Whenever I've shared a talk or lecture about the Devil, as the author of Reviving Old Scratch, the most common thing disenchanted and progressive audiences get hung up on isn't really Satan. They can get their heads around evil, however conceived. What they trip over, as I described in Part 2 of this series, is the phrase "spiritual warfare."

Why is this?

There are a few reasons.

Some of it is personal history. Among disenchanted and progressive Christian audiences many are ex-evangelicals, and ex-Pentecostals in particular. And among these persons the language of "spiritual warfare" is associated with a lot of bad and hurtful experiences. Consequently, trying to rehabilitate or reconstruct the language of "spiritual warfare" is like revisiting an old wound. And beyond being a haunting memory, there is a legitimate concern about perpetrating harm. Isn't the language of spiritual warfare, along with all this "devil talk," dangerous and prone to abuse?

A related worry here is how many associate the language of spiritual warfare with Frank Peretti's novel This Present Darkness, published in 1986, which has sold over two million copies. The plot of the book concerns a small town that is being taken over by demonic powers. Here's a bit of the plot summary—Spoiler alert!—from Wikipedia:

As the investigation continues, Marshall and Bernice begin to realize that they are onto something much bigger than they thought. They slowly uncover a plot to take over the town by buying the college, which is being carried out by the Universal Consciousness Society, a powerful New Age group and "worldwide front organization for Satan." The college's psychology professor, Juleen Langstrat, is part of the Society. She teaches meditation, which brings practitioners in contact with spirit guides (demons), as well as witchcraft and New Age beliefs. Members of the community are thus influenced by Satan, including Brummel and the pastor of the liberal United Christian Church. 

You can see the culture war tropes. A liberal college and a psychology professor. New Age beliefs and witchcraft. Meditation as communion with demons. A liberal mainline church. Peretti fuses the culture war with a florid vision of spiritual warfare where angels walk alongside the evangelical protagonists and demons sit on the shoulders of the secularists and liberals.

Such associations with the phrase "spiritual warfare" make it a damaged brand in progressive Christian spaces. If by "spiritual warfare" you mean something like Frank Peretti's This Present Darkness, well, we'll take a hard pass.

Beyond this connection between "spiritual warfare" and evangelicalism, there are many progressive Christians who just get hung up on the metaphor of "warfare." To describe the loving way of Jesus as "warfare" is theologically problematic. And, again, there is a concern that such a metaphor is prone to abuse. So, while many audiences are happy to talk about Satan, they are less enthused about using the phrase "spiritual warfare" to describe this struggle.

I sympathize. There are many metaphors we might use to describe our relation to evil. If you don't want to describe that relation as "fighting," "doing battle," or "going to war," softer metaphors like "resist" might be better. I think the metaphors of gardening, repairing, and healing can do good work. For example, there are forces that stand in a satanic—adversarial—relation to your garden. Poor soil. Lack of water. Weeds. Pests. Etc. If you do nothing, the garden will suffer. So, you have to act. You have to attend, invest, care, work, and sweat. This garden can be your soul, your home, your relationships, your workplace, your neighborhood, your nation, and the world writ large. Call all your work to bring flourishing your version and vision of what others call "spiritual warfare."

I don't mind anyone doing good story work here. I love deploying a diversity of metaphors for the spiritual life. All I really care about is that the metaphors call you to watchfulness and action.

That said, I don't have a problem with the metaphor of "warfare." It's richly Biblical. As I pointed out in Part 2 of this series, the key is keeping the Christological framework firmly in view. Jesus wins his military victory by dying on the cross. And the enemies Jesus defeats are spiritual powers. Sin, death, and the Devil. Here's how Paul describes it in Colossians 2:

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.

The vision here is of a Roman military victory, how the Caesars would parade the spoils of war and their defeated enemies through the city. Jesus is portrayed as leading that victory parade. But notice Christ's weapon. Not guns, cannons, or bombs. The weapon is the cross. And notice who the defeated enemies are: Death, sin, and the spiritual powers holding us captive.

The most famous military metaphor is Paul's description of the armor of God in Ephesians. Recall the "weapons" in that list: Truth, righteousness, the gospel of peace, faith, salvation, and the word of God.

We could also work through Revelation and how it describes the "War of the Lamb."

All that to say, whenever I run into skepticism of "spiritual warfare" as a metaphor, my knee-jerk reaction tends to be:

"People, it's a metaphor."

"who trains my hands for battle"

I picked, here, the most triggering line from Psalm 144. Psalm 144 is a royal psalm, and it's opening lines call upon the Lord to be an aid in battle:

Blessed be the Lord, my rock
who trains my hands for battle
and my fingers for warfare.
He is my faithful love and my fortress,
my stronghold and my deliverer.
He is my shield, and I take refuge in him;
he subdues my people under me.

Narratively, we understand how these petitions functioned in the life of David as he fought with the peoples around him. But once we step outside of that story, how do we apply such texts to our time and place? Especially as war rages again in the Middle East. We can see how texts like Psalm 144 can be easily coopted as prayers for our war-making efforts. 

So let me say this: Reading the Bible is hard.

