The Supernatural Worldview

Examining Paranormal, PSI, and the Apocalyptic
by Cris Putnam

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PART 14 - Demons & the Ghost Hypothesis

"Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; " 1 Tim. 4:1

One of my schools is the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, now known as BIOLA University, where I earned a certification in Christian apologetics.[i] A few years back, the BIOLA magazine ran a very interesting article called “Exorcizing Our Demons.” I was surprised to read that Dr. Daniel B. Wallace (1974, BIOLA)—one of the top New Testament scholars, Greek textbook authors, and professors at Dallas Theological Seminary—was asked to perform a house blessing/exorcism that became overtly supernatural. A wealthy Christian homeowner had reported poltergeist phenomena that began when his elderly father moved in, and he asked Wallace to bless the house. As Wallace and a colleague prayed through the rooms, objects began to move with no apparent cause. The BIOLA article reads:

“It was small objects, like magnets on the refrigerator flying clear across the room. It was really remarkable,” said Wallace, who once doubted that demonic activity occurs today. He’s now writing a book arguing that many evangelicals have become unbiblically antisupernatural.[ii]

Wallace no longer doubts the Supernatural Worldview, and this impressed me, because it’s not often that a big name like Wallace (from a cessationist seminary like Dallas) will openly speak about such activity. I wrote Dr. Wallace, and he personally confirmed the above to be accurate, except for the part about the book, entitled Who’s Afraid of the Holy Spirit?, which was already written. Not only that, he also confirmed the overt poltergeist activity to me personally:

Cris, it has been awhile but I can say this regarding the items that flew in the house. There was an elderly gentleman living there who was dying. His son owned the home. It’s a very large home, and the father was upstairs in the “mother-in-law apartment.” Besides the father and son, the son’s wife and one baby lived in the house. No teenagers. Husband and wife in their 40s at the time. When the items flew, we were in the kitchen—about the farthest place from the mother-in-law apartment (which was on the third floor, I believe).[iii]

I had him asked about teenagers and who else lived there because most parapsychologists try to explain poltergeist-type activity as psychokinesis from a living agent present in the haunted location. Usually a teenager is the culprit, and poltergeist activity is labeled RSPK (recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis), which sounds scientific but explains very little. However, because there were no typical RSPK agents present, this case excludes it and strongly supports the demonic hypothesis for this activity, as the objects were flying across the room in response to Wallace’s blessing the house. Thus, demons are immaterial beings who can affect the physical world, perhaps even reading and implanting ideas in our minds (Luke 8:27–29; Mark 9:22) and empowering false religions and some psychic phenomena. The demonic is all but dismissed under the delusion of scientism as per Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark,[iv] and is still controversial amongst purported believers, as 59 percent of professing American Christians do not believe Satan is real.[v] The greatest trick the devil ever pulled, indeed.

Is the Trickster Really Satan?

Recalling the “trickster” mentioned by parapsychologist George Hansen (discussed earlier in this series): “The paranormal encompasses everything from levitating monks to ESP, from spirits to cattle mutilations—an incredible and unsavory hodgepodge. The mix seems incoherent. But the trickster makes sense of it.”^[vi] Hansen believes that paranormal events, the manifestation of strange creatures, UFO sightings, and ghosts occur when the society is in transition. Most interestingly, he forecast that during the transition, “Charismatic leaders may arise who demonstrate paranormal powers, attracting followers, and challenging the legitimacy of the establishment.”[vii] Pope Francis is seen by prophecy scholars as matching the description, and the book by myself and Tom Horn, Petrus Romanus [FREE THIS WEEK ONLY WITH $300 IN OTHER BOOKS, VIDEOS, AUDIOS, E-BOOKS & MORE], details how he satisfies a nine-hundred-year-old prophecy pointing toward the False Prophet or second beast in the biblical Apocalypse (Revelation 13:11). Pope Francis is confirming this identity by asserting universal salvation: “The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!”[viii] Of course, the idea that atheists are redeemed is contrary to the teaching of Jesus (Matthew 7:13–14) and the New Testament in general (Galatians 2:16; Hebrews 11:6). Whether or not Pope Francis is the False Prophet remains to be seen, but it is indisputable that he is a false prophet. We’ve seen plenty of evidence for the transition—the paranormal paradigm shift—but who is the trickster?

In mythology, folklore, and religious studies, a trickster is a god, goddess, spirit, man, woman, or anthropomorphic animal that plays tricks that defy the rules and conventional behavior. Often this deceptive behavior is cast as heroic. Brer Rabbit from American folklore and Bugs Bunny from Warner Brothers Cartoons are the tricksters from a purely literary standpoint. Popular folklore posits the trickster as a high-ranking angel indulging in some off-the-clock fun. On the CW network’s television show Supernatural, there was a villain known as “The Trickster” appearing in seasons 2, 3, and 5. In the show, the Trickster was revealed to be the archangel Gabriel, who allegedly used the Trickster persona to indulge certain personal desires. Gabriel was killed by Lucifer, but he managed to leave a video that eventually helped the two brothers to defeat Lucifer. Who says the age of myth is dead?

While it isn’t possible to say with any authority whether or not the trickster is objectively real, Scripture does seem to offer a few hints. Satan is said to blind the minds of unbelievers (2 Corinthians 4:4); his mission is to deceive (2 Thessalonians 2:9) and to disguise himself as “an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:4). Hansen also sees sexual perversion as a trickster attribute: “There is another component of the trickster constellation—sexuality. I have not addressed the sexual imagination, but it is a powerful force. So here we have the trickster elements of deception, sex, and psi, which are all closely associated with the imagination.”[ix] Of course, Satan and demons are associated with sexual temptation (1 Corinthians 7:5; Jude 6–7).

