Judging “The Gods” Yahweh’S Conflict With Angelic Beings In The Old Testament

Many primordial peoples seem to have preserved this insight, by either spiritual intuition or oral tradition.52 Hence if the Creator himself is judged to have withdrawn (because of the experience of sin), it is easy to understand how more focus, hope and religious reverence began to be placed on the mediating spiritual beings who were put in charge of various aspects of creation. Instead of praying to the Creator God for rain, one prayed to the closer god who was supposed to be in charge of rain. In this fashion, perhaps, monotheopraxis gradually degenerated into polytheopraxis.53 Israel’s ongoing tendency toward idolatry can perhaps be seen as a microcosm of an ongoing tendency among humans in general.

We may conclude that the monotheism of the Bible is not about conflating various gods into a new monotheistic view of the cosmos, as the evolutionists have argued. Rather, it is about reestablishing the supremacy of the Creator, who alone is deserving of worship amid the gods. What lies behind the Bible’s ongoing polemic against other gods, then, is not the issue of whether these other gods exist. It is the issue of who is the Creator, and thus the issue of who is the appropriate object of worship. If we are to recapture the biblical warfare perspective of the cosmos, it is imperative that we give full credit to the Bible’s robust affirmation of a divine society that exists between humans and the supreme God.

So long as we see monotheism as threatened by the acknowledgment of other relatively autonomous and powerful gods, we simply cannot accept the central scriptural and primordial understanding that our world is caught in the crossfire of a tremendous spiritual cosmic struggle. Thus our ability to make headway in understanding evil is correspondingly impoverished. For it is precisely in the acknowledgment of the society of free spiritual beings in between humans and the Creator that the primary explanation for evil on a cosmic scale is to be found. When one possesses a vital awareness that in between God and humanity there exists a vast society of spiritual beings who are quite like humans in possessing intelligence and free will, there is simply no difficulty in reconciling the reality of evil with the goodness of the supreme God.

For example, it has been noted that African people routinely blame various gods, nature spirits or ancestors for ills that befall them and for prayers that go unanswered. But they never blame the Supreme Being, who is envisaged as being all-good.54 This position is quite congruent with the scriptural position (minus, of course, the inclusion of ancestors in the divine society), and it virtually sidesteps the problem of evil. One is inclined to blame the Supreme Being for the ills that befall us only when we do not accept the existence of lesser gods or do not accept that these gods are, like human beings, free moral agents.

We now turn to the robust affirmation of the significance of gods in between the Supreme God and humanity within the Old Testament.

While the supremacy of Yahweh among the gods is never qualified in the Old Testament, this supremacy is not generally interpreted in a strictly autocratic fashion. That is, the gods are never portrayed as mere puppets of Yahweh. Rather, they appear to be personal beings who not only take orders but also are invited to give input to their Sovereign (1 Kings 22:20; Is 6:8). They collectively constitute a “heavenly council” that, in the Old Testament, is similar to many portraits of a heavenly council in prebiblical Near Eastern texts. In the Old Testament, as elsewhere, the heavenly hosts surround the captain to discuss the issues and affairs at hand and help make decisions on important matters.

These gods never rival the Creator’s authority. Thus they are never construed as major competing deities. Herein lies the central difference between the Old Testament and pagan conceptions of the heavenly council. But it is important to note that the Old Testament certainly accepts that some such council exists, and that the members of this council have some say in how things are done.55 In sharp contrast to the later 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 alter previous plans in response to his creatures’ requests and behavior (e.g., Ex 32:14-15; Jon 3:4-10; Is 38:1-5; Jer 18:6-11).

The classical-philosophical theistic tradition has judged all of this scriptural talk to be anthropomorphic. It has had to, not because anything in Scripture suggests this but because of a nonbiblical philosophical presupposition. At the heart of this concept of God is the Hellenistic philosophical assumption that divine perfection means changelessness, impassibility, immutability, pure actuality and so on. Such a concept rules out the idea that God could ever be affected by, let alone receive advice from, angelic or human beings.

Omnipotence, in this view, means omnicontrol, which further entails divine impassibility and immutability. But if God exercises total control, what power does anyone outside God have to affect, influence or move God in any way? If then some passages of Scripture portray a different view (are there passages that do not?), we must understand them to be anthropomorphic.

