Handing them over to Satan: two cautionary tales

Theologically I am committed to a pretty deep pessimism about human nature. Original sin and all that. The belief that history is not headed anywhere and does not mean anything; that things do not generally improve; that the real problems of life are intractable and almost completely resistant to our flimsy toys of reason, education, therapy, and whatnot; that the only thing really worth hoping for is the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.

Temperamentally, though, I am an outrageous optimist. I won't be lying if I tell you that I have probably felt optimistic about every human being I ever met. I once knew a mad and rather menacing individual who told me with a scary gleam in his eye that he had been investigated for several murders – and all I could think was that I liked his roguish sense of humour. I was once mugged by a ruthless fellow who threatened me and took a fifty dollar bill right out of my hand – and the whole time I just kept thinking to myself: he is probably doing it to buy his child a birthday present. I have shaken hands with professors of French philosophy, and have been quite willing to believe that even they are not altogether devoid of some residual spark of human goodness.

I say this only to make it perfectly clear that I am not easily angered or disillusioned with my fellow man. He does not disappoint me, because I expect so little of human nature to begin with; he does not disgust me, because I assume the best of him and am always willing to give him another chance. Nobody is beyond redemption, and nobody is above the need for it. My boundless confidence in these two truths makes me, as a rule, quite agreeable.

And yet. There is a chilling scene in the New Testament where St Paul casually mentions that he has handed a couple of his associates over to Satan (1 Tim 1.20). He instructs the Corinthians to hand a certain troublesome parishioner over to Satan too (1 Cor 5.5). That's at least three people who were entrusted to Satan's diabolical care. It's a serious business to deliver a fellow human being into the welcoming arms of the Prince of Darkness. I myself have done it on occasion – on two occasions, to be precise – and it's no laughing matter, believe me. It kind of enervates the spirit, even though when the moment strikes there's no avoiding it.

The first time I ever had to do it was some years ago. A Christian minister, an acquaintance of mine, was preaching a sermon against family values. I cannot recall exactly what he disliked about families, but the gist of it was that he admired them about as much as kidney stones. I guess the family was one of those things that had to be squeezed out before this preacher's Marxiose-revolutionist-liberationary dreams could all come true. To explain the problem with families, the preacher embarked on a very entertaining satirical description of a certain conservative middle-class suburb. He was rather funny, pouring scorn on all the spiritual emptiness and hypocrisy of suburban life. He pronounced the name of the suburb with a kind of sneer that got funnier every time he did it. He had the congregation rolling, positively LOLing, with merriment. He persuaded everybody that this particular suburb was a spectacle worthy of all imaginable ridicule.

The only trouble, reader, was that it was my suburb. I take my shoes off there every night. My dog takes his walks there. My children serve their school detentions there. Some of my dearest neighbours live there. They knock on my door when they need to borrow milk or eggs. They feed the fish when we are away. To the preacher it looked like a funny old-fashioned conservative-voting suburb, but to me it is a community. To me it is people, and I'm pretty fond of them too. If the preacher had spent fifteen hilarious minutes making fun of me, I would have laughed with everyone else and forgotten all about it. But he made fun of my neighbourhood. 

I knew what I had to do. Silently I turned the light of my countenance away from him. Solemnly I consigned him to a spiritual darkness. I handed him over to Satan, hoping that one day he would repent and I would be able to look at him once more.

The second time it happened was even worse. I cannot call the incident to mind without feeling deeply shaken. Even now I can scarcely bring myself to speak of it. It all began innocently enough. A conversation with a learned gentleman about the theatre. Not just any learned gentleman either but a real scholar, an author of books, and not just any books either, but big ones. We exchanged pleasantries about the history of theatre. We chatted about the Greeks. We were enjoying ourselves. Inevitably the conversation turned to Shakespeare. I professed a particular devotion to The Tempest, explaining that I admire the way that play lays bare the essential machinery of the theatre. It is like the Eiffel Tower, I said, a building that exposes to plain view all the engineering that other buildings try to conceal. The Tempest is the quintessential play about plays; it is not so much a play as the blueprint of all drama, the pure Platonic form of Shakespearean comedy, history, and tragedy.

