That changed in the eighteenth century as part of a broader cultural movement characterized by the ENLIGHTENMENT. The old theological worldview shared by all Christians was challenged by the rise of natural science. Causation seemed to be mechanical, leaving no place for divine intervention or human free will, let alone the Devil. Even though logically such a view disallowed human freedom, liberal Christians and secularists increasingly insisted on human effort as opposed to divine decree, and predestinarian views, along with belief in original sin, slowly withered. Gradual moral progressivism slowly took the place of stark moral choice, and the dichotomy between good and evil—God and the Devil—closed. Deists, while denying original sin, still took the human propensity to evil seriously.
Material progressivism, which increasingly dominated thought in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, treated the past, and therefore both tradition and the Bible, as a positive evil to be cast off in order to establish a new order of the ages. Not only the Devil but also God became symbols of ancient repression and despotic kingship. The profoundly influential arguments of the Scottish philosopher DAVID HUME (1711–1776) against Christianity undermined its theological foundations; the rise of democracy undermined ideas of hierarchy, even those of heaven and hell. Popular revolutionary and antireligious writers such as Thomas Paine (1737–1809) derided Christian beliefs and scorned the idea of Satan as absurd. On the other hand, the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) proved both in his writings and in his life that if there is no objective standard for evil, then there is no way of judging torturing children as worse than eating peach pie. Without a foundation for belief in good and evil, Sade demonstrated, there is no basis for rational moral judgment. Satan, in other words, is as good as Christ.
In the nineteenth century, the mechanistic theories of the previous century were made real by industrialization, with its hell-like factories and its depletion of the rural villages where the sense of Christian community had been stable for hundreds of years. From its beginning, Christianity had been communitarian; now the uprooted were forced to bear the brunt of the individualistic entrepreneurial theories of their masters. Having to confront the Devil alone, without the support of community, in hellish labor conditions, caused many impoverished Christians to abandon their faith altogether. Meanwhile, many Protestant leaders retreated from the old worldview centered on Christ’s sacrifice as saving humanity from sin. Abandoning the independent epistemological bases of Christianity in experience, revelation, and tradition, they began trying to fit Christianity into the empirical, scientific framework that had begun to dominate intellectual circles, a task achieved only by gradually amputating theological limbs and eventually excising spiritual vital organs. Liberal Christians staggered back before agnostic sarcasm about the grotesque absurdity of Satan even more quickly than they did before direct philosophical attacks. As they abandoned traditional and biblical beliefs, the Devil was usually first to go as an encumbrance in their effort to make Christianity easy and optimistic in a world where secular progress was in vogue. FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER (1768–1834), a pastor of the Reformed (Calvinist) Church, argued that it was obvious that evil existed but that displacing its origins from humanity onto Satan did nothing to explain it. Conservatives argued in response that without the Devil, the purpose of Christ’s mission was lost. A third, middle persuasion, a sort of practical mysticism (for example, original METHODISM), abandoned traditional theological certainties yet affirmed the authority of the Bible and therefore the existence of the Devil.
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Christian beliefs were further undermined by reductionism (the belief that everything can be explained in materialist terms alone). Most weakening was biblical criticism, which sapped the authority of the Bible and the credibility of tradition. One nineteenth- and twentieth-century Christian reaction to this criticism was to dismiss it and to affirm the words of the Bible “literally”; a second was to adopt mystical and metaphorical interpretations; a third was to reject the reliability of the Bible. Modern psychology revealed the power of evil in negative projection (assigning the destruc-tive impulses within ourselves to outsiders whom we choose as scapegoats). Disbelief in the Devil did not prevent Protestants (or others) from demonizing people. In the third view, biblical mentions of the Devil and demons in the Bible were considered the product of the primitive first-century worldview of Jesus and the NT writers. Scripture and tradition were abandoned in favor of the shifting arguments of the latest historians.
By 1800, liberal intellectual Protestants in Western civilization had abandoned the core of Christian beliefs; by 1900 more and more educated Christians had done so; by 2000, most Christians—in the West but not among newly converted peoples—had done so. The Devil had become a comic figure or a childish bogey. One result has been a peculiar defenselessness against the problem of evil. Against the flood of desacralization, a generation of theologians bred in the experience of World War II—KARL BARTH (1886–1968), PAUL TILLICH (1886–1965), and REINHOLD NIEBUHR (1892–1971)—tried to reverse the dilution of Christianity by reaffirming neo-orthodox values, expressing ancient truths in opposition to materialist reductionism, but in ways understandable to their culture. The obscene horrors of the world wars, they argued, demonstrated that radical evil (if not the Devil as a personality) was real. For a while, their ideas caught, but in Western culture they were swept away by the socially popular view that evil does not exist and that accident, fate, circumstance, genetics, and environment are all to blame for other people’s actions. The term “evil” has been replaced by “disturbed,” “sick,” “inappropriate,” or “mean-spirited” (while hatred, rage, and incivility have actually increased).
By the end of the twentieth century identifiably Protestant concepts of the Devil had become rare except among the Evangelicals. The contemporary worldview among leading intellectuals, including clergymen as well as professors and journalists, is irony. Use of terms such as “evil,” “truth,” “sin,” “beauty,” “God” (and most of all “the Devil”), have become social blunders unless set in the ironic quotation marks that let contemporaries know that we do not take them seriously. In a world where irony elides into cynicism, when any behavior is simply a matter of personal choice, when any idea is as good as any other, there are no standards by which Hitler is worse than Lincoln. In such a world, the Devil is no longer even a joke or a scary story; he simply has no place at all.
The Protestant self has been replaced by the post-modern self, a random collection of feelings, impulses, desires, and functions, a self that has no moral being at its center—indeed, no center—but only fluctuating identities that sway with cultural fashion. In such a society, Protestantism has had a variety of responses to the concept of the Devil and of radical evil. Three main strands can be traced in current Protestantism: a conservative, traditional, view; a liberal, skeptical view; and a so-called “literalist” biblical view typical of Evangelicals. The tension between liberal and conservative forces within Protestantism continues into the twenty-first century, but in broad societal terms the liberals have been successful in persuading most of the Western world (though not less devolved cultures) to disbelieve in both the Devil and hell. To many contemporary Christians the Devil seems old-fashioned and absurd in the context of the dominant materialist worldview of the time, which in fact has no room for any sort of Christianity at all, demythologized or not. What remains to be seen is whether Protestantism has the resources to give society the ability to suspend irony in the face of real suffering—in the face of the Devil.
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