Desert Fathers

Origen and Augustine are two of the major figures who help shape that answer.

With Desert Fathers and early monastic tradition, demonology takes one of its most unsettling turns.

The demonic is no longer only in idols, temples, wilderness terror, or public exorcism scenes.

It turns inward.

It becomes one of Christianity's great containers for corruption.

So where do demons in Christianity come from? From many places at once.

From the accuser in the Hebrew Bible, from Shittim, Azazel, Lilith, Psalm 91, and Wilderness Threat, from the Second Temple expansion of the Unseen World, from Tobit and Asmodeus, from the Watchers, from the Nephilim and the Giants, from the Spirits of the Giants, from Belial and Mestima, from Greek translation and the hardening of spiritual vocabulary, from Jesus' exorcisms, from Beelzebub and Kingdom language, From Paul's powers and rulers, from Paul's warning about pagan sacrifice, from Justin and Athenagoras attacking the old gods, from idols re-read as sites of demonic fraud, from Origen's providence, from Augustine's diabolical suggestion, from the desert fathers and Evagrius, from the noonday demon, from household bowls buried under the threshold, from late technical lore like the Testament of Solomon.

Then Christianity gathers all of that and gives it a more stable theological home.

Sure.

And that's their, the, the, um... they're called the Desert Fathers.

And what, what is the term? There's a Western term that they use, um, it's slipping my mind right now.

I, I'll pull it up.

But jumping right into it, it was an article you'd written, Scott, talking about... like for our soul health and development and that there are kind of these three zones, the stretch, the comfort zone, the stretch zone and the panic zone.

And as I was reading that, you also referenced the desert fathers and mothers, and there was a lot of the ways you were talking about the desert fathers and mothers that resonated with us.

ah, this is parallel to what a lot of cross-cultural workers are doing and have done.

And I just wanted to have this conversation because it also raised questions for me.

I am a huge fan of frameworks, Scott.

And to me, this is just an excellent framework for life and ministry and for everything we do.

Let me, like Amy, you mentioned the Desert Fathers.

Let me give you a context for this framework.

Eventually, they made this effort at the good and the ordered and the true, and they did it astonishingly in the name of Christ.

And then the really radical thing was that insofar as people thought about Christianity, it was brought by monks and hermits and celibate people, and it was almost a bit like the Desert Fathers flee from the world.

So, like, it would have nothing to do with soldiers.

Soldiers wouldn't want some, you know...

Active imagination is something we're going to be talking about today, and it isn't a New Age import.

Ignatius of Loyola built an entire discipline of it in the 16th century, The Desert Fathers were doing a version of it centuries before that.

And what we're recovering today is old, orthodox, and largely forgotten.

It is not new.

In my own longing for a deeply transformative Christian experience, I found that the psychologist Carl Jung had already provided us with tools.

tools that are deeply biblical and aligned with the Christian faith.

The rich spiritual tradition that we inherited from the Celtic saints, the Desert Fathers, and the Book of Acts is available for us today.

Let's journey together as we discover the spirit in Christianity and water the dry, aching areas of our soul.

And I think also about how a lot of the There's a lot of Catholic rhetoric, if you want to be cherry-picky about our tradition, that a sort of detachment from everything, including human relationships and adoring only God, is kind of the pinnacle of the Christian existence, the pinnacle of the Christian life.

And we have examples of great saints who did these kinds of things, like the Desert Fathers, for example.

And a lot of this rhetoric is behind priesthood and religious life as well.

maybe not to the same extent, but like I have given up human relationships for the pursuit of God to better adore God, to better pray, to better serve God.