This One Goes to 11: Rethinking Referent and Affirmation - Episode 137

Carey Griffel: Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without our faith. My name is Carey Griffel, and we're finally going to get into it. I'm going to talk about John Walton and J Harvey Walton's concept of referen We're gonna get into the depths of their hermeneutical model. We're going to explore strengths and weaknesses. I'm going to be getting into a little bit of their content in the book about demons that the Waltons wrote, and I'm going to be talking about Dr. Heiser's response to them as well.

[00:00:47] So this is going to be a lot for this episode. I do hope that my explanation might help you navigate the differences between Dr. Walton and Dr. Heiser and I hope that this episode is going to help frame all of that in a useful way. I have a few concerns in a lot of areas. I'm going to try to keep this episode really reasonable and not too long and organized, but I don't promise that I will not go down rabbit trails because there is a lot to say in this episode.

[00:01:21] If you've been listening to recent episodes, you know I've been talking a lot about Dr. Walton's work. I've been talking about hermeneutics. One of the biggest problems I hear regarding Dr. Walton's work is about his methodology. And it's fair, there's quite a bit to criticize here for a lot of people. And I think that there is a big reason why he does what he does and it's different than what a lot of other people do. We tend to assign a value judgment to that. But sometimes a different methodology is just a different approach.

[00:01:55] I first of all want to say that I don't actually think that the Waltons are trying to de mythologize in the way that Dr. Heiser suggested that they did, but we'll get into some more detail there.

[00:02:08] I do think that they are shooting at what Dr. Heiser and others call conflict theology. And conflict theology is the idea of God at war with spiritual powers. So like there's a good side and a bad side and the Waltons are navigating this road of the Bible is not teaching conflict theology.

[00:02:30] That's a bit difficult when we see a whole lot of conflict language in the Bible. But that's why we're gonna be talking about their idea of referent and affirmation. This is absolutely key to understanding them and it's frankly a little bit hard to understand.

[00:02:48] But before we even get into that, I wanna talk about minimalist versus maximalist hermeneutics. In biblical interpretation, the terms minimalist and maximalist don't refer to how much we value Scripture or whether we have a high view or a low view of Scripture.

[00:03:09] Minimalist and maximalist approaches are basically how much we're trying to extract from a given text and how much we're using that to base our interpretive methods or our belief systems on. These approaches can also apply to how much evidence we're trying to build, and it can apply to our methodologies in general.

[00:03:32] Now, remember last week I talked about several methodologies. I'm not gonna go through all of that again, but I landed the plane on saying that Dr. Walton was using the socio critical methodology and he really tries to stick with that.

[00:03:48] Now, that doesn't mean he doesn't use other approaches at all, or that he doesn't affirm them. John Walton talks about theology and he uses a lot of canonical ideas, such as the fact that the Bible is very centered on covenant. Covenant is a theme that marries the scriptures together for Walton. So it's not that he does not see any canonical approaches at all, but a lot of his methods are very minimalistic.

[00:04:18] And I bring that out first because if we understand that this is Dr. Walton's approach, then that will help us understand why and how he comes to the determinations that he does. Now I know this is the work of Dr. John Walton and his son, and I'm not trying to discount that there's two people here. I'm just trying to talk about this in a way that's a little bit easier. So I'll say Walton or the Waltons, but it's really both of their work and I want to acknowledge that.

[00:04:48] Okay. So the main sources of information from the Waltons that we're gonna be talking about today is their book, Demons and Spirits in Biblical Theology, Reading the Biblical Text in Its Cultural and Literary Context. This was published in 2019 and it argues that the Bible refers to demons and spirits because they feature in the ancient author's cultural environment. But the Bible does not affirm these beings as ontologically or metaphysically real, or even theologically normative.

[00:05:24] At least for the senior John Walton, he does affirm that spiritual beings do exist. He's not denying that reality in general. I've heard him saying that in interviews. So we need to be fair according to what he actually says, his views are. John Walton does believe in spiritual entities, okay. And this book, Demons and Spirits in Biblical Theology, John Walton also says is mostly his son's work, but he signed off on it. He agrees with it. He has no problem with it, so there we go, that's kind of the lay of the land we've got today.

[00:06:03] I will be discussing some of Michael Heiser's pushback on this. And first of all, I will say that I don't think he was wrong overall, but John Walton said that he doesn't believe that Dr. Heiser understood his concept of referent and affirmation. And I see Dr. Walton's point there, to be honest.

[00:06:23] I do think Dr. Heiser was a little bit skewed in his analysis. And frankly referent and affirmation in the way that is being described, they're not straightforward concepts. They're hard to understand, and the bigger issue is that much of this is eclipsed by the fact that they claim that all demonology in the Bible is referent and not affirmation, and that the Bible teaches nothing about demons and Satan. That's a really big claim. It kind of overshadows their whole methodology. So that when we come to the book and we read things like that, we kinda get freaked out and it's hard to listen to what they're actually saying about reference and affirmation to understand it really well.

