Word: devilment
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...last model that first caught on. For roughly a thousand years, the church fathers seem to have viewed Christ's suffering and dying less as salvation's all-important tragic fulcrum than as one more necessary step in God's triumphant campaign into the human world and, eventually, the devil's precincts. They saw the incarnation and the Resurrection as far more important to reconciliation and a new start for humanity. In fact, a position close to this is still maintained by the world's 250 million Eastern Orthodox Christian believers, rendering them less susceptible than most to extended images...
When the early church fathers did pick up on the scriptural language of Christ's death as a ransom, the payee was not God but the devil, who some felt had legitimate claim on humanity because of Adam's fall. But others preferred another scenario: to see the Crucifixion and Jesus' subsequent descent into what they called Hades as a kind of divine bait-and-switch scheme, whereby the devil thought he had claimed a particularly virtuous human victim only to discover he had allowed into his sanctum the power that would eventually wrest humanity back from his grasp...
...formidable supernatural force--of invisible kingdoms battling above our heads and below our feet. That conception survives in Martin Luther's great hymn A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, in the Revelation-based Left Behind books and in the eerie getting-to-know-you scene between Christ and the devil that opens Gibson's film. But it did not come to define Western Christianity's majority understanding of the meaning of Christ's death. That honor went to a theory developed by Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who in 1098 wrote one of the most influential theological tracts ever penned...
...grownup world of realpolitik is all about compromise and lesser evil and deals with the devil in pursuit of limited objectives; it's simply na?ve to imagine that principle tops expedience in the pursuit of national security objectives . Still, it's worth asking - as the Israelis have done over Hamas - whether it was possible, in the 1980s, to visualize the long-term consequences of the "Arab Afghan" program. If we focus only on an immediate objective and our sense of history is measured in months, we may, unfortunately, be doomed, sooner or later, to repeat...
...might say that through history Times Square has been a cyclotron of social change, a place where sex and liquor and talent all spun around to produce some truly phosphorescent elements of the national disposition. That's the history that James Traub tells in The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (Random House; 313 pages). It's a shrewd and rollicking account of a place that rose to glory as a playground for all classes, skidded into a chaos of drugs and porn, and has come back as a family fun center. Traub...