More About the Divine Council

I dislike systematic theology as a way of learning about the Bible: Dispensationalism, Calvinism, Replacement Theology, Covenant Theology, Amillennialism — you name it. “Isms cause schisms,” it is said. This testimony is true.

“Isms” also build weak Bible students who accept other men’s assumptions uncritically.

Yet Another Theological System

To be fair to system-builders, the creation of systems is unavoidable, whether we accept someone else’s pre-constructed package whole hog or assemble our own subconsciously from repeated reading of the Word. The “hyperlinked” view of the Bible means we are constantly using one scripture to help interpret another, and what we arrive at when we do must be described somehow, somewhere. Voila: a system.

Like it or not, the divine council worldview is yet another theological system, complete with proof texts and wordy explanations, whether we get it from Michael Heiser’s The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible or from someone else with similar notions about how God operates. To my mind, the spiritual value of any system may be discerned by comparing the number and magnitude of the scriptural difficulties it creates with the seriousness of the difficulties it resolves and the number of solutions to which it points. Assessed by that standard, some systems are definitely better than others.

For a theological system, I have to say this one does much more of the latter than the former. Today, let’s look at four more ways the divine council worldview points toward the truth rather than away from it.

9/ A Rationale for the Obscurity of Messianic Prophecy

Years of Bible reading had made me increasingly aware that many of the Old Testament’s messianic prophecies are frustratingly cryptic and not much use in evangelism unless the unsaved person never bothers to look them up for himself. Rarely do the words “that it might be fulfilled” point backward to something crystal clear. I had no answer for this. Heiser does:

“By God’s design, the Scripture presents the messiah in terms of a mosaic profile that can only be discerned after the pieces are assembled. Paul tells us why in 1 Corinthians 2:6-8. If the plan of God for the messiah’s mission had been clear, the powers of darkness would never have killed Jesus — they would have known that his death and resurrection were the key to reclaiming the nations forever.”

Yes, even his own angels didn’t know what God was doing:

“The story of the cross is the biblical-theological catalyst to God’s plan for regaining all that was lost in Eden. It couldn’t be emblazoned across the Old Testament in transparent statements. It had to be expressed in sophisticated and cryptic ways to ensure that the powers of darkness would be misled. And it was. Even the angels didn’t know the plan (1 Pet 1:12).”

To the rejoinder that such subtleties are ‘beneath God’, one can only reply that if the Lord chooses to perfect strength in weakness and to destroy the wisdom of the world with apparent folly; if he chose to appear on earth as a man in abject humility and to die on a cross in shame; if he pitted one measly nation against the might of seventy to accomplish his purposes in this world; and if he chose to evangelize the planet with a mere eleven men — then God is manifestly not in the business of consulting us with respect to the appropriateness of his tactics.

10/ Affirmation of the Trinity, Especially in the OT

For someone who would purport to rob us of the word elohim as a title exclusive to God, Heiser’s divine council worldview is surprisingly orthodox with respect to the Trinity and its place far above anything else in the universe we might call gods. He not only finds the Trinity in the New Testament, but right in the oral and written law of the apparently-monotheistic children of Israel. Moreover, he finds it there repeatedly:

“How could God be here (visibly and physically) and still be in heaven? Today, this apparent conundrum is what keeps many Jews from embracing Christianity — it feels like polytheism to them.

The startling reality is that long before Jesus and the New Testament, careful readers of the Old Testament would not have been troubled by the notion of, essentially, two Yahwehs — one invisible and in heaven, the other manifest on earth in a variety of visible forms, including that of a man. In some instances the two Yahweh figures are found together in the same scene.”

Thus the divine council worldview strongly affirms a Trinitarian position.

11/ The Value of Biblical Truths Outside the Bible

The definitive answer to every inquiry or disagreement about meaning lies within the text of scripture. We must never use extra-biblical sources to dismiss its plain teaching. That said, there is considerable value to extra-biblical source material approached with appropriate discretion. For example, Plutarch’s first century use of the word ekklēsia clarified my understanding of what the writers of the New Testament intend by it. Likewise, my study of Chaldean flood stories reinforced my conviction that the Genesis flood account is history rather than myth. Again, Tobit, while not part of the canon, provides insight into life in Assyrian captivity we cannot find in the pages of the Old Testament.

