Egypt and Rome

Nobody is fit to be "a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation"; Israel was Nobody; and so it was fitting that God chose Israel for that role.  On the other hand, Everybody has sinned, and sinned grievously, yet Everybody still has some remaining good, and God earnestly desires the salvation of Everybody.  Is there a nationality that can stand in symbolically for Everybody?

The first such nation was surely Egypt. Maybe when the first humans left Africa for Arabia or the Levant, they simply followed the coast, but it seems just as likely that they followed the Nile.  After the Sahara Desert started spreading at the end of the Ice Age, the Nile became all the more important as the best "road" connecting central Africa with the Mediterranean world.  The amount of trade and travel surely waxed and waned, but from a very early date, the Nile Valley was a place where people from different cultures met.  Both Abraham and Jacob left the Levant for Egypt to escape famine; and from the earliest records we have of Egypt, they were trading with neighbors, conquering and being conquered, teaching and learning, always mixing in one way or another with very disparate neighbors.

That's not all.  The Canaanites, among others, practiced human sacrifice, but the Egyptians did not.  Oh, very early on, maybe Pharaohs were buried with some of their slaves, but they quickly moved on to just using pottery figurines instead.  And if you look at what the Egyptians hoped for in the afterlife, it was hunting, fishing, and beer.  I'm not at all kidding -- this is what even the likes of King Tut had on the walls of their tombs.  Compare this with the gravestones of your redneck relatives.  They were a lot more like us than most people realize.  The Egyptians were "good ol' boys."

Bear in mind that Egypt was the refuge for Abraham and Jacob in time of famine; it was the refuge of Jewish refugees from Nebuchadnezzar; it was the refuge of Holy Family when they fled from Herod; and it was the only place outside Jerusalem where a Jewish Temple was constructed.  Egypt represented generic, Gentile humanity at its best.

Even the events of the Exodus have to be read in that light.  Egypt may have been generic humanity at its best, but the fact remains that our best is not good enough.

What about Rome?  Rome became what Egypt had been.  Just read chapter 7 of The Everlasting Man, "The War of the Gods and Demons;" perhaps read 1 Maccabees 8 as well, though "Now Judas heard of the fame of the Romans" does not mean that all the propaganda Judas heard was entirely true.  This also explains Rome's role in the Crucifixion:  those directly responsible for it were (arguably, and by worldly standards) the best of the Jews and the best of the Gentiles, lest we claim that we would have behaved better under similar circumstances.

At the same time, there is a tradition, apparently a rather old one, related to 2 Thessalonians 2:7 --

For the mystery of iniquity already worketh; only that he who now holdeth, do hold, until he be taken out of the way.

The tradition is that "he that now holdeth," restraining the emergence of the Antichrist, is in some sense the Roman Empire.  If this seems strange or even impossible, consider that it has already happened:  in 168 BC Antiochus IV Epiphanes was very literally halted and humiliated in his ambition to invade Egypt by a single Roman senator, Gaius Popillius Laenas.  If, in typology, Antiochus Epiphanes prefigures the Antichrist -- and no knowledgeable Christian denies that point -- then it seems likely that the Roman senator holding him in check also has some deeper meaning.

"Coincidentally", in his letter to the Romans (2:14,15), St. Paul says, 

For when the Gentiles, who have not the law, do by nature those things that are of the law; these having not the law are a law to themselves: Who shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness to them, and their thoughts between themselves accusing, or also defending one another....

Many other writers -- including Chesterton in The Everlasting Man and The Barbarism of Berlin, Lewis in the appendix to The Abolition of Man, and Budziszewski in What We Can't Not Know -- have likewise argued that, in broad terms, there really is only one morality; that we all have consciences aware, however dimly, of one law binding on all humans by virtue of our nature, which is what Natural Law means; and that although no society adheres to this law with absolute fidelity, since we are all sinners, they generally aspire to keep rather close to it, particularly the societies that are able to survive for many generations.

If pagan Rome indeed represents Everybody in the way an Olympic athlete represents his nation -- not as being typical, but as being a champion -- the only meaningful standard by which they could have excelled must be adherence to the standard for Everybody, the Natural Law.  If Rome is also that which restrains the Antichrist, and if it is Rome in this sense, a few things begin to fall into place.  Maybe the "times of the Gentiles" has something to do with the influence of this universal standard, despite the spotty adherence given to it.  Maybe the falling away that precedes the Man of Sin is not a falling away of Christians from specifically Christian doctrine, but a startlingly universal and complete falling away of all humanity from the Natural Law.  Just as the Antichrist will surpass even the likes of Hitler in evil, this falling away from the Natural Law would have to surpass all those before it -- Nazism, the slave trade, human sacrifice in the Americas, all of them.  However, a more profound error does not necessarily (or immediately) require a greater recourse to violence and cruelty.  The fact is that these things are very nearly impossible to imagine, and they will presumably remain so until they take place.  That is a good thing; I do not want to imagine evils worse than those we have already seen.