A Natural History of Scripture -book review.

 Lately, I've found myself more and more talking with other people about the Bible in terms of a kind of evolutionary pressures understanding of composition and preservation. In doing this, I guess I take it as plausible that writings that helped people tend to get preserved and copied while those that didn't got 'lost'. This means that where people found something in a writing that resonated with their sense of God, they would go back to it, and commend it to others. Where they found things that expanded their understanding of God and God's ways, they would copy it and pass it on. Where they found that challenges were productive, they'd engage with them and teach others to do similarly. Sometimes, I guess writings would be commended, and passed on because they had gained an aura of authority or because authoritative figures commended them. 

For this reason, I think it is important to talk about not just storytellers, but also editors and especially hearers and then readers. There would've been a reciprocal relationship around texts between these various people. Storytellers would adapt their telling to audience reactions -what 'tells well' would become a normal telling. Audiences would by their responses, requests and questions influence what was told and became an informal 'canon'. Editors would collect stories and writings with such matters in mind. But also they would have an eye to social and political conditions. 'Inspiration' in this view doesn't just belong to a writer but to the dialogical processes of telling, hearing, retelling, refining, reflecting, commending> I like to think that at key points were people paying attention to the divine resonances so that stories were also sifted for their spiritual value. Somewhere in all of this would be considerations of teaching and learning: what stories and texts promoted good reflection and wise conversations? This doesn't preclude 'divine inspiration' but it does take the focus off original authors being uniquely inspired -a model which seems suspiciously like the Romantic movement's views around the time when doctrinal bases dealing with scripture were being discussed, debated and codified.

An evolutionary approach suggests to me a survival of the fittest, and in this case that would mean that texts that were fittest for connecting people with God and God's purposes, would be the most likely to survive. 

Anyway, I thought I recognised in the title and blurb for this book, an approach that may help me to think about this approach more. So, I read with a question about how far this book would help me to develop and challenge this kind of approach.

Adkins sees what we now call Genesis 12:1-4 as the originating, kernel, story. And he spends some time in giving a potted version of the bigger narratives of the Hebrew scriptures. The book spends quite a lot of space retelling in summary the narratives and history of the accumulation of scriptures with some comment, history and framing to give a sense of development. I was intrigued by the naming of the NT as the Christian Sequel and will consider using this naming from time to time, myself. The rehearsal of the writings that become the bible raises the issue of canon, and canonisation is one of the matters that is touched on, as well as the non-canonisation of other writings.

I'd consider putting this book into the hands of people who were curious about the sweep of biblical history and open to consider how what we now call 'scriptures' interrelate with history. I think that there are challenges her to those who have a 'take it as it comes' approach to the writings of the Bible, and the author doesn't offer much to help such readers to consider and understand the critical scholarship which implicitly questions the 'straight forward' /face-value reading which doesn't really entertain the possibility that the texts we now have might have a back-story and not be written in the kind of way that someone now writing a novel or a textbook might write a complete work. Admittedly, something of the overview of critical scholarship comes when the history reaches the 1800s.

One of the interesting things that this book does, is to not only consider the formation of Jewish and Christian canons, but to incorporate consideration of the Qur'an alongside consideration of the Jewish Mishnah and Talmud. I think that this is a necessary consideration if one is taking a 'natural history' approach. The other interesting approach here, for me, is not to consider the Christian canon closed until the reformation is well underway. And indeed he points out that until the council of Trent, the 27 books were not considered a closed canon. It is also important that it considers the matter of translations and textual history which in actuality are big parts of discussions today about bible and authority in some parts of the church.

So, I didn't get my desired exploration of the kinds of forces that would drive 'natural' (cultural) selection nor a theology of canon, reception and inspiration that would take account of it. There are hints, to be sure, but mostly this is a historical summary of 4,000 years of story and reflection. It's a fair introduction but the further reflection I was hoping for is not part of it.

I may have to do that myself ...

Links

A Natural History of Scripture Website
Keith H. Adkins’ Website 

#ANaturalHistoryOfScripture

I should give a declaration of interest here. I received a pdf of this book as part of an agreement to review it, even if only briefly. There was no implication or explicit agreement that I should make the review favourable or otherwise. So I have simply stated what interested me and given my reactions.

A More Christlike Word -a review

 One of the biggest problems I think I come across in Christian education is what I think of as a flat reading of scripture. By this I have in mind treating the whole bible as some kind of text-book: all one kind of writing, pretty much all of it giving propositional truths. Even bits that are obviously poetic and literary are treated as if the poetic form is merely a more aesthetic delivery system for what are really, at base, propositional statements. Related to that is the way that the differences of time, human writing and collecting and the history of receiving a text is banished to a far horizon (I think this is touched on at p.115: "literalism is generally tied to believing that truth is reduced to actuality, factuality, and historicity, whether or not the human or the divine author intended any such thing [p.115]"). This mind set is deeply uncomfortable with different parts of scripture apparently saying contradictory things because 'contradiction' means falsity in some part. Though of course if your definition of falsity is in large part leaning on a limited idea of 'propositionally true', then, yes; you are in trouble. Of course, a lot of this could be stood-aside from by simply being less prompt in equating "God's word written" with a kind of uniform concept of propositional truth. To turn the matter around: if scripture is in some way 'God-breathed' (I'm happy to start there, as is Dr Jersak), then what kind of way does it speak to us in the different 'notes' it is breathed through? As in music, cannot the dissonances also speak? If God speaks in Scripture, what do the differences and divergences tell us? -It's not good, in the end, pretending they're not there.

So a related question about how the early Church read scripture starts to bob up to the surface. They didn't have what we now call the New Testament, only that pesky hard-to-understand Old one. Can their readings of those writings help us to do a better job of reading scripture to tune into God?

I'll confess that for me the Anglican liturgical practice (retained from its pre-reformation form) where we  stand for the Gospel (and indeed face the gospel book and its reader) has helped me in this. Symbolically, to me at least, it says, "Christ is the centre -the rest is commentary". The Word (who was at the beginning) is the heart of the word of God written, the rest is commentary and context enlivened by the Spirit of the Word. (interestingly echoed on p.97: "... the “divine liturgy” of the church is a medium that functions to frame the Scriptures within the canon of faith—the message of the gospel—showing how they work together within the drama of redemption that inexorably points to Christ crucified and risen")

My hope was that this book might help me to think this through more, perhaps give me a resource to pass on to people I converse with about such things from time to time and /or perhaps deepen or re-found my line on the matter.

While above I mentioned as the way I think of a certain approach to reading scripture -'flat'- is the word used in this book too -in a fairly similar way. I think this word is going around in discussions about how we receive scripture and I've clearly picked it up too.

The idea of Christ being the centre and re-establishing in our thinking and attitudes that the Word is primarily, first and foremostly, Jesus is also robustly expounded here. One of my other favourite terms comes in here too: seeing the scriptures as witnesses to the Word. And from there he quickly gets into noting the hard questions prompted by the dissonance between the Abba of Jesus and some of the frankly genocidal commands in, say, Deuteronomy. And in relation to this issue, I found myself very much resonating with this:

I would not opt for the functional Marcionism of inerrantists who ignored the “toxic texts” or pretended they don’t exist. Nor could I follow the biblicists —literalists who were willing to throw the character of God under the bus, painting him as a monster and calling it “good” without blinking. Nor could I follow many progressives who had seen the problem but left the Bible behind altogether—and with the Bible, sometimes Jesus too! (p.45)

I like the way that the author keeps the Emmaus Road encounter as a paradigm case. Though I must admit that his putting the prodigal son story as a master text by which to interpret and weigh all others much surely have vied for the headline label, but I guess that "the Emmaus way" is probably more disclosive in that role than, say, "the prodigal way".

I was a little shocked that the fundamentalist /literalist way of reading scripture was labelled a heresy -a modernist heresy, but I must admit that I have gone a long way down the road already to thinking that there is something in that label. I found the characterisation of this in this sentence, very arresting: " seeing Christ thrown under the bus again and again through an agenda-laden, simplistic misuse of our sacred text..."

So, I think that I found that overall, the book was confirming me in where I'd come to, and that I would want to have this book to hand to commend or pass onto people I talk with about scripture and spirituality and Christian formation. I read with a sense of recognition of both the problems being identified and of the ways forward trough the network of issues raised. It is good to have a winsome book which goes through things systematically, with clarity and in a way that shows clearly that this a a 'faith seeking understanding' issue not one to be mistakenly characterised as 'disobedience', unbelief or deception.

It's quite a fat book -over 280 pages- but not a hard read at all; it covers a lot of ground in a winsome way with occasional turns of phrase that help to attract and hold the imagination. It doesn't labour points but feels to give enough information and argument to outline the main points and there are useful further reading and resources signalled along the way where the reader can follow-up things that become of particular interest.

The first parts of the book look at how the bible gets misused and misinterpreted and in what ways flat readings are inadequate and downright unhelpful, while making a case for a biblical strategy for reading scripture chistotelically. The second parts of the book cash out the theory. I was particularly taken by the chapters on rhetoric and diatribe -so far I'd only seem them in fairly scholarly books, it's good to see an author widening the audience and appreciation of these ways in which scripture is full of texture which is easily missed. The second moiety of the book moves more into the nature of God in relation to scriptural language. The key thought to emerge is that God is love and that we need to be wary of language about God, especially 'wrath'. We are also treated to some of the writings of the early Church supporting this. The main point, though, seems to be that by flattening out the scriptures, there's no way to put characteristics asserted of God into order and so a mean-spirited wrath is put on a par with love.

