Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Two Case Studies
Part 3: Serpent = Satan?
Part 4: What is Satan's Real Name?
Part 5: Accuser
Part 6: A Son of God?
Part 7: God's State Prosecutor
Part 8: God’s Sifter
Part 9: Azazel
Part 10: Desert Temptation
Part 11: What Does a Jewish Messiah Look Like?
Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System
Part 13: Proclaiming Jubilee
Part 14: The Evil One
Part 15: The Angels of the Nations
Part 16: The Gerasene Demoniac
Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
Part 18: Driving Satan from Heaven
Part 19: The Unveiling of the Beast of Rome
Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today
Part 21: Jesus and the Domination System
Part 22: Violence
Part 23: Death
Part 24: The Advocate
Part 25: Conclusions?
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Two Case Studies
Before we explore the Biblical roots of this character named “Satan”, I’d like to examine the question of why this matters? If the Bible says there is a character named Satan, we should believe it, right? End of story.
But what if believing in the existence of this character causes problems? You might think that this is a ridiculous assertion to make, but let’s examine a couple related stories.
Matthew Murray’s Nightmare of Christianity
In the last hours of December 8, 2007, a 24 year old Matthew Murray suited up in black military fatigues and got into his car, which was loaded up with 2 automatic rifles, 3 semi-automatic pistols, and over a thousand rounds of ammo. Along with this arsenal, Murray also had with him Aleister Crowley's “The Book of the Law” and “I Had to Say Something”. The latter was a memoir written by former escort Mike Jones, whom the pastor of the Colorado Springs mega-church named “New Life Church” - Ted Haggard - had been involved in a secret affair with. Murray took his arsenal first to the Youth With a Mission (YWAM) training center in Arvada, Colorado, where in the early hours of December 9, 2007, Murray shot and killed two people and wounded two others. He then drove to the aforementioned New Life Church where he killed two more people and wounded three others before being shot and wounded by one of the church members. Murray then committed suicide.How did this happen? What motivated this young man to commit this heinous crime? The popular answer - portrayed through many different media outlets - seemed to be that this was caused by the influence of evil spirits. The web magazine WordNetDaily relied on the testimony of pastor Joe Schimmel, and reported that Murray "had sold his soul" to the occult and "another devil: rock and roll." And an earlier analysis from WorldNetDaily had used an anonymous comment: "Two words: DEMONIC POSSESSION."
The Rocky Mountain News took a slightly different approach to the cause of this incident when they turned to evangelical anti-porn crusader Steve Arterburn, and reported: "Arterburn said Thursday he wasn't surprised to hear that pornography played a role in Murray's life. Not only does pornography dehumanize, but like any addiction, increasing amounts are needed to be satisfied--a deadly recipe for those prone to violence." Is this the answer? In his book “Republican Gommorah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party”, author and journalist Max Blumenthal doesn’t seem convinced:
But if porn breeds violence, then why had Ted Haggard, an avid porn consumer, never engaged in any act of physical brutality beyond lightly spanking the buttocks of a gay bodybuilder?
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| Focus on the Family headquarters |
But was there more behind this matter than evil spirits floating through the air - for which there is no other defense but prayer, the singing of vibrant worship songs, sequestration from the world, and Bible reading?
One source during the media coverage of the incident seemed to think there was a more realistic explanation. When reporting on the incident, CNN reporter Rick Sanchez interviewed Marlene Winell - a psychiatrist who had attempted to counsel Matthew Murray before the incident. Winnell's opinion on the cause of this incident contrasted with Dobson and the popular viewpoint of the religious right. She believed that Murray's destructive actions were influenced - at least in part - by "a crazy-making system that has all sorts of circular reasoning. It's got bottom line rules like, 'Don't think, don't respect your own feelings in any way.' Small children are told they're going to burn in Hell. And if it doesn't work for you...[you are told that] it's your fault."
