The title might lead you to suspect that I have quietly built a time machine. But I am referring to the first long piece I wrote, back in 2008, when I was nineteen, which I have just been examining with Jarvis, my AI assistant. I began with these introductory words to the legendary prophecy teacher Leo Meller, who died in January 2026: “Dear Leo Meller, I am a nineteen-year-old student of biblical prophecy from Orivesi. In the following study, I intend to present some of the thoughts and conclusions that have opened up to me over the years. I thought I would share them with you because I believe the subject is close to your own interests.”

Those opening words are followed by an unfinished essay of some 6,500 words—the length of a substantial blog article—which I therefore never sent to Meller. Yet that essay marked the real beginning of my writing career, even though I did not start working on my first book until four years later, in 2012. I completed that book in 2014, and my first published book was not finished until the end of 2018. The 2008 letter reveals a rather beautiful literary arc. I approached Meller very cautiously, almost apologising for troubling him with the unorthodox ideas of a young amateur:

I hope that you will read it with as open a mind as possible and with a willingness to consider new ideas. I believe I can promise that it will uncover prophetic mysteries that have so far remained hidden and bring their scattered pieces together into a coherent whole (or at least that is what I have tried to do). I, too, represent futurism and premillennialism, but I would like to recover certain approaches to eschatology that futurists deliberately forgot when they rejected the conclusions of the preceding interpretation—by which I mean historicism and postmillennialism. I hope you will not dismiss out of hand my defence of this form of eschatology.

Over the decades, Meller probably received similar messages from dozens of other overenthusiastic interpreters of prophecy. Realistically, the chances that my particular views would capture his attention and interest were rather small. Yet a few months before his death, Leo left a comment on my blog saying that he had felt privileged to read my words. Nor was this the first time he had responded positively to my writing. Ten years earlier, he had said this about my work:

It is clear that Heaven has given you understanding and gifts that are not meant to be hidden under a bushel. After a ten-year period of preparation, God will lead you, in the manner He chooses, to share what has been placed in your spirit.

— Leo Meller, February 2015

Reading my old texts is rarely a pleasant experience. Mostly, they make me cringe. Not because I am ashamed of young Samuel or of the subjects that interested him. What embarrasses me is how clumsily he sometimes expressed his thoughts and how confidently he could draw sweeping conclusions that would have required much more research to justify.

That kind of self-critical embarrassment is, in many ways, a good thing. It suggests that my thinking, my reasoning and my prose may have developed at least somewhat over the past eighteen years. What surprised me most about nineteen-year-old Samuel, however, was that I had remembered his thinking as much narrower and more black-and-white than it really was. Instead, my 2008 essay made it clearer than ever that, from a very young age, I have been what might be called a synthetic thinker.

By this I mean a tendency to examine opposing views by asking whether the apparent contradiction between them might belong to some larger whole in which each side has perceived part of the truth. Rather than choosing a ready-made theological box and defending it against every rival, I was already interested, at nineteen, in dismantling the boundaries between the boxes themselves.

In my 2008 text, this tendency sometimes appeared in an almost comically ambitious form. In a single essay, I considered historicism and futurism, premillennialism, postmillennialism and amillennialism, the Protestant interpretation of the papacy as Antichrist, Daniel’s prophetic time periods and even the Adventist Ellen G. White’s views on the cleansing of the sanctuary—and, of course, Prince Charles was already part of it all. I did not accept all these systems wholesale. I was trying to discover whether their apparently contradictory observations might describe different aspects of the same eschatological history.

The problem with young Samuel, then, was not so much that his perspective was too narrow. It was almost the opposite: the synthesis machine did not yet have proper brakes. If I found an interesting connection between two very different traditions of interpretation, I was eager to see what would happen if I combined them. Sometimes this produced insights whose underlying ideas I still find interesting. At other times, ingredients found their way into the mixture that I now regard mainly with amusement, wondering what logic had persuaded me that they belonged in the same whole.

But that was perhaps my most interesting discovery. The fundamental character of my thinking has not changed as much as I had imagined. Its methods have. Today I demand more historical sources, stronger biblical grounds and, above all, a greater willingness to reject an appealing connection when the evidence cannot bear its weight. Samuel in 2008 might notice a connection and become excited by it. Samuel in 2026, I hope, is more likely to ask as well: does this connection really exist, or am I merely exceptionally good at constructing such things?

