"Do You Renounce Satan?” A Glance at the Christian Baptismal Vows of Renunciation
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I have been in deliverance and exorcism ministry for nearly four decades. When I tell some Christians about my ministry, occasionally a few are perplexed, terror-struck, or scandalized. To some, it is not an “official” or “real” ministry of the church. And worse, to some, it is an unprofessional, self-appointed, fanatical concoction practiced by certain backwoods snake-handling types. Of course, I am quick to remind them of the ministry of Christ and his disciples and of the baptismal vows of the church for the last two-thousand years. My focus in this article is the baptismal vow of renunciation, which is usually situated at the front end of the rite. Spiritual warfare and deliverance are not eccentric novelties to be practiced by a few specialists or fanatics. Christians need to own that resisting evil–deliverance and exorcism–has been preparatory for one’s baptism and initiation into the church for centuries. In addition, vows to resist the devil have also been instrumental for Christians seeking to renew their baptism and walk in deeper holiness.
Paul exhorts us “to clothe ourselves in Christ and not to satisfy our evil desires (Rom 13:14). Scripture is replete with injunctions to resist evil and walk in the Spirit. Spiritual warfare, repentance, deliverance, and sanctification begin with the call to renounce the devil and his works. Practices such as these actually begin with our baptismal vows. Thus, in our commitment to resist evil and do good, we should return to our baptismal vows as a theological foundation that grounds and informs our Christian praxis. Simply put, remember your baptism!
In this article, I want to focus on the reality and significance of “renouncing Satan, all spiritual forces of wickedness, and their works.” If you are a Christian and were baptized, either you, your parents, your godparent(s), or sponsor(s) took baptismal vows. Several of those vows were affirmations in response to various questions about one’s faith. Across denominational lines, these affirmations are fairly similar and often involve faith in God–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit–as expressed in the Apostles’ Creed, faith in Jesus Christ as Savior, a profession of Christian faith contained in the Holy Scriptures, and a pledge of faithfulness to Christ’s holy church. Along with these vows of Christian affirmation, there are also vows of renunciation. For example, in the Anglican Rite for candidates who can speak for themselves, these questions are presented followed by the appropriate renunciations, along with an anointing and prayer for exorcism:
Question: Do you renounce the devil and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that
rebel against God?Answer: I renounce them.
Question: Do you renounce the empty promises and deadly deceits of this world that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?
Answer: I renounce them.
Question: Do you renounce the sinful desires of the flesh that draw you from the love of God?
Answer: I renounce them.
The Celebrant prays over the Candidate(s) and may anoint each Candidate with the Oil of Exorcism, saying
Almighty God deliver you from the powers of darkness and evil and lead you into the light and obedience of the kingdom of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen (Book of Common Prayer, 2019).
With some exceptions, these renunciations are fairly similar across Christian traditions. They involve renouncing Satan, all demonic forces, their evil works, and the entirety of sin. What do such renunciations mean to the church and to us personally? What is meant by Satan, evil, and renouncing? Do we take our vows seriously? What do we mean when asked if we renounce the devil, demons, and their works? Who are the devil and his demons? Is Satan a real being? Are Satan and the hordes of hell abstractions, fallen angels, titans, or some other race or species of beings? Do demons as fallen angels have ontic status (real being)? Do they exist as created personal angelic entities? Or is Satan merely a metaphor, figurative language for systemic evil, a metonymy, or a synecdoche for all evil?
There have also been several streams of interpretation, mostly over the last century, that have identified Satan more metaphorically and systemically, for example, the quality work of Walter Wink or Robert Linthicum among others. I do not discount these impersonal, psychologically abstract, or socio-systemic interpretations of Satan and evil. Such constructs should be included in our broad hermeneutic of the demonic. Personal evil can work collectively as a system, as the fallen angels collaborated in revolt against heaven, and as they collaborate through large scale sin like racism or abortion. Yet even in such cases, the evil is not merely an abstract system but is undergirded by “principalities and powers,” which in their scriptural context refer to systems of demons. The demonic works on both levels, personal and systemic.
