The doctrine of the Trinity is one of the more recognizable facets of Christianity. But what about the dark side? Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, meet Satan, Antichrist, and False Prophet—the Unholy Trinity, nearly 2000 years in the making.
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00:00The doctrine of the Trinity is one of the most recognizable facets of Christianity.
00:04But what about the dark side? Father, Son, and Holy Ghost meet Satan, Antichrist, and
00:09False Prophet, the unholy trinity nearly 2,000 years in the making.
00:14To understand the unholy trinity, we first need to understand a simple concept with a
00:18big name, eschatology, or studies related to the end of the days.
00:22I think something terrible is coming! The apocalypse! The end times!
00:26In the early days of Christianity, there was a kind of evolving chaos of beliefs about
00:30good and evil and the end of all of it. Take, for example, Arianism, which holds that Jesus
00:35wasn't the equal of God the Father but was created by him, hence no holy trinity, Father,
00:41Son, and Holy Ghost as we know it. Again, it was early days, and the doctrines that
00:45seem so solid to some of us now were still just being debated and discussed.
00:50One of those debaters was Aaronias of Lyon, who wrote Against Heresies in 180 AD, in which
00:55he claims the apocalyptic events of Revelation were engineered by an anti-God cabal driven
01:00by Satan.
01:01Hippolytus of Rome jumped on the bandwagon in On Christ and Antichrist, written in 202
01:06AD, suggesting that the Antichrist in Revelation is a vessel of Satan. Eventually, like around
01:12200 years later, St. Augustine writes City of God, in which he compares heaven to the
01:17city of man, which he says is ruled by Satan, who's hellbent on establishing an earthly
01:22inversion of heavenly order. Basically, hell on earth, in other words.
01:26And here's where we get the unholy trinity. Augustine's theory causes later theologians
01:31to envision Revelation's false prophets and Antichrist as agents of Satan, making one
01:36unholy trio.
01:38In reality, it was 1,500 years after St. Augustine that the notion of the unholy trinity finally
01:43crystallized. In the meantime, several medieval Christian theologians dug deep into the notion
01:47of the end times, beginning with Bede the Venerable, who lived from around 672 to 735
01:53AD.
01:54Bede was one of the first to try and interpret Revelation in a non-symbolic, real-world way
01:58and the explanation of the apocalypse. In the book, he provides a blow-by-blow explanation
02:03of each chapter of Revelation, framing events in relatable, easy-to-understand terms. In
02:08chapters 6 and 8, for instance, he describes the Antichrist as a kind of cheap heretic
02:13guided by Satan, who leads a physical army against the Catholic Church.
02:18Bede paved the way for later thinkers like Joachim of Yor in the mid-to-late 12th century,
02:22who began to associate Biblical characters with real-world individuals. For example,
02:27Joachim flat-out stated that the Muslim leader Saladin was the sixth head of Revelation's
02:31dragon.
02:32Okay, that's problematic!
02:33St. Thomas Aquinas piled on in the later 13th century with Summa Theologia, calling the
02:39Antichrist a member of the devil. He drew comparisons between Christ and God on one
02:43side and the Antichrist and Satan on the other. And if there are two evil figures opposite
02:48the Trinity, then heredity demands a third.
02:51It wasn't until the Protestant Reformation, which lasted from 1517 to 1648, that Christian
02:57theologians began to use language that hinted at a formalized unholy trinity. But in keeping
03:02with their, shall we say, concerns at the time, they no longer described the unholy
03:07three as heretics fighting the holy Catholic Church. Now, it was the unholy Catholics versus
03:12the purity of the Protestants.
03:15German pastor Martin Luther kickstarted the Protestant Reformation when he attacked the
03:18Catholic Church's selling of indulgences to grant forgiveness from sin. In other words,
03:22back then, Catholics said you could buy your way a fad list, and Martin Luther, who knew
03:27a cash grab when he saw it, begged to differ.
03:29In a nutshell, Luther called out the pope, saying,
03:31"...the pope is the very Antichrist who has exalted himself above and opposed himself
03:36against Christ."
03:37Later on, Luther refined his thinking and decided the pope was actually the beast from
03:41Revelation and the papacy was the Antichrist, both of which were appendages of Satan. Freeze
03:47again.
03:48Taking the baton from Luther in 1536, Protestant leader John Calvin wrote Institutes of the
03:53Christian Religion, in which he presents Catholicism as a three-part evil, but defines Antichrist
03:58as more of a general, worldly, ideological poison running through nations rescued by
04:02Christianity like Italy, Germany, and England.
04:06Calvin's branch of Protestantism, Calvinism, took firm root in the early United States.
04:11And it was here that the work of John Nelson Darby, the true father of the unholy trinity
04:14idea, took off.
04:16The European Enlightenment, which lasted from 1685 to 1815, was characterized by a shift
04:22toward rational scientific inquiry. But in a weird retro twist, it also marked a renewed
04:27interest in figures from Revelation, like the beast, the Antichrist, and the false prophet.
04:32This is due to the rise of premillennialism, the belief that the end of the millennium
04:36— Y2K, in other words — would bring the apocalypse described in the New Testament.
04:40Spoiler alert, it didn't.
04:43Even Sir Isaac Newton, one of the Enlightenment's most brilliant thinkers, was obsessed with
04:47decoding facets of Revelation like the number of the beast, 666.
04:51And, in a callback to Martin Luther, Newton equated the pope with the Antichrist.
04:57Again, as the religious and geopolitical environment shifted, theologians took advantage of the
05:02opportunity to paint real-world devils as, you know, Satan.
05:06For example, 19th-century Anglican clergyman John Nelson Darby wrote in Questions of Interest
05:11as to Prophecy that Napoleon Bonaparte was one facet of a larger Satanic entity represented
05:17by three key figures — Satan, the Antichrist, and the false prophet, the unholy trinity.
05:23Darby was practically obsessed with the notion of the end times, to the point where he founded
05:28dispensationalism, a method of investigating history — things that happened in real life
05:32— based on its relationship to Revelation's apocalypse, a story filled with dragons, beasts,
05:37and evil numbers.
05:39Some say that today's unrest is a sign that Satan's army has begun to assemble.
05:45History professor Donald H. Aikenson of Queens University brings this idea all the way forward
05:49to today's American evangelical movement, many of whom have been beguiled, in his words,
05:55to legitimately waiting for the rapture to whisk them right out of their shoes and off
05:59to paradise.
06:00This brings us to the final piece of the unholy trinity puzzle, which fell into place less
06:05than 30 years ago, when the Left Behind book series was first published.
06:09The series is a 16-volume fictional take on the events of Revelation, written by a couple
06:13of guys named Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye.
06:17Satan is the big bad in Left Behind, followed by Nicolae Getty Carpathia, the Antichrist,
06:22and Leonardo Fortunato, the false prophet, the unholy trinity.
06:27When asked about Left Behind, the late Jerry Falwell proclaimed,
06:29"...in terms of its impact on Christianity, it's probably greater than that of any other
06:34book in modern times, outside the Bible."
06:37Was it the rapture?
06:39Yes.
06:40Yes, it was.
06:41Whether or not that's true, thanks to the books, the term unholy trinity is now everywhere,
06:46from video games to black metal music to bad movies.
06:50Can't get much more mainstream than that.