Believe me, reader, I had more to say on this subject of the The Tempest. I was only getting started. Comparisons to eternal forms are only the beginning. You should hear me when I really get going. But at exactly this moment the learned gentleman did a curious thing. He wrinkled his nose. He kind of sniffed in a sniffy sort of way, if you know what I mean. He said, with an air of infinite detachment and world-weariness, "Shakespeare? Ah but have you read the Arabic dramatists? Not to mention the German dramatists. And how much, tell me, how much do you know about the Chinese theatre? Not just the contemporary stuff but the history of it, the history I say. Ah, Chinese drama! Now there's something worth knowing about! You see, my dear fellow," he continued, regarding me with the profoundest boredom in the world, "you see, Shakespeare can't possibly mean anything until you've read everything else. You need to see him in his proper context. Otherwise there's no point saying you love Shakespeare. It's nothing but British imperialism, that's what it is. It's nothing more than –" he cleared his throat in a decisive, disgusted sort of way – "ignorant prejudice."

Very carefully I located the parts of myself from the floor and gingerly began piecing them back together. I wanted to get to the door as quickly as possible but I also had to tread very carefully in case the earth opened up underneath us. I remember the time, as a boy, when I had first experimented with swearing. I whispered the four-letter words reverentially and waited for lightning to strike or for angels to appear in the sky or for the world to collapse in on itself. I felt the same way now, more or less. A fellow human being, made in God's own image, had just described the love of Shakespeare as – it pains me to have to repeat the words – imperialism; ignorance; prejudice.

Now personally I don't mind being insulted. I am as imperial and as ignorant and as prejudicial as the next person. Insult me as much as you like, I deserve every syllable! But my learned interlocutor had not wanted to insult me; that was clear. It was against Shakespeare – which is to say, against Humanity – that his scorn was directed.

If there had been dust on my feet I would have shaken it off. I wanted nothing more to do with this man. I had nothing else to say to him. I had no good news to tell him. He wanted to see Shakespeare "in context": well, let him keep his context, and I will keep Shakespeare! He wanted to peer down his aristocratic nose at the entire human race: well, let him keep his higher vantage point, but I will stick with the human race! Though I loved this person, though I had always respected him, though I admired his learning in the non-Shakespearean departments, I resolved that I would never speak to him again. I would do nothing else for him except to pray for his soul. In a nutshell, I handed him over to Satan so that he might learn not to blaspheme.

Now I know what the moralists out there are thinking. That I should stop handing people over to Satan. That I should forgive and forget. Shake hands and make a fresh start and all that. Leave Beelzebub out of it. Hear me, you moralisers! Listen to me! If you insult me, slander me, criticise my haircut and spit in my eye, I will forgive you quick as a flash. If you pounce on me out of the shadows and take my fifty dollar bill, I will never give it a second thought. If you tell me you might possibly have murdered a few people I will still go on believing the best of you. But don't come to me with malicious words about my neighbourhood! Don't bring me your "contexts" for understanding Shakespeare! For when you do these things, you set yourself above the common human lot. And then you force my hand: for I am all on the side of humanity. If the gods themselves took your side, I would still be unmoved. I would stand right here – with Shakespeare; with humanity; with my neighbours – against all gods.

The Judaeological argument for the existence of the devil

I know it's an unedifying question, but has anyone ever tried to construct an argument to prove the existence of the devil? I've wondered about this from time to time. Perhaps one way of proving the existence of the devil might go something like this:

(1) Let the devil be defined as intelligent evil.
(2) Most of what we call evil is random and chaotic.
(3) But a pattern of purpose or design in evil would be evidence of the devil.
(4) An observable phenomenon: In modern political thought, the extreme Right and the extreme Left tend to converge on one common point: anti-Semitism.
(5) The arrival of antithetical systems of thought at exactly the same destination – a quite precise form of hatred – is evidence of purpose, or design.
(6) Therefore the devil exists.

OK, I know it's not exactly an iron-clad proof. But there's my rough sketch of the Judaeological Argument for the Existence of the Devil.

Devilish doodlings

by Kim Fabricius

Cardinal George Pell –

Death by climate – went to hell.

