Evangelicals and the Realm of the Supernatural

On Saturday, I was out walking my property and something clicked in my head. One of those seemingly obvious bits of insight, yet it only came together at that moment. Call it a Unified Supernatural Field Theory of Evangelicalism, sort of the holy grail of understanding most evangelical churches’ positions on the supernatural.

Consider these passages:

Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.
—1 Peter 5:8
Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
—Ephesians 6:11-12

When you ask many evangelicals to name what opposes them, you’re likely to get a number of answers, but I’m not sure the number one answer would be Satan.

M.C. Escher gets all supernatural

If you read a lot of Reformed/Calvinist books or blogs, Satan is barely a footnote—very odd considering what the Bible says of his place as the prime foe of the Christian. My own experience as part of two large, conservative Presbyterian churches would confirm that Reformed/Calvinist churches tend to place sin over Satan as the primary source of opposition, though sinfulness is a state of being not a personal foe. The Bible, on the other hand, is quite clear (as the two passages above note) that the foe is an entity, the devil.

Consider this: If an enemy drops a bomb on you, the bomb is not your foe; the person who tossed it is. Yet if one reads enough Reformed/Calvinist literature, it’s impossible to escape the reality that the devil doesn’t get much mention, with sin getting almost all the press. This, at least to me, seems a major oversight.

In many other Evangelical churches today, especially nondenominational, the devil gets a minor mention (as does sin), but the real enemy is made out to be negative thoughts patterns and practices. Again, this avoids the very real teaching that our foe is a being.

There’s a reason why these blinders exist.

The problem with these two viewpoints is they both avoid the truth that the enemy of the Christian is a supernatural entity that can’t be dealt with by human knowledge or through behavior modification. Yet this is how we deal with him in too many of our churches because to deal with him as a supernatural being necessitates holding a worldview that is consistently open to the daily intersection of the supernatural world with our own.

And the supernatural is…well, messy. It involves all sorts of nonrational thinking and practice, which scares the willies out of folks who like to be able to wrap their brains around everything they equate with the realm of God.

So I think that the reason you hear almost nothing about the prime foe of the Christian in large swaths of Evangelicalism is that acknowledging him as a supernatural being mandates believing that the supernatural is the “natural” state of the Christian life. By relegating the devil to a mere mention now and then some evangelicals think they can avoid dealing with the plane beyond this existence. In fact, I would say there’s a distinct inverse relationship: The more an evangelical places the opposition to the Christan in non-demonic sources, the less likely he or she will be to accept visions, charismata, and “mystical experiences” as part of the normal Christian life.

This argument may seem obvious to some of you, but it explains a great deal.

I also find it interesting that we possess this tendency to write off the devil and blame our problems on everything BUT him. Again, though, the Bible clearly states that he and his minions are the foe. And by purposefully downplaying his position as the opponent of the Christian, we naturally underestimate him.

This makes for problems for a Church not given to seeing the devil in his true guise. If anything, the entire book of Revelation depicts an entity doing its damndest, quite literally, to cause as much anguish and horror as possible before it’s cast into the lake of fire. We underestimate such a foe at our own peril, and I would say that, in many ways, we already have. Worse, by underestimating him, we’ve reduced our reliance on the supernatural power available to us Christians to combat the Enemy and use the tools the Lord Jesus gave us to defeat him.

Remember folks: This is not a flesh and blood battle, but a supernatural one.

(Hot) Thursday Thoughts

We’ve had a mild, gorgeous summer here, but today is shaping up to be one of those 95/95 days—95 degrees with 95 percent humidity. Welcome to southern Ohio in the second half of July.

Haven’t had as much inspiration for gut-wrenching blog posts lately. Life is difficult right now, so my energies are being directed elsewhere. Sorry. Will attempt to do better.

So today we get links and various musings on a variety of topics.

Musical Worthiness – Derek Webb is one of the few contemporary Christian artists I listen to. This is slightly old news, but he’s giving away his The Ringing Bell album free at NoiseTrade. You can find other free albums by alternative Christian artists at that site. Heaven knows we need alternatives to Third Day, Casting Crowns, and Mercy Me!

Cautionary-Tale-from-an-Impeccable-Source Worthiness – If you want to hear just how well the Lakeland “Revival” and Todd Bentley travel, William Dembski of Intelligent Design fame shares his tale of attending a Dallas offshoot appearance. Given Dembski’s notoriety, intellect, and the revelation that one of his children is autistic only makes the story all the more worthy of note.

Charitable Worthiness – Reader Sara Wilson alerted me to a 131-year-old organization called The Fresh Air Fund that provides a two-week summer vacation for inner-city kids by placing them with families that live in suburban and rural areas or by sending them to camp. As someone who worked in camping for years and now lives on a farm, sounds ideal to me. If you can host a child, please contact the organization ASAP.

Blog Worthiness – Pastor Michael Newnham’s Phoenix Preacher blog is also worthy of note. Plenty of good linkage there and gripping reading.

A Lesson for Early Adopters – Though always a “wait and see” person when it comes to software updates with new functionality, I threw caution to the wind and upgraded my WordPress software almost immediately after v2.6 came out. I’ve used a plugin that does the upgrade seamlessly, but this time the outcome was a mess and took me about four hours to finally clear up. The plugin choked right at the end, I got locked out of the admin panel, and I could not upgrade the database. A real mess with gobs of scary errors. Sure enough, the next day, a new version of the plugin showed up. Of course.