This also explains why I had been particularly fascinated by conspiracy theories since the age of thirteen. Seeing connections between seemingly unrelated things—the hallmark of conspiracy thinking—requires precisely this synthetic mode of thought: a Sherlock Holmes mind capable of assembling clues and tracing them to the source of a great crime or an unsolved mystery. The problem with conspiracy theories is that clues sometimes lead nowhere, even though the human mind can still arrange them into a convincing-looking trail.

Here the greatest strength of synthetic thinking also becomes its greatest danger. The ability to see connections that others miss can produce a genuine insight outside the box. But if synthetic thinking is allowed to grow too enthusiastic without the restraints supplied by the analytical mind, it may soon decide that the United Nations flag proves the rulers of the world know we live on a flat Earth edged by a closely guarded Antarctica.

The synthetic and analytical minds should therefore remain in balance, guarding one another. The analytical mind must ask whether a connection discovered by the synthetic mind is genuinely well founded, or whether it looks persuasive only because we had already decided to search for it. The synthetic mind, in turn, must remind the analytical mind not to limit reality in advance to connections that fit our adopted system of thought.

We need both the courage to form hypotheses and the ruthlessness to test them. Without the first, we may never discover anything genuinely new. Without the second, sooner or later we shall find the Illuminati behind every road sign.

Perhaps this tension also helps me understand my literary history more clearly. Young Samuel did not lack imagination or intellectual curiosity. Rather, his synthetic mind sometimes ran so far ahead of his analytical one that the latter arrived years later to inspect whether the bridge built by the former had any load-bearing structure at all.

Some bridges I have since had to dismantle entirely. Others I have rebuilt on stronger foundations. Yet perhaps the most intriguing discovery in my 2008 essay was that the bridge-builder himself had not changed very much. I still enjoy finding connections between subjects that are usually treated separately. The main difference is that nowadays I try a little more often to check the building permit as well.

My 2008 essay to Leo Meller nevertheless revealed that my thinking and interests have remained remarkably consistent over the past eighteen years. The text contained many familiar themes that would later colour my career as a writer:

• Combining historicism and futurism. Even then, I was dissatisfied with the idea that these two schools of eschatology had to exclude one another. I tried to construct a model in which prophecies could be fulfilled both as a long historical process and later in their final futurist fulfilment.
• A synthesis of premillennialism, postmillennialism and even amillennialism. I believed in Christ’s future visible kingdom, but also that this kingdom was already breaking into history gradually. This produced the idea, even then, of a world passing through a kind of “divine evolution” towards the millennial kingdom of peace.
• The idea that prophecies have several levels of fulfilment. Daniel’s visions were not merely past or future to me, but patterns that could recur at different stages of history and on different scales.
• The prophetic periods of 1,260 and 2,300 days. I was already interested in the day-year principle and in how long prophetic periods might describe stages in the history of the Church and the world.
• The papacy as a historical type of the Antichrist. I had absorbed much from classical Protestant historicism, though not without qualification. Even then, I tried to distinguish between the historical “antichristian” system of the papacy and the final personal Antichrist.
• A critical yet surprisingly positive attitude towards Roman Catholicism. Although I criticised the papacy, I also defended the Catholic Church’s historical importance and rejected the extreme Protestant tendency to regard all universal—or catholic—Christianity after Constantine the Great as nothing but apostasy or a mixture of paganism and Christianity.
• Ellen G. White and Adventist interpretations of prophecy. I was not an Adventist and did not accept their teaching as a whole, but I was willing to ask whether evangelicals who had adopted dispensationalism and futurism as their dominant dogmatic doctrine of the end times ought to reconsider the Adventist, church-historical interpretation of prophecy. After all, this had been the prevailing Protestant interpretation since Luther’s day, and its advocates included such historic figures as Isaac Newton.
• The historical advance of Christ’s kingdom. The Reformation, revivals, democracy, national liberation movements and the restoration of Israel appeared to me as parts of a larger eschatological process in history.
• The Beast as both a person and a system. Historicists saw the Beast as a kingdom; futurists saw him as a person. My question was already very characteristic of me: why could they not both be right on different levels?
• Prince Charles. He was already present in 2008 as a possible candidate for the final Antichrist, although my systematic model concerning Charles was still in its infancy.
• Calculations of prophetic years. And because this was me, a general philosophy of history was naturally not enough. I was already constructing a larger chronological model that I believed might reveal the beginning of the final seven-year period and which—at least according to the title—was connected to the year 2012. 😄

