I've been listening to a lot of Heiser recently. I can't speak for the review itself as I personally haven't read Unseen Realm (though it's on the list) but I find him quite stimulating. Yeah there's points I might not agree with but I do find he's quite good not only as to the biblical theology, but also breaking it down so that people who haven't read as much of the academic sources can benefit.
Thanks, Swrath. That's more or less my current thinking about Heiser too, though I also haven't read Unseen Realm, but I mean based on other things I've seen of his.
The comment about "a man with a hammer" is perfect description of the main deficiency of Heiser's work. I am repeatedly frustrated with Dr. Heiser. Or to be more accurate, I am frustrated with those who follow him.
To be fair, I am a PhD candidate in OT, so I am in the demographic of people who are already familiar with the material Heiser discusses (I had actually read his UW dissertation before he ever wrote the Unseen Realm). As he himself says repeatedly, he is making material that is common in OT scholarship accessible.
So when I read Heiser and then I read people who act like what he says is some huge breakthrough, I am non-plussed. But again, in my clear thinking times, I recognize that a lot of what he says is new to his audience.
And I do really appreciate his explicit supernaturalism. He is DEAD ON that a lot of western Christians have lost this worldview and absolutely must recover it. In that sense his worldview is much more biblical than the average American Christian's.
The problem is, Heiser goes way too far (most scholars with a specialization do), and his followers latch on and ride the wave. Heiser makes the divine council the key to all biblical theology. He is like a Bart Erhman in one sense: His data is usually correct (for the most part), his theological conclusions are horrifically off.
Another way to verbalize his errors is to say, Heiser makes foreground what is deliberately in the background. Now obviously, Heiser and his fans would say you have to understand the background to understand the foreground, and that is true to an extent, but there is still a major issue when you background the foreground, and foreground the background and then try to come up with a biblical theology.
I get why it's popular. It is sensational and interesting. It just frustrates me how many people get caught up in Heiser's sensational material about the divine council and start making it the key to their own understanding of the whole Bible. Heiser tends to downplay individual sin and evil in his highlighting of spiritual beings and evil. It is simply undeniable that the biblical account foregrounds individual human sin and backgrounds warring spiritual powers. Heiser reverses those two and makes his biblical theology all about what is going on in the unseen realm. Consider the Bible Projects series on Spiritual Beings (which reflects Heiser's theology very well, he was a supervisor for the scripts). The videos are fantastic and so right about so much. But what is missing?
There is a reason that the Bible has NOTHING comparable to literature like the Baal cycle in it. And that is because the theological emphasis of the entire Bible is not on all the political interaction between heavenly beings. Getting too into that, and trying to make your theology all about spirits and their territorial control is exactly the kinda stuff Paul was warning against in Timothy when he mentions not getting into spiritual speculation and genealogies and stuff. If you read all of Paul's letters and all of Heiser's work you see that their priorities are exactly reversed. Both cover the same ground, but each are primarily interested in two different things.
I think you’re misunderstanding Heiser. His argument is that the parallels to Baal are meant as a polemical device against those who worshipped Baal. Yahweh is the cloud rider, NOT Baal. That’s the point. A very similar thing could be said about the author of Genesis. God is depicted as speaking the world into existence which is very similar to a story about the Egyptian god Ptah. Heiser would say that the author is deliberately using an ancient reader’s understanding of that story to contradict Egyptian religion.
Because of how consuming the sensationalism in his teaching is, I generally avoid recommending him to lay people. My opinion is this (which Heiser and his fans would call anathema): You can understand the Bible's storyline more than sufficiently, without ever thinking about the Divine Council. Sure, some of your understanding will be anemic at some points, sometimes more, sometimes less, but you can get the general gist of the main point. You can be 80% right without ever knowing about the Divine Council. On the other hand, Heiser's understanding of the Bible's storyline and meta-narrative is 80% false, 20% right. So which would you rather be, right about the Divine Council and misunderstanding the Bible as a whole? Or understanding the Bible as a whole, but missing a few things? I think there are better sources for understanding the supernatural and divine council, that avoid the over-reading of those things (granted they do not exist for more general audiences and that is a problem).