[00:07:08] Dr. Heiser called it a dangerous book, and he has a really good point here because it can erode our ability to think of the spiritual world as a reality that we live in. Like how else are we supposed to understand that if we can't go to the Bible for it?

[00:07:25] But I will also say that Dr. Heiser's comments ended up poisoning the well for a lot of people in regards to Walton and his methodology. Now, don't get me wrong again, I think there's problems with Walton's methods and ideas too. It's not that we can't have problems with somebody's work, but I'm using the term poisoning the well because of the value judgment of the term dangerous.

[00:07:50] It might be a fair value judgment, but that has got impact on people. And I'm not saying that Dr. Heiser comments did this because he also said that Walton's work was helpful, but poisoning the well might be like saying that someone is heretical versus saying an idea or doctrine is heretical. Those are two different claims.

[00:08:15] And again, I'm not saying you can't lay out the implications of people's work, and Dr. Heiser was not saying that Walton was a heretic or that all of his work was bad. But people who are listening to Dr. Heiser's teaching are taking it those directions. I will also say that people could also say that Dr. Heiser's work is dangerous as well. Just because someone can take something a particular way doesn't mean it has to go that way. And I think to some degree, the work of Walton and Heiser can be combined in really, really helpful ways.

[00:08:53] I just want to acknowledge that all ideas have street cred. All ideas have traction. Once an idea is out there, it exists and people can do with it whatever they want.

[00:09:06] I also want to loop in Dr. Walton's book, The Lost World of Genesis One, Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate. I won't get too deep into this book and its information, but it kind of does help lay out a little bit of Walton's work in reference and affirmation, although he doesn't get quite so deep into it here.

[00:09:27] I mention it because The Lost World of Genesis One is a book that Dr. Heiser would recommend to people. I would recommend it. It's a great book, But this work is a little bit less inflammatory because there's less language about referent and affirmation, and it's not touching on things like spiritual reality. Instead, The Lost World of Genesis One is shooting at materialistic creation versus functional creation. I've also recently talked about John Walton's newest book with his son, and John Walton has gone from discussing things in a functional view to discussing functional views in language of order.

[00:10:10] A lot of people will read it and they will say, okay, we see the functional creation here, but can't Genesis also be talking about material creation? Why does it have to be an either or? Well, the reason it's an either or for John Walton is because you have to draw out the meaning of the text, right?

[00:10:32] You have to understand what it means in its context, in its situation. And John Walton suggests, and I think he's basically right about this, that Genesis one has so little language that you can point to that shows a material creation that we can't really say that Genesis one is about material creation.

[00:10:54] That doesn't mean that God didn't create things ex nihilo. It just means that we cannot use Genesis one to prove that. That's not the point of the whole text.

[00:11:07] All right, at any rate, here's our core tension. Can we affirm biblical truth if cultural referents are ancient and unfamiliar and that the Bible is not teaching everything that it refers to?

[00:11:22] In other words, everything the Bible describes. Is it teaching about that? Is it affirming it in a positive way? We might talk about things like slavery, polygamy, and other cultural norms of the time.

[00:11:38] We tend to think that the Bible is not teaching, that polygamy is okay, that slavery is okay, that stoning adulterers is okay. Those are descriptions of the culture of the time. They're rooted in the ethics of the time and the whole worldview, right?

[00:11:56] So then the question becomes, if the referen are embedded in a specific cultural moment, how can they communicate enduring theological truth? This is a problem for Walton more so than it is for other people, simply because of his minimalistic approach. If you use a broader methodology, this problem kind of evaporates.

[00:12:21] But it is a really fair question because what happens when our own referents, our own conceptual vocabulary, our own scientific worldview, even our categories of spirit and body and cosmos... How does a referent that is centered in time give us any information about God or salvation history as a whole?

[00:12:44] Now, of course, I would respond with the idea that, well, it gives us that information because God has worked in history. Like there is an actual thing that is happening historically, right?

[00:12:57] But we also have to acknowledge that God works in accommodating ways. He did not teach the ancient person quantum physics. He didn't teach them whatever kind of science we're gonna come up with next.

[00:13:11] But here, let me go ahead and actually describe referent and affirmation a little bit more clearly. I do wanna say though, that we all do this kind of thing that the Waltons are doing. We all do it. Every single one of us does this. We see that the Bible is referring to something and say that it is teaching something. If those two things were always and everywhere the same thing, we would be complete Bible literalists, and no one can really do that.

[00:13:44] So a referent is what the biblical text talks about or refers to. It's using conceptual categories and vocabulary of the time. So a referent is the firmament, the cosmic waters, demons, the pillars of the earth. And honestly, I wish that Walton wouldn't use the idea of firmament as a premier example of this, because it's one of the lamest ones. And I'm not convinced that the ancient person actually thought there was a solid dome over the earth. That could just have been their language. Just like we could use that kind of language.

[00:14:24] We say the sun rises in the east. That does not mean that we believe that it's the sun that's moving. Right? So the ancients could have been talking about this solid dome without actually thinking there was a solid dome. And I don't think it's a dome anyway, but that's another subject entirely.

