I was just thinking along this lines today.
The last enemy to be destroyed is death
To be carnally minded is death
The last enemy to be destroyed is the carnal mind(satan possibly)
Hi Redhotmagma -
Wiht the carnal mind and just say that ‘flesh’ in Paul is ‘sarx’ meaning dead flesh - it refers to every part of us, body/living flesh (soma), soul (psyche), and spirit (pneuma) that is in bondage to death, decay, frustration and bondage. Its interesting to me that one of the titles of Satan (or one of his minions) is ‘Beelzebub’ which means ‘Lord of the Flies’ (‘Baal’ = Lord. and ‘Zeebub’ imitates the sound of flies like the English word ‘buzz’ I guess) Perhaps these are the flies that feed off ‘sarx’ - the dead flesh whihc holds us in bondage until we become fully alive.
Hi Melchi - I’d go along with everything you say here; I think you’ve put it excellently. Sturmy raises the issue of Satan as scapegoat - I guess if we make Satan our scapegoat it helps us not to take responsibility for our own actions when we are actually responsible for and can do something to change - and therefore never to grow up.
However, I also think that Satan is a social power that exists between individuals as well as within them, and in institutions. When satan casts out satan in the Gospels - this is when satan brings a satanic peace upon a violent crowd driven by rivalrous desire through a scape-goating ritual. Jesus frustrates this mechanism several times in the Gospels - for example with the woman accused of adultery. Here the crowd, probably frustrated because they are unable to try cases according to Jewish Law under Roman jurisdiction - and probably hating the Romans while envying their superior power -arraign a woman without due process of giving warnings and disobeying the protocol of going for the mildest punishment possible that existed at the time (indeed there is no evidence that she has even had a proper trial). Also we note the anomaly that her lover is not also on trial as should be the case - so the crowd of men are picking on the weakest party, the woman. And Jesus saves her without condoning her sin - and may well have written a passage from the Law in the sand about false accusers, as was rabbinical custom. So rather than depart in false satanic peace after the frenzy of a ritual stoning in which they all act as one, Jesus appeals to their individual consciences and they disperse as individuals (Jesus is always suspicious of crowds because they can so easily become mobs).
The peace of satan casting out satan is the peace that Jesus speaks up against when he tells us that he has come not to bring peace but a sword. And the ritual of satanic peace is what happens during Jesus trial and crucifixion. A crowd filled with hatred and envy of the Romans, are played off against the Roman authorities who are jealous and fearful of their own brutal power. Jesus is the scapegoat here and unmasks the satanic mechanism - ‘They hated me without cause’. The crowd depart in ‘Peace’ after his death and Luke’s Gospel tells us that Herod and Pilate become friends as a result, -before this time they had been enemies. The resurrection shatters this satanic peace with the true peace of the forgiving Victim/Victor
The secret of satanic peace is the ‘thing hidden since the foundation of the world’ in the sorry of Cain and Able - where rivalrous desire ends in the sacrifice of Abel the Just. And all scape-goating throughout human history follows this pattern. Because of our rivalrous/competitive desire, human societies have always indulged in some form of scape-goating ritual where peace is secured by our discharging our rage at each other onto an innocent victim. The religion of Christ is meant to teach us to live without scapegoats - however it has so often become embedded in the sorts of behaviour it is intended to overthrow. We are meant to celebrate our Peace - Christ’s Peace - in bread and wine rather than over the broken bodies of our victims. Christ reveals to us the totally gratuitous and non-rivalrous love of God - and gives us the opportunity to redirect our snarled and tangled webs of personal and social desire in a creative direction, two steps forward, one step back.
Well that’s Rene Girard’s theology in a nutshell for you all. I find it very useful indeed although I don’t think it should be overused. If you’ve not heard of it before, it’s not a purely academic matter. It is enormously influential in the new thinking coming out of the Ecumenical Church on atonement and eschatology - and is becoming especially influential in the historic Peace Churches.
Hi Sturmy - I’m glad to see you back too (we are fellow Londoners!)
Best Wishes
Dick
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Well I for one am interested, Dick!
First up I must confess I know diddly squat about the Jewish text of Genesis. But if I read you right, you are suggesting God first created chaos ex nihilo, and then created the universe out of the initial chaos he had created? That seems a very odd way of going about things to me. 