One of the things I gained from reading this book which I didn't expect was the challenge to read more of early church writers like, well more specifically, Origen and Melito of Sardis (being introduced to an online version of his On Pascha seem like a good place to start). I noted too that there's a really helpful 'further reading' section.

Lines I liked

The Word of God is inspired, inerrant, and infallible. And when he was about eighteen years old, he grew a beard (p.29)

  if there is a God (forever a faith statement), that God is Love. And God is Love only, for every other attribute of God must ever only be a facet of that one pure diamond lp.56]

I invite you to make an honest inquiry of how the so-called “toxic texts” function as a mirror that reveals the human condition and our habit of projecting our own un-Christlike images onto God, especially in the form of religious violence. [p.58]

seeing Christ thrown under the bus again and again through an agenda-laden, simplistic misuse of our sacred texts... [p.114]

... whatever unrecorded words Jesus relayed on the road to Emmaus, they did not fit into the historical-grammatical-literal approach (i.e., literalism) of my education. Frankly, I felt ripped off [p.129] 

Imagine Jesus saying, in all humility, “I hate to make this all about me...BUT, yeah, it really is.” [p.142]

 

Thoughts I found helpful

An Emmaus reading of their accounts sees these agendas. When the authors rationalize bloodshed, we ask, “How do they prefigure the Sanhedrin’s rationale for Jesus’s crucifixion?” And when they problematize violence, we ask, “How do their critiques anticipate Christ’s denunciation of violence?” As I read any given text through Christ, I need to con-sider whether the author’s perspective reveals a veil that Christ has since removed or an unveiling that foreshadows his revelation of God [p.84] 

Imagine that the whole Bible is simply an incredibly long version of the parable of the prodigals. And conversely, imagine that the parable is Jesus’s ingeniously brief summary of the whole Bible, distilled into short-story format. We can do this because both offer us the same gospel narrative...one in an expansive library and the other in a tight paragraph. So, here’s what we can do: turn the parable into an imaginary walk-in closet organizer for every section, every book, and every chapter of the Bible. [p.97]

The traumatic training offered in the Bible’s R-rated material should not be read as the threats of a violent deity but as the loving (and dramatically memorable) warnings of a good Father in good faith. The people of God made countless missteps that become vivid moral lessons for avoiding landmines. God wastes nothing... because of Jesus’s instructions on loving, forgiving, blessing, and praying for our enemies, and his explicit rejection of retaliation, vengeance, and violence, we must never use a text where the Philistines are slaughtered to call for the slaughter of “infidels.” Rather, we might see how they foreshadow Christ’s victory over the nonhuman enemies of satan, sin, and death, and our personal battles with the spirit of pride, malice, and other un-Christlike attitudes within ourselves.[p.133] (Personal note: this has been the only way I have been able to appropriate these texts)

I will say this to all Christians, Jewish or Gentile: we have no business in the Jewish sacred writings without reference to our Rabbi and his Emmaus Way of reading them. And that way of reading always points to and prostrates before him... Christotelic reading  [p.141]

So, as we read Old Testament narrative, we are invited to watch and see:

•When the people of God experience suffering, Christ suffers with them.

•When God’s people cause suffering, Christ suffers in their victims.

•When the people of God achieve victory, Christ is the victor.

•When God delivers his people, Christ is the deliverer.

•When the people go into exile, Christ goes with them.

•When the people of God are led out of exile, Christ leads them.

•When the priest offered a sacrifice, Christ was the priest.

•When the lamb was sacrificed, Christ was the lamb.

•When God appeared, that was Christ.  [p.158]

 ... new consensus has been emerging around what we are calling a “Christ-centered hermeneutic.” This term describes what we have been discussing throughout this book: that we must read the whole Bible through the lens of Jesus. Christ is the chief cornerstone—the Canon par excellence—so that all Scripture is received as authoritative only after passing through the life, teachings, and gospel of Jesus [p.196]

Rather, the best theologians are those who analyze and describe what the praying and worshipping community has come to believe through its corporate experience of the reality of the triune God. In other words, worship precedes theology, often by several decades. As we experience the presence of God in prayer and worship, we begin to compose liturgies and songs that express what we have come tosee. Eventually, theologians become observant and follow suit. Teachers may begin to confirm the implications of what the congregation has already been singing and praying (which is to say, believing) over the past decades. Ironically, the first generation of these teachers are often regarded as heretical, sometimes even by the very congregants who spawned theoriginal revelation. Why? It may be that the congregation is still under the spell of previous teachers whom they regard as their authoritative prescribers of the truth.  [p.197]

 The voices of sacrificial religion that permeate the story of Scripture are at least threefold in tone and content. Sacrificial religion speaks to readers as “the voice of the accuser,” “the voice of the victim,” and “the voice of the law.” Each voice makes particular claims and demands ..a fourth voice emerges in the biblical text, corresponding to the revelation of sacrificial love. I call it “the voice of the Lamb.” The voice of the Lamb—the voice enfleshed in Christ as self-giving love—proclaims the way of the cross vis-à-vis the worldly religious way of the sword. [p.204-5]

...biblicism regularly fails to delineate between the omniscient Author and the limited or unreliable narrator. However, there are many examples in literature where we are required to do just that. For instance, in Don Quixote, Cervantes constructs an epic tale of a very strange protagonist—but he also writes the tale through multiple genres, stories within stories, and a famously unreliable narrator. That is, the true author (Cervantes) knows exactly what he is doing, but he tells the story through a narrator who does not. Thus, the author is not truly the narrator. Narrators are actually extensions of the character they’re describing or evenan independent character who speaks from a particular perspective. [p.218]

Quotes I want to put 'out there'

 the first Christians would not have asked whether the Bible was authoritative. Instead, they would have said that Jesus was their authority, and then they would have asked, “Which books testify to this?” Those that did were chosen for inclusion in their written canon, [p.76]

I confess to finding the pastoral and evangelistic damage literalism causes upsetting. The edge comes from seeing Christ thrown under the bus again and again through an agenda-laden, simplistic misuse of our sacred texts...with the ironic claim that this constitutes faithfulness. [p.114]

literalism is generally tied to believing that truth is reduced to actuality, factuality, and historicity, whether or not the human or the divine author intended any such thing [p.115]

Modernist literalism... constantly stumbles into thinking that if a text (such as Genesis 2, Job, or Jonah) is not accepted as factual history, then it isn’t true. But consider this: is the parable of the prodigal son not profoundly true? Is Christ’s story of the good Samaritan not supremely true? [p.123]

... the redactors who gathered the Hebrew canon consciously incorporated texts that challenge and subvert other texts across the Scriptures... without imagining that this might undermine or threaten the authority of their Bible. The narrative is allowed to stand as is, confirming the integrity and genius of the story of God and God’s people.[p.201]

I used to flip right to the “good stuff” in Job until I started seeing how “good” the foolish counsel seemed to me. Some of it appears to make good sense. Exactly! The important function of the friends’ speeches is to shine a light on our own idiocy. The friends’ speeches are an inspired revelation of our own error, not a divine thumbs-up to their error. [p.207]

Side note: Paul commissioned the female deacon Phoebe to deliver (preach!) his sermon to the Romans in person. He would have prepared her to communicate the tones such that his first audience picked up on the diatribe [p.245]

The emotional pairing of the terror of judgment offset by the relief of escape is effective(ish). But if our message focuses on fear that makes God the cause or agent of fear, we’ll either run from God or turn to him but have no desire to draw near to him. Spiritual Stockholm Syndrome

True justice for the prophets is the beautiful restoration of the shalomic state by means of mercy—defined as every manifestation of divine goodness. In that case, justice and mercy kiss [p.269]

Provocative or intriguing quotes

Origen included within his literal sense the need to discern and distinguish (1) actual history from (2) fictitious history (when we can) composed by the Spirit to communicate more-than-literal truth. In either case, the message the story conveys is true [p.130]

If we don’t see that Christ is the point, then the whole Bible remains Old Testament, but if we do, then the whole Bible becomes New Testament [p.218]

Link-Love for Review

A More Christlike Word on Amazon
A More Christlike Word website
Bradley Jersak’s website 

#AMoreChristlikeWord

I should say that I received this e-book as a review copy via the Speakeasy review scheme. I'm not obliged to say nice things about it (or the reverse, come to that), just to comment on it within 30 days of receiving it. Which I've done. 

Christ-centred creation and prodigality

This excerpt from a talk by Tom Wright resonated with some things I've been thinking about in relation to the nature of creation centred in time and space on Christ. +Tom says:

... if creation comes through the kingdom bringing Jesus, we ought to expect it be like a seed growing secretly. That it would involve seed being sown in a prodigal fashion in which a lot went to waste, apparently, but other seed producing a great crop. We ought to expect that it be like a strange, slow process which might suddenly reach some kind of harvest. We ought to expect that it would involve some kind of overcoming of chaos. Above all, we ought to expect that it would be a work of utter, self-giving love. That the power which made the world, like the power which ultimately rescued the world, would be the power not of brute force, but of radical, outpoured generosity. We ought to expect, in other words, that the creation would not look like an oriental despot deciding to build a palace, and just throwing it up at speed, with his architects and builders cowering before him. 

What I find helpful in this is how our attention is drawn to the prodigality of it all. One of the minor objections from creationists is the wastefulness of the processes that the rest of us believe we discern in the geological records and other related evidences. Linking the debate in the way that +Tom does here; to the parable of the sown seed, helps see a kind of implicit endorsement in Jesus' own teaching of a prodigal creative process in which there is some 'hit and miss' element to it all. It kind of finds in creation a prodigality, which Jesus draws attention to and thereby endorses rather than questions. And while this doesn't add up to saying 'this is the meaning of the parable' it does take Jesus' acceptance of the wastefulness of both the creational type and the parabolic antitype as at least the possibility of seeing that generous endowment in which there is more and to spare as the way things are and develop.
I'm finding that really helpful to think further about.

