to the shadows and the darkness. The rhetoric of human servanthood and instrumentality rings inherently offensive, suggesting images of oppression by eighteenth-century slave drivers mistreating their human property. Characteristic of the demonic is scorn of one’s true identity and spurn of one’s place and role in God’s order. Accordingly, demons are riotous monsters of chaos. In the Eastern Church sin is not described in terms of a deliberate wilful opposition to God. Instead, the sinful nature is framed within a discourse of man’s inability to know himself and God clearly: a confusion of identity. During one exorcism, a demon was quoted describing hell in the following way:
Everyone lives folded within himself and torn apart by his regrets. There is no relationship with anyone; everyone finds himself in the most profound solitude and desperately weeps for the evil that he has committed.17
For creatures that find their satisfaction, fulfilment and peace in something that lies outside of their own personhood, hell is the absolute expression of navel-gazing—useless.
According to St. Augustine, demons are restless and confused creatures. Therefore, they never enjoy peace. To put things very mildly, they are like spoiled bratty children who don’t get their way and throw a tantrum—for eternity. Still, they remain more powerful and clever than a neighbourhood bully, devoting themselves to pulling the rest of God’s creation into their self-created misery. Their followers are residents of “Babylon,” Hebrew for “confusion.” Augustine’s City of God summarizes the demonic error as a mixing up of “use” with “enjoyment” which occurs through the confusion of all orders in life.18 For example, an anti-rational society steered by sensation and hyper-romance is apt to confuse ontological distinctions essential to the maintenance of healthy relationships. There are four distinctive words for ‘love’ in Greek. English has collapsed them all into one, with grave consequences. What is bestiality or pedophilia other than a confusion of philia (friendship) or storge (affection) with eros, from which we obtain the word “erotic”? Defenders of these perversions are, nevertheless, sincere. The discipline of economics stresses how the stock market is only as stable as it is perceived to be. Reality becomes anecdotal to the truth. Feelings and perceptions are mutually dependent. They can both be sincere, but still misplaced. Demons are fixated on muddling up and confusing God’s order through their relentless pursuit of turning our love for the Creator (agape) towards creation, with the result of devising new gods in our own image.
The Augustinian monk, Martin Luther, would later apply this theorem to pastoral care. Specifically, he accentuated how the mixing up of theological concepts and their implicit orders, such as the fundamental differences between things pertaining to the realm of Law and those of the Gospel (i.e. confusing the commands and promises of God), was evil and harmful.19 Confusing the letter that kills with the spirit that gives life is spiritual suicide (2 Cor 3:6). Accordingly, the God-fearing navigator fluctuates between the poles of what we ought to do but are unable, and what Christ has done on our behalf and in our stead. For example, the question regarding what “Jesus would do” in any particular moral instance provides little guidance in the cogitations of our ethical decision-making. Routinely boycotting a company’s products because of their link to abuse in the developing world presumes the existence of morally uncontaminated multinationals. How do our political alliances shift when Palestinian Christians outnumber Messianic Jews? Moreover, innocent children huddle on both sides of barbed-wire fences, regarded by armies as potential adults and eventual threats. We live interdependently with a corrupted global network paralyzing all ability to react in a holy manner. I am not perfect. I am also not the invincible holy Son of God. This does not excuse me to do the wrong thing but offers a compelling explanation for the limits of doing the right thing. Because of the poisonous repercussions of the fall from Eden, all of one’s good moral behaviour is perverted to some extent. A work may still be good (as all good deeds arising from a Christian heart—as saint, not as sinner—are labelled fruits of God’s Holy Spirit), but my motives are never entirely pure. The Old Adam remains within me until death. My deeds are not the problem; I am. I can give a magnanimous contribution to a charity, and it will likely do much good objectively. Yet some of my motivations are selfish. My generous donation may make me feel good, may demonstrate my importance at making a global difference, may assuage guilt, might provide proof that I am better than someone else, etc. Lex semper accusat: the Law always accuses us of our sin, exposing our inadequacy even with regards to our best attempts at fulfilling a divine rule. Evil stems from the corrupt heart. Where does that leave us? We are left with a great hope: naked and eager receptors of the Good News. The Gospel forgives our sins, exonerates our wrongs, and covers our unrighteousness with the merits of Christ. The Law has been fulfilled by Him, but credited to us. Some call this “imputed righteousness.” Man is pure, not because of what he has done, but because of what has been done unto him. It terrifies all the hordes of hell, who may laugh at man’s efforts to behave purely but now lay vanquished before the works of Jesus Christ.
Distracting man from this wonderful and life-altering Gospel announcement is an archetypal strategy for Satan. Demonic confusion penetrates our belief system when we think that our forgiveness is conditional on our works of the Law. It annuls a justification by grace through faith, which is the foundational doctrine to Christ’s holy Church. Nothing pleases the devil more than believers convinced that they are saved by their works and not by grace alone. Eastern Christians disapprove of a Lutheran hermeneutic that dichotomizes faith and works, and even accuse it of subsiding incongruously with church history and the New Testament. Although Lutherans believe that salvation is by faith alone, they do not believe that it is by a faith that is alone. Yet, the theological distinction must be maintained. Otherwise, a treacherous merging of the quintessential doctrine of justification with sanctification occurs, partially pinning the assurance of the believer’s saintly status in his or her own holiness as opposed to Christ’s. Jesus Christ has clothed Himself with our sins, while we have dressed ourselves with His mantle of righteousness. The devil schemes to “cross-dress” these gowns. Some Eastern Orthodox who find the Lutheran fixation on the Second Person of the Holy Trinity to be slightly unbalanced, also discover St. Paul to be too “judicious” in his perception of the atonement. Nevertheless, the dialogue of life is permeated with dichotomies. The tension and friction intrinsic to our daily experiences of sin and grace, justice and mercy, and Law and Gospel are the uneven cobble stones beneath the war-torn feet of the human venture, a yin-yang that shapes our individual paths. There are multifarious ways to articulate the dichotomous relationship within the paradox while still remaining faithful to the dialectic. But when the two notions are twisted apart, mixed together or interchanged, the devil has achieved his ultimate goal.
Yet demonic confusion is not limited to individual human experience. Martin Luther observed the same kinds of confusions in the socio-political spheres, between the Two Kingdoms—God’s rule on earth through both the instruments of the Church and those of the government. For example, the religious crusades were guilty of the same demonic error as the Social Gospel is today. They were attempts at turning temporal realities into eternal realities, or eternalizing temporal ones. Constantine’s objective of erecting the first “Christian state” resembled the same thinking patterns of his contemporary pagans, despite his good intentions. All theocracies seek to materialize heavenly realities on earth. Although some of the crusades were politically motivated and even justifiable considering the threat of Islamic expansion, others were clearly driven by a view of spiritual conquest. Conquering the Holy Land embodied a physical victory over the spiritual dark forces. Still today, the Vatican is not just a church, but a state. The issue lies deeper than a cynical mixing of politics and religion, but exemplifies how easily the tools that belong to one realm can be mistakenly applied for use in the other. Years later, emerging from his exile at the Wartburg castle, Martin Luther was horrified to discover that his colleague Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, in an effort to crush what he believed to be the worship of idols, had begun a rampage breaking all religious images, stained glass and statues of the saints. Luther rebuked him not only for demonically confusing the realms of inward cleanliness through such abominable outward behaviour,
