The Atlantic climbs the Georgetown seawall twice a day. Guyana’s government measured the coast behind that wall at 1.4 metres below the mean high tide.1 That gap roughly matches the height of a ten-year-old child. Ninety per cent of Guyana’s people live on that low strip, by the same official count.1
The sea taught the city its arithmetic early: water rose in the spring of 1855 and swept away most of what stood in its path.2 Baron Hora Siccama finished the first stretch of wall by 1860, and builders carried the wall east for two more decades.2
A wall alone cannot keep that coast alive, because rain falls on the landward side. The Dutch left Guyana a word for the remedy: koker, a sluice gate.3 The gate opens when the tide drops, and the land drains; the gate shuts when the tide turns and bars the ocean.
Guyana gave me birth, and Stabroek News trained me as a reporter. I return to that gate for a reason no engineer planned. The apostle Paul described a force that does a koker’s work, and the Greek word he chose now fills a lecture hall in San Francisco. Paul’s word reads katechon: the thing that restrains.
01Four words from one letter
Paul wrote to a young church in Thessalonica, a port in northern Greece. His second letter to that church carries a puzzle that Colin Nicholl, a New Testament scholar, ranks among “the most enduring exegetical enigmas” in Paul’s letters: the identity of the one who restrains.4
The King James translators rendered verse six this way: “ye know what withholdeth.” Verse seven adds a person, “he who now letteth will let,” and English speakers in 1611 used “let” for “hinder.”5 Greek grammar marks the shift from thing to person. Verse six uses a neuter participle, to katechon, the restraining thing; verse seven uses a masculine one, ho katechōn, the one who restrains.
Paul sets that restrainer against two dangers. One still waits: a figure the King James Bible calls the “man of sin,” and modern critical editions of the Greek call the man of lawlessness. The other runs loose in Paul’s own day: “the mystery of iniquity doth already work.” The Greek behind “iniquity” reads anomia: a, without; nomos, law. Lawlessness.
A third word sets the clock: the lawless one arrives “in his time,” and the Greek for “time” reads kairos, the appointed moment, the opening.
Paul never uses the fourth word in that chapter. Eschaton, the last thing, lives on other pages: Paul calls death the “last enemy” in his first letter to Corinth, and the Greek for “last” reads eschatos.6
Paul never wrote the sentence I chase in this essay; I stitched it from his vocabulary: the katechon of anomias until the kairos of the eschaton. Paul wrote the second word as anomias, the form that says “of lawlessness.” Plain English carries the whole line in twelve words: something holds lawlessness back until the appointed moment of the last things.
02Nineteen centuries of guessing
Paul told the Thessalonians that they knew the restrainer’s name, and he never put that name on the page. Readers guessed for the next nineteen centuries.
Tertullian, writing in Roman Carthage around the year 197, named Rome. He told the empire’s governors that Christians prayed for the emperors because Rome’s survival delayed the end, and he called that prayer “lending our aid to Rome’s duration.”7
John Chrysostom weighed two answers from his pulpit: “Some indeed say, the grace of the Spirit, but others the Roman empire, to whom I most of all accede.”8 Augustine reached the same verses in The City of God and wrote a sentence few bishops sign.9
Rome fell, and the guessing continued. John Henry Newman argued in the nineteenth century that Rome never quite died, and he located the restraint in “the present framework of society and government.”10
Modern scholars count the wreckage. Charles Powell tallied more than a dozen proposed identities in 1997.11 Paul Dixon listed the usual candidates in 1990 (the Holy Spirit, the church, Paul himself, the gospel, an angel, Rome) and then argued that the restrainer serves evil.12 Nicholl, whose own candidate stands in his chapter title as the archangel Michael, wrote in 2004 that discussion “has reached something of an impasse.”4
Authorship draws its own quarrel. John Bailey reported in 1979 that a considerable number of scholars, many of them German, no longer credited Paul with the letter. Paul Foster answered in 2012 with fresh reasons for Paul’s hand.13 A reporter owes readers that disagreement before he builds on the verse.
03The restrainer wears two faces
Two Germans carried the word into the twentieth century, and their lives split the word in two.
