Is Jesus an Exorcist — and What Does That Mean Now? with Brad East
In this Theology Lab conversation, theologian Brad East explores the biblical concept of salvation through the lens of spiritual warfare, addressing themes like Satan, sin, and cosmic powers. Drawing from the New Testament, including Gospel of Mark and Epistle to the Ephesians, the discussion examines how early Christians understood evil as both personal and systemic. This engaging dialogue helps modern believers navigate discomfort around spiritual language while offering practical insights into faith, discipleship, and confronting evil in everyday life. Ideal for those interested in Christian theology, spiritual warfare, and biblical interpretation.
Listen Now
Description
In this Theology Lab episode with Brad East, we explore how the Bible speaks about spiritual warfare, sin, Satan, and cosmic forces—and how Brad understands the ongoing meaning of these ideas today. Brad brings in perspective from the charismatic and pentecostal tradition of Christianity. This episodes looks at topics like exorcism, the authority of Jesus in the Gospels, and how Scripture frames both personal sin and systemic evil. As cultural trends show a renewed interest in spiritual realities, this conversation asks what Christians should take seriously without falling into fear or caricature. What does it mean to live in light of spiritual warfare in daily life?
Resources
📚 Check out Brad's most recent book, and the article mentioned in the episode from Christianity Today: 📚 Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry: https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802883872/letters-to-a-future-saint/ 📰 The Way We Debate Atonement Is a Mess: https://www.christianitytoday.com/2025/09/penal-substitutionary-atonement-debahttps://open.spotify.com/episode/6NWLhGbp9jp3qsNvgpju2G?si=d2ac3292bb6f4d2fte-theology/
Generated Transcript
Scott Rice (00:00)
We're here with Brad East. ⁓ Brad is a guest this year on the Scripture and Tradition Theology Lab. We've been having this conversation with Brad about an article that he wrote for Christianity Today on the debates around penal substitutionary atonement.
I'm asking Brad though, if he would speak to the significance of salvation.
understood with these themes in the Bible around the powers and principalities and Satan. So this is a little bit different than the Christianity Today article. Brad, what would be, you think, a context where language around addressing cosmic forces, sin as a cosmic force, or Satan or the devil, has a certain power to it? And I want to ask you this question because I think there's just a lot of
A lot of Christians who don't really know what to do
the language of Satan within the Bible, how to contextualize that now.
Let me ask if you can kind of speak to maybe the power of how the New Testament addresses this language.
Brad East (01:08)
I think this is a timely question for at least two reasons. One, there are Christians in our neck of the woods and by our
for whom this language is a stumbling block. ⁓ But for most of the world, it's not a stumbling block. And for Christian history, it was never a stumbling block. It was just part and parcel of daily experience. And second, because as I'm sure y'all ⁓ are well aware, in recent years, there has been a very quick and interesting return to this kind of language in the public sphere.
in popular context. So whether it is more secular and you have all of a sudden you have the occult making a reappearance or the rise of astrology or Wicca or sort of more homegrown DIY witch hex stuff, crystals, seances, what and what not. There was this amazing, amazing essay by the British writer
Paul Kings North for first thing, it's called The Cross and the Machine, and it detailed his very unexpected, in his late 40s, just before he turned 50, conversion to Christianity. ⁓ He was baptized in January of 2021. And in that essay, he says that he joined a coven, he was a witch. ⁓ The problem was not that ⁓ the magic they performed.
didn't do things, it was that it did, but what did it do and for whom, right? This is part of his story and this is not an isolated marginal instance. This stuff is everywhere these days. For listeners, I would recommend the work of Tara Isabella Burton. ⁓ I am forgetting her book. Am I gonna stare at it right now? ⁓ Yes, Strange Rights, R-I-T-E-S, Strange Rights. I commend this book to listeners and viewers because she deals with all of this.
in a wonderful way that this is sort of everywhere and even for Westerners or American Christians, it's right under our noses because what is the only growing kind of Christianity in North America? Charismatic. It's the Pentecostals. It's the spooky Christians who believe that God is alive and God is at work in the world through the Holy Spirit fighting demons, the devil, principalities and powers, so on and so forth. Okay, that's my preface. I haven't even gotten started, Scott.
I'm just validating your series and your question to say that I think this is not a kind of arcane or peripheral subject. For anybody who reads the New Testament, this language is everywhere, right? Just read the Gospel of Mark and you will realize that the first thing, the first unabiding thing that Mark wants you to understand about Jesus is that he is exorcist in chief. That is his role on earth. He is casting out demons and all four Gospels, Jesus is the one who...
Scott Rice (03:45)
Yeah.
Brad East (04:11)
defeats Satan at the cross. So what do we do with that? ⁓
There are so many ways to answer that and I'm wanting to find for you and for listeners the three to five minute answer and not the three to five hour answer. Here's what I'll say.
