Ernest Lussier, S.S.S.
Satan Is the belief in a personal Satan 1>art of divine revelat¡ion?
It is fashionable today to refuse to recognize the existence of personal evil spil¡its and to think that a sufficient explanation of the problem of evil and of the present occult revival can be found in psychoanalytical and psychiatric studies or in spiritualistic experience. See for example Henry Ansgar Kelley's book The Devil, Derrwnology, and Witchcraft, Doubleday, 1968, which has been described as the "death of the devil"; or the book by Ruth Nanda Anshen, The Reality of the Devil: Evil in Man, Harper and Row, 1972. The devil and the other evil spirits of the Bible would be simply part of the cultural furniture of the time which can easily be removed without damaging the structure of Christianity. Another current approach is to glibly reject the idea of Satan: "The subject is not one which sophisticated people ought to spend much time studying. It is Sunday supplement stuff, not material for real reflection ... . It is bunk ... the work of men out for a fast buck" ("Satan and the Occult in Contemporary Society" by Joseph W. Goetz, Dialog Autumn 1973 p. 272-278). Actually belief in good and evil spirits is universal in the history of religions; it has played 3