This may be a particularly acute problem for those of us in so-called "mainline" churches. For much of our history we've been closely allied and aligned with the culture. And we came to understand our faith as fully compatible with culture and nation. But if we must reckon with evil, and especially if biblical passages speaking of Satan as "the ruler of this world" are taken at all seriously, then nation, world, and culture end up being complicated places, not simply the arena for progress.
I think that stereotypical images of Satan as some guy with horns and a pitchfork are to be laughed at. Such images trivialize the problem of evil. But the need for God to intervene in history, the need for a Messiah, for Christmas and a cross, all say that we humans cannot finally "save" ourselves. And I use "save" here not as a synonym for going to heaven, but in the biblical sense, meaning to heal, make whole, rescue, restore, and set right.
Perhaps the most basic reason that we don't like to deal with Satan or evil comes down to not wanting to admit the power that evil, that sin has over us. We don't want to think that we could ever have betrayed Jesus. We don't want to think we would have been among those who failed to recognize him as the Messiah. We don't want to consider the possibility that we might have joined the crowd in shouting, "Crucify him." Not us!
But Christmas insists that we need saving - from evil, from sin, from our own self destructive ways, from our arrogance, from our tendency to trust in things other than God, be they money, nation, ideology, church, or progress.
But of course the hope of Christmas also insists that evil, Satan, and sin, are no match for God. Evil is real, but evil's greatest triumph, the cross, only leads to Resurrection, the herald of God's coming new day. And so we will work against poverty, and war, and hunger, and oppression, not because we "believe" in progress, but because we trust that this is the shape of the salvation God is bringing.
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There's a great passage in a book I'm currently editing about this (which unfortunately is rather hard to reduce to sound bites):
ReplyDelete"One approach that works well in the modern context is to see demonology as descriptive of a power struggle. It also helps if we can concentrate on the demonic (adjective) rather than the Devil or devils (nouns). Clearly some sort of ‘spiritual warfare’ is described in the Bible (see e.g. Ephesians 6:12), and we probably do not take this sufficiently seriously. However the source of the evil that confronts us is ultimately human wickedness.
It was human rebellion that caused the fall and it is human sin that feeds into the ‘lake’ of evil which in turn is the source of the structures of domination which Paul mentions in Ephesians...
Thus the Bible speaks of him as an Accuser or Adversary and we know very well that often, for very human reasons, because we are depressed or have low self-esteem, or something of the sort, that we hear a ‘voice’ which accuses us (compare the experience of Jesus in the Wilderness). There is usually no harm in our personifying this voice (‘Satan said to me’) but that is just the way we use language. When John in the Book of Revelation wanted to use dramatic, pictorial language to describe the new confidence that the work of Jesus had achieved for us, he said that ‘the great dragon was thrown down’ (Revelation 12:9 cf. John 12:31) but he did not mean anything different from Paul when Paul says ‘there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus’ (Romans 8:1)."