On the Reality of Demons

Are there such things as demons? Are the principalities and powers mentioned in the Bible real, individual, entities with independent awareness and volition? That has certainly been the dogmatic teaching of most of the Christian church as long as I’ve been alive. Why is that?

While this question initially appears to be about the nature of spiritual enemies or demons, I would observe that this is instead fundamentally a question of the nature of God.

Let’s start by thinking about the general flow of awareness about the nature of the spiritual realm over the course of human history generally, and Christian history more specifically. Then we’ll consider how the ideas about demons have changed, and what Jesus had to say about the topic. We’ll consider how these topics bump into the very idea of evil itself, across various religious expressions.. Then we’ll consider the idea of atonement, of becoming one with God, and how that has been presented over the centuries. And finally we’ll consider how the nature of evil plays into human assumptions about the personification of that evil, and why many humans seem to need an opponent like Satan or demons.

For around 2000 years we Christians have been ruminating on what the spirit realm looks like, and as far as I can tell, we have come to a lot of new conclusions in the last century or so, based on a particular theological construct and set of dogmas. The specifics of our current demonology are fairly recent, much of it derived from fiction such as Dante’s medieval epic poem “Inferno” and then shaped strongly by modern evangelical books like Frank Peretti’s “This Present Darkness” or the “Left Behind” series and a ton of movies and even video games. Since it’s clear to me that our current demonology is fairly recent, I have to look back and see what the flow has been like over the centuries.

In paleohuman thinking, spirits could be good or evil, and were often understood as being both simultaneously. It was contextual. Even the spirits that were more harmful than good were worshiped for the good they did. For example, Hades as the god of the underworld was not evil as such, even though he fulfilled a loathsome role as ruler of the dead; importantly, he was the guardian of a balance between reward and justice. The Greek word “δαίμων” or “daemon,” from which we derive the English word “demon,” originally had no particular connection to evil. The term’s negative context began to appear with the Hebrew-to-Greek Septuagint and then transferred into the New Testament era with the Koine (common) Greek. Clearly, even within the span of the Bible’s history, and within its pages, the Hebrew and then Christian thinking about the role of the spirit realm changed considerably.

It’s fascinating to study the flow of theology within the Hebrew and early Canaanite cultures. Many entities strongly stated as evil in later parts of the Hebrew Bible – like Baal and Asherah – were apparently an accepted part of Hebrew worship practices until King Josiah’s reforms centralized all worship in the one temple in Jerusalem and refocused all worship on The Lord, named as Yahweh (YHWH, the Tetragrammaton or “four letters”). The High God El seems to have been worshiped as a separate deity from Yahweh by early Canaanites, with El as the high God of a council of Gods, and Yahweh as merely one of his 70 offspring. Yahweh was the local deity over the Hebrew lands, with other gods like Baal and Chemosh over other nearby lands. Asherah was apparently the bride or consort of Yahweh or El in early Hebrew theology, and was worshiped alongside Yahweh. The “discovery” of the books of the Law documented in 2 Kings 22-23 and 2 Chronicles 34-35 resulted in Josiah’s priests consolidating all Hebrew worship into the “one God” Yahweh, merging El and Yahweh’s roles into a single deity, and demoting all the other lesser and foreign gods into false gods or to be shunned. This coincided with the literal demonization of Asherah, even while some of the contents of the Temple (the menorah in particular) strongly hint at the ancient tree form of depicting Asherah. (https://asphodel-long.com/goddess-writings/asherah-the-tree-of-life-and-the-menorah-continuity-of-a-goddess-symbol-in-judaism) So this consolidation by Josiah removed all other gods from the Hebrew pantheon and created a new monotheistic, or at least monaltristic, theology for the Jewish people. Aside from archeology, hints of the polytheism of early Judaism also abound in the scriptures, and are pretty easy to see once you are aware of the history.

There are numerous Bible passages that describe the satan (σατανᾶς) or “the adversary,” as a trusted member of the heavenly council, which gave the spirits or minor gods who held this role their power to carry out various commands of the high God El or the decisions of the council. In many passages of the Bible, there is no sense at all that this adversary was acting in opposition or rebellion against God. Instead, it was an “adversary” position in the legal sense, a role designed to provide a healthy counterpoint to the majority opinion, and one that often carried out adversarial interactions with humans. The later comprehensive identification of Satan as a name instead of a title, and the conclusion that Satan was a ruler of all evil spirits, and was necessarily violently opposed to God, was entirely post-biblical.

In the later parts of the Bible, the language related to demons began to focus on idolatrous worship of false gods, of the sin of sacrificing to any deity other than Yahweh, and how the spirits serving those false gods would entice the believer away from worshiping the true God.

Post-Bible, the concepts of demons continued to change in medieval times, as pagan concepts were integrated into Christian thinking, and then often later tagged as evil. Witness the number of medieval and Gothic cathedrals decorated with “grotesques” and gargoyles, demonic-looking creatures of all kinds. Why would a church knowingly cover its spires with what anyone understood to be demonic creatures? Dante’s “Inferno” didn’t change the theology, per se, but it certainly made it more vivid and created new ideas in people’s minds about what the infernal world looked like and how it functioned.