Technically, even dictionaries and concordances are extra-biblical sources. Few students of scripture have trouble using them. I would be lost without them.

The divine council worldview is built on a foundation of numerous scriptures that cannot be lightly dismissed rather than on external source material. At the same time, Heiser’s Hebrew scholarship and familiarity with extra-biblical source material enable him to suggest possibilities otherwise opaque to the modern reader of God’s word. For example, archeological discoveries at Ugarit prompt this thought:

“In our discussion of Deuteronomy 32:8-9 I mentioned that the number of nations disinherited by Yahweh at the judgment of Babel was seventy. [See the table of nations in Genesis 10-11.] The number is telling. Israel’s nearest religious competition, the worship of El, Baal, and Asherah at Ugarit and in Canaan, held that their divine council had seventy sons. When Yahweh disinherited the nations and allotted them to the sons of God, a theological gauntlet was thrown down: Yahweh alone commands the nations and their gods. Other gods serve him.”

The value of such discoveries is limited and they must be quickly discarded if and when they contradict the word of God; nevertheless, this one is a remarkable coincidence. Likewise, apocryphal works have their uses, within limitations:

“The punishment for the transgression, however, is not mentioned in Genesis 6:1-4. Peter has the divine sons of God held captive in ‘Tartarus’ in chains of darkness until a time of judgment. Jude echoes the thought and clarifies the judgment as the day of the Lord (‘the great day’; cf. Zeph 1:1–7; Rev 16:14). These elements come from Jewish literature written between our Old and New Testaments (the ‘Second Temple’ period) that retell the Genesis 6 episode. The most famous of these is 1 Enoch. That book informed the thinking of Peter and Jude; it was part of their intellectual worldview. The inspired New Testament writers were perfectly comfortable referencing content found in 1 Enoch and other Jewish books to articulate their theology.”

Heiser’s footnote to this paragraph clarifies his view of the limited value of such extra-biblical information:

“None of this means 1 Enoch should be considered inspired. It shouldn’t and wasn’t. A handful of leaders in the early church gave it that status, and those who did eventually abandoned the idea.”

For the most part, I find Heiser’s use of extra-biblical material illuminating and suggestive. From what I have seen to date, he always handled extra-biblical sources with appropriate reserve.

12/ A Rationale for Demon Possession

Heiser’s use of extra-biblical contemporary literature to gain insight into how the writers of scripture freely referenced the supernatural is particularly useful in his discussion of demons. He points out that extra-biblical sources imply demons are actually the spirits of dead Nephilim.

“The New Testament is silent on the origin of demons. There is no passage that describes a primeval rebellion before Eden where angels fell from grace and became demons. The origin of demons in Jewish texts outside the Bible (such as 1 Enoch) is attributed to the events of Genesis 6:1-4. When a Nephilim was killed in these texts, its disembodied spirit was considered a demon. These demons then roamed the earth to harass humans. The New Testament does not explicitly embrace this belief, though there are traces of the notion, such as demon possession of humans (implying the effort to be re-embodied).”

The silence of the New Testament with respect to this issue makes it impossible to be dogmatic about how demons came to be demons. Heiser certainly is not. The disembodied Nephilim theory is, however, an interesting possibility, and it fits the minimal data about demons that we do have in scripture and is at least as plausible as the alternative hypothesis. The plea of the demons banished from Legion to be sent into a herd of pigs rather than summarily dismissed suggests the pathological desperation for embodiment of beings who had grown addicted to the experience of living in the physical realm.

In Summary

There are definitely more difficult questions and scriptural conundrums resolved by a divine council worldview, but I’ll stop at an even dozen. To frustrate his critics even further, before his death, Heiser created this website devoted to answering his readers’ questions about the book and providing further insights into its subject matter on a chapter-by-chapter basis. He was certainly not afraid to have his views scrutinized right down to the granular level.

I try to do “fair and balanced” when reviewing books, so tomorrow I’ll look at a couple of paragraphs in The Unseen Realm that I’m a little less comfortable with. Nothing major, and in any case, Mike is with the Lord now, so I’m sure he’s got his theology all straightened out.

One day I’ll have mine straightened out too.