Silencing Satan: Handbook of Biblical Demonology
Sharon Beekmann and Peter Bolt.
Wipf and Stock, 2012, 234 pp.
The Sam Freney who first came to know Christ was an arrogant young man in late high school, thoroughly self-assured, and convinced of the rightness of Western modernism and the superiority of reason above any kind of mysticism or kooky spirituality. In other words, a pretty typical white Anglo-Saxon Australian teenage male. (I like to think I’ve changed since then, at least a little. At minimum, I’m not a teenager any more.)
So reading the Bible was a very strange experience at times, because things like conflict with demons kept popping up—and in places where I felt I couldn’t just write it off as a symbolic expression. Jesus seemed to have real interactions with something other than just the people involved, which was unsettling. I recognized that my world view was a bit different to that of the Bible writers; I thought Verbal from The Usual Suspects was probably right: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”. But what do you do in that situation? Pray that God would reveal the devil to you? That didn’t seem like a good idea to me.
Since then I’ve heard stories from Christians in other parts of the world—stories I’ve had no real reason to doubt—where they talk of (what seem to me to be outlandish and unsettling) manifestations of demonic activity. And there are stories from the other side of things too—Muslim people having dreams where an angel tells them to go visit a church to find the truth. These things are just so far outside of my everyday experience that I don’t really know what to make of them.
All of this made reading Silencing Satan a profoundly unsettling experience. I often felt a visceral reaction against believing what was being described—for example the testimony of Sharon Beekman, one of the authors, of “the two and a half years demons possessed me” (p. 159)—but I had little alternative but to change my mind-set. As a sceptical Western evangelical, I’m very much the target market for the book. Craig Blomberg explains in the foreword:
For many Western evangelicals, [belief in the demonic] is something that once was real, because the Bible describes it as such. But today we would do better to explain it as psychological disorder or affliction of some kind. In many parts of the Majority World, however, the powers of darkness are very real. As the Western world becomes increasingly post-Christian, manifestations of dark, supernatural powers are on the rise closer to home as well. All it takes is to have one encounter with such manifestations or to have a trusted friend or relative describe such an encounter, in the presence of equally trustworthy eyewitnesses, and it becomes easy to recognize that the diabolical is real, very much present, and exceedingly dangerous. (p. ix)
It really is a useful book. It’s a handbook, which means that although you can read it from cover to cover, it’s not a single narrative. It’s more like an encyclopaedia in major sections, covering the demonology of Ancient Near East cultures, the terms involved, and the demonology found in the Old and New Testaments as well as in church history, along with ministry applications. In lots of ways it functions as a reference book: find the topic(s) you’re interested in—for example, the ‘armour of God’ from Ephesians 6—and you’ll find 5-10 pages on that subject. Scholarship is presented simply and clearly, with references to other parts of the handbook that will fill in more detail for you.
I have quibbles here and there (there’s a bit of unevenness between the styles of the two authors, for example), but there’s lots of clarity to be gained here. This is a carefully biblical book in an area fraught with speculation. Beekman and Bolt have a wealth of knowledge of what the Bible says about demons and what the biblical cultures thought about the spiritual world; but much more importantly, they have a firm grasp of the very good news that Jesus Christ has risen from the dead and has defeated the evil powers of the universe.
This is the real value of this handbook. In all of the information given (and the intentional and explicit silence that honours the Bible’s silences), the purpose is always to show the glory and victory of Christ. Beekman speaks of her demon possession in order to speak of the greater work of the Holy Spirit within her. The activity of demons and the work of the devil is always presented as something real and potentially dangerous, but for us in Christ something that cannot harm us because of the surpassing victory of Jesus over every power and authority.
