One of the biggest flaws in Western Christian thinking is to externalize and project moral conflict outside of self. The idea that all moral conflict is outside of oneself permits the deeply false model of internal problems as “illness.” The illness model excuses moral failure; if you are “sick” then it’s not your fault. This locks us into a false frame of reference that excludes spiritual discernment.
This also brings a crippled image to so-called “spiritual warfare.” People get all militant and verbally forceful, and we see lots of “spiritual heroes” supposedly with special talents for effectiveness in dealing with problems. This is not the way things are depicted in the Bible, but it’s read back into the Bible.
A critical element in deliverance from demons is that the victim hears and recognizes the word of truth in the midst of their internal storms. The ritual of demanding demons leave serves the purpose of awakening the moral awareness of the person who is suffering demonic presence. I realize it doesn’t sound like that when you read stories in the Bible about casting out demons. There is probably nothing I can do to convince your mind this is how it works, but I’m trusting your heart to catch the truth of this. Demon possession doesn’t work like most Western minds imagine it, because Western thinking is poisoned with a pagan mythology inherited from the heathen Germanic tribes that conquered the Roman Empire. It’s half the foundation of Western thinking.
Demon possession is fundamentally an issue of moral volition. Demons are quite happy to seize any authority you yield to them in your soul. Granted, your human development can be crippled badly by your environment and can set you up for failure, but there is something inside of you that is attuned to recognize divine truth. It’s in the dynamics of that field of sensory activity in the heart that recognizes the presence and authority of another heart that has the right answer. So the real miracle here is not the authority of the words spoken in some orthodox ritual of precise language, but the resonance of two humans communicating on the heart level.
Seeking God’s face and gaining moral clarity changes the resonance of your heart, that 10-15 foot field of quasi-electromagnetic energy our hearts exude. Actually, the field stretches off into infinity, but the measurable activity is detected at 10-15 feet with current technology. Either way, when someone surrendered from the heart to Christ comes within proximity of someone in need, that someone in need is capable of recognizing it.
Demons naturally recognize it, and they do what they can to bias their captives from hearing the truth. But demons can’t change what God has made, and reality actively supports those who are committed to Christ. So when a true believer announces authoritatively that the victim need not remain captive, it really depends on the victim to seize the moment of God’s mercy or to reject it.
Even with all this explanation, I’m not giving you a genuine clinical description; I’m portraying it in a fashion that should help you be an agent of God’s miraculous powers. I’m striving to counteract a very bad imagery, false parables, and hoping your heart will receive my words as a better representation of truth. And it really is between you and God. I’m not going to pretend I can authoritatively assert anything that doesn’t depend on the Holy Spirit actively breathing it into your soul. Don’t do this by your mind; let it learn from the heart.
This is the whole issue. If we saddle the mind with figuring it all out, we will get it wrong and keep doors open for the demons to come and inhabit our souls. Let the heart establish what’s true and the mind work out the implications. That’s how it should work. Rituals are not magical incantations of “word power,” but are calls to the soul. All I can do is seek to awaken some moral awareness inside of you; you are the one to cast out your own demons. If your faith rises because it resonates with your convictions, then you win.
Could you attach a link, or cite some source materials covering some scientifically proven evidence of this phenomena?
Thanks~!
Yeah Jack; we covered this long ago. The short answer is in this post, a draft chapter for one of my books. The longer answer is a ton of reading from previous decades. The problem is that once free material is now behind a paywall, and some has simply been removed from the Net. There are some scientific papers, and I have a copy of one in particular, but I’ll need to dig it out and post the reference in a later comment. For now, I’ll offer something from the Internet Archive that pulls up a webpage that is an accurate reference, but is somewhat commercialized by someone trying to sell stuff: Science of the Heart.
I’m not going to tell you I read this whole thing, but this document is the one everyone else points back to as the scientific source for research in the electromagnetic field emanating from the heart: Self-Organized Biological Dynamics and Nonlinear Control.
Ah, good ol’ Westernized “Faith” demands verifiable evidence. Jack, I shall pray the Lord grant you the miracle of Faith without reason.
Good prayer, Iain, but everyone has to start somewhere on that long journey.
It requires a bit of faith to attach any credence to science, so a much greater degree of faith is necessary to reconcile science with scripture. On that note, here is an inspiring essay written by a Christian professor of physics.
https://sigmaframe.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/science-and-scripture/
Concerning the OP, I was a little excited to find empirical evidence for something I already believe.
I suppose the issue, Jack, is that for all the honesty and humility expressed in essays like that, we are saddled with a culture that ignores all of that and pretends that math and science somehow represents absolute truth. It’s what we say about Aristotle: In one sense, it doesn’t matter what he actually taught, but the effects of his teachings on the vast majority of the West. We have to recognize the huge gap between sensible academic positions and the shape of society as a whole. Iain was reacting to his experience on-the-ground with people around him, whereas you are talking about things those people ignore, things we wish they gave more attention. I think it quite sad that the masses don’t pay more attention, but I’m sure more people in the academic world would be quicker to embrace what we teach here.
Dr. Burton is a very exceptional person. I doubt that the vast majority of academia has anywhere near as much faith as he does.
A while back I wrote an essay about truth. I would appreciate hearing your honest opinion on it.
https://sigmaframe.wordpress.com/2017/05/13/the-quest-for-truth/
I’ll try to avoid rewriting here my books and various scattered blog posts that address this. Instead, I’ll offer a summary that should indicate the direction for your further questions.
What you wrote in that long post represents probably the very best of Western Civilization. It’s right out of the Enlightenment with a good accounting for recent improvements. Most people are quite satisfied with this once they dig into it. They are happy with where it brings them. But at any given time and place, some few will be left with a lingering sense that something is missing, and they are right.
A critical part of my education was examining how we got to that place in the West, both in history and literature. My primary criticism of that education was, “It’s not working.” I was driven by the inescapable conclusion that there was something beyond this. Even if you throw in all the best of Church History and all the theological writing on such things, there was still no satisfactory answer. But then I was alerted to the rather obscure path of studying and understanding the Ancient Near East as a collection of civilizations that had a different approach. The Hebrew culture was one of them.
Without carrying on too much longer, it was summarized as an approach that included all of the Western wisdom, but built an entire layer of wisdom on another level above that. If we leave “truth” where you defined it, then you’ll miss what the Bible means by “truth” in it’s Hebrew (Ancient Near Eastern) context. There’s a whole range of assumptions about truth that includes multiple levels of consideration, some with conflicting answers, yet evaluating it all simultaneously. It’s not a higher form of intellect, but taps into something built into us that exceeds the limits of intellect. It’s an entirely different kind of wisdom that is relational and moral in nature. It presumes a morality that is alive, another dimension where reality is a Person. Indeed, all of Creation must be acknowledged as living, sentient and willful, independent of our wishes and presumed knowledge. It’s a different epistemology than Aristotle taught, and different from what everyone assumes he taught.
I have said previously here that we have a lot in common with phenomenology. There is only experience and perception. It’s not that you can’t nail things down, but that you can’t really trust what your intellect can know. It’s not enough; it won’t account for everything you experience. It’s a handy reference point for what we teach here. What we cover is of no use to someone who is happy with what you wrote. We are addressing people who are already aware that they need something more. We believe that if you stick with Western wisdom, you can’t really hear that well from God. We want to offer the means to making Christ a living Person in your awareness. It works for us, so maybe others will find it useful.