1-2 The Devil After The New Testament
The New Testament reveals the same God as in the Old Testament. God is
still presented as the source of our trials, of judgment, and the origin
of sin is even more repeatedly located in the human mind. God's supremacy
is emphasized just as it was in the Old Testament. Even the beast of Rev.
17:17 'fulfills His will'. Those persecuted by it "suffer according
to the will of God" (1 Pet. 4:19). But the history we're now going
to consider reflects yet once again how God's people have an endless desire
to add to and change the most basic teachings of God's word.
It's been observed about the pagan deities that "their characters
and properties were retained but were now understood and subsumed in the
Christian context" (1). This happened in many ways. Consider the
following:
Christ = Apollo [sun god]
God the Father = Zeus, Kronos
Virgin Mary = Magna Mater, Aphrodite, Artemis
Holy Spirit = Dionysus [the spirit of ecstatic possession.], Orpheus
Satan = Pan, Hades, Prometheus
Saints = Hosts of angels
Michael the Archangel = Mars
St. Christopher = Atlas.
In our context, let's note how Pan and Hades were imported into apostate
Christianity as "Satan".
Christian art is a valid reflection of the dominant ideas going on within
popular Christianity. "The earliest known Christian depiction of
the Devil is in the Rabbula Gospels, which date from AD586... why Christian
art does not portray the Devil before the sixth century is not known".
Perhaps the answer is simple- because the idea was still developing. A
survey of the Apostolic fathers shows how the idea of the Devil as a personal
being and fallen Angel began to develop. Writing at the end of the 1st
century, Clement of Rome wrote to the Corinthians as if Satan was a personal
being responsible for urging Christians to sin (Clement 51:1). Ignatius
about the same time started writing of how there are good and sinful Angels
in Heaven, and the sinful ones follow a being called the Devil (Trallians
5:2; Smyrneans 6:1; Ephesians 13:1). As Christianity encountered opposition
and persecution, the language of the Devil came to be applied to them-
Jews, heretics, pagans etc. were seen as on the side of Satan, playing
out on earth a reflection of some cosmic battle between Christ and Satan
which was supposed to be going on in Heaven. Polycarp's letter to the
Philippians around AD150 develops this idea- he sees those who don't agree
with him as not merely holding a different opinion, but therefore as followers
of Satan. He and so many others started to 'play God' as countless have
done since, and use the idea of a cosmic battle being played out on earth
[with them as the righteous heroes, of course] as a good excuse for demonizing
their opposition. These ideas were used to justify the crusades, just
as they are used to justify war today. The other side are the bad guys,
reflective of Satan in Heaven; and 'our' side are the good guys, with
God on our side. We've shown that Biblically, there is no cosmic battle
going on in Heaven; even the symbolic description of a power struggle
in Revelation 12 as a "war in heaven" was prophetic of the situation
which would exist immediately prior to the second coming of Christ. Hence
the common pagan idea of cosmic conflict was imported into Christianity,
and used to justify the demonization of anyone seen as opposed to the
Christians. It enabled 'Christians' to use the foulest and bitterest of
language against their opponents, on the basis that in so doing they were
reflecting the supposed cosmic war which Jesus was waging against Satan
'up there'. All this was a far cry from the gentle and non-violent witness
of Jesus in the face of evil. It may seem of merely academic interest
as to whether or not there's a cosmic battle being waged up in Heaven;
but the reality is that those who believe this tend to see themselves
as fighting on the side of God here on earth, and therefore that end [as
in any war] justifying whatever means they chose to use (2).
As time went on, the basic questions thrown up by the ideal of a personal,
fallen Satan began to be grappled with. I have listed some of them in
Section 3-2. One of these was quite simply, where
is Satan? Is he on earth, in mid air, or under the earth? The need to
find a location for Satan was one of the reasons why Christian thought
departed from the Biblical notion that 'hell' is simply the grave, and
turned it into a place of awesome horror, inhabited by the fallen Satan.