This is one of the points I make at the start of The Book of Love. I recently shared this quote from the book on Substack Notes:

In the book, I go on to make the following observation, which I think has great applicability when it comes to reading texts like Psalm 144:

Consider what you have to go through to obtain a driver’s license. To become certified as a safe operator of a motor vehicle, you must take a written exam, spend many supervised hours behind the wheel, and pass a driving test where you are asked to make turns, change lanes, and parallel park. And parallel parking is hard! Driving takes practice and skill. Getting a driver’s license is a laborious and stressful process. But it’s important because, when you get behind the wheel of a car, you’re putting all of us at risk. Driving is high stakes, a matter of life and death. Your life and mine. Given those risks, we demand that everyone undergo rigorous safety training.

Reading the Bible is also high stakes. You can harm people with a car, and you can harm people with the word of God. To read the Bible well, we need safety training. Like driving, reading the Bible takes practice and skill. We don’t hand out licenses to untrained drivers, but we regularly give Bibles to untrained Christians, unskilled in the virtues of kindness, gentleness, self-control, wisdom, and love. The outcome is predicable. We crash into people in the name of God, doing massive amounts of damage. The Bible is a book of love, but it takes some training to read it properly.

In Revelation 12 a great war in heaven is described:

Then war broke out in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. The dragon and his angels also fought, but he could not prevail, and there was no place for them in heaven any longer. So the great dragon was thrown out—the ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the one who deceives the whole world. He was thrown to earth, and his angels with him. Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say,

The salvation and the power
and the kingdom of our God
and the authority of his Christ
have now come,
because the accuser of our brothers and sisters,
who accuses them
before our God day and night,
has been thrown down.

In the New Testament Satan is called diabolos, or Devil. Diabolos means accuser. The meaning is similar to that of a prosecuting attorney. The diabolos brings an accusation. We see this role in various stories in the Old Testament, the book of Job especially. In that story the Devil brings an accusation about the nature of Job's righteousness and fidelity. Another example is Zechariah 3.1: “Then he showed me the high priest Joshua standing before the angel of the Lord, with Satan standing at his right side to accuse him.”

In Revelation 12 the activity of the diabolos is plain. The Devil is “the accuser,” the one who accuses the faithful before the throne of God, very much like what we see in Job, day and night.

The good news is that the Voice of Accusation has been thrown out of heaven. As Paul writes in Romans, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. When we get to the Courtroom of Heaven no one will be standing at the table of the prosecuting attorney. We will face no accusation. Instead of an Accuser we will, instead, have an Advocate. The Son of God will stand beside us as a defense attorney. As it says in Hebrews:

Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens—Jesus the Son of God—let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin. Therefore, let us approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in time of need.

So that's the good news. No Devil in heaven. The bad news is that, as Revelation 12 continues, the Devil continues to hunt us here upon earth:

When the dragon saw that he had been thrown down to the earth, he persecuted the woman who had given birth to the male child... the dragon was furious with the woman and went off to wage war against the rest of her offspring—those who keep the commands of God and hold firmly to the testimony about Jesus.

The Voice of Accusation still pursues us. And for the most part, we do the Devil's work. We point the finger of accusation at each other. Tragically, much of this accusation comes from Christians. Like the Devil in Revelation 12, we accuse the world before the throne of God day and night. We stand with stones in our hands, like the crowd in John 8 who brought accusation against the woman caught in the act of adultery. The church is the diabolos.

Even more insidiously, we've internalized the Voice of Accusation. We accuse ourselves. I'm reminded here of Brené Brown's work on shame. Shame is the diabolos in your mind, that voice saying “I am bad.”

The point here, as we conclude with our fourth and final name for our Enemy, is that spiritual warfare is doing battle against the Voice of Accusation. That battle involves dropping the stones in our hands. It manifests in a church who refuses to do the Devil's work. And much closer to home, it means beating back that Voice in your head as you exorcise the demons of shame.

In Mark 3 Jesus performs an exorcism. Observing this, the Jewish leaders level an accusation, claiming that Jesus is able to cast out demons because he is in league with the Prince of Demons:

And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He has Beelzebub,” and, “By the ruler of the demons He casts out demons.”

Scholars believe the roots of the name Beelzebub (or Beelzebul) come from 2 Kings 1. Ahaziah, king of Israel, is injured in a fall. Rather than turning to the Lord, Ahaziah sends his messengers to secure the favor of a different god:

So he sent messengers, saying to them, “Go and consult Baal-Zebub, the god of Ekron, to see if I will recover from this injury.”

2 Kings (1.2-3, 6, 16) is the only time the Philistine deity Baal-Zebub is mentioned in the Old Testament. Baal means “lord” and zebub means “flies.” So Baal-Zebub is the “Lord of the Flies.” And by association, so is Beelzebub.

This third name for Satan, Beelzebub, highlights another aspect of spiritual warfare. Specifically, the sin of Ahaziah was idolatry. Seeking healing, he turned to the Lord of the Flies rather than the God of Israel. And this is the same choice we face in our own lives. Who do we turn to? Who do we seek? Who do we trust? Who do we depend on? God or the Lord of the Flies?

Biblically, idolatry is the sin that sits beneath all our sin. Everything confused, broken, disordered, or sick in the world, and within ourselves, is due to our turning, collectively and individually, toward the Lord of the Flies. We recapitulate the sin of Ahaziah over and over again.

Here’s how William Cavanaugh describes idolatry:

Idolatry is not primarily considered to be a metaphysical error, a question of ontology. The key question is not what people believe but how they behave. What constitutes idolatry is usually not the mistaken attribution of certain qualities to material objects, but the attitude of loyalty that people adopt toward created realities...Idolatry is primarily a way of life, not a metaphysical worldview...

