I remember I was standing at the counter of a gun store in Athens, PA talking to the owner. At the time I was attending a Bible school in the Southern Tier of New York, and there wasn’t really anything to do. This particular store was the closest location to the school I went to, and while I never bought anything, I would browse, and eventually struck up a friendship with the owner. After the first visit she talked about being a Christian herself, so theology and the Bible were regular parts of the conversation when I would come visit.
Then one day she said something that was really strange. “Our pastor is talking about Genesis 6, and how angelic beings came and created hybrids that eventually became demons.” I was kind of shocked and didn’t know what to do with this information. I had never heard of such a thing before. And while I had read the Bible a bunch of times (I was in Bible school after all), this particular episode was nothing I had ever heard of. I then started digging into the resources I had available to be at the school, and when I presented her with the explanations that these books (now looking back on them poorly researched commentaries on the Bible that was more personal opinion than grounded interpretation), she quickly and expertly took apart the thin arguments I presented her. That conversation particular ended, and I continued on with life.
Several years later my brother started talking about this book called The Unseen Realm, and this guy Michael Heiser. At this point, I was slowly being dispelled of the fundamentalist underpinnings of Biblical interpretation, my mind was now open for serious scholarship on Scripture, and I started watching videos and listening to podcast episodes from this Heiser guy.
I was immediately captivated. His basic premise was, “if it’s weird, it’s important.”
The Bible, whether we acknowledge it or not is full of a lot of weird stuff that we simply can’t just explain away. We like to try, to may our interpretations of the Bible fit our neat evangelical, contemporary, post-enlightenment categories of theology and the world. But, as Heiser points out, if we take the Bible seriously, as it was meant to be taken, we get dispelled of that very quickly.
While I grew up in a Charismatic and Pentecostal background, which assumes the reality of angels, demons and the like, in reality the understanding was very flat and two dimensional. A standard dualism was baked into the cake, and much of what I thought was found in the Bible, later turned out to be stuff from Milton’s Paradise Lost, that had simply been subsumed into the Biblical narrative, without actually being found in the text itself.
But then I started to see the big picture that Heiser was starting to present. And once I got my hands on a copy of The Unseen Realm, so many different pieces started to fall into place.
This idea of a Divine Council Worldview, which predominately is derived from Psalm 82, and Deuteronomy 32 (though is thoroughly replete throughout Scripture) fleshes out the truly supernatural worldview of the authors and recipients of the Biblical text. And what was most captivating, was that this understanding of Scripture was holistic in taking into account all the weird stuff that we find, without having to bend over backwards to make other data points fit. More than that, it wasn’t just coherent with the Gospel message, it actually strengthened the mission of Christ, and what our role as the Church is in the world.
Sadly, Michael Heiser passed away in 2023 from cancer. Though, throughout his entire time of treatment, he kept making content, and writing. Since his passing, much of the content that he had been working on has been compiled and been rolled into his original magnum opus; The Unseen Realm: Expanded Edition. The additional 20,000 words of content help flesh out, and further contextualize the Divine Council Worldview.
For anyone who has not read the book, or is familiar with the concept of the divine council, I highly recommend that you take the dive. When we take seriously the context the Scriptures were written in, we begin to see how everything falls into place, where before some stuff might seem weird or untoward to our modern sensibilities.
For those who have already read Heiser, the expanded edition is well worth getting as it adds additional notes, context & application of the expansive content already found in the book.
Heiser has had one of the greatest impacts on my understanding of God, and His work in the world. and for that I am eternally grateful. I hope you will come to see the blessing that Heiser was and is to the church as his legacy lives on through The Michael S. Heiser foundation, run by his widow, AWKNG School of Theology, The Divine Council Worldview Podcast and so many other resources.
The Unseen Realm: Expanded Edition releases on October 1, but early shipping is available if ordered through Logos.