Confessions of a Ghostbuster

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

Halloween, or All Hallows’ Eve, with witches, ghosts, goblins, ghouls, and trick or treat is upon us. But do evil spirits exist? Is there such a thing as the devil, Satan, or fallen angels? Are there demons that tempt, influence, and even possess people? Most of us would prefer to say “no.” Who wants to believe in invisible agents of evil and forces of spiritual wickedness? There is enough evil in the visible world; who needs more? Much of the mainline church does not hold to a literal view of the demonic, let alone combat it. In a day of technological progress, who wants to hold onto a leftover vestige from a superstitious pre-critical, pre-modern and pre-scientific world? As a deliverance minister for the last 35 years with a jam-packed schedule of cases (especially from September 1st to October 31st), I wish demons were only folklore. 

Here is the brief story of my baptism into deliverance ministry almost four decades ago. My unforeseen initiation into spiritual warfare and deliverance began as an open-air campus evangelist. Outdoor preaching was a longstanding tradition at the Ohio State University. Students waited for the warm weather when the campus preachers would arrive. They would eagerly cut class and flock to the Oval (OSU’s version of a quad) to hear and heckle the outdated, over the top, Bible-banging preachers. Witches, warlocks, and Satanists attended our preaching events and were ready to stir up a firestorm of opposition at the first syllable of the good news. 

In the 1980s, following the first week of my conversion to Christ, I felt the call to share the gospel with my fellow Buckeyes. I would set out for the Oval daily to preach repentance and faith in Christ for the forgiveness of sins. Old time, revivalistic, fire-baptized, Holy Ghost convicting preaching seemed to stir up the sleeping, sinister sprites in those days. Or perhaps the mere oddity of proclaiming the truth outdoors at a major secular university day in and day out in the twentieth century rubbed some the wrong way. 

In any case, my colleague and I found ourselves regularly accosted by a group of self-proclaimed witches and Satanists. Two in particular stood out: an older and a younger woman, both self-proclaimed witches. They felt it necessary to inform us that they were cursing our ministry and holding black masses for our death. What did I do as a young Christian to deserve this attention? I sure felt special. In that season, my friend and I prayed more intensely in our devotional time. We meticulously “put on the armor of God” and interceded with prayers of divine protection. Not disturbed, we continued our regular outdoor routine. Wesley would be proud. Nonetheless, the harassment and threats continued, until a startling incident happened to my friend one night. He called me in a panic after the incident and related what occurred. It went something like this:

 I was in my bed trying to fall asleep, when I saw an apparition at the foot of my bed that scared the @#X* out of me. Those two crazy witches who have been praying curses against us appeared in my room. I am not kidding… I freaked out and began to pray…Then, they disappeared…Then shortly after the phone rang. I answered it. I heard a female voice say, “Did you see us?” and the voice began to laugh. It was a shrieking, menacing laugh, along with another cackling female voice in the background. I quickly hung up the phone. 

Needless to say, as a young believer, I was a little shaken. For a moment, I questioned the veracity of my colleague’s “ghost story.” Maybe after hearing the frequent threats, he had become paranoid. Yet, in my spirit, I felt he was truly sharing what he had experienced. His alarmed and frightened tone had a ring of truth to it. I began to pray for discernment as to what our next move would be. They had already planned theirs. 

One Sunday, we were aghast to find them at our church, sitting in their car. They began regularly attending services on Sundays and Wednesdays, especially at evening services. We heard stories of occult members sent on assignment to pray against churches and pastors, but we took those tales lightly. Besides, those sorts of things always happen to other people. They managed to fit perfectly into our small non-denominational, charismatic congregation. It was as if they had rehearsed this methodically, almost like they had performed it before. They were clothed conservatively in dresses or long skirts. They clapped to the praise music and lifted up their hands when the music shifted from high praise to deep worship. They warmly shook everyone’s hand and hugged every neck when the preacher told the congregation to “go and greet each other.” During the sermon, the ominous pair would “amen” at the right moment and shout along with the best of them. During ministry time at the altar at the end of service, they would routinely come up front with hands lifted high, ready to receive prayer and even a word from God. The whole charade was quite eerie. It was something I had never witnessed before or since. 

The good people of the church did not suspect anything. In fact, some of our friends in the church rebuked us when we refused to embrace ‘the two visitors’ during greeting time. We were stand-offish with our ghoulish guests. We knew the truth, and they did, too. This went on for weeks. They arrived an hour prior to every service, camped out in their powder blue Trans-Am. We assumed that they came early to pray against the service, the pastor, and the people of the church. Their part was well rehearsed and their performance stellar, even award-winning, until the revivalist came to town. 

