Philip Ziegler, professor of Christian dogmatics at the University of Aberdeen, wants Christians in the Reformed tradition to pay greater attention to the New Testament language of Satan and the demonic, and he makes the compelling case that a demonology is best located in the second article of the creed. While this short book does not seek to give the topic comprehensive dogmatic treatment, it does sketch out some of its key characteristics and how they illumine Christ’s salvific work.
Ziegler traces a ‘majority report’ that draws from Augustine’s treatment of Satan as a fallen angel who willfully rebels against God. Subsequent dogmatic theology in the West – Reformed dogmatics, too – focused on questions of ontology and providence (matters of the first article of the creed) – that is, what kind of being the devil has (as created by God, yet whose evil deeds represent the privation of being), and how God bends the devil’s work to God’s own purposes and so brings good out of evil. Only a ‘minority report’, occasionally represented in Reformed catechisms, emphasised Jesus’ and the Christian’s struggle against the demonic. Here, the confessional focus was not on speculative questions about the devil’s being, but rather on the cosmic battle between diabolic forces and Christ’s ministry of healing, forgiveness and restoration.
Ziegler, who has also focused on apocalypticism in some of his other writings, follows the wider Christian tradition in rejecting Manichaeanism. But Ziegler does not wish to diminish the power of evil. He insists that we must reckon with its reality, even though we will never be able to explain why it exists, and we will have only paradoxical language to describe its dynamics. Demonic beings can seem to take possession of a person, yet they are only unbeings. Satan, correspondingly, is best understood not as a person, but rather as an unperson. Evil is an active force that effects chaos and diminution of God’s good creation, but it is, in fact, nothing – in Karl Barth’s words, ‘an impossible possibility’. Ziegler follows Bultmann’s lead in demythologising biblical language about the devil but suggests that Bultmann may go too far in reducing the demonic to a psychological category. There really do seem to be evil powers ‘outside’ of us, even if they defy any effort to locate them in time and space.
While acknowledging his debt, especially to Barth, Ziegler draws on him even more extensively than a reader might first recognise. Ziegler’s interpretation of the demonic is clearly influenced by Barth’s discussion of the ‘lordless powers’, and Ziegler, like Barth, sees praying the Lord’s Prayer as an act of active resistance. What makes Ziegler’s approach distinctive is his detailed development of a ‘new biblical theology’ (Michael Welker). He discusses and synthesises the many relevant biblical texts and garners insights from the best contemporary scholarly commentaries, as well as from key historic and contemporary theologians. His bibliography is a goldmine for any who wish to read further.
Ziegler’s case for moving demonology from the first article of the creed to the second will be especially persuasive to the Reformed, who will be interested in the devil and all his works only insofar they illumine the contours of Christ’s saving work, which now appears principally as ‘redemption’, rather than ‘reconciliation’. But Ziegler’s question of where to locate a demonology in a dogmatic theology stimulates us to imagine other possibilities, too. What would a demonology of the third article look like? How would we understand the Holy Spirit in relation to, and confrontation with, other spirits? What would we learn about ‘testing the spirits’ to see whether they are of God (1 John 4:1)?
Ziegler includes reflections on the Christian life, but a demonology of the third article would place even more emphasis than he does on the human experience of destructive powers that manifest themselves, at least to some people, as evil ‘beings’. Ziegler sees Jesus’ cross as the ‘great exorcism’ of evil, and, he argues, we participate in that exorcism through the sacrament of baptism, which includes personal renunciations of evil (although these renunciations were not a part of the Reformed baptismal rite until very recently). But a demonology of the third article may help us think more than Ziegler can in a short book, about other ways in which the church is called to cast out demons, including its own. We may also better understand those Christian traditions that have rites of exorcism, something that the Reformed have generally been suspicious of – although here again Barth encourages us to reconsider, insofar as he took seriously the healing ministry, which included exorcism, of the nineteenth-century German Lutheran pastor, Johann Christoph Blumhardt.
Based on his Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary in 2024, Ziegler writes in an engaging, accessible manner. His book is suggestive of future work for systematic theologians, and it will help preachers constructively approach New Testament texts that they might otherwise avoid. Ziegler has indeed succeeded in ‘reframing Christian faith and life’ to take seriously ‘the adversary’ (p. 118).
