3-1 Some Practical Implications
Battle For The Mind, Not Blaming Others
We're going to now take a break from the theology, and look at where
all this leads in practice. We have spoken of history, of ideas, of theology,
of Biblical interpretation. But if we leave all this at the level of mere
ideas, lodged merely within some complex brain chemistry beneath our skulls-
we will have totally missed the point. These 'ideas' must have real encounter
with our whole personalities. I mean that reading the Bible, or this book
or that book about the Bible as we ride to work or a few pages
each night before sleep takes us... really should and can have a gripping
effect upon human personality, upon our entire world-view, taking us far
beyond our safe, sleepy little bedtime studies, out into the most fundamental
issues of the cosmos, and into the real issues of the dirty lives we humans
live out on the face of this spectacularly beautiful planet. The fruit
of correct understanding of these issues will in the end be love, and
walking humbly with our God. We now want to reflect on what these ideas
mean for us in these intensely practical terms. I urge you to take these
reflections especially seriously; for I believe there is a huge danger
in purely academic study of God's word which doesn't lead to any praxis.
For all that he was a Roman Catholic priest, Raimundo Panikkar put it
well: "If intellectual activity divorces itself from life, it becomes
not only barren and alienating, but also harmful and even criminal [because]...
I am convinced that we live in a state of human emergency that does not
allow us to entertain ourselves with bagatelles" (1).
The idea is generally held that 'Satan' tries to stop people being righteous,
and uses every opportunity to tempt people, but is overcome by spiritual
mindedness and quoting Scripture. If Satan is a personal being, exactly
why and how would this evil being be scared off, so
to speak, by spirituality? Exactly why is this supposedly powerful
being somehow driven away by spirituality or encouraged by unspirituality
and moral weakness? I see no real answer to those questions. To simply
say 'Well, he's like that' only throws the question a stage further back-
why is he like that? How did he become like that? Eph. 4:27 says that
anger and an unforgiving spirit give a foothold to the Devil; 1 Tim. 5:14
warns that young widows will give Satan a door of opportunity if they
don't remarry. When we are told: "Resist the Devil and he will flee
from you" (James 4:7), we hardly imagine us wrestling with a literal
beast who runs away just because we put up a fight. Putting meaning into
those words, seeking to understand what they really mean for us in daily
life, it's surely apparent that James speaks of the need to resist sin
in our minds, and that very process of resistance will lead to
the temptation receding.
These kinds of passages make so much more sense once we understand the
real adversary / Satan as being our own temptations, our own weak mind.
We all know how anger and a hard spirit within our hearts lead us to sin
more. We can imagine how for a young widow in the first century world,
being single could lead her into a range of temptations. But the psychological
processes involved in those temptations would all have been internal to
her mind [e.g. sexual unfulfilment, lack of status in society, being childless,
economic difficulties etc.]. Not remarrying didn't of itself allow an
external Devil to lead her to sin; rather the situation she might chose
to remain in could precipitate within her a range of internal
temptations.
The fact that the Lord Jesus really conquered the Devil should mean for
us that in our struggles against sin, victory is ultimately certain. If
we grasp this, we will battle daily for control of the mind, we will strive
to fill our mind with God's word, we will do our daily readings, we will
be cynical of our motivations, we will examine ourselves, we will appreciate
the latent liability to sin which we and all men have by nature. We won't
take the weakness of others towards us so personally; we will see it is
their 'Devil'. Belief in a personal Devil is so popular, because it takes
the focus away from our own struggle with our innermost nature and thoughts.
Yet whilst we don't believe in a personal Devil, we can create the same
thing in essence; we can create an external Devil such as TV or Catholicism,
and feel that our entire spiritual endeavour must be directed to doing
battle with these things, rather than focusing on our own desperation
. A lack of focus on personal sinfulness and the need for personal cleansing
and growth, with the humility this will bring forth, can so easily give
place to a focus instead upon something external to us as the real enemy
(2). Realizing who ‘the Devil’ really is inspires
us to more concretely fight against him. Albert Camus in his novel The
Rebel develops the theme that “man is never greater than when
he is in revolt, when he commits himself totally to the struggle against
an unjust power, ready to sacrifice his own life to liberate the oppressed”.
Once we have the enemy clearly defined, we can rise up to that same struggle
and challenge. Truly, man is never greater when he’s in the one
and only true revolt worth making, and sacrificing life for the ultimate
cause.
We should not blame our nature for our moral failures in the way that
orthodox Christians blame an external Devil. We must hang our head over
every sin we commit and every act of righteousness which we omit. In this
we will find the basis for a true appreciation of grace, a true motivation
for works of humble response, a true flame of praise within us, a realistic
basis for a genuine humility. Dorothy Sayers in Begin Here correctly
observes: " It is true that man is dominated by his psychological
make-up, but only in the sense that an artist is dominated by his material"
. We really can achieve some measure of self control; it cannot
be that God is angry with us simply because we are human. It cannot be
that our nature forces us to sin in a way which we can never counteract.
If this were true, the anger of God would have been against His own spotless
Son, who fully shared our nature. The Lord shared our nature and yet didn't
commit sin, and in this He is our ever beckoning example and inspiration.
The question 'What would Jesus do…?' in this or that situation has all
the more inspirational power once we accept that the Lord Jesus, tempted
just as we are, managed to put the Devil to death within Him, triumphing
over it in the cross, even though He bore our nature. People parrot off
phrases like ''I'm a sinner" , 'going to heaven', 'Satan', without
the faintest idea what they are really saying. And we can do just the
same- we can speak of 'Sin' with no real idea what we ought to feel and
understand by this.
