Teufelvolksbefolgengeist, Part 2
June 4, 2024 § 4 Comments
Casting out the spirit
Jesus’ answer to the problem of society’s possession by a violent and oppressive spirit is not to assault the man who is possessed, but to drive out the spirit that possesses him. To do this, he forces it to declare its name, its true-name, if you will—what it really is.
What is our Legion’s name?
I woke up a few mornings ago with a name in my mind: Teufelvolksbefolgengeist (pronounced toy’-full-folks-be-foal’-gen-gicest). (I love the German language for its capacity for creating compound nouns that say something concisely that you couldn’t say any other way, like zeitgeist, the spirit of the times.*) I translate teufelvolksbefolgengeist as the devil-spirit-whom-the-people-follow, whom they adhere to and obey.
The key to driving out this unclean spirit is not to attack the possessee, but the possessor, the teufelvolksbefolgengeist, the spirit that has infected our society. How do you do that?
First, we meet it with the truth of its name. This movement is following and obeying a spirit we have seen before. It animated Nazi Germany and reemerged in Soviet-occupied East Germany; it animated Stalin’s Russia. It’s an addiction to power and money, a love affair with the Satan, the father of lies, and with Mammon, the love of ill-gotten gain.
Second, we minister to the fears, trauma, and resentments that are the movement’s wellspring. Only by addressing the problems that the movement’s people face can we unbind them from their pain. Only communities can restore what they have lost—hope, a sense of belonging, of being seen and being known, and security, both material and spiritual. This calls governments, civic institutions, and the church to step up.
Third, we meet its most dangerous elements and their assaults with moral aikido, using their own energy and direction to disarm them and throw down their spirit, the way Jesus did repeatedly to his opponents. The way, for instance, that he caught out the scribes who tried to trap him into saying Jews shouldn’t pay the Roman tax: when you render unto God what is God’s, there’s nothing left for Caesar. For us, this means the law and the courts. And against the white Christian nationalists who are prominent in this movement (as “Christians” have always been in such movements), it means we prophetically uncover how they violate God’s laws with their words and deeds; specifically, in some cases, for instance, how they have broken their oaths of office, in which they had invoked God’s attention and judgment with the words at the end of their oath: “so help me God.”
Fourth, we meet the worst of them with humor and ridicule. Like Mel Brooks’s The Producers and the opening monologues of our late-night hosts. With political cartoons and video mash-ups of these possessed folks revealing their possessed selves, like John Oliver does in his show.
And fifth, we love. We call to their true selves. We answer that of God within them, that spirit within them that seeks truth, peace, wholeness, and love. I’m not talking about a feeling here, which we are just not going to feel. At least I’m not going to feel it, unless, perhaps, I get to know one of these folks personally. I’m talking about biblical love, which is something we do, not necessarily something we feel. With this love, we remember that we are dealing with a spirit, not just with a person; that these people are children of God, just like we are, that there is that of God within them, somewhere; that some trauma or pain lies behind their fear, their anger, their despair; that we must go high when they go low and remain faithful to our own moral compass.
To return to mythology and monsters for a moment, I take heart from a truth that guides the faithful fellowship of the ring in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: evil always overreaches and it does not expect others to make the sacrifices that it would never make itself. Sauron never expects the good guys to destroy the ring; he expects them to use it. In the chapter in the The Fellowship of the Ring titled “The Council of Elrond,” Gandalf says something that has always stuck in my mind: “[Sauron] weighs all things to a nicety on the scales of his malice.” Meaning, evil assumes that everybody else is malicious, too. But we aren’t.
* I studied German for two years in college and still retain a surprising amount of that knowledge, considering. But I think this word teufelvolksbefolgengeist came into my mind because I’ve been watching Amazon Prime’s TV series Grimm, in which each episode features a monster from fairy tales or mythology, a la the work of the brothers Grimm; they all have German compound-noun names. I have long been fascinated by the monsters in mythology and folklore, and have always loved a good monster story. Grimm is pretty good in this regard.
Note that the Grimm brothers did not just collect these stories, they studied them, and developed a vocabulary for categorizing them according to repeating themes and structures. Their approach was soon applied to the stories in the Bible, especially those in Christian scripture, giving birth to what is now called form criticism, which names various kinds of gospel story according to their theme, purpose, and structure. The brothers Grimm are the progenitors of one of the main disciplines in Bible criticism.
Through the Flaming Sword 
Good Morning Steven,
Related, when Meshack & Eileen traveled in the early ‘90s among US Friends, in NYYM they discerned evil spirits and warned the young Christian couple that was doing the youth program at Powell House (after Fran) of our condition. During our service on Renewal, at a Representative meeting, I was driven from the lunchroom by a specter that arose from The Women’ Rights Committee that was still meeting in the room.
Within a liberal democratic social paradigm, the principalities and powers and spiritual wickedness in high places is within each of us (even, and likely explicitly, in our capacity to see an ‘other’. Without the precedent of biblical perfection (e.g., Samuel Bonas’ “Qualifications of a Gospel Minister” – if memory yet serves me well here) the glass seen through, partially or otherwise, may be little more than a functional willful blindness of a stiff-necked and hard hearted piety of a “Mordor privileged’.
My recollection is that at your initiation we often spoke of this point about biblical perfection regarding the Fox quote and how it needed qualification.
Regardless, mythologically/socially nurtured and trusted motivated reasoning/functionally-a-theology, ‘Lucifer’-as-a-spirit-of-light, can (and does) possess …and darkness reigns.
In our time it is the spirit of #CapitalismFAIL that ‘faileth not’ in corrupting Truth. To discern this, consider #AbruptClimateChange⁉️
=) Greg
https://youtu.be/cqkT4gvBL_4 Poet’s Plea youtu.be
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Nicely done, Steven. Now we need to go out and do it. Thank you for the shove!
I do love this as much as your other articles. But as a German native speaker I have to say that there is a limit to how you can construct new compound words in German (linguistically, it has to do with their order and relationship to one another), and I don’t think your new creation would be intelligible to Germans. I am only making that comment for some sort of completeness sake, it doesn’t detract from your argument and is obviously not the point you’re trying to make.
Yeah, I knew I was pushing it. I’ve seen some pretty long rank titles in stuff about the German army during the Second World War, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a compound noun with more than three elements, and usually just two. So I have whipped out my poetic license.
Thanks for your appreciation of the post itself.