The Little Red Blog

The War in Heaven

{I may have made a mistake giving Professor Arguendo the password to my blog. He appears to be bound and determined to impress upon one and all the connection between early Christianity and the myth-laden cosmos of the ancient Near East. Why he believes that issue to be important remains unclear; it’s almost as if something has possessed him.}

Arguendo: "Both Christ and Satan are necessary for salvation. 'No Devil, no God,' was John Wesley's way of putting it." (Neil Forsyth, The Satanic Epic)

After his uncredited cameo in Genesis, Satan received scant attention in the Hebrew scriptures until the Book of Job, when he unexpectedly was awarded a co-starring role. After a brief prologue praising Job’s piety, the author commences the plot:

“One day the angels came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came with them. The LORD said to Satan, ‘Where have you come from?’  Satan answered the LORD, ‘From roaming through the earth and going back and forth in it.’ Then the LORD said to Satan, ‘Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.’ ‘Does Job fear God for nothing?’ Satan replied. ‘Have you not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has. You have blessed the work of his hands, so that his flocks and herds are spread throughout the land. But stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face.’”

Unable to resist the challenge, God first allows Satan to inflict calamities upon Job’s properties, his animals, and his family, culminating with the tragic death of Job’s children, to which loss Job responded with, “The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised.” “In all this,” the author insists, “Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.” We then witness round two: Satan returns for another chat with God, who smugly brags of Job, “He still maintains his integrity, though you incited me against him without any reason.” Satan has a ready answer: “Skin for skin!” Satan replied. ‘A man will give all he has for his own life. But stretch out your hand and strike his flesh and bones, and he will surely curse you to your face.’” God, who seems surprisingly accepting of torture, agrees: “Very well, then,” he tells Satan; “He is in your hands, but you must spare his life.” The rest of the story is too well known to need repeating, though it is worth noting that God never admits that Job’s troubles stemmed from a wager with Satan; likewise, Job never suspects that anyone other than God could be responsible for his miseries.

The point is, YHWH (the God of Israel) and Satan had a long and complicated history. As Israel’s fortunes declined, its anguished prophets developed a new understanding of the balance of powers in the cosmos. As Norman Cohn explains:

From the second century BCE to the end of the first century CE, the Jews produced a new, complex, and comprehensive demonology. There grew up a body of literature commonly known as ‘apocalyptic,’ full of allegedly supernatural revelations about the future. This literature abounds in references to evil spirits working to thwart and undo God’s plan for the world. Evil spirits ‘rise up against the children of men and against the women’; they are demons who torment human beings on this earth. They also lead them astray into sacrificing to pagan gods. Within limits prescribed by God, evil spirits or demons wreak destruction on the earth; they are also seducers, tempting human beings to every kind of sin. The chief of the fallen angels, Belial (or Satan), emerges as the antagonist or rival of God. His subordinates tempt men to fornication, jealousy, envy, anger, murder, and idolatry. Ultimately, the Devil and his servants, human and demonic, form a single host and are all alike doomed and destined to be overthrown and annihilated.

Such apocalyptic dualism—Good pitted against Evil—was late in coming to Judaism, but its antecedents were ancient and can be found in mythologies from numerous cultures (Babylon, Egypt, Persia, India, etc.). Neil Forsyth (The Old Enemy) links the Jewish and Christian narratives to ancient dualistic myths in which the world, along with its human inhabitants, was the scene of divine combat. “The Christian version of the plot,” he writes, “is something like this: A rebel god challenges the power of Yahweh, takes over the whole earth as an extension of his empire, and rules it through the power of sin and death. He is the typical death-dealing villain who causes consternation among his subjects, and his depredations and cruelty make them long for a liberator. This dark tyrant, ‘the god of this world,’ as Paul called him, is eventually thwarted by the Son of God (or man) in the most mysterious episode of the Christian story, the crucifixion, which oddly combines both defeat and victory. The struggle with Satan continues, however, and we wait still for the end of his story in the end of history. The function of Christ is to be the potential liberator of mankind from this tyranny, while the function of Satan is to be the Adversary in this Christian variant of the ancient combat narrative.”