This hermeneutic amounts to an illegitimate exaltation of what is taken to be general revelation over special revelation. In essence it says: since we know (from Hellenistic philosophy!) that God is immutable, timeless, impassible, purely actual, devoid of contingency and so on, these passages cannot mean what they seem to mean. In contrast, if we stick with the text, we cannot avoid the conclusion that biblical authors understood God to be genuinely open to and affected by the input of his creatures, both angelic and human. Nothing in the texts suggests that Scripture is in these instances speaking nonliterally.56

The centrality of this concept of the Lord as being surrounded by a council of gods is seen in the fact that one of the most frequent ascriptions of Yahweh is “the LORD of hosts.”57 He is described as being revered by the multitudes of “holy ones” who “are around him” in his heavenly council (Ps 89:7), for it is he who “has taken his place in the divine council” and “in the midst of the gods . . . holds judgment” (82:1). While these hosts are themselves “mighty ones,” their primary job is to “do his bidding, obedient to his spoken word,” as well as give him praise (103:20-21; 148:2). Paralleling other Near Eastern conceptions, this heavenly council is also seen as including the sun, moon and stars (Deut 4:19-20; 17:13; Job 38:7; Judg 5:20; Ps 148:1-6; Is 14:13; Hab 3:11), as well as the winds and thunder (Ps 104:4; cf. Heb 1:7).58

This conception of a heavenly council lies behind the prologue to the book of Job. All the b^enê ha’^elohîm (sons of God) present themselves before the Lord (Job 1:6; 2:1), probably to give a report on their various duties such as Satan gives (1:7-8; 2:2-3).59 These are the “holy ones” to whom Job’s “friend” Eliphaz later chides him to turn (5:1; cf. 15:5).

This conception also lies behind Micaiah’s vision in 1 Kings 22: “I saw the LORD sitting on his throne, with all the host of heaven standing beside him to the right and to the left of him. And the LORD said, ‘Who will entice Ahab, so that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?’” (vv. 19-20). Micaiah is allowed to be privy to the otherwise concealed “great assembly” where crucial decisions “among the gods” are made (Ps 82:1). Interestingly enough, one possible qualification of a legitimate prophet, Jeremiah tells us, is that they have “stood in the council of the LORD so as to see and to hear his word” (Jer 23:18; see Is 6:1). The prophet is one who has been granted access into the inner chambers of the Lord’s assembly. This is precisely what Micaiah did.60

This understanding of the divine council also perhaps explains the first-person plural used by God when crucial decisions are being made in Old Testament history. The most famous of these is Genesis 1:26. In creating or fashioning every previous feature of the cosmos and all that is in it, the Lord had simply used his word (1:3, 6, 9, 14, 20). But in creating humankind, the pinnacle of his creation, the Lord says, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness” (v. 26).

Attempts have been made to explain this as a “plural of majesty” or as a reference to the Trinity.61 While these are possibilities, the standard interpretation among the Jews has been to understand this plural as a reference to the heavenly council. In light of subsequent revelation, this plurality within the divine council can be understood in terms of the triune divine society. But in fidelity to the original meaning of the text, we must also admit that the original author or his audience would not have understood the text in this way, and thus it should not be taken as the primary meaning of the text.

The heavenly-council interpretation also seems to make the most sense of the Lord’s statement made just prior to casting Adam and Eve out of the garden: “The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:22).62 There is obviously a connection between the first-person plurals of these verses, but in this later verse a plural of neither majesty nor the Trinity is possible. The author (or redactor) is certainly aware of other divine beings (6:1-4), and it is most likely that these references in the first-person plural in both passages are to these beings.

So too in Genesis 11, when the Lord makes the monumental decision to scatter the people throughout the world in response to their attempt to build a tower to heaven, he says, “Let us go down, and confuse their language” (Gen 11:7).63 In Isaiah 6, which is explicitly a scene of the heavenly council, the Lord seeks to turn Israel around from its wayward ways by asking his heavenly court (which Isaiah, being a prophet, is privy to), “Who will go for us?” (v. 8).

If we interpret all this in the way it was originally intended and do not simply dismiss it as anthropomorphic because our theology does not allow for it, a picture begins to emerge in which the Lord shares power and decisions both with his council and with human beings. This conception is as pervasive in the Bible as it is absent in the Western Christian philosophical tradition, which in part accounts for the fact that the academic problem of evil is intractable for us but nonexistent in Scripture.

