Alexander Schmemann in his book, Of Water and the Spirit, expounds the question that appears in nearly all the older baptismal liturgies, “Do you renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world and all sinful lusts of the flesh.” This renunciation, according to scholars, was used almost universally in the Church in all its branches from the second century.
Some church fathers argued that it originated with the apostles. Though it began to fall out of use at the Reformation and has been almost completely forgotten in our day, viewed as a vestige of a more superstitious time, it may be time to revive it again.
The need for a renunciation of Satan and all his works was obvious in a day of pervasive paganism and idolatry. The presence of disgusting idols, widespread perversion, and gross demonic rituals gave Satan a face and identity that he has lost – not because he is less evil or active, but because with the advance of Christianity, he has moved on to more subtle forms of idolatry. In the old world, as Schmemann points out, evil could not be explained away. It was a very real presence –“something dark, irrational and . . . immediately understandable” (p. 22). Today, evil has been depersonalized: “Behind the dark and irrational presence of evil there must be a person or persons. There must exist a personal world of those who have chosen to hate God, to hate light, to be against” (p. 22).
And baptism was the public act in which the Church declared to the world (and Satan) that the new Christian no longer belonged to the kingdom of evil. Thus, says Schmemann, baptism is inescapably a form of exorcism: “In the baptismal rite, which is an act of liberation and victory, the exorcisms come first because on our path to the baptismal font we unavoidably ‘hit’ the dark and powerful figure that obstructs this path. It must be removed, chased away, if we are to proceed. The moment that the celebrant’s hand has touched the head of a child of God and marked it with the sign of Christ, the Devil is there defending that which he has stolen from God and claims as his possession. We may not see him but the Church knows he is here. We may experience nothing but a nice and warm family ‘affair,’ but the Church knows that a mortal fight is about to begin whose ultimate issue is not explanations and theories but eternal life or eternal death. For whether we want it or not, know it or not, we are all involved in a spiritual war that has been raging from the very beginning. A decisive victory, to be sure, has been won by God, but the Devil has not yet surrendered. On the contrary according to the Scripture, it is when mortally wounded and doomed that he stages the last and most powerful battle. He can do nothing against Christ, but he can do much against us. Exorcisms therefore are the beginning of the fight that constitutes the first and essential dimension of Christian life” (pp. 23-24).
Thus, at baptism, the Church addressed the devil directly and called upon the baptized to denounce him, renouncing all allegiance, loyalty, and service that he may have formerly given; renouncing all the deadly works of darkness and pledging by the power of the Spirit to have no fellowship with them any longer.
Baptism marks our deliverance from the kingdom of darkness and our entry into the kingdom of Jesus’ light and life by the power of the Spirit. It is a very real deliverance from the clutches of the Satan and death – an act of emancipation as real as Israel’s deliverance from Egypt. The Spirit takes us from the clutches of Satan and the kingdom of death and ushers us into the Kingdom of God’s dear Son.
Living in a world dominated by devil worship, made a clear repudiation of the devil and all his pomps an obvious necessity. But what was clear then is not as clear now. Schmemann notes that there are many Christians who are “still convinced that there is nothing basically wrong with the world and that one can very happily accept its ‘way of life,’ all its values and ‘priorities,’ while fulfilling at the same time one’s ‘religious duties.’ . . . The terrible truth is that the overwhelming majority of Christians simply do not see the presence and action of Satan in the world and therefore, feel no need to renounce ‘his works and his service.’ They do not discern the obvious idolatry that permeates the ideas and the values by which men live today and that shapes, determines and enslaves their lives much more than the overt idolatry of ancient paganism. . . . They do not understand that such seemingly positive and even Christian notions as ‘freedom’ and ‘liberation,’ ‘love,’ ‘happiness,’ ‘success,’ ‘achievement,’ ‘growth,’ ‘self-fulfillment’ – notions which truly shape modern man and modern society, their motivations and their ideologies – can in fact be deviated from their real significance and become vehicles of the ‘demonic.’ . . . To renounce Satan thus is not to reject a mythological being in whose existence one does not even believe. It is to reject an entire ‘worldview’ made up of pride and self-affirmation, of that pride which has truly taken human life from God and made it into darkness, death and hell” (pp. 29-30).
Viewed in this light, maybe it’s time for those churches that have dropped the “renunciation of the devil” from their baptismal liturgies to restore it. Baptism is an induction into the Lord’s army. Every baptism reminds us of our calling to be faithful soldiers and to fight the good fight of faith. And every baptism signals to Satan that his future will conform to his past. All that awaits him is defeat and death.
Steve Wilkins is Pastor of Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church, Monroe, Louisiana.