links for the weekend 11-16-2025 Theopolis Institute conversation about the work of the late Michael Heiser, on Heiser's Driscoll foreward and some thoughts on trajectories in demonology and anti-demonology in Christian and Jewish theologies

https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/the-divine-council/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/curiosity-and-the-divine-council/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/evaluating-the-divine-council-theology-of-michael-heiser-and-christopher-kous-adaptations/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/heisers-interpretive-iconoclasm/
Now it doesn't just so happen if you look up the book on Google books and find the "Limited Preview" version you can read the entirety of Michael Heiser's foreward to Mark and Grace Driscoll's spiritual warfare self-help manual published in 2019. Since I own a physical copy I can just transcribe a bit.  I haven't gotten around to reading Heiser's work beyond about 15% into any given of his books but I saw quickly how much he drew upon work by Archie T. Wright, Loren Stuckenbruck and Annette Yoshiko Reed among others.  I'm more in a Graham Twelftree phase and Andrew Bowie's writing on philosophy lately, so Heiser's on one of a few back burners.  Still, this seemed something to share for the record:
 
Win Your War: Fight in the Realm You Don’t See For Freedom in the One You Do
Mark and Grace Driscoll
Charisma House
Copyright © 2019 by Mark and Grace Driscoll
LCCN 2019022514 (print)               LCCN 2019022515 (ebook)
ISBN 9781629996257 (hardback)     ISBN 9781629996264 (ebook)
Foreward by Michael S. Heiser pages xxiii-xxv
 
As a Biblical scholar I'm prone to read only scholarly works produced under peer review and highbrow academic publishers. The focus of my own work for both the academy and the person in the pew has largely been the supernature worldview of the Bible. Consequently, when I was approached by Mark to read the manuscript of Win Your War, I was drawn out of my scholarly bubble by the twofold goal he and his wife, Grace, sought to accomplish in the book: to convince Christians that they need to embrace the reality of the supernatural world and to process every area of the Christian life (every personal "war") in accord with that belief.
 
The implication, of course, is that being conformed to the image of Christ involves more than the daily struggle to turn from self-destructive behavior, character flaws, and human evil. It also means believing that there are intelligent evil forces at work that not only impede the process of our growth in becoming more like Jesus but seek to manipulate our thinking and behavior to undermine our joy and usefulness to God. In short, God has enemies, and His enemies are our enemies--and they are not passive.
 
This may sound odd to some readers. How does it make sense to tell Christians that they need to embrace the supernatural? Don't Christians believe in God, that Jesus was God in the flesh, and that God the Holy Spirit resides within? Don't they believe what happened on the cross supernaturally resulted in the forgiveness of sin and everlasting life to all who believe that God sent Jesus for those purposes?
 
The answer put for by Mark and Grace is straightforward, For many Christians, belief in the supernatural ends with the points of doctrine noted above. Affirming the reality of intelligent evil the way it is portrayed in the Bible--where supernatural agents of darkness actively participate in misdirecting our thoughts and behavior to self-destruction, unbelief, and apathy--isn't on the table for many Christians in the modern Western world, driven by "enlightenment" rationalism.
 
The unfortunate reality is that many Christians are selectively supernatural in their outlook, a stance that not only denies biblical authority on a range of ideas but anesthetizes believers as to what's really happening to them and their churches on social, cultural, and geopolitical levels. Most believers don't realize that demons occupy a low status in the pecking order of supernatural darkness. It's no accident that the Book of Daniel incudes supernatural intelligences in the operations of empires (Daniel 10's "princes"). It's also no coincidence that Paul's vocabulary for intelligent evil (rulers, principalities, powers, thrones, etc.) follows suit--the terms are common ones for geographical dominion.
 
This is not to endorse a cartoonish view of spiritual warfare, a term that has become a buzzword in certain circles of Christianity. Mark and Grace are not finding demons under every rock (not every church, corporate, or governmental board). While they refer to some truly strange supernatural incidents in their lives, they are quite clear from the outset that Win Your War is not about baptizing Hollywood's portrayals of the supernatural. Biblically speaking (and when we discuss supernatural darkness we should indeed be speaking biblically) warfare should not be defined as soliciting angels, engaging in shouting matches with supernatural powers, or blaming our failures on demons. Rather, spiritual warfare is fundamentally about the conflict between two kingdoms, a conflict within and without for every true Christian whether he or she discerns that or not. Followers of Jesus win their spiritual war when they spready the gospel, protect the gospel against false teaching, and live out the gospel by becoming more conformed to the loving, sacrificial character of Jesus.
 
