RELI 209 - The Devil You Know: Personifying Evil in the West

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

You already know the devil. He’s the serpent in the Garden of Eden. He’s the rebellious angel who got pushed into hell. He possesses small children in horror films. The devil appears for many as God’s enemy, the shadow side of reality. But how can an all-powerful, omnibenevolent God have such a scary and apparently successful enemy? What if the devil we know now is actually profoundly different from the devil as he has appeared in different times and places? This class approaches that question through a biographical investigation of the devil, starting with his shift from a heavy-handed part of God’s angelic bureaucracy in the Hebrew Bible to the personification of evil in the New Testament, and then moving through the theological speculation of late-antiquity and the middle ages that solidified the devil’s paradoxical place in the cosmos. From there, it explores the massive violence the concept of the devil facilitated during the European witch hunts of the early-modern period and the colonization of the Americas. Key topics include the devil’s role in contemporary pop culture, elite and popular political discourse, and indigenous resistance to colonialism and capitalism. Along the way this course questions why this theological personification of evil still has so much relevance in an allegedly secular age. Klaus Yoder.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS