Christopher Kou’s article on the divine council is a penetrating engagement with the work of Michael Heiser. It is a piece I will doubtless recommend to others in the future, as a perceptive and illuminating treatment of a subject that has risen markedly in popularity over the past decade.
Christopher’s cautions against overreliance upon Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) parallels and extra-canonical texts, for instance, are much needed. Preoccupation with the divine council and related matters—concerning which Holy Scripture says relatively little—can remove us from the sure ground of scriptural revelation into the realm of dubious myths and ungrounded speculations. Mixing these things, without clear discrimination, can have the effect of diminishing people’s regard for Holy Scripture.
While there is doubtless serious research to be done in this area, the current preoccupation with the divine council and related issues may often owe more to intellectual vice than to healthy interest. A fascination with diverting and exciting new ideas, and an appetite for the sensational over the true, can distract us from, and subtly substitute for, studious devotion to those truths that relate to our duties.
For us as moderns, outside of a few contexts, ‘curiosity’ tends to have a clear positive sense. Surely, knowledge is good and it is good to want to know things. However, historically, curiositas has been widely recognized as a vice, as a disordered appetite for knowledge. Such a vice is readily recognized in such things as prurience, an unwholesome interest in sexual matters, particularly the sexual activities of others, and in the broader practice of gossip, with its inappropriate delight in other people’s business.
Curiositas is not restricted to such interpersonal situations, though. It can be seen in the itching ears of those who are always wanting to hear some sensational new idea, rather than studiously devoting themselves to those truths that relate to their proper duties. Luke describes the behaviour of the Athenians in a way that suggests that they were afflicted by this vice, writing that they ‘would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new’ (Acts 17:21). With an unrelenting stream of podcasts, social media posts, and articles on blogs, all vying for our attention with the promise of some exciting or controversial new thing, yet which are hardly ever intentionally digested and metabolized into our lives, this is a vice to which we might be especially prone.
It is no accident that so much of the ‘content’ concerned with matters relating to the ‘unseen realm’ has been generated within such an epistemic environment. It can predispose us to a shallow and distracted ‘learning’ that is not really learning at all, encourage an undisciplined appetite for, fixation upon, and credulity for the controversial and sensational, and can function as a diversion from the duties that should principally concern us.
2 Timothy 4:3-4 describes a time in which people will not abide sound teaching, but will be drawn astray by their ‘itching ears’, ‘accumulating teachers’ that feed their fancies and ‘wandering off into myths’. This is a danger that is peculiarly pronounced in our time, where there is a myriad of ‘teachers’ we can choose from—it has never been easier to ‘accumulate’ teachers—who will speak to the issues that most interest us. In contrast to online teachers, who can take little realistic responsibility for the balanced character of their listeners’ theological diet, pastors do need to consider whether some of those under their oversight may have exceeded their recommended yearly intake of Nephilim-related content, while neglecting the meat and potatoes of core biblical teaching!
Deuteronomy 29:29: ‘The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.’ Curiositas is further encountered in the desire for forbidden or inappropriate knowledge. Prurience in sexual matters is one example of this, but it also concerns inordinate desire to know those things that God has not revealed to us, a refusal faithfully and patiently to occupy our station beneath the firmament. Scripture does not merely give us truth, it also directs our attention to those things that are most worthy of our attention. And, in the process, while it often hints at realities beyond the focus of the text, it does not allow our gaze to linger too long upon these before bringing us back to those matters that should be central matters of interest and concern. Deuteronomy 29:29’s juxtaposition between the ‘secret things’ and the ‘things that are revealed’ suggests that a crucial aspect of this distinction is between matters that merely feed idle, doubtful, and disorienting speculation and matters that encourage and enable confident and obedient practice.
None of this means that it is altogether inappropriate to consider the divine council and the ‘unseen realm’ more broadly—and, yes, there may also be a time and place for Nephilim discourse! While it may not speak of it to the degree that much apocryphal, deuterocanonical, and pseudepigraphical, or ANE literature, does, Scripture does speak of such matters on occasions. Resisting the vice of curiosity—the inordinate desire to know those things God has hidden or left unrevealed—it is good to reflect closely upon what God has disclosed and how he has disclosed it, all while allowing revelation to direct the focus of our attention, prioritizing practical knowledge of God’s truth and ways over idle and wandering speculation. However, before and as we engage in such consideration in our context, it is essential that we are mindful and circumspect about those factors that commonly disorder such reflection
Having registered such concerns, which I suspect Christopher would largely share, there are some key points where I believe that his otherwise robust analysis is weaker. One specific area is his treatment of the use of Enoch in Jude and Peter. He argues that Peter and Jude’s use of Enoch is ‘limited and polemic’. Yet I do not believe such a claim is so easily maintained in the case of a passage like 1 Peter 3:18-22, where Peter seems to be alluding to something like Enoch’s account of the fall of the Watchers, in the context of an exhortation to faithful suffering.