The archbishop, frying, said, “Jesus, it’s hot!”

The devil, denying, said, “Hot?  No, it’s not.”

What is the difference between Global Warming Denial and Holocaust Denial? Both are ideologically motivated and doctrinaire, overwhelmingly from the right. Informing both is quack science, and sustaining both are bogus statistics. Both concern anthropogenic phenomena reliant for their implementation on exceptional technological sophistication and public moral indifference. Both consolidate their identities by appealing to conspiracies against them. But here is a difference: the number of deaths due to Global Warming will finally, sickeningly, far surpass the Eight Million.

Certainly a great deal, if not all, human evil is a product of the inferiority complex.  Satan is the archetypal case.  He wreaks his havoc because, due to self-esteem issues, his “sense of injur’d merit” (Paradise Lost, I/98), he’s soooo pissed off.

The problem with writing fiction about Satan is that it’s really hard to make him the minor character he is.

Satan is the supreme intellectual. Sexual sarxian vices are mere peccadilloes compared to the sins of feverish cogitation. Of course, Satan may come on as a sexual predator, and boast of his amorous exploits, but remember, he is a liar. In fact, the Devil is impotent.

Being “spiritual” but not religious, and averse to the somatic, the material, and the quotidian messy – these too are characteristic of the demonic.  Satan – OCD for sure.

On Judgement Day, God will ask us not what we have done, or what we believe, but what we desire, what we love.

“Unforgiven Sinners” is any empty set.  If there are any sinners in hell, it is not because they are unforgiven but unforgiving – of themselves as well as others. 

Acknowledgements I’d like to see in a book on theodicy: “I dedicate this book to Satan, without whom it could not have been written. God, of course, carries the can for all the many errors it no doubt contains.”

What is the Free-Will Defence but the title of a theological Just So Story that for the liberal theodicist lets God off the hook of the Holocaust, and for the Arminian infernologist lets God off the hook of Hell?  And this is supposed to be a win-win discourse?  The apotheosis of human “choice” on the one hand, and either a morally repugnant or an impotent deity on the other? 

In the parable of the Unjust Steward (Luke 16:1-8), Jesus (in)famously praises a crook for his sense of urgency, presence of mind, dedication, resourcefulness, and cunning.  A contemporary version might be called the parable of the Desperate Junkie.

When God told Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of the knowledge-of-good-and-evil tree, he was saying that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

John cried, “Repent!”, not “Repaint.”  Not “Change the decor”, but “Here comes the wrecking ball!”

Mirabile dictu: thirty years of ministry and I’m still a Christian.  I put it down to the suffering and sorrow I have seen and shared, and to the unpleasant confrontations with intellectual and moral squalor. With a not altogether ungrudging nod to the Holy Spirit.

You can always spot an optimist: they are the ones who laugh at their own jokes.

“O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers …”

Jeez, I see a bunch of constellations like Orion and Cassiopeia named after pagan mythical figures.  And what’s with the Babylonian/Egyptian astrological signs, a goat, a crab, a scorpion …? 

O Lord, our Sovereign, how crummy is your astronomical marketing technique!

Despair is God’s strange way of keeping faith honest.

Happiness is a banquet for sharing; sorrow is a meal-for-one, picked at alone.

“Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables; without a parable he told them nothing” (Matthew 13:34).  And the scribes and Pharisees said, “We’ve been counting the number times you use the word ‘Yahweh’ and ‘faith’ in your stories.  The concordance does not look good.  Furthermore, you seem reluctant to tell the crowds ‘The Torah says …’ on a whole raft of issues.  This excision of God from your manifesto is a scandalous affront to the national narrative. We’ll be endorsing Caiaphas.”

It is (as Eliot observed) a sign of faith’s decay when the Bible is judged on its artistic merits – and (I would add) when church music isn’t.

“Hey Jesus,” said Satan to Jesus at Golgotha, “the Romans are about to round up your disciples, rape your mother and sisters, and torch the town of Nazareth. And you’re just gonna hang there?”

Question: What is the “invisible church”? Answer: The Christian Right.