I am astonished at how many reformed are in love with his work. The other problem is that non-specialists don't realize the disconnect between Heiser's data and his theology. When Heiser says that what he is saying is widely recognized in OT scholarship, he is right, but only in the way I've qualified. His seeing the Divine Council everywhere, and his reading every text in light of Gen 6 and the conflict between spiritual powers (Nephilim and purebloods) is not at all recognized in OT scholarship. His reading is VERY idiosyncratic in the world of OT scholarship (believing and non-believing).
I remember once when in my PhD coursework, after a seminar, discussing Heiser with three OT PhDs (including one of the endorsers of his book) and a fellow OT PhD candidate (who was one of the most brilliant people I ever met). And our general consensus was his reading of the storyline of the Bible in light of the unseen realm's warfare, is totally wrong. (E.g., Like reading the conquest as a destroying of mixed bloodlines).
For example, Heiser reads Amos 2:9 as evidence that the Amorites were cross-breeds between humans and spiritual beings. Because they are described as giants. However, even cursory reading in the Bible and especially other ANE material will show that describing your enemies with language like "tall as cedars" was not a reference to literal giants of cross human-elohim heritage, but simply a poetic way to say "they were big and strong and scary"
I don't mean that Heiser's readings (on this or that text) are 80% wrong, although I see how my specific example might have sounded that way. My number "estimate" was just meant to express that Heiser's biblical theology as a whole (and he has developed quite a robust and full biblical theology across all his works) is mostly wrong (sometimes just in what he emphasizes and minimizes, so not even in facts). So I find myself often saying to Heiser's work "Yes ... but that isn't really the main point..."
So just like Bart Erhman is correct to say "there are X number of variants" but wrong to make the conclusion "therefore the content of the Bible is untrustworthy and even uncertain."
I would say Heiser is right to say, "This is in the background of this writing" and then wrong in the theology he builds (again, sometimes only in emphasis).
I would say that you would have a better idea of the Bible's metanarrative by reading Goldsworthy's or Beale's biblical theologies (which either hardly or don't at all interact with the divine council motif) than you would by reading Heiser. The random number I generated in my (subjective opinion) is you'd be 80% right about the metanarrative of the Bible (and the biblical emphasises) reading Beale, Goldsworthy, Desmond Alexander, etc, but if you were to read Heiser you'd only be 20% right.
My way of summarizing Heiser's missed emphasises is that Heiser downplays (or sometimes almost ignores) individual sin and God's wrath against sinners (and attendant ideas such as covenant), and up-plays cosmic warfare and God's wrath against fallen spiritual beings. Of course, Heiser wouldn't deny human responsibility, but the key is how central each element is to his system. Heiser makes divine council politics the center of his theology. I say a theology built around that is going to be mostly wrong (even just in emphasis).
As an example: assume I believe in the doctrine of reprobation (I do). If I built a biblical theology whose central controlling idea was the idea of reprobation, and I read the whole biblical storyline in light of reprobation, saw it driving everything, and said you couldn't understand the Bible at all without understanding reprobation, the final product will be way off. Even though reprobation is true.
Besides that metanarrative stuff, I have the normal scholarly more technical quibbles here and there. Heiser is selective in sources sometimes. So he makes a lot of the book of Enoch and acts like it represents THE Jewish view at the time, but that conclusion is dubious at best. Even if his reading of Enoch is spot on. And then of course anything he conclusively states on that basis is going to be less shaky than he makes it appear. There is a trend in OT scholarship to make too much of too little. You have to try, so I'm not arguing against that. But often the conclusions are far more modestly based than you would realize based on the way scholars present their conclusions. Anytime you read any OT scholar say something like, "This was THE view of Mesopotamians at the time" or "this was THE view of Egyptians of the middle kingdom," take that with a grain of salt. That is like saying, "Cultural Marxism was THE view of 21st century Americans" because you read one NY Times article that you understood that way.
Makes sense. Even though I haven't gone to seminary, I tend to keep up on trends. He sounds an awful like Wright, et al where 2d Temple Literature is the control for the NT, regardless of context.
