Satan, etc.

When I was in college I took a seminar in the Old Testament with one of the few liberal professors who taught at my school.  Rumors had circulated to the inquisitive collective of Bible majors that he didn't believe in Satan.  Thus, I recall spending close to 30 minutes every week, participating in the group attempt to corner the man into stating this possibly blasphemous belief.  Fortunately, he was much smarter than us; we could never coerce him into a blatant denial of the devil's existence.  Lord knows we tried.  He always dodged the question and tried to point us to literature that represented respectable scholarship, which I imagine a dismal percentage of us ever consented to read.

He did manage to incite enough interest in me to be tormented for years following with the desire to know.  Such was my downfall.  

I've read a few of the things that he might have possibly pointed me to earlier had I really cared to know rather than be told.  So, here's my reply to the question I asked so relentlessly.

No.

First let's lay out on the table that the word Satan is used very sparingly in the OT.  In all such cases, it carries the connotation of an accuser or a prosecutor.  Never the personification of all evil.  There are a few other terms, such a Belial, which come closer, but never amount to God's great antagonist.  The OT has no category for a being that represents the inspiration of evil.  There is that in the world which fights against God, but it's story is never so important as to be told.  It is just an existential fact that there is evil that opposes God, but therefore the important thing is siding with God.

Second, I think it of vast importance to say that snakes are snakes.  Why you may wonder?  Because, goes the reply, the serpent in Eden was just that:  a serpent.  There is no direct equation in the OT that Satan entered Eden in serpent form to tempt man.  This was to become the assumption later . . . much, much later, but the story of the Fall has no "evil force" responsible for Eve's temptation.  The fact is that the ancient mind was fascinated by the fact that snakes appeared to sit around, still, all day long, and with a little venom managed to survive . . . that takes some craftiness.  Keep in mind these stories are contrived by shepherd who chase sheep around all day to make a living.  The serpent of Eden is just as likely to represent the craftiness of human intuition by which we deceive even our very selves.  There is nothing in the narrative that advises us to assume Satan has an affinity for reptilian manifestations.

When reading the OT through an historical lens, it becomes apparent that originally faith in YHWH attempted to diminish faith in all other demigods and spiritual beings.  It appears that the spiritual proponents of faith in YHWH had in mind to compromise the very existence of such lesser gods.  The hope was to leave faith in YWHW alone and no others.  Yet outside such circles belief in lesser spiritual beings persisted in Palestine.  

In the Exile, Israel faced many significant theological challenges.   Both in witnessing the wholesale slaughter of massive portions of Palestine by Assyrian and Babylonian armies, which had obvious traumatic effects.  The question of theodicy (how can an omnipotent God be justified in the face of evil?) became much more pressing to those who would propose that YHWH remained the one true God.  No longer was evil a matter of minor malevolent forces, but now it was major force that for all appearances could rival YHWH himself.  How could this be reconciled to their theology?  Israel found itself simultaneously confronted with Persian/Babylonian religions, primarily Zoroastrianism.  This religion had a much more dualistic view of the world and saw the cosmos divided between good and evil equally.  It is in returning from this context that we begin to hear Judaism give more and more credit to the concept of Satan.

Around 200 years before Christ we begin to find the ideas (for instance in Chronicles) that Satan is the adversary of Israel.  Not God, but God's chosen people.  The idea that God could be opposed by any was still largely denied.  It appears that around 180 B.C.E. was when this began to change.  First with the advent of the anti-messiah Antiochus IV, the man who sacrificed a pig on the alter of the temple.  In other words, the man who openly defied and opposed God in front of God's people.  This combined with their suffering lead to an increased viability for the idea of an "Adversary" who opposed YHWH himself.  Satan is born.

By the time Jesus was born, Satan with his extensive hierarchy of sub-demons were simply an accepted part of the contemporary worldview.  As I've written before I think Jesus was completely human and fully enculturated to the worldview of his people at his time.  With such a mindset I think sparring with Satan was a viable idea of his time.  He certainly wasn't foolish for thinking such things, as even the most educated frequently believed such ideas.

I just don't think with our modern understanding it's something we can truly believe in anymore.  I fully believe in the reality of evil as an experience of humans resulting in the loss of their dignity and the opposition of wholeness.  I just don't believe that there is a personified form of this evil.  I believe that the realm of the 'spiritual' is so subtle and unknown that we could identify things as the work of angels or demons, but to me this is just assigning a symbolic name to a human experience.   If someone chose to explain it by atoms and molecules and synapses with neurotransmitter levels I don't think they are wrong to do so.

For people who have no taste for modernity as a way of understanding the world, I don't know that I think of it as my quest to convince them to give up on the idea that there is a Satan, and a war between light and dark.  But, as with all humans, I hold to my understanding because I'm convinced it's true.

At the core, I think the most important point is that belief in spiritual beings, including Satan, is not a part of the core of Christian faith.  I know that a huge portion of our population, both those who believe Jesus and those who don't, are excluded by the fact that it is too often assumed that to find salvation in Jesus, I must believe in a Satan that he saves me from.  I find it vitally important as someone who frequently finds himself poised between such parties, to point out that this is not so.  Human salvation can readily be experienced whether or not Satan is real, just as evil is experienced by all whether or not we personify it in the form of demons.