The army of the Lord. Closely related to the conception of the gods as Yahweh’s council is the frequent Old Testament portrayal of these gods as Yahweh’s warriors. As Elijah’s servant was allowed to see, the Lord possesses a vast army of mighty angelic warriors who fight on his behalf (2 Kings 2:11). These warriors surround Elijah and his servant, as they protectively surround all who fear the Lord (Ps 34:7). The vastness of this army is beyond imagination. “With mighty chariotry, twice ten thousand, thousands upon thousands,” the psalmist writes (68:17).64 Daniel prophetically sees “the Ancient of Days” going into battle with “a thousand thousands” attending him and “ten thousand times ten thousand” standing before him (Dan 7:10).

It is these “heavenly beings” (Ps 29:1) or “mighty ones” (103:20) to whom Joel refers when he prays, “Bring down your warriors, O LORD” (Joel 3:11), and Deborah when she proclaims, “The stars fought from heaven, from their courses they fought against Sisera” (Judg 5:20). According to some scholars, these same warriors, again depicted as the “starry host,” are called into military file “one by one” in Isaiah 40:26 (cf. Is 45:12).65 This spiritual army is also referred to in an otherwise cryptic piece of military instruction the Lord gives to David as he is about to attack the Philistines:

You shall not go up; go around to their rear, and come upon them opposite the balsam trees. When you hear the sound of marching in the tops of the balsam trees, then be on the alert; for then the LORD has gone out before you to strike the army of the Philistines. (2 Sam 5:23-24)

The battle between the Israelites and the Philistines was more than a physical battle. “Marching in the tops of the balsam trees” was “an army of God” (1 Chron 12:22), his legions of “mighty ones,” fighting on David’s behalf. The passage also suggests that evil spiritual warriors were fighting on the side of the Philistines. As Wink notes, “What occurs on earth has its corollary in the heavens.”66 The earthly battle, involving God’s people against a people who were opposing God’s will, corresponds to a heavenly, and perhaps far more important, battle being carried out by God’s army, a view also suggested by Judges 5:20 and 2 Kings 3:26-27.

Just as biblical authors could see Israel’s battles, or their own personal battles, as partaking in God’s battle against cosmic forces of chaos (e.g., Rahab), so too they could envisage their earthly battles as participating in God’s battle against evil armies. Indeed, these two conceptions are based on the same conviction.

As we shall see more fully in the next chapter, this conception of the Lord and his army engaging in battles that parallel on a spiritual level the battles of the righteous on earth became more developed and explicit in later Jewish thought. And in this developed form it exercised a significant influence on the New Testament authors, though in distinctly modified form. This motif is clearly seen, for example, in the Qumran War Scroll (1 QM), which describes a final battle in which God’s angels and human servants (“sons of light”) will wage war against Belial, his evil angels and human forces of wickedness (“sons of darkness”). One illustrative passage reads as follows:

On this [day], the assembly of the gods and the congregation of men shall confront each other for great destruction. The sons of light and the lot of darkness shall battle together for God’s might, between the roar of a huge multitude and the shout of gods and of men, on the day of the calamity. . . . The King of glory is with us together with his holy ones. The heroes of the army of his angels are enlisted with us; the war hero is in our congregation; the army of his spirits, with our infantry and our cavalry.67

Like 2 Samuel 5:24 (in a less developed form), this passage clearly assumes that physical and spiritual realities interpenetrate. It assumes that battles on earth can reflect battles in the heavenlies, and that armies align themselves with one side or the other in these earthly/cosmic battles. Passages such as these assume that humans are part of a much more vast, invisible, cosmic society, and that this society, on both a spiritual and a physical plane, is in a state of war.

A note on Israel’s “Holy War” tradition. It is, I maintain, in the light of this intimate connection between the spiritual and physical planes of warfare that the Old Testament’s “holy war” tradition must be understood.68 That is, Yahweh’s various commands that the Israelites go to war against other nations must be understood against the backdrop of Yahweh’s own cosmic warfare. What is at stake in such wars is not simply earthly territories or the dominion of earthly governments: from the perspective of the Old Testament, what is at stake is the kingly rule of the one true God. The struggle of nations to dominate, or at least to resist, Israel is also, and even more fundamentally, a struggle of other gods, with whom these nations are in league, to resist Yahweh.

Nowhere is this inextricable connection between earthly and spiritual battles more evident in the Old Testament than in the paradigmatic military deliverance of Israel by the power of God—the exodus. Here, in describing the purpose of the plagues, Yahweh proclaims, “On all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the LORD” (Ex 12:12, cf. 2 Sam 7:23). And so each of the ten plagues affects some aspect of the Egyptians’ false religious system.

