ANONYMOUS SAID:
Hey Steve, this touches slightly on something that I've had a lot of questions on. Are unclean spirits still operating in the same manner that they did during the first century? I realize that some of the people in the time of Jesus had mental ailments that they were set free from, but unclean spirits were cast out of others. Do unclean spirits still possess people today? Why or why not? Is there anything in the Bible that can clear this up one way or the other? Thanks, Bro!
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2007/02/out-of-eden.html#comments
A good place to start is the article by Vern Poythress:
http://www.frame-poythress.org/poythress_articles/1995Territorial.htm
The short answer to your question is, yes, I believe that spiritual warfare, including the occult, is a fixture of the church age.
The early church had a category of persons called energumen. This included demoniacs, but it was a broader classification. It also included individuals who, while they were not evidently possessed, did exhibit paranormal powers of one sort or another.
I think we need to draw a number of distinctions:
1.There are demoniacs. This is the most extreme case of occultic bondage.
2. Beyond that extreme are individuals who exhibit paranormal powers. This isn’t necessarily diabolical.
It’s possible for God to give a Christian a prophetic dream or premonition of death or deathbed vision, &c.
3.Then there’s the question of whether a Christian can be subject to occultic influence. I’m talking about something less extreme than possession. There are a number of ways in which this might possibly happen:
4.An individual may have dabbled in the occult before he came to Christ. Even as a Christian, there is some lingering influence from his exposure to the dark side.
5.A Christian may have a family background in which parents or grandparents or other close relatives were trafficking with the dark side, and the child inherits their paranormal abilities. This would be a mediumistic form of occultic empowerment or oppression.
6.A Christian may unwittingly live in a haunted house—or a missionary may live in an area permeated by the occult.
Where the source of the problem is external (#6), the simplest solution, and perhaps the only solution, is to leave the area.
Where the influence is internal (#4-5), Kurt Koch and Martyn Lloyd-Jones have helpful advice (see below).
Since the evidence is anecdotal, I don’t think we can be dogmatic one way or the other. But experience can be a genuine source of knowledge.
For Further Reading:
The Haunting of Bishop Pike: A Christian View of the Other Side (Tyndale House 1971)
by Merrill Frederick Unger
Demon Possession: Papers Presented at the University of Notre Dame (Bethany House 1975)
by John Montgomery (Editor)
Occult Bondage and Deliverance (Kregel 2006)
by Kurt E. Koch
Occult ABC (Kregel 1978)
by Kurt E. Koch
Christian Counseling and Occultism (Kregel 1972)
by Kurt E. Koch
Healing and the Scriptures (T. Nelson 1988)
by David Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Glimpses of the Devil: A Psychiatrist's Personal Accounts of Possession, Exorcism, and Redemption (Free Press 2005)
by M. Scott Peck
An Exorcist Tells His Story (Ignatius Press 1999)
by Gabriele Amorth (Author), Nicoletta V. Mackenzie
An Exorcist: More Stories (Ignatius Press 2002)
by Gabriel Amorth (Author), Nicoletta V. Mackenzie
Hostage to the Devil: The Possession and Exorcism of Five Contemporary Americans (HarperSanFrancisco 1992)
by Malachi Martin
http://theconstructivecurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2006/07/carl-jung-beware.html
Thanks Steve!
ReplyDeleteI have a very hard time believing in haunted houses and the like. Now, there are always various "excuses" (can't think of a better word) Christians give for not being able to show God directly, but those same restrictions shouldn't apply to ghosts and demons. Proof of the existence of a demon or a ghost would definitely make the existence of God more plausible (for me, at least), yet it seems like all of these are unverifiable (and mostly, from my experience, supported by whackos).
ReplyDeleteI can't think of a good reason to believe in hauntings or ghosts. This seems like this is an empirical question. Why isn't it more obvious to people?
Try consulting some of the standard academic literature on the subject:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.amazon.com/Survival-Human-Consciousness-Essays-Possibilities/dp/0786427728
http://www.amazon.com/There-Afterlife-Comprehensive-Overview-Evidence/dp/1903816904
http://www.amazon.com/There-After-Examination-Empirical-Evidence/dp/0786421169
http://www.amazon.com/Hauntings-Poltergeists-Multidisciplinary-James-Houran/dp/0786409843
Here are two, more recent works:
ReplyDeleteThe Truth Behind Ghosts, Mediums, & Psychic Phenomena. Ron Rhodes (Harvest House, 2006; ISBN#: 0-7369-1907-4).
SpellBound: The Paranormal Seduction of Today's Kids. Marcia Montenegro, foreword by Norman Geisler (Cook, 2006; ISBN#: 0-7814-4360-1).
To save some of us the money of going out and buying this academic literature on hauntings, could you describe some of the scientific evidence for these things?
ReplyDeleteAnonymous said...
ReplyDeleteTo save some of us the money of going out and buying this academic literature on hauntings, could you describe some of the scientific evidence for these things?
*******
It's generally possible to get books via interlibrary loan via your local public library.
You can listen to Ron Rhodes talk about his book (mentioned above) here:
ReplyDeletePart 1 (starts about 1/2 way through) and
Part 2.
Anonymous said...
ReplyDeleteTo save some of us the money of going out and buying this academic literature on hauntings, could you describe some of the scientific evidence for these things?
******
steve said...
It's generally possible to get books via interlibrary loan via your local public library.
******
Steve, to save us time and money, could you explain what modal logic is so that we may understand what you mean by "possible," here?
:-)
~Anonymous
I think Steve should just plug us all into the Matrix and let us learn everything without any effort or cost.
ReplyDeleteYou know, the way it's always been done....
Anonymous said.