The Swiss psychiatrist Paul Tournier wrote an incisive and brilliant
study, Violence et puissance- in English translation, The
Violence Within (3). From wide experience of practicing
psychotherapy and investigating the causes of various neuroses, Tournier
discerned that within each person there is a huge battle between the right
and the wrong, good and evil, temptation and resistance to temptation.
This battle goes on constantly, over even the most insignificant things-
e.g. the choice to take an instant dislike to another person, to get angry
and aggressive because we feel a person in a restaurant is somehow laughing
at us, etc. Most people on earth wouldn’t agree with the religious / theological
conclusions we have reached- that the Devil refers not to a ‘fallen Angel’
or supernatural being but rather to our own internal temptations which
battle with us, as Peter says, like a roaring lion. Yet in practice, a
psychiatric analysis of human beings reveals that indeed, like it or not,
the ‘violence within’ is not only very real, but a fundamental part of
our moment by moment spiritual experience. Along with Tournier, the French
sociologist Claude Levi-Strauss came to the same conclusions, written
up in his classic The Savage Mind - a book whose title says it
all (4). I mean that our Biblical / theological conclusions about the
Devil are actually confirmed by psychotherapy and psychiatric analysis
of people. Our conclusions are true in practical experience, even if people
don't want to accept the way we express them Biblically because they have
a tradition of believing that the real problem is the supposed violence
from without, supposedly perpetrated by a supernatural 'Devil'. And here
doctrine comes to have a biting practical relevance- for if we truly perceive
and believe that in fact ‘the Devil’ and its power has been vanquished
in Jesus, if we survey the wondrous cross and see there the power of the
Devil finally slaughtered in the perfect mind of the Lord Jesus as He
hung there, and that ultimate victory of victories shared with us who
are in Him… the source, the root cause, of so much neurosis and dysfunction,
is revealed to us as powerless. For we who have given in and do give in
to temptation, who submit to ‘the violence within’ all too often, who
are at times beaten in the fight, have been saved from the power of that
defeat by grace and forgiveness, and are counted by the God of all grace
as being ‘in Christ’. Thus the whole thing becomes what Frederick Buechner
called The Magnificent Defeat. The Lord Jesus was the one who
overcame that ‘violence within’ moment by moment, as well as in the more
accentuated and obvious scenes of ‘the violence within’ which we see in
the wilderness temptations and on the cross. And by grace, we are counted
as in Him. No wonder that to achieve this He had to share human nature,
to have ‘the violence within’, in order to overcome it. Perfectly and
seamlessly, to my mind at least, one true aspect of Biblical interpretation
thus leads to another, and becomes the basis for a transformed life in
practice. In all this we see the matchless, surpassing beauty of how God
works with humanity towards our salvation.
Sin De-Emphasized And Minimized
It's commonly understood that human beings frequently practice 'projection'
onto others of certain attitudes and behaviours with which they struggle.
It seems to me that the Satan concept is a classic case. We've taken all
the aspects of God's personality with which we struggle- not least, that
He brings evil into our lives; and we've also taken all the aspects of
our own personality which we dislike, our sin, our unpleasantness... and
projected them onto an external being called Satan. All this is not only
a minimizing of our own sin; it's an attempt to remake 'God' into our
image of who we think He should be. It's blasphemous, as well as demeaning
to Him, and reflects our huge barrier to accepting that we are not God,
that we are sinners, and need to work on self-improvement rather than
projecting all our weakness away from ourselves and onto something or
someone else.
We as sinful humans in relationship with a perfect God have a terrible
tendency to justify, rationalize and minimize our sin. This is the very
essence of the Biblical 'Devil'- a false accuser of God, effectively a
'slanderer' of Him, somewhere within our psyche and self-perceptions.
So many times we justify sin in the heat of the moment, only later to
realize the extent of our self-deception. If we say that we have not sinned,
we make God a liar (1 Jn. 1:10); if we don't believe Him, we likewise
"make him a liar", we slander or falsely accuse Him (1 Jn. 5:10).
We may recoil at this language. But it is so- to deny our sinfulness,
to disbelieve what God says about it, is to slander God. We not only do
this within our own mind, self-perceptions and psyche. We do this in a
more formal and rational manner when we twist Bible teaching in order
to somehow minimize sin. And this is what has happened with the steady
progression of human thought about sin and the Devil. I am not saying
that God's intention is that we should feel ourselves as miserable sinners
who incite God's wrath constantly; positively, an awareness of our sin
is the basis for the joy and marvel at God's grace, that energy to serve
Him and love Him through thick and thin, which so many Christians privately
admit that they lack. Without doubt, the Biblical message concerns our salvation from sin
by God's grace and the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus. The focus is not
upon how God saved us from the clutches of some cosmic being; it's very
much on the fact that we have been saved from our very own sins.
