old square toes

I have a question for readers of this blog, both casual and committed. Where do you stand on this whole Satan thing?

Many, if not most, Christians in America regard Satan as chief among the fallen; that is, they believe that Lucifer was created as the highest of all angels, second in power and authority only to God. His status led to pride, and Lucifer led a third of the heavenly host in rebellion against God. They failed, were cast out of heaven, and while they await final judgment, they do what they can to mar God's creation. In short, Lucifer became Satan, the devil; and the angels who rebelled with him became demons.

The difficult thing about this is that it's largely extrabiblical if not unbiblical. The story I just summarized is found in the book "Paradise Lost," by John Milton, and not any of the 66 biblical books Protestant Christians consider to be canon.

The ancient Hebrews considered the Satan to be an agent of God, rather than an evil creature bent on the ruin of God's plans. His job was to take a contrary view so that the truth could be determined through thorough cross-examination, a role much like the "Devil's advocate" we use in argument today.

We see this principally in the book of Job, where ha-Satan comes before the Presence. There is no remonstration or hostility expressed, just the question, "Have you considered my servant Job?" and the response, "Does Job love you for nothing? Look at all you've given him." The result of this challenge is the process just described: God removes all that Job has, and Job continues to worship him.

The role also surfaces in the parallel accounts of the census David took in the latter days of his reign, in 2 Samuel and in 1 Chronicles. In 2 Samuel 24, God incites David to take the census and then smites him; in 1 Chronicles 21, it is Satan who makes the suggestion. You also can see this notion of a heavenly court with advisers in 1 Kings 22, when the prophet Micaiah describes an angel that suggests putting a lying spirit into the mouths of Ahab's prophets so that Ahab will go to battle and be slain.

That view of ha-Satan is not entirely what we see in the New Testament, but that that is largely because we read the New Testament with preconceptions about who Satan is. The tempting in the wilderness is similar in nature to the testing of Job, to see what Jesus is made of.

Even when the Bible tells us about Jesus casting demons out of people, the term is better rendered as "unclean spirits," as the footnotes in the New International Version indicate. The afflictions described in the gospels -- epileptic fits, self-inflicted injury, aphasia -- can be seen as coming from a medical or psychological condition, which also would qualify as an "unclean spirit" in a poetic sense.

As a matter of religious history, the view of Satan as subservient to God did shift to the more familiar dualistic one during the intertestamental "silent period." During this period, Judaism acquired the noton of a devil from Zoroastrianism, another Eastern religion practiced near Judea. It lost the concept shortly after the destruction after the Second Temple, and resumed its previous view, namely that ha-Satan was an officer of the heavenly court, subservient to God.

Precisely because it is late in coming, I think we need to view such a dualist God/Satan view of the world with some suspicion. Don't we say that older revelation is the standard by which we gauge newer revelation?

If it weren't for passages of Scripture like Isaiah 49, which speak of God's desire to bring the Gentiles into his kingdom, or for places like Zechariah 12, which Christians believe foretell the Crucifixion, it would be harder to see a connection between the Tanakh and Christianity as we know it and practice it today.

So tell me, whether you're a regular guest here or a new visitor, what you think. Does the Bible actually teach about a devil, or that somethng we misunderstood and have all wrong?


Copyright 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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gods of ash and stone

A fairly fundamentalist friend recently surprised me by admitting that he believes or is willing to believe the animist notion of dryads, naiads and other such elemental spirits that are familiar to us from Greco-Roman myth.

I admit it's an idea I've toyed with, because of stuff I've read or heard, and just because the geekboy within me finds the idea interesting and strangely compelling. I also like it because it's more nuanced than the fundamentalist view of spirits that "They're all demons."

Lewis actually discussed the notion in "That Hideous Strength," if you've read it. Merlin suggests that he can go out into the woods and glens of England and awaken the slumbering spirits he once dealt with back in the days of Arthur; and Dimble separately muses that such wild spirits could be spirits that haven't yet had to choose sides in the war between heaven and hell, or at least hadn't had to make such a decision during Merlin's time.

And of course if you're familiar with the stories missionaries tell from animist countries, there's invariably tales told of families or villages that were doing obeisance to a spirit. It wasn't an evil or malicious spirit necessarily; quite often it directed them toward good water, advised them on planting crops and so on -- and incidentally the one story I'm thinking of, from Cambodia, deals with a spirit that the family got into a relationship with after disturbing its sacred tree. Anyway, the spirits usually have a good relationship with the family until the missionaries come with the gospel and then, often though not always, the spirits go nuts and start threatening reprisals if people convert. Other times, they just fade out quietly as the family embraces the gospel.

In a larger sense, this is a reflection of what goes on when the gospel explodes in a culture where it was unfamiliar. The change the gospel brings is quite amazing: People who "get" it, who see the story as fulfilling a messianic expectation in their own culture, will see a values shift in terms of morals, justice and spirituality; while those who see it as a threat will start to define themselves in opposition to it. In a sense, those who have been seeking the Truth (or at least who see it) move dramatically toward it and those who prefer the secrecy of darkness move that way. The same perhaps could be said of dryads, naiads and others, for the sake of argument.

But of course, in a larger sociological perspective, we see the exact same phenomenon in conjunction with other socio-messianic movements. The music of The Beatles exploded on America like a small nuke, spiritually and socially. For large chunks of society, the 1960s was a time of redefinition, with utopian aspirations, social responsibility and breaking free of the shackles society had clapped on them. Others saw the cultural revolution spearheaded by The Beatles as a menace to society, and pushed back hard, to the point that rock music was seen as seditious, Lennon himself was regarded as a threat to national security and there was a serious move by the Nixon (?) administration to have him deported; and so on. We still see that divide perpetuated today, in the presidential campaigns, for instance, where McCain scored points with other conservatives by contrasting his service in Vietnam (establishment) with Clinton's identification with the Woodstock/hippie movement (counterculture).

