Book Review: The Unseen Realm

I seem to see more and more lately in the reformed world on spiritual beings and their influence. Michael S. Heiser’s The Unseen Realm was recommended by one source and so I picked it up, not fully knowing exactly what it was about or who Heiser was.

It turns out we actually share an academic pedigree (up to a point at least). Heiser received a Ph.D. in biblical Hebrew from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This is the same small (but quite good) program where I did my undergrad¹ and got a Master’s in biblical Hebrew.² It appears that he was there a few years after I left so we did not overlap but I think we must have known people in common. All of which is to say, I know where Heiser is coming from, academically speaking. We have a common intellectual background and many of the observations he makes, particularly those that arise from the text of the Old Testament, are things that I was taught as well.

I will add that Heiser was a Christian (was, because he passed away not long ago).³ From the little bit of poking around I have done online, I have no reason to doubt the reality or sincerity of Heiser’s faith. But there are also some pretty big differences between his brand of Christianity and mine. Specifically, I am reformed (aka Calvinist) and he is not. While we start from many of the same places, this difference proves pretty significant in where we end up.

My short take on The Unseen Realm is that Heiser has some good observations that I think could be very useful to bring to a more general Christian audience but that he also makes some assumptions and has some ways of dealing with the text that cause him to push things too far so that he ends up in places I would not go. Ultimately, I cannot recommend his book.⁴

Heiser’s story is a well-known, even cliched, one: Christian student goes to study the Bible at a secular institution, is confronted with new ideas, and has his faith shaken.⁵ For Heiser, this did not lead to an abandonment of that faith but it did lead to some pretty big readjustments.

The text that initially threw Heiser for a loop is Psalm 82:1 which, as Heiser quotes it,⁶ reads:

God [elohim] stands in the divine assembly;

he administers judgment in the midst of the gods [elohim].

The picture we are given here and in a number of other places in the Old Testament is of a kind of divine assembly. It is not God alone but God in the midst of what is essentially a small congregation of gods (little “g”). This idea that there is a divine council is the basis for all that follows, for a whole system that Heiser goes on to develop. This is a bit of a stretch. We can accept the idea that the Bible speaks as if there is a divine council, even that there is something like this, without drawing all the conclusions that he does.

Having told a bit of his story and introduced his subject, Heiser gives us the “rules of engagement” in chapter 2. This is key because it is Heiser’s presuppositions and the ways that he deals with the biblical text that are going to explain why he goes one way and I would go another.

Heiser says that Psalm 82 caused an intellectual crisis for him because it broke his filter. He had been reading the text through a lens and didn’t even know it. So he threw away his filter. As a part of his desire to get rid of his “filters,” Heiser argues that we must read the biblical text as its original audience would have done:

“The proper context for interpreting the Bible is the context of then biblical writers — the context that produced the Bible. Every other context is alien to the biblical writers and, therefore, to the Bible. Yet there is a pervasive tendency in the believing Church to filter the Bible through creeds, confessions, and denominational differences.” ⁷

(p. 18; emphasis original)

On the surface, this may sound good. It has a ring of sola scriptura to it — just the Bible in its original context. But this is not how we read and understand the Scriptures. None of us come to the text without what Heiser calls “filters.” We always have ideas, often unconscious ones, that are lurking in the back of our minds influencing how we understand the text. It is always good to consider what the human author of a text would have known and how his original audience would have understood him, but this is not all there is. Even apart from the Bible, it is an open question how we understand any form of art whether the artist’s or author’s intent defines the meaning of the piece or if there can be meaning that he never intended. This is even more true when it comes to the biblical text which we believe has not just human authors but a divine one. God’s Word was for the original audience but not just for them. It is also for us and the Divine Author knew what was coming though the human authors often would not have. Finally, there is the rejection of creeds and confessions. Now creeds and confessions are not infallible. I believe that the Bible is the “only infallible rule for faith and life.” That is, it is the only rule that is infallible. But it is not all we have. We know, even from Scripture itself, that God’s Word can be misused and misapplied (Luke 4:1-13). As Christians we believe that God the Holy Spirit reveals to us the meaning of His Word and guides us in a right understanding of this. He does this not primarily individually but over time through His church. The creeds and confessions are records of how the church, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, has understood His Word. While Heiser is correct that “biblical theology does not derive from the church fathers” (p. 118), we must also have the humility to acknowledge that our forefathers in the faith may be good people to consult when it comes to interpreting the Scriptures.