But then again, I personally accept the Biblical notion – it’s there in Isaiah 45:7, in the holy scriptures, as plain as the nose on our faces – that God ‘creates’ evil. God is ultimately the creator, the originator, of everything that exists. And that must include evil.
Evil is ‘created’ by God – inasmuch, I would suggest, as the very creation of anything at all automatically, ontologically, creates its potential and balancing opposites – eg the existence of light ‘requires’ the existence of darkness, otherwise it is incoherent.
God is in Himself perfectly good, perfectly light; as dazzling as light can be. But without darkness we cannot see anything by that light.
Thoughts?
Shalom
Johnny
Already addressed this, I suggest you reread my posts. I already said Satan had access to heaven, but his origin has always been earth, he said this himself, but he was hurled down to earth and took 1/3 stars ( not angels ) with him. Sons of God never referred to angels but men. I also told you who Satan was and why he was in the assembly of the sons of God (men in the presence of God).
You may try to assert you myth and fable of fallen celestial beings and demigod Lucifer but I don’t see a Scripture that can support your belief that is not clarified but Jesus and his apostles words.
Johnny, lovely to hear from you (I thought you might have gone off radar with my extended post on the history of Calvinism).
The idea of God being engaged in a struggle with the forces of chaos and creating order out of chaos is given in ‘Creation and the Persistence of Evil’ which has rave reviews from Walter Bruggeman (who I know is a friend of open evangleicals). I’ll lend you the book when I see you one day - since I know that this is a real interest of yours and you might enjoy it and you might understand it better than I do. Its based on a close reading of Genesis 1, the Book of Job, and the Temple texts. All that it suggests to me is that the New Creation will be the perfected creation - the refreshment and completion of the old creation. As for Jurgen Moltmann - I think it suggested to him that in order to complete the creation God has to empty himself in Christ and die in the space of chaos and nothingness and abandonment in order ot redeem it.
I know from Levenson that this interpretation of Genesis has been around since the Middle Ages at least. It has come to prominence again because of Jewish experience of the holocaust (how could God be all powerful and allow this to happen?). It is found in the very moving book by Rabbi Kushner - ‘When Bad THings Happen to Good People’ - which many Christians have found a great comfort. In this book Kushner tells us the story of his son who was born with a genetic disorder leading to premature ageing. So Kushner watched his son become an old man and die by the age of ten. Personal story is interspersed with a prolonged reflection on the Book of Job. And he also looks at Christian liberation theology very sympatheically in terms of the God who abdicates omnipotence to share our sorrows (and our joys).
Regarding the plain teaching of scripture - well I’m not a fundamemtalist and fundamentalism can be a neurotic creed as legalistic as a debased Pharisaism. So I accept that there is a development going on in the Biblical texts. They don’t all speak with one voice (for exmaple the xenophobic ethnic cleansing ideology found in Ezra, needs to be balanced against the Books of Ruth, Job and Jonah that all, in their own way, are deeply critical of this). I also think that the awarenss of the God of Love in this full Glory emerges only slowly in the Bible. There are scriptual passages where God speaks as being responsible for both Good and Evil. In a sense this is right - God took the risk of creating a world in which the opposites emerge. However, I note that in some of the earliest parts of scripture God seems very much like Satan. This seems to be the case in his calling of Moses. After Moses has responded to the call, the Spirit of Yaweh attacks him by night and the attack is only averted by Moses’s wife Zipporah who tears off their son’s foreskin and annonints Moses with it crying ‘Behold I have made you a bridegroom of blood!’. Another example - in the book of Samuel, Yahweh in anger incites David to carry out a census (the basis for taxation and military conscription). However in the retelling of the story in the Book of Chronicles it is Satan that does this. So although God creates a universe which allows both good and evil to exist, there does seem to be a process in the Bible by which God is progressively idenitfied with the Good and Satan with Evil - I can’t see it any other way. Yes light adn darkness, good and evil both exist but as the world is redeemed both are made to serve the cause of Love, so our evil inclinations - anger, lust, greed, etc - are rechanelled and transoformed into virtues of non-rivalrous desire.
By the way - see my post above on Girard; it’s pretinent to an issue you raised on another thread about the killer monkey instinct.
all the best
Dick
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Satan means ADVERSARY. Remove the context that EVERYWHERE you see SATAN it means the same Satan. Anything that plays an adversarial role against your best interest in the sight of God, is Satan. The law, sin, the flesh, etc.