Hearing God in Conversation: How to Recognize His Voice Everywhere: Samuel C. Williamson

I am reviewing this book having had a free e-copy for the purposes of review but my review is not obliged to be favourable because of that.

So what do I make of this book? I was drawn to it because I think that for many people I deal with, hearing and listening to God is important, So I was looking for a potential resource to recommend on to them. Personally, as well, I'm interested in how we discern and know God speaking to us. I have to say that this book is fit for those purposes. It comes from what I think of as a classic evangelical background (classic is not code here for militantly conservative but rather rooted in the kind of piety which has a generosity to it and an affectionate approach to God). So, I recognised the classic quie time disciplines of attention-giving to God in and with scripture and the in-life expectation of reflection, and ongoing conversation with God. So in many ways this is a clear and gently encouraging restatement of what used to be considered normal evangelical spiritual practice. What is interesting, of course, is that the author writes this because he perceives that so many in supposedly evangelical churches do not know this stuff and have even been warned off it by a particular kind of biblicism which is scared of iner spiritual experience. This book does a great job of normalising in a low key way the expectation that God does address us personally.

Thire are stories of hearing God to illustrate the points being made. Many of them are the author's own experience and are helpful for  their honesty and power to enable the reader to grasp how it might look in their own experience.

Hearing God is anchored, for this writer, in the discipline of reading scripure ruminatively with the expectation of finding in it things that inwardly resonate and which may then be reflected on and kept company with to disclose to us something of God's communication with us. He also shows how this process can be followed in everyday life, with the biblically-based and learnt basis forming a kind of training ground and filter.

I'd commend this book to people wanting to connect or reconnect with classic evaneglical discisplines of quiet time and converse with God. In this book we get to see how scripture memorisation might make sense as part of a living relationship with God rather than a way of arguing with people. In this book we see the Bible as a devotional tool rather than a textbook or apologetic tool. I think it would also, potentially, be enjoyed by Christians with a Catholic background as it is, in more catholic terms, an exposition of Lectio Divina.

One thing that I think deserves more consideration, though, is the way that Scripture is conceived of to be functioning in the devotional life of a believer. The writer is clearly keen that people are not misled by mistaking inner voices for the voice of God (there is no sure-fire method except learning by experinec and reflection to distinguish the various voices, some are obvious, others are not). A big part of the remedy for this is seen to be testing the voices/feelings by scripture. So far, so evangelical and clearly a reassurance to the traditional evangelical presumptive readership. However, there is a lacuna, a missing piece in relation to this in the book. The author, discussing hearing God through Scripture, points out that it is possible to mistake things. In other words, just because it is in Scritpture dosen't mean that whatever you 'pick up' is of God; we need to triangulate (my phrase, not his) with the rest of Scritpture, but also our reason and to take advice from the wider Christian communtiy through space and time (again my expression). So, the point here is that the same difficulty also applies to listening for God in Scripture as in oher areas of life.This may not satisfy some hard-line biblicists but it is true to human experience and the nature of creation and Christian Scripture. Implicitly we are invited to enter into a life-long learning to discern the Spirit's leading. An anchor point for this is Scripture, but it is not something that can be read text-book-wise or oracularly but a place to learn to hear but with its own potential pitfalls.
This is a good book to think about psycho-spirituality and to recover a wise and gentle Evangelicalism rooted in a warm God-centred piety rather than finger-pointing alledeged doctrinal rectitude.

Hearing God in Conversation: How to Recognize His Voice Everywhere: Samuel C. Williamson: 9780825444241: Amazon.com: Books

The New Covenant by Robert Emery

 For a number of years I've experimented from time to time with narrative sermons. For me, usually, this has involved telling a Bible incident as a more extended story. Usually I've found this easier to tell as a first-person narrative and I've tended to either take the part of a central character (eg Simeon in Luke's birth and infancy story) or to pick or make up a bystanding character. What this has enabled me to do is to use what I have learnt about the circumstances, culture, habits, mores and economics of the time to add depth and colour to the telling. It also enables me to teach about such things obliquely as part of driving the story forward.



So I was intrigued by Robert Emery's book when it was offered for review. At this point I've not read it all; just the first part, but already I can see that Mr Emery has done essentially the same sort of thing that I have done in my narrative sermons. It's been good for me to see how this technique reads when it's not been me that has created the story, and I've enjoyed it. I have found that social and cultural details that have figured as part of the story have 'come alive' more than if they are simply stated in a more textbook fashion. It also gives a chance to reflect on the biblical characters and what were the personal drivers and perspectives and struggles they might have had. It has to be said that as a means of conveying such information, it has a lot to commend it and it is preferable in terms of memorability and engagement to simple textbook tellings.



of course their are downsides in the form of potential pitfalls. The reader (or in my case listener) is at the mercy of the knowledge of the narrator and the ability to make imaginative connections and to understand the implications of cultural artefacts, ways of living etc in terms of the effects on human actors. So the possibility of slipping in anachronisms is very real and sometimes a crucual issue.



The other main potential downside is maintaining the balance between story, character and background. And in the temple tour narrative I think Emery only just manages not to get totally lost in the background at the expense of story and character. This pitfall is that the first-person narrative can simply become a lecture where the character speaking becomes a mere proxy for the author and so the character can end up giving what is effectively a textbook lecture on something (eg the architecture and furnishings and rituals of the temple) without it actually being part of the story or helping us to gain sympathy or insight into the characters. As I say, I think Emery just about manages to stay on the right side of the line in these respects, but the fact that I noticed the danger was a bit distracting. What I don't know is whether i noticed because this approach is familiar to me or whether it was because for most readers, the amount of detail being conveyed by the characters in 'conversation' was quite heavy.



It is hard to properly weave lots of such detail into narrative form in an engaging way, and consistently over a whole story arc. I'm looking forward to learning more from Emery's book both about the way of life of the times as he has discovered it and also about the relaying of insight into the times, people and events through this approach to narrative.



The New Covenant, a book by Robert Emery  #SpeakeasyNewCovenant

Although I'm not in the USA, I'm happy to meet with the guidelines for such reviews required in the USA: I received a copy of this book from Speakeasy for review. I'm not required to write a positive review.

Theology From Exile Volume II: The Year of Matthew

 I decided to take a look at this book for a handful of reasons: one is that I preach in churches that use RCL; another is that this book seemed to promise commentary on the RCL readings in a way that would bring out the Empire-resistance themes. I was also intrigued by the suggestion in the blurb that insights also from creation spirituality were part of the commentary.

Now, of course, the difficulty of reviewing a book like this within 30 days of receiving it*, is that it is a commentary on the weekly readings, so it's not a regular 'read-straight-through' sort of book since it's meant to be consulted on a a week by week or at least 'as needed' basis and each set of commentary pondered on the way to writing and performing a sermon. This makes it quite hard to read in the same way as a novel or standard book with a unitary argument, thesis or theme. And what is really needed is to 'road test' the volume over several months actual usage in informing the preparation for preaching. So what I'm doing here is having read the readings and commentary for about 3 months' worth of Sunday readings, to give an impression of the kind of commentary being offered. It's a little harder to comment directly on how well the material worked as stimulus for preaching.

The first thing to say is that I think I will continue to refer to the commentary pieces in this volume as a prepare for preaching. This is because the comments I have read do seem to me to have the kinds of insights that could provide the seed of a sermon. There is a useful reference to the kinds of insights that come from the work of people like John Dominic Crossan on the economic and political effects of the Roman Empire on Judea, Galilee and the rest which can yield interesting possibilities in understanding the gospels and epistles. Also an attentiveness to the environmental dimensions of it all are potentially useful to someone like me who is keen to help people to value justice, peace and the integrity of creation in discipleship and therefore in preaching.

What, I guess, I find less helpful is the way that the volume picks up the sometimes strident enemising of more traditional approaches to scripture and theology. Partly this is because I'm not fully 'with the program' that the author is signed up for: I'm not committedly materialist in my philosophical presuppositions, I do tend to think that the Jesus Seminar approach to the texts is unnecessarily skeptical and somewhat belligerent. I sometimes think that creation spirituality is more New Age than orthodox Christian. (That said I think that CS does alert us to distortions of orthodoxy and challenges us to reconsider the tradition and the way that we translate it for contemporary life). So in using the volume, I will not be automatically taking on board all of the perspectives but I do expect that some of the insights will be productive for me and that in wrestling with the things I'm less convinced by or even sense I disagree with, I will be challenged to develop my own thinking and appreciation of the texts more fully and carefully.

I do find myself, as I read, sometimes musing over a certain irony. There is a new orthodoxy espoused which reads the Bible as a manifesto for political resistance and change of a particular sort (I happen to agree with the thrust of this), but I do find it odd that while undermining these writings as Scripture, they are yet being used as in some way authoritative or at least as validating resistance to Empire. This feels a little parasitic on the tradition and I can't really see any reason for retaining it except to access the more general religiosity of north American society compared with Britain and Europe. I'm not sure that holding on to the tradition seems as useful politically in GB and EU and that the kind of orthodox radical approach of people like Jim Wallis or Shane Claiborne is more likely to feel authentic.

