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Demonization
By John Gavazzoni
What is portrayed in the Bible as the activity of demons/evil spirits is essentially a condition of toxic insecurity fueled by profound ignorance of one's worth as a child of God. Left untreated by the Truth, over time, the condition becomes more and more malevolent as the person, with no hope of ever being involved in any way at all in the world of goodness, seeks recognition by evil doing. To be worthy of recognition is a basic human need.
To be utterly ignored can be more damaging to the human psyche than overt emotional or physical abuse. We need to have our existence validated. The "demonized" person without hope of being recognized as good... for after all, there is no good in worthlessness... will seek a validation as a person to be recognized and reckoned with by outstandingly evil behavior: "If I can't be good, I'll show everyone just how bad I can be."
It's basically the feeling of being abandoned by God as having no worth, which Jesus took on with us and for us on the cross. The "demonized" person is plagued by feelings of resentment leading to out and out acts of enmity toward the God he believes is responsible for his hellish condition. Religion enters with its insistence that the person so victimized should and must love God with all his heart, soul, mind and strength, and his neighbor as himself.
All psychosis is rooted in pain. The "demonized" are the wounded. Jeremiah (Jer. 17:9), translated accurately, describes this syndrome of wickedness: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick." The KJV has it as "desperately wicked," but "sick" is the correct translation. Sin is the result of soul-sickness resulting from soul-wounding. The author of the lyrics of the hymn, "Have Thine Own Way Lord," understood this. Included in the third stanza are the words, "wounded and weary," and "touch me and heal me." Healing exorcizes evil.
Grandiosity is a fundamental characteristic of the demonized, and depending on the individual soul-temperament, its manifestation will range all the way from despair that reaches grandiose depths to grandiose notions of self-importance and self-exaltation. It covers, "I'm ashamed of my very existence," all the way to, "the superiority of my humanity over others is so obvious, all the world needs to recognize the fact and bow before me," with levels of difference between those two extremes. The gospel record supplies us with the following understanding: "... God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good and HEALING all who were oppressed of the devil...." (KJV, emphasis, mine)
Jonathan Mitchell offers the following about the origin of the term "demon," from Kittel's Theological Dictionary of the New Testament: "A basic animism underlies the Greek 'daimón' concept. This persisted amongst the Greeks. Hence we can fully understand the 'daimón' concept only against the background of popular animistic beliefs." Vol. II, p 1, footnote 1 cites Andres, stating, "The concept and term 'daimón' lead us back to earlier periods of Greek religion in which it resembles that of primitive peoples." Theologian Paul Tillich characterizes the malady of demonization as being a "distortion" in the human psyche, or personality.
The idea of demons being some sort of "spirit entity" is absent from the Hebrew text of the OT. This idea arose in Second Temple Judaism through the Jews' contact with the culture and religions of Hellenism. By the time of the Advent of Jesus, and His ministry, the concept was thoroughly embedded as part of the Jewish worldview of that period, but there was no Scriptural basis for this belief, except occasional use of the term in the Septuagint, which arose in a Hellenistic environment. It is Jonathan's conclusion that Jesus addressed the maladies of demonization according to the accepted cultural beliefs of His time. Jesus' dealing with those conditions were normally termed a healing, or that the person was now in their right mind. The conditions were and are real, but he questions the wisdom of assigning an ontological reality to demons as "spirit beings." The traditional Christian view of demons being some kind of entity (as opposed to a distorted mindset, attitude or spirit within which a person was held in bondage) is a theological construct that accepted the worldview of Second Temple Judaism, and the Hellenistic culture that was its environment.
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