Satan’s Fall and God’s Redemption Story in the Gospel of Luke

Chakrita M. Saulina offers an extensive examination of Luke’s treatment of evil spirits and how they are related to many of Luke’s theological agendas, such as his Christology, soteriology, and eschatology. Saulina offers a close reading of the Gospel within a broader view of narrative criticism, implementing a fresh method of character reconstruction to find the overall characterization and the roles of evil spirits in the Gospel.

Saulina’s examination utilizes micro- and macroanalysis; the former employed to assesses each episode in Luke’s Gospel in which evil spirits emerge in three discrete phases of Jesus’ ministry — the Galilean ministry, the travel narrative, and Jesus’ passion narrative — and the latter used to analyse the role(s) of evil spirits vis-à-vis the elements of Luke’s overall plot. Saulina demonstrates how Satan and his allies’ defeats mentioned in the Gospel is part of God’s redemptive story that has begun in Christ, and stresses that the present manifestation of the Kingdom of God is much more significant that scholars have previously argued.