Unclean Spirits

A seminary I attended had an ad hoc course on angelology and demonology, taught by a retired icon of evangelicalism. I didn’t take it for a variety of reasons, but sometimes I wish I had. I believe that the biblical notion of demons is still useful, because it allows us to name and objectify those tendencies within us that try to turn us away from God. By naming a demon and bringing it to light we have some power over it. Recognizing the demon of gluttony, for instance, reminds me that sometimes I want to eat a lot more than I need to, for reasons that do not promote my spiritual health. One danger in using such demon-talk is the temptation to abdicate responsibility for our actions (“the devil made me do it”). It is also necessary to be able to discern which spirits are from God and which are not.

The reading from Deuteronomy for this Sunday makes it clear that some prophetic voices originate in God while others do not – and the latter lead to certain death. It is also clear that even demonic voices are subject to God. This is underscored by the interaction of Jesus with the “unclean spirit” in Mark. The people are astonished that Jesus has power over the spirit, although they miss the connection with divinity that implies. (I do realize that illnesses such as epilepsy were attributed to “demons” in biblical times, and that such attribution continues to cast a stigma on any disease that affects normal brain functioning and behavior. I am not talking about that, but rather temptations common to all humanity.)

Walter Wink’s books on the “powers” showed me how institutions can have spirits (angelic or demonic) as well as individuals. Using the addresses to the “angels of the seven churches” in Revelation, Wink shows how churches, industries, nations, and cultures can each have its own angel. But how does one discern whether they are divine or demonic? The criterion of whether they lead us toward or away from God and God’s kingdom still holds, yet with institutions, especially ones in which we live, it is much harder to find a place apart where we can examine them dispassionately. We simply have too much invested in them. That investment can also tempt us to define God’s kingdom in ways that minimize the need to change.

I don’t have a solution for all of this. I simply want to present the value of taking demons more seriously than we do. They aren’t little figures with pointy tails and pitchforks. They are very real tendencies within us that turn us away from God and toward our own destruction. We ignore them at our peril.