So perhaps we should see "The Giving Tree" as personal revelation from the co-dependent spirits of the woods.

In the Torah, God warns the Israelites not to fall into the ways of the Canaanite people, saying repeatedly that their sins are why he is going to drive them out before the Israelites. There is another time, though, where he says "the land will vomit them out"; suggesting that this isn't just an action on his part but a reaction by the land itself, that the sin of the Canaanite peoples has so violated the natural order that the land itself was in revolt against them. In other words, sin has not just personal and interpersonal consequences, but environmental (in the broader sense than the merely ecological one) consequences as well.

demonology

A friend of mine launches a discussion on the Christian doctrine of demons
1: Do you believe there is such a thing as a literal "demon"? If so, where do you think they came from?
Pittsburgh.

No, seriously, I'd say the testimony of Scripture is pretty clear that there are spiritual entities that are evil, but what they are, doctrines are going to vary. The traditional explanation, which I side with by default, is that demons are fallen angels that took place in a rebellion against God back at the beginning.

That's not entirely stated within Scripture. Christ bears witness that he saw Satan "fall from heaven like lightning," and there is a passage in the book of Revelation that talks about a war in heaven that ended with a third of the stars being cast from the sky. We assign that story to the beginning, but I'm not clear on why, except that it's what we do.

The Greek New Testament calls the spirits Jesus casts out of people "unclean spirits," with no explanation of where they came from, although the spirits recognize Jesus as the Holy One of God and recognize that they have a date with destiny.

The prophet Micah, in 1 Kings, declares that God sent a lying spirit into Ahab's court so that Ahab's prophets would all promise him victory, so that Ahab would go into battle and be killed. The book of Job also has Satan entering the presence of God and giving an accounting of his activities to God. So while Scripture clearly indicates that Satan is in opposition to God's kingdom and his plan, it also shows that he is subject to him, which makes for a different sort of rebellion than we usually imagine.

There was a school of thinking among the ancient Hebrews that Satan was a servant of God whose job was to take the opposite view and be (you'll pardon the phrase) the Devil's Advocate. That certainly seems to be one of the functions he has.

But yes, I believe in demons and devils, even though I won't claim to know definitively and exactly what they are.

Do you think that "demon-possession" is often a case of a misunderstanding of a health problem, either physical or psychological? Are tales of such things from the Bible a superstitious view based on incomplete understanding by the authors?

I think there's some overlap. Some people are like Father Zosima in the Brothers Karamazov, who saw more devils than hell could hold. To them, any head cold or missed parking space is an attack by Old Scratch. Other people believe everything has a natural cause and completely disbelieve in angelic or demonic beings -- what Lewis called the two equal but opposite errors concerning the Devil.

Sometimes mental illness is demonic affliction. Other times it's just mental illness. Same is true for physical ailments, I would say.

Just because something has a physical cause doesn't mean it's rooted solely in the physical world. The natural world is a subset of the supernatural world, and so the supernatural world is able to affect the natural world we live in, in ways that we cannot perceive, just as our physical activities have repercussions in the spiritual world.

So to answer your question, my short answer is No, and my long answer is Yes, but.

Demon possession seemed to be very common in Jesus' time, at least compared to today. Why do you think that is? Is it because of the sort of misunderstanding mentioned above, or were there other issues at work? Do you think maybe the stories are a metaphor?

Like everything else in the Bible, the accounts of deliverance from demonic possession are layered with meaning and can be interpreted correctly in several different lights. I believe they happened pretty much as described.

As to the explosion in demonic activity, I'd say it's because of Christ's grand entrance onto the world stage. The world and its people didn't notice much at first, but in the spiritual world Mary's pregnancy was a rock that shattered mighty empires into dust that blew away, and then grew into a mountain that covered the earth.

And I'd say demonic activity is just as pronounced now as in New Testament times, but I think we're inclined to disbelieve it because we're more enlightened.

I've been through demonic oppression. I know other people who have been. I know two people who claim to have been demon possessed, and a few others who claim to have cast demons out of people. (I'm sure someone's going to make charges of crackpottery, but there you have it.)

Interesting points: The Greek word we translate as "possession" also gets translated as "anointing" when it's used to describe the Holy Spirit and his effect upon Christians. Thus it's not possession as much as it is an unholy anointing of sin, or, as could be said, "demonization."

Other interesting point: The New Testament authors used the same word to describe Jesus casting out demons as they did to describe what he did to the money changers in the temple.

Do you think it's possible that even modern medical problems, fully understood by medical science, are in some way physical manifestations of spiritual conflicts?
I already answered this, but yes, I do.

For example, I have a severe case of psoriasis. It covers about 20 percent of my body. The biological causes of psoriasis are all well documented: hyperactive immune system from not being breastfed as an infant, stress factors, skin damage, weight problems, zinc shortage, blah blah blah.

Let me focus on the stress factor. Do you think just maybe that there could be something even slightly demonic that could trigger a stress attack and lead to a flareup in psoriasis? That's a minor thing, of course, and I'm not saying that Satan has given me a severe case of psoriasis, but I do think it could be a physical side effect of something else like a spiritual attack that has nothing to do with the health of my skin.