Early Greek medical traditions viewed mental health issues as imbalances in the body – much as we understand them today. But with the growing influence of the Catholic church, doctrine began to shift to understanding mental illness primarily as a spiritual problem, thus centering a focus on the demons as the source of much harm in society.
https://socio.health/public-health-and-nutrition/mental-illness-middle-ages-demonology/

The ideas of witchcraft were developed substantially in the 15th century and later, with ideas about harmful magic being tied to the spiritual realm. But the concepts later tagged as “magic” were largely originally focused on natural healing and, as argued by the book “Immortality Key,” pharmacology and the pursuit of psychedelic drugs for out-of-body experiences.
https://dr.lib.iastate.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/b329c0b7-1f0c-420e-ba39-d8bd852dbc18/content
For the most part, this attack on witchcraft was focused on women, probably because women had long been the ones in multiple societies that knew the most about pharmacology, both healing and mind-altering, and traditionally were the ones who created and dispensed the drugs in religious ceremonies. It’s arguable that the drive towards patriarchy, as a pushback against Jesus’ centering of women, led to the suppression of religiously-focused pharmacology as an attempt to remove women from positions of power within the church.
https://www.amazon.com/Immortality-Key-Uncovering-History-Religion/dp/1250207142

From all these perspectives, one cannot reasonably argue that the Bible, and those who wrote it over many centuries, and those who interpreted the Bible in the centuries since, held a single consistent view of the spirit realm and its denizens. It just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The idea that “this is what we have always believed” results from an understandable but misguided need to view the Bible as a single, self-consistent, univocal, and perfect book, instead of a diverse collection of writings about the religious journey of the Hebrew people and the Christian successors to the Hebrew faith.

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In light of that, let’s divert for a moment into a meta topic about Truth.

I always pursued The Truth, with an idea in mind that I could come to a verifiable and solid position that fully agreed with God on every topic. But this awareness I now have of the dramatic and wide-ranging historical flow and change in religious thinking leads me to reevaluate what I believe about whether our current religious thinking and doctrine can be considered absolutely correct, whether we today can claim to know The Truth with any confidence.

For the last couple years I have believed that the Bible represents a wide-ranging documentation of a flow of thinking, a trajectory of change if you will, instead of a single comprehensive and self-consistent viewpoint. And I have concluded that this trajectory did not stop with the writing of the last verses of the Bible. Nor should we be surprised that this would continue – the Bible itself claims that the Holy Spirit would continue to teach us new things after Jesus left (John 14:15-31), and there’s no indication that Jesus only meant this through the end of the age of the original disciples.
http://crucibleofthought.com/trajectory

This leads me to some critical questions:

• Do I believe that where we are now is fundamentally more correct than what Jesus’ followers were thinking 2000 years ago?
• And more to the point, do I believe that where we are today is finally entirely correct, and incapable of further improvement?

I can identify a lot of post-biblical innovations in our Christian thinking – such as the Trinity itself – and I can identify a lot of changes in ideas about the nature of the spiritual realms, even within the Bible. And since the pace of change of doctrine doesn’t seem to have slacked off, I think it would be foolish to insist we’re absolutely correct today.

In light of that, I have to wonder about the validity of my past assumptions about deity itself.

At the highest level, I have to ask: do I believe that God supernaturally oversaw the course of human thinking and human decision-making about the doctrines and the dogmas, such that a certain group of people arrived at a certain set of conclusions? Or do I believe that God is fairly hands-off about such things?

So that question ultimately goes to the very nature of God.

And this already complicated topic is certainly further complicated by the recognition that the set of beliefs and dogmas that I hold are far from universal, even within Christianity, and so if I believe that mine are absolutely correct, then I automatically assume that everybody else is absolutely wrong, either in small or in large part.

I think of that as fundamentally arrogant – which itself is a moral failing. So I don’t think it’s fair to assume I’m more correct than the other 99.99% of Christians, so again it points me back to what I believe about God at a very fundamental level. Is God the kind of an entity that insists on an absolutely correct awareness, or not? Given the diversity of religious thinking across the globe and more specifically within the religious systems that constitute Christianity, and being unable to say with utter confidence that any one of them is absolutely correct, I have a really hard time concluding that God is THAT concerned about the details, to ensure that a specific collection of writings that we call “the Bible” is correct, and even more to the point, that the post-biblical thinking arrived at an absolutely correct position only at my exact time in history.

Stated humorously, if God wanted to clearly explain God’s self and God’s rules to humanity, the Bible was a pretty lousy attempt.

One cannot assert a perfectly accurate or even perfectly infallible Bible, unless one first aligns that Bible with their dogmas. Different translations result in differing dogmas, so even asserting that one version of the Bible is The Correct Translation is foolhardy. There will ALWAYS be someone else with equal confidence in THEIR different interpretation. Both cannot be simultaneously right.

So this inherently begins to undermine my assumptions about either (1) God’s power and ability to ensure that a specific set of doctrines was recorded and decided, or (2) God’s fundamental interest in being so intimately involved in the finer details of a very human book.