Basically, idolatry isn’t about worshiping the sun or a tree or a carved statue, mistakenly attributing certain qualities (like godness or divinity) to a material object. Idolatry is, rather, an attitude of loyalty toward created realities. Idolatry is about allegiances.

This is true, but I think these loyalties and allegiances flow out of something deeper, as I suggest above. The issue is a matter of trust. Who is your savior? I’m loyal and pledge allegiance because I think you’ll come to my aid when I’m in need. Otherwise, why bother? The issue of idolatry really concerns our fundamental dependency. The ground upon which we stand. That ground can be my talent, my attractiveness, my success, my bank account, my social media followers, my nation. Even my religion.

The point here, in pondering the history of the name Beelzebub, is to draw our attention to these deep questions about primary values, loyalties/allegiances toward material realities, and fundamental dependencies. Simply put, spiritual warfare is, at root, about our way of life, implicating the whole of my life and the entirety of my choices. And at every nexus a decision.

God or the Lord of the Flies?

You likely use a modern translation of the Bible. And if you do, were you to read the Bible from cover to cover, Genesis to Revelation, you'd never come across the name "Lucifer."

And if that is so, where did the name Lucifer come from?

The name Lucifer comes from a single passage, Isaiah 14.12. Here it is in the NRSV:

How you are fallen from heaven,
O Morning Star, son of Dawn!
How you are cut down to the ground,
you who laid the nations low!

Can you spot the name "Lucifer" in the text? It's "Morning Star." That's what Lucifer means, Morning Star. The proper name Lucifer comes down to us because of how the King James Version translates this passage:

How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!

How did this translation come about? In Hebrew the phrase is helel ben shachar, which means “shining one” or “morning star.” When St. Jerome translated the Hebrew Bible into Latin he rendered this phrase as lucifer, from lux (light) and ferre (to carry or bring), meaning “light bearer” or “morning star.” In Latin this was a common noun, not a proper name, and it referred to the morning star, the appearance of Venus. The next step was the King James translators choosing to transliterate the Latin lucifer into a proper name rather than translate it as “morning star.” That is how the proper name "Lucifer" entered English-speaking Christianity.

Interestingly, the Lucifer of Isaiah 14 isn't Satan. The original Lucifer was the king of Babylon. And what we find in Isaiah 14 is the people of Israel taunting the king of Babylon and rejoicing in his downfall:

How you are fallen from heaven,
O Morning Star, son of Dawn!
How you are cut down to the ground,
you who laid the nations low!
You said to yourself,
“I will ascend to heaven;
I will raise my throne
above the stars of God;
I will sit on the mount of assembly
on the heights of Zaphon;
I will ascend to the tops of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High.”
But you are brought down to Sheol,
to the depths of the Pit.
Those who see you will stare at you
and ponder over you:
“Is this the man who made the earth tremble,
who shook kingdoms,
who made the world like a desert
and overthrew its cities,
who would not let his prisoners go home?”
All the kings of the nations lie in glory,
each in his own tomb,
but you are cast out, away from your grave,
like loathsome carrion,
clothed with the dead, those pierced by the sword,
who go down to the stones of the Pit
like a corpse trampled underfoot.
You will not be joined with them in burial
because you have destroyed your land;
you have killed your people.

The thing to underline here is the political origin of the name Lucifer. Lucifer names an oppressive ruler, the king of Babylon. This ruler also has a semi-divine status, and he aspires to an even higher position, wanting to make himself equal to God. The same sin we see at work at the Tower of Babel. For this hubris, the king/lucifer is humbled and "brought down." 

All this imagery gets carried forward into the New Testament. Satan appears to us as an "angel of light" (2 Cor. 11.14). Jesus sees Satan fall from heaven like lightning, just like the Morning Star falls in Isaiah 14. And in the book of Revelation we see Satan portrayed as the ruler of Babylon.

This last is important because this association--Satan as Lucifer, the King of Babylon--is a window onto the political implications of spiritual warfare. 

Satan is described as "the god of this world" (2 Cor. 4:4). And this power over the world is political. Satan offers Jesus this political power in the temptation narrative: "The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, 'I will give you all their authority and splendor; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to." And in Revelation, Babylon, the city ruled by Lucifer, is described as "the great city that has dominion over the kings of the earth." Note also that, when Babylon falls in Revelation 18, the kings of the earth and the merchants are those who weep for her. Notice here that the grief is political (kings) and economic (merchants).

A lot more could be said, but this is enough to make the point. In the Biblical imagination, the spiritual is the political. Spiritual warfare is the pursuit of social justice. We’ve made a grave mistake in splitting the spiritual from the political. In rejecting the Biblical vision of spiritual warfare, we’ve exiled the Devil to ghost stories and Pentecostal hysteria. But Lucifer is the King of Babylon, the oppressive power now at work in every nation and economy. Lucifer is the lord of the United States of America. Lucifer is the king of Wall Street. Scripture makes this plain. Our failure to see it only reveals our Biblical illiteracy and our spiritual idiocy.

Two stories from the gospels.

The first is from Luke 10. The seventy-two return from their preaching efforts and report back to Jesus: “Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name.” And Jesus responds to them, “I watched Satan fall from heaven like lightning."

The second story is from Matthew 12. Jesus has performed an exorcism and the Jewish leaders accuse Jesus of being in league with the Devil. Jesus responds by saying that if Satan is being used to cast out Satan then a house divided cannot stand for long. And then Jesus says this: "If I drive out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you."

