Once you becomes sensitized to the issue of demons, you see them everywhere in the New Testament. Every couple of chapters Jesus is casting out an evil spirit. Mary Magdalen was a demoniac; the famous story of Legion, etc. In fact, one of the “powers” that Jesus officially confers upon his apostles is that they can expel demons.
Exorcism and the tradition of possession are still present in the church. In the Greek church, the ceremony of baptism includes an excorcism (the godparents spit three times to cast Satan out of the child—pah, pah, pah). My sister did this for my son’s baptism. It was a great relief, as I was writing the book at the time and a little on edge about the devil. And remember the famous baptism scene in the Godfather: “Do you renounce... Satan?”
That’s the Roman Catholic echo of the same point. The Catholic church, I read, has revived the office of the Exorcist. And the evangelical church has embraced the notion of exorcism, cast as “deliverance ministry.” In mainstream Protestantism, however, it’s all but invisible.
Glimpses into the early church’s teachings on the reality of evil spirits, and the way they can be fended off with prayer, were illuminating background, though I ain’t no scholar on these points:
- Passage from St. Paul
- Book on Medieval Europe
- General info about Early Church
- Tertullian on the Power of Prayer (at the bottom)