So let us number your verses in the NT and find out what Satan is being referred to.
Matthew 4:10 …Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship …
The Mind of the Flesh
Matthew 12:26 …against itself shall not stand:And if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against …
…not stand:And if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall …
Jesus is using their own analogy against them speaking in a parable. (We can talk about this one later since it proves that Satan could never have rebelled against God.)
Matthew 16:23 …and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for …
Peter
Mark 1:13 …there in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and …
Mark 3:23 …and said unto them in parables, How can Satan cast out Satan?And if a …
…them in parables, How can Satan cast out Satan ?And if a kingdom be divided …
**Jesus is using their own analogy against them speaking in a parable. (We can talk about this one later since it proves that Satan could never have rebelled against God.)
**
Mark 3:26 …itself, that house cannot stand.And if Satan rise up against himself, and be divided, …
**Jesus is using their own analogy against them speaking in a parable. (We can talk about this one later since it proves that Satan could never have rebelled against God.)
**
Mark 4:15 …word is sown; but when they have heard, Satan cometh immediately, and taketh away the word …
The law
Mark 8:33 …he rebuked Peter, saying, Get thee behind me, Satan: for thou savourest not the things that …
Peter
Luke 4:8 …and said unto him, Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship …
The law
Luke 10:18 …And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.Behold, …
The law (specifically those in authority who live by the law) Speaking concerning the Pharisee, Sadducee and Lawyer)
Luke 11:18 …house divided against a house falleth.If Satan also be divided against himself, how shall …
**Jesus is using their own analogy against them speaking in a parable. (We can talk about this one later since it proves that Satan could never have rebelled against God.)
**
Luke 13:16 …this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen years, be …
**Spirit of infirmity, verse 12 tells you what ‘satan’ it was **
Luke 22:3 …for they feared the people.Then entered Satan into Judas surnamed Iscariot, being of the …
The law
Luke 22:31 …And the Lord said, Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he …
The law
John 13:27 …son of Simon. And after the sop Satan entered into him. Then said Jesus unto …
The law
Acts 5:3 …apostles’ feet.But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the …
The law
Acts 26:18 …from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness …
** The law **
Romans 16:20 …And the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly. The grace of …
** The law **
1 Corinthians 5:5 …Jesus Christ,To deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that …
** The law**
1 Corinthians 7:5 …fasting and prayer; and come together again, that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency…
** The law**
2 Corinthians 2:11 …in the person of Christ; Lest Satan should get an advantage of us: for …
The law
2 Corinthians 11:14 …apostles of Christ.And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of …
** The law. A 'Messenger of Light"**
1 Thessalonians 2:18 …you, even I Paul, once and again; but Satan hindered us.For what is our …
The law (those who follow the law persecuting them
2 Thessalonians 2:9 …Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying …
The law (talking about the old system of things specifically the Mosiac Law)
1 Timothy 1:20 …is Hymenaeus and Alexander; whom I have delivered unto Satan, that they may learn not to blaspheme. …
The law (which riles of the Mind of the Flesh
1 Timothy 5:15 …For some are already turned aside after Satan .If any man or woman that …
The law
Revelation 2:9 …Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan .Fear none of those things which …
The law
Revelation 2:13 …thy works, and where thou dwellest, even where Satan’s seat is: and thou holdest fast my …
…faithful martyr, who was slain among you, where Satan dwelleth.But I have a few …
The Synagogue
Revelation 2:24 …doctrine, and which have not known the depths of Satan, as they speak; I will put upon …
The law
Revelation 3:9 …Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are …
The law
Revelation 12:9 …out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was …
The law
Revelation 20:2 …that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years,…
The law
Revelation 20:7 …And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison,…
The law
If you read back on what the law is and what it does, you will realize why some answers might seem off just to say the law, but when the law came it revived sin and made sin utterly sinful.