“This bald and inadequate summary of the story,” Forsyth admits, “is nowhere contained in the scriptures. Versions of it are implicit in the New Testament, but its obscurity and fragmentation there, its presence as an assumed truth rather than a revealed truth, has made it possible for centuries of rationalizers, from the earliest allegorists to the latest liberal or humanist Christians, to ignore or avoid the devil’s role in the Christian system. The Bible says very little about the devil, and that mostly obscure and allusive; furthermore, texts which did apparently mention the devil seemed to give contradictory information about him.” 

Forsyth insists that “A shift of focus from God to Satan helps to clarify the mythological foundations of the whole Christian system. ‘No Devil, no God,’ as John Wesley put it, but this idea is not a peculiarity of the devil-soaked Protestant imagination; it is basic to the Christian story. It is mainly Satan, in fact, who gives to Christianity its mythological dimension. The depredations and tyranny of Satan are what motivate the incarnation story and that against which the activities of Christ are directed. The myth is most evident in those parts of the Christian testament which are explicitly apocalyptic, but it is present wherever the Satan figure or his demonic allies appear. In Luke, Christ sees Satan fall like lightning from heaven; the implication is that the struggle of the disciples with demon opponents is an episode or manifestation of the larger myth. Similarly, when we are told that Satan enters into Judas, the human tale of treachery is transformed into another stage of the cosmic battle being waged between Christ and his adversary; such battles are the stuff of myths.”

Christianity insisted that its salvific events had taken place in history rather than in the realm of myth, but the inclusion of Satan in the narrative created problems: 

The mythological mode ascribed evil to the activities of an independent cosmic principle loose in creation—Satan or the devil. If human life is seriously viewed as conditioned by a struggle between divine forces, it becomes difficult to insist on human responsibility; yet human responsibility was essential to both Judaism and Christianity. The notorious difficulties of Paul’s theology may be seen as his efforts to construct a version of the narrative that would allow for a separate principle of evil but would confine its power. A cosmic evil, beyond human control, raised the difficult problem of the relationship between evil and sin. 

The cosmic struggle could not absolve the humans caught up in it; a vestige, at least, of human responsibility had to be preserved. According to Paul, humans were tainted by Adam’s original sin; they were enslaved by Satan, by Sin, and by Death; their will was conflicted, and their flesh was weak; they could do nothing at all to save themselves; yet, as the Book of Job had emphasized, humans had no more right to lament their condition than clay had to complain to the potter. Humans had been given “free will” and sufficient knowledge of God; they had no excuse for their idolatry or their other sins, for which they would be judged accordingly. They could not be neutral regarding the spiritual war; they had to choose a side.

^{_________________________________}

 

A Non-Existent Enemy?

{Was it a mistake to give Professor Arguendo a pulpit from which to preach his unorthodox gospel?}

Arguendo: modern Christians can only give lip service, at best, to the beliefs of Jesus and his earliest disciples. Those beliefs were deeply rooted in a pre-modern worldview no longer tenable today. 

I am hardly the first to notice or to call attention to this fact. David Bentley Hart, a 21-st century Eastern Orthodox theologian, has emphasized the radically different New Testament worldview:

“The New Testament emerges from a cosmos ruled by malign celestial principalities and torn between spirit and flesh. There are no comfortable medians in these latitudes, no areas of shade. Everything is cast in the harsh light of final judgment, and that judgment is absolute. In regard to all these texts, the qualified, moderate, common-sense interpretation is always false.”

It is, however, the ingeniously qualified, moderate, common-sense interpretations which allow modern Christians to ease their cognitive dissonance by pretending that the New Testament authors meant something other than what the authors themselves, and their earliest readers, thought they meant.  

In another essay, Hart describes the Pauline/early Christian worldview in detail, discomfiting as it may be:

Paul’s teachings emphasize the overthrow of bad angels. For Paul, the present world-age is rapidly passing, while another world-age differing from the former in every dimension – heavenly, not terrestrial, spiritual and not physical – is already dawning. The story of salvation concerns the entire cosmos; and it is a story of invasion, conquest, spoliation, and triumph. For Paul, the cosmos has been enslaved to death, both by our sin and by the malign governance of those ‘angelic’ or ‘daemonian’ agencies who reign over the earth from the heavens, and who hold spirits in thrall below the earth. These angelic beings, these Archons, whom Paul calls Thrones and Powers and Dominations and Spiritual Forces of Evil in the High Places, are the gods of the nations. In the Letter to the Galatians, he even hints that the angel of the Lord who rules over Israel might be one of their number. Whether fallen, or mutinous, or merely incompetent, these beings stand intractably between us and God.

