I just finished Tosca Lee’s, Demon: a memoir. I would never have read the book if it wasn’t getting rave reviews from everyone and strong recommendations from people whose opinions I respect.

Now that I have read it am I glad I did?

Well, the book is a work of art, that’s for sure. The writing is wonderful. Tosca Lee knows how to turn a phrase. Also, the gospel is presented. It is clear that man’s sin creates a breach between him and God, and God became flesh and shed his blood to save man. That much is clear.

Another good thing in the book is that the main character sees himself as a good man in the beginning of the book, but by the end of the book he sees himself as a monster.

I can see why people like this book. It’s a departure from the normal way [read "preachy way"] Christian books present the gospel. It feels fresh. This gospel is spoken from the mouth of a demon.

That’s all well and good.

My main problem with the book is with what I see as a subtle message that scripture is not quite good enough.

In Demon, Lucian, the demon, gives Clay, the main character, a vision of the fall of Satan and of the creation of the world. Clay sees it all in a vivid dream. Later he goes to read the Biblical account of creation and finds it “recounted with all the emotion of a recipe.” He reads the first two chapters of Genesis and finds them dry and rote. But when he reads the first two chapters of the Bible, and adds in the things he’s learned from the demon, the text, dead and cold, “comes to life.”

With another passage of scripture, Clay finds the demon’s account to be “more vivid” and “more compelling” than scripture alone.

I’m offended by the suggestion that a demon’s account can improve upon scripture. I understand this is a novel and it’s a fictional character who believes the demon’s story is better than scripture, but I think the whole point of the book is to do for me what the fictional demon does for the fictional protagonist–give me a fresh view of scriptural events. I found I liked the traditional view better than the fresh view.

I had problems with the fresh view of the spiritual realm. Sometimes demons were unable to approach praying Christians, other times they were able to kill them. No explanation on why they were allowed to kill sometimes and not other times. Jesus commanded the demons in scripture and they had to obey. Do they still have to obey?

The Father took a back seat to Satan in the beginning of the book (Satan was glorious, God was offstage; Satan screamed insults, God kept silent with his back turned) and the risen Christ took a backseat to demons in the latter part. Does he rule over the demons? If so it wasn’t apparent.

And then, after the fresh view, the end of the book, I thought, added more of the “low view of scripture” stuff.

*spoiler alert*
If (as the demon asserts) demons hate God and are bent on stealing humans from him and if they hate humans and want to see them damned to hell, why would this demon tell Clay, the protagonist, that the Bible is true? Why would he warn Clay that he was dying and he needed to believe in Christ before he died?

His motivation for telling Clay everything is so that when Clay still refused to believe, even in the face of such evidence “there will be at least one of El’s precious clay humans more damned to hell than I!”

What? We’ll be more damned to hell for disbelieving the testimony of demons?

It’s very possible that every man who goes to hell is worse off than the fallen angels. It’s possible that to turn down the grace offered in Christ makes us doubly worthy of damnation. I don’t know. But a man who refused to believe a demon would not be more damned than any other man.

It’s not as if the demon’s testimony is more sure than scripture so all the people who have rejected scripture are less damned or equally damned but the one man who has heard the truth from the demon’s lips is the “one” precious man who is more damned than the demons. The man is not worse off for rejecting the demon’s testimony of the crucified Christ than he is for rejecting scriptural truth offered by the apostles or by a minister or by a neighbor lady. To reject Christ is equally damnable no matter who offers him.

I find the scriptural presentation of Christ to be far superior to what the demon gave us in his memoir, and to imply that the demon’s testimony is more sure than scripture is…well…disturbing, to put it mildly.

It’s disturbing because we live in a day where scripture is seen as irrelevant and needing embellishment.

I don’t care if it’s a demon or the Virgin Mary doing the visitation: Visions are not more reliable than scripture.

I had a friend, a Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor, who was drawn to Eastern Orthodoxy but he had trouble accepting their position that Mary was the co-redemptrix and mediatrix for man. So he prayed and prayed and prayed asking God to show him if it was OK to join the Eastern church. He kept praying. For weeks. And finally Mary came to him in a vision and told him it was OK. It was OK for him to pray to her–she was alive–and the Orthodox reverence of her was fine. So he joined the Russian Orthodox Church. I don’t think he was willing to take “no” for an answer. Scripture is clear on the matter. Mary is not the mediator between God and man. But my friend prayed until he got a better word. A word that superseded Scripture.

I see Demon: a memoir advocating the same nonsense.