Introduction

Hence for all their emphasis on the radical uniqueness, sole eternality and absolute sovereignty of Yahweh, biblical authors generally assume the existence of intermediary spiritual or cosmic beings. These beings, variously termed “gods,” “angels,” “principalities and powers,” “demons,” or, in the earliest strata, “Leviathan” or some other cosmic monster, can and do wage war against God, wreak havoc on his creation and bring all manner of ills upon humanity. Whether portraying Yahweh as warring against Rahab and other cosmic monsters of chaos or depicting Jesus as casting out a legion of demons from the possessed Gerasene, the Bible as well as the early postapostolic church assumes that the creation is caught up in the crossfire of an age-old cosmic battle between good and evil. As in other warfare worldviews, the Bible assumes that the course of this warfare greatly affects life on earth.

Now, the very prevalence of the warfare worldview among so many different people-groups, in such radically different times and unrelated locations, should itself be enough to inspire us to take this worldview seriously. If we modern Westerners cannot “see” what nearly everyone else outside the little oasis of Western rationalism the last several centuries has seen, then perhaps there is something amiss with our way of seeing. It is just possible that the intensely materialistic and rationalistic orientation of the Enlightenment has blinded us to certain otherwise obvious realities. It is just possible that our chronocentrism—our tendency to assume that the worldview we hold at the present time is the ultimately true worldview—is preventing us from seeing significant features of reality.28

But even if the nearly universal intuition of cosmic conflict is not enough to call our own naturalism into question, the fact that this warfare worldview constitutes a central component of Scripture’s understanding of God and the cosmos should surely inspire us to do so. At least for those of us for whom this collection of canonical books is no mere collection but rather constitutes the inspired Word of God, not seriously considering the warfare worldview can hardly be said to be an option, however much such a view may conflict with our own naturalistic cultural presuppositions. For again, as I demonstrate in this work, the thematic unity of Christ’s ministry (as well as that of his disciples and the early postapostolic church) becomes fully intelligible only against the backdrop of a warfare worldview.

Myth anticipates reality. Indeed, I would go still further and argue that, if we consider the variety of warfare worldviews throughout the world and throughout history from a perspective that is thoroughly committed to Scripture, the most plausible way of understanding them is to see them as approximating and anticipating the truth revealed in Scripture. If we arrive at a full appreciation of just how thoroughly a warfare perspective is woven into the fabric of Scripture, all the pagan warfare perspectives present themselves as intuitive confirmations of the truth revealed in Scripture.29

In Scripture, and especially in the person of Jesus Christ, myth becomes reality, as C. S. Lewis insightfully put it.30 In this light, the nearly universal myth of our world being largely shaped by warfare among various cosmic forces and spirits is here incarnated as the one true God-man warrior of God enters our real war zone and wages war against God’s real foes.

In sum, then, the truth to which all these mythologies point, and indeed the truth to which the mythological warfare dimensions of the Old Testament itself point (see chapter three), is the truth that God’s good creation has in fact been seized by hostile, evil, cosmic forces that are seeking to destroy God’s beneficent plan for the cosmos. God wages war against these forces, however, and through the person of Jesus Christ has now secured the overthrow of this evil cosmic army. The church as the body of Christ has been called to be a decisive means by which this final overthrow is to be carried out (see chapters six to ten).

This is the truth to which the nearly universal intuition of spiritual warfare points. Thus from the perspective of Scripture, all the so-called primitive stories of cosmic conflict, and all the supposedly primitive techniques for waging war against evil spirits, must be judged as being far more true to reality than the Western “enlightened” worldview, which presumptuously holds that the cosmos is strictly material, that noncorporeal beings do not exist, and that humans are the highest form of life in the cosmos. If we can free ourselves from our own chronocentrism, which is in reality another form of ethnocentrism, the heavily tinted nature of our Western Enlightenment spectacles will become apparent.

The warfare worldview and evil. A second reason why I believe that the warfare worldview needs to be taken seriously is that it provides a remarkably different, and a remarkably better, understanding of evil than does the classical-philosophical Christian (or any other) approach to this problem.31 In a nutshell, the way in which classical-philosophical Christian theists have approached the problem of evil has generally been to frame evil as a problem of God’s providence and thus of God’s character. Assuming (rightly) that God is perfectly loving and good, and assuming (wrongly, I hold) that divine omnipotence entails meticulous control, the problem of evil has been formulated within the classical-philosophical theistic tradition as the problem of locating a loving and good purpose behind evil events.32 This, I later argue, represents an impossible task, and hence the problem of evil becomes simply unsolvable within this framework.

