The Little Friar

I've been exploring -- in the lead-up to the American elections in a couple of months -- how the demonic in the Bible mixes both the spiritual and political, both idolatry and oppression. All of the preceding posts have been tracing out a simple development.   It started with "sons of God" ruling over the nations as national, regional deities.  These national gods -- like the Canaanite god Moloch -- tempt the Israelites into idolatry, worship that was accompanied by oppressive practices such as child sacrifice.  The spectacle of that wickedness darkened the aspect of these national deities. So the shift occurred, the gods of the nations became the demons. They sacrificed to demons that were no gods, to gods they had never known, to new gods that had come recently, whom your fathers had never dreaded (Deuteronomy 32.17). They served their idols, which became a snare to them. They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons; they poured out ...

As we continue to reflect upon how the treatment of the demonic in the Bible mixes the political and the spiritual, I want to revisit something I used to emphasize in my Intro to New Testament courses.  So this is something about which some of my readers have already heard quite a bit. Lucifer, as I've already insisted, referred to a political reality -- a Babylonian king -- imagery that was used by the New Testament authors to describe a spiritual reality, Satan as a star falling from heaven. In this post we revisit another name for Satan to make a similar point:  Beelzebul or Beelzebub . This draws on an argument I used to make in my New Testament classes:  In the Synoptic Gospels Beelzebub is described as the "Prince of Demons",  a prince Jesus associates with Satan: And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, "He is possessed by Beelzebul! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons." So Jesus called them over to him ...

I arrived, yesterday afternoon, home, finding a note on our door.  The note had been left by the property manager for the apartment complex in which we live.  The note was to schedule a meeting to recertify our lease for the coming year. In the note, that meeting had been scheduled for 12 noon -- on the day of the note . Obviously, we weren't home when the note was left yesterday morning, sometime after 8.  And the note wasn't found until 4 pm. So, I proceeded to the office to register a complaint. Now, mind you, this isn't the first time I've lodged a complaint against this particular property manager.  After multiple emails and phone calls, I gave up just yesterday morning (before I got the note, in case you were wondering) in another matter.  I'd been asking to meet with the property manager and the district supervisor, in order to resolve some concerns.  That meeting was never scheduled -- we had to follow "the chain of command", I'd been...

A friend asked today what I thought about demons, angels, and the like.  I sketched out a few remarks that covered a lot of territory before we had to call an end to the conversation.  So let me lay out here a few more of the specifics of how I think about demons and the demonic.  And let me begin with some of the usual ways these things are constructed.  First, there are the Literalists.   The Literalist takes the passages in the Bible about demons and spiritual powers literally.  The Literalist, thus, has a robust notion of spiritual warfare and believes in the reality of demonic possession (although they might believe this to be a very rare and extreme event).  I have a couple of problems with this position.  First, ontologically, it's just hard to believe in demons in the modern, scientific age. To quote Walter Wink's Naming the Powers :  "We moderns cannot bring ourselves by any feat of will or imagination to believe in the real existenc...