The Sin Of Adam And Eve Minimized
Take
the Biblical account of Adam and Eve's sin. In Biblical Christianity,
it is man's fall that led to the fall of the cosmos; yet the pagan
myths as well as apostate Judaism turned this around- so that man's
fall was just the result of the fall of cosmic powers. The Bible
underlines human guilt, whereas false doctrines of men seek to minimize
it. At least one Akkadian myth features a vaguely similar story to that
of Genesis 3, whereby the gods deceive a man into eating forbidden food
and he is punished for it with mortality (5). As I explained in Digression 3,
the Genesis record alludes to such myths in order to deconstruct them
and show where the truth really lies. According to that Akkadian myth,
the gods were to blame for the deception, and man was punished with
mortality somewhat unfairly. The Biblical record brings out how Adam
and Eve's attempts at self-justification were effectively a blaming of
God, and draws a red line through them as ultimately irrelevant excuses
for their sin. Thus Eve blames her fall upon the serpent, whilst Adam
seems to blame God for providing him with Eve- "the woman whom You gave
to be with me, she gave me of the tree" (Gen. 3:12). The idea of
blaming 'the gods' for humanity's fall was a feature of the pagan
myths; and Genesis 3 deconstructs them by alluding to them and placing
the blame back upon Adam and Eve themselves.
The Jewish
apocryphal Book of Enoch was instrumental in forging the Jewish misunderstanding
of Satan as a personal being. This book shifts the blame for sin from
humanity to a Satan-figure called Azazel: "The whole earth has been
corrupted through the works that were taught by Azazel: to him ascribe
all sin" (1 Enoch 9:6; 10:8). There is a subtle but significant difference
between this and the Biblical record in Gen. 6:11- which states that the
earth became corrupt before God because of human sin. The Biblical
record makes no attempt to pass the blame for this onto any other being-
humanity was punished because they sinned. It would in any case
be surely unethical for God to punish humanity because of what Azazel
did.
The account of Adam and Eve has has been slowly re-interpreted by Christian
dogma, initially under such Jewish influence, to mean that the real villain
was the Devil who supposedly used the snake, or turned into a snake, in
order to deceive Eve; and the way of putting it right is to cheer on Christ
in Heaven as He does battle with this terrible 'Devil'. But as we've stressed
so many times, the Bible speaks of the snake as a snake, one "of
the beasts of the field" which God created (Gen. 3:1). The ideas
of Satan, Devil, lucifer, fallen angels, rebellion in Heaven- simply don't
occur in the Genesis record. The real issue is that by one man
sin entered into the world, and so death and the curse pass upon us all,
for we have all likewise sinned (Rom. 5:12). Neil Forsyth points out how
Milton's Paradise Lost minimizes Eve's sin. The huge presence
of Satan as it were excuses her fall. And Milton makes out that she simply
bought in to Satan's suggestion she could become a goddess: "In Book
9, Satan appeals to Eve's desire to be like a goddess to make the heroic
attempt to rise above her lot, and [Milton] ignores the point of her act
in the Christian epic- simple disobedience" (6). The point is that
if we were in Adam and Eve's position, as we are daily in essence, we
would have made, and we do make, just the same bad choice as they did.
This is why the record of Adam's sin is alluded to throughout Scripture
as being the prototype of the experience we all go through whenever we
sin. Adam is Everyman, his failure and salvation by grace is re-enacted
in the experience of every human being; hence the Hebrew word for 'man'
or 'humanity' is in fact 'adam. My ever analytical friend Dr.
Alan Fowler commented to me in a private communication that Adam is set
up in Scripture as our (human) representative, whereas the Lord Jesus
is presented as God's representative to us.
The
way in which Adam is to be seen as everyman is exemplified by how Paul
speaks of his own spiritual life and failure in terms of Adam's
encounter with sin in the form of the serpent. Note the allusions to
Adam's fall in Rom. 7:8-11: "But sin [cp. the snake], seizing an
opportunity in the commandment [singular- there was only one
commandment in Eden], produced in me all kinds of covetousness [the
essence of the temptation to eat the fruit]... I [as Adam] was once
alive apart from the law [Adam was the only person to ever truly exist
for a time without any law], but when the commandment [singular- to not
eat the fruit] came, sin sprang to life and I died [as Adam], and the
very commandment that [seemed to] promise[d] life [cp. the hope of
eating of the tree of life] proved to be death to me. For sin [cp. the
snake] seizing an opportunity in the commandment, deceived me [s.w. 2
Cor. 11:3 about the serpent deceiving Eve] and through it killed me".
Note how Rom. 7:7-13, with all the Adam allusions, speaks in the past
tense; but in the autobiographical section which follows in Rom.
7:14-25, Paul uses the present tense- as if to suggest that both Paul
and by extension all of us live out the essence of Adam's failure. He
was everyman, and his salvation through the seed of the woman, the Lord
Jesus, can be everyman's salvation if he so chooses. But in our context
we note the pointed- and it is pointed- omission by Paul of any
reference to a Satan figure.
That Adam is indeed set up in Scripture as 'everyman' is apparent on
almost every page of the Bible through the allusions back to him. Thus Jezebel's provocation of Ahab to
sin is presented in the same terms as that of Adam and Eve; Israel "like
Adam have transgressed the covenant" (Hos. 6:7). John speaks of how
we are tempted by "the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes
and the pride of life" (1 Jn. 2:16), alluding to the very things
which were Adam and Eve's temptation in Eden. Paul sensed that as the
serpent deceived Eve by his subtilty, so the minds of the Corinthian Christians
were being deceived by false reasoning (2 Cor. 11:3 = Gen. 3:13). The
sinner chooses or accepts the words of the "tongue of the subtle"
(Job 15:5- the same word is used about the serpent in Gen. 3:1). The frequent
command: "You shall not covet" (Ex. 20:17 etc.) uses the same
Hebrew word translated "desire" when we read of how Eve "desired"
the fruit (Gen. 3:6); yet Israel "desired" the wrong fruit (Is.