ReplyDelete"I have a very hard time believing in haunted houses and the like. Now, there are always various "excuses" (can't think of a better word) Christians give for
not being able to show God directly, but those same restrictions shouldn't apply
to ghosts and demons."
This will depend on the precise nature of the phenomeon we're dealing with here. Since
you haven't explained this, I don't see any reason to suppose that there is a plausible
distinction to be made here between God and ghosts.
Quite to the contrary. . . .
If we suppose that ghosts are actual disembodied persons, with some significant
degree of psychological continuity with formerly living persons, then I'd say there
is good reason to suppose that actual and recognizable communications from
the dead would restricted in a variety of ways.
(1) If a person survives death, then if he is able and willing to communicate with
living persons, he's most likely to communicate with people he loved and knew in
life, not just any Tom, Dick, and Harry. So the communication targets will be
selective, and this places a boundary on what we should expect in the way of
frequency of ghost experiences.
(2) On the assumption that the surviving person is disembodied, all interactions
with the physical world or living minds will presuppose psi-functioning (telepathy,
psychokinesis) in the disembodied, and most interactions will require psi-functioning
among the living.
But. . . .
(a) Not all selection targets will have the requisite degree of receptive psi-functioning,
such as the requisite degree of telepathic functioning. (You can try calling me, but
if my phone is dead or I'm deaf, you won't be successful).
(b) Not all disembodied persons will have the same degree of psi-functioning, so their
ability to "send information" will be limited.
(c) Communications between the living and the dead will probably depend on a kind
of telepathic calibration or fine-tuning between sender and receiver. This limits the
effective target group even more.
(3) A surviving disembodied person may not have any need or desire (or at least no
prolonged need or desire) to communicate with the living. Hence, we can't assume
that every surviving disembodied person would even have a desire to communicate
with the living, especially if what survives is something like the domain of the
unconscious mind. How often do you feel the need to seek out friends and family
while you are in REM state?
These are just three factors that reasonably set constraints on the frequency of
interactions between surviving disembodied persons and living agents. I haven't
considered other factors, such as "temporal windows" for effective communication
(which is suggested by the empirical evidence of documented apparitions of the
dead) which might be engendered by the very nature of survival itself.
Moreover, if we alter the ghost hypothesis so that it involves psychic interactions
between living agents (not dead-to-living communications), then you'll find rather
quickly that such experiences should probably not be common at all. Indeed,
they may depend on a convergence of various psychological and environmental
factors.
What needs explanation is not the fact that some or many people don't experience
alleged communications from the dead but the fact that there are a large number
of cases in which such claims are not easily explained by the usual suspects (e.g.,
fraud, imagination, malobservation, hallucinations). Hence, we must postulate
either a disembodied agent of some sort or simply psi-functioning among the living.
"Proof of the existence of a demon or a ghost would definitely make the existence of God more plausible (for me, at least), yet it seems like all of these are unverifiable (and mostly, from my experience, supported by whackos)."
Given that the recent Gallop Poll (conducted in 2005) showed that 3 out of 4
Americans hold at least one paranornal belief, and at least 1/3 believe in ghosts,
there must be a lot of wackos out there.
The problem of course is not that Americans are largely wackos (that may
very well be true). The problem is that some of the greatest minds of science
and philosophy have believed in the paranormal and in ghosts in particular.
I hardly think William James qualifies as a wacko. You might want to read
Deborah Blum's recent book *Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search
for Scientific Proof of Life after Death*.
More to the point, your criticism overlooks the fact that the better cases of
apparitions, near death experiences, mediumistic communication, and
spontaneous past life memories involve a veridical component. Hence, these
experiences do transmit information about the world than can be verified,
and in hundreds of cases the information has been verified by qualified
researchers. The only question is, what provides the best explanation for
the possession of significant veridical information? You're not going to get
much mileage out of the fraud hypothesis here.
"I can't think of a good reason to believe in hauntings or ghosts."
Unfortunately, this may be indicative only of your lack of consideration of
the ostensible evidences. What putative reasons have you actually considered?
Have you read any of the literature on this topic produced by philosophers
or survival researchers, say in the last 15 years?
"This seems like this is an empirical question."
It is in part an empirical question, and that's why there's a fairly
extensive range of ostensible empirical evidences of survival, from
near death experiences to mental mediumship.
"Why isn't it more obvious to people?"
How many people must it be obvious to?
I think far more people claim to have such experiences that you are willing
to admit. See Dean Radin's *Entangled Minds* (chapter 3) for the results
of various polls dealing with psi-phenomena. Gallop's website has some
good data on this too.
But there's no good reason to suppose ghosts or other kinds of psychic
phenomena should be so obvious. Even if psi-caused
events are very common, there's no good reason to suppose that they would
stand out like a sore thumb. Many psi-events may be observationally
indistinguishable from events that are engendered through standard causal
processes. They would only differ in their actual causal histories, not what
we can observe. This point has been developed in some detail by Stephen
Braude in his *Limits of Influence*.
The issue is not whether it is obvious to people that ghosts exist but whether there are good reasons to believe that they do, however unobvious it may be to some people. For much the same reason that people reject the conclusion of theistic arguments, they reject the conclusion of arguments for survival. The conclusion doesn't fit with their metaphysical naturalism or their belief that consciousness cannot exist without a functioning brain. Religious people too have a viewpoint from which they see things, and this viewpoint frequently generates a blindness to the kinds of issues involved in assessing putative empirical evidences for survival.
What you see depends on your sight and your sight is, as Plato noted a long time ago, potentially shackled by your own presuppositions.
Michael
Thought you might find it interesting to look at my blog: richard monaco occult science and religion.
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