But Christ has conquered them all. In descending to Hades and ascending again through the heavens, Christ has vanquished all the Powers below and above that separate us from the love of God, taking them captive in a kind of triumphal procession. All that now remains is the final consummation of the present age, when Christ will appear in his full glory as cosmic conqueror, having ‘subordinated’ all the cosmic powers to himself – literally, having properly ‘ordered’ them ‘under’ himself – and will then return this whole reclaimed empire to his Father. God himself, rather than wicked or inept spiritual intermediaries, will rule the cosmos directly. Sometimes, Paul speaks as if some human beings will perish along with the present age, and sometimes as if all human beings will finally be saved. He never speaks of some hell for the torment of unregenerate souls.

The new age, moreover – when creation will be glorified and transformed into God’s kingdom – will be an age of ‘spirit’ rather than ‘flesh’. For Paul, these are two antithetical principles of creaturely existence, though most translations misrepresent the antithesis as a mere contrast between God’s ‘spirit’ and human perversity. But Paul is quite explicit: ‘Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom.’ Neither can psychē, ‘soul’, the life-principle or anima that gives life to perishable flesh. In the age to come, the ‘psychical body’, the ‘ensouled’ or ‘animal’ way of life, will be replaced by a ‘spiritual body’, beyond the reach of death – though, again, conventional translations usually obscure this by speaking of the former, vaguely, as a ‘natural body’.

For modern Christians, Paul’s writings present obvious challenges. For one thing, Paul’s predictions regarding the end of the “present age” (or “evil age”) simply did not come true; his eschatological timetable was off by—well, as of today, almost two thousand years and counting. Second, Paul’s cosmology, anthropology, demonology, and angelology make absolutely no sense today—and, frankly, made no sense to many of his first-century contemporaries. Third, as we have already mentioned: if Paul’s discredited views reflected those of Jesus—what does that say about the man who Christians continue to worship as God?

Linking Jesus to the views of his time about Satan and the demons, Christian theologian James Kallas has written: “Even though Jesus accepted these facts, not even the most Bible-pounding fundamentalist truly accepts them today, no matter what he may say to the contrary. Whatever Jesus said [about demons], no one today believes it! Not even the most pious among us accept that fact! No matter what we say in theory, for us pain is a medical, not a theological, condition.” Moreover, Kallas continued, “How many of us, when we wake up in the morning, are surprised that we woke up and that the world did not end? How many of us, as we walk the streets in the daytime, have our eyes fastened on the heavens, literally waiting for Jesus to break through the clouds surrounded by angels, bringing an end to the world?” And he concluded, “We really do not believe these things [that Jesus and Paul and the early Christians believed]. No one does. We are making as the standards of orthodoxy statements we do not really accept.”

My purpose here is not to disparage Christians or Christianity, but to clarify the reality of Christian beginnings. Christianity, regardless of how it managed to survive, develop, and become an enduring world religion, began as a very literal war (albeit one fought with spiritual weapons) against Satan. That war was launched by Jesus, whose subsequent death on the cross was, depending on your perspective, either a crushing defeat or a stunningly paradoxical victory.

Or, of course, it may have been a pointless display of defiance in the face of a non-existent enemy. 

Arguendo Wednesday

{Filling in today for Pascal the existential Russian blue cat, Professor Arguendo makes (or belabors?) the point that the New Testament chronicles a war against Satan. One assumes that Christianity won the war, since Satan has not been heard from for quite a while.}

Arguendo: You do not believe in the Devil.

Denis de Rougemont, among others, has noticed: “Over dessert, we agreed: what modern nations in general, and America in particular, most lack is belief in the Devil. We retired to the smoking-room, and everyone went back to discussing the day’s news as though the Devil did not exist.” 

In going about your life and in observing the world around you, you do not take into account the existence of personal, malevolent supernatural entities. Why would you? You are a citizen of the 21^st century, living in a modern, post-industrial, technologically advanced, Western country. ¹ You are perfectly willing to watch scary movies about demons—movies like The Exorcist or The Omen or even the ones featuring the IRL batty but indefatigable exorcists Ed and Lorraine Warren. ² You enjoy the frights, but you don’t for a minute believe in the phenomena you are watching. You are willing to use the word “demons” in a metaphorical sense: We all have our inner demons, or He just couldn’t live with his demons. You might characterize addictions of various kinds as “demons”; you might, depending on your politics, think of racism or sexism or homophobia as “demonic”. Confronted with biblical language about demonic “powers and principalities,” you might apply it to global capitalism, to neo-Fascist movements, to the military-industrial complex, to cultural Marxism, etc. You might find—as does, say, Christian theologian and psychologist Richard Beck—the “demonic” to be a useful category when it comes to plumbing the depths of our existence.  