Beyond all this, the text displayed perhaps the most important instinct of inquiry that has remained with me to this day: the desire to take established schools of thought apart, treat seriously whatever in them appears well founded and try to build a larger whole from those elements. Samuel in 2008 was not yet an especially disciplined researcher. But he was already suspiciously recognisable. 😄

My 2008 study also provides an interesting chronology for how I came to write about the then Prince Charles as a serious candidate for the role of the biblical Antichrist. One might imagine the sequence as follows: first I read Tim Cohen’s 1998 English-language book on the subject, became convinced by his views and then began promoting Cohen’s ideas to Finnish readers. My email archive revealed, however, that I did not order Cohen’s The Antichrist and a Cup of Tea until August 2008, after I had already turned twenty.

I had therefore written my eschatological study for Leo Meller before reading Cohen’s book. In other words, neither my interest in Charles nor my own eschatological reflections began with Cohen. Rather, 2008 was the moment when I decided to start treating an earlier curiosity as a serious research question. I was, of course, already aware of the work of Cohen and researchers such as Monte Judah. My own interest in the Charles hypothesis began around 2003, while I was still at comprehensive school. On a Finnish Cutting Edge website, I read about a statue made for Charles that idolised him as a “saviour of the world”, as several international news magazines had reported around 2002.

The thought that the much-mocked, jug-eared prince might be the long-feared final embodiment of evil in world history struck me as both so fascinating and so extraordinary that I readily understood why most people would find it absurd. I, too, used to browse photographs of him on Google and tell myself: “That cannot be the Antichrist. The Antichrist ought to be young, handsome and charismatic.” I had already raised with myself the familiar objections that my critics would repeat to me again and again, even before I began investigating the subject seriously.

For several years, this was essentially my starting point: there may be something here, but the arguments presented so far do not convince me. Cohen’s book undoubtedly had a considerable influence on the subsequent direction of my research. Paradoxically, however, part of its influence arose precisely from its failure to convince me sufficiently. Had I considered Cohen’s arguments airtight, I might have had no particular reason to spend the following years looking for arguments of my own. I could simply have concluded that he had solved the matter before me.

Instead, I was left looking for what might be called a missing link. If Prince Charles really were the final Antichrist foretold in Daniel and Revelation, I reasoned, should that not be visible much more deeply in the structure of the prophecies themselves? Arguments based on coats of arms, names, ceremonies and other curious details associated with Charles might be interesting, but they were not enough for me on their own.

So I began investigating the problem itself, which quickly proved much larger than Charles. I had to understand how the Book of Daniel had been interpreted before the rise of modern futurism. Why did the Reformers and Isaac Newton see the prophecies as a long continuum of world history, while modern dispensationalism placed much of the same material in the future? Were historicism and futurism truly mutually exclusive alternatives, or might they describe different levels of prophetic fulfilment?

The earliest form of that question is already visible in my 2008 essay. My later Charles hypothesis did not therefore arise merely by adding new details to Cohen’s ready-made theory. I sought to construct an entire eschatological model in which Charles’s possible role would follow from a much broader interpretation of Daniel’s prophecies and world history. In that sense, Charles began as a research question rather than a research finding. I did not set out because I was certain that he was the Antichrist. I set out precisely because I was not.

Yet this eschatological journey was exactly what led me, in my first book, written between 2012 and 2014, to construct an extensive, systematic model combining historicism and futurism. I presented my reasons for believing that the Book of Daniel had foretold the most significant and transformative upheavals in Christendom, from the dissolution of the Roman Empire to the Second World War. At the same time, I tried to show how understanding this “missing link” between historicism and futurism might also lead us to the contemptible king of Daniel 11—and why I came to identify that figure as Charles III.

