Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

In summary, we need not defend ourselves against the natural dimensions of biblical miracles. That is no denial of their

divine dimension. Here again the old scholastic axiom applies: “grace presupposes nature and perfects it.” The biblical miracles would lose their strangeness or embarrassing character if, finally, what the theology of grace has long since worked out were applied to them. Let me again emphasize that taking seriously the “natural” dimensions of a miracle by no means excludes the action of God. God always acts in and through the world’s autonomy.

Demons

The view of miracles described here is also compatible with Jesus’ exorcisms. I have already pointed out that in antiquity in general, and also in Judaism, all that is chaotic and destructive could be attributed to demonic powers. This was true in particular of psychoses and mental illness in general. If a sick person’s identity was disturbed, or if she or he had lost all self-control, it was all too easy to assume that the person was possessed by a demon.

Beyond that, it is important to keep in mind that at the time it was simply assumed that there was such a thing as “possession” in this sense and also that someone who was possessed could be freed from his or her demons through exorcisms. This made it easy for sick people, the handicapped, the oppressed, people in hopeless situations—in short, all those who were socially stigmatized—to slip into the role of a possessed person. Normally this was a completely unconscious move. Those who were pushed to the edges of society thus had a “social construct” at their disposal that made it possible for them to give expression to their socially hopeless situation “in a language of symptoms which is publicly acceptable.”²² They thus succeeded in being noticed, having people pay attention to them and “treat” them. Cecile Ernst, in a study on the driving out of devils in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for which—in contrast to the biblical exorcisms—we have extensive biographical material at our disposal, has demonstrated precisely this phenomenon.²³

Today’s biblical scholars frequently remark that obviously we can no longer share that era’s belief in demons.²⁴ Superficially that is correct, and yet it is fundamentally false. Of course we would ask today what underlies phenomena of possession from a medical, psychological, and social-psychological point of view, and we will have no hesitation in regarding exorcisms as a prescientific method of (often successful) “psychotherapy.” But that, certainly, is by no means a real explanation of the explosion of the phenomena of possession in particular times and cultural groups, for we must suppose that some kind of deep crisis is revealed in these phenomena—a crisis resulting from guilt, namely, from the self-betrayal, lies, egoisms, recklessness, meanness, and heartlessness of society.

These things not only happen again and again; they settle themselves in the world in the form of a damaged and distorted state of things that no individual can overcome. The New Testament is therefore quite right to speak of the “powers.” In such a connection one must indeed talk about the demons of society—and also, of course, of their victims. For there are particularly sensitive people in whom the chaos and guilt of whole generations, their obsessions and compulsions, concentrate and express themselves physically. Evil in history and society can gather itself to a “potency,” and it very often takes hold precisely of the weakest and objectifies itself in them in the symptoms that are common in the particular society. The illnesses thus produced can be so powerful that the sick persons require help from outside themselves—possibly through a word of power that transposes them into a new situation.

Jesus must have had a profound power to bring such crises to light, to take the form of their expression seriously, and still more, to force them to take objective form and so to heal them. In this he showed himself to be the stronger one, the one who cannot be led astray by the wounds that evil can inflict but through his truthfulness and lack of ambiguity can banish the demons of society. It would be nave to think that we can leave Jesus’ exorcisms behind us as constructs conditioned by time. Rather, they are his confrontations with the power of evil and everything in the world that stands in opposition to God.²⁵ It is true that in the first place Jesus’ exorcisms were conducted “naturally.” The possessed people were sick, and Jesus offered healing. But behind their illnesses lurk the sicknesses of society, and the one who heals them stands in the place of God, who cannot permit God’s good creation to be distorted and destroyed.