The Devil Can Quote Scripture to the Extent You Can
“The Devil is angry because he does not exist.”
The assigned lectionary Gospel for the First Sunday of Lent is Matthew’s account of the Devil’s testing of Jesus in the wilderness.
A feature in the accounts of the temptations given to us by Matthew and Luke is Satan’s ability to quote God’s word— not loosely, not approximately. The Devil in fact quotes Psalm 91 with precision, applying it to Jesus with what appears to be genuine theological acuity. The shock of this moment has not been sufficiently absorbed by the tradition. We tend to process it as a piece of exegetical cunning, a rhetorical trick by an adversary who has done his homework. And we picture it, I imagine, as a sort face-off in the desert between two discrete creatures, the one external to the other. But of course, if “the Devil is angry because he does not exist,” as Stanley Hauerwas writes, then this is not at all the right way to read Christ’s ordeal.
What if the devil’s knowledge of the scriptures is not his own knowledge at all? What if it is, in a precise theological sense, Jesus’ own knowledge of the scriptures, returned to him, warped in a form stripped of its proper direction? What if the Tempter attempts to lure Jesus with a voice speaking from within Jesus, using what Jesus knows against the One who gave him that knowing? Only if we first have a proper understanding of the Enemy can we then read Christ’s temptations in the wilderness. In his essay “Evil as Person,” Robert Jenson makes such a reading possible. Satan, Jenson argues, is a self with no substance of his own.