1:29). In all these allusions [and they exist in almost every chapter
of the Bible] we are being shown how human sin is a repetition in essence
of that of our first parents. The insistent emphasis is that we should
rise above and not be like them. And yet this call for personal
effort and struggle with ourselves in order to overcome sin is muted and
misplaced by all the stress upon a supposed Devil tempting Eve, pushing
the blame onto him, and thereby de-emphasizing our role in overcoming
sin within ourselves. And so we see so many loud-mouthed condemners of
the Devil totally not 'getting it' about the need for personal self-control
and spiritual mindedness in daily life and private character.
Mea Culpa
I am by far from the first writer to observe that belief in a personal
Satan minimizes sin. C.F. Evans, in one of the most well known commentaries
on the Lord's Prayer in the 20th century, pressed home the point: "It
is precisely a quasi-belief in a spiritual being who for many a long year
has been little more than a comic figure, a belief which even in those
who wish to be most orthodox is often an inert and inoperative belief,
which is likely to minimize the seriousness of evil... it is precisely
the Christian Gospel... which locates the height of spiritual evil in
man... a being wholly devoted to evil is hardly congruent with anything,
since as such he is beyond redemption, and there would be no reason for
God to permit his continued existence, unless it were his impotence to
bring it to an end" (7).
"It was not theologically insignificant that the "O mea culpa"
passage of the Easter liturgy was expunged by certain medieval churches"
(8). And indeed it wasn't insignificant. The liturgy originally read:
I confess to Almighty God,
... that I have sinned exceedingly,
in thought, word and deed:
through my fault [mea culpa],
through my most grievous fault [mea maxima culpa].
But mea culpa was changed to felix culpa. 'Felix culpa'
literally means "the happy / fortunate fall"- the idea being
that Adam's fall brought about our salvation. In this we see the minimizing
of personal sin- "my fault" was replaced with a reference to
Adam's fall. A willful misunderstanding of the Genesis record was used
to deflect attention away from the tragedy of our personal sin. And the
logical fallacy is evident- Christ died so that we could be saved from
the effect of Adam's sin. Yet this was twisted around by the "felix
culpa" idea into a position where Adam's sin was a blessing, which
led to our salvation. Yet we and this world only require salvation because
of the effects of Adam's sin- his sin was a tragedy which required the
sacrifice of Jesus. Indeed the idea of Adam's sin being the felix
culpa, the fortunate fall, is the basis of the reasoning that "let
us continue in sin, that grace may abound" which Paul so stridently
argues against in Rom. 6:1.
Cyprian,
Bishop of Carthage in the third century, sought to minimize human sin
by teaching that the fall, and humanity's subsequent suffering, was the
fault of Satan rather than Adam. Paul's position was quite the
opposite: "By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and
so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned" (Rom. 5:12).
Compare this with Cyprian: "He [Satan] took away from Man the grace of
immortality which he had first lost himself" (9). The Canaanite,
Babylonian and Assyrian myths of creation say nothing about the
culpable sin of humanity in the beginning. They explain our fallen
world as resulting from unreasonable punishment of man by the gods, or
humanity being caught up in the fallout from some cosmic conflict. It
was the gods and not man who 'fell'. The Biblical account shows Adam
falling from a "very good" state. The myths speak of the gods behaving
immorally, filled with hatred, anger, murder, immorality etc., and they
conceive humanity as descended from them, created from their blood. So
they have no place for a "very good" human personally falling from that
state; for they presuppose that man was created evil and not "very
good". "In Genesis man is created in the image of God; but the
Babylonians created their gods in the image of man... Man,
consequently, was created evil and was evil from his very beginning.
How, then, could he fall? The idea that man fell from a state of moral
perfection does not fit into the system or systems of Babylonian
speculation" (10). Personal disobedience, sin against the one and only
God and creator, thus defacing His image, consequences and
responsibilities arising from that sin... all these things, which find
their unique answer in the Christian Gospel, are simply not even
recognized as the issues in the myths. And the Genesis record is
bringing this out, highlighting what are the real issues, by means of
allusion to these myths.
So many commentators have
noted that Gen. 1-3 is one of the most misused and misunderstood
sections of the whole Bible. But why? They give no significant
explanation. I'd suggest it's because humanity [and that includes
theologians and formulators of church doctrine] squirms awkwardly under
the glaring beam of the simple record of human guilt. And therefore the
serpent has been turned into a superhuman being that gets all the
blame; and human sin has been minimized, at the expense of the plain
meaning of the text. The whole structure of the Biblical narrative is
concerned with the guilt and sin of the man and the woman; the snake
isn't where the focus is. Von Rad, in one of the 20th century's most
seminal commentaries on Genesis, understood this clearly: "In the
narrator's mind, [the serpent] is scarcely an embodiment of a 'demonic'
power and certainly not of Satan... the mention of the snake is almost
secondary; in the 'temptation' by it the concern is with a completely
unmythical process, presented in such a way because the narrator is
obviously anxious to shift the problem as little as possible from man"
(11). The record keeps using personal pronouns to lay the blame
squarely with Adam: "I heard... I was afraid... I was naked; I hid... I ate... I
ate" (Gen. 3:10-13; and compare Jonah's similar confession of sin in
Jonah 4:1-3- Jonah appears to allude to Adam here). Nobody reading the
Genesis record with an open mind would surely see anything else but the
blame being placed on humanity; as I have repeatedly stressed, the
words 'Satan', 'Lucifer' and the idea of the serpent as a fallen Angel
are simply not there in Genesis. They have to be 'read in' from
presuppositions, which ultimately have their root in pagan myths.
