Keeping Faith

Our church can never be accused of underestimating the reality and the power of evil. While insisting on the overwhelming victory of Our Lord Jesus Christ over sin and death, the church also teaches the origins, existence and influence of a malicious power beyond human control, a personal force for evil persisting in our world, yet always subservient to God.

This force is to be defeated definitively by Christ at the end of time. Meanwhile, we human beings must continue to struggle with a dynamic evil, one that has a life of its own, one that may converge, undetected, in our own perpetration of evil. The church has never minimized this reality or reduced it to comedy, as contemporary culture often does. Nor will official teaching permit that it be explained away as merely a symbol or personification of human sinfulness, rather than a personal, spiritual, evil entity.

Biblical testimony to the development of this personal reality surfaces in the post-exilic books of the Old Testament and is further advanced in the New Testament. Probably influenced in part by the tenets and myths of the surrounding peoples of the ancient world, the many biblical references and symbolic expressions of evil gradually coalesced principally, but not only, into a specific being -- the wily, cunning tempter of human beings who, with accompanying demons, is set upon the undermining and destruction of the design of God for the salvation of all people. The Gospels often present the mission of Jesus and his disciples in the rich imagery of unmasking and overthrowing the kingdom of this evil being, to make way for the kingdom of God.

Identified variously as "the devil," "Satan" or "the evil one," (used sometimes interchangeably in the New Testament) and viewed as the leader of numberless lesser demons, this creature is explained as enjoying a nefarious, potentially damaging, presence among vulnerable and unsuspecting human beings.

"The Catechism of The Catholic Church" defines the devil/demon as "a fallen angel, who sinned against God by refusing to accept his reign. Satan, or the devil, or the Evil One, and the other demons were at first good angels, created naturally, who became evil by their own doing." The devil and other demons are presented as persistent enemies of the good, as hostile to God's design in the human domain, having fallen from grace through their own fault.

Who would reject the plausibility of some superhuman dynamic behind the horrendous "sins against humanity" which we have witnessed in our own generation? How are we to explain the tragedies of persistent ethnic hatred and recourse to violence, the horrendous crimes against human life in the forms of terrorism, genocide, and ethnic cleansing, the social acceptability of abortion and euthanasia, the endless cycle of poverty that engulfs millions, the widespread racism, sexism and heterosexism that diminish and strangle so many and poison the minds of others, the various addictions that devastate their victims and cause them to prey upon others?

Surely human beings are responsible for these evils, but the particularly unspeakable immensity and pervasiveness of such malice suggest as well a larger, underlying or accompanying force, even beyond the accumulated "Sin of the World," one which we may be inclined to speak of as "insidious" and even "diabolical."

Even in our personal or communal struggles with temptation and evils of lesser magnitude, may we believers, who draw our strength from God's spirit, not at times detect a deeper pressing and destructive force attempting to disrupt our perceptions and judgments, to diminish our virtuous efforts and responsible actions?

Would we necessarily be paranoid in considering such negating power as more than human weakness and inherited or learned evil tendencies? Could we not be confronted with our own scene of the reign of God in combat with the reign of evil?

The devil may seem to elude our experience, but certainly not the imagination of so many people in an otherwise secular society. They exhibit a certain fascination with the strange and bizarre claims of satanic power and with alleged manifestations. The church is usually reluctant to pursue such claims, while insisting that any human effort toward "taming" this powerful, yet elusive force for evil is dangerously misguided.

As Christians, we are sustained by the conviction that the defeat of this diabolical force in our world is already underway, that in the grace of the Lord's resurrection we, even now, are empowered to withstand the onslaughts of this personal evil force. Nor need we be pessimistic about the present age as we witness so many people engaged in so much that is honorable and good even though they do not recognize the grace that sustains them. We further believe that in God's mysterious plan, the devil, or Satan, or The Evil One will be irreversibly undone at the end of time.

(Nelson resigned as rector of Saint Francis Seminary, St. Francis, effective Jan. 1.)