Some forty years later, as a rainstorm broke, he led a group of friends at his
home on Block Island in a liturgical exorcism to banish from the place of his
household the presence of death after his dearest friend and companion, the
poet Anthony Towne, had died. For that liturgy he employed a rite, published
by the Bishop of Exeter, which Stringfellow had acquired and first utilized to
exorcise publicly President Richard Nixon on the eve of his second
inauguration.
Let no one consider these liturgical events either spooky or weird. Stringfellow
enjoyed regarding them with deadly seriousness as inherently political while in
practice having specifically to do with pastoral care and healing.
Jesus had no problem with it happening in the past; that does not make it acceptable now.
Reading it literally?
In any discussion of John’s Apocalypse it must be kept in mind that the big factor that got it included in the canon was that early Christians read it and saw in it the things happening all around them. To them, it was a Gospel message that whatever things looked like, the Kingdom continued coming, along with being a depiction of Jesus’ statement that the gates of Hades could not withstand His church.
Several translation teams have agreed that the main theme of the OT writings is the word חֶסֶד (khe-sed), which is also one of the hardest to translate despite appearing about two hundred fifty times. It gets rendered “grace”, “covenant love”, “lovingkindness”, “loving faithfulness”, “favor”, and more. That’s quite different from the notion of a violence-loving deity.
No flying in the text, and the sea was right there. The location on the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee there is steep, which is what both Matthew and Mark recorded.
I could never decided if that indicates punishment or consequences.
“Loving and merciful” comes together with “just” in the concept of חֶסֶד (khe-sed): smiting the unworthy, whether enemies or failures, is a part of faithfulness to His people and plan. We have trouble fitting the two together; ancient Hebrews would have had trouble separating them.
Note that this is apocalyptic language.
Especially when one considers that the church Fathers regarded the visible, physical Yahweh in the Old Testament to be the pre-incarnate Jesus – He does arrive on occasion bearing a sword, after all. Add in that Jude tells us that it was Jesus who led the Hebrews out of Egypt and “destroyed those who did not believe”.
Would that include the cult of the Nazarene. LOL “Cult” is just another word for religion, particularly when they are small and new. The pejorative flavor of the word is not undeserved because new religious groups tend to make mistakes and it takes time for them to learn what types of things should be avoided.
But I suppose you are talking about about pseudo-Christian groups, and while I have noticed some commonalities… that is not one of them – it frankly sounds like nonsense to me. Christianity embraces a great spectrum on the high and low views of God and Christ.
What I do see… is some favoring Revelation because it is so easy to interpret in many bizarre ways. I see them putting the burden of salvation on people in order make them do what they want them to do – even “lying for Jesus.” And I see them paying more attention to other publications than the Bible.
Unfortunately… we see quite a few groups within Christianity doing these things also.
Great point! After discovering Heiser, 1 Corinthians 2:8 never sounded the same again.
Longman has a good book on poltics called The Bible and the Ballot. I went back to look at the chapter on nationalism and found I highlighted this
In this passage, Moses pictures God as parceling out to the nations the “sons of God,” a well-known reference to angels. According to these verses, therefore, each nation has a spiritual being associated with it and with which it has a special relationship.
On top of that is the fact that different people have different ways of viewing places; one may think that the identifier for a place is its largest city, others might see it as being the oldest one, others might identify it by the name of someone famous from there.
I remember reading one source from sometime before the fifth century that argued that until Jesus ascended heaven as a place humans might end up didn’t exist, it was just Sheol with subdivisions.
One of my professors held that view.
That’s new to me! As is the archaeology. Nice reference.
My current sparsely-founded opinion is that babies in the new heavens and earth will grow up there.
True. A point against using it to justify violence today is the connection with the Nephelim/Anakim/Rephaim: all the peoples God said to wipe out fall into that category, so the only violence that could be justified would be if any of those were still around – and if Deuteronomy and Isaiah can be trusted, they all got eliminated.
No – the point of the slaughter was to set up conditions that would lead to the Incarnation. Since the Incarnation has happened, no more such violence is needed.
And the lesson of the Incarnation is that the Kingdom is everywhere that there are Christians, so the geographical imperatives that were involved no longer pertain.
But that didn’t apply to all Canaanites, just a specific set.
Jesus followed the same theme the Law had: He tweaked towards mercy.
Where would that be in the text?
Sure, Pope Richard.
Some yes, some no. The only way we can guess at how many of them are real these days is through Jewish lore and legend, and I don’t know of any numbers given except for the original such rebels who BTW Peter notes are chained in darkness.
But Paul speaks of them in the same terms as Jewish lore – principalities, powers – so we know at least some are still around.
I think I’ve told here before about the atheist psychiatrist who concluded demonic possession is real – while rejecting the idea that God is.
It fascinates me when themes in the Old Testament are teased out and taken seriously just how much of what was reported in the Gospels starts to look obvious because it arises right out of what the Messiah was supposed to be, Even the dialogue with the Devil at the start of Jesus’ ministry makes complete sense as the Adversary trying to get Jesus to give away the Plan.