A second assumption that Heiser makes is that “if it’s weird, it’s important” (p. 23). What he means by this is that the odd passages that we often want to gloss over in Scripture (eg. Genesis 6:1-4) are vital. Now I am not going to say that any part of Scripture is unimportant but there are certain principles that we use to interpret the Bible and one is that the obscure should be interpreted in light of the clear. Heiser demonstrates in this book a tendency to elevate the obscure and to derive from them theories with which he then interprets all of Scripture.

Beyond techniques of interpretation, Heiser comes to the text with a certain theological framework (a “filer” even) which I do not share. Specifically, I am reformed and he is Arminian. Though he never uses that language or openly identifies himself as such, we see his views clearly when we talks about God’s management style, man’s ability to image God, and God’s foreknowledge.

Heiser has a particular, and very non-reformed, understanding of how God relates to His creatures. “God decrees his will and leaves it to his administrative household to carry out these decrees” (p. 61). God’s management style (if you will) is relatively hands-off; He decides what is to be done but leaves the specifics up to His servants. He bases this primarily on 1 Kings 22:19-22 and Daniel 4. I will not spend a lot of time on the specifics of his argument except to say that it is always tricky to base a theological position on a narrative text (or two in this case). The passage from Daniel comes in a dream or vision so we have to allow that it may not be literal. In passages like the one from 1 Kings that Heiser cites, we have to consider that we may be getting a story from a certain perspective and again these passages should be read in the light of others which are more clear on these issues.

At times Heiser speaks of God as a slightly distanced manager who is nonetheless still in control of the final outcomes. At other times, his God seems to be one who is not really in control but is dependent upon the whims of His creatures. His plans are thwarted: “God’s plan that all the earth be Eden came to a screeching halt almost as soon as it began.” (p. 143). His creatures are able to obstruct His plans (p. 429) and so He is dependent on their actions and responses: “We mustn’t conclude that God didn’t try to turn the heart of his people back to himself.” (p. 257) He is not a God who planned the salvation of His people from before creation but One who had to come up with a plan B and adapt to circumstances He did not control: “As Israel reached the final stages of failure, God announced through the prophets that plans had changed.” (p. 245)

Heiser spends some time on what it means that man is made in the image of God. After discussing some of the options, he concludes that the image of God is something man does rather than an ability or characteristics he has. He argues that the image cannot be an ability like intelligence, reasoning ability, or communication because then those who die in infancy or who are severely handicapped could not be in God’s image and any pro-life stance who would undermined (p. 48). He concludes instead that the image of God is something that we do, a calling if you will. Specifically, it has to do with being like God in having dominion. Now this is not my position but neither is it a unique one. I would say it is well within orthodox Christian theology.⁸ The problem is that Heiser seems to circle back around on himself. Having said that the image is not an attribute but a thing we are called to do, he then makes this calling to image God dependent on one human ability: the ability to choose freely. Imaging for Heiser is only possible because of an ability and that ability is the free will: “If humanity had not been created with genuine freedom, representation of God would have been impossible” (p. 70). Here he seems to contradict his own pro-life argument when we says that imaging God is something that those “who survive birth without suffering severe impairment” are able to do (p. 70). I am less concerned with the pro-life argument here than with the rampant Arminianism. Heiser, without reference to the biblical text, maintains both that man is free to choose to image God or not and that he can actively do good by imaging God. As reformed people, we would say that man apart from saving grace can neither do actual good nor even will to do good. Heiser says man can do both — he wills good and he does good. His argument is that since God is not a robot or automaton that we, to be like Him, must also be beings able to freely will (p. 70) though he has argued elsewhere that we cannot just identify the image of God with characteristics or abilities of God (p. 48), even including free will on the list of attributes which we are not to identify as the image of God in man (p. 46).