For this reason, when the Israelites break covenant with Yahweh and align themselves with other gods, Yahweh goes to battle against them! There are apparently no boundaries of immunity: wherever and whenever a people turn from the Creator God to serve other gods, they and their gods become inextricably linked together as Yahweh enacts judgment against this type of concrete actualization of earthly/cosmic rebellion and chaos.69

This close connection between cosmic and earthly battles is also exhibited in the way the Israelites were to engage in holy war. As M. C. Lind has carefully argued, the earliest discernible Israelite war tradition emphasized the notion that Yahweh’s people “were not called to do battle in the usual sense of the word, but to respond to and trust in Yahweh as their sole warrior against the military might of Egypt.” In the celebration hymn of the exodus deliverance—the Son of the Sea (Ex 15)—victory is accomplished “not through human fighting, but through a nature miracle of Yahweh.”70 This vision serves as a unifying undercurrent for Israel’s theology of warfare. As a nation, they are constantly reminded, through events such as the exodus, the Jericho conquest (Josh 6), the timing of Gideon’s troops (Judg 7), David’s match with Goliath (1 Sam 17) and his eventual sin of counting Israel’s troops (2 Sam 24), that Yahweh alone—not their own military might—is the source of their deliverance and protection. In the end, their earthly battles were not really theirs at all: the battle, rather, belonged to the Lord.71

The gods of the nations. One aspect of the Old Testament’s teaching on Yahweh’s council that was to have a profound impact on subsequent Jewish and Christian thinking was the teaching that the Lord assigns a god to each nation upon the face of the earth. The principal text for this teaching is Deuteronomy 32:7-9, which in the Septuagint (the Greek version of the Old Testament relied on by the New Testament and early church authors) reads:

Remember the days of old, consider the years for past ages. . . . When the Most High divided the nations, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the nations according to the number of the angels of God. And the people Jacob became the portion of the Lord.72

As D. S. Russell argues, the point of the passage seems to be that the “nations of the earth are given over into the control of angelic powers,” though Yahweh keeps Israel as his own “portion.”73 The members of his heavenly council rule other nations, but it is ultimately Yahweh who rules the whole earth through them.74 Indeed, the passage teaches explicitly that it was with this delegated authority in view that the nations were divided (perhaps recalling Gen 11:7-8: “Let us go down. . . . So the LORD scattered them”).75

This understanding of the gods of other nations probably lies behind the Old Testament prohibition against the Israelites following other gods, “gods whom they had not known and whom he had not allotted to them” (Deut 29:26; cf. 6:13-17; 32:17). These gods were never intended to become objects of worship, and when they become such objects (perhaps through their own fallen initiative; see below), they are no longer regarded as legitimate “sons of God” but as “demons” (Deut 32:17; cf. Ps 106:37; also 95:5 LXX).76 Their role was to oversee the welfare of the nation assigned to them, not to become surrogate objects of devotion for the Lord himself. When they fail in this duty, they become evil and are judged.

In this light also we are to understand Psalm 82. Here the Lord passes judgment “in the divine council . . . in the midst of the gods” by saying to these gods:

“How long will you [plural] judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.” . . . I say, “You are gods, children of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, you shall die like mortals, and fall like any prince.” (vv. 2-4, 6-7)

We see here, as Russell notes, that “the Lord judges the members of his heavenly court and causes them to fall for their sin.”77 As Wink notes, “Those gods who obeyed their Sovereign’s will were members in good standing (Ps 103:21; 148:1-6). Those gods who failed to do justice among their people were judged and sentenced to die like mortals.”78 The gods here are clearly no mere puppets who are simply extensions of Yahweh himself. They apparently have a mind and will of their own (Gen 6:2-3 also implies this). Although they can never threaten Yahweh’s supremacy, they can fail to carry out his will to administer justice in their assigned land.

