Saturday, April 10, 2021

The Concept Of A Demon

The concept of a demon is not as inflexible across different theologies and broader worldviews than some might think.  There is enough information in the Bible to portray demons as spiritual beings on the wrong side of Yahweh's moral nature, which is already enough to distinguish Biblical demons from the demons of several other worldviews.  Fallen angels, after all, are more than just malevolent spirits, even if all fallen angels would be malevolent spirits (at least all unrepentant ones).  It is here that the Bible goes beyond how some other ideas might frame demons despite the fact that it actually clarifies just a fairly small number of things about them.  Yes, it has far less to say about demons than many Christians might suppose based on unevaluated hearsay, yet it does plainly affirm some things about them.

One thing it contradicts is a looser understanding of a demon as simply being eager to harm humans.  A hypothetical (or real) being could be malevolent and aligned with moral evil without actually being formerly perfect in a moral sense, like Satan.  This is why the Biblical conception of a demon differs from certain other similar concepts.  For example, the wendigo of Algonquian (a group of Native Americans) tribal tales is a cannibalistic spirit that can manifest itself in a physical form, but it is not a former angelic being that chose corruption.  Humans can even become wendigos by practicing cannibalism according to some descriptions!  This is not the case in Christian theology, which presents demons as evil spirits that can possess human and animal bodies and yet are distinct from human consciousnesses.

Moreover, while the New Testament clearly describes Satan as having a prominent status among the non-human spiritual enemies of Yahweh, Satan himself is a demon, even though the word typically gets used in reference to lesser wicked spirits other than the devil.  Since the fundamental concept behind the word demon is a fallen angel, at least in the context of Christian theology, Satan is also a demon, just an especially noteworthy one.  Of course, much about Satan is left undisclosed [1], even to the point of the Bible not truly confirming that the entity described in Ezekiel 28 as being cast out because of its pride is the same being elsewhere called the devil [2].

Indeed, the collective history of demons other than Satan is left obscure.  Only a handful of details are provided as to their origin.  Even passages that do not mention demons are occasionally relevant, such as Genesis 1 when it calls that which God creates "good" left to itself--the point being that God cannot create beings in a state of hostility towards him; they must rebel on their own.  Other verses only speak of a subset of demons, such as 2 Peter 2:4, which mentions a group of demons that committed an unspecified sin and were cast into "Tartarus" as divine punishment.  Matthew 25:41 does teach that the devil "and his angels" will be sentenced to hell, but this is a rare verse that refers to demons as a whole.

The Biblical concept a demon is clear enough to establish that it entails a fallen or evil angelic creature without being clear enough for the Bible to mention a great many details about them.  Nothing more is truly necessary, as angels and demons are never the primary focus of the Bible.  The strongest emphasis is always placed on issues of more foundational metaphysics, morality, and soteriology.  This seems to have never stopped the majority of Christians from contriving unbiblical ideas about demonology, broader metaphysics, morality, and soteriology, but at least the Bible has far more to say on the other matters, something which makes it even easier to show that not only do mainstream Christians embrace extra-Biblical theological concepts as Biblical, but that they also ignore the wealth of details that are present in some cases.



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