The point couldn't be clearer: Jesus describes the advance of the kingdom as reclaiming territory once held by Satan. As the kingdom advances Satan falls from heaven like lightning. And as Jesus releases those under Satan's power that is a sign that the kingdom of God has come upon us.

1 John 3.8 states it plainly: "The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil."

Simply put, the kingdom of God comes as an exorcism.

The name "Satan" means adversary, opponent, antagonist, or enemy. "Satan" is, therefore, a name for a relation, pointing at that which stands opposed. Set aside, for a moment, any definite view about Satan's metaphysical existence. What is obvious on the pages of the gospel and in our own lives is that the kingdom of God is contested. Jesus doesn't operate in a morally or spiritually neutral space. His work faces headwinds and stiff opposition. This is why Jesus describes his work as liberating and emancipatory. A prior condition of bondage and captivity is assumed. True, conservatives tend to view that bondage as moral or spiritual (sin) whereas progressives view it as political (oppression and exploitation). A full reading of Scripture sees a Gestalt here, a moral, spiritual, and political matrix, instead of splitting the baby. Regardless, everyone views Jesus’ work as addressing some prior state of captivity.

Here's how C.S. Lewis described the Biblical imagination:

Enemy-occupied territory, that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.

I also think Flannery O'Connor's description of her fiction is an apt vision for the work of Jesus in the gospels: "My subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil." That's the work of the kingdom, the action of grace in territory held by the devil.

Turning toward our own lives, we experience this same sort of opposition. Grace, love, truth, mercy, justice, and love are everywhere contested. Especially in our own hearts. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously put it, the line separating good and evil runs through every human heart. Consequently, we experience life as a moral and spiritual struggle. Here's how William James described our experience:

If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.

Again, set metaphysics aside. Experientially, we're in a fight. Goodness, in the world and in my heart, is contested. "Satan" names this contest and fight, all the forces opposed and antagonistic toward goodness.

And yet, it's here with the word "fight" where some worries creep in. A concern about talk of "spiritual warfare" is with the word "warfare." Doesn't all this talk of fighting and warfare tempt us to name others as the Satan, as our enemy and opponent? Doesn't all this devil-talk tempt us toward the demonization of others?

Let me call bullshit on that worry. Humans dehumanize other humans. And this isn't due to "devil talk." It's due to group psychology, self-interest, and fear. True, groups will use their religious systems to justify their hostility, scapegoating, and violence toward others. But you're mistaking the cart for the horse. Consequently, it is naive to think that if you evacuate your group of religious language you've achieved some sort of immunity to dehumanization. Worse, by eliminating religious language you've also eliminated your prophetic capacities to call out the darkness. It's true that moral relativism creates a "live and let live" tolerance, but moral relativism is impotent when the world goes sideways and history becomes a moral dumpster fire. That's the moral irony of the liberal humanist.

The better path is to retain the language of good and evil but to precisely define those terms. Truly, there are evil things afoot in the world. We're in a real fight. Goodness and justice are contested. So let's not get shy about defending the light. The tricky part is how slippery those labels "good" and "evil" can become. Scripture is aware of this. As 2 Corinthians 11:14 says, Satan appears to us as an angel of light. We do evil things in the name of good.

Given this threat, Jesus gives a clear definition for what must be labeled as "Satanic." From Mark 8:

Then Jesus began to teach them that it was necessary for the Son of Man to suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, be killed, and rise after three days. He spoke openly about this. Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning around and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan!"

Recall, "Satan" is a term of relation. And Jesus calls Peter "Satan" because he's tempting Jesus away from the cross. Here, then, we have the definition of Satan. Satan names that which is opposed to the cross, all that which is opposed to self-donating love, even for one's enemies. Such love isn't natural or easy. It will be contested, just like Peter contests it. But most importantly, what we have here is a cruciform definition for this battle, struggle, and fight. The military metaphor of spiritual warfare is flipped on its head. Jesus wins a victory by dying for others. And our own victory traces this same sacrificial shape. So the language of "Satan" isn't the problem, it's losing track of the cruciform vision of the good.

Now, is that vision contested? You bet it is. 

We're in a real fight.

"no one alive is righteous in your sight"

Church tradition identifies seven penitential psalms: Psalm 6, Psalm 32, Psalm 38, Psalm 51, Psalm 102, Psalm 130, and Psalm 143. So here we are with Psalm 143, the last of the seven penitential psalms.

Psalm 143 is included in the list for its opening lines and their recognition of universal sinfulness:

Lord, hear my prayer.
In your faithfulness listen to my plea,
and in your righteousness answer me.
Do not bring your servant into judgment,
for no one alive is righteous in your sight.

It’s a fitting reflection here at the start of Lent.

I’ve shared this before, but in my spaces there is a struggle to recognize Lent as a penitential season. Lent has, rather, drifted into pop existentialism, pop Stoicism, and pop Buddhism.

What do I mean by pop existentialism, pop Stoicism, and pop Buddhism?

Well, you likely saw this all over social media last week with Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent. In these posts, notes, tweets, photos, and short videos, we’re told that Lent is the season where we “face our mortality.” During Lent we “face our finitude.”

People get this idea, of course, from the words of Ash Wednesday: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” It seems straightforward. We’re told to remember we are dust, so we contemplate our mortality.