The existence of the devil is more than just figurative. Jesus was not casting metaphors out of people. In the letters of the New Testament, when we are encouraged to resist the devil or evil, we are not commanded to resist figurative language, abstractions, a synecdoche, or even a political system so that it “will flee from us.” Nor are we called to beware of Satan, who roams around like a roaring metaphor or trope seeking for someone to devour. A lion is indeed a metaphor and an appropriate one, though its purpose is not to claim that Satan is a metaphor, but to compare his destructive work to a vicious predator that can ruthlessly destroy and devour its prey. I am not a verbal and plenary literalist, but I will take the genre as it presents itself and interpret it in its plain sense.
Both Scripture and Christian tradition have identified Satan as a fallen, evil angel, thus a being with agency and intelligence. Furthermore, that being chose to rebel against God and become morally evil. By misusing his freedom and perverting his will, the devil became the “author” of evil, the father of lies. Evil is not ontologically real but a distortion or falsification of what is real, a privation of the good that God has created. As the father of lies, the deprivation of truth, Satan is bent on deception and malevolence, as is the rest of the demonic hosts. Prominent figures of the Great Tradition such as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine, Maximus the Confessor, Anselm, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, C.S. Lewis, and others infer similarly and often wrote practically on spiritual warfare against the devil.
Now that we have established what “Satan” refers to, what does it mean to “renounce Satan?” The baptismal vow of renunciation has several echoes in Scripture, where many have had to confront the evil one. From the beginning, the devil has been the adversary of both God and humanity. Michael and his angels defeated Satan and his hordes when they attempted a coup in heaven (Rev. 12). The prideful, rebellious angels were given no place in heaven and were cast out and banished to the earth.
Satan disguises himself in many forms to tempt humanity. In the beginning in the garden, he came as a cunning serpent that beguiled our primal parents into distrusting God. They rebelled against his command, believing the Almighty was withholding some good from them in paradise. They believed a lie that with the knowledge of good and evil they would become like God and trust in themselves. Adam and Eve did not renounce Satan but acquiesced, as have we throughout human history. Renouncing the devil, at least in part, would have involved condemning and rejecting the tempter’s lies that attempt to undermine the goodness and faithfulness of God and refusing his counterfeit offer of blissful autonomy.
Moses by the power of God confronted Pharaoh, resisted the injustice of slavery, and delivered his people from bondage. Tertullian understood Moses’ confrontation with Pharaoh as one with the devil. In the leanness of the desert, the liberated Israelites were tempted not to trust the God who delivered them but to return to Egypt and serve false gods. Many did not resist the devil and died off in the wilderness. It would be the next generation led by Joshua that would renounce idolatry and unbelief and enter into the promised land.
In the New Testament, Christ comes as the last Adam. Where Adam failed against the devil, Christ succeeded. In the desert and in the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ was tempted with covetousness, pride, autonomy, power, and vainglory. He renounced the devil, resisted temptation, and stood on the word of God (Matt. 4; 26:36-46). When tempted to choose his will over the Father’s, he denied himself and went to the cross. He died on the cross for our sins and defeated sin, Satan, and death. Throughout his ministry, we find Christ confronting and expelling the kingdom of darkness by doing good, casting out demons, and empowering his disciples to do the same (Matthew 10:7-8). Likewise, we find the apostles in the book of Acts carrying out Christ’s deliverance ministry (Acts 16:16-18).
Paul exhorts us in Ephesians “to be strong in the Lord’s power” and “put on his armor so that we can stand against the devil’s evil strategies.” We find a representative list of those strategies in Galatians 5:19-21 marked as the “works of the flesh.” The proper response is “to crucify the flesh” (v. 24). James gives us the direct command to oppose the devil and his works: “Submit yourselves to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (James 4:7). In this one verse, we find a theological summation of spiritual warfare. The injunction is given by James within the larger context of prayer, humility, and true repentance, which are instrumental to renouncing Satan and drawing near to God (James 4:8-10). Baptismal renunciation of Satan and sin is a call to radical humility, to reject Satan, to life-changing repentance that shuns the ways of the world (v.4), and to receive God’s gift of grace to follow Christ in righteousness.
Finally, John the Revelator shows us Christ returning to the world to destroy the power of the antichrist, the beast, the false prophet, and Satan. They are thrown into the lake of fire along with death and Hades (Revelation 20). As all things are becoming new, the history of the old creation culminates with the defeat and judgment of Satan and his demons and all of the works of evil, both systemic and personal. Satan was defeated and judged at the cross and receives his sentence with Christ’s return.