If this all seems confusing, that’s because it is. To sum up, Heiser’s line of thought seems to be:

1. The image of God has been identified with one of more of these attributes of God, giving a list that includes free will. (pp. 46-48)
2. The image of God cannot be limited to these attributes or the unborn and handicapped people could not be said to be in the image of God and pro-life arguments would be undermined. (p. 48)
3. The image of God is rather something we are called to do: “To be human is to image God” (p. 50).
4. In order to do this thing — which Heiser assumes we are able to do — we must have free will (p. 69).
5. Free will is an attribute of God and so to be in His image, we must have it or we wouldn’t be like Him. (p. 70)
6. Oh, and by the way, it is only people who survive birth and develop more or less normally who can actually image God. (p. 70)

Not content to weigh in on the free will debate, Heiser also tackles the issue of predestination (p. 71). Here again, his methodology is suspect because he bases his understanding of what is a pretty big theological issue on one text, and that one a narrative, without considering other texts which speak more directly to the issue. As Heiser begins to discuss this issue, he again makes the appeal that we need to lay aside our theological systems and think like an ancient Israelite (p. 72). While there are many instances in which knowing how the original audience thought will help us gain a better understanding, we also need to allow that man’s understanding of God has evolved over time, not because God Himself has changed but because He has revealed Himself with progressive clarity to His people. There are many Old Testament texts that we are going to have more clarity on than the original audience did or even than their human authors (remember that the disciples did not see fully Christ in the Old Testament until after the resurrection; Lk. 24:27).

Heiser’s position is that God can have foreknowledge without predetermining events. The passage he goes to for this is 1 Samuel 23:1-13. Here David asks the Lord if the men of Keilah will deliver him into Saul’s hand. The Lord says yes, they will, and so David changes course and the men do not deliver him over to Saul. Heiser argues that since God was wrong (he said the men would deliver David over and they did not) that He did not predestine or predetermine what happens.⁹ God’s knowledge was conditional. There is another way to read this passage, however. David is not consulting the Lord just to know what will happen. As those going to battle in the Old Testament often do, he is consulting the Lord before going to fight so that he can decide what course of action to take. There is an implied conditional —if I go to meet Saul, will they hand me over? The answer he gets is yes, if you do, they will, but the “if” never happens because David changes course. God was answering a hypothetical. He was not wrong just because the “if” didn’t happen. It is not that Heiser’s interpretation is impossible, but when deciding how to interpret this passage, we should do so in the light of other biblical texts which speak more clearly to this very complicated theological issue.

Heiser often shows a lack of understanding, or at least a carelessness, of basic theology. He says that after the Fall “God, the Life-giver, forgave Adam and Eve” (p. 143). No doubt God did forgive them; but only later through the death of God the Son. Again, he says “We affirm that Jesus is on of those Persons. He is God. But in another respect, Jesus isn’t God — he is not the Father.” (p. 172) I don’t think he is meaning to make a heretical point here but the language is careless; there is no way in which Jesus isn’t God.

Heiser also seems to make little, unsubstantiated assumptions which can spiral into larger issues. A small one would be that, had the Fall not happened, “Adam and Eve would have been the mediators between God and other humans, their own children.” (p. 261) And similarly: “Had the fall not occurred, humanity would have been glorified and made part of the [divine] council” (p. 56). Working off of this, Heiser further argues that, once God has gone to plan B and worked around the obstacles thrown in His way by His creatures, that His original plan will come to fruition and believing humans will be made divine.