Not surprisingly, these things are encapsulated in the last words of Jesus before He ascended to heaven (Matt. 28:18-20). It follows, then, that these are the things the supernatural powers of darkness fear, for they grow the kingdom of God and are the catalyst for the Lord's return. As the apostle Paul so eloquently noted, when the gospel spreads to the nations, the moment of the kingdom's consummation draws closer (Rom. 11:25-27); cf. Gal 3:7-9, 26-29). Believers weren't tasked by Jesus with "ghost-busting" in His name. We are instead supposed to be making disciples of all nations. But doing that requires each of us to be a useful and effective believer. The powers of supernatural darkness are on the clock, and they know it. We must win our spiritual war to do our part. This is why we face supernatural opposition.
 
Win Your War is a pastoral plea that needs to take hold in the hearts and minds of serious believers in every church that preaches the gospel. My hope is that Win Your War will prod readers toward realizing that the powers of darkness are real and that they work to influence our thinking and behavior to distract us from fulfilling--and enjoying--our lives in Christ and our kingdom tasks.
--Dr. Michael S. Heiser
PhD, Hebrew Bible and Semitic Studies
Executive Director, Awakening School of Theology and Ministry
Author, The Unseen Realm, Angels, AND Supernatural
 
 
If you are not already familiar with mark Driscoll’s post-Mars Hill resignation books I’m not going to get you up to speed.  Charting the theological trajectory of Mark Driscoll in the last eleven years it not the primary point here.
 
Heiser’s account was that Mark Driscoll sent him a manuscript copy of the book that became Win Your War. Mark Driscoll’s take on Genesis 6:1-4 in 2005 was substantially different from the take he had after reading Michael Heiser’s work.  Driscoll referred to the idea that angels and humans had sexual relations and begat offspring as the “seed of Chucky” theory from the pulpit back in the Genesis series from 2005.  At the risk of pulling the eyewitness testimony move, I remember this because I was attending Mars Hill at the time.  I knew Augustine wrote that this was a widely held belief about how to interpret Genesis 6 but that the interpretation had fallen into disfavor.  I knew Driscoll had read Augustine so his “seed of Chucky” quip struck me as unbalanced and glib with regard to scholarship on an obviously debated biblical passage.
Fast forward twenty years later and, as you can see, people at the Theopolis Institute have been having a round table discussing the late Michael Heiser’s work.
 
What jumped out for me about Heiser’s foreward commending Mark and Grace Driscoll’s book is that there’s no indication Heiser met the Driscoll’s and no indication he had any idea that just a few years earlier in 2014 there were a variety of scandals swirling around Mark Driscoll about plagiarism; the use of ResultSource to rig a #1 place on the New York Time bestseller list; objections made public about Driscoll’s abusive and domineering leadership style; or concerns about the disbursement and use of funds in Mars Hill Global.  There’s no sign that Heiser was familiar with any of that.  If he was busy reading and writing work in peer-reviewed contexts then this may be a sign of how really peripheral Mark Driscoll had always been if Michael Heiser was approached by Driscoll and gave no evidence of having ever heard of him before. 
 
That might, at least, be a potential explanation for how and why Heiser was unfamiliar with the scandals connected to Driscoll and by 2021 former Mars Hill pastors stated for the record they believed Mark Driscoll was unrepentant and showed himself unfit for pastoral ministry.
https://www.christianitytoday.com/2021/07/mars-hill-elders-letter-mark-driscoll-pastor-resign-trinity/
https://www.christianitytoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/mars-hill-former-elders-statement.pdf
https://churchleaders.com/news/402200-former-mars-hill-elders-plead-for-mark-driscoll-to-resign-immediately.html
https://julieroys.com/mark-driscoll-unfit-former-mars-hill-elders/
 
This was a point that had already been expressed somewhat by Acts 29 leaders when they urged Mark Driscoll to step down, although that has since been scrubbed off Acts 29 websites.
 
