HC6335

1
HC6335

• Luther on the Devil, the Witchcraze, Spiritual
  Warfare

2
The Reformation symbol of Christs presence is
not the halo of the saint, but the hatred of the
Devil. Transforming Luther into the forerunner
of enlightenment means dismissing this warning of
the Devils growing superiority as a remnant of
the Dark Ages. But that would deprive Luthers
life of the experience of the Devils power,
which affected him as intensely as Christs. Take
away the Devil and we are left with the
Protestant citadel, the better self, the
conscience, which thus becomes the site of the
Last Judgment, where the believer confronted with
the laws of God, acknowledges that he is a sinner
and declares himself at the same time to be
righteous by virtue of Christs sacrifice. It is
precisely this conventional, conscience-oriented
morality that mans innermost self struggles to
fulfill, and that Luther, to the horror of all
well meaning, decent Christians, undermined. The
issue is not morality or immorality, it is God
and the Devil. . .The two great turning points of
the Reformation age, the Lutheran and the
Copernican, seem to have brought mankind nothing
but humiliation. First man is robbed of his power
over himself, and then he is pushed to the
periphery of creation. Oberman, Luther Man
between God and the Devil, p. 155
3
Devil not the subject of superstition

• Gabriel Biel (d. 1405) Mass Commentary to make
  the devil into God is a superstition worthy not
  of refutation but laughter. quoted Oberman, The
  Reformation Roots and Ramifications, p. 59.

• But if that is not enough for you, you Devil, I
  have also shit and pissed wipe your mouth on
  that and take a hearty bite.
• quoted in Oberman, Luther, p. 107

4
The Devil(Heiko Oberman, The Reformation Roots
and Raminfications, pp. 53-75)

• Doctor Consolarius
• Magister conscientiae
• Princeps mundi
• The spirit of despair

5
Spiritual Warfare

• Satan is his name, that is, adversary. He must
  obstruct and cause misfortune he cannot do
  otherwise. Moreover, he is the prince and god of
  this world, so that he has sufficient power to do
  so.
• LW 37,17

• The conflict between God and the Devil is
  basically a conflict between faith and unbelief
  in the human soul it is not a mythological
  conflict.
• Edgar Carlson, Reinterpretation of Luther, p.
  50.

6
Health

• In all grave illnesses the Devil is present as
  the author and cause. . .and he is the author
  of death.
• LW 54, 53

7
Marriage

• At first everything goes all right, so that, as
  the saying goes, they are ready to eat each other
  up for love. The Devil comes along to create
  boredom in you, to rob you of your desire in this
  direction, and to excite it unduly in another
  direction.
• LW 21, 89

8
Scripture

• When we wish to deal with Scripture, Satan
  stirs up so much dissension and quarreling over
  it that we lose our interest in it and become
  reluctant to trust it.
• LW37, 17

9
Law/Gospel

• It is the supreme art of the Devil that he can
  make the law out of the gospel.
• LW54, 106

10
Murder

• The Devil incites the Cainites against their
  brother, just as Christ declares in John 8.44
  that the Devil was a murderer from the beginning.
• LW 1, 322
• John 844 You are from your father the devil,
  and you choose to do your father's desires. He
  was a murderer from the beginning and does not
  stand in the truth, because there is no truth in
  him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own
  nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

11
Daily Matters

• The Devil comes at unsuitable places and times,
  as in the choir during songs of praise to God, or
  at night when one ought to sleep, in order to
  ruin the head. Or elsewhere, when other things
  are being done in common, so that he hinders
  these things or sees that they are done with less
  dedication.
• LW 10, 348f.

12
Politics and Religion

• The Devil never stops cooking and brewing these
  two kingdoms into each other. In the Devils name
  the secular leaders always want to be Christs
  masters and teach Him how He should run His
  church and His spiritual government. Similarly,
  the false clerics and schismatic spirits want to
  be the masters, though not in Gods name, and to
  teach people how to organize the secular
  government. Thus the Devil is very busy on both
  sides, and he has much to do.
• LW 13, 194

13
Pope

• apostle of the Devil
• AntiChrist himself
• Against the Roman Papacy, An Institution of the
  Devil. LW 41, 263-376

14
Promise and Faith

• . . .what Luther took Gods promise to be the
  justification of the sinner through the gift of
  Christs righteousness as it is received with the
  humility and surrender of the self, Gods
  righteousness triumphant over all human self-
  righteousness.
• Wilhelm Pauck, ed. Martin Luther, Lectures on
  Romans, lxvi.

