The Devil, the Disbeliever, and the Politicians

BY LEROY LAWSON

Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted

Richard Beck

Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016

What should we do when faith falters, either our faith in God or our faith in no God? Either loss is a life-changer. Like most serious believers, I have had my own doubts. I am not alone. Some of my best friends have left the faith. Others claim to have no faith in the first place—but even they have had doubts, in their case about their lack of belief.

Richard Beck’s Reviving Old Scratch tackles a very specific kind of disbelief: What happens to Christian faith when you no longer believe in the devil? That’s Beck’s position. And the devil he doesn’t believe in is the same one I can’t believe in—the redclad, horned, tailed, pitchfork-wielding, “the devil made me do it” beast of popular imagination.

But he does believe in the Bible’s Satan (literally, the Adversary, the One-WhoOpposes). He also takes the antichrist seriously, though refuses to identify him with a specific leader, political (Hitler, Stalin) or religious (the Pope), but rather with the principalities and powers that oppose the God of love, the Christ of compassion. The opposer: that’s Old Scratch.

Beck believes in the reality of spiritual warfare. There are spiritual hosts of wickedness in heavenly places, and they wreak havoc where we live on earth. He takes it seriously because it came perilously close to defeating him. But it failed.

So how come he writes now as a convinced believer? How did he recover?

And what did the devil have to do with his recovery? It was in prison, where he ministers to convicts, and in church,

Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense

Francis Spufford

New York: HarperOne, 2014 where he teaches addicts and disturbed individuals (like most of us), that he began to take the Adversary seriously. These spiritual warriors have no doubt that evil is real and the war is serious (deadly serious) business. They believe in Christ in part because they’ve met Old Scratch and realized they couldn’t defeat him without Christ’s help.

Reviving Old Scratch is a provocative read. Beck doesn’t know how to write a dull book.

From the Inside

In Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic, the tone is in the title: I will not apologize for being a Christian. Period. So there, you intellectual snobs with your withering skepticism. Take that.

Unapologetic is the author’s answer to atheistic notables like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and other rationalists who argue there is no sensible argument for the Christian faith. But that’s because they are looking in the wrong places, Spufford argues back. For them, it’s all about the mind. For me, it’s about the heart, about emotions, about experience as well as mind. Unapologetic, he insists, is not an attack on atheism—though he is not loath to skewer some of its more pompous advocates. Rather, it’s a look at the faith from inside out, rather than outside in.

This is a very different and, to this reader anyway, helpful point of view. For many years I led tours abroad; often those tours included visits to holy places, when

The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

Rick

Perlstein

New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015 we would noisily intrude on worshippers, rather smugly disparaging their illogical behavior while congratulating ourselves for not being like them. In time I became aware that I was judging what I didn’t understand, couldn’t understand from the outside looking in.

Those experiences came back as I read this book. I am not entirely comfortable with Spufford, either. His language is too salty—offensive—for me. But I like the man’s honesty—honesty about his earlier atheism, about his wrestling with the irreconcilables of the faith, about how nearly impossible it is to argue someone into belief. I appreciate an intellectual who can accept the ordinary emotions that constitute most of what we call “life.”

About them he writes, “The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.” As far as Spufford is concerned, a strength of the Christian faith is that it neither denies nor disdains these emotions but speaks to them through the One who identified with our experiences and shared (shares) our feelings. “We don’t say that God’s in His heaven and all’s well with the world; not deep down. We say: all is not well with the world, but at least God is here in it, with us.”

Unapologetic’s feisty tone gets a little wearisome, I admit. This book doesn’t make my list of all-time favorites. But I did enjoy hearing from a thinker who once denied there is any reason at all to believe but then found his way to belief. I wanted to know what changed his mind. His heart did. That’s not a bad argument.