666 and the Pope?! Nonsense!

666 and the Pope?! Nonsense!

Poor seventh day Adventists and some other seriously misguided Protestants are trying to say that the title the Latin title of the Pope adds up to 666 when you associate the numbers of the letters. 

Look, a person's name or title has nothing to do with the nature of the person, it is rather the theological nature of what the person stands for that determines the sense of what evil is. 

I'm not sure but I think it might have been Jimmy Akin , our friend from Catholic Answers, who said that you can take Ellen Gould White's name, the founder of seventh day adventism, and in a certain delineation it adds up to 666. 

And that would not make her the antichrist, she is just a poor misguided soul who started a gravely heretical sect which very much misunderstands the Catholic Church. 

666 should therefore stand for something in essence that is the fullness of the nature of the fall and the LIE of the devil, which is the same taking the total lies against God and twisting them into something that is presented as the fullness of truth.

Here is a quote from part of my book that shows that in a certain sense, 666 can image both paganism as a general rule as well as where humanity makes itself like God, self deifying himself in place of God.

Excerpt on 666 from a potential Catholic view 

The second reason for preliminary ages to precede the Incarnation is humanity's severe tendencies toward materialism and paganism because of its fallen nature. To illustrate, we perhaps recall the infamous "mark of the beast" in the NT apocalypse and that its number is 666. A mystical way to look at this symbolism is to reverse the relationship between God and man. We see this by first recalling that 7 is the number of perfection and so, in one sense, of God. It follows that 6 is a symbol of imperfection and therefore of man, who falls very short of God. But then, just as God is three Divine Persons in one Nature, so three 6’s in one number symbolizes man [6] making himself as God [three in one].

Consequently, whereas God made man in God’s Image and Likeness, the flip side is that, through the evil number above, man makes God in man’s image.

Subsequently, when man makes God into his image, one greater result is paganism, which is precisely the nature of man projecting his image onto the Divine. For, in paganism, the deities are largely a reflection of the fallen nature of man, themselves finite in power and in constant struggle according to diverse, and many times, arrogant and selfish passions.

An additional severe hurdle in the nature of man making God into his image is the blasphemous tendency of humanity to even deify themselves, presuming utter independence from God, the makers of their own destiny and fulfillment, and the final arbiter of truth.

This very construct presents the supreme problem of the mystery of God's Plan to impart the Revelation of the Incarnate One to a fallen world. Why? Well, firstly, because of paganism, man tends to see God in multiplicities and with conflicts , whether through the multiple gods of polytheism, or pantheism, where the god of the universe is having a bad dream from which man must help "him" [and therefore themselves also] to wake up.

From this, we see that, preliminarily, God must first overcome the hurdle of multitheism and limited power of the deities by emphasizing the Unicity, Omnipotence, and Omniscience of God. Likewise, the emphasis on God's unicity and infinite transcendence must also be ground in first to make certain the reality that man cannot ascend above God, fashion his own fulfillment, nor determine the truth independent of God.

Only after this hurdle can the next much more profound mystery of the Incarnation and Trinity be made manifest, where we see the threefold family of love within God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, each different Persons but all fully God (which must not be confused with a multiplicity of limited deities ) and of the Son Himself taking on human nature, so as to suffer in humility for the creatures (not to be confused with a lack of potency on God's part, nor to imply that man, as a mere creature, can ascend and become God, but to reveal His Immeasurable love to suffer in solidarity with and for fallen man).

Hence, our first conclusion is that before the Incarnation, the Spiritual Nature, Unicity, Omnipotence, and Omniscience of God must be firmly grounded in Revelation.

http://theologyoftheages.org/content/apocalypse/greater-ages/ages/abstract-ages-prefigurement.php