But you do not (and you cannot) believe in this:

They went across the lake to the region of the Gerasenes. When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an impure spirit came from the tombs to meet him. This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain. For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him.  Night and day among the tombs and in the hills, he would cry out and cut himself with stones.

When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him.  He shouted at the top of his voice, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? In God’s name don’t torture me!”  For Jesus had said to him, “Come out of this man, you impure spirit!”  Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” “My name is Legion,” he replied, “for we are many.”  And he begged Jesus again and again not to send them out of the area.

A large herd of pigs was feeding on the nearby hillside. The demons begged Jesus, “Send us among the pigs; allow us to go into them.” He gave them permission, and the impure spirits came out and went into the pigs. The herd, about two thousand in number, rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned.

Those tending the pigs ran off and reported this in the town and countryside, and the people went out to see what had happened. When they came to Jesus, they saw the man who had been possessed by the legion of demons, sitting there, dressed and in his right mind; and they were afraid.  Those who had seen it told the people what had happened to the demon-possessed man—and told about the pigs as well.  Then the people began to plead with Jesus to leave their region. ³

As Jesus was getting into the boat, the man who had been demon-possessed begged to go with him. Jesus did not let him, but said, “Go home to your own people and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.”  So the man went away and began to tell in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him. And all the people were amazed.

Confronted with this story, you will, as a rational modern person, have a ready interpretation. You will concede, and marvel at, Jesus’ amazing powers as a healer. The man living among the tombs, you will explain, was a violently paranoid schizophrenic whom Jesus cured through empathy and his willingness to take seriously the man’s delusions of demonic possession; by remaining calm and unperturbed by the maniacal outbursts, Jesus soothed and disarmed the poor afflicted fellow. As for the herd of pigs rushing into the lake: that was simply a colorful but apocryphal detail invented and added later to embellish the narrative (or to answer the question, where did the demon(s) go after being cast out?).

To be clear: you believe in modern medicine, and you have seen it work. You believe in modern psychology and psychiatry, and in the idea that mental illnesses are biological brain disorders best treated with medications. You live in the Age of Science; you believe in a heliocentric solar system, in evolution and in gravity and in the theory of relativity (not that you understand it). You do not believe in miracles, aside from the everyday technological miracles that you have long since taken for granted; and you most certainly do not believe in literal demons, malevolent spirits that lure and tempt and sometimes possess men’s (and women’s) bodies, minds, and souls.

If you are a Christian living in the twenty-first century, gospel stories such as the one above can be a source of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, you are not surprised that primitive people living two thousand years ago were riddled with superstitious beliefs about angels, demons, and a multi-tiered cosmos the lowest level of which (the level on which humans live) was plagued by Satan and his legions; on the other hand, if, as a Christian, you attribute to Jesus some kind of divinity, you are puzzled that he did not seem to know better and that he accepted the erroneous beliefs of the times. Moreover, it is clear to you that Jesus’ disciples shared those beliefs, including Paul, the self-proclaimed “apostle to the Gentiles,” whose letters are punctuated with frequent references to devils, to dark powers, and to Satan as “the god of this age”.

Arguendo: if Christianity was founded by people who misunderstood the fundamental nature of reality, how can it be, in any meaningful sense, true? If our modern worldview excludes elements that were central to the worldview of Christianity’s founders, can we really be said, despite our protestations, to be practicing the same religion as Jesus and his followers?

________________

¹ Or in Montana.

² Ed and Lorraine Warren - Wikipedia

³ No good deed goes unpunished, not even in first-century Judea. In fairness, Jesus’ display of supernatural power surely affrighted the locals, who had become accustomed to the raving lunatic in their midst but who were not prepared for whatever spiritual energy Jesus was channeling.