Of course those two possibilities are not necessarily mutually opposed. It may be both, but either case – or the combination of both – forces me to loosen my grip on the dogmatism about everything that I was taught about God and the spiritual realm.

Stepping back from all that thinking for a moment, I then have to work backwards in history and examine the flow of thinking about the spiritual realm. Obviously, a lot of of it was influenced by ancient religions and philosophies such as ancient Canaanite mythology, the Roman pantheon of gods, and Greek intellectualism. That milieu played into the Bible’s statements about the spiritual realm, and thus ended up influencing post-biblical dogma. As such, we cannot ignore those pagan ways of thinking, even if we ultimately conclude that they were immature or incorrect. Even the older parts of the Bible have some concepts that deeply trouble any Christian today, and require a lot of mental gymnastics to explain away, or to harmonize with the New Testament – things like affirmation of slavery, or commands for child sacrifice, or a council of gods, or the deep and frequent violence and even literal genocide commanded by the same God that is later described as being infinitely forgiving and unwilling that ANY should perish.

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That was a pretty big diversion into the most basic ideas about theology and God, and while I think it was a critical foundation for this discussion, let’s get back on topic, and get to the question of what any spiritual entities and forces really look like. Are “angels” and “demons” an accurate understanding of what is going on in the supernatural realm? Perhaps they are just a set of constructs founded on a lot of pagan mythology and fanfic’d into fuller existence by early Christians and then church thinking through the Middle Ages and right up through Frank Peretti. Even today there are some sillier self-proclaimed yet widely-touted “prophets” like Kat Kerr, who claims to have been repeatedly taken to heaven and shown the literal truth.

I was certainly taught the reality of the spiritual forces, and such Christian fiction hammered the idea of self-aware, malicious, intelligent demons into my consciousness. It is undeniable that Jesus certainly spoke about the spiritual forces as individual volitional entities, and I think it’s safe to say that the recorded stories that we have in the gospels are a fairly accurate representation of what a historical Jesus might have truly said and believed – as might any mystical rabbi at His point in time and space, given the culture that surrounded Him.

Now, the fact that Jesus seemed to treat the evil He encountered as real and volitional entities bears a bit of further examination, in light of what modern Christians seem to believe about them.

The demons (δαιμόνιον) that Jesus ordered out of people seem to have been causing very temporal physical or mental effects on them: blindness, muteness, deafness, illness, madness. Most of the results of casting them out was immediate healing of those symptoms. Not once in what is recorded of Jesus’ ministry did He address an eternal effect of a demon. When Jesus proclaimed salvation, it was from those tangible immediate harms.

Jesus also refers to the formally-titled entity Satan (Σατανᾶν, meaning The Adversary) and the Devil (διάβολος, meaning The Slanderer or The Accuser) a few times as a stumbling block to humans (taking away the seed in the parable of the sower in Mark 4:15), an opponent of the Kingdom of God (responding to His critics in Matt 12, Mark 3, Luke 11, and an odd comment in Luke 10:18 about seeing Satan fall from heaven), and a persuader for evil (Judas in Luke 22 and John 13). Only once does Jesus refer to Satan in the context of immediate harm (a crippled woman in Luke 13:10-17). Interestingly, even though He frequently rebuked demons directly, Jesus does not seem to ever confront Satan directly, other than rebuking Peter’s opposition to Jesus’ pending death in Matt 16:23. It was appropriate to call Peter “Adversary” in this case, and He wasn’t identifying Peter as the evil entity Satan. And while Jesus refers to “the devil” several times, he never once addresses “the devil” directly. So Jesus simply does not interact with Satan or the devil as personal, volitional entities. It’s almost like Jesus is using these two terms as a placeholder for various appearances of generalized evil, rather than as a being.

But here’s something interesting: When we read further into the New Testament, after the Gospels, every instance of demons and Satan instead refers almost entirely to beliefs (false doctrine, false worship, false sacrifice, false gods) and opposition to God’s kingdom, and only once to personal health or mental state (an “angelos” or messenger of Satan sent to torment Paul, but even this is opposition to the advance of God’s kingdom). In fact, Satan is even referred to by Paul as a useful agent to punish the soul of a person doing harm (1 Cor 5:5), perhaps something of a throwback to the Adversary role in the ancient council-of-the-gods polytheistic past of Hebrew religious thinking. As to “the devil,” all post-Gospel references refer to believers being snared and fooled.

Well… what an interesting shift that is. In the decades after Jesus, the doctrine seems to have shifted from demons causing immediate bodily harm, to intellectual attack. From physical to theological.

My conclusion here is that modern demonology differs sharply from Jesus’ doctrine. We have abandoned Jesus’ sole focus on the temporal harm caused by the spirit realm, and refocused almost exclusively on its effect on our belief and faith. This is unsurprising, perhaps, given the modern evangelical focus on “going to heaven” as the primary sense of salvation, coupled with the perceived need for purity of belief as the ticket to salvation.

