The God of This Age: Satan in the Churches and Letters of the Apostle Paul by Derek R. Brown

Abstract

Reviewed by: The God of This Age: Satan in the Churches and Letters of the Apostle Paul by Derek R. Brown Henry Ansgar Kelly derek r. brown, The God of This Age: Satan in the Churches and Letters of the Apostle Paul (WUNT 2/409; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015). Pp. xi + 243. Paper €79. Derek Brown's lightly revised Edinburgh dissertation (2011) deals with the seven passages in which Paul mentions ho satanas (Satan) in his epistles: (1) 1 Thess 2:18: Satan blocked our way; (2) 1 Cor 1:5: let Satan punish the offender's body so that his spirit may be saved; (3) 1 Cor 7:5: abstaining too much from sex may give rise to Satan's temptation; (4) 2 Cor 2:10-11: we will not let Satan outwit us, for we know his thoughts; (5) 2 Cor 11:14: Satan sometimes appears as an angel of light; (6) 2 Cor 12:7-9: an angel of Satan afflicted me to keep me from pride; (7) Rom 16:20: the God of peace will crush Satan under your feet. He includes one other obvious reference to Satan, in 1 Thess 3:5, where Paul says he feared that "the tempter" (ho peirazōn) had tempted his readers. In addition, B. accepts Paul's question, "What agreement is there between Christ and Beliar?" (2 Cor 6.15), as referring to Satan. Likewise, he takes "the god of this age," who has blinded the minds of unbelievers (2 Cor 4.4) as Satan and uses the designation as the main title of his book. The book consists of seven chapters. The first is an introduction, in which B. outlines the need for the present study and its scope, and in chap. 2 he reviews images of Satan in biblical and Second Temple Jewish traditions. In chap. 3, he deals with apocalypticism and Satan in Pauline theology and, in chap. 4, turns from Satan temporarily to speak of Paul's apostleship and his churches. The next two chapters deal with the epistles and their references to Satan: in chap. 5, B. takes up the last and the first of the epistles (Romans and 1 Thessalonians) and, in chap. 6, the longest chapter, deals with the two letters to the Corinthians. The final chapter is a brief conclusion. In chap. 2, B. proposes to show the ways in which Satan is portrayed: as accuser, originator of evil, ruler, tempter, and active agent in the history of Israel. The "biblical" aspect of B.'s survey covers mainly Job 1–2, Zechariah 3 (the satan accusing the high priest), and 1 Chronicles 21 (a satan inciting David's census). He misses a great opportunity by not drawing on the rich satanic data of the Gospels and the deutero-Pauline and other epistles of the NT, perhaps because he considers them to be after Paul's time. Apart from the Pauline letters he cites in his seven passages, the only NT passage used in this survey [End Page 332] is Rev 12:10, the explanation of the Dragon-Devil as "the accuser of our brethren." At times B. has to resort to "Satan-figures": for instance, naming the lead Watcher angels in the Enoch literature to illustrate Satan as the origin of evil. Brown agrees with many other exegetes that a new idea had recently come on the scene in Paul's time implicating Satan himself in introducing evil into the world, identifying Satan with the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Although Paul was probably aware of the idea, B. argues that he rejected or disregarded it: Satan plays no role in Paul's account of Adam. B.'s case would clearly be much stronger if he were to question the currency of the Satan–Eden connection. The chief prooftext that B. accepts for it is Wis 2:24: "Death entered the world through the envy of a diabolos," taking Adam's sin to be a catastrophic death-dealing event. But this is hardly the wisdom author's meaning, for when he unmistakably refers to Adam, he interprets his transgression as a mere peccadillo, easily rectified by Lady Wisdom. He...