A brief interlude to lighten up the conversation (personal story followed by story from history relevant to encounters with Satan)
In 1999 there was an Ecumenical rally in Birmingham (England) in support of Jubilee 2000, the Churches’ campaign for the abolition of Third World Debt. The climax of the rally was to be a human chain formed by all attendees linking hands around the outskirts of the City Centre (the symbolism was clichéd, but the sentiment most noble). It was a boiling hot day and the rally was addressed outside of Birmingham Cathedral by a number of speakers (as always happens at rallies). Elaine Storkey took the platform when her turn came. She is an Evangelical Christian with strong social justice concerns. At this time she worked for TEAR fund – the Evangelical Alliance Relief Fund in Britain. As she began to speak, and she gave a rather good speech, all of a sudden a great din of ‘rough music’ sounded. People blowing whistles, shaking football rattles, and one rather porky man stripped to the waist and wearing a Stetson even blowing his bugle in someone’s ear. Then a man produced a soapbox – seemingly from nowhere - near me; and mounting it he began a nasal rant against the ‘sodomite apostate Church’ while his henchmen barked out ‘Praise the Lord!’. Then I saw that this ‘militant tendency’ were co-ordinating their disruption, speaking to each other on mobile phones in clandestine conspiracy against the Evil One and his slaves. As we left to form our human chain one of them barked at us – ‘Enjoy your daisy chain, you bunch of pagans’. These people were obviously having enormous fun and I hate to criticise enjoyment in life 
. They were clearly engaged in public warfare against Satan – reclaiming space from the Enemy, and feeling very important as God’s counter-intelligence agents. When I went to bed that evening I thought – ‘surely that must have all been a dream 
– but it wasn’t!’.
One man, whose writings and legacy have often troubled me – with good reason –had a lifelong battle against the Adversary; namely, Martin Luther. He once reputedly threw an inkpot at Satan and used a great deal of strong scatological language to make Satan flee when he was assailed (language that would break site protocol if I reproduced it here!). However, there is one thing I really like about Luther’s idea of how Satan tempts us. Luther, recovering from the late medieval pessimism about the natural world and the human body, loved the good things of life; music, good wine and company, and the scent of flowers. Late in his life, each morning he would walk in his rose garden and forbid Satan to interfere with his enjoyment. When he was a younger, at a debate where he argued the cause of reform - and if he’d not gained support in this he would have lost his life - he nonchalantly smelled a rose flower when listening to the counter arguments.
All the best
Dick
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Do post over my lastpost - the two stories. I really didn’t mean to close this conversation down. My point was serious in the two. The message of the first must be - judge not, and discern the idols within before tackling those without. The second must be that Satan does not necessarily manifest in the guise of a sensualist - Mr ‘go on, have that second cream cake’, is a real trivialisation of evil.
All the best
Dick
Hi Dick
Two very quick thoughts:
-
Luther - what do we really think of him? The more I read about him, the more uneasy I become - the anti-Semitism, for a start. But I have to empathise with his honesty about his own failings as a human being and as a Christian.
-
Robert Ardrey’s ‘killer ape’ theory. Not sure where you’re going as regards Girard. To me it’s a ‘straightforward’ evolutionary question - either you believe evolution is true (which I do) and that human beings are descended from a murderous ape species (possible, I suppose), or you don’t. To me, the science is 100% proven (check out Ken Miller’s book *Finding Darwin’s God *if you want some Christian validation for evolution.) But if you do roll with evolution, whence ‘the fall’? If we were created through the evolutionary process, and that rendered us intrinsically violent and sinful, what does all the Genesis stuff about the Garden of Eden signify?
Now personally I have no problem reading Genesis pretty much any way you wish to read it - literal, part allegory, imaginative retelling, pure poetry, whatever. However it works for you is okay with me, as long as you get the ‘truth’ of what it signifies. (And I think even my non-hero Augustine might even back me up here. 
) But what truth?
These are the kind of thoughts that float through my mind after my second glass of bubbly on Valentine’s evening.
Shalom
Johnny
As ever Johnny you put me on the spot in exactly the right way. I can answer both questions without disagreeing with you in the slightest. I am convinced of the scientific evidence for evolution by natural selection in the biological sphere (although I’m nt convinced that all biological and ecological processes can be explained purely in tersm of concflict models of a ruthelss fight for survival; and also I’m totally convinced that human culture works very differently fomr biological mechanisms and that we are free to choose differently, however limited our freedom may be).
Luther - a deeply disturbed man - yes the antisemitism, the murderous hatred shown in his attitude to the the peasant risings, the bile with which he conducted himself against his opponents facilitaing violence - all were and are deplorable (as you know I prefer not ot dleiver an ultimate juidgement - but we Protestants have a lot of issues to come to terms with here). But he did have a heroic side. The hatred of the body and the natural world that had been part of Christian culture since at least the fourth century - he put up a noble fight against these. The problem is that he projected his heoic inner struggle onto the ‘enemy others’ outside of himself.
