Q- Does Satan (evil incarnate) operate in the world today?

Q- How do Christians define evil (Amos 5:15 and Romans 12:9)?

Q-Why do bad things happen to good people?

Reflections of Doug Huneke

If God is all-powerful and all-good, why is there evil in the world? Job makes the question more complex. God was talking with the angel Satan. Job, a faithful servant of God, was successful and scrupulously avoided evil. God asked Satan: "So where you been hangin’?" "‘Round the hood." Satan replied. God asked, "So, have you seen my main-man Job -- he’s a peach: good and faithful, loves me, and shuns evil?" Satan answered, "Big deal! You pour out all your favors on him. Who wouldn’t be a goody-goody?" This, roughly translated from the Hebrew, if you will!

Satan twice easily convinced God to let him test Job’s loyalty and goodness. Abruptly, Scripture gave a human face to Satan and for the first and only time introduced the possibility of God acting in concert with evil. Aside from the evil incarnate in Job, there are only three passing references to Satan in Hebrew Scripture. In the Hebrew, where there is evil incarnate, it solely lurks in the intentions and actions of humankind.

Jesus had very little to say about Satan, who appeared only briefly in the wilderness temptation. There is no evidence that Jesus personified Satan. More likely, Satan symbolized Jesus’ inner struggles and his wrestling with trials, suffering, grief, and the evils in the world. For Jesus and Job, as for us, God is the integrating, creative, strengthening, and sustaining reality in all of life. In the presence of evil, Job and Jesus held in tension the God who willed only good for them, and the dark impulses that could only exist in their own image and likeness.

Does Satan, evil incarnate, operate in the world today? A recent Gallup Poll found that 68% of Americans believe in the existence of a personified devil. 70% of Catholics, 79% of Protestants, and 83% of the self-identified religious right believe in the devil. I can’t buy it, though I do understand massive evils that cause people to ascribe them to super natural divinities gone bad. But I do not believe there is an incarnation of evil -- an evil being.

Two thoughts about "evil incarnate" and four questions for squirmin’:

First thought: We are solely responsible for how we live and what we do in our lives. Bad things happen, we live with it, and we try hard not to cause bad things to happen.

Second thought: God is a given whose Spirit inspires and strengthens our resolve to be good persons who resist evil within themselves and in the world.

The questions:

1. How does the presence of evil affect how you understand God?

2. How does the presence of God affect how you understand evil?

3. How do you differentiate between Evil and acts that are evil?

4. As a disciple of Christ, how do you come to terms with the impulse in yourself to do bad things, and how does your faith move you to respond to the reality of evil in the world?

So Kirk, how do pastoral counselors take Satan into account in their work?

Reflections of Kirk Bingaman

"Let us be clear about this," writes the nameless abbot of the late Middle Ages, in the classic devotional text, The Book of Privy Counseling, "Let us be clear about this: the fiend must be taken into account." If a faith tradition or spirituality movement does not take the fiend into account, or tends to minimize or downplay it, then be suspicious. Examples of this abound throughout the Bay Area; New Age movements spring up left and right, essentially touting, on the one hand, the goodness of humans, while, on the other, dismissing as illusion such things as evil, sin, and suffering. In this particular view, all that is needed is for you and me to get in touch with the divine light or spark within, and all will be well. But what about the fiend? It is not taken into account. Be suspicious.

Now do not get me wrong, I do believe that we human beings are created Imago Dei, in the very image of our Creator, and that we do have the potential for goodness and greatness and kindness and love and compassion. I believe this with all my heart. History and the daily newspaper, however, are replete with one example after another of the other side of the coin, the human capacity for unkindness and insensitivity and cruelty and violence and destruction. I am equally aware of this "shadow side," to use Jungian terminology. The fiend must be taken into account.

Robert Louis Stevenson vividly illustrates our dichotomous human nature in his classic fable, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The kind and decent Dr. Jekyll intimates that "I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me, good and ill, were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, in the relief of sorrow and suffering." Then, adds the good and kindly doctor, I am ever aware "of the animal within me licking the chops of memory," and of "the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin." The fiend must be taken into account. It is what we do every year at Lent and Holy Week - take the fiend into account, just as Jesus did those 40 days in the wilderness, just as he did while hanging on a cross. No pie-in-the-sky spirituality for Jesus.

To be Christian means to take the fiend into account, even though I am not quite sure who or what the fiend is exactly. When I was growing up in the United Brethren Church in south-central Pennsylvania, there was no question that the fiend was none other than Satan, a very real and literal devil. This was illustrated one Sunday evening with the showing of the "Christian film," The Burning Hell. This young man, in the film, has the opportunity to accept Jesus as his personal savior, one night at the conclusion of a revival meeting in his town, but decides to forgo the opportunity. He exits the church, while the organist is playing softly and the evangelist is pleading, "Won't you come to Jesus," gets on his motorcycle, and you can probably guess what happens next. The young man is involved in a fatal accident, is subsequently transported to hell where he meets up with the fiend himself, the devil, who diabolically directs his attention to the nearest corner of hell. And what does he see: None other than John the Baptist's executioner, wielding a bloody ax, a maniacal gleam in his eye.

Yes, the fiend must be taken into account, just not so anthropomorphically and sensationalistically. Do I personally believe in a literal devil? No, not really, but that does not mean I do not believe in the reality and the powerful effects of evil. The issue, then, for me, is not, is there or is there not a devil or a Satan? That one we will never have absolute clarity about, at least not on this side of the grave. We do, however, have clarity about the effects and the manifestations of evil, and this is what we must, as people of faith, have the courage to face: the more obvious manifestations, such as the extermination of 6 million Jews, as well as the more subtle and everyday manifestations.

Scott Peck, in his classic book, People of the Lie, suggests that the more subtle manifestations of evil are every bit as destructive as the more obvious, because they so often occur behind closed doors, without public awareness. He presents, as a vivid and chilling example of this, the case of 15-year-old Bobby, referred to Peck for the treatment of Major Depression. It seems Bobby had received a twenty-two rifle from his parents for Christmas. The only problem was that it was the very same gun Bobby's older brother had used to end his life several months before. "Did you think how that present might seem to Bobby," Peck asked the parents, "[that] it was like telling him to walk in his brother's shoes?" To which the parents replied, "We can't be expected to think of all these things." And at that moment, Peck felt himself on the verge of hyperventilating, feeling he needed to leave the room at once, for he had come face to face with the full force of evil that was at work within this family system.

For whatever reason, Bobby's parents could not or would not take the fiend into account, within themselves and within their family system. "We cannot," writes Peck, "ever begin to hope to heal human evil until we are able to look at it directly." The fiend, as I have been saying, must be taken into account. For our own sake and the sake of our children and the sake of their children and the sake of their children. Who or what is the fiend? I cannot say for sure. All I know is that it is still very much alive and well.