Shabbat shalom y’all,
The best bits of the Bible are the monsters. The heads, the horns, the ghosts, the angels, the satyrs and screech owls. They captivate and exercise the imagination to a fuller capacity, espousing theologies that bend over backwards trying to domesticate these wild beasts of the soul.
I started listing to the adventist podcast, Bible and Beast, to see if they un/covered adventism’s metaphysics about spirits or monsters. I was hoping for more, but I think we have different goals with our work. This weeks post is kind of in dialogue with Dr. Pierce, but mostly a culmination of my lifetime fascination with the odd beings mentioned in the Bible and a curiosity as to what their presences tell us. What we think of the non-human says more about how we perceive ourselves than anything else.
The more I’ve worked on this week’s post the more it evolved into a list of questions about spirits, less so about monsters. Would be happy to hear your answers or further questions.
Opening questions:
What is a spirit to you? Have you ever felt a spirit or something invisible? Could you share the experience? What do you believe about spirits? Where did you learn those beliefs? Are they real? Can they read your thoughts? Are they around you all the time or just at certain times? Are there spirits besides God/angels and Satan/demons? What do you believe about other cultures’ spirits? Demons? Superstitions? Real?
Old Testament:
The Witch of Endor summons the ghost of Samuel. Adventists retcon this story by claiming that Satan impersonated the ghost of Samuel. What do we get out of changing this story? Well, we get out of the position of discussing the reality of ghosts within and without the Bible. If it’s Satan, then we can say that about any and every instance of spiritual presence that feels whatever we deem “ungodly”. Then we can just say every other human being in existence who has seen or felt something “weird” was deceived by the devil.
God is said to have a court of spiritual beings. As Christians, how do we relate to the members of the court? In the book of Job, Satan is a member of God’s court. What do we make of that?
The goddess Asherah was demonized by patriarchal Bible writers while archaeology shows she was a widely revered part of Ancient Judaism as YHWH’s consort. As Christians, how do we interpret this eradicated history of Asherah? How do we engage with her reality?
New Testament:
In the New Testament, one can be possessed by daimons as well as the Holy Spirit. Is possession inherently bad? Or is it a matter of what you let possess you?
Jesus appeared when John the Revelator was “in spirit” (1:10). Are spiritually receptive states a cornerstone of the Christian experience? How often do we engage in such states?
The earliest gospel, Mark, describes Jesus as being possessed by the Holy Spirit, which is where his healing and exorcising authority began:
Mark 3:19-22– Then he went home; and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.” And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.”
Do we tend to align with Jesus, being spiritually activated to the point of being accused of demon possession, or of his community, accusing others’ spiritual experiences of being deceptions of demons?
Mark 16:17, 18– And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out daimons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.
At the time of Mark’s composition“daimons” did not refer to fallen angels, but rather to spiritual forces or beings that include spirits of nature, creative genius (genii), as well as malicious lingering human spirits. How does that inform our relation to the state of the dead and the dead themselves?
1 Corinthians 12: 4-11– Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services… to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.
Does this imply that interaction with/commanding of spirits were part of the early Christian mission? Should some Christians be well-versed in demonology?
2 Corinthians 11:14– Satan masquerades as an angel of light.
What would this look like? Ministers calling other pastors demon possessed and justifying their execution? A white Jesus used to empower America’s military industrial complex and its agendas? How do we know we’re not already deceived?
A valuable secular approach to the metaphysics of spiritual entities is the metaphor of Flatland. If you haven’t heard of it before, do watch the video! In their book, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained, Rice University professor of comparative religion Jeffrey Kripal and UFO experiencer Whitley Strieber wrote what I think is a compelling description of the nature of spirits in relation to our stories about them:
[Supernatural or spiritual] experiences might represent an encounter with other actual species, invisible life-forms existing in some other dimension of the natural world that overlaps with ours and whose occasional rupture into our dimension is always mediated by our cultural imagination… it appears that the visitors “were somehow trying to hide themselves in our folklore.”
Closing questions:
What unseen forces do you perceive in your life that seem to have a mind of their own?
Is God a spirit?
Is the Bible a spirit?
Are you a spirit?
How can we as Adventists learn from cultures that have other conceptualizations of spirits?
Thanks for reading.