By contrast, the warfare worldview is predicated on the assumption that divine goodness does not completely control or in any sense will evil; rather, good and evil are at war with one another. This assumption obviously entails that God is not now exercising exhaustive, meticulous control over the world. In this worldview, God must work with, and battle against, other created beings. While none of these beings can ever match God’s own power, each has some degree of genuine influence within the cosmos.

In other words, a warfare worldview is inherently pluralistic. There is no single, all-determinative divine will that coercively steers all things, and hence there is here no supposition that evil agents and events have a secret divine motive behind them. Hence too, one need not agonize over what ultimately good, transcendent divine purpose might be served by any particular evil event.

If the world is indeed caught up in the middle of a real war between good and evil forces, evil is to be expected—including evil that serves no higher end. For in any state of war, gratuitous evil is normative. Only when it is assumed that the world is meticulously controlled by an all-loving God does each particular evil event need a higher, all-loving explanation. For only then is evil not expected, hence only then is it intellectually problematic at a concrete level. In other words, only when we reject the view that the cosmos is something like a society of free beings, most of whom are invisible, and all of whom have some small degree of influence on the whole—in short, only when we reject the warfare worldview in favor of a monistic one in which one sovereign will governs all—are we saddled with an understanding of God and his relationship with the world in which evil becomes impenetrably mysterious on a concrete level.

Now, on the biblical assumption that God is the sole Creator of all that is, there is still the ultimately metaphysical question of why God would create a world in which cosmic war could break out. In this sense the problem of theodicy remains, even within a warfare worldview. But unlike the futile quest for the elusive good divine motive for any particular evil within the world, this metaphysical question is answerable. Instead of futilely trying to locate a particular loving divine reason for a particular evil event, we are now attempting to conceptualize God’s most general reason for creating a societal cosmos in which a multiplicity of creatures share power, and in which moral conflict (and thus suffering) can therefore occur. But as was said, in contrast to the problem of evil within the classical-philosophical tradition, this question is not impossible to address.

Resignation versus revolt. Once the intelligibility of the war itself is accepted, no other particular evils require explanation. Hence Scripture gives none. This shift away from the classical-philosophical monistic perspective is empowering in terms of confronting evil, and this represents the third reason why I believe that Christians today need to take Scripture’s warfare worldview seriously.

Put succinctly, the classical-philosophical assumption that a mysterious, loving, sovereign, divine plan lies behind even evil events in our world encourages an approach to evil that defines it as an intellectual problem to be solved rather than a spiritual opponent to be overcome. If all evil is believed to serve a higher divine purpose, then clearly one’s sense of urgency in fighting it is compromised, while one’s ability to render it intelligible is diminished.

This is precisely what has tended to happen within the Christian tradition since at least the time of Augustine. I believe it largely explains the Western church’s long-standing propensity to theologize so much about evil while being relatively impotent in waging war against it. Whereas the New Testament exhibits a church that is not intellectually baffled by evil but is spiritually empowered in vanquishing it, the Western tradition has more frequently exhibited a church that is perpetually baffled by evil but significantly ineffective in and largely apathetic toward combating it.

Within a warfare worldview, however, particular evils are their own ultimate explanation: they flow from the wills of creatures, hence there need be no higher “good” divine reason for their occurring. Thus evil must be understood as being what God is unequivocally against, and thus what God’s people must also be unequivocally against. Whereas the classical-philosophical theology of sovereignty encourages a theology of resignation, a theology rooted in a warfare worldview inspires, and requires, a theology of revolt: revolt against all that God revolts against.33

This is the only understanding that squares with Jesus’ ministry and the whole of the New Testament, on the one hand. On the other hand, it is the only theology that is going to reappropriate for the contemporary church the power of the New Testament church to confront and overcome the evils in our present world. It is, as such, a theology that the church today must take seriously, despite the significant difficulties such a theology may create with our culture’s naturalistic assumptions and with some of the church’s traditional theology.

As mentioned, this volume will be followed by another, entitled Satan and the Problem of Evil. The objective of both volumes is to explore the significance of the biblical portrait of Satan for a contemporary theodicy. The goal of this first volume is to demonstrate the thesis that the biblical writers, like almost all ancient peoples, held what I call a warfare worldview. Indeed, I hope to demonstrate the centrality of this warfare worldview for the biblical writers, especially in the New Testament, a centrality that has rarely been given its due.