Will post more on both issues when I get time - I know we’ll end up meeting in the middle ground old chum.
Dick
Fair points both, Dick
I’m with you on Luther, mostly. After all, if I can consider myself a Christian, with all the myriad faults, failings, weaknesses, petty jealousies and yes, downright willful sinfulness that defines me, then who am I to ‘judge’ Martin Luther (or anyone else for that matter)?
As regards evolution, like you I ‘buy’ it. I think it’s a done deal, evidentially. (I think I’m right in saying the Vatican has pretty much said as such.) America doesn’t seem to be getting the message, for some reason - any of our transatlantic friends care to opine why that is so? - but here in the land of Richard Dawkins (he’s on *Newsnight *as I type )I think the tide turned a good few years ago.
Now I am in no way averse to the notion that God used evolution to create us, but somehow as part of that process endowed us with faculties which are not strictly the products of deterministic evolution - call it conscience, if you will. We are *so *different from all other life forms on earth, there has to be some non-evolutionary explanation for that.
Have you read Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, Dick? It speaks brilliantly on this subject.
More soon.
Shalom
Johnny
Hi Johnny –
Well I know we have plenty of common ground to explore here – and I hope we shall explore issues around evolution, original sin and evil in nature with anyone else that wants to get involved. I’ve not read G.K. Chesterton’s book – can you briefly tell us what he says?
Regarding Luther, I really wasn’t doing a ‘let him who is without sin cast the first stone’ trip on you (in case you thought I was!). In my view rather than dismiss people like Luther as a bad lot we should try and learn from their stories. ‘I am a human being, therefore nothing human is alien to me’ runs the old Christina humanist motto (it’s a quotation from a Roman poet). Luther is important as a major Father of Protestantism. IN my view he is also important for what we can learn from his example about how to live well– we can learn a lot about ‘the Satanic’ from him for example; his story can teach is that to project out inner doubts and fears outwards onto others is a ‘Satanic’ thing and leads us to do evil just when we think ourselves most righteous. We can also learn from his story about one man’s struggle against a distorted faith (late medieval Catholicism) that entailed believing punishment and hatred of the body as a thing pleasing to God ( and how many among us do not have an obsessive compulsive aspect in our view of God? – I know I do!).
There is a Jewish writer who became an Anglican on her deathbed named Gillian Rose – she writes in such a difficult style that I when I’ve read her I receive most of it as a sort of poetry. But her clearest and most important theme is that none of us are innocent – she does not argue that we are depraved, or hateful in the sight of God, but merely that by virtue of being born, none of us are innocent. She argues that here are two false/inauthentic strategies for dealing with this situation –
First – the ‘beautiful soul’ strategy. For the beautiful souls of this world, the world is too cruel and horrible. So they retreat from the cruel world to the company of fellow beautiful souls. I’ve known some romantic relationships that seem to work like this. It also seems to well describe the impulse behind some forms of monasticism, new age ‘wounded childism’, and cultish religious movements that cut themselves off from the world.
Second – the angry angel strategy. The angry angels are assured of their own innocence and rail in bitter anger at a wicked world. I’ve known plenty of people like this – including Marxists and Christian fundamentalists (the elect can begin to assume a sort of angry innocence in their assuredness of their election) and it seems to me also to be the impulse behind terrorism.
The authentic strategy of dealing with our lack of innocence is to perceive some sort of solidarity in human sin that does not overwhelm us with self loathing.
This is how I see ‘ancestral sin’ doctrine. We come into this world as ‘blessings’; however by virtue of being born we have a solidarity with ‘Adam’ – who symbolises our solidarity with all human beings and all of human history, genetic, cultural, and any other sense we can think of. In Augustine’s view this means we come into the world as criminals complicit in Adam’s crime, and Christ becomes the substitute for our punishment. In the Eastern view – and in many other traditions in Western Christianity – it means something slightly different. Namely that we come into a world governed by death, forces of bondage and frustration, and by division, rivalry, and disharmony (which can be symbolised as Satanic). We have solidarity with all other humans in this bondage and we need to be liberated from it; Christ is our Liberator from and Victor over this bondage. Therefore we should now act in the Spirit that overcomes divisions, rivalry, and disharmony (this is not simply about the voice of conscience; it is also about the voice of imaginative compassion; conscience alone can merely become our Accuser – imaginative compassion helps us act differently and in solidarity with the New Adam).
