Troublesome TopicAGAINST RELIANCE ON OTHER RELIGIONS

Michael Heiser had the attitude that there is nothing special about the Bible; the writings of all religions of the Ancient Near East were equally trustworthy in his sight. He put lots of stock in other religions and the languages used in those regions. He also gave lots of credence to the books of Enoch. Therefore, he was comfortable bringing that stuff into the Bible as if it belongs there, as if the way the other nations interpreted things was the way that the Hebrew people interpreted things.

The worldview Heiser promoted is ancient, but it is not Biblical. In many ways it mirrors the religions of that day with their demigods, and power struggles among the gods, with the exception that he adds Jesus to the mix.

Actually, Michael Heiser was right according to the standard he was using. But was he using the right standard? NO! Paganism should never be our standard, yet Heiser asked us to accept it as such.

We always hear that we should interpret a passage of Scripture according to its context. That means its context in the passage, in the chapter, in the book and in the Bible. When a passage is challenging to understand, we should interpret it in the light of the rest of Scripture. Maybe you have heard the phrase, “Scripture interprets Scripture”. The context of the Bible in ancient Near Eastern cultures also has a place, but we need to be careful with that one. What other cultures and religions in that part of the world taught cannot supersede how the Bible interprets itself. But Michael Heiser did just that. He always chose the interpretation of the foreign religions over the Bible’s own context – I can think of only one exception and that is he did not believe the extreme size that 1 Enoch gives to the giants. He assumed the beliefs of other religions are valid and should be brought into our understanding of the Bible. For Him the Bible was not unique and the God we serve is understood best by looking at the supposed gods of other religions.

Heiser was not the first one, others have attempted to mix Christianity with pagan beliefs. The early Christian creeds were developed to clarify the basic beliefs of Christianity and define the Christian worldview in order to avoid the dangers that come from mixing with other systems of thought. That is also why Heiser held nothing but disdain for the early Christian creeds! Notice that the first thing he tried to do in his book was eliminate those things which would prohibit him from mixing Christianity with other worldviews. Heiser was probably accused of heresy in the 6 years that he was preparing this book, so he wanted to take off the table one of the primary mechanisms used by the early church to identify and eliminate heresy. I believe the charges of heresy made against Michael Heiser have been well-founded; that is exactly what this is; the book Unseen Realm is indeed a heresy!

The problem with getting a doctor’s degree in Semitic Languages (which includes Hebrew) is that much of the teaching is pulled from other religions and their respective languages, supposedly for comparative purposes. But the doctoral candidate begins to give greater credence to those other perspectives than is warranted and less uniqueness to the Bible than is warranted. Why accumulate all that knowledge about ancient cultures and not use it?

However, if you feel you need to rely on the books of Enoch to support the case you are making, you’ve got no case. Once you have quoted from the books of Enoch, you still have no case.

Heiser said that if we believe that Jesus could be born of a virgin, we should just as easily believe that Nephilim could be half god and half human. But Jesus was all God and all man – He was an impossibility. Heiser showed his fondness for other ancient religions when he assumed that we should accept demigods because we accept the birth of Jesus. He was putting those two things on the same level!

God taught His people the concepts of clean and unclean in part to teach them, “Don’t even get close to evil.” Part of that was, “Don’t get close to pagan religions, even in small ways.”

The worship of the Creator God as described in Genesis developed before other religions, and did so twice, once before the flood and once after the flood. Adam and Noah taught their respective children and grandchildren the ways of God, but it did not take long before some rebelled against what they had been taught and began to develop their own form of religion which was a perversion of the worship of the true God. Therefore, we should reject claims that the things we find in the Bible were informed by, and developed from, the other religions in that region. In reality, some of those other religions broke off from the worship of the true God and then others were splinters that broke from religions which had already rebelled against God. Michael Heiser relied heavily on the perversions, not on the original way to seek God. He even sought to introduce the perverted ways into the Bible. He was rewriting most of the Bible by doing this.

Michael Heiser wanted us to believe that if other languages in the Ancient Near East used a word or phrase in a certain way, that governs how we should interpret the use of that word or phrase when we see it in the Bible. Doing so would put the other languages in first place, implying that those other languages have precedent or priority. My point is that the worship of the Creator God described in Genesis was the original one and all others came later. Therefore, it is very possible for certain terminology to have developed in a simple way under the worshippers of God, and then later be twisted or reshaped by those who developed other religions with false gods. For example, the use of words like El or Elohim by other languages in that region do not govern how those names should be interpreted when we see them in the Bible.

Chapter 13 of Heiser’s book, Unseen Realm, is one of two chapters dedicated to the Nephilim of Genesis 6:1-4. In that chapter, pages 101-104 and parts of pages 105-107 are dedicated to the perspective of foreign religions, primarily those of Mesopotamia. On one hand, Heiser’s reliance on other languages of the Ancient Near East seems logical because the Bible only uses the term Nephilim three times, giving us very little to go on. Looking at the use of a word in other Semitic languages has benefit, as long as one is very careful to not introduce ideas from the religions those languages were tied to that violate the teaching of the Bible. Heiser was not careful; he threw that door wide open and received everything that pagan religions of the Ancient Near East had to offer.

On pages 107 & 108 Heiser said that Gen 6:1-4 was a polemic, a critical attack on the teaching of Babylonian mythology. If Michael Heiser were still alive, I would say to him, “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t rely on pagan religions for your interpretation of certain passages and then turn around and say that those passages are attacks on the very worldview you were relying on.” 

While God told the people of Israel to serve Him only, Heiser said they were to listen to and obey other god’s (members of God’s council) who served as judges in civil matters (according to his website when he discusses Exodus chapters 18-22).

Likewise, not only did God tell His people to not serve other gods, He said in Deuteronomy 12:14 and 31 that they should not worship Him, the true God, the way the other nations worshipped their gods, i.e. on the high places. That is the degree to which they should shun the other religions around them. But Heiser welcomed almost anything written or believed by another religion.

On page 327 Heiser said “if Paul was thinking more in terms of Greco-Roman cosmology …” But wait, why would Paul rely on Greco-Roman cosmology if he was a missionary to the pagans? He was trying to convert them out of their paganism, not promote that paganism.

On pages 377 & 379 Heiser used Paul’s words in I Corinthians 15:35-53 in an attempt to show that humans will become divine. On page 378 he brought up the question of what Paul meant by “heavenly body.” The first thing he did was mention the beliefs of the ancient Hellenistic Graeco-Roman world. But in the next paragraph he wrote “Paul was not dependent on Graeco-Roman paganism for his thoughts about celestial immortality.” However, notice what he said next about why Paul was not dependent on them. He wrote, “The Old Testament contains kernels of the idea, and many Jewish literary works of the Second Temple period address the topic.” But the “kernels” he referred to are things he interpreted to fit his worldview, and the Second Temple Jewish writers he referred to were themselves heavily dependent on pagan mythology. So Heiser started by going to pagan religions, then claimed that Paul did not rely on pagan teaching but rather relied on Jewish teaching from the Second Temple era, which was in fact, pagan in nature.

Heiser mentioned that many people today want to understand the ancient context of the Bible. He was right about that. But doing so does not mean studying pagan religions; it means coming to understand first of all the Law, and secondly the culture that was shaped by that law.

By emphasizing pagan gods as much as Heiser did, he gave prominence and even glory to the demons that are behind those gods.

The next lesson in this sectin is WHAT SHOULD WE CALL HEISERS WORLDVIEW?