*Disclosure of Material Connection: This was a condition of getting a review copy; I received this book free from the  publisher through the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR,Part 255 -even though I am British, residing in Britain.
Theology From Exile Volume II: The Year of Matthew eBook: Sea Raven: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

Genesis and the Rise of Civilization -a review

I have had to be careful how many books I pick up for review for Speakeasy -I've got a reading list to work through for various ongoing writing projects of my own. However, when I sow this being offered for review*, I knew I had to have a look at it. Genesis and the Rise of Civilization by J. Snodgrass:  The Goodreads review is short but captures what drew me in.

 Snodgrass Integrates Studies of World Mythologies, Ancient Near Eastern Tribes and Empires, Archaeology and Rabbinic Stories to Read Genesis as a Parable about the Agricultural Revolution, and God's Counter-Revolution.

You see I'm finding myself fascinated by all of those things, so having them in one book ... well, several birthdays came at once. And the Goodreads blurb is right. I've enjoyed the insights brought to bear on specific stories or sections of stories by archaeological anthropology: these have been very insightful. Not always will they be congenial to a certain kind of literalism that can't countenance history or even pre-history beyond 6,000 years ago, or those who can only conceive that truth can be told by straight-forward historiography and are suspicious of the truth that can be told by parable, legend and mythical storytelling. What Snodgrass does is enable us to appreciate the truths that these kinds of language can tell.

As I've read this, it has become more evident to me that I'm going to be returning to it when I'm reflecting on the early chapters of Genesis and due to preach about them.

one of the themes that emerges clearly from this reading based upon prehistory reconstructed from archaeology and anthropology, is the conflict between pastoralists and agriculturalists in which the latter emerged the victors.  The interesting thing it makes clear is the way that, contrary to the myths and legends of most other civilisations of the shift from hunter-gatherer to settled agriculture, the Bible we have tends to exhibit sympathy for the pastoralists and to sound out the warnings about the downsides of agriculturally based ways of life.

The bigger picture of cultural difference and change is interspersed with little titbits of information which made me stop and think more. For example, what if it is right that Abram's wife Sarai's name reflects a background in her being an intentionally childless (ex)-priestess of the Moon-goddess cult. Could she and Abram have been fleeing a situation -eloping together for religious convictions?

The author is a teacher in church settings, and occasionally that background shows through in the writing in asides, puns and witticisms. I enjoyed these but i expect some readers might find them less scholarly and others that there aren't enough of them to properly lighten a scholarly book.

It's not a short book -though half of it is index etc.  There's something of interest on every page so reading it is not a hard job.

*Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the  publisher through the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR,Part 255 -even though I am British, residing in Britain.

Bible beyond fundamentalism and Islamic critique

My encounter with Islam has taught me to view the Bible differently (although still Christianly) than how I'd come to see it through Christian nurture previously. i would say it spurred me, perhaps, to see the Christian Scriptures more in the way that Brian McLaren and Steve Chalke have recently been saying.

So what did my encounter with Islam teach me? Well, there are a few incidents and some thinking.  One of the incidents was in the mid 1990's when  a young Muslim man, clearly wanting to try out his latest apologetic strategy on a Christian  told me that the Bible couldn't be the word of God because some of it is addressed to God and other parts are clearly not really God speaking in the first person. At least the Qu'ran has the vrctue of appearing to be God addressing humans. At the time we didn't have time to go into it further. What went through my head was that this was a fundamental misunderstanding of what Christians mean when we talk about the Bible as word of God in a way that includes greater co-operation between human processes and God's desire to communicate. And I nearly said to him something like 'Don't you think after thousands of years that we haven't thought of that and have a way of thinking about it that makes sense of that?' -really I was wanting to signal that what he seemed to think was a match-winner point was only the beginning of a conversation and that he should perhaps consider that obvious issues like that would have been considered in the Christian traditions of thinking about Christian Scripture.



However, of course, that incident does put a question mark against a quasi-islamic understanding of the Bible which sometimes it seem that Christian fundamentalists have and i think that, in some ways, is indeed vulnerable to the rhetorical point made by Muslim apologetics of the sort just mentioned.



For me it started to make me clear that Christians really don't think of the Bible as God addressing humans directly. Now there's a whole world of important difference in the theologies of revelation between the two faiths. Christianity is much more 'incarnational' -even fundamentalists when it comes down to it will root their defense of the Bible as God's words in the term 'inspiration' rather than dictation. 'Men, carried along by the Spirit...' 'God-breathed' are the kinds of phrases picked up from Scripture to think about what the relationship between God and Bible is: it is something which involves humans more than taking dictation but is a process where something of the personality of the writers or the signs of developmental processes can be discerned. This complements theological understandings of God working through and in human beings, inviting us to be part of what God is about.



But there are a couple of further developments. One of those was the realisation that many Muslims tend to regard the Qur'an (or at least a heavenly antetype the Umm al-Kitab, 'mother of the book') as something that has eternally existed with God. I think i owe this insight to Kenneth Cragg. In Islam the Word of God that is eternally with God is made recitation/book. In Christian faith the Word of God that is eternally with God is made flesh. In other words where Muslims have Book, we have Christ. This made it clear to me that it is really quite significant that in Christian faith the Word of God is first, foremost and importantly a Person. Enter Karl Barth into my thinking: therefore it really is so that Scripture bears witness to the Word of God, that is Christ. In Muslim terms, Christian Scriptures are more like reliable Hadith -stories about what the prophet said and did which help Muslims to understand what the Qur'an says and means. These Christian 'hadith' are souped up with the work of God's Spirit.



As a result of this, i started to feel that the liturgical practice of my church (Anglican) gained new resonance for me. When we hear Scripture read in Communion services, we sit to hear most readings but stand to hear the Gospels -some churches even have extra ceremonial to prepare for the reading and for the announcement of the Gospel including parading the book of the Gospels to the centre of the congergation where everyone turns to face it (the book is our qiblah). By these actions we are telling ourselves and honouring the fact that Christ in the centre of our faith; the means by which we are most directly addressed, personally (that is 'in person'), by God. The Gospels are the witnesses closest in to the Word of God.



Steve Chalke wrote:

"We do not believe that the Bible is 'inerrant' or 'infallible' in any popular understanding of these terms. In truth, there is nothing in the biblical texts that is beyond debate and questioning, and healthy churches are ones that create an environment which welcomes just that. The biblical texts are not a 'divine monologue', where the solitary voice of God dictates a flawless and unified declaration of his character and will to their writers." 

 So we would not want to think about the Bible as the Word of God -for that is Christ, but rather as word of God: witness and testimony to enable us to understand the Word of God. Witness and testimony that God has nurtured (by the action of the Holy Spirit) to be good enough to do the job of forming us in the way of Christ ('... useful for correcting, rebuking, teaching and training in righteousness ... equipped for every good work').



By the witness of these same scriptures, words like 'inerrant' or 'infallible' can only properly be understood in relation to whether they mean the ability of Scripture to lead us rightly to being trained in righteousness and being equipped to practice love in the way of Christ.



The biblical cat is out of the f - Brian McLaren:q

Doubt as a way of faith

"I'm so mixed up I doubt my doubts -only to discover I believe!"
Okay, so I made that quote up but it came to mind as I was thinking about the gospel passage for this coming Sunday.
First we have John the Baptiser having a wobble:

 "When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples ³ and said to him, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’" (Mt.11:2&3).

Perfectly understandable: first of all John's in prison which perhaps doesn't seem fitting to him but might be part of the programme if the Messiah would then actually do something to bring about the Promised renewal. restoration of national life under God. But Jesus doesn't seem to be set to do that. So, is it all for nothing?

Then there's also the doubt that Jesus seems to be addressing when he turns to the crowds. Presumably, John's followers had come upon Jesus in public and asked their question in public; meaning that the doubt that John implies by his question is communicated to the crowd. If they have the same sort of particular Messianic script in mind as Jesus needs to address and subvert and reconceptualise in the apostles at other points in the gospels, then how much more the crowd? And how much more important to frame what they've heard helpfully.

I find it encouraging that doubt is not dealt with harshly -indeed it's not even named as such here. In some Christian contexts doubt has become "Doubt": it's a big thing, the beginning of the end, the start of a descent into lostness and to becoming one of those people that our church or our ministry sees as a enemy to the Gospel. I think, though, that doubt is a continuum one end of which is faith destroying, the other end is potentially faith-building, It is worth recalling, to help us understand doubt, that 'faith' is ambiguous. On the one hand we might mean something like 'a system of propositions about the nature of life/reality' on the other hand it may be about 'trust and/or commitment'. True enough: the two are linked -if your cognitive doubt is sufficiently foundation-shaking of the belief system, then the trust and commitment ebb away. And, of course, in some cases the commitment overcomes evidence or selects evidence of a more cognitive nature to support the commitment.

But some doubt is not so existential. Some doubt is mostly about trying to see things whole. It's about recognising differences of perspective and apparent dissonances in experiences or interpretations or some combination of those. And a lot of times that is more about 'making sense' brought about by changes in circumstances which change our reflex perspectives, or help us to see things from a different point of view, perhaps gaining sympathy with someone or an idea that previously seemed 'out there' for us. Sometimes it arrives with an increase in knowledge which questions something we'd previously assumed or makes a different line of thinking seem more fruitful, plausible or explanatory for us. The thing is, all learning, all making-sense, is initially disorienting to some degree. And this can feel like doubt. In some senses it is: it is a questioning or re-evaluation of what had previously been believed. And if that previous belief had been important to us or remains important to those around us whom we trust, then the doubt can feel quite frightening. In response we may try to ignore it, reassert the old perspective more vehemently to try to force it from us or we may face it with boldness or humility to learn what lies the other side. This kind of doubt is the vulnerability of the hermit crab between shells.

