Romans 16.17-20
The church fathers called it the Proto-Evangelium, the First Gospel.
After the serpent lures Eve and Adam to distrust the Lord’s word, God searches for them as they hide in the garden, “What is this you have done?” the Lord God asks Eve.
And she replies, “Satan deceived me.”
In response to the news of the devil’s deceit, the Lord speaks his two words.
Curse and blessing.
After pronouncing judgment upon the tempter, God utters a gracious promise, “I will put enmity between you and the woman; and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall crush your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” That is, while the struggle between God’s creatures and this particular creature will be both constant and cosmic, it will not be ceaseless. The Lord will deliver a final crushing blow in the battle.
Thus, the primal church referred to Genesis 3.15 as the Proto-Evangelium, the good news before the Good News. For there, at the site of our original sin, God hands over a promise that is undeserved precisely because it is unthwartable.
One day God’s people will triumph finally over God’s enemy.
One day.
But that day is not yet this day.
Paul’s promise at the end of his epistle is pending still, “And the God of peace shall shortly crush the Adversary under your feet.”
Shortly.
But not yet.
Several years ago, I was traveling home from guest preaching. On my flight, sitting in first class and sipping champagne was Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former Archbishop of Washington. I recognized him instantly from the front page of the Washington Post. This was the very same week the McCarrick Report, commissioned by the Vatican, had made clear that Theodore McCarrick was not only— for decades— a serial sex abuser protected by the Roman Catholic Church's hierarchy, but he was himself a member of that hierarchy which protected other serial sex abusers. Even Saint John Paul the Great turned a blind eye to McCarrick’s crimes and coverups.
Shortly after the Vatican released the findings of the McCarrick Report, Dr. Larry Chapp, a Catholic professor of theology, wrote in Macrina Magazine:
“After I left the seminary and moved on with my career as an academic, I always kept one eye on the rise of McCarrick to high office. And when he was made Archbishop of Washington and then later a Cardinal, I just could not fathom in my naiveté why someone had not blown the whistle on this guy. I could not get my mind around how such a manifest sexual deviant and drunken ecclesiastical party boy had gotten so far. And I worried that the entire thing was a train wreck waiting to happen, a fear that was deepened when in 2002, while I was a guest on Fox News for a segment on priestly sex abuse, off camera, a journalist told me that they were investigating a leading American cardinal for sexually inappropriate behavior with adults. I said to him, “You mean McCarrick?” And he just grinned from ear to ear, leaned back in his chair and replied, “Have a safe trip home, Dr. Chapp.”
But nothing ever came of their investigation. And so I can only surmise that they ran into the same problem that everyone else had; namely, that you could not get anyone to go on the record and that McCarrick was being protected by some powerful American prelates who were masters of deception.”
Chapp concludes his article with an assertion:
“My claim is actually shocking. Some would even say dark. My claim is that the concrete actions taken with regard to McCarrick in particular and the entire sexual abuse issue in general tells us that many, if not most of our priests and bishops are de facto atheists. They may overtly give public statements of faith, perform the sacraments, and kneel dutifully before the blessed sacrament, all the while living as though there is not a God who sees. The sins of Theodore McCarrick and others are sins of such magnitude that one is safe in assuming that no one who possesses a genuine faith would commit them. These are the actions, the sins, of faithless men.”
Not quite. The scriptures forbid us from an answer as simple and banal as “faithless men.” “De facto atheism” is not as dark and shocking an explanation as the Bible demands.
How can evil men capture Christ’s church?
How can corrupt men captivate a nation?
Why do cruelty and lies abide?
Why do those who know better do the worst?
Only at the end of his Letter to the Romans does the apostle make his answer to such questions explicit. The God of peace has not yet trampled Satan underfoot. And in the meantime of the Lord’s long delay, the devil musters many minions. Among the Prince of Lies’s legion, Paul says at top of this passage, among the Adversary’s army are the church’s false teachers— those who, under the guise of Christ, serve their own appetites and deceive the hearts of believers, sowing cynicism so as to reap unbelief.
