Is There a Devil?

“There was a time in the history of the Christian Church when the devil, Beelzebub or Satan, the king of evil, was as real and forceful a figure as for a diminishing number of people ‘God’ still is today; a creation of the Jews and early Christians to give substance in half-human, half-bestial form to the wickedness they saw about them. Later Christians came to recognise that this was a fantasy figure with no basis in reality and quietly discarded him.”​—“All in the Mind—​A Farewell to God,” by Ludovic Kennedy.

AS WRITER and broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy states, for centuries no one in Christendom doubted the reality of the Devil. Rather, Christians were at times “obsessed by the power of Satan and his demons,” as Professor Norman Cohn puts it. (Europe’s Inner Demons) This obsession was not limited to simple, uneducated peasants. The belief that the Devil materialized in the form of an animal to preside over evil and obscene rituals, for example, “belonged not to the folklore of the illiterate majority, but, on the contrary, to the worldview of the intellectual elite,” says Professor Cohn. This “intellectual elite”​—including learned clerics—​was responsible for the witch-hunts that swept through Europe from the 15th to the 17th century, when church and civil authorities are said to have tortured and killed about 50,000 alleged witches.

Not surprisingly, many have rejected what they consider to be wild, superstitious notions about the Devil. Even back in 1726, Daniel Defoe derided people’s belief that the Devil was a frightful monster “with bat’s wings, horns, cloven foot, long tail, forked tongue, and the like.” Such ideas, he said, were “weak fancied trifles” manufactured by “devil-raisers and devil-makers” who “cheated the ignorant world with a devil of their own making.”

Is that how you see things? Do you agree that “the devil is in reality man’s invention to account for his own sinfulness”? That statement appears in The Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible, and many who profess to be Christians think that way. Christendom’s theologians, says Jeffrey Burton Russell, have by and large “dismissed the Devil and the demons as superstitious relics.”

Yet, to some people, the Devil is very real. They reason that there must be some kind of superhuman, malignant force behind the recurrent evils that pervade man’s history. “The horrors that the twentieth century has produced,” says Russell, provide one reason why “belief in the Devil, after a long lapse, is rapidly reappearing.” According to author Don Lewis, a number of modern, educated people who “smile patronisingly” at the superstitious beliefs and fears of “their artless ancestors” are “once again becoming enthralled by the evil element in the supernatural.”​—Religious Superstition Through the Ages.

What, then, is the truth of the matter? Is the Devil simply superstitious nonsense? Or is he someone to be taken seriously even in the 21st century?

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As shown in this engraving by Gustave Doré, old superstitions depicted the Devil as half human, half beast

[Credit Line]

The Judecca​—Lucifer/​The Doré Illustrations For Dante’s Divine Comedy/​Dover Publications Inc.