Biblical scholar is endorsing some sympathy for the devil
Satan isn't pure evil, Henry Ansgar Kelly says -- he's just one of God's employees.
Manya A. Brachear
Chicago Tribune
Posted September 2, 2006

For centuries, popular culture has treated Satan as God's nemesis -- an angel consumed by pride and cast out of heaven to run his own evil empire.

But Henry Ansgar Kelly says Satan has gotten a bad rap. For decades, Kelly has pleaded the devil's case, arguing Satan is simply one of God's celestial agents with the dirty job of gauging humanity's virtue.

Though that job has made Satan cynical and jaded, Kelly says, it doesn't make him the mastermind of evil.

"Christian tradition has laid a lot of blame on Satan for things they're causing themselves," says Kelly, 72, a former Jesuit exorcist and now a medieval scholar at the University of California at Los Angeles. "I am pessimistic about human nature. I think we are totally capable of doing what we have done. You can blame it on psychosis if you want.

"But you can't blame it on Satan, he says. the rest