So, how do we see Jesus responding here (to John, via his followers)? In short, it seems to me, pragmatically and sympathetically. There is no deriding the 'wobble', nor is there a forceful restatement of the right position and/or an exhortation to believe. To be sure there is that at one or two other points -but let's take those also on a case-by-case basis, remembering that here it is dealt with sympathetically, I think that there are different ways of responding to doubt because there are different kinds of doubt and we do ill if we treat all of them as if they are Doubt.

Jesus treats John's doubt as sense-making disorientation: events have overturned John's prior understanding of the Messiahnic script and he needs help to reorient faithfully. So Jesus draws John's attention to some salient facts about what he's doing, and does so using phrases which echo Messianic passages in Isaiah, but which also point to another area of 'messianic scripting' that doesn't involve nationalistic, other-punishment or violent fantasy-stoking which may have been the script playing in John's mind and now being doubted. Jesus does a bit of pastoral re-framing to help John re-integrate his experience as it is now in such a way as to keep him true to the important things now: 'blessed is the one who does not fall away on account of me'.

There's an implicit warning in there as well as encouragement to stay true. One might fall away because having hoped that Jesus were the Messiah, his following parts of the script that were previously not noticed or not weighed sufficiently heavily might cause one to throw over the whole plot rather than adjust ones expectations and understandings in the light of an expanded appreciation which reframes the former beliefs.

Then Jesus has to turn to the crowd who've been listening in on the exchange and drawing their own conclusion and perhaps finding their own doubts or skepticisms amplified and played back -perhaps even as they murmur to one another. So I imagine that 'Blessed is the one who does not fall away on account of me' is also said with the crowd in mind -to encourage and challenge them too. But with some further perspectives to supplement. He tells them, in effect, that those of them who went to see and hear John's ministry were right to do so and that John was indeed the fore-runner. This is a reassertion of the plot but with a further dimension drawn to attention: that the forces arrayed against them are the rulers and the interests of wealth-accumulation. Implicitly a reminder that they shouldn't be expecting an easy shoe-in to earthly power but rather powerful opposition. And, of course, we realise that this is also a prefiguration of Jesus' own life-narrative.

There are forms of doubt that can make us less likely to stay true to the plot when it contains suffering and misunderstanding by others. There are forms of doubt which enable us to put aside perspectives which would keep us from staying true because they are perspectives which would deter us, lead us to take mis-steps or even end up working against the God-plot and for the Powers-plot instead. In this latter case, doubt is part of the way of faith.

Understanding Spiritual Warfare: Four Views

This is a helpful book in setting out different views on how to interpret the Biblical language about principalities and powers and the theologising about mission and ministry that are implied by the different viwes. I suspect that some readers will be surprised to discover how close some at-first-apparently divergent views are and to understand more clearly what the differences are. I think that one of the useful things about it is that it enables us to see clearly that many of the popular Christian ideas that tend to be associated with the term 'spiritual warfare' are not biblically based or not straightforwardly interpretations of the whole counsel of scripture. We see that a lot of the ideas being proposed and used as a basis for thinking are actually from myths and stories around at the times of Scripture's composition and collection but not actually in Scripture.

For me it is a helpful reference point in supporting and finessing my own thinking about corporisations and Christian ministry with/in them.

Notes and quotes

careful consideration has demonstrated that this common correlation is not a sign of Christianity’s inherent intolerance and proneness to violence but rather a sign of the fact that any religious or philosophical system can be used—and misused—for self-centered ends and political gains. Even the vast majority of the critics of Christian violence readily acknowledge that the original vision and movement inaugurated by Jesus was one of remarkable inclusiveness, principled nonviolence, and self-giving agapē-love.   location 166

Some will grant that Christian monotheism is not inherently oppressive. But they will argue that it is the segments within Christian theism that traffic in spiritual warfare language that tend to become oppressive. The concern is that using the biblical language associated with “spiritual warfare” will lead Christians to embrace and imitate the whole range of biblical texts on “warfare,” including the intolerance and divinely sanctioned violence in the Bible itself. Even more pressing is the concern that Christians who take spiritual warfare seriously will reframe their own human enemies as “God’s enemies”—enemies who, perhaps, are today no less deserving of violent judgment than the Canaanites were in the time of the ancient Israelites. To the ears of many, “spiritual warfare” sounds uncomfortably close to the language of “holy war.” And holy war—with its “warrior God,” Yahweh, and its divinely authorized violence against the “enemies” of God’s people—is a common theme found throughout the Old Testament. Critics remind us that the Old Testament holy war tradition always included a component of “spiritual warfare.” As the Old Testament itself reveals, the Israelites believed that the spiritual and physical worlds were deeply interwoven, such that as they conducted war against human enemies, God and his angels led the way in the spiritual realm.   location 172

Paul’s important statement that “our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the . . . cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12 NRSV). Unlike every other known instance of Jewish apocalyptic eschatology, the version held by Jesus and much of the early church viewed the hostile forces they struggled against as composed entirely of spiritual beings—not fellow human beings.   location 236

Paul Middleton has recently demonstrated, unlike other forms of Jewish apocalyptic eschatology, “[early] Christianity had no temporal outlet [i.e., they refused to identify human enemies and/or participate in earthly war and violence] . . . and so Christian apocalyptic war was conceived in wholly cosmic terms, with a cosmic enemy, a cosmic outcome and a cosmic stage on which martyrs lived and died: nothing less than cosmic conflict.” In fact, especially prior to its post-Constantinian affiliation with the Roman Empire, the early church was commonly known not for inciting intolerance and violence but for its spirit of inclusiveness, principled nonviolence, and what Middleton refers to as “radical martyrdom”—a willingness to die rather than do violence to others.    location 248

the New Testament concept of spiritual warfare—rightly understood—not only does not contribute to these evils but goes even further by offering a vision of reality where, ultimately, no fellow human is recognized as “enemy” when viewed from a kingdom perspective.   location 258

With regard to the nature of “demons” per se, most who hold to a traditional view today understand demons as equivalent to fallen angels. However, in both ancient Judaism and the early church, this was only one of two perspectives on this question. Other ancient Jews and Christians held that demons are the spirits of the deceased “giants” (the Nephilim) mentioned in Genesis 6:1–4, who were the hybrid children produced by sexual liaisons between evil angels (the “sons of God”) and human women.   location 371

Note: makes me wonder if nephilim could be seen as corporisations in some (probably mythological) way?

Robert Guelich has made the case that the contemporary Christian fascination with spiritual warfare owes more to the imagination of Frank Peretti than it does to Jesus or the apostle Paul.  location 420

Barth contrasts angels and demons to such a degree that he rejects the traditional idea that demons represent fallen angels. Rather, Barth proposes that with regard to Satan and demons, “their origin and nature lie in nothingness.” The concept of “nothingness” (a translation of the German phrase das Nichtige) is crucial to Barth’s theology of creation and evil.  location 434

working to reinterpret, and so rehabilitate, the New Testament notion of “principalities and powers” in the modern world. Among such scholars, there was a common tendency to reinterpret the “powers” in terms of human corporate/structural categories of power, dominance, and oppression. For some, this reinterpretation of the powers allowed for both spiritual and human realities; for others the powers were ultimately reduced to human structures without remainder.   location 468

for Wink, while the principalities and powers have a spiritual dimension, they are not to be viewed as personal spiritual beings. Rather, they are the spiritual dimension of earthly, human institutions and structures.   location 496

Note: I think that while Wink does talk about Powers as the inner 'spiritual' aspect of corporate entities, his integral view actually calls for recognising the outer aspect as part of the deal. an emergentist approch helps in this. At his most consistent, so does Wink.

Unlike the more traditional understanding, in Yong’s model angels and demons are not disembodied spirit beings created by God in an autonomous spiritual realm that is separate from the physical world. This is because there is no autonomous created spiritual realm that is dualistically separate from the physical. Rather, created spirits—whether angelic spirits, demonic spirits, human spirits, and even animal spirits—always emerge from, and then supervene upon, the complex material world that, itself, is always-already an “interrelational cosmos.”   location 527

... disagrees with Wink at a crucial juncture. For Yong, while angels are “emergent from their material substrates,” they are, in fact, “personal realities.” And yet, Yong can also say that “what we call angels are higher-level transpersonal or suprapersonal realities, constituted by and supervening upon the human relationships from which they derive.”   location 538

In turning to the demonic, Yong simply applies his emergentist theory to the dark side of things. He writes: Demonic spirits, then, are divergent (as opposed to emergent) malevolent realities that oppose the salvific grace of God in human lives. . . . But just as the human spirit emerges from socially and environmentally embedded brain and body, and just as angelic spirits emerge as supervenient upon the concreteness and complexity of our interpersonal, social, and cosmic relations, so also, I suggest, do demonic spirits emerge from and supervene upon the human experience of alienation that disintegrates personal lives and destroys human relationships in general and human well-being as a whole.   location 545

Yong is quite willing to recognize the personal dimensions of angels, he is reluctant to do so when it comes to demons. In fact, in good Augustinian fashion (i.e., evil as privation), he is hesitant to confer upon them the status of robust ontological reality.   location 551


Note: I'm not sure why Yong doesn't extend by analogy of human fallenness the possibility of demonic capability of corporised structures. This too is departure from Wink.

even for those who embrace significant elements of the two remaining models, confronting such idolatrous systemic evils as racism, sexism, classism, and violence (in its manifold forms and spheres) can be seen as a vital aspect of the church’s call to spiritual battle. J. Nelson Kraybill, for example, urges that this sort of “macroexorcism” (i.e., “naming and confronting the powers of evil on a systemic and political level”) is a necessary partner to “microexorcism” (i.e., the confronting of evil powers on a “personal level”) and that both should work together in complementary fashion.   location 584

the classic model, with its focus on the “weapons” of repentance, truth, prayer, obedience, worship, and study of the Scriptures, spiritual warfare and Christian growth/discipleship are seen as virtually one and the same.   location 605

Note: In Demolishing Strongholds, I make the case that this classic model is most true to the Biblical data we have and is combinable with Wink's (and I would now add Yong's) broad approach to interpretation of 'principalities' and 'powers'.