When one is worried primarily about their personal eschaton, what happens to them on Judgement Day, and their access to eternal bliss, their temporal life becomes much more about avoiding hell than about the good that they can do to those around them. It’s more about correct belief, and selfishly pursuing their own good, than self-sacrificially bringing salvation in the form of healing and succor to the needy and oppressed. At best, those good works become proof of good belief, instead of being inherently sufficient for their own purpose.

This doctrine thus leads to a fundamental disagreement between various Christian sects over the nature of God: is God interested in our works, or our beliefs? Is God primarily fighting against evil entities that oppose God’s rule, or against disorder in this world and in our human bodies? Is the disorder merely a symptom, or is it the main problem? Mainline churches seem to focus on the works; evangelicals seem to focus on the beliefs.

Which is God really more interested in? Is it one – or either – or both of these?

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So again, I’m drawn back to the question of the nature of God. And in this case, I suppose the more salient question would be the nature of Jesus, as both human and divine. Let’s take another diversion for a moment, because I think we need to understand Jesus before we assess whether Jesus’ ideas about demons and spirits are completely authoritative.

Was Jesus in command of absolute truth in everything that He said or not? Were all the things that Jesus reportedly said actually what He said or not? Or was that a post-Jesus innovation by people writing many decades after He lived? Do we assume (and this goes back to the original question of the nature of God) that what got recorded in the gospels is 100% correct, by virtue of inspiration and God’s direct influence in human minds? Or, even if it’s not 100% correct, is it correct enough for us to completely trust its implications?

Taking it a step further, if we do accept the divinity and absolute Truth of Jesus, one might even postulate that in His heavenly wisdom Jesus was simply using the tropes and spiritual ways of thinking that existed in His time to communicate something bigger and deeper that was useful to His listeners, but not necessarily “accurate” for people in a different time and space with very different core understandings and theologies. Perhaps He knew it at a higher level, but knew that it couldn’t be effectively communicated at that time.

In either case, given the huge drifts in thinking about even the very nature of Jesus and His relationship to God, such as with the creation of the doctrine of the Trinity literally hundreds of years after the events recorded in the Gospels, I think it would be foolish to assume that what is written in the Bible is a verbatim description of anything. But is it accurate enough for our purposes? Put differently, and speaking to 2 Timothy 3:16-17, is all Scripture USEFUL even if imperfect?

One of the underlying principles of my theology in the last few years is that the written word exists to point us to the Living Word. Just as Jesus pointed out that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27), indicating that religious law was made for man, and just as He pointed out that the entirety of all of the writings up to His time could be summed up in just two sentences, it seems that whatever exists on the spiritual plane cannot possibly be accurately recorded on any amount of paper (John 21:25). If multiple books of the Hebrew Bible were insufficient to bring salvation through something so fundamentally simple that it really only required two sentences for Jesus, how could any further writings and thinking in the succeeding 2000 years complete the job? One might say that it’s impossible to communicate all of God, all of the perfect religion, in any amount of time or any number of writings.

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Next, aside from the nature of God, and the nature of Jesus, we ought to look at the other side of the coin: the nature of evil.

One might wonder whether evil even exists or has any real meaning, apart from humanity.

First, let’s consider the origin of evil.

Most Christians would say that in the eternity before the creation of the world, there was a massive fight for power between God and some of the angels. Satan’s pride caused him to fall from glory. He convinced a third of the angels to leave heaven with him. Later, following the creation of the world and the humans, Satan tempted Adam and Eve, and thus the existing evil entered the world through Satan’s pernicious question “did God really say?”

In that view, we are taught that we are pawns in this cosmic struggle. God wants us to glorify God; the demonic realm wants to impede us and strip God of glory. So Satan’s attack on Adam and Eve would have been an attempt to interrupt God’s plan to represent God on the newly created earth. (Note that the identification that the serpent in the garden was Satan incarnate is a post-biblical innovation, an assumption that the “serpent” in Genesis is related to the serpent in Revelation; this depends on an assumption that the entire Bible is univocal, that it is speaking with one voice in communicating the authoritative truth.)

I’ve also heard teaching that some of the angels were fundamentally insulted by God’s selection of man as his perfect representative and his heirs, which would pin the fall of Satan and a third of the angels after the creation of man. From that perspective, evil did not exist until the creation of man.

Either way, does evil really even have any meaning outside of man’s existence? The Bible’s creation story insists that God’s creation was Good, even Very Good. Clearly no evil existed in Creation until man chose against God.

And the only ultimate solution to evil in Creation which we are really given in the Bible is that creation itself groans in anticipation of the revealing of the Son of Man – the mature, Christlike, redeemed, free of evil, corporate Body of Christ, perfected in suffering and refined by holy fire. And that conquering of earthly evil seems to lead to a cosmic victory over evil as well. In a very real sense, the Bible pins the eventual conquering of evil on man’s destiny. Once the True Man is revealed, evil will be no more.

Summed up, evil within the world seems innately tied to our humanity. It entered the cosmos related to God’s plan to exalt humans to be God’s very heirs and children. It entered the world as soon as the first humans. It will leave the world along with the last humans. It will leave the cosmos once humans finally achieve their glorified position as God’s heirs.

