Conservative Protestant Reformers such as MARTIN LUTHER (1483–1546) and JOHN CALVIN (1509–1564) drew deeply from Augustine as well as the Bible, adopting his view that God creates the world, including angels and humans, for the purpose of extending his goodness. But if God forced his creatures to be good, they would be only puppets lacking moral choice and, therefore, goodness. So God creates angels and humans with free will, knowing in all eternity that some will choose good and others evil. The great choice between good and evil was first offered to the angels: some chose eternally to love and serve their maker; others, through pride, eternally chose to deny his will. The angels who fell, led by Satan, were cast out of HEAVEN into hell. God allows them to roam on earth and tempt humans. God created human beings in the image of Adam and Eve, completely good yet also completely free to make their own choice to love God or to prefer their own will instead. Satan could not force them, but he was permitted to tempt them, and they yielded, falling into sin through free choice. Because all humanity is present in Adam and Eve, all humanity fell with their original sin. Original sin bent humans so much that their inclination is to evil, and no human has enough power to break that inclination by himself or herself. After original sin, humanity was under Satan’s power. In strict justice, God could have left humanity in this wretched state forever, but in God’s mercy and love God comes to us as Christ. Christ, being completely God himself, has the strength to break Satan’s power, and, being completely human, Christ can represent humanity in atonement with God.
The Reformers readily accepted these ideas because they, like other Christians, needed the Devil as a partial answer to the classical problem of evil: God is all-powerful and all-good; how, then, can there be evil in the world that he creates and maintains? One of the many strategies designed to cope with this problem involves the Devil as a powerful principle of evil in stark and powerful (though ultimately vain) opposition to God’s will. Luther’s and Calvin’s strong belief in predestination shaped their view of the Devil. Luther argued that a corollary of the absolute omnipotence of God was God’s predestination of humans to either heaven or hell: predestination could not be denied without blasphemously limiting God’s sovereignty over all times and all places, and God chooses those whom he saves and those he does not. Thus free will is an illusion, and every man and woman is either under God’s complete power and protection, or under Satan’s.
God has direct, immediate control over every creature, including humans, angels, and the Devil, and Luther unflinchingly accepted the corollary that God causes the Devil’s activity. God wills evil but uses it for the good; on another level God both wills evil and wills us to resist and oppose it. Luther’s emphasis on the Devil’s power derived from this idea of God’s twofold will. God does not do evil himself but uses the Devil to do evil. The Devil is God’s tool, like a hoe that he uses to cultivate his garden. The hoe takes its own pleasure in destroying the weeds, but it can never move out of God’s hands, never weed where God does not wish, never thwart his purpose of making a beautiful garden. Christ’s Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection have broken Satan’s power.
Calvin expressed similar views with his own characteristic logical precision, which led him to teach double predestination. God predestines some to be saved and others to be damned, and he does so not only because he knows that they are damned but also because he wills them to be damned. As a result of original sin, human nature is completely deformed as to both reason and will, incapable of finding truth without faith and the illumination of the Bible. The Bible declares the Devil’s existence, but Calvin grasped that it has little to say about it, so he focused on the central concept of the Devil: evil. Like Luther, Calvin believed that no creature, even a great angel, can act against God’s will. God carries out his justice through Satan. Such beliefs had destructive consequences, especially in the religious wars and the trials for witchcraft, where all sides in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries viewed their opponents as tools of Satan.
The radical Reformers of the sixteenth-century Reformation, in their efforts to return to Biblical Christianity, tended to pay less theological attention to the Devil than the conservative Reformers. They were less interested in theory than in practice, concentrating more on reforming themselves and their own communities than on spreading their own doctrines. Such radicals as the Anabaptists, the Unitarians, and the followers of THOMAS MÜNTZER (1489–1525), JAKOB HUTTER (d. 1536), MENNO SIMONS (1496–1561), and, later, GEORGE Fox (1624–1691) lacked the power, and usually the will, to repress their opponents. They believed that the world was under the power of the Devil and that Christians had no business with worldly affairs. Muntzer viewed Christ as a moral model rather than as Redeemer, thus removing the cosmic struggle of Christ against Satan from center stage, where the conservatives had kept it. Some radicals believed in universalism: the view that every creature—even Satan—would eventually return to the Kingdom of Heaven; a few Anabaptists even denied the existence of the Devil altogether. After reaching its peak in the early seventeenth century, Protestant belief in the Devil declined toward the end of the century at the same time that prosecutions for witchcraft were declining. Protestant scholars finally discovered that there was no biblical basis for belief in diabolical witchcraft. Still, few of the seventeenthcentury skeptics who denied that Satan worked through witches expressed doubt as to his existence.
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