More WordPress Cautions – If you are using one of the recent versions of WordPress that allows automatic updates of plugins, be very, very careful. The automatic update feature requires CHMOD settings on WordPress directories that leave them open to hacker exploits. This blog was hacked about a month ago by someone who modified a plugin to a plugin because of the settings necessitated by the automatic plugin update in WordPress. Needless to say, once bitten, twice shy.

Speaking of Messes… – Man, this banking fiasco is a nightmare. Expect more banks to collapse. When the SEC halts shorting of financial stocks, you know we’ve got troubles. It only goes to show you better have your treasure in heaven and not on earth.

Apocalyptic Inflationary Evidence – I live in one of the largest corn and soybean producing states. Many of the farmers around me grow corn; a 1,000+-acre field of corn sits a quarter mile down the road. Yesterday, I was in my local Kroger store and they were selling corn for 50 cents an ear. Never seen a price even remotely that high. I know that many soybean and corn farmers around here had to plant twice because of the deluge of rain we got in spring, but still. I used to buy corn for under 10 cents an ear. I saw a man standing in front of the corn bin in produce shaking his head and muttering. I joined him. He turned to me and said something I’ve been saying to myself a lot lately: “How do people live?” Unbelievable.

The Neo-Apostolic Mashup – Christianity has seen its mix of assaults (postmodernism being the latest whipping boy of apologists), but I’m convinced the New Apostolic Reformation poses a larger threat to the Church globally than postmodernism does, especially if it cannot cleanse out its undiscerning elements. Sadly, I wonder if anything would be left of the movement if the undiscerning elements were purged.

Thank You – Thank you to those of you who contributed to the support of Cerulean Sanctum. I’ve written to those who did. Blessings. A couple contributers typoed their e-mail addresses, though. If you have not received a personal thank you from me, that is why. And for those who enjoy the blog and have offered to support it in the past, you now have the option to do so.

Thanks always for reading. Have a blessed weekend.

Finding Commitment in a Disposable Age

I’ve spent most of the morning thinking about a man I haven’t talked to in eight years.

Jack Lee is one of the finest men I’ve ever known. He owned a company I once worked for. While any man can run a company of a few hundred employees, scant few run theirs like Jack.

Jack knew my wife’s name. A day before my birthday, Jack asked me if I had any plans for the day. Jack remembered my anniversary. In fact, Jack knew all those important names and dates in his employees lives, and not because some reminder software belched up the info in his planner that morning. He actually kept that info in his head because he considered it essential.

When a problem came up in the corporate health plan, Jack was there for every meeting and changed things so that our package was even better than before (in an age where health plans were getting worse). During my tenure with the company, he kept improving the retirement and investment plans till they were the envy of the industry.

Jack’s office was a hundred miles away from my location, but he routinely showed up in our office to check in with people. When my Mom got ill, and it was clear that I was going to have to move back to Ohio to care for her, Jack threw a going away party. In speaking about my contributions, he teared up. I’d worked for the company less than eighteen months.

Tearing up when losing an employee was common for Jack because his employees weren’t just ten-digit numbers on a folder stashed in an HR filing cabinet. They were flesh and blood people who had lives outside of work. And Jack was committed to his people. I know that the company pocketed less money than was possible because Jack put people before profits. For him, that commitment meant everything.

I say this with regret, but I don’t know if Jack is a believer or not. What gets me is that if he’s not, he exemplified godly commitment better than many of the most vocal Christians I’ve known in my life.

In a disposable age, when everything is classified by a system of worth straight from hell itself, we need more people like Jack Lee. And more than anything, those people should be coming from our churches.

I hate to see people bail. They bail on their promises. They bail on other people. They even bail on their families. That lack of commitment sends one enormous message: nothing has inherent value.

When there is no commitment, our words lose all meaning.

When there is no commitment, we live for the moment and plan nothing.

When there is no commitment, we run after the inconsequential.

When there is no commitment, the least of these remain the least of these.

When there is no commitment, the pillars of society fail.

When there is no commitment, any evil can be justified.

When there is no commitment, it’s every man for himself.

In an age like that, the Church must offer something better.

Jesus Christ is committed to His Church. The question is, Just how committed are we to Him and to each other?

It scares me how paltry our commitment is. Times of uncertainty are not the moments for a gut check. The gut check should come before the battle, not in the midst of it. We are heading into dark times and are completely and utterly unprepared for them because we have not made the commitments needed to weather the storms.

Do we realize how close our economy is to collapse? The Big Three automakers are nearly bankrupt, and as they go, so goes a huge chunk of our economy through a massive domino effect. What happens when a third of the people in a church are out of work? What happens when your bank fails and FDIC can’t cover the loss? What happens when you lose your home?

You see, commitment is behind all those issues. Can we say, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him,” or do we gradually slip away? Do we help others in need even if it costs us everything? What do we do?

If the Church of Jesus Christ doesn’t embody commitment, if it doesn’t hurt us a little to follow Christ, and if we’re all talk with no real guts behind what we say we believe, then the world just got a lot more hopeless.

As for me, I’m not ready to walk away, no matter how much it hurts.