Leslie Weatherhead: The Will of God 3

Leslie D. Weatherhead, The Will of God © 1944; © renewed, 1972

Chapter 3: God’s Ultimate Will—part 1

The discussion moderator began:

Weatherhead begins by rehashing the three divisions of God"s will, as in chapters 1 and 2. Yet he offers an interesting perspective of our ability to choose and free will. How does this mesh with your view of choice and free will?

Then he asked,

Do you believe in a Devil as an actual being? Or do you believe in a metaphorical Satan--a personal adversary that can combine with other personal adversaries to create a greater, collective evil that we've seen repeatedly throughout history?

Actually, I don’t know, but I do believe in spirits of evil in the way Walter Wink talks about them in his Powers trilogy, as he draws upon deuteroPaul of Colossians and Ephesians as well as discussing the Spirits (the "Angels") of the Seven Churches in Revelation. And personally, some (most?) of us do what feels like near-constant battle with demons of various kinds, many of which very definitely live independent lives of their own--lives that seem to be ego-dystonic, something completely outside of us that inflicts themselves upon us. Not being an expert on knowledge of the bodily existence of - or the embodiment of - evil, I do think there's a real sense in which the sum of the parts frequently is greater than any of the elements of the parts: in plain English, "synergistic!"