Theologians Move Away from Satan—Why?
July 10, 2024
Modern theologians have discarded Satan. It is so yesterday. Satan makes Christianity a dualism, a bad to offset the good. The devil is a good concept to have around, since you can blame all your troubles on him. But modern theologians of the monotheistic religions have long since moved on from him, as though an embarrassment from their childhood.
I think this is because they are very much into fixing the world via human solutions. They are really not too much different from secularists, only with a light God-seasoning sprinkled on top. A Devil makes all their efforts moot. How can you fix the world if the basic problem is outside your influence? When they do devil at all, they present him as an analogy for ‘the evil that is within us.’ That is something they imagine will yield to their repair efforts.
Then too I think they suffer an overreaction to how the churches have portrayed the Devil, as the master torturer of hellfire, somehow commissioned by God to do his dirty work of punishing sinners. What logical person wouldn’t want to break away from that?—and these theologians are nothing if not those who pride themselves on their logic.
Chasing down a lecture series that Tom Whitepebble pointed me to, I found the lecturer, James Hall, told that he was raised Lutheran Evangelical. Nobody does hellfire more than they. So when he described himself as an “ethical monotheist,” I just assumed that his worldview incorporated a devil. Instead, he tested theodicy after theodicy, punched holes in all of them, and only last did he consider a “dualism” solution that involves the devil. (A theodicy, for anyone who doesn’t know, is an attempt to explain how God could coexist with evil) He conceded this one made the most sense, but also that it was very unpopular, so unpopular that he seemed to think portions of his audience might not have heard of it.
This “unpopular” theodicy only posited that there was a devil. It did not touch on how that one came to be, why God permits it, how he will resolve it, or any other aspect of the Universal Court case scenario—just that there was a devil whom you could pin all the bad stuff on. I had asked Whitepebble if he knew where our court case scenario originated. Based on something he had heard, he pointed me to this lecture series. But it really didn’t touch on the essence of it, just that there was a master villain devil.
Imagine. The fellow reviews theodicy after theodicy, rejects them all as unsatisfactory, and ignores only the one that works. It recalls what a certain friend used to say to me, a friend who is fond of alternative medicine: “If it works, insurance won’t cover it.”
It is not a contradiction in terms to find a given theologian might not believe in God. Some are atheist. This is because theology is not a study of God, as the uninitiated might assume, but a study of man’s interaction with the concept of God. Thus, there doesn’t even have to be a God for the ‘concept of God’ to be valid. It is entirely a human field of study, like sociology or anthropology.
It is all a part of my current work in progress, a review of our ‘court case’ theodicy. It begins with discussion of the Book of Job. In fact, that’s where I first got the idea to write it, when we were doing Job in our congregation Bible readings. It had been vaguely kicking around in my head before, but it needed those Job readings to gel.
****** The bookstore
Not sure if you want to post this comment as it may distract from the main points of your article. But your series has me thinking about all this...
I'm not actually sure that I hold with a "court case" theodicy. I feel it can be a useful metaphor in explaining some of what we see, especially from a human perspective. And it can be a helpful metaphor in terms of an individual deciding to submit to God's will in all of this. Yet I don't feel it *defines* my concept of what's going on. It is a metaphor with limitations. Now that you're making me think about it all, I would describe my concept as a "love" theodicy. God's love requires his children have the ability to choose. And not only the ability to choose but the opportunity. So you cannot have Eden without the forbidden tree, which seems a most loving way to provide for the development and exercise of significant choice for the first humans. Interestingly, the creation of humans seems to have provided a similar opportunity for choosing on behalf of God's spirit children. The devil chose to exert his will opposed to God by lying and murdering Adam and Eve. The perfect couple also chose opposition to the Creator. But I do not see that court case as ongoing. That case is closed. Adam and Eve are dead. The devil's judgement has been decided. I don't think the devil raised a question of who's rule is best. He never believed humans could do better without God. The devil simply lied in order to exert his own will, which when put in action would have to oppose God's will (otherwise it would just be doing God's will by another route). When other spirits came to Earth in Noah's time, it was to take pleasure in exerting a will or purpose in opposition to God. That case is also closed, and judgement has been decided. I don't think what we're seeing is an ongoing court case; what we're seeing is what Love does when one of the family of creation chooses opposition to God. God is Almighty and therefore his rule is a given outside of any debate over how it compares to human rule. Primarily, God is love, and so what we're seeing is inevitably the unfolding of the most loving response to the choices some have made. I think *defining* it as a court case robs us of the beauty and complexity of God's love. I might even go so far as to quibble that God's sovereignty is not the main issue, but that God's love is the main issue (the secondary issue being our individual choices in the face of all this). Is there some overlap between sovereignty and love? Sure. But if we're talking about what to name the theodicy...
[Reply: Yeah, I think it all lies in naming the theodicy. All that you say I include in my definition of UCC. Free will is indeed the determining factor, the motive behind making a choice to serve Jehovah or not. It is also his motive in wanting the case settled once for all time. While the case may be closed, the final verdict has not been pronounced as unambiguously as it will be at Armageddon.
As to the devil’s doings and motives, I like John Milton’s account in Paradise Lost even better than the Genesis account. It doesn’t conflict with it, it just adds considerable detail, which may or may not be true, but it all makes sense. Milton presents Satan as speaking through the snake as though a ventriloquist, saying in effect, ‘Does this surprise you, seeing a snake talk? That’s what eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and bad did for me. And if it did that for me, a common snake, just think what it might do for you!’
I also like Milton’s backdrop, which goes well beyond any biblical writings but is in complete harmony with them. In it, Satan leads the delegation of all those angels cast from heaven for disobedience. They’ve heard of a new creation Jehovah has going down on earth. They know they can’t strike out at God directly, but maybe they can sabotage this new creation and thus exact their revenge. It is a reasonable extrapolation of several Bible verses. Did it happen that way? Dunno. But it gets the job done.
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Posted by: Cory | July 10, 2024 at 12:37 PM