The understanding that Yahweh rules through the administration of lesser gods, and that these gods are capable of rebelling against Yahweh’s order, sheds light on another fascinating passage of Scripture. In Daniel 10 Daniel prays, fasts and mourns for three weeks on behalf of Israel’s state of captivity (v. 2). Finally, through a vision, he is visited by an angel who tells him:

From the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding and to humble yourself before your God, your words have been heard, and I have come because of your words. But the prince of the kingdom of Persia opposed me twenty-one days. So Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, and I left him there with the prince of the kingdom of Persia. (vv. 12-13)

Later he concludes:

Now I must return to fight against the prince of Persia, and when I am through with him, the prince of Greece will come. But I am to tell you what is inscribed in the book of truth. (vv. 20-21)

The scholarly consensus is that the “prince of Persia” is a divine figure who in this instance is opposing God’s plan to work with Daniel.79 As with the Moabite god Chemosh (1 Kings 11:35; 2 Kings 23:13; cf. 2 Kings 3:26-27) this “prince” is probably to be understood as being the “god” assigned to this nation (if not, where was its guardian “god”?). But in the light of Psalm 82, this national prince seems to have grossly failed in his duties. He is, as Wink notes, still contending for the best interests of the Persian Empire, narrowly defined. For this reason he has a stake in censoring a message that foretells the destruction of the Persian Empire.80

But his national guardianship is now at odds with the One who ultimately “rules over the nations” (Ps 22:28; 47:8; Jer 10:7; cf. Ps 113:4). It has, in fact, become demonic. Hence Michael, who has been assigned special care over Israel (see Dan 10:21; 12:1), is dispatched by the Lord to assist this angel in fighting this “prince,” and all indications from the text are that the battle will continue and will now include the “prince of Greece” as well.81

It is clear that “the angels of the nations have a will of their own, and are capable of resisting the will of God.”82 In this regard they are similar to humans. They have a delegated moral and spiritual authority that is a gift from God. But, if they choose, this delegated authority can become demonic authority. When it becomes demonic, the passage shows, God must contend with it. The possibility of warfare seems to be a necessary concomitant to Yahweh’s plan to rule the cosmos through intermediary beings, human and divine, who are free to some extent.

Another important passage that has traditionally been taken to refer to the ungodly behavior of certain “gods” is Genesis 6. Here, as a prelude to the flood narrative, the author states that “the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose” (v. 2 NIV), a situation that grieved the Lord greatly (v. 3). The progeny of such marriages were Nephilim (giants), who, the author notes, “were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown” (v. 4)—a likely reference to some of the widespread tales of giant beings who were great warriors in the past.83 The point of the passage is clearly to depict just how bad things had gotten on the earth so as to explain the Lord’s regret over ever having made humans (v. 6) and then his radical decision to destroy the world by a flood (vv. 11-13).

Later Jewish thought understood these “sons of God” to be divine beings. Indeed, during the intertestamental period, as we shall later see, this interbreeding of divine beings with human women was often identified as the first fall of the angels. According to this tradition, these “sons of God” were angels who were charged with caring for humans (they were sometimes called “the Watchers”). But, like the god of Persia in Daniel 10, they forsook their duties and abused their divine authority.84 Their progeny were thus giant, hybrid, evil beings who furthered the corruption of the earth.

In some traditions, demons in the world were not identified as fallen angels but as spiritually mutated beings that resulted from the interbreeding of these Nephilim.85 This identification of the “sons of God” with divine beings (without its attendant explanation of demons) is perhaps present in the New Testament and is certainly the dominant view of the early church.86

Other interpretations of this passage, however, have been offered both in ancient and in modern times. One alternative interpretation is to identify the “sons of God” with the righteous lineage of Seth who married sinful women who descended from Cain.87 Another possibility is to identify the “sons of God” with mighty rulers who married commoners and perhaps acquired large harems of women as a sign of their power.88

Both of these interpretations have the advantage of not requiring us to accept the rather difficult idea that divine beings copulated with human beings. This “advantage,” however, renders them suspect. And both interpretations are beset with other significant difficulties. Perhaps most significant, neither interpretation explains the Nephilim. The passage assumes that these giants were unnatural, and it explains this by referring to the unnatural union that brought them about—the union of the “sons of God” with the “daughters of men.” Interpreting the “sons of God” as either righteous men or mighty rulers does not explain why their offspring were unnaturally huge and identified with the giants of various mythological traditions.89

Further, while there is clear evidence that gods or angels were called “sons of God” (Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7; Ps 82:6), there is no clear precedent for calling a lineage of male descendants, or a class of mighty rulers, “sons of God.” In a few instances rulers are called “gods” (Ex 21:6; 22:8; 1 Sam 2:25), and David, as an anointed king, was referred to as “God’s son” (Ps 2:7), but these are not solid precedents for understanding this passage. Nor do we have any biblical or extrabiblical precedent for speculating that certain mighty rulers were acquiring large harems for themselves, and that this is what lies behind this passage. Hence all presuppositions about what angels can and cannot do aside, the most probable interpretation of “sons of God” is in reference to divine beings.