Christian transhumanism is not some recent lapse in judgement of mine, either. Its basic premises were already present in this study by nineteen-year-old Samuel. In December 2023, I wrote on my blog that I would describe myself as a Christian transhumanist. A year later, I wrote my defence of Christian transhumanism, Adam 2.0 or Beast 6.66? Transhumanism in the Light of the Bible. You can find ideas consistent with Christian transhumanism in my website archives as far back as 2018. At the time, however, I did not yet use that term, and I still wrote about transhumanism in rather critical terms, comparing it, among other things, to the eugenics of Nazi Germany.

But the seeds of my Christian transhumanism lay not so much in the question of whether technology is good or evil as in the question of how we should understand the progress of God’s purposes in history. Nineteen-year-old Samuel wrote:

In any case, I believe that for the past five hundred years, beginning with Luther’s Reformation (which prepared the way for the upheavals of nineteenth-century Europe), the world has been passing through a divine evolution towards Christ’s millennial kingdom of peace. In this, the Holy Spirit has used His Church and world leaders who have served as instruments of His purposes…

Jesus Himself foretold that His kingdom would come soon after His crucifixion and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. He also said that it would not come in a manner visible to the eye, but inwardly to believers through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. In fact, the kingdom of heaven began to descend to earth at Pentecost—in the first outpouring of the Spirit—culminating in Christ’s victory when Constantine “subjugated” his empire to Christianity. The manifestation of Christ’s earthly glory culminates in the Roman Catholic Church, and that is why the magnificent Church of St Peter appears to us Protestants so far removed from the modesty of early Christianity.

Here, then, I was defending to Meller the postmillennial doctrine of the millennium, in which the kingdom does not enter history only through a single, sudden supernatural event at Christ’s return. In some sense, its coming has already begun with Christ’s first advent and Pentecost. The kingdom of God breaks gradually into history, using imperfect people, churches, social upheavals and entire civilisations as instruments of its advance.

I was not an orthodox postmillennialist, however, because I continued to affirm the premillennial teaching of Christ’s personal return, the Antichrist and a future millennial kingdom that would begin roughly six thousand years after the creation of Adam—as the earliest Christian theologians had already taught. But once again my question was the same: why must these two perspectives necessarily exclude each other? What if the postmillennialists were right to see God’s kingdom advancing gradually through history, while the premillennialists were right to expect the final eschatological culmination of that historical process?

When I was younger, I had read a great deal of literature and online writing critical of charismatic Christianity. Yet in this 2008 essay I also came to defend the charismatic movement, observing that many of its teachings had “their roots in postmillennial eschatology, which still exerts a powerful influence on its basic doctrines”.

My interest in postmillennialism was partly connected to a contradiction I had noticed in the way Christians spoke about the end times. According to one view, the world would move almost exclusively in a worse direction before Christ’s return: deception would deepen, apostasy would increase and lawlessness would gain ever greater power. I had also encountered much of this more pessimistic eschatology in critiques of the charismatic movement, where many expectations of end-time revivals were themselves interpreted as part of the coming deception.

In charismatic circles, on the other hand, I encountered an almost opposite expectation. Before Christ’s return, there would be not only apostasy but also great revivals, an outpouring of the Holy Spirit and a worldwide triumph of the Church. This view appealed, for example, to Joel’s prophecy of the Spirit being poured out upon all flesh, while the more pessimistic eschatology could invoke the warnings of Jesus and Paul concerning end-time deception and apostasy.

The entire opposition began to trouble me. If Scripture could provide grounds for both expectations, why should I solve the problem simply by choosing one and explaining away the biblical passages used by the other? Which picture of the end times was correct—or could both be?

Postmillennialism thus became interesting to me in a much broader sense than as merely one doctrine of the millennium. It offered a historical and theological framework for the idea that the history preceding Christ’s return need not be one long narrative of defeat. At the same time, I saw no compelling reason to reject the texts emphasised by premillennialism, in which the end of history also brings apostasy, the Antichrist and Christ’s personal return.

Once again, I began to suspect that the problem might lie in the either-or itself. Perhaps history could move simultaneously towards unprecedented light and unprecedented darkness. The advance of Christ’s kingdom did not necessarily mean that increasingly powerful opposing forces could not rise against it.

This led, however, to a much larger question whose significance I probably did not yet grasp fully at nineteen. If Christ’s kingdom truly advances within history, how does it advance? Which historical changes may be understood as part of that long process through which the conditions of a fallen world are gradually repaired?

