Like the other manifestations of evil mentioned above, it has also changed its accidents. Modern possessions are much more subtle than they used to be.
The idea that some force within us causes us to do harm is of course an attractive notion. It removes all personal blame and culpability, it places these on a force beyond our control. The devil made me do it! We are possessed by the demons of our own past. Modern demons have the power of absolution. They are hostile to our doing what is right, they impede our free will and rational action, they make us do wrong to each other, but it's not our fault.
It is the demon working through us and that absolves us as we claim: "I am a victim of my own past! At what point is it appropriate to call the exorcist? The sad thing for us is that we are often unaware of how crude our modern concepts really are. When we hear the story of the Syro-Phoenician woman who came to Jesus and asked that her daughter be exorcised we may miss its value.
The wisdom of our age would explain the daughter's possession with a different language - maybe attention deficiency disorder, maybe schizophrenia, maybe a "cry for help".
Whatever form the girl's possession took, she asked to be freed of it and Christ rewarded her hope for freedom by granting her request. So the demons of yesteryear are with us today. Language has changed and evolved but we remain like people caught on some infernal merry-go-round; the music plays, the carousel turns and we sing along. Somebody may start a new song, we join in, but the carousel keeps turning, and turns again and again and again.
Sometimes a brave person may try to alight; the Syro-Phoenician woman was one of these. A new created world springs up, springs up at God's command. Rising infection rates in central and eastern Europe suggest a correlation between vaccine scepticism and populist politics. The plan for the capital looks too much like another aspirational plan, not the inspirational one it should be. But in one sense, I think we should.
Halloween raises the same question for us today, but we Westerners tend to dodge it. We make spirits and ghosts into silly games, because—obviously—only the ignorant people of the past believed in stuff like that. Christians ought to know better. Our holy book contains stories of spirits being called back from the dead 1 Sam. If the New Testament is any indication, that portal is never completely closed Eph. Our world has far more spirits involved in its affairs than we realize.
Not exactly. Quite the contrary: As C. Lewis pointed out in Screwtape Letters , most Westerners are so spiritually deadened that a direct attack would only serve to wake them up. Make no mistake: Forces of darkness are at work in this world. The Bible calls them among other things spirits, demons, or powers Eph. The names vary, but the reality is all throughout Scripture. But Scripture seems to indicate that dark spirits can work big as well as small 1 Cor.
They seem just as eager to animate an entire nation as they are to possess an individual Dan. There may be no better explanation for some of the more heinous chapters in human history. Something more than human sin was involved in the practice of chattel slavery in the United States, in the dehumanizing punishment of the Soviet gulags, and in the frighteningly efficient mass murder of Nazi death camps. Most of us, for instance, have had the experience of encountering an institution that is rather corrupt but noting that the individuals within the institution do not seem to be the corrupting factor.
In fact, the individuals involved often sense the distortion but feel powerless to change it. The whole is not merely the sum of its parts. Something bigger seems to be at work. Something bigger is at work. The powers Paul talks about are not merely individual demons making individual people do terrible things. He is looking at something more systemic, beyond both the emperor and the empire.
The spirits against whom we battle may be individual. But they may also be found in our ideologies, our institutions, or our political tribes. In fact, the most devious powers at work today are probably not the ones that possess people, but the ones that animate and control power structures like governments, schools, or economies. It can gain us an audience, a revenue stream, and a lot of praise. But the call to follow Christ is a cruciform call from beginning to end.
If we do not follow him on the road to the cross, we do not follow him. That means that if we are devoted to any way of ministry that is not the way of Christ, we are not just being foolish nor are we being sinful only; we are also being deceived and put to work by evil spirits. It has opened her up to much ridicule. But, as a scholar of early Christianity , I am aware that the belief that demons — or fallen angels — regularly have sex with humans runs deep in the Jewish and Christian traditions.
The earliest account of demon sex in Jewish and Christian traditions comes from the Book of Genesis, which details the origins of the world and the early history of humanity. Genesis says that, prior to the flood of Noah, fallen angels mated with women to produce a race of giants. The brief mention of angels breeding with human women contains few details.
It was left to later writers to fill in the gaps. In the third century B. This knowledge is commonly associated in the ancient world with the advancement of human civilization. Its descriptions of fallen angels were widely influential. The story is quoted in the canonical epistle of Jude. Christians in the second century A. Tertullian retells the story of the Watchers and their demonic arts as a way to discourage female Christians from wearing jewelry, makeup, or expensive clothes.
Dressing in anything other than simple clothes, for Tertullian, means that one is under the influence of demons. Christians like Tertullian came to see demons behind almost all aspects of ancient culture and religion. Many Christians justified abstaining from the everyday aspects of ancient Roman life, from consuming meat to wearing makeup and jewelry, by arguing that such practices were demonic.
Christian fascination with demons having sex with humans developed significantly in the medieval world.
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