I recently finished writing a primer on the doctrine of angels and demons for Holman Reference. When people found out I was working on this project, one name came up in the conversations far more than any other: “Have you ever read Michael Heiser?” I am honestly astonished at how widespread and enthusiastic Heiser’s influence has been. It is remarkable that a scholar who specialized in Semitic languages and Ancient Near Eastern literature would have become a best-selling author. Heiser, who tragically died of pancreatic cancer in 2023, was one of those rare individuals who could combine depth of academic research with clear rhetorical skills that made difficult concepts accessible for a mass audience. So, the success of his books on the “unseen realm” is clearly owing to his own scholarly and writing abilities. But I think that part of his success lies in the fact that there is so little material on this particular topic among contemporary evangelicals. Sure, you can find rows of books at the local bookstore on spiritualism and the occult, and quite a few books written from a Catholic or charismatic perspective. But among non-charismatic evangelicals, there is precious little. So, in a sense, Heiser has been the only game in town.

Because of his enormous popularity, it is with good reason that Theopolis would host a symposium such as this. The previous installments have highlighted some of the major promises and perils of Heiser’s project. Christopher Kou has offered a sympathetic but critical evaluation of both the method and the content of Heiser’s divine council worldview. Alastair Roberts has rightly warned us against the vice of curiositas in these conversations. And Heath Henning has launched a full-frontal attack against what he perceives to be Heiser’s heterodoxy on the question of monotheism.

Kou helpfully points out the methodological and hermeneutical weaknesses of Heiser’s approach. I wish to expound on this theme a bit more. Kou notes that a Christian interpretation of Scripture must take account of the canonical and traditional dimensions of the interpretive task. Ancient Near Eastern literature surely has a role to play, as we situate the biblical text in its historical, religious, and cultural location. But the ultimate horizon for biblical interpretation is the whole canon of Scripture, especially the patterns of interpretation prescribed and patterned by the apostolic witness. Furthermore, the community within which our interpretation must proceed is not finally the original audiences to whom the discrete parts of Scripture were first addressed (though reconstructing that original context is a crucial first step). Rather, we interpret the Bible as Christian Scripture within the communion of saints, the church of the Lord Jesus Christ across space and time, deferring the sensus fidelium and the teaching officers whom the living Christ appoints for our instruction. Heiser fatally omits and explicitly disavows these traditional voices and cuts himself off from the regulating function they ought to exercise in proper biblical interpretation and synthesis. It is no accident that one of Heiser’s podcasts was titled, “The Naked Bible.” It betrays a modernist spirit to presume that such a presuppositionless posture is even possible. Heiser himself couldn’t pull it off. He had his own interpretive framework, constructed almost exclusively from background literature, and he rendered his own systematico-theological judgments, with often puzzling and problematic results.

As I argue in my forthcoming book, if Heiser had consulted the history of interpretation and doctrine more earnestly, he would have found some interesting resonances between his interpretations and the great tradition that he so blithely dismisses as a distorting influence in interpretation. For example, his three-tiered understanding of the elohim (God, the sons of God, and angels) bears some resemblance (though not exact) to the hierarchy of spiritual beings that developed in the patristic era and that found its definitive expression in the ornate celestial hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius. His understanding of the term angel as a functional rather than an ontological title is precisely the argument Augustine articulated. Seeing at least some of the
“gods” referenced in Scripture as actually existing demonic powers was a view Augustine held as well.

A quick search of the indices in Heiser’s books reveals virtually zero interaction with the history of Christian interpretation. Again, this is a feature, not a bug of his methodology. His stated methodology is an attempt to develop a theology of the unseen realm that “derives exclusively from the text understood through the lens of the ancient, premodern worldview of the authors.”[1] He argues that “seeing the Bible through the eyes of an ancient reader requires shedding the filters of our traditions and presumptions.”[2] He reports that his discoveries using this method have resulted in awkward conversations with other Christians. “That sort of thing happens when you demand that creeds and traditions get in line behind the biblical text.”[3] Heiser acknowledges that “creeds serve a useful purpose” in distilling theological ideas, but “they are not inspired” and “are no substitute for the biblical text.”[4]

In one sense, these observations are trivially true for any Protestant reading of the Bible. Scripture has pride of place as the sole, supreme source and standard for all Christian theologizing. Creeds and confessions do not supplant or even supplement the biblical revelation. But the emphasis on the distorting influence of “creeds” is odd. The ecumenical creeds have very little to say about the angelic realm. “Maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible” is pretty much all you get from the creeds. The point seems rhetorically motivated. “No creed but the Bible” is a common, but distorted, summary of the Protestant principle of Sola Scriptura. The substance of Heiser’s denial lies in his complete dismissal of the Christian tradition with reference to the celestial realm. You will search in vain for any reference to the church fathers, the medieval scholastics and mystics, or the Reformers and their heirs in Heiser’s work. If it were simply a matter of disciplinary expertise, perhaps this would be unobjectionable. Heiser wrote as a biblical scholar, not a church historian or systematician. But Heiser’s maneuver involves more than simply staying in his disciplinary lane, as it were. He positively derides the post-apostolic reception of Holy Scripture as both an interpretive liability and (curiously) an antisupernaturalistic influence.