That, then, leads me to an uncomfortable thought that whatever spiritual entities that we Christians assign as evil might not actually exist outside of ourselves, either individually or corporately. We certainly want to externalize it; that makes it easier to avoid responsibility. We can simply claim that “the devil made me do it.” But if people were truly honest with themselves, I don’t think they would ever be able to avoid accepting that it was their own choices and arrogance and pride and selfishness that led to whatever evil happened, or in some cases, their mental pathology plus their choices. That certainly is the basis of our legal system. You can’t claim an external reason for your actions, aside from an insanity defense (which is still an internal failing).

It’s interesting that many evangelicals talk about the spirits of lust, of pride, of greed, and so forth. They are assigning specific external entities as the cause for general internal human failings.

What about human good? Obviously the Bible, as with all other religions, is fundamentally an attempt to move humans towards goodness and decency – by creating a moral and ceremonial structure towards that end. (Many Christians would argue otherwise about other religious systems, such as arguing that Islam is a direct attack on God and Christians, but I’ve never once met a Muslim who didn’t fully agree with all the morals of Christianity, and didn’t condemn extremism as evil.) Human religion is constantly trying to find a way to move towards godliness in some form.

I’ve been reading “The Immortality Key” by Brian Muraresku, which explores the possible role of psychedelics in the founding and doctrines of all the world’s religions, how chemically-induced “trips” resulting in spiritual experiences actually underlie and harmonize all spirituality. By creating a sense of universality, of oneness with all the cosmos and all our fellow humans, he postulates, these experiences create the desire for a common set of ideals that encourage humans to live generously and graciously with one another and with the creation they inhabit. This originally led humans to create religious frameworks to bring this goodness into greater existence in the world. In a sense, this is the opposite of the idea of a demonic realm, even though most Christians would identify drugs as demonic or at least demon-inviting.

It’s worth noting that the book’s author is really only addressing positive trips from psychedelics and the potential benefit of those positive trips, but there are certainly plenty of reports of really bad trips. Many who experience bad trips describe them using spiritual language of demonology. What does that mean, in light of my observation about the wellspring of evil being directly within humans? Are they perceiving something evil already bound up within themselves, or is there truly some external malignant entity or force that they’re encountering? Are they simply picking demons because it’s a shared language, a shared concept, that everyone now understands about bad things? Again, it’s pretty attractive to pin the bad experiences on something external, because that absolves us of a lot of responsibility.

I’d note that probably every human has bad dreams and nightmares occasionally. While one might pin a spiritual cause on that, it’s far more likely that it’s merely the brain processing very human difficulties and traumatic experiences during its nightly downtime.

Another interesting spiritual question might be, if God is truly powerful, and if evil pre-existed humanity, why did God tolerate the existence of evil in the first place? The explanation given by most Christians these days (and which I find rather lame) is that God wanted to show God’s goodness to the universe and needed a cosmic battle and ultimate victory to do it. But that doesn’t say a lot of good things about God or God’s nature, because it ties God’s goodness to the presence of evil. I find that fundamentally offensive.

And that leads me to a different line of thinking about the nature of good and evil. Perhaps you’ve heard the Christian trope that there’s actually no such thing as darkness; it’s only the absence of light. Similarly one might postulate that there’s no such thing as evil, other than the absence of good. Just as the tiniest bit of light can vanquish darkness, evil is unable to oppose goodness. Sin is often described as “missing the mark,” thus a failure to do something good, more than an evil something itself. From that perspective, if we take the Bible at face value when it says that “God is above all and through all and in all” (Ephesians 4:6) and that “God is love” (1 John 4:7) then in some sense, the only thing that can exist as evil or something that stands in opposition to God, is us shouldering aside that goodness and love and leaving a void from it in ourselves and our actions. And that is particularly interesting in light of the Bible’s concepts of the omnipresence and omnipotence of God, because when one postulates the existence of a specific evil entity, they postulate an uncorrected gap in that omnipresence and a corresponding failure of God to be omnipotent in regard to that manifestation of evil.

So all of this ultimately goes back to the nature of God.

It seems that all of these concepts can’t be quite as simple as we want them to be, and our dogmas about spiritual entities require us to ignore a lot of gaps in the logic of spiritual entities. Of course, we explain that away by statements like “God’s ways are above our ways,” asserting that God intentionally allows evil to thrive now for a some future good purpose, but to me that is a blatant cop-out. In reality, we spend a lot of our spiritual energy trying to create explanations for these inconsistencies and complexities.

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So, let me turn back to the underlying question about the ontological reality of demonic beings – or more broadly, the reality of evil itself.

A friend recently wrote: “…while it is tempting in one direction to localize evil outside of us to avoid feelings of guilt and shame, it can also be psychologically tempting to localize evil within us because it gives us a sense of control and helps us avoid feelings of fear and threat.“

So here’s a question: What is the purpose of evil, as a concept? And a related question: what is the purpose of fear and threat? In “Immortality Key,” the author says that those who experience a “good trip” very frequently describe a long-lasting result as the elimination of their fear – fear of death, fear of the afterlife, and even fear of personal risk in this life.

Our concept of “evil” thus seems to be a means of avoiding something: fear, or threat, or guilt, or shame. It’s an escape hatch, in some sense, by externalizing what we don’t like about ourselves.

