“In the resurrection, the wounds of Christ do not disappear; they are glorified. Only the devil appearing as Christ has no wounds, being too vain to bear them.”
-Maggie Ross
In his Church Dogmatics III.3 Karl Barth discusses the doctrine of angels for about 200 pages. It is only at the very end of this discussion that he briefly (approximately 25 pages) undertakes the topic of the “Devil and his angels.” But the brevity is intentional:
Why must our glance be brief? Because we have to do at this point with a sinister matter about which the Christian and the theologian must know but in which he must not linger or become too deeply engrossed, devoting too much attention to it in an exposition like our own…
Sinister matters…must not be contemplated too long or studied too precisely or adopted too intensively. It has never been good for anyone–including (and particularly) Martin Luther–to look too frequently or lengthily or seriously or systematically at demons… there is the imminent danger that in so doing we ourselves might become just a little or more than a little demonic.
The very thing which the demons are waiting for, especially in theology, is that we should find them dreadfully interesting and give them our serious and perhaps systematic attention. In this way they can finally catch out, not bad theologians, but good. For this reason, having consciously and intentionally devoted a full discussion to the angels, we shall take only a brief look at this matter. It is not a question of treating them lightly, but of handling them as best befits their nature. A quick, sharp glance is not only all that is necessary but all that is legitimate in their case.
Following Barth’s lead in our own theology of angels, we are only taking a very quick, sharp glance into the abyss of the evil powers that are out to eat up God’s good creation.
I first learned to make a distinction between the satanic and the demonic from Chris Green.1 The demonic is chaotic disorder, and threatens to destroy us and our way of life. The satanic is not chaos/disorder but false order and false light. It offers us rescue from the threat of the demonic.
Evil is always attacking us in this dual way: threatening us with disorder and chaos on the one hand, and extending us a protection from that disorder and chaos through a false order on the other.
Or as 1 Peter 5:8 says: your adversary the devil is like a lion who prowls and roars. The one thing a lion does not do when it is prowling is roar. I think this gets at the duality of the devices of the enemy. The roaring threatens us so that we run away and find refuge. But it is when we are lulled to sleep in refuge that we can become sitting ducks for the prowler.
This is a clever device. Paul says the devil is trying to outwit us. The devil is witty and clever. In that sense he has a sort of warped, perverted sense of humor. But as Robert Jenson points out, the devil is mere wit. He’s a bad comedian. He’s never truly funny because the joke is never on himself.
God, on the other hand, is the belly-laughter at the ground of all things. And he is quite happy for the joke to be on himself.
Here’s Jenson on the good humor of God and the bad humor of the devil:
If one were to…talk of Satan as a fallen angel, one could say that this is how he fell: he could not take God’s big joke on him and the other great spirits. He refused to join Michael and the others in service to those mere animals, those humans down there, whom God impishly and foolhardily proposed to elevate unto himself, and in service to whom God proposed to assign the great spirits… [Satan] never sees the joke on himself, as God does and we sometimes do.
It is the sovereign test: When the voice in the night tells me, “You are hopeless,” is it said with a laugh or a snicker? If the former, the voice is God’s; if the latter, out with the ink bottle.2
The devil’s inability to let the joke be on himself reveals his lack of humility. It is his pride—his bloated sense of self-importance—that keeps him from laughing at himself and forces him to snicker at us.
The way we break free from the witty joke of the devil (being trapped in the deadly spiral of the demonic and the satanic) is humility; we must laugh at ourselves and the wonderful joke God is telling. When we laugh at God’s joke—enthroning lowly human beings on his own throne—we are being let in on the divine joke that all the angels have been laughing at since the beginning of creation. And “God's laughter is our salvation” (Jenson).
Robert Jenson, “Evil as Person” in Revisionary Metaphysics.
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