We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded by your direct support for ReKnew and our vision. Please consider supporting this project.

Do Angels and Demons Really Exist?
While the supremacy of God is never qualified in the Bible, this supremacy is not strictly autocratic. Other “gods” or spiritual entities like angels and demons are not mere puppets of the God of the Bible. Rather, they appear to be personal beings who not only take orders but also are invited to give input to their Sovereign (see 1 Kings 22:20; Is 6:8). They collectively constitute a type of “heavenly counsel.” These gods never rival the Creator’s authority. Thus they are never construed as major competing deities.
In sharp contrast to the Augustinian monopolizing view of divine sovereignty, the sovereign One in this concept invites and responds to input from both his divine and human subjects. The supplications and decisions of his creatures genuinely affect him, to the point where he may even altar previous plans in response to his creatures’ requests and behavior.
This notion that there exists a council, or a society, of divine beings between humans and God who, like us, have free wills and can therefore influence the flow of history for better or for worse, is obviously jarring to a number of Western worldview assumptions. Indeed, for many believers it is foreign to their Western Christian assumptions as well. For a variety of reasons, Westerners have trouble taking seriously the “world in between” us and God. Even when Westerners do theoretically acknowledge the existence of “angels,” we tend to view them as mindless, volitionless, wholly innocuous marionettes completely controlled by the will of their Creator.
If we take the biblical teaching on gods seriously, we must confess that our Western assumptions are erroneous. Indeed, the “heavenly” world largely overlaps our “earthly” world and can hardly be said to form two worlds at all. The “world in between” is, from a scriptural perspective, simply part of the cosmos.
This stands in contrast to the Greek metaphysical assumption which has shaped our Western worldview that the “heavenly” is composed of timeless “forms” that lack all contingency, a notion that exercised a profound influence on Christian theology and contributed to the church’s eventual abandonment of a warfare worldview.
In Scripture, as opposed to the dominant Hellenistic philosophical tradition that so influenced Augustine and other theologians of his day, there was nothing “heavenly” about being timeless, immutable, purely actual and devoid of contingency. There was nothing “perfect” about being an “Unmoved Mover” (Aristotle), and no sense could be made of saying that “time is the moving image of eternity” (Plato). Though it forms the cornerstone of the classical tradition of the Western church, no biblical author ever dreamed of such a notion.
The Bible depicts a “heavenly” world that parallels the “earthly” world, one where freedom and contingency in the “earthly” world has its counterparts in the counsel of heaven. The two worlds overlap and influence one another.
Because of our indebtedness to Greek thought through the classical view of God as well as our indebtedness to Enlightenment naturalism, modern Westerners have difficulty affirming the existence of—let alone the significant freedom and power of—this “world in between.” For these reasons many conservative theologians have difficulty positing genuine contingency in God himself.
But this theological tradition, more than anything else, is what creates the problem we have with explaining the nature of evil. In biblical terms, the evil experienced today—whether the beheading of martyrs or earthquakes—might be the result of evil human intentions. Or it might be due to a malicious “prince” over a part of the world, or some other cosmic power. None of these acts of evil could be an ordained feature of a secret blueprint God has for the whole world.
The character of God can remain untarnished in the face of the terrifying dimensions of our experience only to the degree that our view of the free, contingent world in between us and God is robust. Only to the extent that we unambiguously affirm that angels and humans have significant power to thwart God’s will and inflict suffering on others can we unambiguously affirm the goodness of God in the face of the evil being manifest in our world today.
-Adapted from God at War pages 130-141
Image by jslee_ via Flickr
Category: Q&A
Tags: Angels, Demons, Evil, Free Will, Spiritual Warfare, Warfare Worldview
Topics: Spiritual Warfare, Cosmic Conflict
Related Reading

Podcast: Is It God Withdrawing OR Is It a Scheme of Satan?
Sometimes evil is attributed to God withdrawing. Sometimes it is attributed to a scheme of Satan. We are called to respond to each differently. So, must we be able to discern which is the case in any given situation? http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0189.mp3

4 Reasons to Believe in a Spiritual Realm
For the last century, a large number of theologians and church leaders have claimed that the biblical view of spiritual warfare—where there is an actual realm where angels and demons exist—is no longer believable. The influential German scholar, Rudolf Bultmann famously wrote, “It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail…

Ralph D. Winter Lectureship
Greg has been invited to give this year’s lectures for “The Ralph D. Winter Lectureship,” this April 25 and 26. Greg’s lectures will be on the Biblical Warfare Worldview and its implications for understanding evil, especially “natural” evil and for our understanding of the Christian Life and missions. Greg will also join a panel of…

Grieving
Henning Mühlinghaus via Compfight Here’s a post by Rachel Held Evans about the shootings in Connecticut today. From the post: So let’s grieve together. And let’s give one another the space to be shocked, to be pissed, to appeal to God, to be angry with God, to find peace in God, to question God, to…

If salvation depends on our free choice, how are we saved totally by grace?
Question: I’m an Arminian-turned-Calvinist, and the thing that turned me was the realization that if salvation hinges on whether individuals choose to be saved or not, as Arminians and Open Theists believe, then we can’t say salvation is 100% by grace. If we have to choose for or against God, then the credit for our…

The Warfare We Have Inherited
Image by Chris Sardegna Jesus’ miracles over nature, as well as his healings, exorcisms and especially his resurrection, were definite acts of war that accomplished and demonstrated his victory over Satan. These acts routed demonic forces and thereby established the kingdom of God in people’s lives and in nature. But their primary significance was eschatological. People…