The Unseen Battle Review: Forward and Introduction

Reading and summarizing/reviewing The Unseen Battle: Spiritual Warfare, the Three Rebellions, and Christ’s Victory Over Dark Powers by Joel Muddamalle

Forward

The forward was written by Michael Heiser’s widow, Drenna. I was expecting the tone to be saccharine since Heiser’s passing is still a bit fresh, even more so when this was written. This section was more of an introduction to Muddamalle, a student and somewhat of a protege of Heiser’s. So, if the book’s title and subtitle didn’t clue you in, you’d now know that much of what Battle depends on Heiser’s scholarship and approach to scripture.

Introduction

Muddamalle’s first line is the C.S. Lewis quote from The Screwtape Letters about the dangers of either excessive interest in demons, or remaining unaware of them. The scientific west suffers from the latter affliction while often going much further in dismissing the insistent power of the supernatural domain. The church at large for sure acknowledges that the supernatural exists but it steers hard into demythologizing it when it encroaches into our physical realm on a larger scale. We struggle to regard things like accounts of miracles in scripture as anything more than its immediate effects, when they are really a zoomed in detail of a much larger, coherent tapestry of the ongoing events passing the spiritual realm. Geographic elements like gardens, the sea, and mountains didn’t function just as tools of poetic language for the writers of scripture, but also as referents to staging grounds where supernatural events meet the natural world.

Too, because we rely on church tradition and not what the original writers of scripture intended or believed, we’re often left with an agonizingly incomplete story. Muddamalle summarizes the conflict in the spirit world by invoking the ancient household model, an image both the writers of scripture and their audience would be well acquainted with. As you might guess, “household” here means much more than the modern idea of an immediate family living on a small parcel of land. Households for the ancient Hebrew, and for the surrounding Mesopotamian peoples for that matter, involved their family—the folks you kept close to you because there’d be an automatic mutual trust between—but also counselors and advisors, attendants and servants, bureaucrats and slaves, perhaps allies, temporary allies, and the occassional guest. Unless you were at the head, you were always accountable to someone else, but in the reverse direction, you were obligated to secure the well-being of the people under your charge. Modern individualism and all that comes with it had no place in the Ancient Near East.

In the same way, God has a household, though you could say all aspects of reality, the seen and unseen, are it. Yes, angels are involved, but there’s a family, a council of advisors and executors, “physical” security guards, and who knows what other kinds of roles and responsibilities. It’s more like an entourage that takes care of whatever business God needs handling than a nuclear family. Somewhere along the way, there were rebellions in this supernatural household (three of them, really) and God was obligated by His nature to address each of them. We were created to be a special type of that class of close members of His household, and given a specific task, yet the three rebellions estranged us from this original position and now we’re caught in the middle of this ongoing war that we can’t see but affects us fundamentally.

Scripture only hints at the lore because, like the household concept, its original audiences were already well-acquainted with it. Rehashing common assumptions would be a waste of time. Muddamalle references a few small windows we do get in scripture that peer out into the vista of this conflict in the supernatural household: Deuteronomy 32, Daniel 10, Genesis 11. The details of which, naturally, will be built out in the book proper.