I’ve heard of an Islamic Sufi tradition that refers to Satan as ‘Satan the stoned one’ - or the ‘scapegoat’. Yes he often is just an excuse for our irresponsible actions.
Is Satan personal, is ‘he’ impersonal? Well I don’t think it’s that important as long as whatever we think he/it is doesn’t lead us to close our eyes to/avoid reckoning with the real awfulness of evil and, at the same time it does lead us to think that whatever the Satan is it/he will eventually be redeemed and that it/he in its/his unredeemed state will not have the last word. I guess my view of evil as impersonal is reconcilable (at least in a compromise) with those who see the Devil as personal; the logic of my view is that when Satan is redeemed he will finally become personal.
I’d just like to paint the scope of the conversation that James and I have had- any questions on details and I can fill them in. But you may also wish to jump my post adn go on to the next one.
For me the real problem with the Satan image is that it has been used both to excuse irresponsibility and to terrify people into compliance with sectarianism (a curious paradox). Walter Wink, whose work on ‘The Powers’ is commended on the Rebel God website, which at least three of us on this site have found most useful since Piaidon recommended it, wrote the following –
‘The Satan image has been whittled down to the stature of a personal being whose sole obsessions would seem to be sexual promiscuity, adolescent rebellion, crime, passion, and greed. While not in themselves trivial, these preoccupations altogether obscure the massive satanic evils that plunge and drive our times like a trawler before an angry sea. When television evangelists could try to terrorize us with Satan and then speak favorably of South African Apartheid (which they did), we should have sensed something was wrong.
And again –
‘There is something sad in the moralistic tirades of fundamentalist preachers terrifying the credulous with pictures of Satan lurking in the shadows, coaxing individuals to violate rules which are often enough satanic in themselves, while all the time ignoring the mark of the cloven hoof in economic arrangements that suck the life out of whole generations of people’.
So here are some bits and bobs to suggest a wider context -
**On the salvation of the ‘dark force’ **
I note that Isaak of Syria, an early Christian ascetic, wrote –
‘What is a charitable heart? It is the heart of him who burns with pity for all creation – for every human being, every bird, every animal, every demon’
On the Spiritual Warfare Mindset
I can see that a number of is have on this site have been affected by this perversion of the charismatic movement (There are many charismatic who completely disown the extremism shown by some – all forms of Christianity have a lunatic fringe. I often feel that the emotional liberation that accompanies charismatic worship is far better handled by poor people and black people who are more at ease with their bodies and emotions. My experience suggests that charismatic worship is more likely to go wrong in congregations of stiff lipped middle class white people – but that is a real overgeneralization with just a speck of truth in it). I’m aware of any number of instances of Spiritual Warfare dualism leading to disaster – we had the Satanic panic in the 1990’s in Britain where secular social workers, stupid enough to be influenced by Spiritual Warfare propaganda and thereby listening to false witness, began accusing innocent people of Satanic abuse and taking their children into care (a particularly horrible case of this happened on the Orkney Islands off of Scotland), If anyone want sot look at a particularly distressing instance of the influence of Spiritual Warfare mindset, Google my favorite charity ‘Stepping Stones Nigeria’.
There was a developed theology of dealing with the demonic in the Church Fathers; and I have a book - ‘Mental disorders and Spiritual Healing; Teachings from the Early Christian East’ by Jean Claude Larchet which suggests that the Church Fathers had a sophisticated understanding of mental illness. Using the Pauline model of human beings being comprised of living flesh (soma), emotions (psyche), spirit (pneuma) they took care to distinguish between different types of mental disorders; those with a physical cause, those with an emotional cause (which they specifically associated with demonic oppression); and those with a spiritual cause which they identified with a lack of training in the exercise of virtue and the disciplines of prayer. They were also subtle enough to understand that disorders could be cause at all three levels in varying combinations.