Earlier this year Robert Morris pled guilty to indecent acts against a child.  I asked how it was that Mark “I see things” Driscoll didn’t see “that” about his one-time friend Robert Morris.  Michael Heiser is no longer alive and so he isn’t around to answer a question that, nevertheless, can and should be asked, for an author who wrote so much about the unseen realm and supernatural realities not visible to the naked eye, how did Heiser manage to not be aware of Mark Driscoll’s history of controversy?  Perhaps we could merely guess that an Abiathar can support an Adonijah now and then and not necessarily be an altogether bad guy.  But Heath Henning has contended that Heiser’s teachings are aberrant and errant and because Heiser went to the trouble of writing and endorsing foreward to a post-Mars Hill resignation Mark Driscoll book, specifically Win Your War, I think it’s fair to ask how much practical discernment Heiser had even without raising any claims to the effect that the late Michael Heiser qualified as some kind of false teacher.
My skepticism about varieties of Christian nationalism from evangelical conservatives and liberal mainline Protestants is pretty equal.  The latter dread the influence of the former precisely because the Protestant and mainline denominations threw in with pax Americana and American expansion across the 19th and 20th centuries and dread the prospect of a 21st century dominated by evangelical or charismatic/Pentecostal types with views of spiritual warfare that can feature a Paula White being a spiritual advisor to President Trump.  
So at a practical level just saying Heiser had some bad ideas that shouldn't be adopted proves nothing in itself about the life lived.  Doug Wilson can keep gushing about R L Dabney's prophetic wisdom and vision but Dabney's white supremacism was still what it was, for instance, and we've had eight No Quarter Novembers and hardly a word from Wilson about the Mark Driscoll he said he still liked in 2014.  Having met the man myself some twenty-five years ago I really believe that the Mark Driscoll of 2005 would regard the Mark Driscoll of 2023 to the present as dangerously misguided and a charismaniac of the worst sort.

One of the things that is also worth noting is that there is a distinction to be made between what people say about Heiser's work and seeing how it can (and has been) actually get used by other authors.  Mark Driscoll asked Heiser to review a manuscript and credited Heiser with changing his mind about how to interpret Genesis 6:1-4 but there was little in Win Your War that broke new ground on Mark Driscoll's ideas about spiritual warfare that he articulated in a four-hour session in February 2008 that I mostly transcribed years ago.  

David E Ritchie, on the other hand, drew upon the work of Michael Heiser and others to argue that all forms of nationalism in general and Christian nationalism of the January 6, 2020 variety in particular, can and should be regarded as demonic.

https://wipfandstock.com/9781666732207/why-do-the-nations-rage/

https://www.modernreformation.org/resources/articles/why-do-the-nations-rage-an-interview-with-david-a-ritchie

I have actually read that book and he's written a very earnest case that all forms of nationalism have a demonic element to them. I don't even disagree, actually. All the political theology in the world doesn't address the question of whether the prince of Persia in the Book of Daniel can be saved.  Whatever faults people find with Walter Wink's work he already charted out how powers and principalities could/can refer to earthly empires, seats of authority and spiritual forces behind the scenes.  

That Heiser's work got Driscoll to change his mind doesn't necessarily say anything about Heiser's work.  It tells us that Mark Driscoll is prone to the kinds of all-or-nothing either/or thinking that he prizes.  

Now something that doesn't come up in the Heiser conversation which should come up is that the gap between what academic theologians say about "the unseen realm" and what is popularly believed at the lay level has always differed for centuries.  Francis Young has written histories on exorcism in Anglican and Catholic practice and has pointed out that more people are seeking exorcism now in Catholic and Anglican settings the world over than ever before and the clergy are more reluctant than ever to grant or accede to those requests, preferring to steer people to formal counseling and taking up exorcism as a literal last resort.  The world is not more disenchanted now than it was before, whether because of Weber's thesis or because fewer people believe angels and demons exist.  Jason Ananda Josephson Storm has a whole book about this called The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. He made two simple points in a somewhat long and daunting book:

1) more people believe in supernatural powers, forces and persons now than ever before both because there are literally more people on the planet and because they didn't stop believing in this stuff just because it's a rote notion in the academy that Weber's disenchantment thesis has been "proven"

2) the entire field of "human sciences" has had partisans eager to sweep under the rug the pervasive interest in the occult held by pioneers in the social sciences (Carl Jung was merely one of the more obvious and unavoidable examples). Reckoning with where the human sciences can go "from here" needs to take seriously what the Euro-American academic mainstream has been scrupulously trying to ignore for the whole history of fields like psychology and sociology (and it's not the replication crisis, which Andrew Scull has written about as a crisis that has bedeviled psychiatry from its inception)

