I'm not sure who Timothy Tutt is other than being the senior minister of Westmoreland Congregational United Church of Christ and author of this piece denying the existence of Satan:
The devil is a fascinating fellow. He has argued a court case against Daniel Webster, gone down to Georgia, and worn a blue dress. And he’s getting a lot of press these days.
At Harvard, a student group planned, then cancelled, a mock mass worshiping the devil. The Archbishop of Boston responded with a warning about the Satan’s powers. And as the Washington Post reported, the devil is making a comeback in the Vatican, thanks to what some see as Pope Francis’ frequent allusions to the devil and support of exorcists who seek to rid us of the devil.
A 2013 YouGov poll found that 57 percent of Americans believe the devil exists. A 2007 Harris poll found that more Americans believed in the devil than believed in Darwin’s theory of evolution.
I’m just the pastor of local church in a small-ish denomination, so it may be folly to go against the majority of a polled public and a popular pontiff. (The pope has the prestige of an international pulpit, the history of the Roman Catholicism, and a cadre of theologians to support his views.) But it’s time to be clear: the devil does not exist.
He goes on and ends with this:
Focusing on a made-up devil as the agent of evil distracts us from the hard work of confronting our own wrongdoing.
I think it less than coincidental that on the same day I found Mr. Tutt's piece, I found this over at Crisis Magazine written by Howard Kainz:
Distilling some of the ideas in my book on Thomistic angelology, I published a previous column in Crisis on the massive intelligence and powers of angels. The flip-side of these spiritual faculties, as Aquinas points out, is the existence of a dark kingdom, using the same intelligence and power to prevent the spread of God’s kingdom, get more recruits, and consolidate the powers of evil in the world. In Luke 4:7, Satan declares that power over the kingdoms of the world have been delivered to him, and he offers Jesus a share in this power, if only Jesus would worship him; Jesus avoids the temptation, but does not contradict Satan’s claim of power. With some restrictions, the power is there. The spiritual panorama we are facing includes extraordinarily intelligent, gifted, influential and murderous demons capable of outsmarting all the forces of “the other side.”
Contemporaries of Pope Leo XIII have mentioned the Pope’s account of a vision of Satan, asking for and receiving permission to subject the Church to a test of fidelity for 100 years. Whether this vision is factual or not, future popes have certainly discerned diabolical opposition—one thinks of Pope Paul VI’s warning about the “smoke of Satan” in the Church, and Pope Francis’ recent remarks ascribing the persecution of Christians to the devil, and exhorting “Let us renounce Satan and all his works and seductions because he is a seducer.”
We should not lose sight of the tremendous advantages that Satan has in his project of subverting the Church—with the unflagging help of human minions bent on exterminating Christianity, and even sometimes aided by great numbers of well-meaning Christians and Christian leaders, anxious for the Church to gain secular acceptance.
Father Robert Barron has lots to say about the Devil in the video that follows:
Timothy Tutt, to come full circle, is clearly fooled and by his foolishness is being used as a tool.
Don't be fooled by a tool.
[Image source, yet another tool]