But, also, don't take my comments as a dismissal of his scholarship. I have my disagreements (don't we all), but his work is productive and useful, for the right audience. I wouldn't give to a lay person, but someone in biblical studies or a pastor I would say definitely worth the read. Just don't think that what he writes is everything (as it sometimes sounds by the superlatives he and his most ardent followers often speak with). After all, I did read his entire dissertation and I don't spend time on things I don't think are worthwhile.
I heard of Heiser's work through two sources: 1) Mark Driscoll, who leans on Heiser for Win Your War and 2) Jim West's review, which frames Heiser's work as evangelical work for evangelicals that he, as a Bultmann fan, doesn't necessarily agree with but finds interesting.
I've started into The Unseen Realm and Demons and while I've never gone to seminary myself I've already been concerned that he's over-promising and will under-deliver. Recovering a supernatural take on the biblical texts I'm fine with but Heiser's not even the only scholar to have taken up that topic. His new book on Demons is quoting the work of Walton within the first couple of chapters so Heiser is, at least, letting people know he's keeping up with contemporary work. I never went to seminary because I couldn't afford to and never felt any "calling" but I've tried to keep some tabs on biblical studies on diabology (to be short, very ex-Pentecostal and was becoming ex-Pentecostal around the time in my life I met Steve Hays)
It may just be me but some of the hype about Heiser may have to do with lay audiences not knowing just how much research has been done on Enoch literature in the last thirty years so Heiser's ideas come across, perhaps, as more revolutionary than they really are, maybe?
Trent, I haven't found a lot of stuff on the topic from scholars in general that I've managed to find all that convincing. Keeping up with trends in scholarship isn't necessarily always keeping up with good trends. I'm reading a few books on the topic of diabology and only learned recently that Walter Wink is considered "the" main influence on the topic in mainlines whereas I've heard nothing about him until I started reading on the subject of diabology and Jesus as exorcist (because I'm not a Methodist and even when I was Arminian I was from a fairly old school Assemblies of God wing, so Wink was a non-entity).
Heiser keeping up with Walton, for instance, might not be great.
"Keeping up with trends in scholarship isn't necessarily always keeping up with good trends." Undeniably. Coming up with a novel dissertation, for instance, isn't necessarily good.
of the books I'm reading lately on spiritual warfare and studies in Ephesians one of the more interesting directions that I hope is actually solid is Robert Ewusie Moses' Practices of Power, which I've started into. Moses' thesis is that Paul's letters spend far less time on defining what powers and principalities and spiritual evils are than he does on encouraging churches and Christians to cultivate spiritual disciplines and practices that will protect them from spiritual attacks. I'm early into the book but this seems like a more potentially persuasive direction than what I'm reading of Heiser so far. Not that I'm not going to read Heiser, just like I may eventually bother to read Walter Wink, but it won't necessarily be because I think their approaches work. I'm wondering how many variations of post-Jungian post-Bultmann demythologizing I'm going to come across on the one hand, and what variations on Clinton Arnold via Nevius a century later I'm going to come across.
Very interesting and well put. I read the first 15 chapters of "The Unseen Realm" and could not go on because I knew he was basing everything on his idea of the Divine Council and focusing on spiritual beings, giving them too much prominence. I did 3 posts on my responses to "The Unseen Realm" and while I've been to seminary, I only have a Masters in Religion but Heiser seemed so off to me. What you said about Heiser downplaying individual sin and highlighting evil spiritual beings is spot on. I saw those Bible Project videos based on Heiser's views and did a post on them, and that is exactly the conclusion I reached -- that blame seemed to shift more to the spiritual beings and away from man. I am surprised no scholar I know of has done a thorough critique of Heiser pointing out the issues you have.
I've been listening to a lot of Heiser recently. I can't speak for the review itself as I personally haven't read Unseen Realm (though it's on the list) but I find him quite stimulating. Yeah there's points I might not agree with but I do find he's quite good not only as to the biblical theology, but also breaking it down so that people who haven't read as much of the academic sources can benefit.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Swrath. That's more or less my current thinking about Heiser too, though I also haven't read Unseen Realm, but I mean based on other things I've seen of his.