15
Anfechtung

• Personal affliction that is an assault from
  death, the devil, the world, and hell combined.
• A Mighty Fortress

16
This is the climax of the drama which God enacts
with us. His intention is that we play our part
in full awareness of our sins and of death. Yet
it is not an evil thing. . .to have this
awareness, to complain about our miseries, and to
conclude that there is nothing within us but
damnation. Indeed, one should complain and sigh
this way. One should try to arrange and govern
ones life in accordance with such sighing. Then
it will happen that one becomes aware of
salvation. LW, 13, 116
17
Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles Witchcraft and
Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries, Johns Hopkins, 1984

• Friuli
• Inquisition 1232
• Albigensians
• Spanish Inquisition 1479 against Marranos,
  Moriscos and Protestants
• Torture allowed 1552
• Paolo Gasparulto 1580
• Benandante
• 1580-1634 850 people examined
• Maria Panzona
• maladante

18

• . . .a psychology of evil must be a religious
  psychology. By this I do not mean it must embrace
  a specific theology. I do mean however, that it
  must not only embrace valid insights from all
  religious traditions but must also recognize the
  reality of the supernatural. And, as I have
  said, it must be a science in submission to love
  and the sacredness of life. It cannot be a purely
  secular psychology.
• Peck, People of the Lie, 45

19

• Form of being facts and inexhaustibility of
  being value belong together. Their unity in the
  depth of essential nature is the divine, their
  separation in existence, the relatively
  independent eruption of the abyss in things, is
  the demonic.
• Tillich, The Demonic, 84

20

• Can I, in good faith, continue to teach people
  that the world is good, and that a kind and
  loving God is repsonsible for what happens in it?
• Harold Kushner, When Bad Things Happened to
  Good People, p. 7

21

• We will simply have to learn to live with it,
  sustained and comforted by the knowledge that the
  earthquake and the accident, like the murder and
  the robbery, are not the will of God, but
  represent that aspect of reality which stands
  independent of His will and which angers and
  saddens God even as it angers and saddens us.
• Kushner, 55

22

• Vulnerability to death is one of the given
  conditions of life. We cant explain it anymore
  that we can explain life itself. . .all we can do
  is try to rise beyond the question, What do I do
  now that it has happened?
• Kushner, 71

23
Profile

• a particular variety of narcissism
• Peck, People of the Lie, 77

• Pronounced concern with public image
• Scapegoating
• Excessive intolerance to criticism
• Intellectual deviousness
• Narcissism, self-absorption, fear of criticism

24

• The evil are pathologically attached to the
  status-quo of their personalities, which in their
  narcissism, they consciously regard as perfect
• Peck, 74

25

• It is only one particular kind of pain they
  cannot tolerate the pain of their own
  conscience, the pain of the realization of their
  own sinfulness and imperfection.
• Peck, 77

26

• We need not grant the demon the same right as the
  divine, and therewith the higher, the only right
  that we need not, in the face of the world, grant
  the ultimate victory to negation, to the abyss of
  meaninglessnessthat and that alone is the
  salvation in finite time which again and again
  becomes reality that is the fundamental
  destruction of the demonic dominance over the
  world
• Tillich 122

27

• The affirmation of the demonic has nothing to do
  with a mythological or metaphysical affirmation
  of a world of spirits. . .Only in personalities
  does the demonic receive power, for there the
  form not only grows by nature, is not only
  imprinted on existence, but confronts existence
  by demanding something.
• Tillich, 85

28

• The Enlightenment foreshadowed by Erasmus fight
  with Luther and by theological humanism, saw only
  individual acts of evil, dependent on the free
  decisions of the conscious personality. It
  believed in the possibility of inducing the great
  majority of individuals to follow the demands of
  an integrated personal and social life by
  education, persuasion and adequate institutions.
  Bu this belief was broken down not only by the
  Storms of our Times. . .but also by the new
  recognition of the destructive mechanism
  determining the unconscious trends of individuals
  and groups. The powerful symbol of the demonic. .
  .as a structure of evil is beyond the moral
  power of good will, producing social and
  individual tragedy.
• The Protestant Era, 44

29

• Pure rationalism, just as pure negation, are the
  poles towards which the profane always strives. .
  .Reality lives between the poles. Between them
  proceed the mythical battle of the divine and the
  demonic. . .
• The Demonic, 112