Beating the Devil

{This week’s posts will be from my good friend Professor Arguendo, who has developed an inexplicable fascination with the place of Satan and his demonic minions in early Christianity. Why, you may ask, am I allowing the Professor to inflict his odd obsession on the public? As the legendary Leslie Gore might have said, “It’s my blog and I’ll do what I want to.”}

Arguendo: from its inception, Christianity’s mission was to liberate mankind from the clutches of the Devil.

Let us begin with this assessment from the esteemed Jeffrey Burton Russell:

The New Testament’s diabology and demonology are those of Hellenistic Judaism. Generations of modern theologians dismissed the Devil and the demons as superstitious relics of little relevance to the Christian message. On the contrary, the New Testament writers had a sharp sense of the immediacy of evil. The Devil is not a peripheral concept that can easily be discarded without doing violence to the essence of Christianity. He stands at the center of the New Testament teaching that the Kingdom of God is at war with, and is now at last defeating, the Kingdom of the Devil.

Evers since the rejection of the Gnostics, Christians have been at pains to deny, or at least to minimize, the dualist element. But the conflict between good and evil stands at the center of New Testament Christianity. Christianity is in fact a semi-dualist religion. The central message of the New Testament is salvation: Christ saves us. What he saves us from is the power of the Devil. If the power of the Devil is dismissed, then Christ’s saving mission becomes meaningless. 

To deny the existence and central importance of the Devil in Christianity is to run counter to the historical development of Christian doctrine. Since defining Christianity in terms other than these is literally meaningless, it is intellectually incoherent to argue for a Christianity that excludes the Devil. If the Devil does not exist, then Christianity has been dead wrong on a central point right from the beginning.

Well before Russell, Albert Reville, writing in the late 19^th century, had reflected on Satan’s “central importance in Christianity”:

[In Jewish tradition] the Messiah was to be the servant of God par excellence. He was to appear in order to establish the kingdom of God among the human race, which was almost wholly in the power of the devil and his angels; so that Satan would defend his dominions to the utmost against the Messiah, whose work might be summed up as consisting in a close and victorious struggle with the "prince of this world."

This point of view we must never allow to escape us in our study of the gospels. Satan and the Messiah personified, respectively, the power of evil and the power of good, fighting over every contested point, a battle in which no quarter was given. Never could Jesus have passed for the Messiah in the eyes of his countrymen, if he had not been accounted stronger than the evil spirits, whenever those possessed were brought to him.

Modern theology, which has well-nigh repudiated the devil, has dwelt much upon the question whether Jesus himself shared the belief of his contemporaries in regard to Satan. There is no authority for thinking that Jesus, out of consideration for popular beliefs, would have feigned a faith which he did not hold; moreover, the principles of his religion were not in themselves favorable to this kind of deceit.

We may consider the origin of Satan as closed. He is the link that connects polytheistic dualism with just that degree of relative dualism which Jewish monotheism could support. He will develop himself under new forms, but he has already, in the New Testament, attained a shape which we cannot ignore. He stands before us the old Satanas, the bugbear of our forefathers, in whom is centered all that is unholy and frightful in the world. He is, simply, the ideal of evil.

Lastly, Edward Langton, in the years immediately following World War II, decided it was time to reacquaint the modern world with Satan and his legions:

The belief in spirits—embodied, disembodied, or unembodied—pervades the Bible. The belief in demons and angels is woven into the fabric of Jewish and Christian teaching from the earliest period until the present time.

The Synoptic Gospels represent the number of evil spirits as being indefinitely large. The cases of so-called demon possession are so numerous that they imply a belief in the existence of an immense number of evil spirits who, by God’s express permission, are left free to carry on their hostile operations against men. They afflict, oppress, destroy, attack, and generally cause trouble to men. They carry out the commands of Satan and seduce people into all manner of sin.

Evil spirits are represented as causing a great variety of evil effects in the lives of men. They are said to cause deafness, dumbness, blindness, epilepsy, fever, curvature of the spine, etc.

In the gospels, Jesus stands out primarily as the Great Exorcist. There was something evidently impressive in the complete control Jesus exercised over evil spirits. The evil spirits recognized that Jesus had come to challenge their rule and to destroy their power over the lives of men.

To take Christianity seriously—at least, the Christianity of its earliest believers—one must take the Devil seriously as well.

_______________________

Sources:

Jeffrey Burton Russell, Satan: The Early Christian Tradition (1981)

Albert Reville, The Devil: His Origin, Greatness, and Decadence (1877)

Edward Langton, Essentials of Demonology (1949)