DeleteCurrently reading the book, and Mathison's points are spot on. Read with discernment, and it has worthwhile material.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Ryan! I'd be interested to hear what you think about the book after you finish, if you ever have a chance to write about it.
DeleteThe comment about "a man with a hammer" is perfect description of the main deficiency of Heiser's work. I am repeatedly frustrated with Dr. Heiser. Or to be more accurate, I am frustrated with those who follow him.
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, I am a PhD candidate in OT, so I am in the demographic of people who are already familiar with the material Heiser discusses (I had actually read his UW dissertation before he ever wrote the Unseen Realm). As he himself says repeatedly, he is making material that is common in OT scholarship accessible.
So when I read Heiser and then I read people who act like what he says is some huge breakthrough, I am non-plussed. But again, in my clear thinking times, I recognize that a lot of what he says is new to his audience.
And I do really appreciate his explicit supernaturalism. He is DEAD ON that a lot of western Christians have lost this worldview and absolutely must recover it. In that sense his worldview is much more biblical than the average American Christian's.
The problem is, Heiser goes way too far (most scholars with a specialization do), and his followers latch on and ride the wave. Heiser makes the divine council the key to all biblical theology. He is like a Bart Erhman in one sense: His data is usually correct (for the most part), his theological conclusions are horrifically off.
Another way to verbalize his errors is to say, Heiser makes foreground what is deliberately in the background. Now obviously, Heiser and his fans would say you have to understand the background to understand the foreground, and that is true to an extent, but there is still a major issue when you background the foreground, and foreground the background and then try to come up with a biblical theology.
I get why it's popular. It is sensational and interesting. It just frustrates me how many people get caught up in Heiser's sensational material about the divine council and start making it the key to their own understanding of the whole Bible.
Heiser tends to downplay individual sin and evil in his highlighting of spiritual beings and evil. It is simply undeniable that the biblical account foregrounds individual human sin and backgrounds warring spiritual powers. Heiser reverses those two and makes his biblical theology all about what is going on in the unseen realm. Consider the Bible Projects series on Spiritual Beings (which reflects Heiser's theology very well, he was a supervisor for the scripts). The videos are fantastic and so right about so much. But what is missing?
There is a reason that the Bible has NOTHING comparable to literature like the Baal cycle in it. And that is because the theological emphasis of the entire Bible is not on all the political interaction between heavenly beings. Getting too into that, and trying to make your theology all about spirits and their territorial control is exactly the kinda stuff Paul was warning against in Timothy when he mentions not getting into spiritual speculation and genealogies and stuff. If you read all of Paul's letters and all of Heiser's work you see that their priorities are exactly reversed. Both cover the same ground, but each are primarily interested in two different things.
I can't claim to have a lot of independent knowledge here, but from the little I've read from Heiser, this sounds highly plausible and informative.
DeleteI think you’re misunderstanding Heiser. His argument is that the parallels to Baal are meant as a polemical device against those who worshipped Baal. Yahweh is the cloud rider, NOT Baal. That’s the point. A very similar thing could be said about the author of Genesis. God is depicted as speaking the world into existence which is very similar to a story about the Egyptian god Ptah. Heiser would say that the author is deliberately using an ancient reader’s understanding of that story to contradict Egyptian religion.
DeleteCont.
ReplyDeleteBecause of how consuming the sensationalism in his teaching is, I generally avoid recommending him to lay people. My opinion is this (which Heiser and his fans would call anathema): You can understand the Bible's storyline more than sufficiently, without ever thinking about the Divine Council. Sure, some of your understanding will be anemic at some points, sometimes more, sometimes less, but you can get the general gist of the main point. You can be 80% right without ever knowing about the Divine Council. On the other hand, Heiser's understanding of the Bible's storyline and meta-narrative is 80% false, 20% right. So which would you rather be, right about the Divine Council and misunderstanding the Bible as a whole? Or understanding the Bible as a whole, but missing a few things? I think there are better sources for understanding the supernatural and divine council, that avoid the over-reading of those things (granted they do not exist for more general audiences and that is a problem).