John Steinbeck, who was hardly a Biblical Christian, was fascinated by the early chapters of Genesis, and his 1952 novel East Of Eden
is evidently his commentary upon them. And he finds no place for a
'Satan' figure. Instead, he is struck by the comment to Cain that
although sin crouches at the door, "do thou / thou mayest rule over
him". Steinbeck concluded from this that victory over sin and the
effects of Adam's sin is possible; and therefore we're not bound by
some superhuman Satan figure, nor by an over-controlling Divine
predestination to sin and failure. There's a passage in chapter 24 of
the novel that bears quoting; I find it deeply inspirational, and
another example of the practical import of the correct understanding of
early Genesis: "It is easy out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw
oneself onto the lap of the deity, saying, "I couldn't help it; the way
was set". But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man.
A cat has no choice; a bee must make honey. There's no godliness
there... these verses are a history of mankind in any age or culture or
race... this is a ladder to climb to the stars... it cuts the feet from
under weakness and cowardliness and laziness... because "thou mayest"
rule over sin". The practical inspiration ought to be evident; all
further commentary is bathos.
Out Of Denial
To assist us in understanding the extent of our sin, let me ask those
who believe in a personal Devil: Could or would we sin if the Devil didn't
exist? If not, then surely we suffer and are punished unfairly for our
sins? If we would, then to what extent is the Devil responsible for our
sins as so often claimed, seeing we would sin anyway? Biblically, logically
and practically the problem remains with us, and we simply can't palm
it off onto any personal Devil. Likewise the real victory and achievement
of Jesus was against sin, in the control of His natural tendency, never
sinning, never omitting to perform any act of righteousness- and thereby
He opened the way for our ultimate victory against sin and all its consequences.
But men like Origen presented Christ's whole mission as being a struggle
against a personal Devil. He repeatedly identified death with the Devil,
rather than facing up to the repeated Bible teaching that we die because
of sin, and not because of a personal Devil (Rom. 5:12,21; 6:16,23; 7:13;
8:2; 1 Cor. 15:56; James 1:15). Tertullian taught that at baptism we are
to renounce Satan and [supposedly] sinful Angels: "These are the
angels whom we in baptism renounce". Nowhere does the Bible speak
of this- rather it is personal sin which is to be renounced and repented
of at baptism.
The 'Miracle plays' of the Middle Ages frequently presented Satan and
demons as beings whom the audience could safely ridicule, laugh at and
rejoice in their fall before the might of Christ. But what that approach
failed to get across was that the real battle is not on a stage, not out
in the cosmos- but in the human heart. And the question arises: Why, on
a psychological level, did Dante and others revel in presenting Satan
as so utterly grotesque? I would argue that they did this because they
recognized the existence of awful and radical evil / sin, and eagerly
transferred it to someone or something outside of ourselves. People eagerly
looked at the pictures, watched the plays... because it somehow reassured
them that the awfulness of sin and evil could be externalized. Deep and
honest self-examination reveals that more than anything else, we are in
denial as to the greatness of our sin.
For a long time I was unwilling to give myself wholly to this idea that
sin is solely rooted in the individual human heart. I would've
gone along with Jeffrey Russell's comment that: "It is true that
there is evil in each of us, but adding together even large numbers of
individual evils does not enable anyone to explain an Auschwitz"
(12). Like you, I surveyed the evil and radical sin in the world, and intuitively
felt there must be something beyond individual humanity at work. Why [along
with so many others] did I have that impression, and why was it so strong
and so intuitive? Because I simply didn't want to face up to what Paul
calls 'the exceeding sinfulness of sin' (Rom. 7:13). Paul speaks in that
passage of how even in his life, God had had to reveal this to him, how
sin had to be revealed as sin to him. That process goes on in each of
us. Instead of thinking that sin is an occasional "whoopsy",
we come to see that it really is the radical issue which the Bible presents
it as. And no longer do we labour under the impression that there must
surely be some source of sin / evil beyond humanity which infects our
world. The example of Auschwitz quoted above is personally significant
for me. Living in Eastern Europe, I visited Auschwitz four times over
a period of 16 years. It was only on the fourth visit that I came to disagree
with J.B. Russell's comment. Quite simply- we radically, seriously, majorly
and above all dangerously under-estimate the power of human sin,
and the colossal influence for evil which our sinful actions, thoughts
and decisions can have upon others. My intuitive desire to find some bigger
source of evil to explain the Holocaust is probably typical of the struggle
we all have to not only minimalize our own sin, but also the sin of humanity
and other people. This, perhaps, is why grappling with the issues of sin
and radical evil as we are in this book- is simply not popular. There
seems to be the idea that because these things cannot be investigated
by science, therefore they shouldn't be seriously investigated at all.
But I submit that's just the same old psychological desire to shift the
focus from ourselves and the gravity of human sin. The 'Devil' remains
an unexamined assumption in much of Christianity, and in most societies
and religions. The presence of unexamined assumptions in our lives and
hearts, as well as in societies, ought to be a red flag. Why, in this
age of apparently fearless examination, eager toppling of paradigms, deconstruction
of just about everything, rigorous research, trashing of tradition, brutal
testing of assumptions... does the Devil idea remain an unexamined assumption?