The bit being left out is where the words of Ash Wednesday come from. They come from Genesis 3 and are the words of the curse placed upon Adam and Eve for their sin. Yes, we’re remembering we are dust, but we’re also calling to mind our complicity in bringing about this curse. This is why we don’t smear dirt on our heads, but ashes. Ashes are a sign of grief and sorrow. Dirt would be an existential sign. Ashes, by contrast, are a penitential sign. Ashes preach the sermon of Psalm 143: “No one alive is righteous in your sight.”

When Lent loses this penitential aspect it becomes, as I said, pop existentialism, pop Stoicism, and pop Buddhism. Calls to “contemplate your mortality” run through these traditions:

From the Stoic Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations: “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”

From Stoic Epictetus’ Enchiridion: “Set before your eyes every day death and exile and everything else that looks terrible, especially death. Then you will never have any mean thought or be too keen on anything.”

From the Dhammapada, a core summary of the Buddha’s teaching: “All conditioned things are impermanent—when one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering.”

From the Satipatthana Sutta, concerning the Buddhist practice of corpse contemplation as a mindfulness practice: “This body of mine, too, is of the same nature as that body [the decaying corpse], is going to be like that body...”

Concerning pop existentialism, the title of Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Denial of Death describes all the psychological and social pathologies that result when we repress our awareness of death.

Let me be quick to say here that memento mori practices have a rich tradition within Christianity. Facing our mortality is an important practice. Just a few selections from the Bible:

Ecclesiastes 7:2: “It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, since that is the end of all mankind, and the living should take it to heart.”

Psalm 90:12: “Teach us to number our days carefully so that we may develop wisdom in our hearts.”

Psalm 103:14–16: “For he knows what we are made of, remembering that we are dust. As for man, his days are like grass—he blooms like a flower of the field; when the wind passes over it, it vanishes, and its place is no longer known.”

Job 14:1–2: “Anyone born of woman is short of days and full of trouble. He blossoms like a flower, then withers; he flees like a shadow and does not last.”

Sirach 7:36: “In all you do, remember that you must die, and you will never sin.”

James 4:13–14: “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will travel to such and such a city and spend a year there and do business and make a profit.’ Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring—what your life will be! For you are like vapor that appears for a little while, then vanishes.”

Contemplating our mortality is important. So, insofar as Ash Wednesday brings that mortality into view, it’s all to the good. My concern is how, when the penitential aspect is lost, Lent becomes disembedded from the Christian story. Lent becomes a generic “spiritual-but-not-religious” practice.

Not to pick on Kate Bowler, but her reflections on Lent were shared widely within my circle. See this Instagram video and these reflections from her Substack. A selection:

Ash Wednesday has never been subtle. It begins with dirt. Ash smeared across foreheads. Words that refuse optimism: Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. No pivot. No lesson tied up with a bow. Just an embodied reminder that fragility is our baseline...

Ash Wednesday marks the start of that journey, when the church tells the truth about our limits out loud—using ash because words alone won’t do.

Lent doesn’t promise relief. It doesn’t offer a five-step plan for transcendence. It simply invites honesty. Forty days to stop pretending that we are fine, that we are in control, that we can outrun our limits with enough discipline or optimism.

First, notice the subtle conflation of "dirt" with "ash" across the second and third sentences. In point of fact, dirt is not rubbed on your head. The penitential symbolism of ashes is nudged aside to fit the new framing. Lent is no longer about sin but about our embodied fragility. Lent is about our limits, and that we can’t outrun them. All this is true, but it’s missing Genesis 3 and Psalm 143. And here a rupture with the Christian story regarding Lent becomes explicit:

I am not unfinished because I’ve done something wrong. I am unfinished because I am alive.

Lent is disembedded, here, from its penitential focus and Ash Wednesday begins to wander off into the the spiritual-but-not-religious haze, toward the pop existentialism, pop stoicism, and pop Buddhism. Kate's final lines:

But first—dirt will be rubbed on our foreheads.

We tell the truth. We are tired. We are longing. We are not finished.

So welcome to Lent, my dears. The ache is not going away.

But neither, somehow, is grace.

Again, dirt is not rubbed on your forehead. And while we do tell the truth during Lent, some true has gone missing here, the penitential truth of Psalm 143: “No one alive is righteous in your sight.”

And really, I'm not trying to troll Kate Bowler. Just yesterday I praised her to the sky in my graduate positive psychology class, energetically commending to them No Cure For Being Human. Kate Bowler is amazing. 

Because of her amazingness, Kate is popular in my circles, where her take on Lent is becoming normative: that Lent is about honestly confronting and embracing our finitude and limitations. But telling people it’s okay to be tired is sort of missing the point of Lent. And telling them they are “unfinished,” and that this unfinishedness has nothing to do with “having done something wrong,” is the exact opposite of Lent and is prone to being subtly co-opted by our wellness culture—precisely the thing Kate is trying to prevent. Lent becomes a practice of self-compassion. And we need self-compassion. But you can see the slipperiness here, how Lent becomes, even for Kate Bowler, about my mental health and wellness. And while we need all the help we can get with our mental health, this isn’t what Lent is really about.

Kate is right. During Lent we tell the truth.

I just wish we'd actually tell it.

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.”

I've served as a prison chaplain for over fifteen years now. In many ways, I credit prison ministry with saving my faith.

How so?

As I have described it, what I find so powerful about prison ministry is being in a place where the gospel matters.

