Demon

Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.

— James 2:19 (KJV)

A demon is a fallen angel: a spiritual being created good by God who, together with Satan and the other rebellious angels, sinned and lost its original holiness (Jude 6; 2 Pet. 2:4). Demons are not the disembodied spirits of dead human beings but a distinct order of personal, malevolent creatures who oppose God, deceive and afflict mankind, and serve under Satan’s headship (Eph. 6:12; Rev. 12:9). The Gospels record them tormenting the body and mind of the “demoniacs” they possessed, and being expelled by Christ’s own authority, a sign of his kingdom advancing against Satan’s rule (Matt. 12:28).

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter devoted to angels or demons; its only touchpoint is chapter 4, “Of Creation,” which opens by saying God made “the world, and all things therein, whether visible or invisible.”¹ Nothing further can be built on that one phrase.

The wider Reformed confessional family speaks to the topic directly. The Belgic Confession states:

He also created the angels good, to be his messengers and to serve his elect; some of which are fallen from that excellency, in which God created them, into everlasting perdition; and the others have, by the grace of God, remained steadfast and continued in their primitive state. The devils and evil spirits are so depraved, that they are enemies of God and every good thing, to the utmost of their power, as murderers, watching to ruin the Church and every member thereof, and by their wicked stratagems to destroy all; and are, therefore, by their own wickedness, adjudged to eternal damnation, daily expecting their horrible torments. Therefore we reject and abhor the error of the Sadducees, who deny the existence of spirits and angels: and also that of the Manichees, who assert that the devils have their origin of themselves, and that they are wicked of their own nature, without having been corrupted.²

This states the confessional boundaries the doctrine has to hold together. Against the Sadducees, demons are real personal beings, not a figure of speech for evil in general. Against the Manicheans, demons are not an independent evil power coequal with God; they are his creatures, made good, who corrupted themselves by their own sin and remain dependent on him even in their rebellion. Their final punishment still lies ahead, but the confession already counts them adjudged to it.

Biblical Basis

Scripture distinguishes the one devil from the many demons under him. Hodge notes that the Greek text observes a distinction the King James Version’s translation blurs: “In the spiritual world there is only one διάβολος (devil), but there are many δαιμόνια (demons).”³ These evil spirits belong to the same created order as the holy angels and bear the same kinds of titles, “evil, or unclean spirits; principalities; powers; rulers of this world; and spiritual wickednesses … in high places” (Eph. 6:12).³ Scripture nowhere states directly what their first sin was, though 1 Timothy 3:6, warning against a novice being “lifted up with pride” and falling “into the condemnation of the devil,” has led most interpreters to conclude it was pride.³ Bavinck reaches the same conclusion independently, from the same verse.⁴

That demons are the fallen angels themselves, rather than the spirits of deceased wicked people, is clear from several lines of evidence: they are distinguished throughout the New Testament from the elect angels; Jude 6 says they “did not keep their own position”; 2 Peter 2:4 says God “did not spare the angels when they sinned”; and titles like “principalities” and “powers” belong to the angelic order specifically.⁵ Under Satan as their head, they form an organized “kingdom of evil spirits,” subdivided into ranks that “surpass each other in wickedness” (Matt. 12:45; Luke 11:26) and together make up Satan’s own messengers (Matt. 25:41; 2 Cor. 12:7; Rev. 12:7, 9).⁴

The Gospels’ clearest display of demonic power is the New Testament “demoniacs”: people whose bodies and minds, and in some cases the soul alone, came under a controlling evil-spirit influence that produced violent agitation and suffering (e.g. Mark 5:1-5; Acts 16:16).⁶ Jesus and the apostles treated this as more than popular misdiagnosis of ordinary illness: Christ addressed the spirits as persons, commanded them, and disposed of them, and pointed to his power over them as proof of his Messiahship and of his coming to “destroy the works of the devil.”⁷ He promised his disciples the same authority (Luke 10:17-19), and the casting out of demons became one of the marks of his own kingdom breaking into Satan’s (Matt. 12:28).

Doctrinal Significance

Demonic power belongs to the larger doctrine of Satan’s usurped dominion over a fallen world. Because humanity fell under Satan’s rule through the first sin (John 8:44; 2 Cor. 11:3; 1 Tim. 2:14), the whole world “lies in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19), and the demons under him, already confined to judgment (2 Pet. 2:4; Jude 6), still exercise real power, “especially over the gentile nations” (Acts 16:16; Eph. 2:2; 6:12).⁴ Christ’s earthly ministry was open warfare against this kingdom, and though his crucifixion was in one sense “Satan’s hour” (Luke 22:53), it was also the moment he “disarmed the rulers and authorities” and triumphed over them (Col. 2:15).⁴ That victory is not yet final: Satan continues to war against the church (1 Pet. 5:8), so believers are called to resist him (James 4:7; Eph. 6:12-13), until he and his angels are “thrown into the lake of fire” at the last judgment (Rev. 20:10).⁴