I suggest it's because to reject that tradition of a personal
Satan [for that's all it is- tradition] and get down to living out the
Biblical position on the Devil demands just too much. It's hard to accept
all negative experience in life as ultimately allowed and even sent by
a loving God, it's humiliating to realize we're only tiny children, whose
view of good and evil isn't fully that of our Father; and it's the call
of a lifetime to recognize that our own personal, natural passions and
desires are in fact the great Satan / adversary. That our view of 'good'
and 'right' is often so wrong can be easily proved- think of all the times
a believer has asked for something in prayer, but God doesn't answer,
and later they realize that they had asked for the wrong thing, and are
grateful God didn't answer them. Perhaps Job's requests that God would
immediately take his life would be a Biblical example (Job 6:8).
The popular view of the Devil also de-emphasizes the victory of Jesus
against sin. It wasn't merely a George-and-the-dragon style heroic conflict
between a man and a beast. We are saved because the Lord Jesus put to
death in His mind every sinful impulse, and then gave His life for us,
so that we in our turn could be freed from the power of sin and death.
Heb. 2:14 labours the point that it was exactly because Jesus had our
nature that He could destroy the Devil. And it was His death
that destroyed the Devil. These Biblical facts make little sense in a
theology that claims that Jesus and the Devil are in cosmic conflict,
which is fought out to the bitter end, until Jesus emerged triumphant
and killed the Devil. Heb. 2:14 and the entire New Testament makes the
point that sin / the Devil was destroyed by the death of Jesus.
It wasn't as if He was locked in mortal combat with the Devil until He
killed the Devil. Jesus died and it was that death which killed
the Devil. This makes no sense in the context of the idea of cosmic conflict
between Jesus and the Devil. It was because He had our nature that the
Devil was destroyed- and simply possessing human nature would be of no
relevance if the victory of Jesus was merely against a literal personal
being.
The Value Of Persons
The de-emphasis of sin by the personal Satan theory also results in a
devaluing of human salvation and the personal wonder of it. Grace means
little on a personal level for any of us, if our salvation was really
an abstract transaction which occurred somewhere out in the cosmos between
God and Satan. The Biblical picture is so much more personally gripping-
salvation was achieved by a man, Jesus the Son of God, here on
this earth, on a stake just outside Jerusalem. He died in love for
us, for the forgiveness of our personal sins, rather than to provide
some payment to a cosmic creature called Satan. The essential failure
is not of the cosmos- it is the failure in our human response to God's
love and grace.
In the same way as sin is minimized by the popular conception of Satan,
so, in a related way, is the importance of the individual minimized. Increasingly
in the modern world, large numbers of people are the victims of radical
evil- mass exterminations, terrorist acts, wars etc. But for each person
who dies, there are many others who effectively die in their souls, such
is their struggle with and experience of that radical evil. Solzhenitsyn
reflected how the children of NKVD victims often died of broke hearts,
or lived lives deadened by their experience of the evil: "When we
count up the millions of those who perished in the camps, we forget to
multiply them". And so it is for us all. We all have loved ones who
experience evil, and we are multiple times affected by their sufferings.
The extent of individually experienced evil in our world and lives is
simply beyond words to describe. It seems to me that our attempt to cope
with it has been to try to abstract it all, putting it in the metaphysical
terms of a cosmic conflict between God and Satan, rather than facing up
to the individual experience of sin and evil. The suffering and value
of the individual has become minimized by all this. We speak, for example,
of 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. But those numbers disguise
the reality of evil. It is the suffering of one Jew that we can understand,
and not that of millions of persons. The orthodox idea of Satan attempts
to reduce evil and sin to some abstraction, to something out in the cosmos,
to something intellectual... and thus the Biblical focus upon the individual
is lost. No longer do we fully grieve with our suffering brother, squarely
face up to the sin in our own lives and that of others... the huge effort
required is too much, and so we palm it all off onto this all too convenient
idea of a superhuman Satan.
Sin Is Serious
Our Biblical understanding of Satan leads us to realize that the same
essential sinful tendencies are within us as within the most depraved
rapist or sadist. Godliness isn't merely about separating from sinful
people; it's about dissociating from the sinful passions within our very
own hearts. Solzhenitsyn both experienced and reflected upon evil more
than most; and his conclusion is the same: "If only it were all so
simple! If only... it were necessary only to separate [evil people] from
the rest of us and destroy them! But the line dividing good and evil cuts
through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy
a piece of his own heart?" (13). Erich Fromm set out to use logic,
sociology, psychology and philosophy to understand the origin of human
destructiveness; and he came to similar conclusions to which we've come
to from Bible study, and which Solzhenitsyn came to from observed experience.
He too found the idea of a superhuman Satan an irrelevancy, concluding
that evil comes from within all humanity and not just from a
minority of us: "Evil is life turning against itself... our innate
attraction to that which is dead" (14). Fromm concluded that it's
our attractions and way of living life which are the source of human wickedness-
and this is in line with Biblical revelation. A superhuman Satan plays
no role, neither in the Biblical explanations, scientific approaches,
or observed experience. Realizing all these things will lead us to see
that the answer isn't in physical separation from wicked people nor in
ourselves killing them off, neither by wars nor death sentences; but in
appreciating that the same basic tendencies are within us as within the
most outwardly evil of people. Our experiences of Hitlers, Stalins etc.
should make us look within ourselves rather than demonize them. One only
has to skim read Robert Simon's Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream Of
- and look seriously and honestly into our own hearts- to see that
we're all tempted to be the same desperate criminals (15). I know that
some readers will object to this suggestion... but I can only appeal to
your brutal honesty about the thoughts and desires that at times skate
through your mind. "Everybody always talks about changing the world,
but no one ever talks about changing himself", so Leo Tolstoy observed
somewhere in War And Peace.