I do not think accommodation is deception. If the people believe a psychotic condition is demon possession, and Jesus heals it, it is no more deceptive than if he heals a leper. It would serve no purpose if he were to say, “I balanced his neuro-transmitters.” Of course, the pigs and the sea part gets a little more difficult, but still may be necessary for the sign to be accepted in that culture, and represents Jesus’ authority over both physical and spiritual.
I admit that I struggle with how to deal with the spiritual realm of human existence, but sometimes think the real problem is more the somewhat Gnostic way of thinking that it exists separately from the physical rather than being integrated into the whole.
I don’t think accommodation is deception but I am not going to personally accept deception as accommodation. Fake conversations with fake demons is not accommodation, that would be deception to me.
The stories in the gospels go much further than mere healings. Jesus has full blown conversations with demons who know his hometown and who he is and he silences them and he teaches his disciples privately one kind only comes out with prayer. I went through a listing of them in Mark. Most of them are described as very public as well.
Someone is of course free to just reject the accuracy of these Biblical details which raises its own questions.
Jesus can and does perform exorcisms when they are needed. Jesus heals all illnesses when asked and within God’s purposes. But
The people of Bible times could not tell the difference between demonic possession and other ailments so they just claimed it all as demonic.
There is no deception by Jesus or Scripture. You just need to understand the context.
Scripture is the impressions of the day based on the knowledge and / or superstitions of the day. We read it in that context.
Otherwise Jesus is behaving and teaching contrary to Job, which states unequivocally that illness and disease is not caused by sin or healed by forgiveness.
No – the details are what build the message. Your fuzzy subjective view that treats scripture as the literary version of impressionistic painting where only the gestalt matters makes whatever you get from it your own invention, your own religion.
If that’s what you think, then all you will get from it is your own understanding of God, your personal religion.
Scripture is God’s authorized source.
It’s interesting to me that we never hear about demons until Jesus shows up – perhaps they tended to operate covertly but His presence brought them out openly?
Whatever the case, given the theme of Messiah as conquering king, it would be surprising indeed if Jesus hadn’t encountered them and defeated them frequently.
First, the Gospel writers recognized the difference between medical conditions and demon possession.
Second, it isn’t consistent with the second-Temple Jewish thought that prevailed at Jesus’ time.
Third, it isn’t consistent with the Old Testament roots of demonology and the Rephaim.
Fourth, it isn’t consistent with the ANE mytho-cosmology that Israel shared in.
Taking all but the first together, demons are the disembodied spirits of the Nephilim and their ilk the Anakim, Rephaim, etc. When they were killed their spirits didn’t get stuck in Sheol since they were not fully human, so their spirits were left stuck in/on this world.
Yes, it’s nice to ignore demons this side of the Enlightenment, but it isn’t consistent with scon-Tmple, biblical, or ANE mytho-cosmology.
Okay, so the best way to avoid falling is to not believe in gravity (or to fall towards the ground and miss)?
This ties in with the second-Temple understanding of how evil entered the world. We look at the Garden stories and put the blame on the Serpent, but the rabbis back then would have added the Genesis 6 situation where heavenly beings (elohim) to whom God assigned to the various nations to guide them walked off the job and fooled people into worshiping them as gods and then the situation at Babel where – relying on “the rest of the story” from Jewish lore – yet another batch of elohim enticed people to build a ‘high place’ to which people could come and meet with them as their ‘gods’. At each of these three points the situation for humans got worse.
Which demonstrates that the people then recognized that these situations were not all the same and so distinguished them.
The parable of the tenants isn’t about the Temple, it’s about those entrusted to guard and guide Israel. The cursing of the fig tree is about the nation of Israel which had the forms of bearing fruit but no actual fruit. Cleansing the Temple is about limiting access to God. Jesus’ answer to the challenge of His authority is about faithless leaders who put their own benefit above that of their people and who failed to recognize their Messiah. The bit about David’s son is a hint that the promised son is standing right there in front of them. The widow’s offering comment indicates that despite all the failure of leadership and of the nation as a whole there are still some who pledge their lives to God. And the statement about the “marvelous stones” reads as nothing more than a statement of what is coming – which in context is (just) a warning.
You have to go to Luke to get the punishment aspect; it just isn’t there in Mark.
Heh. I’ve always loved that verse because it puts Christ’s entire earthly ministry into a different perspective where Jesus is masterfully managing events to make sure it all leads to the Cross. When I was first listening to Heiser I remember thinking, "Get to that verse (meaning 1 Corinthians 2:8) because it was clear he was headed that way.
Not just angels but the highest ones who sat on Yahweh’s council.
If each nation now has an elohim matched to it, it would be because the rest agreed on dividing up territory – there’s no indication that God ever made new assignments.
I would be suspicious that assignment probably isn’t strictly one-to-one to the set of modern conceptions of what is a “nation”, but might have some additional (e.g. ethnic), current border-crossing, or multi-country assignments.
Would someone who considers supernatural entities to be an accommodation in Scripture go so far to say supernatural experiences today, whether they be demonic or holy, are a result of a mental lapse or illness.
Like my experience of feeling that Jesus touched my soul in a moment of profound grief, would that be purely biochemical for the “Waltonist”?
