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Historical and Theological Perspectives on Satan

In the figure of Satan Christians have recognized the radical and mysterious nature of evil. Satan personally epitomizes the pervasive presence and power of evil. He symbolizes all that stands in the way of God effecting the divine purpose for the world and for humankind. He is the archadversary and archdeceiver of humankind. If God is all that is right with the world, Satan is all that is wrong with it. Christian thought about Satan remained fairly consistent until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when religious persecutions and wars pushed people toward skepticism about religion. Since then, a growing number have dismissed the Devil as a figment of human imagination or as the psychology of the ancients no longer relevant in trying to explain evil today. In the radical form expressed by Nietzsche, God is dead. Satan is dead. Human beings must accept full responsibility for their lives and stop trying to foist it off on some nonexistent others. The magnitude of destructive happenings in the twentieth century, however, has resuscitated musings about the meaning or meaninglessness of a world without God and without an adversary of God to explain the massiveness of evil in the midst of good. Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, to say nothing of Hitler and Stalin, will not let modern men and women dismiss or sidestep or ignore the question: Why do human beings who are in and of themselves good do unimaginably horrid things? Where in the world does such destructiveness come from? Christian answers to those questions have ranged across a wide spectrum through the centuries—from absolute dualism to absolute monism with more orthodox positions somewhere in between those extremes. Dualism, inherited from Zoroastrianism, posited two eternal principles—good and evil, light and darkness—locked in an unending struggle until the good finally separated itself from evil. Monism, starting with an assumption of the essential unity of all things, explained evil as the absence or perversion of the good, which alone exists, thus leaving little room for a symbol such as Satan. For most Christians, however, biblical evidence precluded strict monism and pushed them in the direction of a qualified dualism. Both God and Satan exist, as scriptures attest, but, since God is the source of all things, Satan, too, must be God's creature, a fallen one, of course. How and why did Satan "fall"? Just as Adam did, by free will because of pride, a desire to be as God or to usurp God's place. Since the fall, he has played a fascinating role as the Adversary.