The conclusions which we have come to in our studies about the devil may
appear freaky, and unsupported by many churches. But it should be appreciated
that we are far from alone in having come to these conclusions. Well known
writers from more orthodox backgrounds have come to just the same conclusions.
Stephen Mitchell, in a much acclaimed and well publicized book published by
none other than Harper Collins, observes that throughout Job, “there is no
attempt to deflect ultimate responsibility by blaming a devil or an original
sin”(1). And Mitchell says this in the context of commenting upon Job 9:24,
where having spoken of the problem of calamity, Job concludes: “Who does it, if
not he [God]?”. And of course at the end of the book, God confirms Job as having
spoken truly about Him. Mitchell observes that Job ends “with a detailed
presentation of two creatures, the Beast and the Serpent… both creatures are, in
fact, central figures in ancient near-eastern eschatology, the embodiments of
evil that the sky-god battles and conquers… this final section of the Voice from
the Whirlwind is a criticism of conventional, dualistic theology. What is all
this foolish chatter about good and evil, the Voice says, about battles between
a hero-god and some cosmic opponent? Don’t you understand that there is no one
else in here? These huge symbols of evil, so terrifying to humans… are presented
as God’s playthings”. And so Mitchell comes to the very same conclusions as we
have outlined here- there is in the end only God, and He is not in struggle with
any super-human ‘devil’ in Heaven. And this is in fact the whole lesson of the
book of Job. Even if such a mythical being is thought to exist, as it was in
Job’s time, the essential point is that God is so much greater than such a puny
‘devil’ that He can play games with him. John Robinson, one time Anglican Bishop
of Woolwich, came to some similar conclusions, albeit less clearly expressed, in
his classic In The End God (2).The Christian psychotherapist Paul Tournier also
came to the same view about the devil which we’ve outlined elsewhere. He
expresses what we’ve said Biblically in more modern jargon: “[We must] unmask
the hidden enemy, which the Bible calls a devil, and which the psychoanalyst
calls the superego: the false moral code, the secret and all-powerful veto which
spoils and sabotages all that is best in a person’s life, despite the sincerest
aspirations of his conscious mind”(2a).
Elaine
Pagels
Elaine Pagels, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, is perhaps
the highest profile writer and thinker to express agreement with our
position about the devil. Her best selling book The Origin Of Satan is well
worth a read if you’re interested in this theme (3). She begins where we
have done- that Christianity and Judaism taught only one God, and this left
no place for a devil / satan in the orthodox sense. We have said time and
again that one true doctrine leads to another, and Pagels grasps that
clearly. One God means no devil. Simple as that. And so she comments:
“Conversion from paganism to Judaism or Christianity, I realized, meant,
above all, transforming one’s perception of the invisible world”. And this
had a radically practical outworking- as does belief in any true Bible
doctrine: “Becoming either a Jew or a Christian polarized a pagan’s view of
the universe, and moralized it”. The pagan worldview would’ve felt that
anything like a volcano or earthquake was a result of demonic activity. But
instead, the Bible clearly describes the volcanoes that destroyed Sodom as
coming from the one God, as judgment for their sins (Gen. 19:4). People were
not just victims of huge cosmic forces; they had responsibility for their
actions and met those consequences. We can easily miss the radical
implications of the moral way the Bible describes such things which were
otherwise attributed to demons /pagan gods. There was a huge political price
attached to rejecting belief in ‘demons’. Rusticus, prefect of Rome,
persecuted Christians because they refused “to obey the gods and submit to
the rulers”. The Romans considered that their leaders were agents of the
gods; and if the gods didn’t exist, then the Roman leadership lost its power
and authority. For this reason, the Romans called the Christians ‘atheists’.
The following quotations from Pagels exactly reflect our own
conclusions: “In the Hebrew Bible…Satan never appears as Western Christendom
has come to know him, as the leader of an “evil empire”, an army of hostile
spirits who make war on God…in the Hebrew Bible, Satan is not necessarily
evil, much less opposed to God. On the contrary, he appears in the book of
Numbers and in Job as one of God’s obedient servants- a messenger, or angel,
a word that translates the Hebrew term for messenger (mal’ak) into Greek
(angelos)… In biblical sources the Hebrew term the satan describes an
adversarial role. It is not the name of a particular character… the root stn
means “one who opposes, obstructs, or acts as an adversary”... But this
messenger is not necessarily malevolent… John dismisses the device of the
devil as an independent supernatural character… Paul holds a perception that
Satan acts as God’s agent not to corrupt people but to test them” (pp. 111,
183)”.