On our flight home to Washington, Theodore McCarrick held forth on the tiny plane, charming other passengers with his flattery and regaling them with beautifully told stories. His valet, a young ruffled priest, sat in coach next to me and carried the disgraced cleric’s bag. After listening to the cardinal entertain his fellow passengers like we were all guests on his private plane, I muttered to his assistant beside me, “If God is a Consuming Fire— like the scriptures say— do you reckon there will be anything left of your boss after he meets his Maker?” The valet managed an awkward smile and pretended not to hear me over the din of the cabin.
Later, after we'd landed, as we waited at the baggage claim carousel, I watched Cardinal McCarrick as he posed for selfies with admirers, adjusting his red vestments in between each photo. I watched as he signed autographs with impunity, as though he had deceived no one more completely than himself. And I watched in horror as he ate up the credulous attention of mothers and fathers who beckoned him near in order to introduce their children to him. “Faithless men” does not lift the luggage as far as explanations go. “Do you not follow the news?! He’s a monster!” I wanted to scream at the adulating crowd around him.
But I didn’t.
I didn’t.
Because I was scared.
“Faithless men” do not frighten.
The devil does.
In his essay “Evil as Person,” the theologian Robert Jenson writes:
“It has always been my principle that there is more in heaven and in earth, and presumably then also in hell, than is dreamed of in anyone’s philosophy. I have therefore always acknowledged reality so abundantly testified in human history as angels and demons…That is, somewhere in being, somewhere out there and in there and down there, there is a subjectivity that comprehensively despises the world, that hates all things, and, thus, deceives all things. And that subjectivity, that hatred, that despising, that deceiving is also antecedent to all our hating and despising and deceiving.”
That subjectivity is scary.
I got my start as a preacher in a maximum security prison. I know of sin. I have handed over the goods to hardened men who did unspeakable acts. Predations I have prayed God would help me forget. Yet the only time I have been certain that I was in the presence of the Lord’s Adversary was that fall evening at Baggage Claim #3 in Reagan National Airport. I stipulate to my certainty; so that, you will know the question elicited by this passage is neither frivolous nor sentimental.
A scholarly consensus dating to the ancient church concurs that verses twenty-one through twenty-seven of chapter sixteen are later additions to the epistle. The apostle therefore concludes his Letter to the Romans with this benedictory promise of God’s final triumph over Satan. And as far back as the primal church, Paul's deliberate echo of the Proto-Evangelium has raised a question.
When the day that is not yet finally arrives, when the God of peace— and note the critical paradox— crushes Satan underfoot, what— if anything— will remain of him?
And before you rush to dismiss the question, remember that according to the apostle Paul Satan’s chief transgression is different in degree but not in kind from humanity’s own original sin. We are the only animals who know not how to be creatures, eating the fruit that is the Creator's alone; we want to be God not give God his due. Likewise, the devil is the angel who refuses to be one. Satan’s insane self-contradiction is our own insane self-contradiction.
Once again the question:
What will the Lord have forged by casting Satan into the lake of fire?
If the devil is the angel who refuses to be one, will his defeat by God result in restoration to his former glory? Will the Father’s love turn out to be the fate of the Prince of Lies too? Can the shed blood of Jesus redeem even the fallen spirits? Will Satan with his kingdom be saved?
After all, Satan is not a name but a title.
Ha-satan: The Accuser.
Lucifer is the name of the angel who refused to be one.
Jus so, the question:
Once the Lord crushes the satan underfoot will Lucifer remain?
The extent to which such a question strikes us as silly or speculative reveals our own de facto atheism, for the Word of God declares unambiguously, “When everything is subject to Christ,” the scriptures proclaim, “then God will be all in all.” When Christ is lord over everything, then God will be everything in everything— that doesn’t leave a lot of room for exceptions.