Before the incident, Matthew Murray had a conversation in an online chat-room for former Pentecostals, where he said:
...my mother was into all the charismatic "fanatical evangelical" insanity. Her and her church believed that Satan and demons were everywhere in everything. The rules were VERY strict all the time. We couldn't have ANY christian or non-christian music at all except for a few charismatic worship CDs. There was physical abuse in my home. My mother although used psychotropic drugs because she somehow thought it would make it easier to control me (I've never been diagnosed with any mental illness either). Pastors would always come and interrogate me over video games or TV watching or other things. There were NO FRIENDS outside the church and family and even then only family members who were in the church. You could not trust anyone at all because anyone might be a spy.Matthew Murray had been virtually sequestered from the world by his parents. His mother had subscribed to Bill Gothard’s philosophy of homeschooling, which was designed to aid worried parents in shielding their children from the liberal hippies of the world who were out to corrupt poor defenseless Christian children through television, music, and movies. Gothard’s philosophy of protection involved absolute submission to the authority of parents, with no questions asked. This method was praised by much of the religious right for being a good character builder, but Matthew Murray believed Gothard was a source of enormous pain. In one discussion forum for recovering Gothard followers, Murray wrote:
I believe that the truth needs to be exposed…. People need to see through errornious [sic] and destructive doctrines and teachings including Bill Gothard's.Desperate to escape his parents’ authoritarianism, and given few options to do so, Murray enrolled in the "Discipleship Training School" of Youth with a Mission (YWAM) held in Arvada in 2002. But he quickly found himself imprisoned within an even more restrictive culture there. Another student of YWAM had described YWAM’s techniques as “cult mind-controlling techniques.” Under this regime, Murray became increasingly paranoid, and according to one roommate would often speak aloud to voices only Murray could hear. Before his first mission, he was discharged for unspecified “health reasons”.
Two years later, Murray’s mother, Loretta, dragged him to a Pentecostal conference, where at one point he raged at two YWAM administrators. These staffers warned Loretta that her son "wasn't walking with the Lord and could be planning violence." Loretta reported this to her local pastor, who later burst into Matthew’s room, rifled through his belongings, and confiscated a bag full of secular music and movies - which were, apparently, evidence of his depravity. For three months afterward, Loretta would search Matthew’s room daily. This not only stripped Matthew of his privacy, but also removed any remaining love he had once held for her. Murray began to descend deeper and deeper into what he had described as a “Christian nightmare” in his journal.
In November of 2006, the aforementioned Mike Jones alleged that Ted Haggard had paid him for sex for a period of three years, and had also purchased and used Crystal Meth. Murray became obsessed with this scandal, and the way the Evangelical community handled it. In one journal entry, Murray reported having confronted his mother over Haggard, whom he wrote was his mother’s “favorite pastor”: “Hey, bit,ch [sic], using drugs, alcohol and having gay sex, I'm just trying to do what any Christian pastor would do, at least I'm not doing meth like Ted Haggard...but maybe I will try it and maybe I'll just OD on stuff just so I don't have to deal with you anymore...", Murray reported he had defiantly yelled in his mother’s face.
In “Republican Gommorah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party”, Max Blumenthal writes:
The evangelical hierarchy's handling of the Haggard scandal had hardened Murray's murderous intentions. Both Murray and Haggard were unable to fulfill their essential selves within the strict confines of Pentecostal culture, so each of them sought an escape through drugs and illicit sex. But whereas Murray openly embraced his turn to decadence, Haggard concealed his secret life behind bombastic expressions of religious fervor. After Haggard was unmasked as a fraud, however, he was pronounced "completely heterosexual" by the movement's elders in only three weeks. Murray, who had been irrevocably rejected for abandoning his faith, was stung by this spectacle of cheap grace. "I want to know where was all the love, mercy and compassion for my supposed imperfections?" he wrote despairingly.Could it be that the dominating authority structures Matthew had been raised with had caused psychological trauma, which later surfaced through expressions of violence?
In “Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead”, Brene Brown - a prominent researcher on shame and vulnerability - writes:
Jean Baker Miller and Irene Stiver, relational -cultural theorists from the Stone Center at Wellesley College, have eloquently captured the extremity of isolation. They write, “We believe that the most terrifying and destructive feeling that a person can experience is psychological isolation. This is not the same as being alone. It is a feeling that one is locked out of the possibility of human connection and of being powerless to change the situation. In the extreme, psychological isolation can lead to a sense of hopelessness and desperation. People will do almost anything to escape this combination of condemned isolation and powerlessness.”Was Matthew’s increasingly isolated existence to blame, or was the cause of this violent act as Matthew’s father suspected: did an invisible personality named Satan invade Matthew and make him do this - despite all his authority figures having done everything right to raise him?
Dr. James Dobson says “We can't explain it, we can't understand” - and in response, Max Blumenthal writes (from “Republican Gommorah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party”):
There was really little else Dobson could say. Murray's parents were not neglectful of their son, nor were they intentionally abusive. By all accounts, they raised him in faithful accordance with the teachings of the Christian right's leading self-help gurus. In their cloistered world, where home-schooling is viewed as an ideal alternative to "government schools," and where the rod is rarely spared, they were model parents. Murray's killing spree thus reflected less on his parents than on the all-encompassing authoritarian culture that Dobson had helped to shape. When practiced in the real world, the movement's "family values" sometimes produced some unusually dysfunctional families. Only by blaming Satan and his minions for Murray's acts could the Christian right avoid acknowledging this absolutely damning indictment of its ideology.