Carl Schmitt, a jurist, wrote in his notebook in December 1947: “I believe in the katechon.”14 His book The Nomos of the Earth credits one achievement to faith in a restrainer who “holds back the end of the world.” That faith, Schmitt argued, freed medieval Christians to build an empire instead of freezing before the last day.15
Schmitt’s record stains that page. He applied to join the Nazi Party on 1 May 1933, Mark Lilla reported in The New York Review of Books. Newspapers soon called him the “crown jurist” of the Third Reich.16 A scholar of restraint lent his legal craft to a lawless regime.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer read the same verse from the other side of that regime. His unfinished Ethics describes the restrainer as the force that “sets due limits to evil.”17 Bonhoeffer refused that force two honours: he would not call it God, and he would not call it innocent. The regime executed him at Flossenbürg on 9 April 1945.18
Peter Thiel carried the word from the seminar to the sidewalk. Hundreds of people lined up outside San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club on a Monday night in September 2025 for the first of his four off-the-record lectures on the Antichrist.19
Thiel laid out his reading in October 2024 at the Hoover Institution. The restrainer, he told the interviewer Peter Robinson, wears many faces: “you can identify it with the good aspects of the Roman Empire, certain political aspects of the Roman Catholic Church, individuals.”20 He told the economist Tyler Cowen that, for the years 1949 to 1989, he “would identify the katechon as anti-communism.”21
Thiel also named the danger: the restrainer, he warned Cowen, always risks turning into the Antichrist it restrains.21 He described the restrainer to the journalist Mattia Ferraresi as “purely defensive and hence somehow inadequate.”22 He stated his own aim to Robinson: “I don’t want Antichrist, I don’t want Armageddon. I would like to find some narrow path between these two where we can avoid both.”20
Wolfgang Palaver, a theologian at the University of Innsbruck, judged in 2025 that Thiel stays “too much focused on the katechon.”23 Guyana’s coast delivered its own verdict on that quarrel twenty years earlier.
04The flood from inside
Rain flooded the coast in January 2005, when the month’s rainfall set a record of 1,108.2 millimetres.24 A coast below the tide drains by gravity only in the hours when the tide drops and the gates open.3 Water rose behind the wall.
The United Nations assessment counted 274,774 people severely affected, 37 per cent of the nation, and 34 dead. Damage reached 59 per cent of the previous year’s economy.24 A wall traps rain as surely as it stops the sea.
ECLAC assessment, 31 March 2005 · Rainfall for January 2005: 1,108.2 millimetres, a record.
Restraint alone never saved that coast. Gates, pumps and people who read the tide save it on ordinary days.
Paul’s word for the danger took its own road into modern speech. Jean-Marie Guyau brought anomie into French in 1885, and Émile Durkheim took the term up in his books of 1893 and 1897.25 Durkheim used it for human activity that lacks regulation and for the suffering that follows.26 Robert Merton sharpened the word in 1938: a society presses one set of goals on everyone, withholds the lawful means from many, and “anomie ensues.”27
Lawlessness, on that reading, starts long before the riot: it starts when the rules lose their grip on an ordinary Tuesday.
Pollsters keep measuring that grip. Gallup’s interviewers phoned 1,001 American adults in June 2026. Twenty-seven per cent expressed a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in fourteen core institutions, near the lowest reading on record.28 Majorities in the same poll still trusted the military and small business. Edelman surveyed 33,938 people in 28 countries for its 2026 report and found 32 per cent expecting the next generation to fare better, even as its trust index edged up a point.29
Two default futures grow in that soil. One hands the whole coast to whoever promises the highest wall; the other waits for the water, and sometimes welcomes the flood. The philosopher Jacob Taubes, answering Schmitt, voiced that second future in four words: “let it go down.”30
05The verb Paul handed a church
My training pulls me toward the name, because reporters hunt names and so do seminaries. I trained in a newsroom and studied toward a Master of Divinity at Tyndale University in Toronto.
The letter itself pulls a reader off that hunt, because Paul did not write the paragraph to feed speculation. Four verses earlier he names his target: a rumour announcing the day of the Lord, a rumour that shook the church.31 One chapter later he names a second trouble: some members “walk among you disorderly, working not at all.”31
Paul sets those two troubles inside one short letter, and I read them as one trouble. The restrainer paragraph answers the panic: not yet. The work chapter answers the idlers: “if any would not work, neither should he eat.”31 A work order hides inside the prophecy.
The concordance pushes the turn further. Paul’s verb, katechō, surfaces eighteen times in the New Testament, by the concordance count.32 The same church received that verb as a command in Paul’s first letter: “hold fast.” Hebrews uses the verb for a confession: “Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering.” Luke uses it for good soil, for people who hear the word, “keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience.”
Paul aimed the verb at wrongdoers too, at people “who hold the truth in unrighteousness.”32 One verb serves the empire’s wall and a single hand.