I've discussed the nature of hell at more depth in Section
2-5. The "Odes of Solomon", a Jewish-Christian work of the
second or third centuries AD, was the first to claim the Devil is located
in the dead centre of the earth, in the lowest point of hell (3). Later
Dante would develop this idea graphically and popularize it. However,
it was Greek philosophy, especially Platonism and Gnosticism, which had
an even deeper impact upon Christian thought. Platonists believed that
there were intermediaries between the gods and humans, called demons [daimon].
This idea became confused in the minds of many Christians with the Angels
of which the Bible speaks. Yet there's no doubt about it that this is
not how the Bible itself defined demons- see Section
4-2 for more on this. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the
Old Testament, always translated the Hebrew mal'ak as angelos
["angel"] rather than daimon ["demon"]. But
amidst the general trend of mixing pagan ideas with Christian doctrine,
it was easy for the association to be made- and thus the idea of demons
as fallen Angels began to enter Christendom. Philo had equated the demons
of the Greeks with the Angels believed in by the Jews; and additionally,
the Persian idea that there are some good demons and some wicked ones
lent itself so easily to the idea that there are some good angels and
some evil ones. But in our context the point we wish to note is that all
this was an admixture of Biblical doctrine with extra-Biblical and pagan
traditions and philosophies.
There can be no doubt that Gnosticism influenced early Christian thought-
the letters of John especially are full of warning against incipient Gnosticism,
redefining as John does the terms 'light' and 'darkness' in contradistinction
to the false ideas which would later become Gnosticism. The Gnostics were
dualists, i.e. they saw everything in opposing terms. For them, if God
were good, then evil cannot come from Him but rather from some other,
opposed, independent source or principle. This was a tidier and more sophisticated
form of what the Persians had earlier believed, with their god of light
and god of darkness, a god of peace and a god of disaster. It was this
Persian belief which Is. 45:5-7 specifically challenges, warning the Jews
in Persian captivity that the God of Israel alone is the source
of light and darkness, peace and disaster. The Gnostics held that this
world is irredeemably evil, and therefore the God of good is far from
it. They argued, especially through their leading advocate Marcion, that
God cannot be all good, all powerful, and yet have created and allowed
to exist a wicked world. Of course they missed the entire point of Christianity-
that sinners and this wicked world are indeed loved by the one and only
God of all goodness, to the extent that He gave His Son, who was "in
the likeness of sinful flesh" (Rom. 8:3), so that not only could
He enter in to this wicked world and the savage humanity that exists here,
but also save it. The Gnostics rejected this, and decided that this sin
stricken world is created and sustained by another god, Satan. R.M. Grant
has pointed out that the major challenge of Gnosticism to Christianity
led Christian leaders to define more carefully the understanding of the
Devil which they wished to preach- and thus came another stage in the
development of the dogma of the Devil (4). Increasingly over time, the
Devil was used as a threat- if you don't support the church, pay your
dues, back the leadership, then the idea developed that there awaited
an awful future of torment by the Devil in a fiery hell. This idea has
always seemed strange to in the light of the Lord's very clear statement
that the wicked will be punished in the [figurative] fire "prepared
for the Devil and his angels [followers]" (Mt. 25:41). It is the
Angels of Jesus, and not of the Devil, who punish the wicked (Mt. 13:42-50).
A wresting of Scripture to make out that the Devil is the tormentor of
the wicked simply runs in straight contradiction to these plain statements
of the Lord Jesus.
Notes
(1) Richard Tarnas, The Passion Of The Western Mind: Understanding
The Ideas That Have Shaped Our Worldview (London: Pimlico / Random
House, 2000) p. 110.
(2) The desire to demonize others in a spiritually respectable manner
seems to me to be one of the largest psychological reasons for the development
of the personal Satan idea. This theme is explored and exemplified at
length in M.E. Hills, Human Agents Of Cosmic Power (Sheffield:
S.U.P., 1990), especially chapter 5.
(3) Odes Of Solomon 42 in J.H. Charlesworth, The Odes Of
Solomon (Missoula: Scholar's Press, 1977).
(4) R.M. Grant, Gnosticism And Early Christianity (New York:Columbia
University Press, 1966) pp. 128-131; see too Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic
Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979).