We were holding revival for the next few weeks, as any Spirit-filled church would do in the summer. The evangelist was a powerful African-American preacher who was also a seasoned prophetess, fluent in the gifts of the Spirit and dripping with spiritual authority. The sanctuary was packed that evening with many new faces as is customary during revival season. Our stealth sorceresses blended in well, and the service went on as usual. At the conclusion of her preaching, the prophetess began to operate in the word of knowledge. She called out people who had various problems and health issues; this is customary in a Spirit-filled church. However, this time was different for both the prophetess and our two friends. 

Following the word of knowledge, both pernicious performers came forward with hands raised, the elder standing in front of her apprentice. Immediately, as the woman of God laid hands on the elder witch, the prophetess boldly exclaimed, “We have two witches in the house!” In that very second, the spellbound, startled woman hit the floor and began to scream with a deep howling shriek. She began to writhe on the ground like a snake. The prophetess followed her to the floor, rebuking the spirit of witchcraft as she commanded the slithering figure to repent and surrender to Christ. The angry woman screamed, “No, no, my power!” and would not yield. My friend and I, enthusiastic, young, and insensitive, were elated and energized, as we shot up out of our pews and ran to the altar behind the fallen witch, almost waiting for the prophetess to retrieve a bucket of water to pour on them to melt them, like in The Wizard of Oz. (Jesus would have clearly rebuked us. We would later repent for our misguided zeal). For us, the culmination of events leading up to this Elijah vs. the Prophets of Baal smack-down was both an adrenaline blitz as well as a comic conclusion to what developed initially into a drama and a tragedy. 

After lying on the carpet for a few minutes, the elder witch, still screaming and squirming on the floor, managed to get to her wobbly feet. She snatched the wrist of her whimpering apprentice and made a mad dash for the door, never to be seen again. We hoped and prayed that one day those two souls would heed the call to repent of their dark arts and come to Christ. This was my glorious baptism into deliverance. 

After nearly four decades of deliverance ministry, I have seen every type of demonic manifestation imaginable. Are these invisible beings that the Bible calls demons or evil spirits real? I could tackle this question from a scientific perspective. We can examine complex concepts like causal closure and the hard problem of consciousness, emergence of intangible properties and downward causation, quantum indeterminacy and quantum non-interventionist divine action, and dark matter and dark energy, etc. And I have done so elsewhere. These discussions all challenge the notion of reductionistic physicalism (only matter exists) and posit the reality of immateriality. Of course, that would not “prove” in a hard, Cartesian sense that invisible beings like demons and angels exist. But if science can entertain the possibility of invisibility and immateriality, theology can possibly entertain angels unaware. 

The scriptural notion of an invisible realm of spirit beings cannot be unequivocally ruled out. Science admits invisibility at the least. Where science wants proof, scripture assumes. The biblical worldview assumes a notion of divine and even spirit agency, which is held by majority world Christianity and other world religions. We are justified by faith, not reason. Reason is instrumental in the pursuit of truth, but it works in concert with faith, “faith seeking understanding.” 

As believers, we take scripture by reasonable faith and believe what it reveals about God, angels, demons, heaven, hell, miracles, the supernatural, and other invisible realities. The Bible calls us to believe in a God that we have never seen who saves us from a hell that we have never seen. Scripture offers us eternal life in a heaven where we have never been. Reality is not just material or matter. We walk by faith and not by sight, like Moses “who saw Him who is invisible” (Heb. 11:27). Our five senses apprehend the ratio-empirical world. But faith is the sixth sense that apprehends the invisible world. What we believe is not irrational but revealed from the suprarational mind of God.

Colossians 1:16 states that the Son of God created all things “visible and invisible.” When we acknowledge the doctrine of creation in holy writ, we are admitting a worldview that encompasses both material and spiritual realities. Scripture is filled with accounts of divine agency working in both the invisible and visible worlds. We also note invisible beings such as angels and demons working in the visible world. On the other hand, we see visible beings, such as women and men, interacting through prayer and worship in the invisible realm, as their prayers are lifted to heaven. The traffic of agency flows both ways. 