And it's true. All the talk about preserving and saving the physical
planet is all good stuff; but it can be an excuse for not facing up to
the essential problem, which is within individual human beings. Indeed
it may be more than an excuse for not doing that; it could even be an
indication that we are running, madly, from ourselves as individuals,
looking outwards with our telescopes and carbon dioxide reductions...
because we just can't hack looking within.
Responsibility For Actions
Understanding that sin comes from within leads us to a far higher level
of responsibility for our own actions- as well as teaching us to hold
others the more responsible for theirs, too. Responsibility is something
sadly and increasingly lacking in the modern world. We justify both ourselves
and others, to the point that real feelings of contrition, humility, joy
at the experience of forgiveness, realistic and victorious striving for
self-improvement, all seem little known in the lives of many today. And
further, we will hold others responsible too, rather than slipping into
the postmodern, emotionless mindset of shrugging at others' behaviour
and passively excusing it. As Andrew Greeley observes: "Why else
be angry at a man for doing evil unless you think he is responsible for
his evil?" (16). Rollo May was yet another Christian psychologist
who came to the same conclusions as we have been led to from Scripture:
"The common personalized term [for evil] which has been used historically,
namely the devil, is unsatisfactory because it projects the power outside
the self... Furthermore, it always seemed to me a deteriorated and escapist
form of what needs to be understood about evil" (17). That is indeed
the case- the popular conception of the Devil is a form of escapism from
our own responsibility for sin, a looking outside of ourselves rather
than within.
Forgiving, Not Excusing
Understanding the personal nature of sin gives us the understanding and
mechanism through which we can forgive others, and even forgive
ourselves. This is of vital practical importance. We simply must
forgive. The only option is revenge, against others or against
ourselves. The pain a person causes you always feels heavier to you
than it does to them; and what we may consider as minor failings on our
part toward another are felt as brutally heavy by them. Because of
this, revenging pain never balances out. So... we simply must forgive,
or else we will be caught up in ever more debilitating war within
ourselves and with others. To say "the devil made them / me do it" is
to excuse sin; and we sometimes find forgiveness hard because we
confuse it with excusing. Forgiving both others and ourselves requires
us to be specific- she / he / I / they did this, that or the other sin.
We don't just vaguely 'forgive', we must narrow down what we are
seeking to forgive, to hard, actual specifics. We may wonder why we
feel hatred at times, both of ourselves and of others. A lot of it
comes from our own, or their own, sin; sin which we are each ultimately
accountable for and can't blame off upon a Satan figure. Lewis Smedes
makes an acutely powerful observation: "The pain we cause other people
becomes the hate we feel for ourselves. For having done them wrong"
(18).
All the time we're excusing that wrong we do, or
the wrong others have done to us, we can't begin the process of
healing. Dostoevsky's Crime And Punishment tells the tale of
Raskolnikov, a murderer who couldn't forgive himself because he kept
trying to excuse himself. Excusing ourselves or others is the classic
result of believing in the mantra of "Satan made me / them / her / him
do it". And this is a significant barrier to forgiveness, both of
ourselves and others. In the story, Raskolnikov has a relatively happy
ending, because he came to realize "the fundamental falsity in
himself...". It's this 'fundamental falsity in ourselves' which the
Bible calls the Devil, the liar within us, the false accuser. Earlier
in the story, Dostoevsky adds the narrator's comment: "How happy he
would have been if he could have blamed himself! He could have borne
anything then, even shame and disgrace". That's so true. Happy /
blessed are those who blame themselves and not Satan. Let me stress
that self-forgiveness isn't the same as having a high opinion of
ourselves. It's exactly because we can candidly face our sin in all
honesty that we can forgive ourselves. This is why the 12 steps require
recovering alcoholics to list in great, specific detail all the times
they've lied, lost money, hurt people, as a result of their addiction.
The honest specifics are necessary for healing and forgiveness to
happen. Confrontation of our own sins and those of others [even if they
won't confront them] is required on our part if we are to forgive. We
have to be realistic about human sin. By making ourselves and others
accountable for sin, not blaming it on any Satan figure out there, we
open up the possibility of forgiveness. If we're not specific about our
failures, or about the sins of others who have hurt us, then we will
easily drown under our own weight of vague self-condemnation. We
forgive people, and ourselves, for what is actually done, and not for who people are . Attempts to forgive people or ourselves for who we are often
end in miserable, depressing failure- because we were going for the
wrong goal. It takes courage to be specific, not least because the
self-righteous societies in which we live often unconsciously want us
to live under am umbrella of permanent shame, to make them feel and
look better. It may be that we still have some anger after achieving
forgiveness, probably we can only forgive both ourselves and others in
dribs and drabs and not in the one-time magnaminous way that God does
(for we are not God)... but all the same, forgiveness is an achievable
goal. It's the ultimate sign of freedom, that we aren't going to be
dominated by others' hurts toward us, nor by our own sin. We are going
to forgive, and thus be ultimately free and creative, after the Divine
pattern in Christ.