Ten years later, I began to examine the same question from the perspective of science and technology. In April 2018, I wrote on my blog about extending the human lifespan and asked whether the achievements of science and medicine might help create the conditions described in biblical prophecies of the messianic age. If, in Isaiah’s future, human life is greatly prolonged and the effects of creation’s curse recede, must we assume that all of this will happen in a single instant through a supernatural miracle? Or might God also use human creativity, medicine and technological development?

This, I believe, was the true seed of my Christian transhumanism. It did not begin with the idea that technology is itself salvific, or that humanity can build the kingdom of God on earth by its own power. It began with a much older eschatological question of mine: can the coming of God’s kingdom also appear as tangible progress within history?

If the answer is yes, the history of science begins to look far more interesting in eschatological terms. Vaccines, antibiotics, advances in surgery, falling child mortality, more efficient food production and humanity’s growing capacity to master the forces of nature are not yet the millennium. But they do show that the sufferings associated with Adam’s fall need not be regarded as immutable laws of nature to which humanity must piously submit until Christ repairs everything at once, while human beings stand passively aside as the broken world is mended on their behalf.

The seeds of this idea, too, can be seen in the mind of nineteen-year-old Samuel when I reflected:

The birth of the Jewish state has been part of the gradual coming of the Messianic kingdom, which, following the weakening of papal power, has begun to displace old forms of government and world orders. Yet many Jewish rabbis and Christian theologians alike do not believe that the modern State of Israel fulfils biblical prophecy, because that fulfilment should occur only with the coming of the Messiah’s kingdom; the same applies to the doctrine of the latter rain. Historicism and postmillennialism, however, would appear to explain why these things are already taking place in this present age, which Satan still rules.

This thought already contains the basic eschatological logic of my later Christian transhumanism. I was asking whether promises associated with the Messiah’s kingdom must remain beyond some invisible temporal boundary before any part of them can begin to be realised in history. If the kingdom of God comes gradually, things associated with the coming restoration may also begin to break into the present age before their final fulfilment.

In 2008, I applied this idea chiefly to Israel, spiritual revivals and social change. Ten years later, I began to apply the same logic to science and technology. I understood that all these things had occurred through human labour as historical processes, although Scripture teaches that God intervenes in the course of history and directs it towards the fulfilment of His purposes.

If, then, the restoration characteristic of the messianic age can begin before the millennium reaches its final realisation, why could the same not apply to conquering disease, extending life, reducing hunger or freeing people from heavy and exhausting labour?

The question of technology thus became a theological question about humanity’s role in God’s purposes. Is our task merely to wait passively for God one day to repair the broken creation on our behalf, or can human beings, created in God’s image, participate in healing that brokenness through the abilities they have been given?

From this perspective, medicine is not a rival to divine healing, nor is technology a rival to God’s restorative work. A person who develops a cure for cancer is no more trying to supplant God than a farmer who weeds thistles from his field instead of treating them as part of Adam’s curse to which he ought piously to submit. In both cases, human beings use their God-given abilities to resist the suffering caused by a broken world.

From there, it was only a relatively short step to my later question: if we accept humanity’s right to use technology to repair the world around us, why should our own biology constitute an absolute exception?

This journey thus led me from Revelation back to the opening pages of the Bible and the question of what Genesis really means when it says that human beings were created in the image of God. Or to a theological question perhaps even more central to the Bible: Why did God become human in Jesus Christ? How do Genesis, the Gospels and Revelation ultimately fit together? Have we misunderstood humanity’s entire purpose and place within creation? What is man?

This question is ultimately much larger than the debate over transhumanism. If human beings were created in God’s image, perhaps their task was never merely to inhabit passively a world God had already completed. In Genesis, humanity is charged with cultivating and keeping creation, naming the animals, multiplying, filling the earth and exercising dominion over it. Human beings are placed in the midst of an unfinished task. God creates the world and then entrusts His own image with the work of continuing to cultivate it.

From this perspective, human creativity, science and technology are not foreign additions to the Genesis story that appear only in the modern age. They may be understood as consequences of a far more fundamental human vocation: the ability to understand creation and shape it purposefully. Human beings do not create from nothing as God does, but they can receive what already exists, discover new possibilities within it and make something that was not there before. Humanity is the image of the Creator and therefore, in a sense, a creator with a small c.

