Evil as Person

Some ground rules for thinking about Satan and his minions.

Lent begins this Sunday with Luke’s account of Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness, a text which posits, to put it quite simply, that Satan and his demons have been given possession over the governments of the world. For the Prince of Lies to offer the Oval Office to Jesus implies it is already within his grasp to give to Jesus.

Just so, the scriptures show forth nothing more mysterious than our monstrous world.

Starting out as a rookie preacher, Karl Barth struggled with translating the ancient, premodern world of the Bible for contemporary listeners. As happens with many preachers, seminary had nearly wrung the faith out of Barth, rendering the Bible as a text to be demythologized rather than declared. However, when Barth discovered that all of his former professors had fallen under the Kaiser’s spell and signed an enthusiastic endorsement of Germany’s unprovoked war, Barth concluded the liberal theology they had handed over to him was rotten at the core. He immediately set upon the task of rebuilding his faith from the ground up.

Around the same time, while Barth was attending his brother’s wedding, he and a friend traveled a short distance to the town of Bad Boll in order to meet Christoph Blumhardt, a young pastor whose father, Johann Blumhardt, had, some years earlier, exorcised a demon from a young woman in his parish. The exorcism had sparked a revival in southern Germany.

The young woman’s name was Gottlieben Dittus.

She lived with her two sisters and brother in a ramshackle basement apartment. The was cheap because not only was the plaster peeling and the paint fading, the walls themselves knocked and creaked uncontrollably. Soon Gottlieben started hearing other noises, shuffling feet and scampering in between the walls. Next she began seeing things, shapes and light. One day she started speaking in voices not her own.

The sisters of Gottlieben Dittus reached out to the pastor for help. Pastor Blumhardt was every bit the modern man. So Blumhardt followed the science. He sought out doctors and treatments and medicines. Weeks went by as neighbors began complaining about the noise emerging from the sisters’s apartment. Gottlieben was now speaking in the voice of the deceased former owner of the house, who led Blumhardt to discover bones buried under the floorboards and bodies in the adjacent field. Despite his modern prejudices and secular superstitions, Johann Blumhardt eventually became convinced that what was holding the young woman hostage was, in fact, a minion of the one the prophet John sees falling as a star, a star who clutches the keys of hell.

One night, three months in to the ordeal, as Gottlieben fell into another demonic trance, Blumhardt took her hand and shouted into her ear:

“Place your hands together and pray, ‘Lord Jesus, help me!’ We have seen long enough what the devil can do; now we desire to see also what God can do.”

It was a moment like that one, only months later, that the demon finally left her. Gottliebin cried out in a strange voice, loud enough for the neighbors to hear, “Jesus is victor!” The demon left her— that little word felled him.

The Bible refuses to acknowledge that our “real” world deserves the adjective.

Just as we cannot speak Christian by eliminating the word angel from our vocabulary neither can we preach the gospel without explicit reference to God’s opponent.

Christianity just is a struggle with a personified Liar.