A Genealogy of Satan, Part 7: Is the Devil Necessary?

 

In his groundbreaking study of social processes behind the emergence of Christianity in the Roman Empire, The Rise of Christianity (1996), Rodney Stark notes a consensus of scholars that "the world of antiquity was groping toward monotheism" (p. 201). Christianity ultimately dominated, but Judaism and monotheistic philosophy--including Neoplatonism and Stoicism--expanded at the same time. In keeping with his formal theory of religion (Stark and Bainbridge, 1987), Stark puts this as a formal proposition: "As societies become older, larger, and more cosmopolitan, they will worship fewer gods of greater scope" (1996, p. 201). The end product of this would seem to be monotheism, belief in one all-powerful god, a cosmic emperor, but trends need not imply that their extremes will be realized. Trends generally have natural limits.

A single god of entirely unlimited scope becomes identical with What Is, which is called Monism. A Monist deity is beyond human comprehension or pleading, a face or cypher on the entire cosmos. Being everything, he explains nothing. He may, of course, evoke transcendent acceptance, what Friedrich Schleiermacher called "a feeling of absolute dependence." Some religions stay with this, but more often, human sensibility rebels. If God is good, there is the Problem of Evil. If he loves his creation, then why did God create suffering? If a good God is the single and absolute author of the universe, how can evil even exist? I don't propose to argue or even summarize solutions to the Problem of Evil, but simply to note that it is thorny and that the Devil is at the heart of its most ancient and popular solution: modified, temporary Dualism.

Anthropomorphic gods, whether the sprawling pantheon of ancient Rome or the jealous Yahweh, are ways of bargaining with unseen or natural forces. The older gods, including Yahweh before the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, demanded sacrifices and might give rewards in exchange. They had favorites, even whole cities or nations, but could not be said to love their whole creation (certainly not the God of Noah's flood). "God is love," was revolutionary concept that emerged in later Judaism and took center stage with Christianity. As explained in earlier posts, the religion of Abraham and Moses, like that of their neighbors, shared the idea that God or the gods were not bound by human morality and could be blamed for all sorts of humanly defined injustice and suffering. 

        The gods, including Yahweh, were temperamental friends and terrible enemies. They might be entreated with prayers and bribed with sacrifices, but they need not keep their share of a bargain. Yahweh wasn't good, but simply irresistible. Worshippers related to gods as they might to powerful human despots.

With an amoral concept of deity, there is no Problem of Evil, but the problem emerged in the ancient world alongside the worship of Stark's "fewer gods of greater scope." When God-is-love--or any perfect god, whether Platonist, Jewish, or Christian--approaches Monism, theology hits a wall. A God who is All is evil or, at least, bears sole responsibility for the world's imperfections. A Monist God is semi-evil.

       Christianity solved this problem with evil forces able to thwart God and, therefore, to blame for evil. God remains theoretically all-powerful, able to overwhelm these forces, but declines to do so at present. God has a plan that must play out through history. At the end time, but not before, everything will be set right. This theology seems to have emerged with the teachings of Zoroaster and had merged with Judaism by the time of Jesus. It became a central teaching of Christianity and, in later centuries, of Islam.

But what forces temporarily thwart God? 

Part of the answer is, of course, human sin. In Paradise Lost, John Milton justifies "the ways of God to men" by invoking free will. A good God had to give us free will because a human race without it would be less good, robots rather than spiritual beings. Genuine free will required freedom to choose evil, which Adam promptly did, frustrating God's good intentions. The best that God could do after that was to send a savior and perfect the world through history, the best outcome given free will. A world of suffering is, as Leibniz would later describe it, "the best of all possible worlds." Of course, Satan co-stars in Milton's epic, but only as a tempter. Natural and social evils all spring directly from human sin. When Eve eats the forbidden fruit:

        Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat,

        Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe,

        That all was lost.

When Adam. "sufficient to have stood, though free to fall," follows Eve's example, there is another ecological spasm: "Earth trembl'd from her entrails." Finally, it's all humanity's fault.

The free will argument is a traditional one, and a variation on it works even in the Calvinist tradition, which denies free will. Human beings are understood to deserve suffering because their corrupt wills reject God. If human sin suffices to explain God's screwed-up creation, we can dismiss the Devil as simply a symbol of selfishness, anger, lust, greed, and all that--not a supernatural person. This may explain how, in recent Gallop polls, 87% of respondents said they believed in God, but only 61% in the Devil. There may be other explanations, but the obvious one is that people demythologize the Devil, reducing him to a component of human psychology. God may be someone out there to pray to, but the Devil is your own brokenness.

There are problems with this, however, as theology. For one thing, it is radically unscriptural. Much of the story of Jesus in the Gospels involves demons who cause mental and physical illnesses not blamed on the sufferer's moral choices, and the Devil appears repeatedly in the New Testament, even described as "the god of this age" capable of blinding unbelievers (2 Corinthians 4:4). There is no indication that 1st-century writers imagined an allegorical figure rather than a real power. If we demythologize the antagonist in the spiritual drama of the Gospels, then the whole story may unravel. If we mythologize--that is, ascribe serious and fundamental meaning to--the protagonist of the story, to Christ's grand and messy arc of salvation, why demythologize Satan, a supporting player? Isn't this straining out a gnat while swallowing a camel (Matthew 23:24).

   Satan may be only the first domino to fall before the entire line of the Gospels goes flat. Indeed, for many moderns, this has happened, so there may be good reason for fundamentalists defending the Christian gospel hold onto 1st-century demonology.