Pacific Crossroads Church: Pastor's Page

What's Rankin been thinking about lately?

2.6.2008 — Spiritual Powers

"I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics. Maybe he did. I told that to somebody at breakfast the other mornin and they asked me if I believed in Satan. I said Well that aint the point. And they said I know but do you? I had to think about that. I guess as a boy I did. Come the middle years my belief I reckon had waned somewhat. Now I'm startin to lean back the other way. He explains a lot of things that otherwise don't have no explanation. Or not to me they don't...
What I was sayin the other day about the papers. Here last week they found this couple out in California they would rent out rooms to old people and then kill em and bury em in the yard and cash their social security checks. They'd torture em first, I don't know why. Maybe their television was broke. Now here's what the papers had to say about that. I quote from the papers. Said: Neighbors were alerted when a man run from the premises wearin only a dogcollar. You cant make up such a thing as that. I dare you to even try.

But that's what it took, you'll notice. All that hollerin and diggin in the yard didn't bring it.

That's all right. I laughed myself when I read it. There aint a whole lot else you can do."

— from No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

In his preface to The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis writes "There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils: one is to disbelieve in their existence; the other is to believe and feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them…they themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight."

The materialist is the dominant voice in most learned circles. A materialist is one who believes that physical matter is the fundamental, the only reality, that material and biological explanations are sufficient to describe human experience. There is no such thing as the supernatural. "Intelligent people don't believe in demons."

What about Jesus? He did.

A skeptic might respond: "This language of spiritual powers represents an outworn mythology, an archaic worldview, from which we have progressed. Paul and his contemporaries simply didn't know any better."

To those of you who doubt the reality of the supernatural I put the question back to you: What makes more sense of reality?

On the one hand, look around. Look at recent movies: The Exorcism of Emily Rose, the reissue of The Omen, Constantine. Look at television: The Medium, Ghost Whisperer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Our culture is crying out for transcendence, weary of a materialism that says we are nothing more than worm food. Wishing doesn't make it so, but even scientifically speaking, if modern physics has taught us anything it is that we can't explain reality simply by visible, material forces. As Hamlet said, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

On the other hand, consider: A young man enters a movie theater in Manhattan. It is the year 1940. It is a predominantly German section of town. Not just your typical patron, by 1939 at the age of 32 he had published his complete poems. He was hailed not only as the preeminent poet of the Western World, but regarded as one of the most persuasive spokesmen for Marxism. He was not only one of the most celebrated artists but also most recognized intellectuals in the world.

On the screen was the Third Reich's version of its conquest of Poland. Every time a Jew would appear on the screen, the angry screams of the crowd resounded in the theater "Kill him…Kill them." The young artist left the theater. Shaken by this experience of unmitigated hatred, a bloodthirsty mob. His dismay was not merely in his feebleness to offer a solution to such a moral plague, but in his inability, as a materialist, to explain the existence of such inhuman passions. He said later, "Nothing in my materialist perspective could explain or even account for the evil I had witnessed…" And so, much to the shock of his contemporaries, in 1940 W.H. Auden converted to Christianity.

The existence of evil is often held up as a reason not to believe in God, but for Auden, apart from the existence of the spiritual world, and its influence, evil not only remains unanswered; it defies explanation.

So, when someone asks me, "How can an intelligent person believe in demonic forces?" I say, "You're being narrow-minded." To quote Charles Baudelaire in a line made famous by Kaiser Sosae from the film The Usual Suspects, "The devil's greatest trick is convincing people he doesn't exist."

The Bible assumes that the line between natural and supernatural is not a clear one. C.S. Lewis says that demons hail a materialist with delight. But why does he also say that they hail a magician, one who does believe in the supernatural, with equal delight?

To be continued…