The good news: that includes you.
The bad news: that includes not just you.
Kallistos Ware was an Eastern Orthodox theologian and bishop who died in 2022. In the first of his Collected Works, he recalls an assignment doled out to him when he was a young priest. His superior tasked him with escorting an important Greek archbishop on a four-hour journey by car. Kallistos Ware looked forward to the time for conversation the trip would afford them, and he began with a question he felt certain would provoke a long discussion. “Archbishop,” Ware asked, "If it is possible that the devil, who must surely be a very lonely and unhappy person, may eventually repent and be saved, why do we never pray for him?”
And the archbishop replied, “Mind your own damn business.”
End of discussion.
Silence accompanied them for the rest of the journey.
Reflecting upon the hierarch’s clipped response, Kallistos Ware writes:
“He was right. So far as we humans are concerned, the devil is always our adversary; we should not enter into any kind of negotiations with him, whether by praying for him or in other ways. His salvation is quite simply none of our business. But the devil has also his own relationship with God, as we learn from the prologue of the Book of Job, when Satan makes his appearance in the heavenly court among the other “sons of God.” We are, however, altogether ignorant of the precise nature of this relationship, and it is futile to pry into it. Yet, even though it is not for us to pray for the devil, we have no right to assume that he is totally and irrevocably excluded from the scope of God’s mercy.”
Kallistos Ware has a point.
Jesus commands us to pray for our enemies. Scripture exhorts us to pray even for the emperor. But Satan has never been the object of the church’s corporate prayers. At baptism, the church renounces “the devil and all his pomps.” During the Lord’s Prayer, we pray for deliverance from his malignant power. In the eucharist, we anticipate Christ’s coming again and so triumph final over him. But the church has not taught the baptized to pray for his salvation precisely because we know not the power of his lure.
“Mind your own damn business.”
On the one hand, Satan and the fallen spirits are none of our business. We should steer as clear from them as I did at Baggage Claim #3.
On other other hand, as Paul makes clear in the passage, Satan and the fallen spirits are God’s business. Indeed, as Paul’s letter makes clear, they are the last bit of God’s business. And if God is determined to be all in all, then the void that appeared in heaven as a consequence of their fall must surely be filled. What was lost must certainly be found. For if the void persists eternally then the saving work of the three person’d God is not without remainder.
Not long ago, I met with a young woman— she’s barely out of college— to plan the funeral for her father. Her mother, his ex-wife, wanted nothing to do with the affair. Mary was a rookie law enforcement officer. Her Dad, Henry, worshipped at my former parish. After over a year of aches and pains and doctor visits and elusive diagnoses, Henry learned he had stage four bone cancer. Only ten days later he died of massive organ failure. I knew Henry’s face and name. I knew his youngest daughter, Rachel, was in my son’s class. But I didn’t know much else about him. I didn’t know what Mary told me in my office.
After running a successful campaign in his home state of Michigan, Mary told me, her Dad had come to DC to make his living in politics. And for a time, he was more than six-figures-successful. But he lost his position at a policy firm during the Great Recession, and in the years that followed he refused to take any job that would pay him less than what he was making before.
“Pride took a hold of him,” Mary told me— notice her language, “It possessed him and then it turned him into a stranger.”
He disengaged at home. He started to drink. He circled the drain. And he ran up debts no career comeback could ever settle. Seven years ago he was discharged from the hospital after a minor illness. He came home to find his wife finally had made good on her threat to change the locks. His belongings were on the sidewalk next to old, wet newspapers.
“It was fall, but he lived in his car for the next six months,” Mary told me, blowing her nose, “After that, for all these years, he’s been living in a tiny room in a house not far from here. He had fewer belongings than bills and letters from debt collectors. The landlord said none of the people who’ve lived with him the past seven years knew anything about him, “probably not even his name.” We’d see him every couple of months. He’d come by the house to take us to dinner or the movies. Eventually, it was just the two of us. My sister didn’t want to see him. She’s too young. This version of Dad is the only version of Dad she can remember. Honestly, maybe it is the only version of Dad.”