There is divine-human interaction in the invisible and visible realms, which are interconnected. For example, in Gen. 28:12-13 and John 1:51, “Jacob’s ladder” resembles a staircase between the invisible and visible worlds depicting angels descending and ascending from heaven to earth. Angels are ministering the will of God in the world, while demons are seeking to thwart it. In Revelation 12, Michael the archangel casts Satan and the other fallen angels out of an invisible heaven to visible earth. In Luke 10:18, Jesus said that he “saw Satan falling like lightning from heaven” to the earth. Conversely, a good portion of Christ’s ministry was “to heal all of those oppressed of the devil.”

Scripture is replete with exchanges between the invisible and visible worlds. We observe this in the life of Jesus who spoke to his heavenly Father, was filled with the Spirit beyond measure, was ministered to by angels, healed the sick, worked miracles, raised the dead, and cast out demons. Jesus interacted with spirit beings in the heavens and earthly beings in this world. In fact, Jesus was an exorcist, as New Testament scholar Graham Twelftree reminds us. Jesus cast out demons and commanded his disciples to do likewise. 

Was Jesus operating merely out of a premodern worldview? Is the evil that he faced more hermeneutical (his interpretation) rather than ontological (real beings)? Was Jesus wrong in his interpretation of worldview? Stated another way, was Jesus ministering to the afflicted with healing and exorcism, because the ailments and treatments were interpreted through a pre-modern worldview? And if Jesus were living in our post-enlightenment worldview, would he really cast out demons and lay hands on the sick? Rather would he refer such persons to medical professionals, since we know that demons are not real and that no one can supernaturally heal the sick? Modern interpretations of demonic encounters in the gospels are frequently demythologized or explained in scientific terms as mental disorder or physical illness. The assumption is that we are more enlightened and are aware of the exact physical nature of these first century afflictions. We do not need to resort to demonology. 

 This line of thinking is problematic. Today, we are not aware of the exact neurobiological causes of mental disorders, nor do modern treatments offer a “cure” merely symptomatic relief attempting to ameliorate one’s condition. Similarly, there are many physical diseases that have unknown origins and remain incurable. Of course, that is not to take away the advancements of medical science. It has performed its own “miracles” that first-century Palestine could not have imagined. Simply put, although our biomedical model is the best science can put forth at this time, it is limited. In our scientific worldview, if we cannot perceive something with our five senses, then we cannot understand it with our reason, and thus we dismiss such things as not real. On the other hand, that is also not to say that every ailment is a demon, including mental disorders. (I parse this and other problems like multiple levels of causality in my book Unleashed!) 

The question remains: does our modern, post-enlightenment worldview with the advances of medical science understand what Jesus and his disciples were facing any more than persons in the first-century Greco-Roman world? Scientifically, yes, but not exhaustively. Explain a man levitating when going through deliverance. I have seen it. Explain how a person can be delivered instantly of sexual addiction. I prayed for such a person. My contention is that perhaps scientism has exorcized demons from its worldview, but it has not exorcized them from the world. Only the Spirit can do that. Science cannot heal the soul of pride, adultery, murder, or any other deadly sin. These are matters of the spirit. 

Thus, we still have the problem of spirit or immateriality. Remaining modern intangibles and uncertainties related to etiology and cure, sin, and the problem of evil are understood by scripture in terms of broader moral concerns related to spirit. God is Spirit. Angels and demons are spirits. Humans are spiritual beings capable of relating to God. We are made in the image of God. God the Holy Spirit indwells our hearts. The Bible understands the problem of evil and its collateral damage in the world in terms of demonic agency and temptation, human freedom and sin, the universal fall, and redemption in Christ. Scripture does not have a problem with a spirit worldview, spirit beings, divine and angelic action, supernatural miracles, deliverance from demonic powers. 

The great tradition of the church from the apostles to today also affirms the invisible and visible nature of creation. Many traditions have practiced exorcism and deliverance through their rites; most have incorporated it into their baptismal liturgies. Exorcism continues to be a charism in the modern church. Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy have practiced exorcism rites since their inception. Pentecostal-Charismatic and global Christianity of all stripes recognize deliverance ministry as normative. Along with the witness of the major Christian traditions, I call upon the numerous testimonies of my vast array of colleagues who have ministered in deliverance and add those to my own. 

Yet above all, Christ on the cross has defeated the power of the devil. We do not fear demons. He has given us his power and authority to set captives free and put the enemy under our feet. In the dark times we live in, we need more than ever to revive the healing ministry of deliverance. 

Peter J. Bellini is Professor of Church Renewal and Evangelization in the Heisel Chair at United Theology Seminary in Dayton, Ohio