Troublesome Topic: WHAT SHOULD WE CALL HEISERS WORLDVIEW?

For considerable time I puzzled over what to call this worldview. It is obviously not a Biblical worldview, so what should we call it? Then I thought of the name Amalgamated Paganism. It has been put together from Ugaritic, Canaanite, Greek, Babylonian, Roman and other ancient religions and their mythology. However, Heiser mixes some Jesus in there too and tries to make it sound Biblical, so I decided to revise the name to include the insertion of Jesus into the mixing pot. I came up with The Amalgamation Station. However, that is too broad because modern religions and those from other parts of the world were not involved. Therefore, I finally settled on The Ancient Near Eastern Amalgamation Station, or the ANE Amalgamation Station. I know the name is a bit long, but it is accurate. (We call that part of the world the Middle East, but it used to be called the Near East – maybe it moved.)

Why is such amalgamation and mixing a bad idea? God and His word are constantly separating themselves from the belief in other gods and from the ways that other nations did things. If we introduce just a few elements from other religions, we have corrupted the Word of the one true God. But if we bring in many beliefs from other religions, as Michael Heier does, we have created something different, it can no longer be called Biblical.

The subtitle of Heiser’s book, Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible, is false and misleading. While it is supernatural, it is not Biblical.

Every religion has a sacred book. What is the sacred book of this worldview Michael Heiser promotes?  It is actually a number of books organized into a tiered system.

The first tier only has one book, 1 Enoch.

The second tier includes numerous religious books from the Ancient Near East, as well as most of the second temple era Jewish writings, including 2 Enoch, 3 Enoch, the Book of Giants, The Book of Jubilee, and more, all of which show a heavy influence from pagan religions.

The third tier is the Bible that we know. Michael Heiser places the Bible in a place of lower importance than the books of other religions of that era in that part of the world (the ANE). We can know this because he is always trying to change or reinterpret the Bible while he accepts almost everything from foreign, pagan religions without hesitation.

Therefore, I encourage you to think of Michael Heiser’s worldview as The Ancient Near Eastern Amalgamation Station which holds 1 Enoch as its most important holy book.

The next lesson is called HOW FAR ON THE SLIDING SCALE SHOULD WE GO?