I’m increasingly convinced that the Bible’s statements of “fear not” (Isaiah 41:10) and “perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18) and similar verses are fundamentally the most important in the Bible, at least from a practical “how then shall I live” standpoint. Every other personal growth follows from them.

Part of my testimony from the last 10 years or so, starting well before my deconstruction process, was finally beginning to understand that concept of not fearing. Of finally being able to say to God, “you can challenge or change anything I believe.” I won’t be ruled by fear of God, fear of what God may ask of me, fear of others, fear of sin, fear of evil, fear of the demonic. All those fears have ever done is cripple me.

That process has been transcendent.

In my case, it didn’t require psychedelic drugs.

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As I think about the book, and about the testimony of people who have used psychedelics, and compare it to my own experiences with religious practices, and my own tangible encounters with the divine, this occurs to me: we Christians have largely tried to reduce Jesus’ teachings to oneness with a Creator God which we perceive as a distinct volitional being, totally apart from creation and apart from humanity. We often put it in terms of our soul returning to the One who breathed it into us, perhaps because any more intimate kind of “oneness” seems intimidating and impossible.

But the people who describe ecstatic Christian experiences beyond human explanation, the reports of many mystics and shamans of many religions, even people describing “drug trips,” often report a sense of oneness with the universe itself, not necessarily with God – oneness with all being, all life, even all non-living creation. And this seems to hold true even for people without a pre-existing faith in divinity or a higher power. Even atheists who experiment with psychedelics report this sense, even if it does not cause them to gain a particular faith. And this desire for oneness seems to exist in religion too. A goal of oneness with the universe, and oneness with raw, unnamed, infinitely pervasive divinity, is even foundational to a couple major religions, even though the Abrahamic religions are more focused on individual oneness with God.

And so thinking about our Christian word “atonement,” at–one–ment, I cannot help but wonder if we Christians have an inadvertently crippled or minimized that concept by striving to become one with this individual, “Other,” apart-from-Creation deity – but in so doing, abandoning the higher call to become one with all of Creation itself – in Christian terminology, to restore what was lost by Adam and Eve in the Garden. The call to be One, in a globally communal sense, is massively important – and so far beyond simple evangelical, individualistic salvation.

I think Christian mystical people like Richard Rohr do a good job of restoring this global, universalist at–one–ment language, but it is a little bit too spooky for most Christians. No, I should say it’s WAY too spooky. In particular, anyone raised during my generation was taught to deeply fear and anathematize anything that sounded even remotely like New Age theology. I think now that this understanding of universality was the very essence of New Age thinking. But we Christians threw it away because it sounded too much like we wanted to individually BECOME Gods – the height of arrogance, one of the worst sins… while in the New Age vernacular and their thinking they actually meant to become one WITH something that is higher than us, not INSTEAD OF, not to usurp its power or authority. It now seems to me that this isn’t arrogance, but exactly the opposite: the height of humility, recognizing our accurate and important role as a valuable part of a much larger cosmic whole, restoring the harmony that was intended in the original creation.

I find this particularly interesting, because I have been rediscovering this concept of oneness on my own for the last few years, of how that call to oneness is much larger than I had previously been taught or given any credit to, of the need for an expanded universality. In my particular case, it was at first merely expanding the definition of WHO I was willing to become one with. Loving one’s enemies is hard. Being one with them seems impossible, if we both need to be one with Christ and thus also one with each other. But Rohr’s language challenged me to understand that by God’s own self definition, in the Bible at least, God pervades all things, and in some sense we could say that all things comprise God, although Rohr doesn’t say it quite that way. God is all in all, pervading the universe, and so becoming one at that cosmic level is arguably the highest possible fulfillment of the Bible’s drive towards at–one–ment.

Yes, that concept completely clashes with the individualist salvation favored by evangelicals. And that concept also inherently clashes with the general Abrahamic religious understanding of a God who is entirely Other. We humans, even the individualist types, generally seem to have a need for something majestic and independently powerful, and holding great power and authority over us. Consider how the Israelites demanded of Samuel, “Give us a king, like all the other nations” (1 Samuel 8:20), and they got Saul, who ruled them as badly as Samuel had predicted. But becoming one with God our ruler would emasculate the ruler’s power over us – making it worthless to satisfy our need for being ruled. So oneness and being ruled are mutually exclusive.

However, Rohr’s conceptualization envisions at-one-ment more as us being, or rather becoming, PART of something majestic, that is made even more majestic by virtue of our participation, and I think this touches on the New Age philosophy. But when I step back from my evangelicalism, I can see it all throughout the Bible, and I’m beginning to understand that this concept infuses pretty much all of the world’s religions at some level, even if its most numerous adherents and largest sects don’t see it and desperately want to maintain their own religion’s individualism. Many religions seem to have a tension between inclusion into and exclusion from the infinite.