What strengthens this interpretation even more is that the “sons of God” are explicitly contrasted with the “daughters of men.” It is precisely this contrast that expresses the unnaturalness of their union, and hence the unnaturalness of their progeny. This contrast is not between the righteous and unrighteous, or between the mighty and the lowly. Rather, it is explicitly a contrast between sons associated with God and the females born from humans. The starkness of this contrast explains why their unnatural union produces mutant progeny.

While conceding that this is the most natural interpretation of this passage, some Christian exegetes nevertheless reject it on the basis of Jesus’ teaching that in the resurrection there will be no marriage, for we will be “like angels in heaven” (Mt 22:30). The implication, it is argued, is that angels are sexless and thus could not copulate with human women as the divine beings interpretation of Genesis 6 requires.90

Two considerations quickly dismiss this objection, however. First, Jesus is clearly speaking about unfallen angels in their natural state (“heaven”), whereas Genesis 6 (if this interpretation is correct) is speaking about angels “who did not keep their positions” (Jude 6). The point of Genesis 6 seems to be that what the “sons of God” did was rebellious and unnatural for them, so it can hardly be argued that these “sons of God” could not be angels because sexual activity is unnatural for them.

Second, the point of Jesus’ instruction in Matthew 22 is not about the sexuality or asexuality of people or angels in heaven at all; it is about the social institution of marriage (see vv. 23-32). Jesus’ point in this passage is to say that marriage covenants do not carry over into the next life. It may be that angels in their natural state of heaven (and people in heaven?) are asexual, but we cannot arrive at this conclusion from this passage.

It seems that the traditional Jewish and Christian understanding of Genesis 6 is best, however difficult it is for modern Western people to accept.91 This being the case, this passage can justifiably be seen as yet another Old Testament example of gods who did not carry out their God-given duties within the council of heaven (Ps 82:2-4). Rather, they rebelled and thereby contributed to the moral decay of the antediluvian human society.

Modern Westerners and the free beings of the “society in between.” 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, what one missiologist appropriately called “the flaw of the excluded middle.”92 Even when Westerners do theoretically acknowledge the existence of “angels,” we tend to view them as mindless, volitionless, wholly innocuous winged marionettes completely controlled by the will of their Creator.

If we take the Old Testament teaching on the gods seriously, however, we must confess that our Western assumptions about “the world in between” are erroneous. For these writers—and it shall prove even more obvious and pervasive for New Testament authors—the “heavenly” world was not much different or distant from our “earthly” world. Indeed, the two worlds largely overlap 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.

We are light-years removed from the Greek metaphysical assumption that the “heavenly” is composed of timeless “forms” that lack all contingency, a notion that would exercise a profound influence on later Christian theology and contribute to the church’s eventual abandonment of the warfare worldview.93 For the biblical authors, the freedom and moral authority of created divine beings were just as commonsensible as the freedom and moral authority of created nondivine (viz., human) beings were. The cosmos was constituted by a vast society of free, intelligent, morally responsible agents governed by (but not dictated by) God at the top, with humans at the bottom. In this view, contingency characterized the whole domain.

In Scripture, therefore, as opposed to the dominant Hellenistic philosophical tradition that so influenced the apologists and especially Augustine, 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).94 Though it forms the cornerstone of the classical-philosophical tradition of the Western church, no biblical author ever dreamed of such a notion. The “heavenly” world paralleled the earthly world, but for this reason it was not conceptualized as a radically otherworldly blueprint of this world. Rather, for biblical authors, the reality of human freedom and contingency in this world had its counterparts in the reality of divine freedom and contingency in the council of heaven. These “two” worlds overlapped and therefore influenced one another.

Because of our indebtedness to Greek thought through the classical-philosophical theistic tradition 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 it is precisely this unbiblical philosophical tradition more than anything else that creates the intractable intellectual problem of evil.

In biblical terms, then, the cause of Zosia’s torment might be the result of evil human intentions. Or it might be due to a malicious “prince” of Germany, or even a cosmic Leviathan. But on biblical terms it could not be an ordained feature of a secret blueprint Yahweh has for the whole of world history, and for Zosia and her mother in particular.

In the end, 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 Zosia’s torture. The Bible, I maintain, provides just such a conception. The Western philosophical-theological tradition, however, does not. This is why it has an intellectual problem with evil that the Bible does not have, while biblical authors have a revolting activism and power in the face of evil that the church has lacked.