Christians have always believed, not just in the spiritual realm, you have to, to believe in God, not just in angels, but in aspects or elements of the spiritual world that are hostile to us and to God, that do not have our best interests at heart. And these powers are not like the dark side of the force. They're not natural and they're not faceless, but they are personal.
and they are agents. that, for example, in Ephesians 6, Paul says, our conflict is not with flesh and blood. It's with the spiritual forces of darkness. It's with the devil and the demons and so on. Well, okay, even if you're open to that, why is that ⁓ healthy for Christian faith and discipleship? I'll give you at least one very, very concrete answer. It means...
that when Jesus commands you to love your enemy who may be your neighbor, even if you see spiritual darkness in them, Paul has told you that they are not your ultimate enemy. This is your neighbor whom God loves, for whom Christ died. And when you look around in our society right now, if you feel like there are forces that seem to be dark and scary and violent, then instead of... ⁓
demonizing human beings you can demonize literal demons. In other words, allows you, it offers you a conceptual toolkit to understand when things go wrong in the world structurally but also when things go wrong at the more local or personal level that we are up against powers. You are right to feel like you're up against something that is supra-human. It is more than or bigger than you and me and then
forces us to turn to divine power, the power of the Spirit of God, to ⁓ fight fire with fire, so to speak. In other words, to not limit ourselves to human agency, human acts, human power, as we engage these things. I can leave it there or I can keep going, Scott.
Greg Fung (06:56)
Okay, mean, keep going, which is, mean, ultimately, so for the local believer, what does that look like? Is it, hey, like, in your prayer closet, because we're fighting principalities and powers, or is it more than that? What about, there seems to be evil in these systems and structures. How do we fight that and not
just be in our closets? Or is that the answer?
Brad East (07:19)
For me, obviously, if one extreme is sort of like ignoring, pretending that these things don't exist, that's what the pendulum can swing there. The pendulum can also swing to win charismatic Christians and communities ⁓ themselves go off the rails or when they go wrong, which is to think that this is sort of the whole point that...
every single day, every single moment, you are basically engaged in constant warfare and you are looking for and eliciting or soliciting the ever-present spectacular. And that's a danger too, because somewhere between 90 and 99 % of the Christian life is just getting up and putting one foot in front of the other. Prayerfully, coram deo before God, ⁓
But like, what does it look like to love your neighbor? It's gonna look extremely mundane. It's gonna be quotidian. It's going to be, ⁓ there's a local ministry here in my town ⁓ that bags thousands, creates thousands of lunches for kids in the school system who don't have lunch. And you know what it looks like? You're on an assembly line for an hour just putting stuff in bags. is that a form of spiritual warfare? Absolutely it is, right? Like what we're fighting is,
a hunger, hunger and poverty and perhaps unjust systems. How are we doing it? We're not doing it by speaking in tongues or performing miracles. It's not spectacular. It's unspectacular. So I think that's a danger to be mindful of. But I'll point you all to a book by a friend of mine that I went, that I did my PhD with named Matthew Crossman, a pastor and a New Testament scholar. He's still at Yale.
He works in the Center for Faith and Learning, for faith and whatever, with Miroslav Volf. And he wrote a book, developed out of his dissertation called The Emergence of Sin. And he talks about sin as a kind of power, like a super personal power, almost like in Paul's letters, especially in Romans. It's like an agent, it's like Pharaoh and it holds us in its sway. And he has this anecdote at end of the book where he says, how do conservatives and how do progressive Christians typically deal?
Greg Fung (09:42)
Mm.
Brad East (09:42)
with a
local problem. And he was speaking personally as a pastor that ministered to an area of New Haven that was very impoverished. And he said, well, what the conservatives want to do is talk about individual agency ⁓ and empowering ⁓ individuals and families to make decisions to improve their lot. ⁓ But also the spiritual. These people need, just like everyone, they need their sins forgiven. So we're going to preach a gospel that hits them here, right?
He says, okay, I'm not denying that's true. Then he says, what do the progressive Christians in my church or in my city want to do? They want to address the systemic issues. They want to address poverty at the structural and legal level. And he says, yeah, like that's part of it too. And he says, but you know, a third thing that nobody talks about that my, he's speaking, my charismatic churches, we go to these neighborhoods and with folks who live here, we pray against the powers. Like we march through and.
Cast out demons. You know, we actually engage in explicit spiritual warfare that is both spiritual and systemic at the same time. And I think, and he's doing this in like a Yale University Press book or Cambridge or Oxford. So good for him for outing himself in such a prestigious context. But I think that sounds biblical to me, right? It's individual, it is systemic, and it's spiritual. And we get in trouble when we ignore any of those.
to the exclusion of the others.
Scott Rice (11:14)
Brad, like I led with, think around this language of the demonic, of Satan, of the powers, there is just a general discomfort for a lot of folks. And I think your descriptions there of its possible relevance or maybe even responsible ways to be thinking and addressing these kinds of themes and how they come to expression in our faith will be really helpful for folks. So thanks so much for offering your take on that. If folks are interested in more from Brad on the topic of
Salvation and Atonement, check out our conversation in the Scripture and Tradition series. We'll put a link to it here. Brad, thanks for being a guest at Theology Lab.
Brad East (11:50)
Yeah, thanks for having me.