But Elaine Pagels isn’t just out there on her own. Neil
Forsyth comments likewise: “In… the Old Testament, the word [satan] never
appears as the name of the adversary… rather, when the satan appears in the
Old Testament, he is a member of the heavenly court, albeit with unusual
tasks”(4). Several respected commentators have pointed out the same,
especially when commenting upon the ‘satan’ in the book of Job- concluding
that the term there simply speaks of an obedient Divine Angel acting the
role of an adversary, without being the evil spirit being accepted by many
in Christendom (5).
How Did Christianity Adopt
Pagan Beliefs?
Pagels and other writers tackle the obvious question: Where, then, did
the present idea of a literal evil being called satan come from, seeing it’s
not in the Bible? They trace the idea back to pagan sources that entered
Judaism before the time of Christ- and then worked their way into Christian
thought in the early centuries after Christ, as mainstream Christianity
moved away from purely Biblical beliefs(6). But pushing the question back a
stage further, why and how did Judaism and later Christianity pick up pagan
myths about a personal devil and sinful Angels and mix them in with their
belief system? Pagels quotes sources such as the Jewish Book of the Watchers
to show how there was a clear belief that each person has a ‘guardian
Angel’, and when conflicts arose, people judged as ‘wicked’ or ‘evil’ came
to be charged with therefore having a ‘wicked’ or ‘evil’ Angel controlling
them. And it was an easy step to assume that these ‘wicked Angels’ were all
under the control of a personal, superhuman Devil as widely believed in by
surrounding pagans. The book of Jubilees (e.g. 15:31) made the association
between pagan gods and demons. Jewish apostates who believed in the pagan
gods, or who were accused of believing in them, were then seen as being
somehow in league with them. And thereby those ‘demons’ were felt to be real
beings, because the people they supposedly controlled were real people.
The Essenes were a Jewish sect who were in conflict with the rest of the
Jews, whom they believed were condemned to damnation. They expressed this
conflict between them and others in terms of a cosmic conflict between God-
who they believed was on their side- and a personal Satan, whose followers
they believed their enemies on earth were supporting. The more bitter the
political conflict within Israel, the stronger was the appeal made to a
supposed cosmic battle between good and evil, God and Satan. The result of
this false doctrine was a demonizing of ones’ opposition. And the same can
easily happen today. The value of the human person is forgotten about, if we
believe they are condemned, evil people who are the devil incarnate. The
orthodox ‘devil’ can’t be reconciled with. He can only be destroyed. And if
we demonize people, we can never reconcile with them, only seek to destroy
them. Here is where doctrine is important in practice. If there is no
personal satan up there, and all people, our enemies included, are simply
struggling against their own nature… then we can reach out to them, as
fellow strugglers, understand them, seek to reconcile with them and seek
their salvation.
Let's keep remembering that the Old Testament is
silent about a 'satan' figure as widely believed in by Christendom. The
Genesis record says nothing at all about sinful angels, a Lucifer, satan
being cast out of Heaven etc. There seems significant evidence for believing
that the idea of a personal devil first entered Judaism through their
contact with the Persian religions whilst in captivity there. Rabbinic
writings don't mention a personal satan until the Jews were in Babylon, and
the references become more frequent as Persian influence upon Judaism
deepened. This is why the monumental passages in Isaiah [e.g. Is. 45:5-7],
addressed to the captive Jews, point out the error of the Persian idea that
there is a good God in tension with an evil god. Classically, the devil is
understood to be a being with horns and a pitchfork. If we research why this
should be the case, we soon find that the Bible itself is absolutely without
any such images of satan or the devil. But we do find these images in pagan
mythology- Pan, Dionysius and other pagan gods were depicted as having
horns, long tails etc. In the British isles, let alone ancient Rome and
Greece, there were traditions of 'horned gods' being the source of evil-
e.g. the Cernunnos amongst the Celts, Caerwiden in Wales, etc. In so many
ways, apostate Christianity adopted pagan ideas and brought them into its
theology. These horned gods, with forks and long tails, became adopted into
a false Christianity as 'the devil'. But the Bible itself is absolutely
silent about this- nowhere is there any indication that satan or the devil
is a personal being with horns etc.
