Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 180:719 (Jul 2023)
Article: “They Make You Ill”: An Evangelical "Ressourcement" Of Early Christian Demonology
Author: John A. Adair

BSac 180:719 (July-September 2023) p. 289

“They Make You Ill”: An Evangelical Ressourcement Of Early Christian Demonology

John Adair

John Adair is Associate Professor of Theological Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary in Dallas, Texas.

Ressourcement was an early twentieth-century French Roman Catholic response to the rupture between theology and life that modernism had rendered decades earlier. It advocated a return to the sources, by which it meant the Bible, the church fathers, and the liturgy. Hans Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 2–3. Its influence grew throughout the twentieth century, having a significant effect on Vatican II and expanding beyond Roman Catholicism to Protestantism. See John Webster, “Ressourcement Theology and Protestantism,” in Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology, ed. Gabriel Flynn and Paul D. Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 482–94.

Abstract

In light of a common evangelical practice of attributing the cause of specific evils in the world to God himself, this article will examine the work of second-century Christians such as Justin, Tatian, and Tertullian, who offered a robust assessment of evil in the world. It focuses on the responsibility of demons not just for personal sins such as immorality and blasphemy but also for disease and systemic injustice.

In 2017, Hurricane Harvey made landfall outside Houston, Texas. It was the first hurricane of its size to make landfall in the United States in over a decade. More than one hundred people died, and thousands of people lost their homes or were otherwise displaced, with damage still being repaired years later. In the aftermath of this terrifying and upsetting experience, a church member sent out a message declaring that “God sent Harvey,” that God “created and guided Harvey’s path and effects,” and that God “dismantled” our lives.1

BSac 180:719 (July-September 2023) p. 290

It is one thing to hear such things from church members. But over the years, prominent and respected evangelical teachers and preachers have preached the same ideas. For example, in a sermon entitled “Cancer Is a Parable about Sin,” John Piper said: “So God brought it down with calamities galore, and diseases galore, and death everywhere in order to make plain: that’s how ugly sin is.”2

None of these charges were levied in opposition to God’s supposed ways. In fact, they were not spoken as charges at all. They were simple affirmations o...