Although Christians are fallible, they (including Roman Catholics) should look to the Bible as being their highest authority short of God--for when Christ returns to Earth. Higher than the words of any creature human.
The closest thing you might find approaching forcibly converting others (as in convert or be killed) was the call to kill the Canaanites, who were the only people for whom genocide was called.
Besides that case, which was more expansive than just religious--the genocide was to remove Canaanite religion, culture, property, and the people themselves, to give Israel the land--the Bible does not advocate the murder of non-Christians at all.
Christians can do bad things, because they--as with humanity except for Christ--are bad people, but that badness is not because of Christianity. The flaw is with the people, not with the belief system.
I was wondering what your perspective is on this.
- The most common belief however, held almost universally by Bible teachers, is that the Antichrist Empire will be a revived Roman Empire.
There are however some glaring problems with this theory:
Firstly, Rome was the sixth empire.
• The Egyptian Empire
• The Assyrian Empire
• The Babylonian Empire
• The Persian Empire
• The Greek Empire
If Rome was the sixth, and will also be the last, then what happened to the seventh? This theory has a gaping hole.
Is Rome the sixth, seventh and the eighth empires?
Neither Scripture nor history nor common sense supports this. Secondly, every one of the previous six empires ruled the Middle East, including Jerusalem. This is very important. We must always remember that the Bible is thoroughly Jerusalem centric. It is not America centric, nor is it Western centric. In the biblical view of things, Jerusalem is the center of the earth. This point cannot be underscored enough.
Any theory that revolves around a revived Roman Empire based in Europe - for instance on the European Common Market - is a foreign concept to the Bible.
Unless the empire rules over or directly affects Jerusalem, it is actually a bit irrelevant to biblical mind-set.
And the third crucial point is that if we look at the first six empires, each succeeding empire either destroyed or absorbed the empire that preceded it. There is a very natural sucession. If we look at each empire, we see that they all fulfill these two characteristics: they ruled over Jerusalem and they defeated or absorbed their predecessor. The Egyptian Empire ruled all of Egypt and Israel as well. But the Assyrian Empire defeated the Egyptian Empire and likewise ruled over a vast portion of the Middle East, including Israel. After this, the Babylonian Empire defeated the Assyrian Empire and became even larger than its predecessor, again, ruling over Israel. Such is the pattern with each successive empire: The Medo/Persian Empire succeeded the Babylonian Empire only to be succeeded by the Greek Empire. The Greek Empire was in turn suceeded by the Roman Empire. Which leads us to the seventh empire. Who overcame the Roman Empire?
In order to answer this question, we need to briefly review the fall of the Roman Empire. What exactly happened?
In 395 A.D., The Roman Empire was divided into two portions; the eastern and the western portions. The Eastern portion became known as the Byzantine Empire. In 410 A.D. the western capital city of Rome fell to invading Germanic tribes known as the Visigoths or Barbarians. The western/European half of the Empire including its capital had fallen but the Roman Empire nevertheless continued.
How so?
It simply shifted its capital and its throne from Rome to Constantinople – a thousand miles east. The western European portion of the Roman Empire fell but the Eastern Byzantine portion of the Roman Empire lived on for nearly another thousand years with Constantinople as its capital. The Roman Empire didn’t actually completely fall until the eastern portion of the Empire finally fell to the Turks in 1453 A.D. Likewise it was the Islamic Caliphate of Umar Ibn al-Khattab that took Jerusalem in 637. Thus we see that it was the various manifestations of Islamic Empire culminating with the Ottoman Empire that suceeded the Roman Empire and ruled over the entire Middle East, beginning with Jerusalem for over thirteen hundred years.
The Turkish Empire existed right up until 1909.
Thus we see that the only empire that fulfills the patterns necessary to be considered the seventh empire is the Turkish/Ottoman Empire. This of course corresponds perfectly with Ezekiel’s list of nations with such a heavy emphasis on Turkey.
The Turkish Empire was the seat of the Islamic Caliphate. It was not until 1923 that the Islamic Caliphate was officially abolished. Today the Islamic world is awaiting the restoration of that Caliphate. I believe that the Bible teaches that someday soon the Turkish Empire will be revived.
The inhabitants of the earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the creation of the world will be astonished when they see the beast, because he once was, then he was not, and yet came again. Revelation 17:8
At that time, we may expect to see the Islamic Caliphate restored. Eventually this position will possibly be given to a man whom the Muslim world would refer to as the Mahdi, but whom people of understanding would identify as the man known biblically as the Antichrist.