It's important for people in the Church to realize that the way they talk and think about the … - Michael S. Heiser

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I listen to all these complaints about rudeness and intemperateness, and the opinion that I come to is that there is no polite way of asking somebody: have you considered the possibility that your entire life has been devoted to a delusion? But that’s a good question to ask. Of course we should ask that question and of course it’s going to offend people. Tough.

Michael S. Heiser

It's important for people in the Church to realize that the way they talk and think about the Bible isn't the way Bible scholars talk and think about it - and I'm including "Bible-believing" scholars there. There is a wide gap between the work of biblical scholars, whose business it is to read the text of the Bible in its own worldview context, and what you hear in church.

Biblical, Including, People, Read, Thinking, Wide

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Angels can fail because God allows them to make decisions and they are lesser beings than the perfect God. They can go astray, but the task is legitimate. God never tells they aren't allowed to instruct people - "just shut up and babysit them".

Angel, Babysit, Legitimate, People, Perfect

If you don't have the worldview of the people who produced the Bible - under inspiration no less, - you can't understand what they were trying to communicate in many respects. Biblical people weren't modern people. That's self-evident no matter how much we try to deny it.

Bible, Biblical, Communicate, Inspiration, People, Worldview

The powers of darkness are still part of the spiritual world - they don't become something else when they rebel against God. Disembodied believers are, by definition, also part of the spiritual world. So are God and Christ.

Darkness, Definition, God, Rebel, Spiritual, World

Our contexts are foreign. They derive from church tradition that is thousands of years removed from the people who wrote Scripture and the audience to whom those people wrote.

Audience, Church, Derive, People, Scripture, Thousands

What I mean by context is worldview - having the ancient Israelite or first-century Jew in your head as you read. How would an ancient Israelite or first-century Jew read the Bible - what would they be thinking in terms of its meaning? The truth is that if we put one of those people into a small group Bible study and asked them what they thought about a given passage meant, their answer would be quite a bit different in many cases than anything the average Christian would think. They belonged to the world that produced the Bible, which is the context the Bible needs to be understood by.

Christian, Having, Mean, Thinking, Thought, World