On the complex personas of Satan in the Bible –
This is just a very rough sketch- but Satan is not simply the adversary. He/it assumes different forms; as an oppressive bureaucrat; as a the council for the prosecution in the court of heaven - at first the agent that uncovers the truth of person’s guilt, but quickly becoming the agent provocateur who seeks to entrap the accused; as the accuser of sin who demands strict justice when God wants to show mercy; as the one who tempts us to despair, telling us we are worthless when we are in fact children of God – and that’s just the Old Testament. In the New Testament he/it is the liar and the murderer, Beelzebub (‘The Lord OF the Flies’ that feed off rotting flesh). It could be argues that he/it also assumes a positive function for those being redeemed by Christ as the sifter - the one who strengthens us in faith by tempting us – and the pains of bad conscience. This would all take time to go through – Walter Wink does an excellent job of looking at all of the relevant scriptural evidence in his ‘Unmasking the Powers’.
**On the identity of the Powers and Principalities **
As I understand it, in the biblical world view everything on this earth has a corresponding spiritual entity. Therefore Nations have Angles - whether fallen or redeemed, (and the Parable of the Sheep and Goats takes place in the context of the Judgment of Nations, interestingly) while social structures, like laws and institutions, have Powers and Principalities - either fallen or redeemed. This is all a way of talking about social sin - a lot of the evil in the world is not a result of personal sin but of the structures of injustice, and alienation that people become trapped in (including both poverty and consumerism). It’s these that need to be redeemed, and it’s these that we need to struggle against in the name of Christ the Victor.
In a much of the Epistles and in Revelation the Principalities and Powers are the idols of Roman religion - symbolic functions of a brutal state; very fallen spiritual entities. And the rites of these idols were depraved. People being whipped up into a frenzy of ecstasy in which they lost all inhibition gashed themselves, and reversed social and sexual roles in brutal ritual climaxing in the slaughter of an animal and the splashing of blood (the first chapter of Romans alludes to this). The gladiatorial games were just a magnified version of these cultic rites. People were whipped up into an ecstasy of frenzy climaxing, this time, in the spilling of human blood by executioners dressed as the Gods of Rome. The ritual killings were often staged as depraved reenactments of the Roman myths. At the end of all this the result - in a brutal society where casual killing and vendetta were common - was that the spectators, having discharged their violent rivalry in the experience of frenzy at the slaughter, could go home feeling united in peaceful fellowship against society’s scapegoats.
On the issue of freedom
Is sin, in a biblical view, only a result of our free choice? Not when so much of it is a result of our being oppressed by the Fallen Powers and Principalities of this world as a result of begin born into a world of sin. Indeed the Greek Fathers define freedom as our ability to choose our own good. So freedom is not what makes us fall – we are born into a fallen world already and this makes us fall - but it is something we progressively attain as we are redeemed - gradually made free - and can collaborate in establishing the Peace and Justice of God’s Kingdom (thereby redeeming the Powers).
The idea of Satan’s choice to disobey God with his rebellious angels is actually extra biblical and mostly post biblical as I understand it. Parts of scripture may seem to echo this view, but the only parallel biblical story is that of the Nephalim in Genesis – the Sons of God that lusted after the Daughters of Men (as far as I know).
On the origin of Evil –
Where does evil come from? The idea that God created the universe out of chaos rather than out of nothing is now well recognized as being a biblical theme by reputable scholars, including open evangelicals. The original creation was well ordered but never completely perfect(ed) because the waters of chaos were contained in the firmament above and below, but not completely under control. There have been extra biblical speculations on why this is so (Jurgen Moltmann the great Christian Universalist theologian refers to this Jewish Zimzum tradition which suggests that chaos comes into being prior to the creation of the universe because in order for the universe to exist in the first place there had to be a contraction in God for the universe to exist apart from God in freedom, and finally to return to God in freedom. Chaos will only be subdued/redeemed in the fullness of time.
Many scholars now argue that a close reading of the Jewish text of Genesis strongly suggests this theme (and I’d have to expand on this if there was any interest shown). It is also seen in the cult f the Temple which was a microcosm of God’s creation (with the great sea of bronze representing the containment of chaos). The monsters that emerge from the sea and need to be subdues continue this theme, and perhaps the beast in Eden – more of a lizard than a snake because it originally has legs – is the force of chaos in the well ordered garden.
All the best
Dick
. Basically, I’m not sure I’ve thought it through enough to be definitive about *what *I think.
, I’ll stop posting here and go back to the summary essay idea).
.
)