Share this page:
In Screwtape Letters, author C.S. Lewis, who also wrote The Chronicles of Narnia, expressed disapproval of two polar opposite views on demons and evil spirits:
Christian missionaries have sometimes gravitated toward one or the other of those views. That's sad since neither position really reflects what Scripture says.
Missionary anthropologist Paul Hiebert said that the first view -- demons don't exist -- has created a "flaw of the excluded middle." Hiebert noted that believers who have been heavily influenced by a rationalist worldview generally acknowledge only two kinds of reality:
What is a worldview?
One result of this is that things in between or in the "middle" -- such as ancestral spirits, the evil eye, magical forces, astrology, local demons, and ghosts -- are excluded from being "real" in people's minds. So, outsiders simply dismiss people's fears of evil spirits rather than proclaiming the power of Christ over them. Hiebert said that dismissing things in that middle as not real makes it difficult to minister to people feeling beset by invisible spiritual forces.
Missionary to India and noted theologian Leslie Newbigin further argued that denying the existence of middle-domain supernatural forces actually turns missionaries into a secularizing force in the lives of the very people they are trying to serve.
Actually, the Bible does not give us any wiggle room to argue against the objective reality of the spirit world. On the other hand, it needs to be said that passages in Mark's Gospel1, Romans2, and 1 Corinthians3 make clear that there are definite limits to what evil powers can do.
The second view denounced by Lewis -- in which all negative things in life are attributed to demons -- leads to an expanded rather than an excluded middle. This "expanded middle" is especially evident when people attribute their own behavior to a "demon of discouragement" or a "demon of procrastination" or when they veer off into promoting the idea of "territorial spirits."
If C. S. Lewis was right -- and I believe he was -- the challenge for cross-cultural missionaries today is to refrain from forcing Scripture to conform to one of the two extreme views. If we genuinely allow Scripture to determine our worldview, we will avoid those extremes of:
I like my Haitian friends' approach to the "middle" domain. They acknowledge that there are evil spiritual forces active in the world. Many of them testified to deliverance from those forces when they converted from voodoo to Christianity. They know clearly from personal experience that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is far more powerful than any other force out there. That seems a very biblically-shaped approach that, in Hiebert's way of speaking, neither excludes nor expands the "middle" category of reality.
-- Howard Culbertson,
This blog on a key issue in world missions outreach is an article in the "Mission briefing" series published in Engage, a monthly online magazine.
In Western thought, there's often a strict division between the physical world governed by natural laws and the supernatural dimension that includes spiritual beings, and divine interventions. This dichotomy can make it challenging for Westerners to comprehend the ways other cultures integrate various spiritual forces into their understanding of everyday life.