René Girard, the Stanford professor whose thought Thiel follows, pressed the same weight onto persons late in his life. The task falls, Girard wrote, “up to each one of us to hold back the worst.”33
I claim no settled doctrine: no council ruled that the restrainer lives in a believer’s grip, and the scholars I cited still argue over the paragraph. I report what the word list shows, and the list shows a verb that lands on a person before it lands on any empire. Each day a hand holds some good fast and presses some truth into the dark. A harder question than the restrainer’s name follows. What does my hand hold fast, and what truth does it bury?
06The opening and the shore
Strength alone never made a koker keeper; the keeper reads the tide.
Greek gave that reading a name. Kairos, the scholar Eric Charles White wrote, came from the archer’s range and the weaver’s loom. An arrow must clear a narrow opening; a weaver must catch “the critical time” when a gap opens in the warp and the yarn must cross.34 Paul Tillich called kairos “the right time” and set it against the clock.35
James Barr spoiled the easy sermon in 1962, when he showed that biblical writers mostly used kairos as an ordinary word for time.36 I keep Barr’s caution and lean on Paul’s own phrase, “in his time,” instead of the dictionary. That hour sits beyond human reach; Jesus told his disciples that no one knows the day (Matthew 24:36). Every hour before it lands in human hands.
South African theologians used the word that way under apartheid in September 1985: “The time has come. The moment of truth has arrived.” They called their hour “the moment of grace and opportunity.”37 Martin Luther King Jr. sent the same warning from a Birmingham jail in April 1963: “Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability.”38
Habakkuk reached that ground first, and his page governs my working life.
“Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it.”
The vision waits for an appointed time, the prophet adds, and the Jewish scholars who carried Habakkuk into Greek chose kairos for that time.39 God assigns the waiting its first task: write.
The last word in my sentence draws the most abuse. Eric Voegelin warned in 1952 against “the fallacious immanentization of the Christian eschaton,” the attempt to build the final kingdom inside history.40 Thiel’s Oxford audience received the mirror warning on a T-shirt: “Don’t immanentize the katechon.”22 I accept both warnings: no party builds heaven by decree, and no wall deserves worship.
Hope still pulls. Jürgen Moltmann, who died in June 2024 at ninety-eight, described Christianity itself as hope, “forward looking and forward moving, and therefore also revolutionizing and transforming the present.”41 Oscar Cullmann pictured the believer’s hour as the stretch after the battle that decides a war and before the day of victory.42 John’s Revelation finishes the picture for a coastal people: a new heaven, a new earth, and no more sea.43
The eschaton, on that page, names a shore that asks for no wall. My stitched sentence now reads as a job description. Something restrains the flood. Lawlessness still works. An hour beyond my reach approaches. Work fills the interval.
07Keep the gate
Six practices follow from the verb.
Name what you hold fast. Write the goods you refuse to release on one page: a vow, a craft, a person.
Name what you bury. Paul’s verb cuts both ways, so write the one truth you keep burying and read the line to someone you trust.
Write the vision plain. Habakkuk’s standard still works: one page, dated, in words a runner can read at speed.
Read the tide each week. Every week opens one gap that the next week closes: an application deadline, a draft, an apology, a call to a parent. Pass the yarn through the gap.
Keep working. Paul handed the idlers no prophecy chart; he told the church not to grow “weary in well doing.”31 I guard my writing hours above every other appointment, and I close each day with three columns: authored, decided, carried.
Inspect the wall. Honour the courts, schools, newsrooms and churches that restrain harm, audit their books, and kneel before no wall. Bonhoeffer’s two refusals still apply.
I build Qualped for that desk work: a place where a person writes the vision plain, QwaiSI presses the hard questions, and a simsbook carries the answers to readers.
Let me author one scene ahead of the calendar. No reporter witnessed what follows; I imagine every detail.
October 2027, a basement apartment in Scarborough. A warehouse picker named Anjali comes home at 6:40 in the morning with her feet aching. Her phone lights up with a war headline and a rent reminder. She turns the screen to the table and opens a notebook to a page dated one year earlier. Two lines sit under the words hold fast: her mother and her nursing prerequisites. One line sits under the words bury no longer: I quit applying because I expected to fail. The college portal closes at noon. She types for an hour, attaches a transcript, and presses send at 8:15. The Atlantic never touches Scarborough. A gate opens in that basement.
The tide drops off Georgetown twice before this hour tomorrow. A gate opens, and the land drains. The keeper built no ocean and names no last day. The keeper holds, reads the water, opens, shuts.
Take the gate nearest your hand.
Hold fast.
Write.
Shaun Michael Samaroo