The goal of Satan and the Problem of Evil shall be to provide a critical history of how the early church compromised the warfare worldview, and then to attempt to render the warfare worldview biblically and logically self-consistent, ironing out difficulties and objections that can be raised against it. I hope to demonstrate thereby that this warfare perspective constitutes the foundation for a theodicy that is philosophically superior to all alternatives, Christian and non-Christian alike.

To demonstrate the centrality of the warfare worldview in Scripture, I have divided this volume into two parts. Following an introductory chapter, chapters two through five concern cosmic forces of evil in the Old Testament, while the last five chapters concern themselves with the warfare worldview of the New Testament.

To be more specific, in my introductory chapter I set the stage by presenting as concretely as possible the central problem we shall grapple with throughout this volume and the next—the problem of evil—and by addressing the two most fundamental obstacles that immediately present themselves in the face of my warfare thesis: the problem of believing in free and influential spiritual beings (“angels” or “gods”) in our modern age, and the problem of affirming their autonomous power in the light of traditional understandings of God’s omnipotence.

Chapters two through five discuss the warfare worldview of the Old Testament. Chapter two first explores the Old Testament’s appropriation of the ancient Near Eastern view that the earth is inhabited by demons and enveloped by hostile raging waters. Chapter three then explores the Old Testament’s use of various Near Eastern mythological representations of cosmic evil (Leviathan, Rahab, etc.). Chapter four addresses the Old Testament’s remarkable reflections on the existence and function of angels (usually termed “gods” at this stage of revelation) who operate under, and sometimes against, Yahweh. Chapter five addresses the Old Testament’s reflection about one particular angel who, we begin to learn at this early stage of revelation, tended to operate outside, and against, Yahweh’s purposes. Throughout all of this I am interested in drawing a connection between this reflection and the Old Testament’s understanding of evil and suffering in this world.

The next five chapters (part two) address the nature and centrality of the warfare worldview in the New Testament. Chapters six, seven and eight explore the way in which the Gospels portray almost everything Jesus was about within a warfare framework. He had, as John later put it, come “to destroy the works of the devil” (1 Jn 3:8). Chapters nine and ten explore how this warfare motif is carried on and developed throughout the rest of the New Testament. Chapter nine centers on the New Testament’s cosmic warfare understanding of Christ’s death, while chapter ten focuses on the New Testament’s warfare understanding of the church’s mission.

Method. The goal of this volume is by no means uncontroversial, if not because of the thesis I defend, then because of the methodological issues it invites. As has been said, I essentially devote this volume to developing a broad biblical theology of Satan, the demonic and the human experience of evil, and I do so with the ultimate aim of constructing a contemporary compelling theodicy that understands evil within a warfare worldview. From a historical-critical perspective, however, such a project is problematic, to say the least. Indeed, the very concept of developing a topic-specific, trans-testamental biblical theology is, according to many, simply impossible.34

Thus many scholars today argue that the very attempt to discover what any particular author originally meant is misguided. Meaning is to be found (if it is to be found at all) between the reader and the text, not behind the text. Moreover, even if one could discover the original meaning of an author, the goal of developing a single “biblical” teaching on the basis of what various individual authors teach is altogether impossible. According to this perspective, the idea that a unity underlies the rich diversity within Scripture on any given theme is nothing more than a myth spun out of an uncritical bygone era. It should, as such, be rejected at the outset by historical-critical scholarship.

Such a perspective would utterly rule out developing a biblical theology about Satan, demons and suffering. Indeed, it would render any attempt to arrive at the biblical perspective on any matter impossible. But I simply do not accept this perspective. I cannot here offer anything like a thorough refutation of this objection, or even enter into a discussion of the issues. But it may prove helpful to the reader for me simply to state what my position is in response to this objection.