The Fall did not remove this task or erase God’s image from humanity, but it broke both human beings and their exercise of dominion. The same intelligence that builds a hospital can build a concentration camp. The same atomic physics gives us radiotherapy and the nuclear bomb. The same artificial intelligence may help discover a new medicine or construct a more efficient system of surveillance. Technology therefore cannot solve humanity’s deepest problem: its user still carries both the image of God and the contradiction of fallen human nature.

Here Christ enters the picture in a much deeper way than as a Saviour arriving from outside the world to repair humanity’s failed project at the end. The New Testament calls Him the new or last Adam. God does not save human beings by abandoning humanity, but by becoming human Himself. If in the first Adam we see the human vocation broken, in Christ we see it fulfilled.

The Bible’s great narrative then forms a single arc: Genesis tells us why humanity was created. In Christ, the Gospels show us what humanity was meant to be. Revelation tells us where the history of humanity and creation will finally lead.

Perhaps this is why my journey of research could follow the apparently strange route from the Antichrist to transhumanism. I began by asking who the Beast appearing at the end of history might be. I eventually arrived at the much more fundamental question of what the Adam created at the beginning of history was.

Perhaps my most important eschatological question was not, in the end: Who is the Antichrist? It was: What is man—and why did God create him?

Conclusion

When I began reading this eighteen-year-old essay, I expected mainly to encounter a younger and considerably more black-and-white version of myself. I thought I might be amused by his overconfident conclusions, wild prophetic calculations and attempts to explain almost the whole of world history in a few thousand words. And I was amused—sometimes very much so.

At the same time, however, it became a surprisingly fascinating journey to the roots of my own thinking. My old essay began to resemble a family tree in which I could trace the branches of my later ideas. One branch grew into my synthesis of historicism and futurism. Another became my interest in combining postmillennialism and premillennialism. The question of the Antichrist later led to my years of research on Charles, while the question of the gradual coming of Christ’s kingdom ultimately led in a wholly different direction: towards technology, transhumanism and humanity’s place in God’s creation.

Some branches from 2008 have since withered and fallen away. I no longer try to find the Merovingian dynasty among Daniel’s four beasts, nor am I quite as eager to quote Ellen G. White as the missing piece in my eschatological puzzle. Other ideas I have had to correct thoroughly. In some cases, I still do not know whether I am right. But the trunk of the tree looks remarkably familiar.

Already present was the effort to see biblical prophecy as part of the great story of world history. Already present was the refusal to choose between established schools merely because they were assumed to exclude one another. Already present was the interest in how God’s kingdom advances within concrete history. And above all, there was the same question that seems to have followed me through nearly all my later work: what if two apparently opposing perspectives have perceived different aspects of the same reality?

Perhaps here I also see most clearly the difference between my nineteen-year-old self and the person I am today. My thinking has changed less in direction than in method. When I was younger, I could intuit vast connections before I knew how to justify them properly—and sometimes I saw connections where there probably were none. Today I have more history, more sources, more life experience and, above all, eighteen years’ worth of my own mistakes.

I would not therefore wish to return to the thinking of nineteen-year-old Samuel. But neither would I wish to lose what was valuable in him: his curiosity, his courage to ask questions that were far too large and his refusal to accept ready-made answers merely because everyone else seemed to have chosen a side between them.

Perhaps growing as a thinker does not ultimately mean that the questions we asked in youth prove foolish and are replaced in adulthood by wiser ones. Sometimes the same questions accompany us throughout our lives. Our answers should simply become more precise as knowledge accumulates, new horizons open and we also learn to laugh at those occasions when we were far too certain that we had found the missing piece of the puzzle.

After eighteen years, then, I met my nineteen-year-old self again. I had prepared myself to cringe. Instead, I found a person whose ideas I did not always share, but whom I recognised with astonishing clarity.

He did not yet know where all his questions would lead. But he had already begun asking the questions that would occupy me for the next eighteen years.

---

This article was created through collaboration between a human being and artificial intelligence. Its ideas, experiences and conclusions are my own, but not every choice of word or turn of phrase originated solely in the blogger’s mind.