If the famous parable of Jesus were an allegory of religion and American politics, the brigands who mug the nation/world and leave it for dead would be the Religious Right, the passing priest and Levite would be Democrats, and the Good Samaritan would be – an atheist.

God invented the church to give atheists a fighting chance.

Once there were the New Atheists. Now there are the New New Atheists. Sort of like the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea. Prognosticating from the membership of the Popular Front of Judea, I suppose we can look forward to the Post New New Atheist. 

Stringfellow on American leaders

“The … ingenious aggressions of the principalities against human life in society, the victimisation of human beings … by the demonic powers exposes a crucial aspect of the contemporary American social crisis. The American problem is not so simple that it can be attributed to a few – or even many – evil men in high places…. Our men in high places are not exceptionally immoral; they are, on the contrary, quite ordinarily moral. In truth, the conspicuous moral fact about our generals, our industrialists, our scientists, our commercial and political leaders is that they are the most obvious and pathetic prisoners in American society. There is unleashed among the principalities in this society a ruthless, self-proliferating, all-consuming institutional process which assaults … and destroys human life even among, and primarily among, those persons in positions of institutional leadership. They are left with titles but without effectual authority; with the trappings of power, but without control over the institutions they head; in nominal command, but bereft of dominion…. The most poignant victim of the demonic in America today is the so-called leader” (An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, pp. 88-89).

A children's Lenten hymn

In case you missed it, the other day Saint Egregious 
posted this hilarious little hymn in a comments thread – here it is again, for your edification and for the edification of your children:

(Sung to Old MacDonald)

Mean old Satan was a grump, e-i-e-i-o

Sat sweet Jesu on a hickory stump, e-i-e-i-o

With a tempt-tempt here and a tempt-tempt there

Here a tempt there a tempt, everywhere a tempt-tempt

Mean old Satan was a grump, e-i-e-i-o



Told Sweet Jesu he could be rich, e-i-e-i-o

Sweet Baby J ’buked that sonofabitch, e-i-e-i-o

With a left hook here and a right cross there, 

Here a bam, there a blam, everywhere a slam-slam

Man that body cast sure do itch, e-i-e-i-o

Is fashion a demonic power?

In Karl Barth’s discussion of the “lordless powers” (published in the Church Dogmatics lecture fragments, The Christian Life), there is a delightfully funny analysis of the way “fashion” operates as a demonic power. Here, fashion is placed alongside other humorous principalities such as sport, transport, and technology. Here’s what he has to say about fashion (p. 229):

“Who or what really determines fashion – the fashion to which man thinks he must obediently subject clothes, headgear, and hairstyle, the alternation of assurance and then of exposure first to the rather sympathetic astonishment and then to the horror and amusement of those who think they must follow the new fashion? How is it that women’s fashions change so much more quickly and solemnly and intensively than men’s? Why does it seem to be to even the most sensible women, if not an act of lese majesty, at least an impossibility to be old-fashioned?

“Who wants it this way? The particular industry that tirelessly makes money out of it and whose kings, we are told, reside especially in Paris? But who has made these people the kings? What is it that has always made this industry so lucrative? How has it come about that since the end of the eighteenth century men’s clothing has become so monotonous and uninteresting? Conversely, how has it come about that world history might be presented from the standpoint of the sequence in which men have thought that they should shave or not shave their faces or adorn them with the boldest or most hideous arrangements of hair? Who inspires and directs these processes, which are not a matter of indifference to the feeling for life and all that it implies? If it is a matter of rapidly changing taste, what released spirit of the earth pulls the strings so that this fancy passes, another which is anxiously watched by millions comes and prevails, and then after a while it too departs?”

Devil's advocate: on reincarnating Milton's Satan

If you were to ask who is the greatest of all fictional characters, then Milton’s Satan would have to be very close to the top of the list. The Satan of Paradise Lost (1667) is an utterly powerful and singular character – and he has cast a long shadow over subsequent literary history. Thus some of our greatest modern characters (e.g. Melville’s Ahab) are in fact precisely reincarnations of Milton’s Satan.

