Thursday, July 17, 2014

Careful, he just stole the show

[Dorothy] Sayers says that if a playwright introduces the Devil into her cast of characters, she immediately has a great problem on her hands. The problem is how to keep the Devil from becoming the hero. Since the human spirit is so attracted to evil, even if you just make Satan one of the minor characters, you are going to have trouble keeping him from getting center stage.— Lectures in Old Testament Theology, page 343

<idle musing>
And that's true in theology too, isn't it? I suspect that is the reason you don't find a fully developed theology of satan in the scripture...and why it is so easy to see "a demon behind every bush" if you aren't careful.

A good illustration of this is the movie Fantasia from Disney. The part where good finally triumphs at the end is boring! But the preceding Night on Bald Mountain is fascinating...we need the redeeming power of the Holy Spirit even to see evil as repulsive.
</idle musing>

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