5.8 Demons in Christianity
The New Testament uses several related expressions, including demons (or devils), unclean spirits, evil spirits, and deceiving spirits. Although these terms are not always used in exactly the same way, most Christians understand them to refer to the same or closely related spiritual realities.
The Hebrew Bible contains relatively few detailed discussions of demons. During the Second Temple Period, the time between the Old and New Testaments, Jewish literature such as 1 Enoch and the Book of Jubilees developed a much more elaborate understanding of demons; consequently, by the time of Jesus, demons were a familiar part of Jewish thought.
In 1 Enoch, demons are the disembodied spirits of the dead Nephilim—the giant offspring of rogue angels (called Watchers) and human women from Genesis 6. Some early Christian writers, including Justin Martyr and Tertullian, accepted this Enochic view rather than the modern fallen angel view. We will discuss the more modern fallen angel view in the next section when we look at Satan.
Within this Second Temple Period worldview, demons were commonly understood as hostile spiritual beings that opposed God, tempted human beings, promoted deception, and sought to lead people away from faithfulness to God.
This is the historical context that surrounded Jesus, His disciples, and the earliest Christians.
As a result, the Gospels assume their readers already understand the concept and focus less on explaining what demons are than on describing the result of their influence.
Different Christian Interpretations
Today, mainstream Christianity generally understands demons as created, non-human, intelligent, usually unseen beings who rebel against God and oppose His purposes.
Demons are not all-powerful, all-knowing, or equal to God. Christianity teaches that they remain created beings whose power is limited and ultimately subject to God’s authority.
Some Christians strongly emphasize that demons operate as instruments of God’s sovereign providential will, noting passages such as 1 Samuel 16:14 in which a harmful spirit was “sent by God.”
Some Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians place a strong emphasis on active demonic influence today. These believers teach that Christians need prayer, deliverance, and spiritual authority in Christ to resist and remove demonic influence. Some deliverance ministries also teach ideas such as generational curses, legal rights, territorial spirits, or demonic strongholds.
Some Protestants, known as cessationists, believe that miraculous signs, including the casting out of demons, ceased after the first century. These believers often teach that miraculous encounters with demons were unique to the baseline validation of the early Church.
Some Christians argue that certain biblical descriptions of demonic affliction resemble conditions now understood medically, such as seizures or severe psychological distress. Other Christians reject reducing these accounts to medical categories alone.
Disordered Allegiance and Divided Attention
One way of understanding demons is to focus less on what a demon is and more on what demonic influence does.
The biblical descriptions of demons reveal profound truths about how deception fragments individuals, communities, and societies.
The defining characteristic of demonic influence is that it reorganizes a person’s perception, attention, and hierarchy of values around falsehood rather than truth.
Demonic influence may operate through lies, distorted perceptions, corrupt desires, destructive habits, manipulation, hatred, fear, pride, addiction, false ideologies, or anything else that repeatedly pulls a person toward destruction and away from truth, holiness, and integrity.
Demonic influence may therefore also be understood as destructive patterns that come to possess individuals, communities, and even entire societies by reorganizing perception, motivation, and behavior around falsehood.
The result is fragmentation, or in more biblical terms, a divided heart. When one’s highest loyalty becomes divided among competing desires, fears, idols, ambitions, or false gods, the mind and character are pulled in conflicting directions.
This fragmentation gradually produces confusion, instability, and self-destructive patterns of thought and behavior.
Demon-possession therefore is not simply being influenced. It is being ruled. There is a difference.
Everyone experiences anger, but not everyone is possessed by hatred. Everyone experiences fear, but not everyone becomes ruled by fear. Everyone experiences pride, but not everyone organizes their entire life around pride.
As falsehood increasingly organizes perception and value, competing loyalties pull the person in conflicting directions until one or more destructive principles begins to dominate the whole personality.
Demon-possession is what happens when the worship due to the one true God becomes distributed among many competing gods, desires, fears, and loyalties.
The Strategy of Deception
Demonic influence rarely begins with obvious evil.
Instead, it often works by gradually redirecting a person’s attention and highest allegiance away from God. This redirection often happens through subtle distortions of what is good. Truth becomes mixed with falsehood, virtue becomes distorted, and good desires become disordered.
Deception often disguises itself as something attractive, reasonable, or even virtuous.
- Hatred may disguise itself as justice.
- Pride may disguise itself as confidence or self-respect.
- Manipulation may disguise itself as compassion or protection.
- Control may disguise itself as wisdom or responsibility.
- Cowardice may disguise itself as peacekeeping.
- Revenge may disguise itself as righteousness.
- Indulgence may disguise itself as love.
- Selfishness may disguise itself as self-care.
- Laziness may disguise itself as contentment.
- Envy may disguise itself as a desire for fairness.
- Bitterness may disguise itself as discernment.
- Falsehood may disguise itself as truth.
In this way, demonic influence is not primarily a dramatic supernatural activity but the reorientation of a person’s attention, desires, and loyalties away from God. As distorted reality becomes normalized, the whole person becomes increasingly divided, making truth more difficult to recognize and righteousness more difficult to pursue.
Every person is also shaped by influences they did not choose. Families, cultures, teachers, communities, and life experiences all help form a person’s understanding of reality. Christianity therefore also recognizes that people often inherit deceptive environments before they are capable of evaluating them for themselves.
People do not choose their starting point.
They do however choose, increasingly over time, what they orient themselves toward as they become more capable of recognizing truth.
For these reasons, Christians have long emphasized the importance of wisdom and discernment: recognizing when something destructive has disguised itself as something normal or good. We will look more closely at discernment at the end of this module.
Throughout Christianity, demons are closely connected with Satan. In section 5.9, we will examine how Christians have understood Satan and his role.
After that, we will return to the Gospels to explore Jesus’ encounters with demons and the different ways Christian traditions have understood His authority over the powers of evil.