All the best
Dick
Afterthought –
There is a much loved and very funny media Rabbi in the UK who once made some interesting observation about the different ‘satanic’ pathologies’ that each of the Abrahamic faiths are prone to.
He said that -
Islam’s temptation to pathology is megalomania (I think he was thinking of the Jihadist movements)
Judaism’s temptation to pathology is obsessive compulsive disorder (I think he was thinking about the tendency in Judaism to get locked into scruples about the ritual purity laws)
Christianity’s temptation to pathology is sado-masochism (I think he was thinking of the debased forms of Catholic ‘self-denialism’ and perhaps of the debased forms of penal substitution atonement theory).
Nice observation from the good Rabbi! – but I guess it’s an over generalisation. Each of the religions also manifests the other pathologies in its various branches and at different time and places I’m sure. I can only speak for Christianity. Certainly sectarian Calvinism has always seemed megalomaniac to me; and fundamentalism can be rather obsessive compulsive – as an Anglican clergyman in the sixteenth century who was influenced by the Anabaptist Spiritual movement once said – ‘No marvel you are such starvelings if you be ever licking upon the letter of the Word’.
All the best
Dick
Hi Johnny –
If you’ve seen my posts above, I stand by all that I’ve said; but what a hypocrite I am, eh 
? Of course religious pathology is also rife in the Christian traditions I have a positive relationship with – the Quakers, and the Anglicans by experience, and –by reading about them – the Eastern Orthodox tradition. (Regarding the Orthodox I note that John Chrysostom - ‘John of the Golden Mouth’ - whose beautiful ‘Christ the Victor’ liturgy I have quoted with approval on another thread and who is cited as a Universalist over at Tentmakers, also said some very nasty misogynistic things and once gave an unpleasantly anti-Semitic Easter sermon - not as bad as Luther, but still bad).
I know I’ve been both a beautiful soul and an angry angel in my time – I think both can be a necessary part of growing up; and we never completely outgrow growing up!!!
Regarding Evolution, Genesis and Creation – shall we start a new thread on this so as not to break up the current discussion? I think it is possibly something that troubles you – and what troubles you will be troubling others. It used to trouble me very badly – I was never a creationist, but the idea of reconciling evolution with the good purposes of our loving God has bothered me; but I feel fairly easy about it now and happy to chat.
I don’t think this current thread has run its course by any means. There are issues around the demonization of the body, sex, and the emotions that can be part of bad Christian tradition (and can seem to be justified biblically); I’d love to see this stuff unpacked and discussed - it’s merely been hinted on this thread thus far.
Also more could certainly be said to unpack belief in the Satanic and the dualistic paranoid tendency in Christianity that many of us will have experienced (and again, this can seem to be justified biblically).
All the best
Dick
Oh dear – at the moment I do seem to have becoming a bit of a road block to this conversation ; but I hope I can say something to start it up again - about ‘the World, the Flesh, and the Devil’ - soon (unless anybody wants to jump in before me – please do!).
Just for the sake of balance and honesty I’d like to set down a note about anti-Semitism and Christianity here – because it’s me that keeps raising the issue (with good reason – but I think I’ve almost made my point now and will move on very soon). I think it is wrong for anyone who is not Jewish to use the holocaust as their point of moral reference – it is certainly a low strategy in self righteousness for a Christian to employ; and it can blind us to other contemporary issue staring us right in the face. However I do believe the holocaust is a sign – our sign – which we cannot and must not ignore.
Obviously in John’s Gospel a literal reading of the pre-passion narrative seems to have Jesus accusing the ‘Jews’ of being the children of the Devil/Satan who was a liar and a murderer from the beginning; and this has done much to fuel Christian anti-Semitism, as has the seeming contradiction between Law and Gospel in Paul’s Letters (I say ‘seeming because many today would disagree that this is a contradiction and there has been some good discussion on this site already. I know that new Catholic translations of the Bible that are done under Papal authority now recommend that ‘the Jews’ in John’s Gospel be translated as either the ‘Jewish authorities’, the’ Judean authorities’, or simply ‘the authorities’. They do so with good reason; everyone in John’s Gospel, apart from the Roman’s in Jewish (oh yes, and the occasional Samaritan who were ethnically Jewish anyway). We also need to note something of the historical context of John’s Gospel – that it was written at the time when Jewish Christians, who seem to have been tolerated as a Messianic sect within Judaism, had been thrown out the Synagogues as heretics and a process of systematic persecution had begun (and the evidence of the Babylonian Jewish Talmud suggests that Jewish polemics against Jewish Christians at the time were just as bitter as Christian polemics against Jews). Let us hope that this is all in the past now.