The devil is a trickster in that he lures and entices with promises of great success and fantastic pleasure, but, in the end, the results never truly satisfy. Peter Jones writes, “The paranormal world of the occult is real, and practitioners have regularly spoken of the cruelty with which they are treated by demonic powers.”^[x] He then cites Helena Blavatsky, founder of the occult Theosophical Society, who late in life wrote to an old friend and declared: “I would gladly return, be Russian, be Christian, be Orthodox. I yearn for it. But there is no returning; I am in chains, I am not my own.”^[xi] This is an astonishing admission of enslavement coming from such an infamous occultist. While such deceptive entrapments are consistent with the trickster archetype, it is still hard to make a definite identification. Nevertheless, Hansen’s inferences about the trickster making sense of the paranormal do loosely fit the biblical data about Satan and demons and, even more so, match the end-time parapsychological agenda forecast by Watchman Nee that people “who develop their soul power cannot avoid being contacted and used by the evil spirit.”[xii] In my new investigation (released this week by Defender Publishing under the title The Supernatural Worldview) I provide fresh and compelling evidence that someone like the trickster is enticing people including Christians through such things as yoga, meditation, and pantheistic monism. Did Watchman Nee anticipate this so well in the early 1930s, or was his warning divinely inspired? One way or the other, it is coming to pass. But let us now examine the identity of the adversary. While it is relatively clear in the New Testament that Satan is a rebel archangel adversarial to Christ and humanity (Matthew 25:41; 1 Peter 5:8; Revelation 12:9), the origins of his brood are less clear.

The Origin of Demons

The original Greek term daimon from which we render “demon” in the New Testament had a wide range of meaning. In fact, in popular Koine Greek, the word commonly referred to human ghosts. According to a leading scholarly lexicon, “So far as concerns popular belief and its animistic basis we may simply say that demons are fundamentally the spirits of the departed.”^[xiv] This is rooted deep in antiquity as Hesiodus of Ascra (c. 700 BC), the oldest Greek poet to emerge as a tangible figure, called the souls of the departed daimones.^[xv] This is generally consistent with Jewish beliefs.

In the Hebrew Bible, the spirits of the dead consulted in witchcraft are called elohim, as seen in the invocation of the witch of Endor, who marveled: “I saw gods (elohim) ascending out of the earth” (1 Samuel 28:13). What we want to know is what the New Testament authors meant when they used the Greek term daimon. The problem is that because we have very little data on the origin of demons and evil spirits in the Bible, we just do not know with any certainty. Theologian Millard Erickson conceded, “The Bible has little to say about how evil angels came to have their current moral character and even less about their origin.”^[xvi]

Furthermore, there could be truth in more than one theory. There is no reason they all must be the same. Some of these entities could have started out as humans and others angels. Thomas Horn lists seven possibilities held by various scholars: 1) Spirits of a pre-Adamic race; 2) Otherworldly beings (extraterrestrials, as unpacked in our co-written book, Exo-Vaticana -- also available FREE this week only); 3) Offspring of angels and women (the nephilim-origin hypothesis); 4) Spirits of deceased wicked men; 5) Fallen angels; 6) Several of the above; 7) None of the above (demythologization). Of the seven, I fall under the broad area of number six, concerning which Horn wrote:

The proponents of this hypothesis believe a singular concept for the origin of “demons” is a mistake, that in fact what is routinely considered “the demonic realm” could be made up of several of the explanations above, and that this might demonstrate the hierarchy of demons as outlined in the book of Ephesians. In this view, “fallen angels” might rank above the “spirits of Nephilim” and so on, with each being a distinct part of the army of darkness. Just as privates in the United States military serve under sergeants who serve under majors, Satan’s forces consist of wicked spirits (poneria: the mass of common demon soldiers comprising Satan’s hordes) under rulers of darkness (kosmokrators: martial spirits that influence or administer the affairs of earthly governments) and powers (exousia: high-ranking officials whose modes of operation are primarily battlefield ops). Above these are principalities or archons (arche: brigadier generals over the divisions of Satan’s hosts). Satan, who reigns as supreme commander and king, is the “prince of the powers of the air.” (Ephesians 2:2)[xvii]

There seem to be a variety of evil spirits at work, and too many unknowns plague our knowledge. As discussed previously, we live amongst a widespread resurgence in occult practices, including witchcraft and magic. More disturbingly, satanic cults have arisen, resulting in ritual murders by conscience-seared adults and misguided teenagers. The reality of demonization no longer seems fanciful, but it is probably still too often explained away by mental illness. Many Americans are falling prey to devices of deceitful supernatural entities, mainly through ignorance. The most advanced books of demonic magic, spiritism, and witchcraft are readily available to anyone on the Internet and in the teen books sections of mega-retailers like Barnes & Noble. The flood of supernaturalism in America is beyond the control of law-enforcement agencies and organized churches, but it is not beyond the sovereignty of God. In The Supernatural Worldview I provide an entire expedient section on how to expand your worldview in preparation for what many believe to be an unprecedented rise in demonic activity prior to the return of Christ. Before moving into speculative territory regarding the origins of the tricksters behind this Spiritual Warfare, I want to clarify what we can be confident in. 

 

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