Re: John's spontaneous generation or hopeful monster?
- From: "*Hemidactylus*" <ecphoric@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2007 09:39:09 -0800 (PST)
On Dec 11, 6:36 am, Jim Willemin <jim***willemin@hot***mail.com>
wrote:
"*Hemidactylus*" <ecpho...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in news:a5baed4b-9688-I am reading Pagels's book _The Origin of Satan_. I find it really
43e9-97d8-fa6fefc87...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:
In the First Epistle General of John it is said (1 John 3:8):"He that
commiteth sin is of the devil; for the devil sinneth from the
beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he
might destroy the works of the devil."
Am I to take it that this John fellow thought the Christian
incarnation of Satan sprung *ex nihilo* from the start? Or was the
Prince of Darkness a product of a gradual cultural evolution? Could
John's version of Satan be more akin to Goldschmidt's hopeful
monsters? Instead of gradually evolving to take over the role of the
root of human suffering and tribulation, he leaps with a dancing
salttional jump into the Christian mindset fully formed in the New
Testament and is retroactively responsible for all bad things even
from the first temptation in the Garden of Eden.
Did hassatan sin in the Book of Job? Was he even present in Genesis?
Or was he a product of the human imagination, an amalgmation of other
mythical figures.
Then we have this (1 John 3:9): "Whosoever is born of God doth not
commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because
he is born of God." This leaves open the ultimate theodical
question...from where springs evil or how did the Devil emerge?
Elaine Pagels wrote a book on the origin of Satan (I recall I liked the
book a lot - readable, informed, cogent, reasonable, scholarly rather
than dogmatic; alas that it is no longer in my library). As I recall,
one of the impressions I took away from her work is that the concept of
Satan is very much related to the turbulence (theological, political,
and phyiscal) surrounding the definition and very early development of
Christianity (e.g. Pauline vs. Jacobian, the whole painful, painful
growth of orthodoxy). What better way to demonize one's opponents than
to have a real demon to associate with them? Anyhow, I heartily
reccommend her book (on Satan in particular and her other books in
general) as a reasonable treatment of the topic.
And I rather think that if one claims to be a monotheist that one needs
must accept that God creates evil as well as good - a concept I'm sure
woudl be rejected outright by most Protestants, though the mental
gymnastics used to accommodate the inconsistency ought to be amusing to
see.
informative, but Wray and Mobley's book _The Birth of Satan_ is much
more detailed on the evolution of the satan character itself vs. the
sociological aspects that Pagels focuses upon.
.
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