I'm reading Craig Blomberg on heresy this morning (HT - City of God) and am only on the second or third page of the article, but wanted to stop and take a break to quote something that I find of interest.
It's not uncommon, or at least it hasn't been in the circles I have run in to hear people saying that certain things are of the devil. Blomberg offers a pretty good warning/caution about such declarations here:
Portraying perhaps the harshest interchange between Jesus and the Jewish leaders in all the Synoptics, Mark 3:22–30 and parallels depict cer- tain scribes who accuse Jesus of exorcising by the power of the devil. After pointing out how self-defeating this would be, Jesus in turn implies that his accusers come perilously close to committing an unforgivable sin—blas- pheming against the Holy Spirit. The context enables us to define this sin fairly precisely as being so out of touch with the true God of the universe as to attribute patently obviously divine manifestations to the power of God’s arch-enemy. This exchange should make us extraordinarily cautious about using the language of diabolical influence on a fellow Christian, since to do so mistakenly places us in the identical position of those Jesus warned against unforgivable blasphemy (Italics mine).
This is not to say that the devil has no influence in the world today, it's just a fair caution not to play fast and loose with our rhetoric.
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