God at War - Take 2 - A troubling shift in semantics

Thus far I have pretty much agreed with what I've been reading in Gregory A. Boyd's "God at War - The Bible and Spiritual Conflict".

However, on page 199 he says something that caught my eye as not quite right.

In the fourth paragraph he states, "If a person is demonized (and we actually recognize this as a possibility, which is rare) it is held that the person must have willed the evil spirit to occupy them, or must have done something (e.g., dabbled in the occult) that opened them up to becoming demonized. Demonized people, the assumption therefore goes, must be ( or, at least must have been) fundamentally bad people."

While I believe in involuntary non-causative possession of non-believers, I do not believe it is the only path towards being possessed. (Consider spiritists and mediums used by familiar spirits in an almost symbiotic way.) And, I believe such possessions are very rare.

If I play in a yard full of pit bulls, sooner or later I will be mauled. In the same way if one were to dabble in the occult they are not wise to be frequenting enemy territory without sufficient reinforcements from the Holy Spirit’s being currently in residence.

So, in my humble opinion, it is dangerous to imply, no matter how vaguely, that dabbling in the occult or, listening to satanically inspired music is “safe”. It is most assuredly not.

And, again in my humble opinion, the reason involuntary possessions are so rare is because of the large numbers of foolish ones who willingly, if naively, walk in to the enemy’s camp and surrender.

Further, it is the extremely foolish Believer who does so without a specific divine edict to do so.

In my view, it is, to me, somewhat strange to go through the preceding 198 pages establishing the on-going conflict and then soft-peddling some of the major areas where conflict is extremely active and vicious.

Don’t get me wrong. I do believe in the premise that a lot of people under demonic influence are in fact causalities of war and should be rescued from the enemy. However, in making this point to not judge, one should not minimize the risk of foolish behavior.

Then on page 201 in the last graph he states, “Far from teaching any sort of pious resignation, Jesus’ whole being, his very God-man identity, was God’s ultimate revolt against the devil’s tyranny.” Emphasis mine.

Now while ‘revolt’ may be a syntactically correct term, while it may be a proper by dictionary definition, in western society words like ‘revolt’ and ‘aggressor’ are typically ‘received’ as evil actions in connotation. So, to apply them to Our Holy and Righteous Father God whose stated purpose is to seek and to save that which was lost. Ie., to Reclaim and deliver, concerns me greatly.

Where will this apparent shift in semantics take me? Is he going to go the way of so many liberals? And, claim that Jesus is trying to take a kingdom away from a valid ruler? God forbid…

Perhaps? I am over reacting. I certainly hope so.

 

Yeah that's how I felt when I read it, too...

Hey, I know not all Pit Bulls are born man-eaters...

But, I was trying to come up with an illustration that would make sense. (To most people)

Mike Sr.