It's something like this we need to keep in mind when academics discuss the popular influence of a popularizer like the late Michael Heiser.  Most evangelical Christians are not even going to think about slogging through books by Loren Stuckenbruck or Archie Wright but the central question between the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible and the New Testament that gets no answer from within the pages of Scripture itself is how did we get from the Jewish scriptures where no demons get mentioned at all to the Gospels where Jesus is obviously presented as an itinerant exorcist?  Depending on which scholars of Judaism you read this could be because Jewish scriptures rejected the idea of demonology as relevant to medicine (Jacob Milgrom staked this claim about Levitical diagnoses of skin diseases as just that over against the demonologies of Babylonian medical manuals). Or you could read a scholarly case that demons and gods were rendered into mere forces that Yahweh could and did control (Judit Blair).  Alternatively you could have Esther Hamori's God's Monsters that contends that all those monsters are all over the Hebrew Bible and that these terrors served at the beck and call of a God who is a ruthless and mercurial mobster.  Hamori also celebrates the necromancer of Endor as a woman who is described as having real power to really summon the dead prophet-judge Samuel and if the text tells us that's what happened that's what happened.  

Jeffrey Burton Russell wrote decades ago that the evolution of the devil is explicable in terms of getting God off the hook for permitting so much atrocity but at the same time theologians fretted that the devil shouldn't be granted so much power as to seem like a potential rival to God.  In Russell's account of the evolution of Western thought on the devil it is this eagerness to minimize the influence and significance of the devil that can be seen as the basis for the trajectory in Western favored atonement theories from the ransom theory to christus victor to satisfaction theory (Anselm) to the more refined variation of satisfaction theory known (and at times damned) as penal substitutionary atonement. Russell pointed out that with each successive atonement theory the devil is increasingly removed from having any role in the human need for salvation.  

What Russell didn't mention is that by the time we get to Friedrich Schleiermacher the liberal Prussian theologian jettisoned the doctrine of The Fall and all demons and the devil as unnecessary to a creedal Christian faith and inadequately accounted for by any biblical texts.  Schleiermacher was happy to jettison the entire unseen realm, to use the late Michael Heiser's idiom, because he didn't see it in the Apostle's Creed or the Nicene Creed so it was easily dispensed with.  

What becomes strikingly obvious if you were to go through, say Merrill Unger's Biblical Demonology and fundamentalist and evangelical writings about Satan and demons is that you find a lot of demonic exegesis taken for granted with zero explanation as to how these traditions emerged or why.  Cue Jeffrey Burton Russell and Peggy Day in the 20th century with attempts to explain how and why.  More recent work has been done by Ryan T Stokes and if you want to go old-school there's a slim book by G. B. Caird.  But the biggest reason a figure like Michael Heiser can sell so many books that academic theologians may urge you to not read is simple, a strictly biblicist take on the Bible gives you no explanation at all of what unclean spirits are, where they came from, what they actually do, and whether or not they are real.  Throw in theological paradigms like cessationism or dispensationalism and the waters become opaque rather than merely murky.  There is probably no field of theology where the gap between the leaders and laity is quite so big as it seems to be on the issue of demonology and spiritual warfare. 

Francis Young and Brivan Levack have both pointed out that hardline cessationism as an anti-Catholic polemical stance was taken up in the Anglican tradition partly to differentiate from Catholicism and also to delegitimize Catholic exorcism as magic and superstition.  On the Catholic side anxiety about the similarities exorcism had to magic was significant enough that the exorcistic formulas that were in the earliest baptismal rites were progressively cut out over a few centuries.  Jason Storm could probably point out that this would be part of the triangular dynamic of legitimate religion, illegitimate superstition and science.  What gets counted as legitimate can change over time.  

Popular belief in demons or the restless dead haven't gone away over a thousand or so years.  If it seems that way because we are modern and "Western" ignore that.  Only a modern post-industrial Western society could keep cranking out films about exorcisms.  This year the United States had successful theatrical releases for anime like Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle and Chainsaw Man, to say nothing of K-Pop Demon Hunters becoming popular. The conceit that the spirit of a restless dead girl could become a full-blown demon was a story line in Rumiko Takahashi's manga Inuyasha decades ago.  Mira being half human and half demon just means she's a new variation on a trope that Inuyasha and countless other tales have had.  

Those are the kinds of things that persist in popular imagination even if academic theologians want to talk about other things like political theology or maybe how "we" are all Christian nationalists now.  In those kinds of moments I am reminded that the Swiss Reformed lay theologian Emil Brunner remarked that the questions that interest and trouble the layman tend to be both more interesting and more difficult than the questions beloved by professional theologians.  

