Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from July 21, 2008

Has Satan Left the United Methodist Church?

The headline of the last issue of The United Methodist Reporter was "Does Satan Really Exist?" I began to read the article to see where this was going to fall. I know that there are plenty of modern, scientifically minded people who cannot integrate a spiritual being who embodies evil into their worldview. Satan has become a literary figure, a metaphor, a symbol, or a fantasy figure to individuals who believe that evil arises out of human motivation. Satan, as an actual being at the heart of evil, has been reserved for those who are not as sophisticated or who have not had the appropriate education into human motivation. I think Satan left the building because of Enlightenment, modernist rational thinking patterns and that evil is a manifestation of social problems or mental/emotional dissociative disorders. Basically when science began to rule the roost, Satan no longer had a nest to hatch in. I'm not one to lay too much power or authority into Satan's account. Sata...