Spiritual Warfare and Worldviews

Direction Journal Fall 2000 · Vol. 29 No. 2 · 114-24

Paul G. Hiebert is Professor of Mission and Anthropology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois. He wrote an excellent article on Spiritual Warfare and Worldviews

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in the gospel as power in the lives of people and in spiritual warfare between God and Satan (Anderson 1991, Arnold 1997, Kraft 1992, Moreau 1997, Powilson 1995, Wagner 1991, to name a few). This comes as an important corrective to the earlier emphasis in many Western churches on the gospel as merely truth, and on evil as primarily human weakness. Both truth and power are central themes in the gospel and should be in the lives of God’s people. But much literature on spiritual warfare has been written by Western missionaries who have been forced to question their Western denial of this-worldly spirit realities through encounters with witchcraft, spiritism, and demon possession. Too often they base their studies in experience and look for biblical texts to justify their views. They fail to examine the worldviews they use to interpret both Scripture and experience. These are hard to see because they are what we think with, not what we think about...

...spiritual warfare emerging out of this Cartesian dualism is that God, angels, and demons are involved in a cosmic battle in the heavens, but the everyday events on earth are best explained and controlled by science and technology (fig. 1). People pray to God for their salvation, but turn to modern medicine for healing and psychology for deliverance from so-called demon possession, because demons exist in the heavens, not on earth. Western missionaries influenced by this dualism affirm the cosmic battle between good and evil, but deny the realities of witchcraft, spirit possession, evil eye, and magic in the cultures where they serve...

...Spiritual warfare in animistic societies is seen as an ongoing battle between different alliances of beings (fig. 2). For the most part these alliances are based on ethnicity and territory. The battle is not between “good” and “evil,” but between “us” and “others.” ...

...Warfare is an important metaphor in Scripture and we must take it seriously. Eugene Peterson writes,
There is a spiritual war in progress, an all-out moral battle. There is evil and cruelty, unhappiness and illness. There is superstition and ignorance, brutality and pain. God is in continuous and energetic battle against all of it. God is for life and against death. God is for love and against hate. God is for hope and against despair. God is for heaven and against hell. There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square foot of space is contested (1997, 122-23)....

...Scripture and church history show that demonstrations of God’s power often lead some to believe, but they also excite the enemy to greater opposition leading to persecution and death (fig. 5). We see this in the book of Acts where victories are followed by persecution, imprisonment, and death. Above all we see it in John’s Gospel where Jesus confronts the religious and political establishments and is crucified...

...Central to our understanding of spiritual warfare is the cross, but the cross as victory makes no sense in the Indo-European or tribal worldviews. In the Indo-European worldview (fig. 6), Christ should have taken up the challenge of his tormentors, called down his angelic hosts waiting ready in heaven, and come down from the cross in triumph to establish his kingdom. In Scripture, the cross is the demonstration of victory through weakness. At the cross Satan stands judged because he put Christ, God incarnate as perfect man, to death. On the cross Jesus bore the sins of the world and triumphed over all the powers of evil. His obedience unto death rendered “powerless him who had the power of death, that is the devil” (Heb. 2:14). The cross was Satan’s undoing (Col. 2:15), but Satan’s defeat was not an end in itself. Rather, it removes the obstacles to God’s purpose of creating people fit for his kingdom (Gen. 12:1; Exod. 19:3-6; 1 Pet. 2:9). The cross is the victory of righteousness over evil, of love over hate, of God’s way over Satan’s way. If our understanding of spiritual warfare does not see the cross as the final triumph, it is in error...

read more