What progressive scholars have regularly noted is that there's never a conversation about demons without talking about who the demons are and how often and reliably the demons or the demonized are "other", people who don't fit into the ideal/idealized culture that people in ivory towers talk about.  The paradoxical aspect of this observation is that in the 21st century progressives tend to demonize socially conservative evangelical Protestants and integralist Catholics.  It's not that I can't understand how and why progressives and secularists could think and feel that way, I'm merely noting the paradox.  The impulse is so strong, apparently, to bracket the unwanted others as demonic in some capacity, that even those who profess to reject such moves on principle can't help making those moves in dealing with and addressing flesh and blood movements they don't want prevailing upon the seats of power.

What I have been finding curious in reading about music is that I find the concept of ethnic or national essentialism to have had what I would regard as actually demonic effects.  Maybe liberal Protestantism turned to intersubjectivity as a way to get past the impasse of the Cartesian split but if the intersubjective modes at hand turned out to be race and nation (per Theodore Vial's work on some arguably bad side effects of thinking about group identity in Schleiermacher) then there is a sense in which some of the most pressing problems of social cohesion and neighborly living in the 21st century had roots in what liberal Prussian Protestants thought was a grand solution to the problem of a lack of German cohesion in the face of Napoleonic conquests in the long 19th century.

What I'm mulling over offline is how it seems partisans of absolute music cordon off a lot of black American music as inferior because there is some inherently lesser range of possibilities in the "musical material".  Now that is manifestly nonsense and I'm not going to rehearse all the blogging I've done in the last ten years toward the aim of advocating for ragtime and blues based sonatas and fugues.  But the social constructivist associationist rebuttal to the racism in partisans of absolute music has not, I think, been able to successfully surmount the problem of tethering musical materials to racialized expression.  To say that all music is racially linked is, unfortunately, conceding the very point antiracists should most want to reject and for obviously understandable reasons.  That is why I have leaned toward steering away from theories of ethnos and race altogether toward how we proprioceptively engage musical time and space.  I don't even have binocular vision, actually, but I can get how we live through space and time by way of integrated senses and this is something we can talk about regardless of our skin color, ethnic heritage, or self-identification by way of race.

I think the antiracists want some great things that a constructivist conception of all music as racially produced will probably prevent them from attaining.  Conversely, the absolutists in absolute music tend to be intellectually dishonest about the alleged impossibility of certain types of musical material to be compatible with "musical argument".  

What can be fruitful about a deep dive into histories of demonologies is something some progressives and secular scholars have pointed out, that who gets demonized should be something we think about.  But there's a more basic intra-scholastic question that needs to be asked, if today's scholars feel obliged to combat the demons their scribal forebears put to page what demons are those scholars creating now that future scholar-scribes may feel compelled to denounce generations from now? 

In Christian theological terms I can appreciate Emil Brunner's terse statement that fundamentalists tend to want to have detailed taxonomies of demons but the Bible is equivocal and unclear; more important for Christians is to say that Christ defeated and overcame all these powers.  

On the other hand, I think Robert Ewusie Moses made a good counterpoint in his book Practices of Power, that Christian life and the life of the mind for a Christian entails confronting what powers and principalities Christ overcame in each age and living in light of that.  I.e. James Cone could assert Christ overcame the powers of white supremacism on the Cross.  I'll say "Amen" to that even if I'm not sure Cone didn't go way, way off the rails in later work after Black Theology and Black Power. 

Given how much tension and debate I've seen within musicology on the legacy of racial essentialist theories about what music X is or music Y isn't, someone like Heiser floating the idea that the biblical literature suggests the possibility of malign spiritual forces being behind anything like that may be rampantly speculative but it's not necessarily more rampantly speculative than advocating for figural readings of passages from The Book of Numbers ... is it? 

I may not be impressed with Heiser's work by the time I finally finish it but it's also not really unfair to ask whether or not the failure of Western academic theologians to address these issues (if they're doctrinally conservative) hasn't made it all the easier for figures like Heiser to simply introduce mainstream scholarly ideas about henotheism in the Levant to otherwise evangelical readers.

Appeals to, say, how the oracle to the King of Tyre in Ezekiel refers to Satan without even explaining why cuts the feet out from under any objection that someone like Heiser has become popular.

Pointing out that Jews have never interpreted the oracle in that way is something Hector Patmore discussed at length in a book published by Brill but I'm trying to wrap up this special links-for-the-weekend post by now.

So it's done. :)