Some critics of SLSW grant that the biblical evidence for territorial spirits is worthy of consideration—or even persuasive—but that biblical warrant for practicing SLSW itself is lacking. Others argue that even the biblical texts used to support claims about territorial spirits are ambiguous at best and are better interpreted in other ways. As a consequence, they fear that SLSW proponents have unwittingly given territorial spirits “more ‘territory’ than they deserve.” Some critics go so far as to charge SLSW proponents with unwittingly succumbing to a syncretistic mixing of Christianity with an “animist” worldview. Proponents of SLSW have responded by suggesting that the animist worldview happens to share some important aspects with the biblical worldview. They in turn fear that the critics of their approach to spiritual warfare have drunk too deeply at the wells of the modern naturalistic worldview, and in the process have fallen victim to what missiologist Paul Hiebert has called “the flaw of the excluded middle”—namely, a systematic neglect of the spiritual world of angelic and demonic powers.   location 727


in his book Spiritual Warfare for Every Christian, Dean Sherman writes: Some think spiritual warfare is only deliverance. Others emphasize pulling down strongholds in the heavenlies. Still others say spiritual warfare is doing the works of Jesus—preaching, teaching, and living the truth. Yet another group says all this is impractical. They claim we should focus on feeding the hungry, resisting racism, and speaking out against social injustice. I believe we have to do it all. Pulling down strongholds is only important if people are led to Christ as a result. However, some are deaf to the preaching of the Gospel until we deal with hindering powers. And some can’t break through into victory until bondage is broken in their lives. We must do it all as appropriate, and as God leads.   location 742


Michael Hardin, who collaborates with Wink on his responses to the other contributors, is the executive director of Preaching Peace and has recently written a book that touches on our topic at hand, The Jesus Driven Life: Reconnecting Humanity with Jesus (2010),   location 757

Excessive zeal for justice always becomes satanic.   location 850

then be punished. Excessive zeal for justice always becomes satanic. All   location 850


Job’s Satan, in short, is no friend of Job’s, but he is in fact humanity’s best friend because he lures God into a contest that will end by stripping God of the projections of the oppressors.   location 859


It is only in the period between the Testaments, and even more in the period of the New Testament and early church, that Satan gains recognition. Soon he will become known as the enemy of God, the father of lies, the black one, the archfiend, and assume the stature of a virtual rival to God.  location 869

Satan is depicted here as able to accomplish something that Jesus had himself been unable to achieve during his ministry. If we refuse to face our own evil, but take refuge, like Peter, in claims to righteousness, our own evil will meet us in the events triggered by our very own unconsciousness. Satan is not then a mere idea invented to “explain” the problem of evil but is rather the distillate precipitated by the actual existential experience of being sifted. When God cannot reach us through our conscious commitment, sometimes there is no other way to get our attention than to use the momentum of our unconsciousness to slam us up against the wall. This is heavenly jujitsu practiced by God’s “enforcer,” this meat-fisted, soul-sifting Satan—servant of the living God!  location 883

1 Timothy 1:20. The writer of 1 Timothy says (in the name of Paul) that he has delivered the heretics Hymanaeus and Alexander “to Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme.” Apparently the writer does not mean that he has damned them to hell for eternal punishment. He really seems to expect them to learn to stop blaspheming and return to the fold. Once we acknowledge that Satan is a devoted servant of God, the meaning is transparent: these men, like the fellow in 1 Corinthians 5, are to be excommunicated in order to force them to recover a sense of “conscience” (1:19) and abandon their libertine ways. location 912

What is Satan tempting him with here and in each of these “temptations” if not what everyone knew to be the will of God? Mosaic prophet, priestly Messiah, Davidic king—theses are the images of redemption that everyone believed God had given in Scripture. (And in no time at all they would be titles given to Jesus by the church: Prophet, Priest, and King.) What irony: everyone in Israel knew the will of God for redemption—except Jesus. He was straining to hear what it was as if he alone did not know.   location 950

Satan’s fall was an archetypal movement of momentous proportions, and it did indeed happen every bit as much as the Peloponnesian War, but it happened in the collective symbolization of evil. “The whole world is given over to the evil one” (1 John 5:19, author’s translation): Satan has become the world’s corporate personality, the symbolic repository of the entire complex of evil existing in the present order. Satan has assumed the aspect of a suprapersonal, nonphysical, spiritual agency, the collective shadow, the sum total of all the individual darkness, evil, unredeemed anger, and fear of the whole race, and all the echoes and reverberations through time from those who have chosen evil before us.  location 977

Satan is “the god of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4 RSV) because we humans have made him a god as a consequence of willfully seeking out our own good without reference to any higher good, thus aligning our narcissistic anxiety with the spirit of malignant narcissism itself. But since narcissism is antithetical to the needs of a harmonious and ecological universe, Satan has become, by our own practice of constantly giving the world over to him, the principle of our own self-destruction.   location 984

Intercession is spiritual defiance of what is, in the name of what God has promised. Intercession visualizes an alternative future to the one apparently fated by the momentum of current contradictory forces. It infuses air of a time yet to be into the suffocating atmosphere of the present.   location 1065

The message is clear: history belongs to the intercessors, who believe the future into being. This is not simply a religious statement. It is as true of Communists or capitalists or anarchists as it is of Christians. The future belongs to whoever can envision in the manifold of its potentials a new and desirable possibility, which faith then fixes upon as inevitable. This is the politics of hope. Hope envisages its future and then acts as if that future is now irresistible, thus helping to create the reality for which it longs. The future is not closed. There are fields of forces whose interactions are somewhat predictable. But how they will interact is not.   location 1087

The Romans were a model of lucidity on this point. They did not, at least during the New Testament period, worship the seated emperor, but only his “genius.” This Latin term does not refer to the emperor’s intellect but to his inspiration, the daemon or god or spirituality that animates the incumbent ruler by virtue of his being incumbent. His genius is the totality of impersonal power located in an office of surpassing might.    location 1102

A seer whose vision cuts through the atmospherics of imperial legitimation is a far worse threat than armed revolutionaries who accept the ideology of domination and merely desire it for themselves. Churches, which continually complain about their powerlessness to induce change, are in fact in a privileged position to use the most powerful weapon of all: the power to delegitimate. But it is a spiritual power, spiritually discerned and spiritually exercised. It needs intercessors, who believe the future into being. If the future is thus open, if the heavenly hosts must be silenced so that God can listen to the prayers of the saints and act accordingly, then we are no longer dealing with the unchanging, immutable God of Stoic metaphysics.   location 1115

An aperture opens in the praying person, permitting God to act without violating human freedom. The change in even one person thus changes what God can thereby do in the world.   location 1156

Impossibility is more possible than everything which we hold to be possible.” Miracle is just a word we use for the things the powers have deluded us into thinking that God is unable to do.   location 1159

the phrases of the Lord’s Prayer are not indicative but imperative—we are ordering God to bring the kingdom near. It will not do to implore. We must command. We have been commanded to command. We are required by God to haggle with God for the sake of the sick, the obsessed, the weak, and to conform our lives to our intercessions.Read more at location 1172

Prayer is not just a two-way transaction. It also involves the great socio-spiritual forces that preside over so much of reality.  location 1207

The angel of Persia does not want the nation he guards to lose such a talented, subjected people. The angel of Persia actively attempts to frustrate God’s will, and for twenty-one days succeeds. The principalities and powers are able to hold Yahweh at bay!   location 1227


This is an accurate depiction, in mythological terms, of the actual experiences we have in prayer.   location 1232

The predicament we see in Daniel derives from the fact that God does not effectively rule “this world” (what I have been calling the Domination System). Satan rules it. In short, prayer involves not us but God and people and the powers. What God is able to do in the world is hindered, to a considerable extent, by the rebelliousness, resistance, and self-interest of the powers exercising their freedom under God.   location 1239

If the powers can thwart God so effectively, can we even speak of divine providence in the world?   location 1252

Whenever sufficient numbers of people withdraw their consent, the powers inevitably fall.   location 1267

Note: in this Wink seems to be enviasging deatruction rather than redemption

Wink’s perception of the scale of evil is human-sized. Here are two metaphors. It’s like explaining Nazism by looking at individual atrocities and at the characteristics of German culture, politics, economics, and society, but viewing Adolf Hitler’s mesmerizing authority and iron will as simply an emergent aspect of all things Germanic. It’s as if Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings located evil in the individual activities and collective organizations of orcs, evil men, Ringwraiths, and the fallen wizard Saruman—but no Sauron or One Ring was a power to reckon with. In each case, much evil would remain, but something essential goes missing. Downsizing Satan into a symbolic resource for institutional evils affects Wink’s goals as well as his perception of what’s wrong.Read more at location 1321
Note: I'm not convinced that this is fair. Leaving aside whether it is fair to Wink, it seems to me that it runs the danger of missing what an emergentist view actually suggests. The LotR analogy is helpful in expressing the misgiving clearly but, I think, misses the point. Sauron is an individual -if disembodied- personal agent in LotR; Tolkien has no emergent agency analogous to Principalities and Powers.This critique misses what is actually proposed.

