While Professor Henry Kelly began studying God and the Bible to become a priest, he now studies Satan to better understand the biblical figure.
A UCLA English professor emeritus, Kelly was training to be a Jesuit priest when he was younger and found many inconsistencies between the current depiction of Satan as the horned, evil ruler of hell and the Satan that was described in the Bible.
So instead of becoming ordained as a priest, he decided to study Satan at the academic level, and has done so for more than 40 years.
“I thought the history of the devil had been done very badly and I wanted to set the record straight and purify religion,” Kelly said.
Andrea Jones, a UCLA graduate student in English, said after taking one of Kelly’s classes she walked away with a different understanding of the devil.
“Part of what he’s interested in is getting back to the roots of what Satan is supposed to mean theologically,” Jones said. “Satan is not supposed to be something external to us and evil isn’t this single force that resides outside of us but something that is in each and every one of us in one way or another.”
Kelly plans to give a talk today titled “Satan, Hell and Limbo” as part of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies roundtable lecture series. He said he will discuss the different faces and phases the devil has had throughout history, as well as the different levels of hell: limbo of the fathers, purgatory, limbo of the infants and hell itself.
Kelly said these levels were added by different religious figures at different points in history due to concerns over the traditional definition of hell, such as the idea that babies who had not been baptized would go to hell.
“I want (the audience) to get a fresh look at the history of Satan and the ideas of punishment and reward after death and the unreasonableness of some of the doctrines such as eternal hell and inherited guilt,” the ordained exorcist said.
“When you ask people if they believe in Satan, they think of the evil Satan. But if they believe in the Satan that is written in the Bible, he’s not the really bad Lucifer character invented afterward.”
Kelly describes Satan as the bad cop in a good cop/bad cop situation, calling Satan cynical but not evil.
“Satan as the rebel against God was not in the Bible. He’s just doing his job, he’s been appointed as governor of the world. ... He’s not the enemy, he’s not some sort of a villain,” Kelly said.
Kelly also said he believes evil cannot be attached to an entity.
“I don’t believe in evil. It’s an adjective and it doesn’t help to talk about a personification of evil. I want to take away this Prince of Evil and reinterpret him as part of the architecture of the world,” he said.
Kelly said he is interested in going back to where the concept of Satan began and ignoring the current interpretation in order to get a clearer understanding of how Satan was presented in the Bible.
“I think (Kelly’s) demonstrated quite nicely that there is a great deal of evidence that the figure of Satan as we’ve come to understand him (is) an interpretation,” Jones said.
Though Kelly’s scholarship has taken him down an academic path rather than a religious one, as he had originally planned, he still has held onto his faith.
“I believe in God,” Kelly said. “And I’d like to believe in heaven and purgatory, which I describe as a temporary hell.”
Kelly, a self-proclaimed “diabologian,” a term he coined to describe his field of study, just completed a biography of Satan, his third book on the subject. The book traces the history of Satan from its beginnings in the Old Testament through its representation in the New Testament, and how the image of Satan evolved from one of God’s governors to the Prince of Evil. Dorothy Kim, a graduate student in English, said she is excited for the book’s future, as there has been talk about making it into a movie.
“I love the fact that (the book’s title) is ‘Satan: A Biography.’ I’d be really pleased if a movie happened,” Kim said. While Kelly said he has received largely enthusiastic feedback, he also said he has faced criticism from some fundamentalists.
“Fundamentalists’ automatic reaction is to say I’m going against what is written in the Bible,” Kelly said. “But what I’m doing is actually advocating the literal reading of the Bible. So they are the ones who are going against the letter.”
After all his research, Kelly said he concluded the current depiction of Satan is not comparable to the Satan in the Bible and the biblical Satan is not evil, nor is he the nemesis of God.
“The devil is not God’s enemy,” Kelly said. “He hasn’t been punished by God and therefore he is not in hell and he’s not in charge of hell. If Satan isn’t in charge of hell, who is?”