Outside of the prison, especially in middle-class to upper-class spaces, the gospel is superfluous. Church is something you can take or leave. Faith is optional. Maybe you believe, maybe you don't, but nothing much hangs on the outcome.

A symptom of the gospel not mattering is when faith defaults to consumerism. Our relation to church reduces to likes and dislikes about the worship, the preaching, and the programming. We like this about church and don't like that about church. We prefer this and don't prefer that. Christianity becomes about expressing your consumer preferences.

Another indication that the gospel doesn't matter is over-intellectualizing. The gospel is something you pick apart and intellectually dissect. The gospel is podcast fodder. A new book to read. A Substack essay. A YouTube lecture. The gospel is held at an objective remove and becomes an inert specimen of metaphysical inquiry. You're not a Christian, you're a philosopher, a writer, or a podcaster.

I believe this is why Jesus says it is difficult for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Wealth insulates us from our neediness, vulnerability, and dependency. Wealth keeps us from coming to the end of ourselves. We're cocooned in self-reliance and self-sufficiency. Wealth becomes an existential narcotic. The alarm bells are blaring but we're anesthetized.

In contrast to all this, the gospel matters inside a maximum-security prison. Faith isn't a hobby, a book club, a form of entertainment, or a philosophical inquiry. We aren't sitting at a critical distance. We aren't shopping like consumers. Inside the prison, the gospel is a matter of life and death, the very bread of life, the only power keeping us going. We've come to the end of ourselves and find ourselves in a desperate situation. We hear the sirens blaring, alerting us to the five-alarm fire that is our lives, smoke and flames billowing.

We are the dying, the burning, the drowning. We've come to the end.

And for us, the gospel matters.

As I've shared here many, many times before, the big point of The Shape of Joy is that transcendence is good for you.

This is, in my estimation, the summative empirical conclusion from thirty years of positive psychology research. No matter where you enter this literature—humility, gratitude, awe, joy—at some point you're going to find your way toward transcendence. This, the key to mental health, is the best kept secret in psychology. 

What do I mean by "transcendence"? By transcendence I simply mean what the Latin etymology of the word points to: going beyond. Mental health necessitates "going beyond" a purely materialistic worldview. Mental health is rooted not in nature but in supernature.

As I discuss in The Shape of Joy, the mental health benefits of transcendence are most clearly seen in the research on meaning in life. Specifically, meaning in life flows from three things: coherence, purpose, and mattering.

Coherence concerns meaning-making, our ability to make sense of our lives. Purpose concerns having an ultimate goal and reason for living, having purpose in life. Lastly, as I’ve shared about a great deal, mattering concerns our cosmic, existential significance and value.

I know I’ve shared all this before, but let me underline the critical point: None of these features that are integral to mental health can be grounded in a purely materialistic and wholly naturalistic view of the universe.

Consider coherence. The existentialists were honest in this regard, that meaning is impossible without transcendence. As Albert Camus so powerfully pointed out, from a purely materialistic and wholly naturalistic view of the universe, our lives are absurd. Human life is devoid of intrinsic meaning. We are Sisyphus, rolling a rock up a hill. The futility and absurdity of Sisyphus' task is the very picture of our lives. Ultimately, nothing matters.

Turn, now, to purpose. According to a Darwinian account of human life, our existence is wholly due to chance and happenstance. There is no ultimate purpose or reason in view for human existence. We are going precisely nowhere. Feeling "at home in the cosmos" is a narcissistic delusion. A Freudian fantasy. Simply put, we are a cosmic accident. Life has no purpose. From the vantage of materialism, suicide has no moral content. The universe doesn't care.

Finally, there is no way to secure our cosmic, existential significance from a purely material, scientific accounting. That our lives have value is, from a naturalistic vantage, wholly fictitious. 

Which brings me back to my point. The drum I keep beating. Our mental health is anti-materialistic. Joy demands transcendence. Mental health assumes supernature, the necessity of going beyond a purely materialistic, naturalistic, atheistic, and scientistic worldview. Of course, being an atheist or a materialist does not doom a person to poor mental health. The point is simply that materialism, as a metaphysical stance, is antithetical to psychological flourishing in that is denies or erodes the cosmic and existential convictions associated with mental health. 

Defenders of penal substitutionary atonement often cite what they believe to be a knockout prooftext from Hebrews 9:22: "Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins."

This seems pretty clear cut. And yet, what is often missed is how Hebrews 9:22 is being read from within a forensic/penal framework, specifically the idea that the shed blood appeases the wrath of God. But that's not the proper framework from which to understand Hebrews 9:22.

As scholars like Jacob Milgrom have pointed out, the use of blood in the book of Leviticus, especially in the Day of Atonement rituals, has to do with ritual cleansing and decontamination. Blood, as life, is the only detergent (Milgrom's word) strong enough to wipe away the pollution of sin and death. God isn't angry at the goat sacrificed in Leviticus 16. The goat isn't being punished. So there's no sense in which the offered goat is being "substituted" for Israel in a forensic sense, suffering the wrath of God in Israel's place. Punishment just isn't the issue in Leviticus 16. The framework isn't forensic/penal but cultic, having to do with holiness and contamination. The critical issue is proximity to God, being able to approach and live with God, in light of our sin.

So, there is a hazard being negotiated, but that hazard is how moral defilement makes approach to God risky and impossible. Thus the need for a detergent, a cleansing agent to decontaminate the people and the space. Only blood is strong enough to perform this function. This is the context of Hebrews 9:22. Without the necessary detergent, approach to God is impossible.