It is precisely the supernatural orientation of the Christian tradition that makes Heiser’s self-imposed methodological strictures so odd. One can hardly accuse the Apostolic Fathers, Origen, Athanasius’s Antony, the Cappadocians, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Luther, or Calvin of some antisupernatural prejudice against the biblical worldview. What we find in these authors, instead, is a robust biblical realism. They believed the biblical text didn’t just report what ancient Hebrews and Canaanites believed about the unseen realm. They took with utter seriousness the existence of the actual referents of the biblical text. No doubt Heiser did as well. But by bracketing out the history of doctrine, Heiser ignored the most reliable guides we have to the biblical teaching on the celestial realm. In other words, if we believe, on the basis of the biblical text, that angels and demons really exist, then the questions asked in the history of Christian thought about their natures (e.g., their relation to form and matter, mind and body) and about their activities (as intelligent and freewill agents under God’s supreme Lordship) are the very questions the Bible pressures us to ask and answer. In short, Heiser’s method is thoroughly modern, constrained by his critical methodology, and is therefore far more antisupernaturalist than the tradition that he so casually rejects.

We could illustrate the weaknesses of Heiser’s hermeneutic from several places in his corpus. Disdain for the tradition is at least partly to blame for some of Heiser’s more problematic interpretations. I acknowledge that my deference to the tradition is unfashionable in certain sectors of the biblical studies guild, but I remain convinced of several positions that are well-attested in the history of interpretation, but are nonetheless rejected by Heiser:

• That the plural divine pronouns in Genesis 1 do indicate something about the Trinity.
• That a human interpretation of the sons of God in Genesis 6 still has purchase (though it should be noted that the rabbis and the church fathers were split on this question).
• That Job’s tormenter was none other than Satan himself.
• That the elect angels were confirmed in righteousness after the fall of the demons and therefore were rendered incapable of any future sin.
• That Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 do allude to the angelic fall in describing the kings of Babylon and Tyre, respectively.
• That God does not, properly speaking, change in response to his angelic and human creatures.
• That the divine council does not, properly speaking, advise God in his decree (Heiser even speculates that God might have “vetoed” any unsuccessful ideas they offered).
• That the “two powers in heaven” or “two YHWHs” framework threatens biblical monotheism (and entails a kind of subordinationism when applied to the divine persons).

In each of these cases, Heiser is iconoclastic. He describes many of these traditional interpretations as unfounded and even incoherent. Let us consider just the first of these. Heiser’s “divine council worldview” imposes itself on the plural pronouns of Genesis 1, leading him to conclude that the traditional trinitarian reading is incoherent. Heiser is hardly alone among scholars of the Hebrew Bible in this judgment. But without any antecedent reference to the spiritual beings in Genesis 1, the divine council view is just as much of an imposition on the text as the traditional Christian reading. Including the spiritual beings in God’s creative act in forming the first humans leads Heiser to the conclusion that the angels too are divine image bearers, a teaching which has no support in the rest of Scripture and which undermines the unique role humans play as God’s vice-regents in creation and as the beneficiaries of the greatest gift of divine condescension in the incarnation of the Word, the true Image of God. Even if the angelic hosts are in view in the plural pronouns, that still would not foreclose the possibility of a sensus plenior (fuller sense) reading of the text in a trinitarian mode. Perhaps we are dealing with an instance of prosopological exegesis, where the original address figurally represents an intratrinitarian conversation well—just as many of God’s addresses to the Davidic king (e.g., Psalms 45 and 110) are interpretated with reference to the Father and Son by the New Testament authors. Still, the straightforward trinitarian reading has a venerable history and points up the very hermeneutical point this post is seeking to make: that our interpretive framework should be canonical and our interpretive community ecclesial.

In the end, Heiser’s project, while it possesses many noteworthy strengths (exegetical rigor, attention to ANE backgrounds, an openness to the supernatural, and more), nonetheless suffers from this fatal weakness: it dismisses the very interpretive tools we need most in examining this sacred subject matter. If you can write multiple books and articles and host multiple podcasts on the angelic realm, without any reference to Augustine, the Areopagite, or Aquinas, you have severely limited your ability to read the Scriptures Christianly. This is not because those authors have the same authority as the Bible. They do not. But they do represent some of the brightest lights in the firmament of those illuminated by the Holy Spirit to interpret the inspired text of Holy Scripture. We ignore or dismiss them to our biblical and theological detriment.

Luke Stamps is Professor of Christian Studies at Anderson University, and is the author of Ultimate Guide to Angels and Demons, forthcoming.

[1] Michael Heiser, Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2015), 13.

[2] Heiser, Unseen Realm, 13.

[3] Heiser, Unseen Realm, 12.

[4] Heiser, Unseen Realm, 12.