Mary paused and looked at me.
“Maybe there’s nobody left underneath what he became?”
Once the Lord crushes the satan underfoot will Lucifer remain?
It may strike us as peculiarly astonishing but the redemption even of Satan and the fallen spirits was an inevitable component of the ancient church fathers’s understanding of salvation, for they saw that it was the straightforward claim of scripture. Citing the church fathers Origen and St. Gregory of Nyssa, the Orthodox theologian Sergei Bulgakov writes:
“Does the universal power of the redemptive sacrifice brought “for all” extend also to demons? Or is it necessary to recognize that this power is limited, that it is manifested only in relation to the earthly human world? But it is clear that it is impossible to admit any limitation on the power of the redemptive sacrifice. Scripture bears direct and certain witness to this: “That at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow, of things in heaven, and things on earth, and things under the earth.” That is, angels, men, and demons. The tongues of them all shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord…Therefore, the fullness of salvation presupposes not only the annulment of the cosmic minus that was introduced by Satan but the participation of all of creation in this new being.”
If the gospel begins in the garden with the serpent, does the gospel not ultimately end with him too?
The question is not meant to dismiss the devil’s detriments. The contemplation of the question is not sentimental. We do not deny the Adversary’s crimes under the pretext of divine love.
Bulgakov continues:
“It is impossible for human experience to measure the ages of ages of torments of hell necessary to exhaust satanical selfhood and malice. Nevertheless, there is a basis for such a conversion in and recovery of Satan’s nature, for he too is a creature of God and does not stop being such….Satan’s very being, his createdness by the omniscient God is, so to speak, an ontological proof of the inevitability of his future salvation. Even Satan in his madness does not have the power to overcome the fact of his own being, its divine foundation, by virtue of which “God will be all in all.” Satan, once the supreme archangel, an anointed cherub, also exists, like each of us, only by virtue of divine love. To be sure, he can never lose this knowledge once it has become known. Once it is known, a love must be loved with an answering love. This love turns out to be a kind of fate for Lucifer too.”
I am not always the best listener but, sitting in my office to plan her father’s funeral, I caught how Mary had put it to me as a question, “Maybe there’s nobody left underneath what he became?”
That is—
Is he recoverable?
She wanted an answer.
And she waited for one.
I nodded.
“Here’s what I know,” I said to her, “No one’s story ends with death— that’s the gospel. And the final outcome of your Dad’s story must correspond to the beauty and goodness with which God intended it. Otherwise, God’s making of him (only to lose him) would be an enormous mistake and a failure. But God doesn’t make mistakes— not with you, not with your Dad, not with any of his creatures.”
I was standing askance at Baggage Claim #3, waiting for the carousel to cough up my suitcase and thinking about how it was ironically appropriate for the cardinal to be dressed in red.
A man in a navy fleece with close-cropped hair and a Wisconsin accent leaned in towards me. He carried a rolled-up newspaper in his hand and, with it, he pointed at Cardinal McCarrick holding court as his valet fetched bags off the conveyor belt.
“Can you believe guys like that?”
I shook my head, sharing his revulsion.
“The audacity! No shame! I don’t know what in the hell the Lord’s waiting for. You’d think God would do something already!”
The God of peace will one day crush Satan under your feet.
I do not know why the promise is still pending.
But I do know:
God’s saving love is absolute to the outer limit.
Just so, when Christ Jesus our Lord comes again, the wideness of his mercy will encompass far more than we have dared to believe.
If you need proof, come to the table, for there no less than “the angels, archangels, and all the company of heaven” join us at loaf and cup. And if those creatures meet us here over creatures of bread and wine, then perhaps the promise is true indeed— one day, “at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow, of things in heaven, and things on earth, and things under the earth and the tongues of all— forked and not— shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.”
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