Christian theodicy posed the question of evil and of the Devil more sharply than ever before. The figure of Satan in the New Testament is comprehensible only when it is seen as the counterpart, or counterprinciple, of Christ. Generations of socially oriented theologians dismissed the Devil and the demons as superstitious relics of little importance to the Christian message. On the contrary, the New Testament writers had a sharp sense of the immediacy of evil. The Devil is not a peripheral concept that can easily be discarded without doing violence to the essence of Christianity. He stands at the center of the New Testament teaching that the Kingdom of God is at war with, and is now at last defeating, the Kingdom of the Devil. The Devil is essential in the New Testament because he constitutes an important alternative in Christian theodicy.
(Jeffrey Burton Russell, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity [Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977], 222 [footnote omitted])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 