Demonization Of Others
I've noted throughout these studies that there's a huge attraction to
the idea that we here on earth are somehow on the side of God and Jesus,
who are engaged in a cosmic conflict with the Devil in Heaven. It empowers
us to assume that anyone against us on earth must therefore be somehow
'of the Devil', and we are made to feel that any aggression towards them
or description of them in Satanic terms is somehow legitimate. The craze
of witch hunting in the Middle Ages claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands
of innocent people- it was a kind of psychological epidemic that spread
throughout society. People assumed that whenever a disaster occurred,
or someone fell sick, this was the work of Satan- and therefore anyone
felt to be somehow against the sufferers was held to be 'of Satan'. Cross
eyed old ladies, anyone who looked or thought differently to the crowd,
therefore became a target for attack. "This belief generally assumed
a very contagious character, spreading like an epidemic in the particular
district in which the incidents happened" (19). What for me is significant
in all this is how eager humanity is to believe in a personal Satan. It
enables us to take out our anger, our dysfunctions, our gut dislikes of
others- in the name of God, in the name of participating in a battle against
Satan in which we nobly take the side of Jesus. Here is the danger of
the idea. The real, Biblical understanding of Satan is so different, and
calls us to personal self control, self-examination, awareness of our
weakness and Christ's strength- and this, in turn, affects our attitude
to others. Rather than witch hunting and demonizing, we become understanding
of human weakness and sensitive to the human condition, ever seeking to
share the colossal victory of the Lord Jesus with others.
We tend to assume that God takes sides in all the squabbles which occur
here on earth- and, of course, we like to think that He is on our
side, and therefore our opponents are against God and therefore particularly
awful and worthy of our best hatred. Shakespeare's Macduff reflects our
assumptions in this area: "Did heaven look on and would not take
their part?". It's this presumption that God is on our side in matters
great and small, from a squabble with the neighbour to international wars,
that in turn leads to a demonization of the enemy. And the Jewish and
pagan myths about a dark god of evil who exists in opposition to the true
God then become very attractive to us. We want to believe in
them, because it just suits us down to the ground to be able to paint
our disagreeable neighbour or the country next door as dark, evil, wicked
through and through, and in league with supposed cosmic forces of evil
with which we are doing valiant battle. It's no wonder that the basic
idea of a superhuman Devil is so attractive, and is pressed into service
by all sides in a dispute. I have on my computer a file of images of cartoons
and posters which demonize people as the Devil. In the two world wars,
each side 'demonized' the other. C.S. Lewis wrote his Screwtape Letters
and other allusions to Satan against the background of the second World
War and the British demonization of Nazis and later Communists. Since
1945, Soviets demonized their enemies with 'Satan' features even though
they officially didn't believe in Satan nor God; Western powers likewise
'Satanized' the Soviets. More recently, the West has done the same in
their cartoons of Islamic leaders and terrorists; and Islamic cartoonists
have done likewise in representing Western and Israeli leaders as 'the
great Satan'. Bosnian Moslems and Serbian Christians did the same to each
other in the wars which wracked the former Yugoslavia... flicking through
those images on my hard drive is a depressing experience. Everyone is
out to demonize the other, and drawing horns and tail on 'the other guy'
is obviously so easy and attractive. And whilst most of us aren't
into drawing cartoons, we effectively tend to do the same in conflicts
great and small.
Notes
(1) Raimundo Panikkar, Worship And Secular Man (London: Darton,
Longman &. Todd, 1973), vi.
(2) These thoughts are well developed in David Levin, Legalism And
Faith (Ann Arbor: Tidings Publishing, 2002) ch. 21.
(3) Paul Tournier, The Violence Within, translated by Edwin
Hudson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978).
(4) Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University
Of Chicago Press, 1961).
(5)
"In the Akkadian myth of Adapa... Ea summoned Adapa... and warned him
that, having displeased Anu... the gods would offer him the food and
drink of death, which he must refuse. Anu, however, learning of this
indiscreet disclosure, fooled Ea by offering Adapa the bread of life
and the water of life and, when he refused them at his father's orders,
grimly sending him back to the earth as a perverse mortal"- Robert
Graves & Raphael Patai, Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis (New York: Greenwich House, 1983) p. 79.
(6) Neil Forsyth, The Satanic Epic (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2003) p. 7.
(7) C.F. Evans, The Lord's Prayer (London: S.C.M., 1997) p.
70.
(8) Richard Tarnas, The Passion Of The Western Mind: Understanding
The Ideas That Have Shaped Our Worldview (London: Pimlico / Random
House, 2000) p. 137.
(9) Cyprian, Jealousy, Chapter 4, as cited in H.A. Kelly, Satan: A Biography (Cambridge: C.U.P., 2006) p. 180.
(10) Alexander Heidel, The Babylonian Genesis, The Story of Creation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984) pp. 125,126.
(11) Gerhard von Rad, Genesis (London: S.C.M., 1966) p. 85.
(12) J.B. Russell, The Prince Of Darkness: Radical Evil And The Power
Of Good In History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992) p. 275.
(13) Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (New York:
Monad Press, 1974) pp. 431,168.
(14) Erich Fromm, The Anatomy Of Human Destructiveness (New
York: Rinehart & Winston, 1973) pp. 9,10.
(15) Robert Simon, Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream Of (Washington:
American Psychiatric Press, 1999). Simon was a forensic psychologist,
reflecting upon a lifetime of examining murderers and other major criminals.
(16) Andrew Greeley, Unsecular Man (New York: Schoken Books,
1972) p. 212.
(17) Rollo May, "Reflections and Commentary," in Clement Reeves,
The Psychology of Rollo May: A Study in Existential Theory and Psychotherapy
(San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1977), p. 304.
(18) Lewis Smedes, Forgive And Forget (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984) p. 72.
(19) F.G. Jannaway, Satan's Biography (London: Maranatha, 1900)
p. 12.