The words “Listen to my voice!” can express two very different standpoints. When God says to us, “Listen to my voice!,” he commands—we perish if we fail to do what he says. When we say to God, “Listen to my voice!,” we entreat—we perish if he does not do for us what he promises. In the imperative of entreaty, I say to God, “Have mercy, Lord. Your kingdom come!” In the imperative of command, God says to me, “Show mercy to your neighbor. My will be done!” Both are in the imperative mood   location 1352

RESPONSE TO WALTER WINK GREGORY BOYD   location 1370

I deeply appreciate the fact that he has helped mainline theology begin to take the New Testament’s teaching on transcendent evil seriously.   location 1375

Wink argues that Satan should not be thought of as a personal being that exists independently of humans.   location 1421

Note: This is true, but as I argue in Demolishing Strongholds, Satan 's existing can be conceptualised even with Wink's general approach. Wink's disposition to interpret Satan more symbolically is not inherant to his way of interpreting the Power's language.

The medieval depiction of Satan as a red monster with horns, hoofs, pointed tail, and holding a pitchfork (along the lines of the Greek god Pan) has got to go! In my estimation, Wink’s own demythologized conception of Satan is much closer to the truth than this and similar mythic conceptions.   location 1434

Wink does not accept that Satan and the powers have a will and a power over and above the will and power of social systems and people groups,   location 1460
Note:  Again we should note that this seems to miss the possibilites opened up by an emergentist interpretation in which the implicit opposition between the social systems and a spiritual power is not very meaningful. As it happens, I think Wink sees the powers as having their own agency but that he tends to fall back into peronification.

It seems to me Wink is inconsistent on this point inasmuch as he appeals to the activity of the powers to help explain unanswered prayer,   location 1462


I will be like the most High” (Isa. 14:14 KJV).   location 1509

Note: this is not about Satan

His phrase, “history belongs to the intercessors,” is quoted again and again with the fervency and assurance usually reserved for biblical texts. However, we have been filtering Wink’s words through the grid of our understanding of intercession, while Wink’s grid turns out to be somewhat different from ours. To begin with, Wink has a broader concept of who the intercessors might be than we do.   location 1520

we would stress, as Wink admittedly also does at points, that it is God who actually changes history, not intercessors themselves.   location 1533

“I believe in a world which does not exist, but by believing it, I create it.” Kazantzakis is not our kind of an intercessor. Our intercessors do not believe that they create anything. They strive to stand in the gap before the Creator himself, but they do believe that, at times, their prayers (both petitions and proclamations) move God to do things to change history that he would not otherwise have done.   location 1540


Scripture points out the person and work of Satan only as he stands in relationship to God’s purposes with us, as we live for either good or ill. The emphasis is pastoral. God passes over many questions that might intrigue us. We might be curious to know more of the biography of Satan. How did he become evil? What is the origin of the collective forces of evil? What is the hierarchy of relationships between the devil and demons? How can it be that Satan and other hostile spirits are utterly malicious, acting to harm and destroy all people, and in particular to subvert God’s church—yet they serve God’s various purposes and work at his permission? God seems to think we don’t need to know all the details.   location 1557


We learn (and need to know) that the animistic, occult, superstitious view of demonic agencies is false. Animism exaggerates the personhood and autonomy of the forces of darkness. It locates the human drama within a haunted universe. It diminishes the significance of personal and sociocultural evils. One of the consistent purposes of the Old Testament is to demythologize the superstitious worldview.   location 1590

The overwhelming majority of evils, individual and collective, are not atrocities or paranormal oddities. They are everyday trespasses and sins; the common passions and fears; the unbelief, anger, lusts, and lies of our foolishness.   location 1626

The pieces of weaponry (6:11–17) are an extended metaphor, a proclamation of Christ, fleshing out how faith and love operate.   location 1635

“Girding on the belt of truth”? Paul took this from Isaiah 11:5, which describes a man characterized by truth and faithfulness.   location 1642

“The breastplate of righteousness”? Paul takes both this and the “helmet of salvation” from Isaiah 59:17. Who arms himself in these ways? Isaiah 59:1–21 makes clear that the Lord God comes armed. He alone can make right all that is so wrong.   location 1646


Again, this is Jesus Christ. Only when wrenched out of its missional context does the military hardware seem to be defensive armor.   location 1649

“Shoes for your feet” that express “the readiness given by the gospel of peace”? This also comes from Isaiah: How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.” (52:7 ESV)   location 1650

“Taking up the shield of faith”? This is the only image that does not arise from Isaiah, and the only image intended to communicate an essentially protective and defensive role.   location 1658

Messiah is going out to war, and he is both shielded (Ps. 18:30–31, 35) and strengthened to pursue his enemies (Ps. 18:29, 32–42). Even the “defensive” weapon of Ephesians 6 is portrayed as being used for a divine offensive.   location 1668

In Ephesians 6:18, Paul drops the metaphor of weaponry entirely in wrapping up this call to faith and love.   location 1678

When children of light lapse into what we once were, hurting and fighting each other, it helps to know that our deepest enemies are not flesh and blood. It “lowers the temperature” amid human conflicts,   location 1688

Paul’s core intercession is very simple: “God, personally strengthen us to know you.” No fireworks, no fuss and feathers, no binding and loosing, no authoritative pronouncements, no naming and claiming. His prayers are new Psalms, familiar patterns overflowing with fulfillment in Christ.   location 1712

To win spiritual warfare is simply to live as light in a dark world. It is to treat others with humility, patience, and thoughtful consideration. It is to live as a conscious and contributing member of “we the people” whom God has brought together by mercy. It is to have things to say that are worth saying: true, constructive, timely, and filled with grace. It is to live purposefully amid a thousand distracting voices. It is to seek God’s grace and strength. At its core, to win this war is to know God and consciously serve him.   location 1722

The “passions of our flesh . . . the desires of the body and the mind” (Eph. 2:2–3 ESV) manifest our own hearts’ sympathy for the devil. Will we insist on healing, or demand a comfortable life, or place our deepest hopes in doctors? We become obsessive, angry, escapist, or fearful when driven by the tyranny of our desires.   location 1767

Deliverance from the sin of pursuing the occult never includes any sort of deliverance from inhabiting spirits.   location 1797

The gospel is unveiled by the God whose power created the world and raised Jesus. If anyone awakens, it is because God shines the light of Christ into hearts (2 Cor. 4:6). Sinners are blinded by the devil, and they culpably choose blindness. Everyone is a slave; but no one is a puppet. God enlightens; people turn and believe.   location 1842

Ministry to enslaved people begins with fleeing our own slavish propensities, bringing us into the community of those who call on the Lord and pursue Christ’s character (note the parallels to the Ephesians’ weaponry).   location 1853
Note: living in the opposite spirit

We learn to do Christ’s work of deliverance in Christ’s way: breathing forth the fragrance of kindness, speaking relevant truth, being patient when others wrong us, correcting gently, relying on the Lord. Jesus sets slaves free, using us. God tells us what to do to liberate the enslaved. He doesn’t need our attempts at a show of power.   location 1855

people whose lives changed—who turned from their sins, who came under Christ, whose lives became fruitful—were people who did “normal” things. “Normal” did not mean rote, perfunctory, or mechanical. It meant the reality of Scripture, confession, repentance, faith, prayer, worship, fellowship, accountability, obedience. People in whom normal things did not take root continued to live in sin, fear, and animistic chaos. Normal things were the difference in delivering people from Satan’s power. Deliverance ministry made a lot of noise but made little difference. It even reinforced the core assumptions of animism. As my friend continued to reflect on Scripture and his experience, he concluded that the demon-deliverance worldview and practice did not add up biblically and failed practically.   location 1904

the brokenness of life calls for a power encounter with an inhabiting spirit. My friend began to change his approach. He started to dig carefully, to proceed more patiently, to do more pointed ministry of Word and prayer. He sought to find out what else was going on in the lives of people. He found dark secrets and relational problems—and the miseries of life that both tempt to sin and result from sin. He found secret adulteries. He found financial corruption. He found Christians who, in their anguish over a sick child or extreme poverty, began visiting witch doctors and wearing amulets. Most frequently, he found bitterness and hatred, relationships that had been broken and never reconciled. False accusations were also a common relational problem. In the context of suffering and unexpected death, the traditional culture looked for someone to blame. The finger of accusation often pointed to “witches” or “witch children” as the cause. In all these cases, bizarre manifestations appeared. The liar, accuser, and murderer is at work in all this—but not quite in the way it was being interpreted. The environing animistic worldview was yet another lie—a “teaching of demons” about demons (1 Tim. 4:1). My friend was uncovering complex spiritual and moral problems. We don’t need to sort out where “flesh” ends and “world” begins, where “world” ends and “devil” begins. We don’t need to determine where the devil’s role in moral blinding and in inflicting destruction begin and end. We can’t see through the fog of war. But Christ’s truth and power address all dimensions simultaneously. We intercede with our Lord to comprehensively deliver us from evil. My friend normalized the abnormal and humanized the bizarre, seeking to get behind confusing appearances, seeking to minister.   location 1914

Why had she first lost control that morning after church? Why did she manifest multiple personalities? Why did she act and sound like an animal? It is a puzzle. Giving her a descriptive label—“MPD” or “DID”[190]—can comfort those who like to use medical-sounding words for complicated human things, but it explains little if anything. Naming her problems as demonic inhabitants is speculation: people in the Bible whose afflictions were demonically induced didn’t do and say the kinds of things she did and said. She was able to describe what happened that morning. People crowding her, loudly and authoritatively invading her physical and psychological space, had utterly terrified her. Hearing her problems named as demons had further terrified her. Her own hysterical reactions had added to her terror. Unassuming human kindness and simple good sense slowly reassured her.   location 1953

