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6. Satan
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6 Satan After noting that the concept of Satan commands little belief and less respect in the modern world with its materialistic worldview, Walter Wink begins his study of Satan in Scripture and in the world with the curious but demonstrable assertion that, in his three Old Testament appearances and in many of his New Testament appearances as well, Satan functions as a “servant of the living God.” In the Old Testament, Satan functions in three capacities: (1) as one who executes God’s wrath against the sinful, (2) as the “accuser or prosecuting attorney” in the heavenly court, and (3) as an agent provocateur. In each of these functions, Satan exhibits great zeal for divine justice but, as Wink points out, “excessive zeal for justice always becomes satanic.” Although in the New Testament and in subsequent Christian thought Satan was transformed from the Servant of God into the Enemy of God, Wink identifies nine New Testament texts where the case can be made that Satan still functions on God’s behalf—which must be on behalf of humankind as well. Wink concludes that the apparent contradiction between Satan as God’s Servant and Satan as the Evil One can be resolved by placing these notions at the opposite poles of a continuum. The moral choices that humans make locate their experience of Satan on that continuum in varying degrees of evil and servanthood. As a spiritual reality manifest in tangible expressions of power, Satan’s function veers toward evil when humans make uncreative rather than creative choices. As Wink wisely asserts, “Whether one ‘believes’ in Satan . . . is not nearly as important as that one recognizes the satanic function as part and parcel of every decision.” Source: Wink 1986: Excerpted from Chapter 1 Nothing commends Satan to the modern mind. It is bad enough that Satan is spirit, when our worldview has banned spirit from discourse and belief. But worse, he is evil, and our culture resolutely refuses to believe in the real existence of evil, preferring to regard it as a kind of systems breakdown that can be fixed with enough tinkering. Worse yet, Satan is not a very good intellectual 71 idea. Once theology lost its character as reflection on the experience of knowing God, and became a second-level exercise in knowing about, the experiential ground of theology began to erode away. “Although mythologically true,” Morton Kelsey writes, the devil is intellectually indefensible, and once it was realized that the conception of the powers of evil was “only” a representation of peoples’ experience, no matter how accurate, the devil began to fade. . . . With only sense experience and reason to go on, and with no rational place for an evil first cause, enlightened people simply dropped the devil from consideration. With direct psychic experience no longer admissible as evidence of his reality, the devil was as good as dead.1 Nor is this picture essentially altered by polls that show belief in Satan to be sharply on the increase. As we shall see later, such belief is most frequently a component of neurotic religion, and the remarkably subtle character of Satan is collapsed into a two-dimensional bogeyman that has only vague similarities with the biblical devil. The Satan image, even where it lingers on, has been whittled down to the stature of a personal being whose sole obsessions would seem to be with sexual promiscuity, adolescent rebellion, crime, passion, and greed. While not themselves trivial, these preoccupations altogether obscure the massive satanic evils that plunge and drive our times like a trawler before an angry sea. When television evangelists could try to terrorize us with Satan and then speak favorably of South African apartheid, we should have sensed something wrong. When the large evil went undetected, when the symbol no longer attracted to the fact, when evil ran roughshod through corporate boardrooms and even churches, unnoticed and unnamed, while “Satan” was relegated to superego reinforcement and moralistic scare tactics then we should have caught the stench—not of brimstone, but of putrefaction. Not that we had progressed beyond evil. On the contrary, the evil of our time had become so gigantic that it had virtually outstripped the symbol and become autonomous, unrepresentable, beyond comprehension. We had killed Satan. For those who never mourned his passing, who even met it with relief, I offer this awkward and perhaps unwelcome parody, pilfered (satanically) from any number of poets: Killed Satan! Hardly the words are out 72 | Walter Wink [3...