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310 - The Demise of the Devil: Magic and the Demonic in Luke's Writings |
The Demise of the Devil: Magic and the Demonic
in Luke's Writings
By Susan R. Garrett
Minneapolis, Fortress, 1989. 179 pp. $16.95.
This study is important as much for what the author refuses to do as for what she accomplishes. Susan Garrett refuses to construct a universal definition of the magician by which Jesus can either be named a magician, as Morton Smith does, or cleared of such charges, as Howard Clark Kee does. Rather she insists that "magic" is a culture specific deviance label with very differing meanings in distinct periods and religious groups. Therefore our best bet for understanding magic is not to stride from century to century with a yardstick, but to make a long stay in a specific spot with eyes and ears wide open to get one particular view.
Her chosen place for such ethnographic study is the narrative of Luke and Acts, which she finds-after some residence-to lie in the region of several other Jewish and Christian texts as to its sense of magic, texts such as Jubilees, Martyrdom of Isaiah, Testament of Job, Pseudo Philo, Revelation of John and the Shepherd of Hermas. In these texts, Satan is depicted working through false prophets to deceive and dominate a world that rightly belongs to God.
Luke's Gospel specifically tells the fall and rise and fall of Satan. The strong one meets a stronger when Satan fails to tempt Jesus to receive authority from him and Jesus begins to exorcize Satan from his former domain. Then Satan reasserts power and the disciples need their swords at the time of Jesus' violent death. Only in Jesus' resurrection and enthronement is Satan's fall like lightning from heaven fulfilled, and then not without last-ditch efforts by Satan to deceive and enslave the church, as told in the Acts of the Apostles.
Much of Garrett's study is taken up with careful attention to the three stories of Simon Magus, Bar Jesus and the Seven Sons of Sceva (Acts 8:4-25; 13:4-12; 19:8-20). As she puts it, "The trio of passages about
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312 - The Demise of the Devil: Magic and the Demonic in Luke's Writings |
magicians is an unexplored hillside overlooking the Lukan terrain. From this vantage point the observer confronts familiar territory from an unfamiliar angle." For example, Garrett discovers that Luke depicts very similarly the techniques of the magician and the gospel preacher, apparently to accentuate that one is an imposter whose lack of divine power the other finally exposes. The primary functions of these stories are apologetic, polemical and hortatory-to defend the new proclamation as a work of God's spirit by exposing the deceit of its enemies, thereby encouraging and comforting hard-pressed believers.
Garrett concedes that, except for the few stories mentioned, the cosmic struggle between God and Satan in Luke/Acts is more implicit than explicit. This needs explanation. Could it be that Satan and company are less a cosmological than an anthropological reality in Luke's narrative world, a way of speaking of the human will that holds out against God by playing the magician for personal gain? At least, this seems to apply once Satan has fallen from heaven and taken up residence below.
A further unanswered question is more serious. Garrett notes that the colleagues of Bar Jesus might well tell about his blinding by Paul as the worst kind of magic. But she does not pursue the problematic of how today's reader is to deal with such competing narrative worlds latent in authoritative texts. We cannot excuse her from this responsibility on the basis that her role at Yale Divinity School is to lay out the texts while those in the field do the application, because her very speech is an interpretation of Luke's narrative world today. So when she says, "The blinding of Bar Jesus illustrates not only Christian authority over Satan, but also the sad fate of all unrepentant Jews," she uses categories of "Christian" and "Jew" which have twentieth-century referents.
Either we must contest that Luke meant the authority of the Spirit, not of the Christian, and the hold of Satan on certain people, not on Jews (and Simon Magus, the Samaritan, supports this-though Garrett argues that Luke recounts Gentile conversions only after the story of Peter and Cornelius). Or, if she reads Luke correctly, then we see within Luke's own narrative world, which celebrates God's Spirit in the marginal over against established religion and state, the genesis of a new established religion already seeking state approval against its enemies. This story has Satanic fruit in our own time. Can Christians today then be responsible to Luke's Gospel without a direct repudiation of this blinding story and its "ongoing Christian triumph over Satan"?
As long as we remember that the devil is alive and well and living at our addresses, Garrett's brief and clear study of the devil's demise in the narrative world of Luke and Acts can be a fine provocation for discussion among people of faith today.
Antoinette Clark Wire
San Francisco Theological Seminary
San Anselmo, California