When was devil created

Is Jesus subordinate to the Father? What is transubstantiation and is it true? Does Satan Influence World Leaders? Why would Jesus need to be baptized?

February When were dinosaurs created and are they mentioned in Scripture? March Why did Jesus tell those whom He healed to not to tell anyone about what He did? Are there guardian angels? Who were on Golgotha during the crucifixion of Jesus? Did Jesus go to Hell before His physical resurrection? April What was written on the sign on the cross?

Grace Kids Question: Did Adam have a belly-button? Philip C. Almond does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

He was big in s pop culture The Exorcist , The Devils and continues to feature on screen today. Conservative Christianity has a long commitment to the idea of a personal devil. Pope Francis, meanwhile, maintains Satan still exists. The rise has fuelled the growth of church ministries that claim to drive out demons. And the conspiracy theorists of QAnon have notoriously created baseless moral panic about the imagined sexual abuse of children in Satanic cults.

Here are five things worth knowing. He is there before the beginning of the world and he survives its end. He is first and chief among the angels. He is the first to disobey God and, along with his fellow fallen angels, to be expelled from Heaven. From this moment on, religious history records the conflict between God and his angelic forces and the Devil and his demonic army. Within the Christian tradition, it was the Devil — in the form of a serpent after his own fall from heaven — who brought about the Fall of humanity in the Garden of Eden.

Yet this story is deeply paradoxical. Read more: Thoughts and prayers: miracles, Christianity and praying for rain. Within the Christian tradition, Satan was a master of illusion. Unlike God, he could not perform miracles because he was bound by natural laws. Satan was seen as a master of magic. In early Christianity, magic was reprehensible because demons were at the heart of it.

For Saint Augustine , the demonic was present within all magic and superstitious practices in other religions. For Isidore, bishop of Seville c. Actually, Mariz claims that the ideas of Devil, exorcism, and possession have been present in Christianity since its origin and participate not only in the cognitive universe of Catholicism but also of Protestantism. So, Neo-Pentecostalism is updating and adjusting an already existing representation of the Devil to its reality and interests.

Thus, before becoming attached to a Neo-Pentecostal church, the believer already knows about the alleged existence and destructive power of the Devil Mariz. Delumeau presents a deep study of the development of fear in Christianity between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age and helps us realize that the use of the image of the Devil to scare people had been used before the appearance of Neo-Pentecostal Churches.

For Delumeau, the emergence of modernity in Western Europe came along with a surprising fear of the Devil, for the Renaissance not only inherited concepts and images related to the Devil, but also gave them a coherence and propagation never seen before in History Delumeau, The author says that images of the Devil were rare in primitive Christian art and did not even exist in the frescos of Roman catacombs.

Nevertheless, these images appear frequently in art between the tenth and twelfth centuries, a period in which the Catholic Church had consolidated and expanded. At that time, the Devil was represented as a horrible hybrid figure with human and animal features. Considered a treacherous vassal by the Feudal Code, the idea of the Devil became more terrifying and showed how necessary the Church was to keep the community safe and away from it.

Seductive and dangerous at the same time, in the eleventh and the twelfth centuries the Devil certainly represented a way to scare many people and accomplished its function of establishing the Catholic Church as a great benefactor and savior.

Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, when Catholicism faced the Reformation, the image of the Devil seemed scarier than ever. At that time, it acquired bat wings and dragon like features Delumeau, As protestants were in their period of consolidation, they also started using a frightening image of the Devil to persuade more and more people to follow them. Delumeau affirms that since the sixteenth century protestants have seen the doctrine of justification by faith as the only theology able to assure that everybody is born as a sinner and will remain as such until death, and that belief in God is the unique salvation from every evil.

Consequently, as Delumeau explains, believers would not have to worry about work as long as they believed in God and in its power to protect them from the Devil Delumeau, This speech was emotionally appealing and based in certain manuals that applied a resource called amplificatio that means exaggeration.

The image of the Devil by Neo-Pentecostal churches follows a pattern taken long ago by the Catholic and Protestant Churches during their periods of crises or consolidation due to the fact that those Churches used to terrify people to make them believe in their power of protection and salvation, as many of the Neo-Pentecostal Churches do nowadays.

The credibility that the Neo-Pentecostal Churches and the UCKG have gained in recent years is thanks to their strategies of persuasion, which are based on a speech that sounds dramatic in order to make people believe in it.

