After reading over this thread I realized how much I don’t know about Satan and his place in Christianity.
As far as I know there are 3 main stories about him.
IIRC in the Old Testament Lucifer is God’s highest ranking angel, who he sends down to hell to take care of sinners and watch over buisness. In this case, he’s not evil, just an angel doing his job.
Satan was an angel who displeased God, and was punished by being sent down to hell for all eternity. He has been bitter about it ever since and takes it out on whoever shows up in his domain. In this case he is in fact evil.
Satan is a fallen angel who tries to corrupt people away from God. He can have direct effect on the mortal world, sending demons, testing faith and etc. For some reason he wants people to forget God and join him in Hell.
What I’m looking for is other definitions of Satan and his function in Christian mythos, in what religion/text these definitions appear, and corrections to my previous 3 points.
Bob Dole wants you to get out of Bob Dole’s Chair, where is Bob Dole’s peanut butter?
Anyways…
Disregarding whatever is written in the bible about Satan (virtually nothing).
I believe it comes down to just several things.
Satan is a betrayer, he betrayed God and his “hate” keeps him from God. We know that (if the Bible is correct) Satan will never come to love God again, and it will eventually destroy him.
And that’s pretty much it.
It’s not like he’s forced in Hell for all time, he’s not damned for an eternity. Biblically no one is…not really. The New Testament might say otherwise but whatever…
The fact is that Satan is a betrayer and that’s pretty much all, he comitted the highest crime you can comitt in society. And so since he was of course in the society of God and not man, he is punished above all others.
In the OT Satan is just the “Adversary,” an angel whose job is to be an intellectual foil for God. he’s not evil. There is not, and never has been any tradition of Satan as “Devil” in Judaism.
In the NT he becomes the tempter and the enemy of God.
Revelation has a passage about “the dragon who is Satan” being “hurled to Earth with all his angesl” and thats’ pretty much where all the “fallen angel” tradition comes from.
The word “Lucifer” is comes from the Vulgate translation of the Greek Septuagint word for the planet Venus. There is a passage in Isaiah which compares the king of Babylon to the “morning star” which is briefly ascendant but then “falls” and is eradicated by the sun (which is God in this metaphor). There was no tradition of Satan as a fallen angel when Isaiah was written so it’s impossible that “Lucifer” is Satan, and in it’s Hebrew context there isn’t even a suggestion of that interpretation.
Of course, when I finally have something of real substance to add to a General Questions thread, Diogenes has to come plodding along and post it all before I have the chance.
Asking who the real Satan is would be like asking who the real Charlemagne or King Arthur or Homer was, just vastly (or maybe infinitely) more abstract and difficult.
Every religion has some flavor of Satan, and many of these have influenced Judaism and subsequently Christianity. Satan as the villain with a thousand faces, all of them placed on his “face” by us humans.
Satan is useful (from my POV as a person who haw ZERO religious beliefs except those I choose to espouse temporarily during discussions, playing the Devil’s advocate, if you will):
Makes God seem powerful and clever, because He allegedly kicked Big Red’s butt several times (through Michael and Jesus, et al).
Bogeyman, a Strawman, a Tilting Dummy, a Punching Bag, a Scapegoat… all symbols useful for getting obedience from people, rallying points. It’s ironic that the use of the word “demonize” may be based on one of history’s first smear campaign. (After all, the Bible is putatively written by the Victor (capitol G-O-D).
A cautionary tale.
An entertaining villain. Makes the story much more interesting.
Plus, despite theories of omniscience on God’s part and predestination bugbears, Satan gets blamed for stuff that either God or Humans should at least partially own up to.
Maybe (with apologies to C.S. Lewis), if Satan’s greatest victory would be to get us to believe in his nonexistence, then God’s own master coup is to get us to believe Satan does exist.
Honestly, I’ve always felt a bit sorry for Satan (yeah, I know…“Sympathy for the Devil” and all that). Maybe because I’m a big authority-questioner as well. Maybe because he’s definitely more interesting and charismatic than the big “G”. Maybe just because I consider the whole Christian cosmological setup to be the work of a bully god with arbitrary tendencies made infinitely worse by omnipotence and absolutely no chance of an effective opposition.
And then there are the days I consider the whole concept of a “Shaitan” to be the ultimate buck-passing on the part of God. If God made everything (and even claims responsibility for the creation of evil in the Bible) then blaming bad things that happen on someone who is, essentially, a subordinate is something that the night manager at the local McDonalds might do when his basic incompetence causes lines out the door. I kind of expect a little more maturity from an all-powerful supreme being.
You recall wrong. The only time the Devil appears in the Old Testament “in person” is as an accuser–as somebody who tries to estrange Job from God. The only appearance “in person” in the Gospel is as a tempter–to try to encourage Christ to swear suzerainty to him–which is an absurd prospect, of course.
Any good writer knows you need to have an antagonist in you story (creates interest, sells books, and all that).
I’m gonna agree with DevilDan. I think Satan is the Judeo-Christian version of the antagonist.
If we look at the history of the Hebrew religion (see my post at Wearia’s link) we might be able to build a case for this Satan character (and possibly all of the angels) as perhaps nothing more than the representative figure of another Caananite god.
It may be worth pointing out that a lot of the modern conception of Satan is indebted to writers like Milton and Goethe, among others. I’m thinking particularly of the romanticized, “anti-hero” role that he’s often cast in.
In medieval art and literature, “Satan” is identified as Lucifer, the fallen angel, but he doesn’t take a very proactive role in human affairs–he’s usually depicted as mired deep within hell, torturing the very worst sinners (this was perhaps most vividly conveyed by Dante, who describes Satan with three mouths gnawing on the souls of Judas, Brutus, and Cassius).
But in the Jewish tradition, “Satan” simply meant adversary, as Diogenes points out. That explains why Jesus calls Peter “Satan” in Mark 8:33-- by refusing to accept that Christ would be killed, Peter was opposing God’s will. Jesus was calling Peter his “adversary,” not “the Devil” in the way that modern readers would understand it.
He’s the boogeyman. He exists to scare little children into loving Jesus.
Historically (so to speak), he’s the result of the bad press given to Báál Zebub, the Lord of the Flies. The word Báál itself simply means lord or owner, which is why there is no entity named Bá`ál per se; it’s always referred to with a descriptive as mentioned earlier.
Anyhoo, when the Israelites came crawling out of the desert, they encountered Bá`ál worship in various forms and lost a lot of folks to it. The Jewish big dogs of the religion couldn’t have this turf encroachment, so they badmouthed the local god and usually killed off the believers, which was a highly effective means of ensuring that they got the power and the money.
There’s some really interesting stuff about Satan (or, rather, dudes in similar roles with names like Samael, Azazel, Mastema, etc.) in the books of Enoch and Jubilees . This guy was an angel who came to earth to have sex with human women (ohhh, those human women!) along with his buddies, the Watchers (“I like to watch…”). They and their offspring go about raising heck for a while, then God rounds them up and throws them in prison. Satan is pissed and asks God how he can get any evil done without his buds (apparently Satan himself was still free), and can he have 10% of them back, please? To which God says (I’m not making this up), “OK”. The relevant verses are Jubilees 10:7-9 at the top of this page .
The early origins of some of the OT myths that got comandeered for Satan’s bio are described in a great book, The Old Enemy , by Neil Forsyth. The Jews borrowed a Mesopotamian myth about a battle between some god or other and Yamm (=sea). The god split Yamm’s head. A lot of OT stories derive from this basic myth: the parting of the Red Sea, the flood story, and the creation story (God separates the heavens and the earth - in the Mesopotamian story the world is created from the two halves of Yamm’s body.)
Well, that’s a mighty bif IF, isn’t it? With the lack of any independant verification or detection, Satan is and shall remain a mythological character.