This idea that humans will be divinized is called theosis and it is not unique to Heiser. But neither is it good Protestant theology. (Theosis, as the term is usually used, is generally associated with the Eastern Orthodox church.) In Heiser’s defense (if it is a defense), I will say that it not entirely clearly what he means by divinization. At times he seems to use the term “divine” to just mean “spiritual.” Early in the book, when arguing for the concept of a divine council and divine beings other than God Himself, he is clear that to be “divine” as he uses the term is not to be like God in all ways. The elohim are not omnipresent or omnipotent (p. 35) but are merely “inhabitants of the spiritual world” (p. 37). And yet at the end of the book, when Heiser says that we humans will become divine, he does equate divinity with becoming like God (p. 357). He says that: “Joining God’s divine family is inextricably linked to the New Testament concept of becoming like Jesus — becoming divine.” (p. 363). This is not how we usually speak. We do believe that God’s people are being and will be conformed to Christ’s image (Rom. 8:29) but we do not say that we will become divine like He is. Heiser seems to conflate these concepts when he says that “theosis” is “being transformed into his likeness” and that our destiny is “immortality as a divinized human” (p. 364).

When he looks at the Sons of God and the Nephilim in Genesis 6:1-4, Heiser says that the marriages in this passage are what corrupted the earth and led to the flood (p. 115). Now these few verses do seem like a kind of prelude to the flood story but the Bible does not connect them or blame these beings (however we identify them) for the flood. We are told that it is humanity’s sin that led to the flood (Gen. 6:5). Heiser later argues that either the flood was not universal and did not kill everyone or that the sons of God again had relations with human women and produced more Nephilim (p. 218). This is a theory he plays out as he argues that the reason the Israelites were told to kill the inhabitants of the land was that they were not fully human; there were among them partial descendants of the sons of God (and if any fully human people were killed in the process, they were unfortunate collateral damage; pp. 232, 240). This may be pleasing on some level as it seems to mitigate one of the classic thorny issues of the Old testament — how could God order what was basically a genocide of the Canaanites? The problem is that there is little scriptural basis for any of it.

The Unseen Realm is a long book and there is much more we could discuss. Though my review has been largely critical, Heiser does make some good observations based on the Hebrew text and the world that the original Israelite audience would have known. Unfortunately, these are obscured by Heiser’s flawed methodology, his unclear and often imprecise thinking, and above all his own theological filter of which he does not seem to be aware but which is so very, very Arminian.

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1. As far as I know, I am the only one who actually majored in biblical Hebrew as an undergrad so all of my coursework in the department was done with grad students. ↩︎
2. Having gotten a BA and an MA in biblical Hebrew from UW, I had done most of their coursework so I went on to a Ph.D. program at another school (it rhymes with Shmarvard) though I never finished the Ph.D. since I began having kids, something that affected my academic path as a female more than it would affect that of my male colleagues. ↩︎
3. This was not uncommon in the program at UW. At least when I was there, most of the grad students were Christians and most were what I would call “solid” Christians. The professors tended also to be what you might call people of faith, though as likely to be Jewish as Christian. This was not so true at that other school. ↩︎
4. Some more internet searching has shown me that Heiser is a fairly polarizing figure. He has some strong proponents who seem quite devoted to his ideas but he also has his critics. ↩︎
5. In case you are wondering, I really didn’t have this experience. Though I was raised in the Catholic Church, I didn’t come to faith until college. I was in the biblical Hebrew program at the same time I was becoming Christian so perhaps I just didn’t have as much of a sense of dissoance as others. ↩︎
6. Heiser uses the Lexham English Bible. ↩︎
7. I read the Kindle edition and my page numbers are from that. I apologize if they do not line up with the page numbers in the print edition. ↩︎
8. Heiser would also include the created spiritual beings (what he calls the lesser elohim) among those who image God (p. 71). Again he is not the only one to make this case so I will not say he is unorthodox on this point, but the Scriptures do not tell us that spiritual beings are made in the image of God. ↩︎
9. Heiser speaks only of “predestination” without any nuance. If we wanted to be more precise, we might confine predestination to the doctrine that God has an elect people chosen before the creation of the world and call His control of events such as this one predetermination. ↩︎