Before we move on to examine the Biblical teachings on Satan and the demonic, let’s examine one more case study.
The Assassination of George Tiller
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| George Tiller |
After Tiller’s death, opponents of abortion - including some who had been involved in the protests that had specifically focused on Tiller - expressed outrage at the shooting and said they feared that their groups might be wrongly judged by the act. But is it really so surprising that this series of events ended this way? Tiller’s death came after a process which highly resembled a very ancient cultural practice of scapegoating. The death came in answer to a social crisis between pro-lifers and pro-choicers. The pro-life forces had painted pro-choicers as the embodiment of evil, and had repeatedly gathered in a ritualized mob setting, where evil had been labelled and named - singling out Dr. George Tiller as a focal point.
In “Understanding Spiritual Warfare: Four Views”, Rebecca Greenwood candidly reports on her spiritual warfare with George Tiller, whilst also expressing regret at his death. Greenwood’s methods of spiritual warfare include a practice of, as she describes it, “Spiritual Mapping”, whereby the practitioner seeks to not only identify the sins of a social region, but to identify and name the demons at work behind them. Greenwood mentions a demon named Lilith, and writes about having a vision of an owl, which represented this demon.
In response to her essay, Dr. Greg Boyd - who, it should be mentioned, is no skeptic of the spiritual world - writes:
...placing too much authority and importance on our subjective impressions while focusing on what may be going on in the spiritual realm can lead people to become so preoccupied with fighting invisible forces that they minimize the significance of other important factors that pertain to an issue. For example, if a person called to address the abortion issue is part of a ministry that is centered on confronting the invisible forces behind abortion on the basis of information someone believes they’ve received from God, they can easily minimize the significance of the multitude of more earthly factors that affect abortion and that need to be addressed. They can easily believe that the most important thing needed to bring an end to abortion is to bind the demonic power behind abortion in the particular way they believe God told them to.Jonathan Edwards once wrote: “there is nothing that belongs to Christian experience that is more liable to corrupt mixture than zeal.” Is it possible that the zealous and overactive imagination of the Kansas abortion protestors caused people to ignore very real phenomena and the possibility that their actions might be doing more harm than good? And is it possible that this same zeal and imagination contributed to the psychosis that grew within Matthew Murray? Is it possible that dwelling on invisible forces causes people to miss very real problems that are right in front of them?
While I’m all for people receiving revelations, and while I’m not against giving a place to praying against spiritual forces, I believe our approach to abortion and every other social issue we may feel called to address needs to be more balanced. If abortion is the issue an individual or community feels called to address, it seems to me their focus should be on more practical, and generally more challenging, questions, such as: How can we individually and collectively sacrifice our time and resources to make it practically feasible for mothers with unwanted pregnancies to go full term with their unborn babies, since studies show a high percentage of women who have abortions do so because they feel they have no viable alternative? How can we sacrifice our time and resources to alleviate poverty, since studies suggest there is a strong correlation between poverty and abortion? How can we sacrifice our time and resources to befriend and serve young people who come from tragically broken homes, since studies suggest there is a correlation between broken homes and abortion? And how can we individually and collectively sacrifice our time and resources to demonstrate Christlike love to the abortion practitioners, since loving and serving “enemies” lies at the heart of the kingdom Jesus brought?
