The fallen spirits bone up on contemporary theological trends.
The Devil was perched on a hot crag reading a book, with smoke curling gently about his face as if he were in Marlborough Country. Nearby sat Spitfire, one of his underlings.
“You have found a good—pardon me, sir!—a bad book?” asked Spitfire.
Satan lowered the volume and looked thoughtfully off into the smoky distance. “Little brother,” he said, “there’s something going on in the earth today. God, they are saying, is meaningless to the modern mind. You can’t talk sense about him in these times of advanced psychology and physics. Those who hold with Dietrich Bonhoeffer have decided that the traditional God has expired; he has gone the way of Nebo and Bel. The Bultmannians try to define God existentially, through much demythologizing of the Word. Harvey Cox of Harvard insists man must forget the very Name of God and try to break through to him in modern secularization.”
Satan lifted the book he had been reading. “We also have ‘process theology,’ as expressed here in A Christian Natural Theology, by the late Alfred North Whitehead. Here we have a different slant on Deity. God has not grown up yet! He’s still attending school. He hasn’t matured.” Satan chuckled. “Why worry over whether mankind will ever attain maturity, when the Creator has the same problem?”
“Ha!” said Spitfire. “Har!”
Satan shrugged. “The Creator of Christian truth who transcends all and by divine fiat ordered life out of nothingness; who ruled the cosmos outside creation; who bears such attributes as Omnipotent, Omniscient, Almighty, and Eternal—he has had his funeral. He rests among the once lively gods who frolicked on Mount Olympus.”
“That,” said Spitfire, grinning a twisted grin, “should make it clear to people why you haven’t been done in! It should clear up the mystery of sin. They won’t have to worry now over why an all-powerful God couldn’t get rid of evil—it simply was just too much for him!”
Satan nodded. “To be sure, he is valiantly trying to overcome evil. Perhaps we can presume that countless eons hence he will have achieved his purpose—if that man, who is helping him toward victory, doesn’t come over on my side in too big a way!”
“So God is growing!” cried Spitfire.
“God is ‘becoming’ something, little brother. We may take it for granted he will eventually grow up. Which, of course, provokes a question in my mind. When he reaches maturity, will he become unchanging, like the God of classical Christian theology? But that, I suppose, the process theologians will hold as a future problem; meanwhile God is progressing nicely, getting more and more capable of handling the universal situation he has got himself into. What will happen when God comes to perfection? That’s a far-off problem. One mustn’t be too inquisitive, you know, else he will find himself right back where his fathers were who couldn’t explain why an all-powerful God couldn’t get rid of evil!”
“Ha!” shouted Spitfire. “Har!”
“They have the satisfaction of feeling, when they flunk at some point, that the Almighty—I beg your pardon!—the Creator is also going by trial and error. This should be quite comforting, especially to those whose pride has made it so difficult for them to submit to a sovereign Being. God is less awesome as a big struggling Brother than as an omnipotent Father. They won’t feel so much like humbling themselves in the Presence, nor feel so wicked when they fail to measure up to the old standards taught by the old-timers. The fact is, man can be pretty irreverent and not feel very guilt-stricken; and he can rid himself of old judgment fears. Since God is having his own trouble with things, surely he wouldn’t want to judge men who have missed the mark. A God wouldn’t want to invent a judgment that he might have to face!”
“Hmmm,” said Spitfire. “Growing up with God. Nobody’s perfect—they’ve been saying that since Adam. How meaningful that is in this process theology! Not even the Lord can measure up!”
“Consider, little brother, what this does for me! The old idea that I was foredoomed to destruction is out. I still have a chance! Spit, what if I should grow faster than God? As of now, I have perhaps more people on my side than he has; if I can help them on to sinful perfection, perhaps my old dream of taking over creation might be realized!”
“Heil!” cried Spit. “Hooray!”
Satan smiled a crooked smile and spat on a hot rock, and the spittle sizzled weirdly. “Maybe the believers better hope nothing happens to stunt God’s development—or they that hold with him will have had it! Wonder how they’d like seeing me take over, sending the bad ones to heaven and the good ones to hell?”
Spit almost collapsed with glee. The Devil said, “But man is funny. The Buddhists smile en route to Nirvana and the existentialists smile en route to nihilism. The process theologians will carry their heads high, even if the Maker finds the going rough. Should he slip somewhere and lose the war—well, it will have been a magnificent try!”
“However things turn out,” Satan continued, “even if neither God nor the believers ever reach perfection, it will have been nice suffering for his cause. They will get to bear the cross and deny themselves, to walk the narrow way, to resist evil, and perhaps to die for their Maker. That should mean something. Shouldn’t it?”
“Shouldn’t it?” screamed Spit, quaking with laughter.
Satan sat with his crooked smile on his face, with smoke curling gently about it as if he were in Marlborough Country. Then he went back to his book, still grinning his crooked grin.—THE REV. LON WOODRUM, Hastings, Michigan.
