Tripp York’s The Devil Wears Nada
Book Review: York, Tripp. The Devil Wears Nada: Satan Exposed. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2011.
“Nobody likes a smart-aleck, Son.” I can’t count the number of times my father said that to me (for good reason, I admit) when I was growing up. Dad’s adage rang repeatedly in my ears as I read Tripp York’s The Devil Wears Nada.
York’s introduction begins in the middle of the action (or, as some students of literature might prefer, in medias res), as he recounts a portion of one of the many interviews he conducted in preparation for writing the book. In that very brief excerpt, York recalls telling a preacher “whose sideburns suggested a slight obsession with the King of Rock & Roll” (p. 3) that he wanted to find Satan in order to find God. Having set the stage for the quest that the rest of the book will chronicle, York spends a few pages reflecting on the experiences that led him to begin his rather unorthodox search. Those who search for God, he says, tend to operate “in one of two frameworks: personal experience or apologetic precision” (p. 4). York finds both frameworks sorely insufficient. Personal experience, he argues, is too subjective to be of value to anyone but the individual to whom it belongs. Further, reliance on such experience tends to lead us to define God in the way that we find most pleasing, essentially creating our own god “in our image” (p.5). Even weaker than personal experience, for York, is the apologist’s effort to prove the existence of God through philosophical arguments. Such arguments, he says, tend to say nothing about the character of the god whose existence they have proven. Further, they “have the uncanny tendency to convince only those who need no convincing” (p. 6). Years of teaching have left York weary of his students’ predictable, weak, uninteresting arguments.