Peter’s reference to non-canonical details of this story (see also 2 Peter 2:4-5) as part of a broader analogy with the situation faced by faithful Christians in his own day, and in continuity with the work of Christ in the fulness of time (‘he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison’—verse 19), does not seem to fit Christopher’s description of ‘limited and polemic’ use. Indeed, Peter’s statement seems to parallel Christ to Enoch: the ascended Enoch preached God’s condemnation to the imprisoned spirits, and Christ, after his decisive triumph over Satan, proclaimed that victory to the spirits who had led the former rebellion (I discuss the text in more detail here). If the Apostle Peter shared Christopher’s convictions concerning the status of Enochic literature, it seems surprising that he would speak in such a manner, casually appealing to elements of its story, without clarifying explanation. Such a use of Enoch would seem to give some significant hostages to fortune. The Apostle seems to have much more of a place for a text like Enoch. Yet it is instructive that, for Peter, the Enochic material serves his exhortation to concrete faithful practice, rather than as an invitation to speculation. The mere fact that something is the case is not sufficient to render it a worthy object of our quests for knowledge; the proper end of our knowledge in edification and holiness of life must always guide us. Unmindfulness of the manner and the ends of our search for knowledge leaves us vulnerable to many common disorders of thought.
At such points, Scripture itself seems to recognize—and confirm—important spiritual truths outside of its own pages, suggesting that, while we must beware of speculative fixations, unfounded myths, and substituting fallible texts for the sure word of Holy Scripture, it is not the only source of insight concerning unseen realities. This might be unsettling for some of us who are concerned to maintain the primacy and the uniqueness of Holy Scripture, However, there is no reason such convictions need be abandoned on account of such recognition and part of what faithfulness to Scripture must entail is wrestling with the ways in which its reality can be less tidy than our theologies of it.
Alastair Roberts (PhD, Durham) is adjunct Senior Fellow at Theopolis and is one of the participants in the Mere Fidelity podcast.. He blogs at Alastair’s Adversaria and tweets using @zugzwanged.
Christopher Kou’s article on the divine council is a penetrating engagement with the work of Michael Heiser. It is a piece I will doubtless recommend to others in the future, as a perceptive and illuminating treatment of a subject that has risen markedly in popularity over the past decade.
Christopher’s cautions against overreliance upon Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) parallels and extra-canonical texts, for instance, are much needed. Preoccupation with the divine council and related matters—concerning which Holy Scripture says relatively little—can remove us from the sure ground of scriptural revelation into the realm of dubious myths and ungrounded speculations. Mixing these things, without clear discrimination, can have the effect of diminishing people’s regard for Holy Scripture.
While there is doubtless serious research to be done in this area, the current preoccupation with the divine council and related issues may often owe more to intellectual vice than to healthy interest. A fascination with diverting and exciting new ideas, and an appetite for the sensational over the true, can distract us from, and subtly substitute for, studious devotion to those truths that relate to our duties.
For us as moderns, outside of a few contexts, ‘curiosity’ tends to have a clear positive sense. Surely, knowledge is good and it is good to want to know things. However, historically, curiositas has been widely recognized as a vice, as a disordered appetite for knowledge. Such a vice is readily recognized in such things as prurience, an unwholesome interest in sexual matters, particularly the sexual activities of others, and in the broader practice of gossip, with its inappropriate delight in other people’s business.
Curiositas is not restricted to such interpersonal situations, though. It can be seen in the itching ears of those who are always wanting to hear some sensational new idea, rather than studiously devoting themselves to those truths that relate to their proper duties. Luke describes the behaviour of the Athenians in a way that suggests that they were afflicted by this vice, writing that they ‘would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new’ (Acts 17:21). With an unrelenting stream of podcasts, social media posts, and articles on blogs, all vying for our attention with the promise of some exciting or controversial new thing, yet which are hardly ever intentionally digested and metabolized into our lives, this is a vice to which we might be especially prone.
It is no accident that so much of the ‘content’ concerned with matters relating to the ‘unseen realm’ has been generated within such an epistemic environment. It can predispose us to a shallow and distracted ‘learning’ that is not really learning at all, encourage an undisciplined appetite for, fixation upon, and credulity for the controversial and sensational, and can function as a diversion from the duties that should principally concern us.