And this is one of the great themes of Hebrews, how Jesus provides his own blood as the detergent par excellence, a cleansing agent so powerful it wipes away sin and death once for all. No repeated cleansings are necessary. And because of this detergent's power, we can be bold in "drawing near to God":

Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. (Hebrews 10:19-22)

Notice, again, how the framework here is cultic rather than forensic/penal. We have "confidence to enter the Most Holy Place" because of "the blood of Jesus." We can "draw near" because our hearts have been "sprinkled to cleanse us." The images of atonement here have to do with Levitical decontamination via the cleansing power of the detergent provided by Christ.

To deepen the point, let me also invoke Rahner's Rule. The Catholic theologian famously declared, "The economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity." That is to say, the actions of God that we see revealed within history (what is called the "economic Trinity") are identical to God's very nature, essence, and life (what is called the "immanent Trinity"). What this means for me, in relation to atonement-as-decontamination, is that while God is holy, God also proactively cleanses the space that makes our approach possible. Crucially, to keep with Rahner's Rule, this isn't to be viewed as a sequence of events: Act 1: Holiness, Act 2: Human sin brings contamination, Act 3: Risk in drawing near, Act 4: Blood shed (detergent and cleansing provided), Act 5: Confidence in drawing near. Rather, the holiness of God and the provision of decontamination (acts within the "economy" of salvation) reflect the eternal and unchanging nature of God. Simply put, it is true that God's holiness is risky for sinful human persons, but it's also true that God's very nature is the provision that makes our approach possible. 

That is to say, God's holiness doesn't precede his safety. Nor is God's unapproachability prior to his approachability. These are not sequences in a drama, but reflections of God's very nature.

Simply put, God is, simultaneously, holy and safe because that is who God is. The vision of Jesus we behold on the cross is a theophany of this duality. Before God, sin is both exposed and pardoned from before the foundation of the world.

"I am very weak"

Tradition describes the setting of Psalm 142 as a song David composed while hiding in a cave. This could have been the cave in Adullam (1 Samuel 22) or En-gedi (1 Samuel 24). Given that location, there is a lament over social isolation and rejection:

no one stands up for me;
there is no refuge for me;
no one cares about me.

In light of our loneliness epidemic, the cry "no one cares about me" speaks to many hearts. I was struck by the two mentions of weakness. One in verse 3: "my spirit is weak within me." The other in verse 5: "Listen to my cry, for I am very weak."

This week I had a few conversations about how to do evangelism in an increasingly post-Christian culture. How do you reach liberal humanists? 

One lamentable strategy has been to double down on the culture wars. Lambast the feminists, the Woke, the progressives, progressive Christians among them. But I've never seen othering denunciation win over many hearts. As an evangelistic posture, it's just a complete failure of missiological imagination. 

Imagine the Woke as a tribe and you show up on their shores as a missionary. You spend some time listening to their passions and concerns, along with their sorrows and pains. There are some things you see that are very good. These people really care about the oppressed and the vulnerable. You sense a moral congruence with the Hebrew prophets and Jesus. But you also notice a lot of mental health problems and crises of meaning. And so, what are your first moves as an evangelist and missionary?

Well, you don't start thumping your chest with war cries that you've arrived to wage war against them on behalf of Western Civilization. Or tell them they are going to hell. And yet, this is precisely what so many are trying to do right now in regards to evangelism.

Listen, I get that you cannot evangelize liberals with liberalism. The decline of the mainline is a cautionary tale here. But you're also not going to evangelize liberals with Trumpy evangelicalism. (Especially since Trumpy evangelicalism is as heretical as the Woke.) So what to do? 

Let me suggest that Psalm 142 opens a window. People are in pain. The lament "no one cares about me" is everywhere. The mental health crisis rolls on. We find ourselves in a very dark place and cry out "I am very weak." Let me suggest starting a conversation about God right there, in that place of darkness and weakness. It's the strategy I use in The Shape of Joy. You start with the Ache I describe in Hunting Magic Eels. 

You don't evangelize the Woke with liberalism. And you don't evangelize the Woke with culture warring. You evangelize the Woke by listening to the hurt and binding up the wounds. 

There is a balm in Gilead. Share the medicine.

As regular readers will know, I share in The Shape of Joy how psychologists have come to highlight the impact of "mattering" upon mental well-being. 

Mattering, however, comes in two forms. As I point out in The Shape of Joy there is "relational mattering" and "existential" or "cosmic" mattering. Relational mattering concerns mattering to other people. By contrast,  existential mattering is metaphysical in nature, how your significance is an ontic fact, a simple truth about the nature of reality. Your existence simply has significance.

As I discuss in The Shape of Joy, research has shown that of the two, relational versus existential mattering, existential mattering is the more robust predictor of mental health. The reason should be obvious. In the face of relational rejection or loneliness we need our value to be grounded in something more durable and consistent than the current status of my social, familial, and romantic life. Or worthiness cannot be wholly in the hands of others. 

And yet, there is an intimate connection between relational and existential mattering. For many of us, we can only come to believe in our existential significance by experiencing being significant to others. Mattering has to be relationally mediated, has to come to us externally, from others. This is something that Dietrich Bonhoeffer recognized:

Help must come from the outside...God has willed that we should seek and find God’s living Word in the testimony of other Christians, in the mouths of human beings. Therefore, Christians need other Christians who speak God’s Word to them. They need them again and again when they become uncertain and disheartened because, living by their own resources, they cannot help themselves without cheating themselves out of the truth...The Christ in their own hearts is weaker than the Christ in the word of other Christians. Their own hearts are uncertain; those of their brothers and sisters are sure.

