Last night, some friends were discussing the difficulties for us in these days to believe in concepts like demons and Satan. It was put forward that issues about esoteric doctrines (like the question of the existence of demons) can be a distraction from the more important matters of our Christian walk and witness. I respectfully disagree, and I’d like to put out the idea (not mine) that doctrine and ethics are “two sides of the same coin”. What I mean is that the above is a false dichotomy, and that what we believe informs how we live, although I guess some “doctrines” may not be as important as others.
The quotes are from N. T. Wright’s “Surprised by Hope”, and the issue he is dealing with is not demons but questions about what happens after we die. I think the principle, however, is the same.
This book addresses two questions that have often been dealt with entirely separately but that, I passionately believe, belong tightly together. First, what is the ultimate Christian hope? Second, what hope is there for change, rescue, transformation, new possibilities within the world in the present? And the main answer can be put like this. As long as we see Christian hope in terms of “going to heaven,” of a salvation that is essentially away from this world, the two questions are bound to appear as unrelated. Indeed, some insist angrily that to ask the second one at all is to ignore the first one, which is the really important one. This in turn makes some others get angry when people talk of resurrection, as if this might draw attention away from the really important and pressing matters of contemporary social concern. But if the Christian hope is for God’s new creation, for “new heavens and new earth,” and if that hope has already come to life in Jesus of Nazareth, then there is every reason to join the two questions together. And if that is so, we find that answering the one is also answering the other. I find that to many — not least, many Christians — all this comes as a surprise: both that the Christian hope is surprisingly different from what they had assumed and that this same hope offers a coherent and energizing basis for work in today’s world.
And after comparing the Platonic (upon death our souls leave the prison of the body and waft up to heaven) and Christian (bodily resurrection, new Heaven/new Earth) views of the afterlife:
The classic Christian doctrine, therefore, is actually far more powerful and revolutionary than the Platonic one. It was people who believed robustly in the resurrection, not people who compromised and went in for a mere spiritualized survival, who stood up against Caesar in the first centuries of the Christian era. A piety that sees death as the moment of “going home at last,” the time when we are “called to God’s eternal peace,” has no quarrel with power-mongers who want to carve up the world to suit their own ends. Resurrection, by contrast, has always gone with a strong view of God’s justice and of God as the good creator. Those twin beliefs give rise not to a meek acquiescence to injustice in the world but to a robust determination to oppose it. English evangelicals gave up believing in the urgent imperative to improve society about the same time that they gave up believing robustly in resurrection and settled for a disembodied heaven instead.
To bring this back to the question of whether or not demons and Satan exist, you could say that it could make a difference in (at least) this sense: What you believe about the nature of the evil forces you are confronting affects how you confront them. So, granting that the question of the existence of demons may not be as important as the questions about resurrection above, I think it still does matter.
The Gourd Reborn 