, he found the conviction softening at Oxford under Hurrell Froude’s influence, retreating by stages until, by 1838, he had “got no further than to consider Antichrist… not the Church of Rome, but the spirit of the old pagan city.” Tellingly, he adds that the belief, though “obliterated from my reason and judgment” long before, lingered “as a stain upon my imagination” until 1843 — two years before his conversion. By 1835, then, Newman no longer identified the Pope with Antichrist in any formal sense; the sermons are the fruit of a change already made, even if the feeling behind the old belief took longer to fade than the belief itself. That is also why the 1872 reprint carries no retraction: the sermons had never made the claim a converted Catholic might be expected to disown.
Sermon One: The Man of Sin
The first sermon opens with St Paul’s warning to the Thessalonians that the Day of the Lord cannot come “except there come a falling away first, and except first that man of sin be revealed.” Drawing on the early Fathers rather than contemporary prophecy writers, Newman argues it was “the universal tradition of the early Church” that Antichrist is “one individual man, not a power, — not a mere ethical spirit, or a political system.” He points to history’s partial rehearsals for that man — Antiochus Epiphanes, “the savage persecutor of the Jews”; Julian the Apostate; and Mohammed — each a type, none the thing itself.
The pattern, for Newman, is constant: apostasy first, the enemy after. “The Man of Sin is born of an Apostasy,” he writes, “or at least comes into power through an apostasy.” And here the sermon turns on his own Oxford congregation, warning that “there is at this day a confederacy of evil, marshalling its hosts from all parts of the world… preparing the way for a general Apostasy” — visible to him in the drive to educate without religion and the erosion of oaths from public life.
Newman sounds a warning to his own age: a “confederacy of evil” is already marshalling itself against religion in public life — “in its most civilized and powerful parts, an effort to do without Religion… that religion is merely a matter for each man’s own conscience… a vigorous and united movement in all countries to cast down the Church of Christ from power and place, an attempt to educate without Religion — that is, by putting all forms of Religion together, which comes to the same thing, an attempt to supersede Religion altogether, as far as it is external or objective, as far as it is displayed in ordinances, or can be expressed by written words, — to confine it to our inward feelings, and thus, considering how variable, how evanescent our feelings are, an attempt, in fact, to destroy Religion.”
A Word for Today
A minority of Christians still hold the older reading — Rome as Babylon, the Pope as Antichrist — though most non-Catholic Christians today no longer do. What has not faded is the underlying story: a single man, an apostasy, a reckoning still to come — the same shape Left Behind puts back on screen every few years. Newman calls us to watch and pray, and to resist the spirit of Antichrist, reminding us: “What fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? And what communion hath light with darkness?”
The solemnity of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary speaks to us of the power of God and his complete victory over the Antichrist. It is the glorification of the Mother of God, taken up to Heaven body and soul by her Son, who, having ascended into Heaven, reigns in the kingdom of light. This feast bids us pray and fight with confidence, our eyes fixed on Christ and the kingdom of Heaven.