But my own favourite contemporary incarnation of Milton’s Satan is found not in literature, but in the 1997 film Devil’s Advocate. The Satan-character in this film (a lawyer named “John Milton”) is modelled very closely on Paradise Lost, and he is brilliantly brought to life by Al Pacino. Like Milton’s Satan, this lawyer is above all a rhetorician – he loves to make long, egocentric speeches. He’s fascinated by himself and by his own unique place in the cosmos: “I’m the hand up Mona Lisa’s skirt. I’m a surprise, Kevin. They don’t see me coming.”

Like Milton’s Satan, this Satan-figure is a champion of human rights and freedoms: “I’ve nurtured every sensation man’s been inspired to have. I cared about what he wanted and I never judged him. Why? Because I never rejected him. In spite of all his imperfections, I’m a fan of man! I’m a humanist. Maybe the last humanist.” Yep, this Satan is one hell of a nice guy.

Further, he is, like Milton’s Satan, a seductive tempter who is always whispering in someone’s ear, enticing people with promises of becoming like God: “You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire; you build egos the size of cathedrals; fibre-optically connect the world to every eager impulse; grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green, gold-plated fantasies, until every human becomes an aspiring emperor, becomes his own God – and where can you go from there?”

The big difference, however, is that Al Pacino’s Satan is a rapacious womaniser, whereas Milton’s Satan is (more profoundly) a sexually impotent voyeur who is tormented by the sight of Adam and Eve’s lovemaking. And Devil’s Advocate would have been a much better film if Satan had turned out to be impotent (like the sadomasochistic Frank Booth in Blue Velvet).

Anyway, the most creative and most insightful aspect of Devil’s Advocate is that, while Milton’s Satan was depicted as a heroic parliamentary leader, Al Pacino’s Satan is the head of a big New York law firm. He is a lawyer through and through, “always negotiating.” Indeed, he is nothing less than a pure embodiment of law itself.

Thus this Satan tells his son: “the law, my boy, puts us into everything. It’s the ultimate backstage pass, it’s the new priesthood, baby! Did you know there are more students in law school than lawyers walking the earth? We’re coming out, guns blazing! The two of you, all of us, acquittal after acquittal after acquittal – until the stench of it reaches so high and far into heaven, it chokes the whole fucking lot of them!”

This is superb satire (and we all love to satirise lawyers), but it’s also a profoundly Miltonic twist – a direct identification of law with the Satanic, and thus a paradoxical identity between law and lawlessness. And it’s hard not to be reminded here of the challenging Pauline thought that even God’s own law can become one of the demonic “cosmic elements” (Gal. 4:3, 9) which enact human enslavement. In the same way, do not our contemporary “rights” and “freedoms” function precisely as a cosmic Law whose sole aim is to reduce us to the status of consumer-slaves – i.e., is there not here, too, a precise identity between Law and the demonic?

The mentally handicapped and the demonic

A guest-post by Scott Stephens

Anyone wanting to poke fun at the naïveté of the first-century worldview – and by implication the biblical texts shaped by it – will sooner or later bring up the “primitive” belief that those suffering from a mental affliction are actually beset by demons. As unremarkable as this jibe is, the comparisons that inevitably follow between their worldview and our own are even less interesting.

For instance: while the first-century world is full of magic, myths and demons, the modern world is determined by rationality, hard science and medicine. And so, whereas the ancients used exorcism to deal with mental illness, we use medication, precise treatment programs and various forms of supported accommodation. The implicit judgment that drives these comparisons is the superiority and benevolence of modern science and the health-care system, versus the cruel, more ancient practice of ostracising the sick from civic life.

But is the difference quite so clear-cut? As soon as it’s pressed, this double reduction (modern benevolence versus primitive cruelty) collapses.

To begin with, earliest Christianity – in which designation I include Jesus himself – did not simply accept the superstitions and religious palliatives supplied by its cultural surroundings. Instead, it consistently exhibited a remarkable capacity for theological imagination and an ethical intensity that released it from the clutches of nationalist idolatry and merciless ritual practices. The ethical freedom of early Christianity is nowhere better demonstrated than in the radical way that it presents and uses the notion of “the demonic”. Far from simply accepting the existence of malevolent, individuated personalities as an easy explanation for a variety of ailments, the Christian texts identify demonic influences as an effective mechanism of cultural and political critique.

