The Devil Made Me Do It

This summer, I'm living in a house in Durham with 5 other Duke undergraduates. We're all doing internships at various churches and nonprofits in the community, and we share meals and do spiritual formation together. We all come from different backgrounds—there are 2 guys and 4 girls; 2 black and 4 white; 2 Pentecostal/nondenominational (black), 1 nondenominational (white), 1 Baptist, 1 Catholic, 1 United Methodist. Needless to say, I'm already being challenged in a lot of ways, and I'm learning a lot.

At our morning Bible study today, we looked at Luke 4:31-37. In this passage, Jesus goes to Capernaum and casts out a demon. We talked about authority for most of the time, then someone asked, "Wait, are we saying that demons actually exist?" and that opened a whole new can of worms. Present at the table were 2 people who had seen demon possession, 3 who had not, and me...who is leery but not unbelieving.

Later, I had a conversation with one of my housemates (who had not been present at the Bible study). It's intriguing to me that I have 2 housemates who consistently use language like "child of the Devil" and the like, while the rest of us pseudo-mainliners don't often hear the Devil spoken of, certainly not personified.

Thomas Merton, in Seeds of Contemplation, says that what the Devil likes most is attention, and the best way to make the Devil mad is to ignore him. You don't want to give the Devil credit for everything bad that happens, or blame the Devil for sins you commit yourself. You don't want to have to see demons around every corner and live a life of defensiveness and apprehension.

Then again, my housemates for whom the Devil is a part of their everyday spiritual vocabulary seem to take sin and temptation much more seriously than mainline Christians do. For them, the tempter is very real and very present, and he/she needs to be recognized, met and rebuked. It is important to pray constantly and not to open yourself up to possession or temptation.

I wonder if, by glossing over the Devil and demons and the like, mainline Christians domesticate sin and temptation. Perhaps the best way to piss the Devil off is to ignore him—but if we are fallen and sinful, is that just going to make us more susceptible to falling further?

For the record, I've seen mental illness that was diagnosable but which also was able to be commanded and controlled by prayer. Maybe in Biblical times demon possession was their name for mental illness. Maybe we don't like to acknowledge the face of evil in depression and other disorders. My dad said that twice in his ministerial career, he has prayed over someone to have demons cast out, because they've been such extreme cases that he hasn't known what else to do, and there is Biblical precedent. So...yes. I'm not talking The Exorcist here, but it's still pretty fascinating, not just intellectually, but in how it affects the ways in which people meet and conquer temptation.