Speaking of the devil

When we lived in Hettinger, North Dakota, the high school teams were called the black devils. The mascot was a cartoon of a small devil with a spiked tail. At one point some parents, accompanied by the pastor of a fundamentalist church, appealed to the school board to change the name of the team and discard the mascot. When asked about their concerns as another pastor in the town, I commented that I didn’t think that changing the mascot would eliminate evil from the school. It seemed to me that underage drinking and the use of illegal drugs posed a far greater danger than the cheers made up by the youth for basketball games. The conversation is now moot, as the school decided many years ago to change the name of the teams and has obtained a new mascot.

The devil doesn’t loom very large in my personal theology. I maintain that the same is true of Biblical theology. Most of the images of the devil that come to mind don’t come from the bible. People are more influenced in their thinking and imagining of the devil by Dante’s Inferno than by what they have actually read in the bible. The horned, red-skinned monster with a pitchfork ruling hell doesn’t really make an appearance in the bible.

The Hebrew word satan means “accuser” or “adversary.” It appears several times in different contexts, but not in the sense of a fallen angel commanding armies of demons. God has no nemesis, there are no spiritual forces that are not under God’s authority. When the word satan appears, such as in the book of Job or Zechariah, the name appears almost as a job description. The accuser is given the job of pointing out the unworthiness of humans. After the exile, Israel does have some images of satan playing a somewhat larger role than the accuser in the court of God. Ephesians 6:12 refers to the prince of darkness. Like many other examples in Biblical literature, the new image of the role of satan has roots not in ancient Israel, but in the experience of living in foreign lands among people with different religions. The cosmic dualism of Persian religion had its effect upon the thinking of the exiles and post-exilic Hebrew thinkers.

In New Testament literature, the language has shifted. Diabolos is the Greek word used for the concept of satan. Still, it is not used as a personal name for an individual as much as for the description of a role. In the Gospels, however, Satan’s “kingdom” is not presented as a burning underworld full of the tormented dead. It is, rather, the bondage to sin and the results of human unrighteousness. Picking up on the Hebrew theology of God valuing human freedom and being the God of freedom, Jesus addresses the struggle for human freedom from bondage to sin and presents forgiveness as the path of freedom.

Popular culture, however, has for centuries developed the image of evil personified in a devil. This image often got mixed up with cultural misunderstandings during the settlement of North America by Europeans. The settlers often did not understand the worldview of the indigenous people. Places that were considered by natives to be “thin spaces,” where the presence of the divine was felt keenly, were given the name “devil” by the settlers. Although plains tribes in general did not have a concept of a devil or personified evil, place names like Devil’s Lake and Devil’s Tower continue to be used to this day. A more accurate translation of the indigenous languages might have resulted in the Lake in North Dakota being called Spirit Lake. The tower in Wyoming is simply “home of the bear” in Lakota and has no association with evil or a devil.

I know almost nothing of Australian Aboriginal languages and culture, but the creature that is known as the Tasmanian devil is a truly remarkable animal. We saw many of them when we visited a place dedicated to the recovery and preservation of the endangered species during our visit to Tasmania in 2006. Their jaws are incredibly strong, capable of crushing the bones of their food. They are scavengers and eat other animals that have perished in a variety of different ways. The animals in the sanctuary were fed chicken and fought over their food. Most had multiple scars on their faces caused by bites from other animals of their own species. They move quickly and snarl in a most frightful manner. It isn’t hard to imagine how settlers arriving on the continent came up with the name devil for the animal. They make the Looney Tunes cartoon character seem like a mild and gentle animal. The animals, however, do not bring to mind any Biblical stories of which I am aware.

Once the animals roamed the Australian continent, but they were hunted to extinction on the Australian mainland and existed only on Tasmania where they suffered from in breeding and a type of cancer that was devastating the population at the time of our visit. Last year, however, healthy animals were re-introduced into a sanctuary on the Australian mainland. The introduction was successful with the animals transplanted all surviving and thriving. This year they have produced offspring - the first animals of the species to be born on the mainland in many years.

So, the devil is alive and well, at least in a sanctuary in Australia. But evil is not confined to that side of the equator. As in the bible, the evil we experience has a direct connection to the decisions humans make. We choose slavery instead of freedom. We deny God’s role in bringing justice. We forsake the widows and orphans and immigrants. We choose to follow false gods. It makes no sense to blame an imagined evil being as the cause of evil in the world. The devil didn’t make us do it. We made our own decisions and chose our own course of action. God remains the God of justice and there is none equal to God in power.

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