Throughout Christian history, although there have always been Christians who have tried to protect the Jews, the mainstream tradition has been against them. The Jew became the Christian shadow on which to project Christina insecurities. The Jew was the ‘legalistic Jew’ – especially when the Catholic systems of penance for sins became cripplingly legalistic and the Protestant theology of ‘justification by faith alone’ became increasingly cold, rational and forensic. Also, the Jew was often ‘the sensual Jew’ – there was it seems an uncomfortable awareness that Judaism preserved the original teaching that creation is the good work of our God of overflowing goodness, and that the good things of life, such as sexual relations between man and woman, were to be celebrated as God’s gifts – almost as sacraments. And I understand that in mainstream Judaism, for all of its faults, there has never been a sense that the growing awareness of sexuality that happens to a person in adolescence needs to be shamed, humiliated and punished.
Certainly this perception of the Jew as the demonic shadow for Christians came to its terrible climax in the holocaust enhanced by Nazi pseudo-scientific racial theories (I note that Luther‘s anti-Semitism was not based on pseudo-racial theories but on his anger at the refusal of the Jews to hear the Gospel in what he thought were the End Times – but that’s no excuse, and the rhythms and images of his rhetoric can certainly be discerned in Hitler’s ranting).
However there is another side to this story – the story of Christians who shielded Jews, and died with Jews. And to round off this issue I need to say something about this other side.
The Christian martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer died because he collaborated in the ‘Valkyrie’ plot to kill Hitler; the other members had mixed motives – to preserve the honour of the Fatherland in the face of humiliating defeat - but he only joined to end the killing o f Jews and bring the holocaust to a close, if possible. In Lutheran Sweden, the whole population of the country – including the King and Queen – refused to collaborate with the Nazis in their persecution of the Jews; and therefore the Nazis had great difficulty doing any persecuting.
In Greek Orthodox Bulgaria, the whole population – urged on by the Orthodox Patriarch of the time - rose up to defend the Jews; and largely succeeded.
Apart from these large scale - and very successful – acts of truly Christian resistance, there were other smaller acts of resistance by Christian groups and individuals.
The book ‘Lest Innocent Blood be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There’ by Philip P. Hallie tells the moving story of how a village of Calvinist Hugenots in France, urged on by their pastors, protected their Jews.
Then there was Cornelia Ten Boom the Dutch Christian (a Calvinist I presume and certainly quite a fundamentalist) who’ with her father and other family members’ helped many Jews escape the holocaust – her father insisted that God’s chosen people were always welcome in his home. Corrie and her sister Betsie were later sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp, where only Corrie survived.
Many Catholics assisted Jews and died becuase of this – including the Jewish Christian nun Edith Stein (the spiritual director of Etty Hillesum who I find one of the most lovable figures to emerge from these terrible times).
As Christian Universalists our ‘particular girl’ to remember – along with Etty whose charity and love were wide and inclusive – has to be the Russian Orthodox nun Maria Skobtsova, canonised by the Russian Church as Mother Maria. She was actively involved in the first social democratic Russian Revolution but when the Bolshevik clique seized power fled to France, appalled at their tyranny. In France she set up a soup kitchen to help the destitute Russian refugees who had also fled. She was good friends with Nicolai Berdyaev – the Russian Christian Universalist philosopher and theologian (and aristocrat) – and, although she was an accomplished intellectual and post herself, she chided him when he came to talk about ideas with her at the soup kitchen, and made him roll his sleeves up to prepare vegetables and wash dishes. Her spiritual director was the Orthodox Universalist Sergei Bugakov (who our Jason is a fan of I believe). After the fall of France to the Nazis she joined the French Resistance, assisted escaping Jews, and was caught and sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp (like Corrie Ten Boom). Although she was known as the ‘marvellous nun’ even by the camp guards, and was never in any real danger herself, on Holy Saturday 1945, a few months before the end of the war, when a young Jewish girl became hysterical at impending death, Mother Maria took her place in the Gas Chambers (to make up the body count). Her whole life was informed by her faith in the inclusive and irresistible love of God. We should treasure her memory.
