Is the devil real?

    Several years ago when I was a practicing mental health counselor, a colleague gifted me a book called People of the Lie. This groundbreaking work was written by a renowned psychiatrist, Dr. M. Scott Peck, who was deeply disturbed by dark human behaviors that did not quite fit neatly into psychiatric diagnoses. He would go on to argue in his book, through a series of case studies and analyses, that true evil does exist and that it can manifest in observable ways in human behavior. Despite its odd-nature, I have come across a surprising number of people who have read and been deeply impacted by this book—professionals in both mental health and religion, but also others who picked up the book out of their own curiosity.

Sometime between when I read that book and now, I began to reconsider who or what I thought of the enigmatic Biblical figure of Satan or Lucifer. Although I believe in evil, I wasn’t quite sure I believed in an embodiment of evil in the form of a fallen angel who rules over an afterlife for the damned. The more I got into Biblical studies, the more I considered that perhaps what we think of as demons are just the manifestations of evil in the world. Isn’t evil just our own choice in turning away from God, not necessarily towards anything—like minions of the Devil running around wreaking havoc in our lives, Screwtape Letter style.

Then, a couple weeks ago, I was in deep theological conversation with one of our bartenders (yes, you read that right), and he asked me if I had read another one of Dr. M. Scott Peck’s books entitled Glimpses of the Devil: A Psychiatrist’s Personal Accounts of Possession, Exorcism, and Redemption. I had not. Reading this book, which he let me borrow, reopened the door to my musings about evil and Satan that I thought had been sealed shut long ago. I began to wonder, if a true embodiment of evil does exist, how would this fit into my current understanding of God’s relationship to humanity and the nature of sin? 

In Jungian psychology, a person is thought to have an inherent knowing and embodiment of archetypes common to all of humanity. These archetypes shape our personalities, behaviors, and relationships with one another. In therapy, we use these archetypes to help individuals create some distance between themselves and aspects of themselves that have become problematic in their functioning. So, instead of someone identifying as evil, she may identify what Jungians call The Shadow, that represents the aspects within herself that are dark, selfish, or broken. Creating this distance between oneself and one’s own problematic thoughts and behaviors helps to create an alliance between the therapist and client against this Shadow and reduces the shame that comes with over-identifying with only one part of oneself, especially when that part is villainous. 

The Shadow archetype in Jungian psychology is often compared to the religious archetype of the Devil in identity and function, which causes me to wonder, is it helpful to understand evil as something living outside of us that has the power to engage and influence us? The alternative being the belief that some people in and of themselves are evil. To me, there is much more grace and hope in the idea that people are inherently good and that there are externalizable aspects of our brokenness that we can ally with God against. Perhaps we call that brokenness Satan or Lucifer or the Devil. Perhaps there are different manifestations of brokenness that we call demons—the demon of confusion, the demon of greed, the demon of hubris. Who is to say that these are any more or less powerful, destructive, or influential if they are embodied spiritual forces or simply firings of neurotransmitters in our brain that result in behaviors that are counter to God and love? 

Through my reflections the past few weeks, I can honestly say that the idea of evil forces that deeply want God to fail makes a lot of sense. Forces that rejoice when sin entered the world and when Jesus was crucified. Forces whose battles are won when they have influenced an individual to follow evil (or the Devil) instead of God. Because in believing this, we can also believe that God is deeply compassionate towards one who has come to be overtaken by evil, one whose life situation has edged him into the dark and despair from which his own poor choices emerge. It does not remove the individual’s responsibility for these choices, but it makes room for mercy. Our God is against evil (Satan), not against people. Our God does not cast aside people but will do anything to reclaim a lost soul from evil (Satan), even to the point of His own death.