Historical Development

Medieval elaboration and the witch trials

Belief in evil spirits and their power over the natural world, already present in the early church, grew far beyond Scripture’s own restraint across the medieval period. Bavinck describes what accumulated: many medieval people held “that the devil could appear in all sorts of guises (cats, mice, goats, swine, werewolves), create all sorts of vermin, engage as incubus and succubus in fornication, seduce people into covenants sealed with blood, bewitch them, enter into them, ride with them through the air, change them into animals, and stir up all sorts of misfortune also in the natural environment.”⁴ The most severe consequence of this expanded demonology arrived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when belief that a person could enter a formal pact with Satan in exchange for supernatural power fueled the witchcraft and sorcery prosecutions that took thousands of lives across Christian Europe, a delusion Hodge calls one that “the most enlightened men of Europe yielded themselves to.”⁶

The Reformation’s differing estimates

The Reformers agreed that evil spirits are real and active but differed sharply on how readily to trace specific misfortunes to their agency. Luther leaned toward attributing a great deal of ordinary calamity directly to the devil: “Let a Christian know that he sits among devils: that the devil is nearer to him than his coat or his shirt, or even his skin; that he is all about us, and that we must always grapple with and fight him.”⁸ Calvin took the opposite, more restrained approach, holding that nothing should be attributed to evil spirits’ agency “that could not be proved to be actually their work,” and stated his own governing rule for the whole subject: the Bible’s teaching about devils tends “to make us watchful and circumspect, to guard against their stratagems and machinations, and to arm ourselves with those weapons which are strong and powerful enough to vanquish these most powerful foes.”⁸ The Reformed doctrine that followed took Calvin’s more cautious line as its standard: real, but not to be invoked to explain whatever otherwise lacks an adequate natural cause.⁷

Opposing Views

Roman Catholic institutional exorcism. Medieval Catholic theology numbered “exorcist” among the seven clerical orders on the way to the priesthood, holding that ordination conferred authority to lay hands on “energumens, catechumens, and demoniacs.”⁹ Calvin rejected counting this among the sacraments or treating ordination itself as conferring an effectual power the office-holders could not actually exercise:

To what end, pray, do they consecrate exorcists? I hear that the Jews had their exorcists, but I see they were so called from the exorcisms which they practised (Acts 19:13). Who ever heard of those fictitious exorcists having given one specimen of their profession? It is pretended that power has been given them to lay their hands on energumens, catechumens, and demoniacs, but they cannot persuade demons that they are endued with such power, not only because demons do not submit to their orders, but even command themselves.⁹

Rationalist denial that demons exist as real personal beings. A modern view treats the New Testament’s statements about demons as accommodated popular superstition, or as poetic personification of natural or psychological forces, rather than as claims about real spiritual beings. Hodge answers that this reading “cannot be rejected without rejecting the authority of Scripture altogether, or adopting such principles of interpretation as destroys its value as a rule of faith.”³ Bavinck makes the same point from the other direction: “It is inadequate reductionism to say that angels and devils are only imaginative symbolic projections created by human beings who are situated between and wrestle with the conflict between good and evil.”¹⁰

Objections and Responses

Calling a person a “demoniac” no more proves genuine possession than calling someone a “lunatic” proves the moon caused their affliction. Hodge grants the objection has force against the word alone, but not against the Gospels’ actual usage: the demoniacs “are said to be possessed with evil spirits,” those spirits “are addressed as persons, and commanded to depart,” and Christ’s power over them is repeatedly appealed to as proof of “his power over Satan, the prince of these fallen angels.”¹¹

The demoniacs’ symptoms match known diseases such as epilepsy, so no supernatural cause need be assumed. Some of the recorded symptoms do resemble epilepsy or lunacy, but not all of them; some demoniacs exhibited “supernatural power or knowledge” that ordinary disease does not produce.¹¹ Scripture also teaches that evil spirits are able to produce bodily disease directly, so the mere presence of disease-like symptoms is no proof that a spirit’s agency was absent from their cause.¹¹

Comparable cases of possession are not seen today, so the Gospel accounts should be read as something other than real possession. Hodge answers that this claim is not even certain, since evil spirits “do now work in the children of disobedience” in ways that could in principle still amount to the same influence.¹¹ But even granting it, Christ’s earthly ministry may simply have been “Satan’s hour” in a way the present is not, a season of unusually concentrated demonic display that made its overthrow by Christ all the more conspicuous, the same way the absence of miracles in the church today is no argument that they were not wrought in the apostolic age.¹¹

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 4, “Of Creation,” para. 1. ↩
The Belgic Confession (1561), art. 12, “Of the Creation.” ↩
Charles Hodge, “Chapter XIII. Angels,” in Systematic Theology, Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 643. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 13, “Sin and Its Consequences.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Hodge, 643-644. ↩
Hodge, 644-645. ↩ ↩²
Hodge, 645-646. ↩ ↩²
Hodge, 647-648. ↩ ↩²
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 4, chap. 19, sec. 24. ↩ ↩²
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 10, “Creator of Heaven and Earth.” ↩
Hodge, 646-647. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