Again, we mediate mattering for each other. Mattering flows from the relational to the existential, from the social to the metaphysical. When our hearts are uncertain we must speak life into each other. Help comes to us from the outside. Mattering is spoken into us. In our homes, with our friends, in our churches. 

For example, one night out at the prison study I was talking about the love of God and Steve raised his hand.

"How can I believe," he asked, "that God loves me when no one in my life has ever told me that they loved me?"

I listened as Steve went on.

"My father never told me that he loved me. My mother never told that me she loved me. No one has ever told me that they loved me. So how can I believe that God loves me?"

Steve couldn't believe in his existential mattering because he never believed in his relational mattering. And I don't think Steve is alone. I think many people struggle to believe that God loves them. Their existential mattering just isn't believable due to how they've been wounded and harmed by others. 

Believing that God loves us, in our existential mattering, is very, very hard. I'm reminded of this famous text from Ephesians 3 about the love of God:

I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

I pray that you may have the power to comprehend. Comprehend what? Your existential mattering. How deep and wide and high is the love of God for you.

This was a power that Steve lacked. Steve couldn't comprehend the love of God due to his lack of relational mattering. 

And here is where Bonhoeffer's insight proves to be so important. We can mediate mattering to each other. We can live in such a way to make the love of God believable. I can stand in front of Steve and say, "Steve, I love you." And through that relational mattering Steve comes to believe in his existential mattering. Through my love the love of God becomes believable. We become sacraments of God's love, material signs of an invisible reality. We mediate mattering.

And through the quiet miracle of that mediation we become the voice through which another soul hears that their life shines with a cosmic, unshakable worth.

I have this really simplistic discernment tool for how to determine if authentic Christianity is operative or at work in a given community, online movement, or theological influencer. Here it is:

If it's popular it's not Christian.

I take this to be Jesus' point when he says, "For the gate is wide and the road broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who go through it. How narrow is the gate and difficult the road that leads to life, and few find it." Authentic Christianity is a narrow and difficult path and few find it. Consequently, mass appeal and numerical volume, in church attendance, online followers, or book sales, is a quick index of if the gospel is truly being proclaimed. The larger the audience the less likely you'll have an encounter with Christ.

Here's an example of why this is so.

Consider audience capture. When people make an appearance on social media they quickly discover that their most thoughtful and critical content tends to elicit crickets. No one pays much attention. And then, one day, they write or record something polemical. Some hot take that fuels the outrage machine. They throw some red meat into the culture wars. And the people love it. The essay or podcast goes viral. Hits, downloads, shares, views, and new subscribers explode. This surge of interest delights the new influencer. But they quickly return to their regular programming, getting back into their thoughtful, critical content. The crickets return. Radio silence. No one cares. And so, they write another polemical "take down" piece or some culture war "hot take." And the hits and attention return. Viral liftoff is achieved.

And so, what happens over time? Well, this phenomenon is called "audience capture." Through the hits, shares, downloads, and followers the writer or podcaster starts to chase virality, pulling their content away from careful, thoughtful analysis toward ideological bomb throwing. The influencer isn't influencing the audience. The audience, through their attention, is influencing the influencer. The influencer starts to serve the interests, values, beliefs, prejudices, and biases of the audience. "Influence" becomes, in the end, culture war fan service.

We've all seen this happen. How an influencer gets a huge, huge following. But the audience is wholly in control. You know this because when it comes time for the influencer to call out the abuses, toxicity, lies, and outright evil of the audience they cannot summon the moral courage to turn on their own. Their entire platform would be decimated. And with the loss of that platform so goes their material livelihood, as paying subscribers summarily drop their subscriptions.

This is why having "a large following" is a sure sign that you're not going to encounter authentic Christian content. Because that "large following" is, rather, an ideological movement that has hijacked the influencer. "Large following" means culture war fan service. And if you doubt this, ask the influencer to call out the evil at work in their audience. They will not do so, for that would hurt their gig and their pocketbook.

Now compare all that to Jesus.

In John 6 Jesus is on the cusp of audience capture. He's just fed the multitude. And experiencing this the people hope to make Jesus king. But Jesus runs from the crowd:

When the people saw the sign he had done, they said, “This truly is the Prophet who is to come into the world.” Therefore, when Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.

The crowds, however, follow Jesus across the sea. And there he tells these pious Jews that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood. Upon been punched in the theological face, the crowd recoils and stops following him:

Therefore, when many of his disciples heard this, they said, “This teaching is hard. Who can accept it?” Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, asked them, “Does this offend you?"

The answer is, yeah, this does offend them. Offense was the whole point. Not offense for its own sake, but the stumbling that inevitably occurs when you face the cross.

Here's the point.

Jesus refuses audience capture. Fan service is not his gig. So when the crowds get big he punches them in the face. He becomes offensive to the very people driving his popularity and acclaim. By contrast, most of us, as false-messiahs, ride the wave of popular enthusiasm. We give the people what they want. We grow the crowds larger and larger, reaping the material benefits in influence, power, and money. 

Jesus, though, does the exact opposite. Jesus drives the crowds away.

Narrow is his way. 

And only few find it.