2 Timothy 4:3-4 describes a time in which people will not abide sound teaching, but will be drawn astray by their ‘itching ears’, ‘accumulating teachers’ that feed their fancies and ‘wandering off into myths’. This is a danger that is peculiarly pronounced in our time, where there is a myriad of ‘teachers’ we can choose from—it has never been easier to ‘accumulate’ teachers—who will speak to the issues that most interest us. In contrast to online teachers, who can take little realistic responsibility for the balanced character of their listeners’ theological diet, pastors do need to consider whether some of those under their oversight may have exceeded their recommended yearly intake of Nephilim-related content, while neglecting the meat and potatoes of core biblical teaching!
Deuteronomy 29:29: ‘The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.’ Curiositas is further encountered in the desire for forbidden or inappropriate knowledge. Prurience in sexual matters is one example of this, but it also concerns inordinate desire to know those things that God has not revealed to us, a refusal faithfully and patiently to occupy our station beneath the firmament. Scripture does not merely give us truth, it also directs our attention to those things that are most worthy of our attention. And, in the process, while it often hints at realities beyond the focus of the text, it does not allow our gaze to linger too long upon these before bringing us back to those matters that should be central matters of interest and concern. Deuteronomy 29:29’s juxtaposition between the ‘secret things’ and the ‘things that are revealed’ suggests that a crucial aspect of this distinction is between matters that merely feed idle, doubtful, and disorienting speculation and matters that encourage and enable confident and obedient practice.
None of this means that it is altogether inappropriate to consider the divine council and the ‘unseen realm’ more broadly—and, yes, there may also be a time and place for Nephilim discourse! While it may not speak of it to the degree that much apocryphal, deuterocanonical, and pseudepigraphical, or ANE literature, does, Scripture does speak of such matters on occasions. Resisting the vice of curiosity—the inordinate desire to know those things God has hidden or left unrevealed—it is good to reflect closely upon what God has disclosed and how he has disclosed it, all while allowing revelation to direct the focus of our attention, prioritizing practical knowledge of God’s truth and ways over idle and wandering speculation. However, before and as we engage in such consideration in our context, it is essential that we are mindful and circumspect about those factors that commonly disorder such reflection
Having registered such concerns, which I suspect Christopher would largely share, there are some key points where I believe that his otherwise robust analysis is weaker. One specific area is his treatment of the use of Enoch in Jude and Peter. He argues that Peter and Jude’s use of Enoch is ‘limited and polemic’. Yet I do not believe such a claim is so easily maintained in the case of a passage like 1 Peter 3:18-22, where Peter seems to be alluding to something like Enoch’s account of the fall of the Watchers, in the context of an exhortation to faithful suffering.
Peter’s reference to non-canonical details of this story (see also 2 Peter 2:4-5) as part of a broader analogy with the situation faced by faithful Christians in his own day, and in continuity with the work of Christ in the fulness of time (‘he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison’—verse 19), does not seem to fit Christopher’s description of ‘limited and polemic’ use. Indeed, Peter’s statement seems to parallel Christ to Enoch: the ascended Enoch preached God’s condemnation to the imprisoned spirits, and Christ, after his decisive triumph over Satan, proclaimed that victory to the spirits who had led the former rebellion (I discuss the text in more detail here). If the Apostle Peter shared Christopher’s convictions concerning the status of Enochic literature, it seems surprising that he would speak in such a manner, casually appealing to elements of its story, without clarifying explanation. Such a use of Enoch would seem to give some significant hostages to fortune. The Apostle seems to have much more of a place for a text like Enoch. Yet it is instructive that, for Peter, the Enochic material serves his exhortation to concrete faithful practice, rather than as an invitation to speculation. The mere fact that something is the case is not sufficient to render it a worthy object of our quests for knowledge; the proper end of our knowledge in edification and holiness of life must always guide us. Unmindfulness of the manner and the ends of our search for knowledge leaves us vulnerable to many common disorders of thought.
At such points, Scripture itself seems to recognize—and confirm—important spiritual truths outside of its own pages, suggesting that, while we must beware of speculative fixations, unfounded myths, and substituting fallible texts for the sure word of Holy Scripture, it is not the only source of insight concerning unseen realities. This might be unsettling for some of us who are concerned to maintain the primacy and the uniqueness of Holy Scripture, However, there is no reason such convictions need be abandoned on account of such recognition and part of what faithfulness to Scripture must entail is wrestling with the ways in which its reality can be less tidy than our theologies of it.
Alastair Roberts (PhD, Durham) is adjunct Senior Fellow at Theopolis and is one of the participants in the Mere Fidelity podcast.. He blogs at Alastair’s Adversaria and tweets using @zugzwanged.
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