For instance, in Mark’s Gospel, the commencement of Jesus’ public activity – in the form of the announcement of the redefined kingdom of God – is punctuated by the presence of “a man with an unclean spirit” in the synagogue. It is as if the Jewish religious system itself, governed by the demands of holiness and ritual exclusions, is possessed by something antagonistic to the presence of the kingdom of God. Similarly, it is hard not to pick up the political overtones in Mark’s episode concerning the Gerasene demoniac. As Dominic Crossan observes: “The demon is both one and many; is named Legion, that fact and sign of Roman power.” Toward the end of Luke’s Gospel, the nocturnal arrest of Jesus is depicted as the proper activity of “the power of darkness.”

And in Paul’s writings, not only are the Roman rulers reduced to impotent “powers” that cravenly plotted to execute Jesus, but the Jewish Torah itself is described as belonging to the stoicheia, the dark, elemental forces that exert their chaotic influence on this world.

What is crucial to notice here is the way that the demonic influence is mediated through political and religious structures as the means by which individuals are subjugated, humiliated, excluded, dehumanised. The message of the gospel is that these powers have been emasculated (as Karl Barth put it, demons “are null and void, but they are not nothing”), and that their effects must be opposed in the same manner by which they were defeated: in faith and by love. The powers are thus to be taken seriously, but disregarded as an act of faith. Here again, Barth captures the spirit of the Christian critique perfectly:

“Demons are only the more magnified if they are placed in a framework of the conflict between a modern and an ancient system.… The demythologisation which will really hurt them as required cannot consist in questioning their existence. Theological exorcism must be an act of the unbelief which is grounded in faith.”

The Christian attitude toward demonic powers, then, was not simple acceptance of their existence and influence on the world, much less a kind of primitive heuristic device for explaining what now is the domain of medicine. Instead, it represented a vital critique of those political, religious and even bureaucratic systems that subjugate the masses, and thus manifest a terrifying yet anonymous form of Evil.

But this sword cuts both ways. Just as the New Testament texts are neither naïve nor homogeneous in the way they speak of demons, our own world is hardly free from “demonic” influences.

What is needed is the theological clarity and moral courage to be able to identify these influences as such. And one need look no further than the diabolical effects that political neglect and bureaucratic indifference continue to have on the quality of mental health care. The dehumanising forces endemic within the mental health care system stretch from the woeful levels of funding – designed to maintain an already exceedingly tenuous status quo – to the high rate of staff turnover due to burnout and work-related stress. But Stanley Hauerwas has gone further, suggesting that the care of the mentally handicapped exposes the deep contradiction at the heart of liberal humanism:

“No group exposes the pretensions of the humanism that shapes the practices of modernity more thoroughly than the mentally handicapped. Our humanism entails we care for them once they are among us, once we are stuck with them; but the same humanism cannot help but think that, all things considered, it would be better if they did not exist.”

In his terrifying masterpiece of theological journalism, Hostage to the Devil, Malachi Martin insisted that it is the exorcist himself that must play the role of “the devil’s hostage”, by placing himself between the victim and the demon, by being an advocate for the one who has no capacity to resist. This is precisely the kind of faithful advocacy demanded from Christians today: to oppose Evil even in its most innocuous, anonymous and bureaucratic forms, and thus to enact the prayer, “Deliver us from the Evil One!”

Jesus' healings

“When Jesus expels demons and heals the sick, he is driving out of creation the powers of destruction, and is healing and restoring created beings who are hurt and sick. The lordship of God, to which the healings witness, restores sick creation to health. Jesus’ healings are not supernatural miracles in a natural world. They are the only truly ‘natural’ thing in a world that is unnatural, demonized and wounded.”

—Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions (London: SCM, 1990), pp. 98-99.

Miracles, faith, and unusual events

Over at Pontifications, Mike Liccione offers a very thoughtful response to my recent post on miracles, and he points out my “characteristic ‘heretical’ error” of one-sidedness. Mike’s main argument is that “some events of grace are a lot more amazing than others,” and that miraculous events “have a significant role in eliciting faith.”

