What is exorcism?

Question 08071

The practice of exorcism carries a great deal of cultural baggage, most of it supplied by films rather than by Scripture, and that makes it difficult to discuss calmly. People arrive at the subject already braced for something lurid.

So let me set the films aside and describe what the Bible actually shows, what the church has historically done with it, and what I think a careful believer should make of the whole business now. I write as someone who takes the demonic seriously and who is nonetheless deeply uneasy about much of what carries this name.

Where the Practice of Exorcism Comes From

The word exorcism derives from a Greek term meaning to put someone under oath, which tells you something about its pre-Christian background. In the ancient world, the practice of exorcism was a recognised trade, conducted by specialists using names of power, incantations and ritual objects. Josephus describes Jewish exorcists at work, and the Ephesian magic books that were burned in Acts 19 belonged to the same world.

That is worth knowing, because the practice of exorcism as a technique existed long before Jesus and continued alongside Him. He acknowledges as much when He asks His critics by whom their own sons cast out demons. The novelty in the Gospels is not the activity. It is the authority.

So we are not looking at something the church invented. We are looking at something Jesus stepped into and transformed, and the transformation is the part that matters.

Exorcism in the Ministry of Jesus

The Gospel accounts are frequent and physical. Unclean spirits cry out, recognise Jesus, name Him, beg Him, and leave. The verb is ekballo, to throw out, and Mark in particular reports these encounters with an almost brutal plainness.

What is missing from every one of them is method. Jesus uses no oil, no relics, no repeated formula, no interrogation, no lengthy struggle. He speaks and the matter is settled. In the Gerasene account of Mark 5:8 He gives a single command, and the only extended exchange concerns where the spirits will go rather than whether they will leave.

The theological point is stated by Jesus Himself in Luke 11:20. If it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. These acts were signs of a kingdom arriving in person, not a ministry model to be reproduced with the correct wording.

The Apostolic Church and the Name of Jesus

In Acts the same authority operates, and it operates through the name. Philip in Samaria, Paul at Philippi with the slave girl, extraordinary events at Ephesus. The pattern is consistent: these encounters occur during evangelism, among people who are not yet believers, and they are brief.

There is no example anywhere in Acts of a Christian being taken aside for the practice of exorcism, and no example of a session in the modern sense. Luke, who is not shy about the supernatural, records nothing of the kind.

The letters are quieter still. Not one of them instructs a church in this. Paul lists spiritual gifts several times and exorcism appears in none of the lists, which ought to give pause to anyone building a specialist ministry around it. I have set out the wider picture in what deliverance ministry involves.

What the Practice of Exorcism Became Historically

Within a few centuries the practice of exorcism had been formalised. Minor orders of exorcists appeared, rites were written down, and by the medieval period there were detailed procedures involving prescribed prayers, holy water, salt and repeated adjurations. The Roman rite went through several revisions and is still in use.

Something had shifted. The apostolic pattern of a word spoken in the name of Jesus had become a liturgy performed by an authorised official. Whatever one thinks of the theology behind it, the practice of exorcism had moved a long way from Mark 5, and it had acquired precisely the features Jesus never used.

The Protestant reaction was mixed. Some rejected the whole apparatus as superstition. Others retained a place for prayer and fasting in genuine cases while refusing the ritual machinery. That second position is roughly where I sit.

Does It Continue Today?

I believe genuine demonic affliction still occurs, and I have encountered what I take to be two real cases. I also believe that the overwhelming majority of situations presented to me under this heading have turned out to be something else, and that the something else was usually treatable.

Mental illness in particular has been catastrophically mishandled by Christians who reached for a spiritual explanation first. The Gospel writers themselves distinguish between the demonised and the sick, listing them separately, which suggests they did not regard the categories as interchangeable. I have written on that specific overlap in whether demons can cause mental illness.

Where genuine affliction is present, no elaborate procedure is needed. The name of Jesus is sufficient, and it always was. What is needed is certainty about the diagnosis, and that is far harder to come by than enthusiasm.

Discernment Before Action

Before anyone considers this, several questions should be answered honestly. Has a medical and psychiatric assessment been done? Is there a history of trauma that would explain what is being seen? Is the person converted, and what would change if they were? Who else knows about this, and would they agree with the assessment?

The Ephesian episode in Acts 19:15 is a permanent warning against approaching this casually. Jesus I know, and Paul I recognise, but who are you? Borrowed authority is no authority, and the seven men who tried it left the house injured and undressed.

I would add a further caution. Anyone eager to do this work should probably not be doing it. The people I trust in this area are reluctant, unpublicised and answerable to a local church.

What Actually Matters in a Genuine Case

If a real case does arise, the goal is not the departure of a spirit. The goal is the salvation of the person. Jesus warned about the swept and empty house that ends up worse than it started, and that warning is the single most ignored feature of this entire subject.

So the gospel comes first, last and throughout. Where there is genuine faith, there is an occupant, and the house is no longer available. Where there is not, expelling something and sending the person home is not a kindness.

Alongside that, keep it plain. Pray, use Scripture, involve the person’s own church leadership, do nothing in private, take no payment, seek no publicity. Related questions are covered in whether any Christian can cast out demons and whether Christians can be demon-possessed.

Why the Practice of Exorcism Fascinates Us

There is a question underneath the question, and it is worth naming. Why does this subject grip people so strongly? Part of it is simple fear, and fear always wants information. But part of it, I suspect, is that the practice of exorcism offers something the ordinary Christian life does not appear to offer, which is visible drama and an immediate result.

Discipleship is slow. Sanctification takes decades and rarely announces itself. Against that, a confrontation with something dark and a moment of visible release has an obvious appeal, and I do not think it is unkind to say that some of the interest in this area is a hunger for spiritual excitement rather than for holiness.

Jesus met that hunger head on when the seventy-two returned thrilled about the demons. He did not deny what had happened. He simply told them to rejoice about something less spectacular and infinitely more secure, which was that their names were written in heaven. That reordering is still the right one.

So, now what?

It is also worth saying that the practice of exorcism has done real harm where it has been applied to people who needed medicine, therapy, or simply someone to listen. I have met believers who were told their depression was a spirit, who prayed as they were instructed, who did not improve, and who concluded that God had rejected them. That damage is not hypothetical and it takes years to undo.

So the caution I keep urging is not coldness toward the supernatural. It is care for people who are already suffering and who deserve a diagnosis made slowly.

If you have come to this question because of something happening to you or to someone you love, start with your own pastor rather than with a specialist. Most of what arrives under this heading has an ordinary explanation and an ordinary remedy, and reaching for the extraordinary first tends to delay the help that would have worked.

If you have been frightened by what you have seen on a screen, let that go. The practice of exorcism as cinema portrays it bears almost no relation to anything in Scripture, and the fear it generates is entirely manufactured.

And if you are a believer wondering whether you are safe, you are. The One who lives in you is greater than the one who is in the world. What would it look like to rest in that this week rather than to keep checking?

“But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.”

Luke 11:20, ESV