Other studies in the history and
developments of religion have shown that religious systems usually begin
without a specific 'satan' figure; but as people struggle with the huge
incidence of evil in the world, they end up creating such a figure in their
theologies. It seems many people have a deeply psychological need to blame
their sin, and the sin of others, on something outside of them; and so the
idea of a personal satan has become popular. It's somewhere to
simplistically dump all our struggles and disappointments and fears of
ourselves and of the world in which we live. The struggle to understand,
believe and love a God who portrays Himself in His word as the ultimate and
only force, in a world of tsunamis, earthquakes, mass catastrophe- is indeed
difficult. It's something all His children have to wrestle with, as children
struggle with their parents' decisions and actions towards them which seem
to them so unloving, unreasonable and pointless. It's surely a cop out to
give up, and simplistically decide that our God isn't actually the only
force and power around, but actually there is an evil god out there too. But
this is indeed a cop out, as well as reflecting our own lack of faith and
acceptance of the one true God simply because we don't ultimately understand
Him, and because He doesn't act how we think He should act.
The Devil In John’s Gospel
John’s Gospel seeks to correct the false idea of a huge cosmic conflict.
John frequently alludes to the ideas of light vs. darkness, righteousness
vs. evil. But he correctly defines darkness and evil as the unbelief which
exists within the human heart. Again, from this distance, we may read John’s
words and not perceive the radical, corrective commentary which he was
really making against the common ideas of a personal Satan existing in
Heaven, involved in some cosmic conflict up there. The real arena of the
conflict, the essential struggle, according to John, is within the human
heart, and it is between belief and unbelief in Jesus as the Son of God,
with all that entails.
In the same way as the concept of ‘demons’
somewhat recedes throughout the Gospels, and the point is made that God’s
power is so great that effectively they don’t exist- so it is with the
‘Devil’. Judaism had taken over the surrounding pagan notion of a personal
‘satan’. And the Lord Jesus and the Gospel writers use this term, but in the
way they use it, they redefine it. The parable of the Lord Jesus binding the
“strong man”- the devil- was really to show that the “devil” as they
understood it was now no more, and his supposed Kingdom now taken over by
that of Christ. The last Gospel, John, doesn’t use the term in the way the
earlier Gospels do. He defines what the earlier writers called “the devil”
as actual people, such as the Jews or the brothers of Jesus, in their
articulation of an adversarial [‘satanic’] position to Jesus. Others have
concluded likewise: “John never pictures satan.. as a disembodied being…
John dismisses the device of the devil as an independent supernatural
character”(7)… “In John, the idea of the devil [as a personal supernatural
being] is completely absent”(8). Raymond Brown- one of the most well known
Roman Catholic expositors of the 20th Century- concludes that ‘Satan’
doesn’t refer to a character in ‘his’ own right, but rather is a title
referring to groups of people who play the role of adversaries or
tempters(9).
The Synoptics speak of how satan ‘comes to’ and tempts
and challenges the Lord Jesus to claim earthly political power, which
‘satan’ can give him (Mt. 4:8,9). But John describes this in terms of “the
people” coming to Him and trying to make Him King- which temptation He
refused (Jn. 6:15). Likewise it was ‘the devil’ in the wilderness who
tempted Jesus to make the stones into bread. But in Jn. 6:30,31, it is the
Jewish people who offer Him the same temptation. In the wilderness, the Lord
responded that man lives by the bread which comes from the mouth of God. In
Jn. 6:32, He responds likewise by speaking about “the true bread from
heaven”. The temptation from ‘the devil’ to publically display His Divine
powers in front of Israel in the Jerusalem temple (Mt. 4:5,6; Lk. 4:9-12) is
repeated by John in terms of the Lord’s brothers tempting Him to go up to
the same temple and openly validate Himself “to the world” (Jn. 7:1-5).
Notes
(1) Stephen Mitchell, The Book Of
Job (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).
(2) John Robinson, In The End God (London: James
Clarke, 1950).
(2a) Paul Tournier, The Person Reborn (New York:
Harper & Row, 1975) p. 6.
(3) Elaine Pagels, The Origin Of Satan
(Harmondsworth: Allen Lane / The Penguin Press, 1996).
(4) Neil
Forsyth, The Old Enemy: Satan And The Combat Myth (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1987) p. 107.
(5) See P. Day, An Adversary In
Heaven: Satan In The Hebrew Bible (Atlanta, GA: Scholar’s Press, 1988) pp
69-106.
(6) In addition to Pagels op cit, see Knut Schaferdick,
“Satan in the Post Apostolic Fathers” in Geoffrey W. Bromiley, ed.,
Theological Dictionary Of The New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971)
Vol. 7 pp. 163-165 and George F. Moore, Judaism In The First Centuries Of
The Christian Era Vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1927).
(7) Elaine Pagels, op cit pp. 100,111.
(8) Gustave Hoennecke, New
Testament Studies (Leipzig: Heinrichs, 1912) p. 208.
(9) Raymond
Brown, The Gospel According To John (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1966) pp.
364-376.