The “Immortality Key” book’s underlying thesis is that the reason that all these religions have that same underlying belief, even if well-hidden and well-suppressed, is because they all sprang from a common and overwhelmingly powerful mystical experience of oneness – often but not always induced by a particular chemical effect on the brain. It postulates that all religions spring from something deeply embedded within the human brain, that can truly connect with the divine realm, but that originally this was often facilitated by psychotropic substances, long before it faded into rote practices largely free of any tangible spiritual experience. In essence, it argues that all the world religions were originally jump-started by humans discovering the mind-altering effects of mushrooms and fungi and yeast. And in the book’s thesis, the history of religious practice is a long story of mankind’s yearning to recapture that ecstatic experience, but without any chemical assistance.

And in that conception, these things that people report psychedelics doing to them, and the things that undrugged mystics routinely also point towards, is a far more expansive oneness than most Christians can accept. It is certainly a less restrictive, less exclusivist reading of the Bible than I was raised with.

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Here’s what occurred to me as I pondered these matters. This will certainly sound deeply heretical to anyone from the circles I grew up in, but such an awareness of this universal spirituality feels like graduating from Christianity. Graduating is not giving away anything that I learned; at a very deep level, perhaps it is just shedding some of its restrictions. It is discovering that there is something much larger at a higher level, that is truly essential for humanity’s growth and its future.

And that something allows me to think much more universally; and to be less interested in creating and maintaining a walled garden of faith.

Call it a meta-religion if you want. While many might accuse this as sinful humanism, I instead think maybe it is the ultimate fulfillment of what I was always taught was God’s plan for humanity, just expressed in terms that in some ways supersede – or perhaps complete – the Bible’s language.

I suppose what this comes down to, in some sense, is learning to reconcile being a person of a particular faith practice (that naturally asserts itself as unique and exclusively true), while nonetheless having a broader, more universalist understanding, and learning to comfortably hold those two seemingly mutually exclusive things at the same time, benefiting from all the things that my faith practice has taught me while also keeping my thumb on the pulse of something much larger.

Now, a graduation isn’t leaving anything behind. It’s affirming and honoring and formally certifying what has gone before, not destroying or invalidating it. It’s formally acknowledging the new status of the graduate. It says “these lessons have been accurately learned and internalized, and now this individual is truly ready to put this awareness to work.” Nothing is lost; everything is validated.

And one who graduates is finally released from merely studying a thing, to actually putting it to use for good measure.

As an example, one could say that Jesus was the first true graduate of Judaism. He said that nothing from the Hebrew law would pass away, but that He came to fulfill all of them (Matthew 5:17-18) and at the same time, that “all the law and the prophets hang on these two things” (Matthew 22:37-40). He did not cancel Judaism, but took it to a higher level of fulfillment. He frequently challenged the Law – saying “you have heard it said, but I say to you” – and eventually, by His obedience and as confirmed by His resurrection, was proven superior to the Law (Hebrews 7:28).

So graduating from one level of awareness to another is not leaving behind the first thing; it’s actually affirming and acknowledging its comprehensive incorporation into the individual’s identity at a very deep level. In this case, it’s looking at Christianity, and understanding it as a deeply True thing, yet incomplete on its own. And it’s being turned loose to begin freely using that True thing for good.

And I think Jesus did something similar with His statement about “all the law and the prophets hang on these two things” – He wasn’t throwing away anything; He was saying “okay, guys, now it’s time to move beyond that training ground, and begin the work of putting that into practice, of living it all, not just learning and reciting and being tested on it.”

As an interesting corollary, let me describe something from my own vocation: in aerodynamics there are a bunch of different ways to describe why airfoil lift works – what keeps a plane in the air. All of them have some real validity. But paradoxically, none of them is entirely the answer. Each theory works very well for a specific purpose – and has specific limitations. We had to learn them all, and were tested on our understanding of each one, how to mathematically compute its results, and how to know which theoretical framework was or was not useful for solving a given problem. But as graduates we are free to use them all as needed to assess a given situation. It would be foolish to insist that any one of them was THE answer. But to the scientists and experimenters and theoreticians who discovered them, they often assumed their new paradigm was THE answer, better than anything that preceded them. Naturally in retrospect, it’s easy to see that dogmatic assumption as arrogant and unhelpful. Instead, we now see a fuller answer about how things fly.

So it is with religion, with Christianity. Early on, we feel like we know The Answer to faith. Our early struggle is to perfect our relationship with exactly one of these theories of faith. It seems like perfect maturity to lock deeper and firmer into that one dogma. However, some people eventually begin to realize the immaturity of that approach, and as they mature, they learn that it’s more complex than they thought; their one theory is entirely insufficient to explain God.

If we proceed past the realm of dogma, and begin to see the vast mystery at the heart of the infinite, we begin to understand it’s pointless to say “THIS is the only answer.” As we truly progress in spiritual maturity, we gain access to more and more of these concepts, and are free to engage with them as needed. And usually the only time we need to focus on one or another of them, is when we are dealing with someone who insists that a given concept is the only valid one. We know better, we see a larger horizon of faith, but we can do as Paul: “I will be all things to all people.” He was a master of “code switching” – of changing how he presented himself and his faith to suit a given context. And so with a given individual or group, working within their specific limited and dogmatic framework, we have the ability to engage with anyone in a useful way, even when we personally know there is much more to know and experience, and many more ways to engage once we see beyond their dogma. So it frees us from their constraints.

