The way forward, part 3: The demonic aspect

I notice that some these days do not believe in demons. To them, what the Bible describes as demonic possessions are actually mental illnesses. On such a view, Jesus did not deliver people from demons but cured their insanity. Lesser manifestations are treated similarly: The whisper in your mind encouraging you to sin is never an actual demon but, in all cases, your own innate tendencies to error and to pride.

I take, instead, the view that demons are real entities, fallen angels, and thoroughly committed to creating troubles and evils of all sorts, having a hatred for mankind and for God's purposes in the redemption of the faithful. They are not brain diseases or psychological archetypes. They are devils, and they quite hate you and wish you harm.

On that basis, then, it looks to me like an unclean spirit of religiosity has been at work in the church for a thousand years or more. The alternative is to think we fall into the same complicated pattern of error all by ourselves, time and again, in different historical eras. This demon's telltale signs are sophisticated theological arguments that lead to self-serving conclusions. You feel smart knowing such a path of reasoning, and then it turns out to be beneficial in that it justifies something you want, so you're pleased in two ways.

But the way of the Kingdom is not self-serving but other-serving. The reasoning the Kingdom calls for is rather simple, and it is straightforward, honest: without tricks. Great subtlety is the serpent's attribute, not the servant's. Moreover, sound and healthy Christian reasoning sometimes leads to conclusions you do not want: repentance not self-congratulation.

Sophisticated arguments with self-serving outcomes is a pattern you see over and over where division has taken place. My church has smarter and better reasoning: Therefore we reject you. Thus we have partisanship over threads of argument. Agree with certain partisan claims or you are not in our in-group. Every church holds its reasonings to be best. Can everyone be right? In fact, it is nobody who is right, for in playing this game you show yourself to duped by the allure of sophistication and feeling superior, but, in that it leads to division where God wants unity, how smart is it, really? But to sustain the argument we have made, we hold those who disagree to be somehow heretical and we disqualify them from their opinion that we are ourselves mistaken...

People can readily believe other churches to be guilty of this, but have trouble seeing their own churches in the same light. What is the antidote for this poisonous type of reasoning? Its obvious mirror image is to avoid over-sophistication and self-serving outcomes, but people are not good at recognizing the error while they are committing it. Perhaps, to combat our tendency to fall for this kind of reasoning, we need to use an argument about the higher good. Christian unity is served by a simple and generous-minded approach.

What this means is that we will have to recognize a particular kind of wrongheaded argument and stop taking it seriously. We may see it in other churches; let us become accustomed to seeing it in our own, treating this as an application of the principle of seeing not just the speck in our brother's eye but the log in our own.

At that, I could be mistaken in attributing to a demon the tendency to develop sophisticated self-serving doctrines. It could be, instead, simple human perversity and the worldly desire to feel superior to someone else, Murphy's Law then producing worst outcomes from ordinary mistakes. In any case, it is a pervasive and consistent pattern. It is the consistent nature of the errors over the past thousand years or more, both the high sophistication of the reasoning propounded and the consistent habit of bending of arguments toward self-serving outcomes, with unintended consequences, that leads me to suspect supernatural agency. If, instead, it is purely a manifestation of human pride, it is still something we ought to combat.


An example: Roman hegemony and papal supremacy

It is likely true that Roman Catholic insistence on Roman hegemony and papal supremacy began innocently, from good intentions, but went wrong later in the way the policies were developed and employed. The ideas began in a desire to strengthen the church by unifying it against heresy and secular threats. That point is allowed, in an eirenic spirit, even by many who feel these policies went far wrong in their later outcomes.

The Great Schism of 1054 has as its root cause the collision of Eastern Christianity with a Roman hierarchy accustomed to having its way, and having the supreme authority in the papacy to back them up. Rome found itself in a philosophical collision with churches in the East that were ill-disposed to accept Roman interference in their affairs (as they saw it) or the claims of the papacy. They remembered, in their church history, popes who did not exercise such sweeping authority or take so much interest in the affairs of foreign churches. They thought the powers of the pope, as they encountered them in the days of the schism, a development of doctrine beyond what scripture or tradition would justify.

Even the famous filioque controversy hinges on objections to Roman supremacy: who were the Romans, and who was the pope, to impose a new wording without an ecumenical council, a council including the Eastern bishops? Who did these Romans think they were?

The whole affair of the schism and its surrounding controversies had, for the Orthodox, the smell of Roman overreach and arrogance, while to the Romans the problem seemed a matter of the East denying the just demands of Roman authority. It is clear that the Romans did not quite understand who they were dealing with when they turned their attention so far afield, for the reaction they got was quite unlike what they were used to nearer to home. For their high-handedness, the Romans got sent away in cold rejection of their claims and demands.

The Roman see's desire to serve the whole church world with its dynamic, powerful administration came to be seen, in the East, as a usurpation of powers that belonged to churches accustomed to be largely self-governing. It looked like unwelcome innovation and an uncalled-for expansion of power and prerogatives. The pope styling himself "Servant of the Servants of God" had become unconvincing: appropriation ex officio of a title that he did not fit and he had not earned. Indeed, his actions seemed those of master not servant.

When we come later to the proto-Protestant and Protestant movements, we see Rome acting as a dictatorship in the religious sphere. We should be careful to avoid anachronism on that point,  not imposing our modern expectations about how the church should have behaved. The world worked differently then. Many secular governments in the era amounted to dictatorships too. Rome was playing the game as the game, in those days, was played. The church was able to stand up to powerful and arrogant governments: Mighty princes thought twice before opposing the will of the pope. If that does not justify what happened, it at least helps us see events in their context of time and place.

All the same, Rome's stern (at times murderous) responses to religious dissent did not serve to stop the Protestant revolt, but to strengthen it. People inclined to ask questions about the church's course and conduct saw as martyrs those the church did away with. Whatever Rome's good intentions were in the beginning, instead of being a force for lasting unity, absolutism about the supremacy of the Roman viewpoint had become for a second time the occasion for schism.

So here I diagnose a self-serving doctrine (you don't argue with the pope, or his hierarchy) as having bad outcomes in two schisms, a pair of deep divisions in the church world that are with us to this day. I do not rule out a third occurrence. In our day, lay Catholic voices are questioning the conduct of a hierarchy that seems to have difficulty responding with anything but fiat and evasion to difficult questions. "Who are you to question?" appears still to be very prominent in the attitude of hierarchs.

I picked that example because it is old and instructive, and not to single out Catholics. There are other examples from other denominations: an abundance, in fact. There are self-serving Protestant dogmas in particular abundance, due to the abundance of Protestant sects. I encourage you to find such examples where a servant's heart and viewpoint are lacking, where the argument becomes an end in itself, and disunity results.