I am astonished at how many reformed are in love with his work. The other problem is that non-specialists don't realize the disconnect between Heiser's data and his theology. When Heiser says that what he is saying is widely recognized in OT scholarship, he is right, but only in the way I've qualified. His seeing the Divine Council everywhere, and his reading every text in light of Gen 6 and the conflict between spiritual powers (Nephilim and purebloods) is not at all recognized in OT scholarship. His reading is VERY idiosyncratic in the world of OT scholarship (believing and non-believing).
I remember once when in my PhD coursework, after a seminar, discussing Heiser with three OT PhDs (including one of the endorsers of his book) and a fellow OT PhD candidate (who was one of the most brilliant people I ever met). And our general consensus was his reading of the storyline of the Bible in light of the unseen realm's warfare, is totally wrong. (E.g., Like reading the conquest as a destroying of mixed bloodlines).
For example, Heiser reads Amos 2:9 as evidence that the Amorites were cross-breeds between humans and spiritual beings. Because they are described as giants. However, even cursory reading in the Bible and especially other ANE material will show that describing your enemies with language like "tall as cedars" was not a reference to literal giants of cross human-elohim heritage, but simply a poetic way to say "they were big and strong and scary"
Thanks, JeremiahZ! This is an informative perspective.
DeleteJeremiah,
DeleteWhat else in the Bible's storyline does Heiser generally get wrong 80% of the time? Just curious.
I don't mean that Heiser's readings (on this or that text) are 80% wrong, although I see how my specific example might have sounded that way. My number "estimate" was just meant to express that Heiser's biblical theology as a whole (and he has developed quite a robust and full biblical theology across all his works) is mostly wrong (sometimes just in what he emphasizes and minimizes, so not even in facts). So I find myself often saying to Heiser's work "Yes ... but that isn't really the main point..."
ReplyDeleteSo just like Bart Erhman is correct to say "there are X number of variants" but wrong to make the conclusion "therefore the content of the Bible is untrustworthy and even uncertain."
I would say Heiser is right to say, "This is in the background of this writing" and then wrong in the theology he builds (again, sometimes only in emphasis).
I would say that you would have a better idea of the Bible's metanarrative by reading Goldsworthy's or Beale's biblical theologies (which either hardly or don't at all interact with the divine council motif) than you would by reading Heiser. The random number I generated in my (subjective opinion) is you'd be 80% right about the metanarrative of the Bible (and the biblical emphasises) reading Beale, Goldsworthy, Desmond Alexander, etc, but if you were to read Heiser you'd only be 20% right.
My way of summarizing Heiser's missed emphasises is that Heiser downplays (or sometimes almost ignores) individual sin and God's wrath against sinners (and attendant ideas such as covenant), and up-plays cosmic warfare and God's wrath against fallen spiritual beings. Of course, Heiser wouldn't deny human responsibility, but the key is how central each element is to his system. Heiser makes divine council politics the center of his theology. I say a theology built around that is going to be mostly wrong (even just in emphasis).
As an example: assume I believe in the doctrine of reprobation (I do). If I built a biblical theology whose central controlling idea was the idea of reprobation, and I read the whole biblical storyline in light of reprobation, saw it driving everything, and said you couldn't understand the Bible at all without understanding reprobation, the final product will be way off. Even though reprobation is true.
Besides that metanarrative stuff, I have the normal scholarly more technical quibbles here and there. Heiser is selective in sources sometimes. So he makes a lot of the book of Enoch and acts like it represents THE Jewish view at the time, but that conclusion is dubious at best. Even if his reading of Enoch is spot on. And then of course anything he conclusively states on that basis is going to be less shaky than he makes it appear. There is a trend in OT scholarship to make too much of too little. You have to try, so I'm not arguing against that. But often the conclusions are far more modestly based than you would realize based on the way scholars present their conclusions. Anytime you read any OT scholar say something like, "This was THE view of Mesopotamians at the time" or "this was THE view of Egyptians of the middle kingdom," take that with a grain of salt. That is like saying, "Cultural Marxism was THE view of 21st century Americans" because you read one NY Times article that you understood that way.
Makes sense. Even though I haven't gone to seminary, I tend to keep up on trends. He sounds an awful like Wright, et al where 2d Temple Literature is the control for the NT, regardless of context.