And thus we graduate to another level of faith.

So I guess I’m saying that there is a graduated, transcendent way of living, of thinking, that doesn’t insist that less mature ways are WRONG, and that can coexist peacefully with less mature approaches. And interestingly, those varied dogmatic views can even conflict, while still containing Truth. We graduates simply need to carefully understand the constraints and limitations of the approach we need to use in a given context.

As another analogy, to drive home this point: I do a fair amount of construction work. I have a toolbag full of different tools. If all I owned was a hammer, I’d have a hard time screwing in a screw. If all I had was a screwdriver, I’d have a hard time hammering in a nail. Both fasteners are very useful for attaching two pieces of wood, but they require quite different tools. In some situations, I really want a screw, and in others, I really want a nail. Neither tool or fastener is “Correct” with a capital C – but each is correct in a specific context. And sometimes both are acceptable. It makes no sense to stand on the street corner and argue that all hammers are heretical, or to try to rid the world of screwdrivers. And the graduate of any school of construction will know how to use each of his tools, without needing to take sides dogmatically.

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So back to the topic at hand. Given all of this thinking, I might suggest that the question about the demonic is such an issue, that is usually wrapped in dogma, and is actually essential to many groups’ worldview and even religious practices. Any given assertion about the practical reality of demons or a demonic realm is only helpful within that context.

Perhaps another good point of comparison is the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation – that during every Eucharist celebration, in the hands of the priest and the mouth of the recipient, the bread and wine are mysteriously transformed into the actual, real body and blood of Christ. Of course every Protestant – and about 2/3 of Catholics by some surveys – don’t believe this. For those who do, it’s absolutely essential to their faith. But those who see only symbolism or memory in the Eucharist still see the ceremony as valuable. And a mature Protestant or Catholic will be able to interact with people outside their doctrinal circles and respect a different set of beliefs, without any distress, and without judging those who believe differently.

So it is, perhaps, with the dogma about demons. Some people absolutely need the demonic to be real, to give them a way to focus their spiritual energies in a fight for purity and righteousness. Others ridicule it as echoes of a past age of fearful superstition. They see themselves as having graduated from that superstition, and following a long time of thinking about this topic, I would agree with them. But those of us who feel as if we have graduated from that particular superstition can yet learn from such early theories and the deep wisdom of those who believe in a demonic reality, while still disbelieving in it ourselves as a literal reality. We can still work with those who today strongly believe in such things, without condemning them. We can benefit from an awareness of the often tangible nature of evil and its effects, personifying it as needed to help craft suitable solutions and wards against evil. But we can find these benefits without needing to consider it a literal otherworldly reality and – perhaps most importantly – not giving it any authority or power in our human lives, and not using it as any excuse for bad choices or behaviors.

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I would anticipate the reaction of anyone who firmly believes in a tangible and intelligent and malicious demonic realm: “this is a dangerous heresy, and leaves you vulnerable to attack. If you don’t believe in demons, they are free to mislead you, to attack you, to use you for furthering their evil plans, to even steal your salvation.” I know that argument: I heard it for decades. I even used it occasionally.

Today, however, I would counter: why do we need a self-aware, volitional, spiritual entity called a demon or Satan or devil, for any of that? There are plenty of Christians who firmly believe in demons, who act just as evil as those demons, and yet call themselves Good. There are plenty of believers in that spirit realm, who are deeply deceived and not living redeemed lives. Believing in demons isn’t any prophylaxis for spiritual health.

But more importantly, it seems to me that those who choose to continue to personalize and wrestle with demons give evil a say in how they live, allowing what they call demons permission to attack and complicate their lives. In a somewhat ironic sense, I would even say that for a committed follower of Jesus, not believing in an incarnate demonic actually largely nullifies evil’s hold on us.

And I understand scripture to indicate that God is unwilling that ANY should perish; I implicitly trust God to finish the work that God began in me and every other human for all time; eternal salvation is not my concern. (John 6:37-39; 2 Peter 3:9)

This denial of demonology is not denying evil. Far from it. It definitely recognizes the stark reality of evil. Nor is it denying the effects of evil; they are self-evident in the world around us. It is, however, denying that evil has any identity outside of our own self and our human systems. In denying that evil exists as an independent, intelligent entity, this approach is instead taking direct and personal responsibility for any evil done by us and by our choices or neglects. And it’s learning to see how the systems of man and of the kosmos (κόσμος) can themselves be evil, and cause harm; it’s being committed to remedying that harm and changing those systems.

And taking responsibility for ourselves and the systems that we inhabit is perhaps one of the most mature things we can do as humans. And I would suggest that the practical effect of actually living out these ideas is entirely in line with Jesus’ goals: to overcome evil with good. To do justly. To love mercy. To fight oppression. To bless and save those around us who are being harmed by evil. To mature in our personal representation of the nature of Christ within us. To own and remedy our immaturity instead of blaming it on something else.

In short, I don’t think we need demons to be Little Christs. I just think we do need to be more like Jesus.