What helped this young woman? My friend prayed silently for her (God hears and answers honest intercession, not according to the volume). He talked gently with her (not bypassing her by loudly challenging supposed demonic agencies). He prayed clearly with her and for her (not praying loudly against supposed demons). He lived, modeled, and communicated how Christ meets a very fearful young woman (not how the animistic worldview feeds fears). His prayers and counsel gathered up her sufferings and fears within the promises of our Lord’s mercies and shielding strength. They talked about listening to God’s voice—the Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace. They exposed the false authority of the rapist’s contrary voice. He was a liar, and the murderer of a girl’s innocence, in the image of the liar and murderer. How might she put her hopes in Christ rather than in the hopeless hope that her past would somehow go away? They talked about small obediences—what Ephesians 4:29 words might look like as she entered into conversations with people at church, the small practicalities of building genuine, mutual friendships. They talked about being known fully by God, and loved. My friend’s conversations embodied the things he spoke about. Did this young woman’s problems all go away? Of course not. Do your problems or mine all go away? She was coming out of a deep pit, and that’s almost always a long process. But she subsequently spoke of that time after church as a true turning point. The bizarre experience forced her to consider crucial spiritual realities with more urgency: Who is in control? Who is her rock and fortress? Whom does she trust? Trusting herself was no longer a viable option. She became able to talk about her fears of people with depth and directness. Her world became organized. As inner panic lost its dominion, outer hysteria was no longer her only option. She learned to name evil—the real evils of sin, the real devil who lies and kills, not the spooks of the animistic worldview—and to call on the name of the Lord. As she began to learn faith, she began to learn love. In other words, my friend practiced spiritual warfare with her. He taught her how to fight, how to find strength in the God of strength, shelter in the God who shields. She learned to pray. She learned to believe, standing against the world of fear. She learned to love, standing against the world of hate. She learned to live within the body of Christ, the light of the world. In a world that often feels precarious—because it is precarious—she learned to stand.   location 1963

recognition that the satan is the spiritual dark side of humanity. To recognize this does not detract from evil, nor does it make evil less evil. In fact to correlate the satanic and the Adamic (as does the writer of the second creation narrative in Gen. 2–4) places the problem of evil right where it belongs: on human shoulders. We no longer need to do a theological Flip Wilson (“The devil made me do it”).Read more at location 1996

Like so many who wrestle with the problem of evil, what is missed is the problem of human violence, its origins and effects.   location 1999

When Paul takes up the armor of God in Ephesians 6, what is notable is what is not there: violent retribution and zeal.  location 2020

Most interpreters see the deception of Genesis 3 and the violent killing of Abel in Genesis 4 as the referent to those “attributes” associated with the satan in John 8:44. Yet few connect the two. Violence is deceptive.   location 2022

The weapons of the Christian life here are not for the casting out of demons but are epistemological in character. They are intended to change the way people think, to alter their perspective. The purpose of spiritual warfare is to create obedience to Jesus and his way, which is not oriented to zeal or wrath, like Phineas, but is a war waged with love of the enemy Other, forgiveness for the sinner, and esteem for the marginalized. If the armor of God is given in Ephesians 6, the strategy and tactics are given in the Sermon on the Mount   location 2033

Paul identifies his preconversion issue as that of zealous violence. His conversion was not a change in religion, from Jew to Christian, as much as it was a change in perspective on the problem of violence within religion itself.   location 2039

While we can only rely on analogies to understand the nature of these invisible agents, based on the things Jesus and New Testament authors say about them, they clearly possess something like personal characteristics such as volition and intelligence. They are, in other words, something like personal agents who exist independent of us.   location 2081


extrabiblical revelation must be accepted in principle, since our very definition of the Bible as having sixty-six books does not come from the Bible itself but through extrabiblical revelation.   location 2250

While today some define monotheism as the belief that only one God exists, biblical authors never thought this way. While they acknowledge Yahweh as the only Creator, and while they consistently emphasize Yahweh’s superiority over other gods, they never deny the existence of other deities.   location 2329

while all gods are commanded to worship Yahweh (Ps. 97:7), it seems that many, if not most, of the gods who were commissioned to oversee nations rebel against God and operate out of their own self-interest. Because of their rebellion, D. S. Russell notes, these gods are no longer regarded as legitimate “sons of God” but have instead become “demons” (Deut. 32:17 TNIV; cf. Ps. 106:37).[221] Rather than leading their people to the worship of Yahweh, rebel gods make themselves idolatrous objects of worship, which is why Israelites were strictly forbidden from following them (Deut. 29:26;   location 2335

the god of the Persian nation was trying to intercept Yahweh’s response to Daniel’s prayer and that he had succeeded for twenty-one days. The passage thus demonstrates that, though rebel gods never threaten Yahweh’s supremacy, they can, within limits, “hold Yahweh at bay,”   location 2348

Yahweh’s supremacy, they can, within limits, “hold Yahweh at bay,” as   location 2350

Note: what is the means of this resistance?

While modern Western believers tend to separate the “spiritual realm” from the “the natural realm,” ANE people, including ancient Jews, had a more holistic perspective. Throughout the Bible “earthly” and “heavenly” battles were viewed as two dimensions of one and the same battle. location 2354

As Wink correctly notes, the prevailing assumption in the biblical narrative is that “what occurs on earth has its corollary in the heavens.”   location 2362
Note: this is very like the world-view played with by Shakespeare in Midsummer Night's Dream: the 'as above so below', microcosm/macrocosm idea is played out as fairy's and human's affairs mirror one another.

Satan and his cohorts are depicted as deceiving and enslaving “all the nations” and “all the inhabitants of the earth, except those who bear the seal of the Lamb” (Rev. 13:3, 7–8, 12, 14 NIV; cf. 20:8). And in his first epistle, John goes so far as to claim that the entire world is “under the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19 NRSV). Paul doesn’t shy away from labeling Satan “the god of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4 NRSV) and “the ruler of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2 NRSV). It is because of this pervasive and oppressive diabolic influence that Paul, in typical apocalyptic fashion, depicts this entire present world system as fundamentally evil (Gal. 1:4; Eph. 5:6).   location 2380

salvation in the New Testament is portrayed not primarily as a matter of individuals being forgiven their sin (as is often the case in American evangelicalism) but of humans and the whole cosmos being delivered from the power of Satan and brought into the kingdom of God’s Son.   location 2403

There is a growing consensus among scholars that Paul’s references to “angels,” “rulers,” “principalities,” “authorities,” “dominions,” “thrones,” “spiritual forces,” and “elemental spirits of the universe” refer to various categories of cosmic powers that were believed to exercise a destructive influence over systemic aspects of society, over particular social groups and institutions, and over systemic aspects of creation.   location 2417

there is no denying that there is a mythological element to the various conceptions of spirit agents in Scripture. Twenty-first-century people obviously cannot be asked to conceive of an evil cosmic agent along the lines of a many-headed sea monster (Ps. 74:14) or angels riding in chariots of fire (2 Kings 6:17). Yet it’s one thing to grant that the way someone conceived of a cosmic agent was mythic and quite a different thing to claim the very idea of cosmic   location 2456

four arguments in support of my conviction that we should continue to understand the powers to be agents, each of whom possesses something like a mind and a will over against humans.   location 2606

if we interpret his language in its original apocalyptic milieu, it’s very hard to deny that Paul thought of the powers as conscious, volitional agents,   location 2607

fully embrace Wink’s perspective that all distinct social groups and organizations have a “spirit” that is an emergent property of these groups and organizations and that therefore transcends the individuals that constitute them. But I see no good grounds for identifying without remainder this emergent property with the transcendent powers referred to throughout Scripture.   location 2624

there is no example in Scripture of God’s people engaging in this type of spiritual warfare, and this must surely be considered relevant.  location 2755

Greenwood and those she ministered with in Kansas, the fact that the abortion rate in Kansas dropped 23 percent in two years after they “bound Lilith” undoubtedly helped confirm that their dreams, impressions, and research about Lilith were accurate and that their strategic-level spiritual warfare “worked.” What did not register as significant, however, was the multitude of other factors that could potentially explain this fortunate drop.   location 3719

so preoccupied with fighting invisible forces that they minimize the significance of other important factors that pertain to an issue. For example, if a person called to address the abortion issue is part of a ministry that is centered on confronting the invisible forces behind abortion on the basis of information someone believes they’ve received from God, they can easily minimize the significance of the multitude of more earthly factors that affect abortion and that need to be addressed.  They can easily believe that the most important thing needed to bring an end to abortion is to bind the demonic power behind abortion in the particular way they believe God told them to.   location 3740

seems to me their focus should be on more practical, and generally more challenging, questions, such as: How can we individually and collectively sacrifice our time and resources to make it practically feasible for mothers with unwanted pregnancies to go full term with their unborn babies,   location 3748

How can we sacrifice our time and resources to alleviate poverty, since studies suggest there is a strong correlation between poverty and abortion? How can we sacrifice our time and resources to befriend and serve young people who come from tragically broken homes, since studies suggest there is a correlation between broken homes and abortion? And how can we individually and collectively sacrifice our time and resources to demonstrate Christlike love to the abortion practitioners, since loving and serving “enemies” lies at the heart of the kingdom Jesus brought?

Understanding Spiritual Warfare: Four Views
Understanding Spiritual Warfare: Four Views eBook: James K. Beilby, Paul Rhodes Eddy: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store