DeleteBut, also, don't take my comments as a dismissal of his scholarship. I have my disagreements (don't we all), but his work is productive and useful, for the right audience. I wouldn't give to a lay person, but someone in biblical studies or a pastor I would say definitely worth the read. Just don't think that what he writes is everything (as it sometimes sounds by the superlatives he and his most ardent followers often speak with). After all, I did read his entire dissertation and I don't spend time on things I don't think are worthwhile.
ReplyDeleteI heard of Heiser's work through two sources: 1) Mark Driscoll, who leans on Heiser for Win Your War and 2) Jim West's review, which frames Heiser's work as evangelical work for evangelicals that he, as a Bultmann fan, doesn't necessarily agree with but finds interesting.
DeleteI've started into The Unseen Realm and Demons and while I've never gone to seminary myself I've already been concerned that he's over-promising and will under-deliver. Recovering a supernatural take on the biblical texts I'm fine with but Heiser's not even the only scholar to have taken up that topic. His new book on Demons is quoting the work of Walton within the first couple of chapters so Heiser is, at least, letting people know he's keeping up with contemporary work. I never went to seminary because I couldn't afford to and never felt any "calling" but I've tried to keep some tabs on biblical studies on diabology (to be short, very ex-Pentecostal and was becoming ex-Pentecostal around the time in my life I met Steve Hays)
It may just be me but some of the hype about Heiser may have to do with lay audiences not knowing just how much research has been done on Enoch literature in the last thirty years so Heiser's ideas come across, perhaps, as more revolutionary than they really are, maybe?
I haven't heard a lot of good things about Walton from REAL Old Testament and Ancient Near East scholars...
DeleteTrent, I haven't found a lot of stuff on the topic from scholars in general that I've managed to find all that convincing. Keeping up with trends in scholarship isn't necessarily always keeping up with good trends. I'm reading a few books on the topic of diabology and only learned recently that Walter Wink is considered "the" main influence on the topic in mainlines whereas I've heard nothing about him until I started reading on the subject of diabology and Jesus as exorcist (because I'm not a Methodist and even when I was Arminian I was from a fairly old school Assemblies of God wing, so Wink was a non-entity).
ReplyDeleteHeiser keeping up with Walton, for instance, might not be great.
"Keeping up with trends in scholarship isn't necessarily always keeping up with good trends."
DeleteUndeniably. Coming up with a novel dissertation, for instance, isn't necessarily good.
of the books I'm reading lately on spiritual warfare and studies in Ephesians one of the more interesting directions that I hope is actually solid is Robert Ewusie Moses' Practices of Power, which I've started into. Moses' thesis is that Paul's letters spend far less time on defining what powers and principalities and spiritual evils are than he does on encouraging churches and Christians to cultivate spiritual disciplines and practices that will protect them from spiritual attacks. I'm early into the book but this seems like a more potentially persuasive direction than what I'm reading of Heiser so far. Not that I'm not going to read Heiser, just like I may eventually bother to read Walter Wink, but it won't necessarily be because I think their approaches work. I'm wondering how many variations of post-Jungian post-Bultmann demythologizing I'm going to come across on the one hand, and what variations on Clinton Arnold via Nevius a century later I'm going to come across.
DeleteIn software, the hammer analogy is called "the Golden Hammer".
ReplyDeleteFor the records, I think Psalm 82 is about humans.
Very interesting and well put. I read the first 15 chapters of "The Unseen Realm" and could not go on because I knew he was basing everything on his idea of the Divine Council and focusing on spiritual beings, giving them too much prominence. I did 3 posts on my responses to "The Unseen Realm" and while I've been to seminary, I only have a Masters in Religion but Heiser seemed so off to me. What you said about Heiser downplaying individual sin and highlighting evil spiritual beings is spot on.
ReplyDeleteI saw those Bible Project videos based on Heiser's views and did a post on them, and that is exactly the conclusion I reached -- that blame seemed to shift more to the spiritual beings and away from man. I am surprised no scholar I know of has done a thorough critique of Heiser pointing out the issues you have.