The appeal of this speech is also supported by the presence of a leader who is supposed to know a great and divine truth capable of assisting people in their search for salvation. For those believers, this alleged salvation could make someone adjust to the traditional and valued behaviors in society, such as: being heterosexual, economically successful, and not a drug user. Thus, when a Neo-Pentecostal church assumes that it has the power to take care of people and help them achieve special goals, they suggest at once a model of believer: docile and able to peacefully fit into neoliberal society standards.

These churches use a kind of power described by Hobbes[ 3 ] in the 17th century, and analyzed by Foucault in the s, which is called pastoral power. According to Foucault, pastoral power appeared in Christian institutions and was developed during the Middle Ages; it was also present in the 15th century, due to the Protestant Reformation. He says that it consists of a technique of power in which one leader sacrifices himself in order to guide other individuals to salvation.

The pastoral power is a way to take the individual towards salvation, which nowadays means the achievement of a good state of being. Foucault also affirms that this kind of power is not limited to religious contexts in modern societies Foucault, Although pastoral power is not limited to the field of religious institutions anymore, one can see that some churches still use it as one of their ways to persuade people to follow them, as the UCKG does.

It means that each person should watch their own attitudes and choices Ottaviani, et al. That is, as a leader, the pastor needs to show his followers that they have to behave according to the precepts of their Church and by doing so, they will reach the divine graces such as prosperity and good health. Many of the followers can end up believing that they also ought to tithe as proof of obedience in order to receive the blessings for the Church and the pastor represent God, to whom they own that obedience.

Then, the followers are supposed to believe that they must pay attention to the ways in which they behave in order to reach the blessings they wish. Their social conditions are never taken into consideration and they feel completely responsible for their success or failure, for being able to follow the pastor or not. This premise of Christian control is also taken by the UCKG, because the believer who searches for this Church can be motivated to fulfil his wishes by tithing and following the model of behavior appreciated by the Church leaders.

At the UCKG the believer confesses his sins not to a single clergyman, but to an audience that can watch and be aware of his mistakes in life, getting to know what not to do in order to keep on what they call the God path. So, for the UCKG narrative, the believer who says he is being controlled by the Devil should not be seen as a miserable guilty person, but as a winner who is ready to be saved from evil.

He is in fact a good example to be followed by the other believers. Fear can be used by a leader to justify his power and the UCKG leaders use the image of the Devil to scare and persuade their believers to follow the Church. It is important to say that the image of the Devil or the fear that it can provoke are not the only resources used by the UCKG to attract more followers or even to keep them attached to this Church. Before explaining more specifically how the UCKG uses the fear of the Devil as an instrument of power, it is worth mentioning some authors who worried about the use of fear as a way of power in the neoliberal societies.

They do so through multiple mechanisms of preservation of life such as health insurance, police organization, alarm systems, planned retirements and so on. The authors state that fear must be produced and shared by the individuals who take part in a society. As a consequence, this fear moves the market of security, which ensures order and safety, in order to make this society economically productive. These authors also assert that the State, as any agent of control, would lose its meaning in a society, if they did not have the alleged function of protecting the individuals from dangers caused by violence and helplessness.

Then, the State would guarantee peace and order to make people produce goods and money. Bauman, who also studied the function of fear in social organizations, admits that a great part of the trading capital is accumulated due to the feeling of insecurity people have nowadays[ 4 ]. He quotes as examples the fears of terrorism, natural disasters, and urban violence. For the author, the existing fear in neoliberal societies causes a lot of insecurity and a permanent feeling of hopelessness in people who see themselves as unable to rule their own lives Bauman, The author even says that this kind of fear is scarier when it is diffused, as a kind of threat that can suddenly assault.

It is what Bauman calls the derived fear, a stable mental structure that produces in the individual a feeling of being constantly threatened and vulnerable not able to trust the available defenses. It is a continuous sensation of anxiety and alert, even though there is no real or present danger Bauman, 9.

For the author, the derived fear is not really linked to a real and imminent danger, that is to say, people affected by it cannot understand it or connect it to any of the three kinds described above Bauman, For Gross, it is necessary to establish an enemy in contemporary societies where fear is applied as an instrument of control. However, this enemy is not always identifiable, in fact, it is very often unknown as a suspect should be. An identified enemy would probably come from a foreign country and would be a cold and calculating deceiver of others, instead of the suspect, who would not be noted, and would act unpredictably.

The suspect could even be a neighbor.