Regarding the Devil

Theodicy as Explanation Versus Resistance

In 2008 I published an article in the Journal of Psychology and Theology entitled "The Emotional Burden of Monotheism: Satan, Theodicy, and Relationship with God." The hypothesis of that research was that belief in Satan helps alleviate the burden of theodicy posed by monotheism. The problem of evil is acute in monotheism as God is ultimately to blame for the suffering in the world. Some of this burden can alleviated, however, if we posit a Satan. This belief creates a soft, good versus bad dualism where some of the bad things in life can be blamed on Satan rather than God. Blame shifts toward the Adversary and is thereby redirected away from God.

Eight years after publishing "The Emotional Burden of Monotheism" I published Reviving Old Scratch. One of the more interesting points I make in Reviving Old Scratch is how our compassion creates doubts. Compassion, I argue, is an acid that can dissolve faith.

How so?

Again, it has to do with theodicy, the problem of suffering. Our compassion pulls us deeper and deeper into the suffering and pain of the world, and as we are drawn deeper and deeper into the darkness our theodicy questions grow more and more heavy and intense. Where is God in all this pain? Thus my argument: Compassion pulls us into the suffering of the world and all that suffering creates questions and doubts.

Given this, how do we maintain both compassion and faith in the face of horrific suffering? The argument I make in Reviving Old Scratch is that we have to adopt what Greg Boyd has described as the "warfare worldview" of the Bible. Or, as Fleming Rutledge puts it, we need to account for a "third power" in the world, beyond God and ourselves. The cosmos is a spiritual battlefield and we are thrown into the middle of an ongoing fight. True, we are not given much information about how the fight started. But we are called to pick a side.

Summarizing, Reviving Old Scratch seems to be doing exactly what I described in 2008, what monotheists do in the face of suffering: Push blame onto the Satan to alleviate our doubts about God's goodness and power. Is there, then, any tension between what I describe in my 2008 article and what I describe in Reviving Old Scratch?

In light of yesterday's post, one way to describe the distinctions between my article and book is to highlight the difference between our intellectual response to evil versus our moral response. N.T. Wright has a nice description of this in his book Paul and the Faithfulness of God:

The stronger your monotheism, the sharper your problem of evil. That is inevitable: if there is one God, why are things in such a mess? The paradox that then results--God, and yet evil!--have driven monotheistic theorists to a range of solutions. And by 'solutions' here I mean two things: first, the analytic 'solution' of understanding what is going on; second, the practical 'solution' of lessening or alleviating the actual evil and its effects, or rescuing people from it. In various forms of the Jewish tradition, the second has loomed much larger. As Marx said, the philosophers have only interpreted the world, but the point is to change it.

To start, Wright makes the exact point I make in my article: "The stronger your monotheism, the sharper your problem of evil." He goes on to say that this problem can go into one of two directions, toward an analytical versus a practical theodicy. This is what Karen Kilby has described as our intellectual versus moral response to evil. My 2008 article was mainly about our analytical, intellectual theodicy, how many Christians create a soft, metaphysical dualism to "explain" evil in the world. Reviving Old Scratch, by contrast, is a call for a practical theodicy, a moral response to evil. In the words of Wright, the theodicy of Reviving Old Scratch is a call for "lessening or alleviating the actual evil and its effects, or rescuing people from it." As I put it in the book, the only theodicy the Bible gives us is resistance.

As I observed yesterday, one of the big points I make in Reviving Old Scratch is how our attempts to solve the analytic, intellectual puzzle of evil can be paralyzing. Even when we posit the existence of Satan, the emotional burden of monotheism remains. In the end, Satan is really no answer. Consequently, Reviving Old Scratch doesn't share an analytical, intellectual theodicy. The call is, rather, to focus upon practical theodicy, our moral response to evil, to "lessening or alleviating the actual evil and its effects, or rescuing people from it."

Simply put, Reviving Old Scratch isn't trying to alleviate the emotional burden of monotheism by viewing Satan as an "explanation." Reviving Old Scratch, rather, a call to face Satan as the "adversary" and to engage of acts of resistance.