The practice of confronting and renouncing the devil was incorporated into the baptismal rite of the early church. Tertullian and Basil claimed the renunciation vow originated in apostolic tradition, though it is difficult to substantiate. The standard dating is between the late second and third centuries. We first see the renunciation vows in Hippolytus’ The Apostolic Tradition (before 235). Tertullian (155-220) also claimed it in his day (De Spectaculis, circa 197 and De Corona 3, circa 201), as did Cyril of Jerusalem in his Catechetical Lectures (circa 350).
In many cases, as with Cyril, sanctified oil, representing the presence and power of the Spirit, was applied after renouncing Satan but prior to the baptismal confession and again following the baptismal act. We also see the renunciation in the baptismal rites in the Apostolic Constitutions (late 4th century), in the Missale Gallicanum Vetis (circa 3rd century), in the Sarum Rite (11th century) in the West, and throughout the liturgical history of the Roman Catholic Church. It is later adopted in the Lutheran and Anglican Rites as well. In the Eastern Orthodox Rite not only is there a baptismal renunciation of the devil, but there is also a prayer of exorcism over the candidate. In the baptismal liturgy of the Orthodox Church of America there are three exorcisms that precede the vows of renunciation (OCA, 2012). The witness of the early Fathers was clear that in baptism and conversion there needed to be a radical shift in allegiance from the devil and his works to Christ and his Kingdom. Baptismal renunciation announced and sealed that shift.
Today, our understanding of renunciation found in the baptismal liturgy needs to be as radical as that conveyed by the tradition. We are condemning and rejecting Satan, his minions, and their abominable works. We will no longer ally with his depraved will or ways. Instead, we turn our full devotion to Christ as Lord and make a vow of radical commitment to his kingdom. In some modern mainline Protestant liturgies, such as the Presbyterian. Methodist, Christian Reformed, and some forms of the Anglican Rite, the direct renunciation of Satan or the devil has been removed. In the case of my denomination, the United Methodist Church, the renunciation was included in Wesley’s original Sunday Service. It was retained in the MEC hymnal from 1905 and in the Methodist hymnals of 1935 and 1966.
In the 1989 United Methodist Hymnal, however, the direct reference to Satan was removed and replaced with “the spiritual forces of wickedness” and “the evil powers of this world.” Following this renunciation, the minister asks, “Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?” “Injustice and oppression” are listed alongside “evil” and may even modify or define evil in this context. Granted this version, to its credit, did add, from the early baptismal tradition, the anointing with oil, the laying on of hands, and an epiclesis.
This change may seem minuscule at first. The phrases “spiritual forces of wickedness” and “evil powers of this world” may seem synonymous with “Satan” but not necessarily in all of the minds of the interpreters. “Injustice and oppression” certainly seem like things we should oppose. Yet the vagary of this language does not help us. These phrases can mean anything today depending on one’s socio-political context. We live in an age where it is easy to hold to a deflationary folk view of evil that lacks a clear, robust theology. Our common view tends to locate evil in others and not in us, and usually points to some extreme form, like Hitler and Nazi Germany. Evil has taken on more of a relative, socio-political guise. Depending on whom you ask, ‘evil, injustice, and oppression’ may mean the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton, and any voice supporting LGBT or CRT. For some, evil may mean the Republican Party, Donald Trump, and any voice supporting nationalism or capitalism.
In our world today, evil is in the eye of the beholder. Absolutes are censured, and surely evil in the ontic form of fallen angels has been debunked and discredited by modernity. Thus, the removal of the direct reference to Satan in the liturgy for some can be interpreted as the removal of personal evil as embodied and summed up emblematically in Scripture and the Christian tradition as “Satan and his works.” The biblical and traditional context for understanding evil is removed or at least demythologized, softened, or perhaps replaced by the latest iteration of one group’s object of scorn.
Our renunciation of evil is specifically a rejection of Satan, his rebellion against God, and his temptation of the whole human race to do likewise. Thus, in our commitment to resist evil, we should return to the roots of our baptismal vows. At the core of spiritual warfare, repentance, deliverance, sanctification, and similar practices is the pledge to renounce Satan and his works and to surrender our sole allegiance to Christ and his Lordship. In this way, we remember, reinforce, and renew our baptism.
Peter J. Bellini is Professor of Church Renewal and Evangelization in the Heisel Chair at United Theological Seminary, Dayton, Ohio, and a member of Firebrand’s editorial board.