Satan Reconstructed

Part 1, Four Names

In 2016 I surprised some people by publishing a book about the devil and spiritual warfare. At that time, most of my work would have fit the label “deconstruction,” though that word wasn’t around in 2007 when I first started writing online. My faith in that early season of public writing was disenchanted and demythologized. My hermeneutic was liberationist and mainly unpacked Scripture in social justice terms.

So it was surprising to many readers when I published Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted. Why was I, someone who was helping those who were doubting and deconstructing, attempting to rehabilitate parts of the Christian experience and worldview that many deemed to be problematic? And not just problematic from a metaphysical perspective, as a subject of belief, but problematic also as a location of abuse and harm. Reviving Old Scratch appeared to be a very strange U-turn for me.

The book was marking a change. Again, we didn’t have the word for it in 2016, but I had made my turn toward reconstruction, pivoting away from disenchantment toward enchantment. And a part of that shift was rethinking the devil.

But why this particular topic? The pressing issue was pastoral. I had begun serving as a prison chaplain, and in that ministry began encountering the enchanted/disenchanted divide that separated me from the men I was caring for. For the men in the prison, satan is obviously real. Demonic attacks really happen. And spiritual warfare is a pressing challenge. In spite of my own doubts, I didn’t want my pastoral interventions to be dismissive, elitist, or paternalistic. Mostly because it quickly became obvious to me that I was the weird one. The majority of people are supernaturalists. Global Christianity is enchanted. It’s mostly over-educated white males in the West, people like myself, who tend to doubt the existence of the devil. This cultural divide creates some very odd situations, like pastors who doubt the reality of satan, given their MDiv, DMin, or PhD training, leading congregations who experience spiritual warfare as a lived reality.

That said, the tide seems to have turned since 2016. Talk of re-enchantment and reconstruction has become much more common. And due to the work of people like Jordan Peterson, skeptical pastors have a better appreciation for how meaning-making is deeply mythological. Life is story work. And stories have dragons.

And so, wanting to bridge the pastoral divide between myself and the men at the prison, I wrote a “devil for doubters” book. My theology of satan needed to be rehabilitated.

Since the publication of Reviving Old Scratch I’ve been invited to give talks, lectures, and sermons about satan and spiritual warfare. Consequently, I’ve experimented with how to share this material in a way that is engaging and can even preach. One of the most effective ways is to take a tour through four names in Scripture used to describe our adversary. These names are:

Satan

Lucifer

Beelzebub

Devil

As we’ll discover in this series, each name is a lens that allows us to pick out particular aspects of the biblical imagination, our lived experience, and what we are called to do by way of “resistance.”

Welcome to a series I’m calling “Satan Reconstructed.”