First, I write as a committed evangelical Christian, and so make no pretense to conducting my study from some supposedly neutral vantage point with a merely “descriptive” purpose. Practically speaking, then, I approach my task in a manner similar to those who would espouse a “canonical approach” to Scripture.35

Unlike some within this broad camp, however, I would argue for an objective, author-centered hermeneutical approach (as opposed to a purely community-based, “fideistic” hermeneutic), rooted in a strong, unifying view of divine inspiration.36 I hold this position for a number of reasons, but in the end it centers on my historical grounds for believing in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, in believing on historical grounds that he held to a high view of Scripture, and in believing in the perspicuity of divinely inspired literature.37

The end result is that I hold to a divinely inspired unity that underlies the rich diversity of the biblical texts and that serves as the foundation for this present project of biblical theology, as well as the more constructive philosophical theology volume (Satan and the Problem of Evil) to be published subsequently.38

Style. A word should also be said about the style of this work. My driving conviction is that this issue is far too important not to be discussed in accordance with the stringent expectations of biblical and theological scholarship, but too important as well not to be communicated in a way that opens it up for nonspecialists. Most of the works on Satan and spiritual warfare in the last several decades have had popular appeal but have lacked scholarship, while most sophisticated works on the problem of evil, in the present as well as in the past, have been intellectually inaccessible to lay readers. My hope is that this work can bridge these two worlds. I am aiming to provide a comprehensive scholarly work on Satan and the problem of evil that is, nevertheless, accessible to nonspecialist readers.

I have attempted to accomplish this task by writing the body of the text without presupposing any prior acquaintance with the relevant issues and by keeping the main text as free as possible from specialist jargon and specialist issues. I have attempted to maintain the academic integrity of the work by incorporating the specialist discussions and bibliographical information into the endnotes. The result may be that some scholars will find the main text at times to be too general, while some lay readers will find some of the endnotes to be too technical. Specialists are therefore advised to take the endnote discussions seriously, while nonspecialists are advised not to worry if they occasionally have difficulty with the endnotes.

Central objective. Throughout our investigations and deliberations, I trust that it will become increasingly apparent that the understanding of the world as being caught up in cosmic warfare constitutes one of the central threads that weave together the whole tapestry of the scriptural narrative. God’s age-long (but not eternal) battle against Satan forms one major dimension of the ultimate canvas against which everything from creation to the eschaton within the biblical narrative is to be painted and therefore understood.

As I proceed with this endeavor, I trust that it will also become apparent that this warfare perspective produces a radically different way of framing evil than the way Christians today tend to frame it. We shall see that New Testament authors were inclined to attribute pain and suffering to the evil purposes of Satan and demons. By contrast, we (indebted as we are to Augustine) are inclined to attribute pain and suffering to the mysterious “good” purposes of God. New Testament authors were inclined to expect evil and fight against it. By contrast, for theological reasons we are inclined not to expect it, therefore to be baffled by it when it occurs, but (all too often, at least) nevertheless to strive to accept it as coming from the loving hand of Providence when it occurs. The problem of evil that New Testament authors grappled with was simply the problem of overcoming it. The problem of evil we Westerners usually grapple with is the problem of intellectually understanding what we unfortunately rarely seek to overcome.

If this work helps us move more toward a New Testament (viz., a warfare) perspective on the problem of evil, it will, from my vantage point, have been a success.

Finally, a number of individuals share the credit for whatever value this work has. My deepest gratitude and love goes out to my wife, Shelley, and my three children, Denay, Alisha and Nathan (to whom this book is dedicated), who patiently put up with a sometimes sleep-deprived and grouchy husband and father. I also appreciate so much their sharing in my enthusiasm over new findings and new ideas—even when they did not have a clue as to what I was talking about.

I wish to also express a word of gratitude to Bethel’s new provost, Jay Barnes, who granted me course release time to complete this project; to my colleague David Clark, who offered critical insights into sections of this work; to Tyler and Chelsea DeArmond and Sandra Unger for their outstanding editorial work; and to my friend and the senior editor of this project, Rodney Clapp, whose critical insight has made this work much better than it would have otherwise been, and whose humor has made getting this book finished much more fun than it would have otherwise been.

I must also express my gratitude to the many passionate believers of Woodland Hills Church whom I have had the great privilege of serving as a preaching pastor for the past four years. They have helped fuel my passion for spiritual war, and have then put up with me when I have occasionally become perhaps a little obsessive in my preaching on this topic. Finally, I need to give a special word of appreciation to my friend, colleague and now fellow laborer in the church, Paul Eddy. His deep biblical and historical knowledge, combined with his spiritual insight, has proved invaluable in the many prolonged discussions and debates we have had on this topic. Though he by no means embraces all the views expressed in this book, much of its content has been crystallized by my interactions with him.