All the best
perhaps a more relevant question might be is there any good reason to believe the idea that Satan isn’t an actual person has more merit than the idea that he or it is purely the epitome of evil ! 
I think that if we believe that Satan is personal what we mean by this is something very different from the normal meaning of personal (even if we see Satan as being the epitome a will in rebellion against God, the relationships formed by this person are not ‘personal’, they are made purely for the purpose of depersonalisation). I personally believe that Satan – which as Anthony has rightly said is ‘The Adversary’ – is impersonal – but very real, although I also believe that what the Satan represents will become integrated in the’ universe made personal’ in the Body of Christ when Christ is All and in All.
I guess we can all quote the Bible at each other using our favourite ‘clobber texts’ about this matter – and I know some here have a fascination with myth (which I share in a sense). Discussion about the nature of angelic beings – fallen and otherwise – is fine I’m sure. However there is just the danger that if we place too much importance on this stuff and make joining up the dots about it the central article of our saving faith we can be lead astray. For example there has been fairly good natured discussion on this thread about the nature of angels – are they men or astral beings of some kind (whichever way you see them will affect how you see their function as ‘messengers’ I guess). Is the rebellion of Satan and his renegade angels the plain teaching of scripture or not? And I don’t expect it to be resolved!
I’ve dipped into the books of Margaret Barker, the biblical scholar who writes about these things. She suggests very compellingly that a lot of the Cosmology found in the Bible stems from the imagery, rites, and traditions connected with the First Temple (and a major source she uses in her research is the Book of Enoch, quoted in the Epistle of Jude, but never included in the canon of our Bible). She speaks, for example, about how the Temple was a symbolic model of the universe (a microcosm), and how the understanding of the cosmos in first Temple Judaism/Hebraism was that everything in the visible world corresponded to an entity, event etc, in the unseen, spiritual world. Whereas in the Second Temple the Holy of Holies – the place where the visible and invisible worlds meet – was an empty space, in the First Temple it was filled by the Cherubim throne. On this an angelic being, one like a ‘Son of Man’, would be enthroned – that is the Priest King of Israel. With sacrifices performed, the Priest King would pass through the veil separating the Holy of Holies from the outer courts as an angelic messenger from the unseen world carrying the blood of a lamb representing the life blood of Yahweh, sacrificed to bring atonement with and between the people of the covenant. By performance of this ritual the fruitfulness of creation and justice between people was restored. Perhaps this tells us something about why it’s so hard for us to agree about angels. She also makes some interesting speculations about demons in First Temple lore.
I think we do have a broken code regarding the exact Cosmology of the biblical writers – and I think we shouldn’t fuss over it too much in a Da Vinci Code like manner, because both Temples were destroyed and our Temple is the Christ we meet in the Gospels and in the face of the stranger and outcast – a Temple not made by human hands. I think we can at least be very tolerant about each other’s beliefs about Satan in particular and Biblical Cosmology in general.
My two big reasons for me not wanting to view Satan as wholly personal – apart from stuff mentioned earlier – is that:
This view of Satan as personal can limit his/its influence to personal temptation; of course evil does tempt us in our personal decisions, but I think evil is more often experienced in the impersonal structures and institutions of our societies and in what these make people become.
This view of Satan as personal is often held to dearly by people who preach a very strange Gospel. I’m thinking of the writer of the Chick Comic Booklets – Jack T. Chick - which I’d like to do a post on soon because I know these have troubled a number of you. Seeing Satan as personal can blind some people to the real and terrible functions of Evil – I’m thinking here of Satan as the False Accuser
All the best
Dick
There is already a thread on Chick comics in Books - will post my thoughts about them over there (but my post will be relevant to this thread).
Jesus’ response to Peter - ‘Get thee behind me Satan for you are a scandal to me’ - is, I guess, a key text for the ‘impersonalist’ school of interpreting Satan. Jesus is speaking to Peter - in the most obvious reading of the text- and Peter has momentarily taken on the role of the Adversary. It is also often noted that this text specifically relates Satan to ‘scandals’ - or ‘stumbling blocks’.
Well, we’re a bit of a resistant lot over here in the States I guess. I mean, we still refuse to get on board with switching to the metric system. “Cultural Stubbornness”, perhaps, if I may coin a term…