Naturally I agree with the former point: some events are more unusual than others. And I wouldn’t want to deny that a given miracle-story in the Bible has an unusual event as its historical basis. But my point is that such an event is a “miracle” not because of anything to do with “divine intervention” or the “laws of nature,” but because of this event’s interpreted place within a particular narrative.

As for Mike’s other point, though: is it true that miracles can “elicit faith”? The miracles of Moses did not seem to elicit faith (except among those who already believed). And the reactions to Jesus’ own miracles were remarkably ambivalent: some people responded in faith, but others concluded that he was demon-possessed. For me, this illustrates the real character of miracles: a specific event can be understood as a “miracle” only from within a particular narrative context; outside that context, the same event may be interpreted in all sorts of other ways, but never as a true “miracle.”

Anyway, let me give the last word to Dostoyevsky. In The Brothers Karamazov, the narrator remarks: “It is not miracles that make a realist turn to religion. A true realist will, if he is an unbeliever, will always find the strength and the ability not to believe in a miracle, and if faced with a miracle as an undeniable fact, he will sooner disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. And if he does admit it, he will admit it as a natural fact hitherto unknown to him. In a realist, faith does not arise from a miracle, but the miracle from faith.”

A geography lesson with Karl Barth

“How can we make clear the victory of Christ? In this way: when speaking of sin, demons, darkness, by not speaking of them in too tragic a manner—like the German theologians, all so serious! The further north you go in Germany, the more they are concerned with the realm of darkness. And if you move to the Scandinavian countries, all is darkness: God against Satan, and vice versa! ... It is not wise to be too serious.”

—Karl Barth’s Table Talk, ed. John D. Godsey (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1963), pp. 16-17.

Demons, magic, and a diabolical lettuce

There was some discussion here recently about demons and exorcism, and this week I was reading some interesting new scholarship on the topic:

Scott Shauf, Theology as History, History as Theology: Paul in Ephesus in Acts 19 (BZNW 133; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005). This book includes extensive research into first-century magic and exorcism; and the book also sets itself the methodological task of exorcising Bultmann and Conzelmann.

Barbara Müller, “The Diabolical Power of Lettuce, or Garden Miracles in Gregory the Great’s Dialogues,” in Signs, Wonders, Miracles: Representations of Divine Power in the Life of the Church, ed. Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), pp. 46-55. This is an entertaining paper about a sixth-century episode in which a demon-possessed lettuce is exorcised. Just when you thought it was safe to be a vegetarian....

Darwin on Intelligent Design

In a much-quoted letter to Asa Gray on 22 May 1860, Charles Darwin said:

“I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design.... There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [parasitic wasps] with the express intention of their [larva] feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.” (The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, 8:224)

Darwin highlights an important theological point here. There is much in the world that is beautiful and majestic and good—but there are also ugly, horrifying and demonic sides of nature. There are hurricanes and floods and famines and cannibalistic insects and parasitic wasps that insert their larvae into the living bodies of caterpillars.

If there is an Intelligent Designer, then It has to be the Designer of all aspects of the natural world. Might not the Intelligent Designer therefore be a cruel tyrant or an omnipotent demon? Certainly It would not be the God and Father of Jesus Christ. And this means that, strictly speaking, the Intelligent Designer cannot be identified with what Christians mean by “the creator”—for Christians confess that the “Maker of heaven and earth” is “God the Father Almighty,” i.e., the Father of Jesus Christ.

The creator is not an Intelligent Designer; he is the God of the gospel, the God of grace.

Angels and demons, Barth and Bultmann

I asked yesterday whether there is “a real spirit world.” Jim West adds a very nice summary of the differences between Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann on this question.

Personally, I would tend here (as elsewhere) to agree formally with Bultmann but materially with Barth. Formally, I think Bultmann is right: our task is not to reproduce the biblical writers’ apocalyptic worldview, but to interpret it. And materially, I think Barth’s theological interpretation of the demons has never been surpassed: the demons are personifications of the threatening, chaotic power of the Nothingness (das Nichtige).