Another author who contributed to "Understanding Spiritual Warfare: Four Views" - Walter Wink - wrote in the book:
There is something sad in the moralistic tirades of fundamentalist preachers terrifying the credulous with pictures of Satan lurking in the shadows, coaxing individuals to violate rules that are often satanic themselves and deserve to be broken, while all the while ignoring the mark of the cloven hoof in economic or political arrangements that suck the life out of whole generations of people. The media have made a sensation out of a few rare cases of possession of pubescent youth, with no comprehension whatever of Satan’s grip on our entire civilization. Why should Satan reveal himself more often in individual cases, when he can, from invisibility, preside over an entire global culture that spreads over the whole planet like a cancer: a civilization that systematically erodes traditional religions; that treats people who produce and serve as robots; that denies not only the spiritual but even the poetic, the artistic, and the inner; that propagates belief in the ultimate power of money; and that organizes an economic system exploitative of most of the peoples of the world and anchored in a permanent war economy?It is interesting to note how versatile a tool “Satan” as a scapegoat can be. A careful observer might notice all sorts of groups claiming that their opponents are under the influence of this shadowy figure - you may even notice both sides of the same conflict making this claim. In “The Birth of Satan: Tracing the Devil's Biblical Roots”, authors T.J. Mobley and Gregory Wray write about the phenomenon of “Satan” as a movement’s main subverter:
If the subversion theory is advanced by communities or individuals suspicious of the government, its Satan and demons are an international network of elites who purportedly control the powers that seem to be. The identity of this cabal of elites varies according to the social prejudices of the theory’s adherents. Anti-Semites suspect an international Jewish conspiracy. This, by the way, is the cruelest irony: that a narrative pattern invented by ancient Jews would be reversed to make its original composers into the enemy. Right-wingers suspect a Communist or atheistic conspiracy while left-wingers fear a military-industrial complex. Protestant John Birchers fear the Vatican, and hysterical Roman Catholics fear the Freemasons. Some middle-class Americans coping with the enormous economic and cultural changes of the late twentieth-century have imagined that a network of Satanists and sexual deviants seek to abduct their children from shopping malls or violate their children in day care centers. Many Westerners see an international Islamic conspiracy dedicated to destroying Jewish and Christian culture, while some Muslims fear the reverse. There is and will always be enough evidence of human chicanery from all these alleged perpetrators to keep such theories afloat. There are also the U.F.O. enthusiasts who warn us about the advance corps of aliens that have already begun to infiltrate our atmosphere. The “thickest” subversion theories manage to combine two or more of these stocks into a hearty stew of paranormal paranoia, such as in the X-Files movie where the aliens are in league with a government elite.Throughout this series, I will examine the Biblical literature surrounding the spiritual forces of darkness. I will be specifically focusing on the character of “Satan”, but will also be examining some of the accounts of the demonic. It is my hope that my readers will keep an open mind, and will join me on this careful examination of these passages as we seek to answer the questions I’ve raised in the last two posts. The issue I hope to demonstrate to my readers is that, rather than turning the interpretation of these passages into a litmus test for orthodox belief, the real issue at hand is whether or not one is able to identify the actual events and circumstances in life which contribute to the experiences and phenomenon one might describe as “Satanic” or “demonic”. And even more importantly than identifying these factors - how do we resist them and prevent such events from occurring in the future? Furthermore, we might question whether our language regarding the "Satanic" or "demonic" are helping us to diagnose problems, or preventing such diagnosis? As scholars Miguel De La Torre and Albert Hernandez write in "The Quest for the Historical Satan":
Naming the Other as "satanic" or "demonic" effectively short-circuits moral arguments, political critiques, or social analysis. By definition, the individual, group, or nation accused of manifesting or personifying Satan's vices and desires can never be in a dialogue of mutual edification or a meaningful compromise.Later on in the book, the authors explore how the old attitude of "the Devil made me do it" is often subtly employed in a way that prevents us from diagnosing our problems as well:
Blaming Satan can absolve oppressors quicker than God's grace. I really am not that bad - so the logic goes - it is Satan, since the Garden of Eden, who has been leading humanity astray. I am really a good person, but I do wrestle with my secret demons. When I participate in the pain of others (not just physical but also caused by society and economics) of others, it is the devil that made me do it. Thankfully, Jesus took our place on the cross so that we do not need to pay the price for our sins. The devil made me do it, and Jesus cleaned up my mess. As a new creature in Christ "I" can move on without really addressing the consequences of or restitution for those sins the devil made me do. Hence, Nazi concentration guards can torture all week long and still attended worship services on Sunday mornings. Politicians can lead armies to war under false pretenses without addressing the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, who are killed or maimed because, after all, our intentions were pure - it was the enemy who was really evil. Repentance from Wall Street greed that tanked the U.S. economy and swindled thousands out of their life savings in 2008 can occur without having to deal with issues of public accountability and restitution to individual investors.
In my next post, we will begin to examine the Old Testament passages that have been used to develop our concept of Satan.
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Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Two Case Studies
Part 3: Serpent = Satan?
Part 4: What is Satan's Real Name?
Part 5: Accuser
Part 6: A Son of God?
Part 7: God's State Prosecutor
Part 8: God’s Sifter
Part 9: Azazel
Part 10: Desert Temptation
Part 11: What Does a Jewish Messiah Look Like?
Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System
Part 13: Proclaiming Jubilee
Part 14: The Evil One
Part 15: The Angels of the Nations
Part 16: The Gerasene Demoniac
Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
Part 18: Driving Satan from Heaven
Part 19: The Unveiling of the Beast of Rome
Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today
Part 21: Jesus and the Domination System
Part 22: Violence
Part 23: Death
Part 24: The Advocate
Part 25: Conclusions?
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