[00:14:43] The point here is that if you're referring to something, it doesn't mean that you just pick that referent up and call it a propositional truth.

[00:14:54] The way that the Waltons described this in their new book is to say that, for instance, we have the speech by Stephen in the book of Acts. Now Stephen is speaking in his context, right? And as Christians, we believe that the Book of Acts is inspired. But that doesn't mean that everything that Steven said is inspired.

[00:15:16] We might think of this like somebody recounting a crime scene, right? They're experience of the crime scene is going to be unique to themselves. It does not mean that their telling of the crime is the objective truth.

[00:15:32] Now, here's where the Waltons get in big trouble. They say, quote, " All of the Bible's statements about demons or similar creatures are references just as all of the Bible's statements about the physical structures of the cosmos are references. References are references because they mean things to the audience who heard them and because they mean things, they're used as a vehicle to convey the author's message, which in turn contains the text's affirmation. What that message is can only be determined by understanding what the references mean. This, in turn, requires that we be attentive to the meanings of the words as the ancient audience would've understood them. But it also requires that we be attentive to features of composition and discourse, which also determine meaning." End quote.

[00:16:29] Okay, so in Dr. Heiser's description and critique of the Walton's Demons book, Dr. Heiser asks, What do they do with this passage and that passage, and this other passage over here where it clearly has spiritual conflict and spiritual things going on? And Dr. Heiser suggests that the Waltons are saying that it's only a matter of genre.

[00:16:53] I don't think that's quite understanding what referent and affirmation mean. The Waltons are not saying, for instance, that if something is written in poetry, then it cannot be an affirmation.

[00:17:06] And that's kind of the way that Dr. Heiser was putting it. And that's not what the Waltons are saying here. Dr. Heiser was like, well, the serpent isn't just a snake. If the Waltons were saying that the serpent was just a snake, that would indeed be de mythologizing. They would presuppose that the ancient world has a supernatural worldview. They would presuppose that the people of the Bible have conflict theology in mind of God and evil spirits, and there's like this cosmic war going on.

[00:17:41] It's not that the people of the Bible didn't believe that. The Waltons are saying that those things are reference or descriptions rather than affirmations or teachings. I know a lot of us are gonna disagree with that, and I know what you mean.

[00:17:59] I disagree with that, but that's because I have a more maximalist toolkit that I'm using versus the Walton's minimalistic toolkit. I think that is fundamentally the weakness in their methodology. The weakness is not this idea of referent and affirmation, because like I said, we all do this kind of thing.

[00:18:23] We all say that the Bible is describing something without prescribing it. That is referent and affirmation right there. We all do it. That is not fundamentally the problem. The problem is that they just have a very, very minimalistic view of how we do interpretation.

[00:18:45] My biggest problem with what they determine is referen is that it kind of tends to reduce a lot of the meaning of Scripture to whatever is new. Like they're saying that we should presume that anything that's culturally situated that is not new to the Bible and its message is something that is not being affirmed or taught or prescribed.

[00:19:12] Now, the problem here is how do we decide what's new and what's not new? What about what the New Testament says about Satan? You're really telling me that there's nothing new being said there? I know that there was a development of understanding through time and development means new. So how do we determine what's affirmed because suddenly we have a new teaching compared to what the people around them believed?

[00:19:42] Okay, I'm going to read this quote from the Waltons. In their new book, New Explorations in the Lost World of Genesis. They say, quote, " I propose first that we must recognize that since communication takes place in a cultural context, not a vacuum, everything can be identified at some level as reference. Yet the author also has affirmations to make in his larger discourse. References, thereby serve as building blocks of discourse that in turn carry the affirmations. That is, this is not an either- or question, but reflects the need to determine when something is both- and. Second, I propose that the most important determining factor as to whether something is affirmation is whether what it says is a departure from the default thinking of the ancient world, most likely affirmation or a reflection of the default thinking in the ancient world, most likely reference only. However, we need to pay attention to how the discourse wants to change how the audience thinks about the subject matter. One of the ways to answer the question, why is this here, is to ask what did this change in their thinking? Though this is not the only guide." End quote.

[00:21:07] Okay. I think that is more helpful than some of the things they said in their earlier demons book. And again, I think that this is really helpful. I think that we need to understand that all of us do this. We all determine what is merely being referred to in the text versus what is affirmed in the text.

[00:21:27] And we can complain that the Waltons are taking a whole lot of liberty in suggesting that what we can affirm in the text is very minimalistic. I think that is the fundamental problem. But again, their methodology means that basically they get to choose what's referent and what's affirmation. But to some degree we kind of all do that.

[00:21:52] But for a lot of people, the question is, are we using the canonical approach? A lot of people will also loop in historical doctrine or church history, and they will also use that as a way to affirm what is being taught in the Scriptures, right? So we all use methodologies to determine what's being described and what's being taught. The question is what is your methodology?

[00:22:19] And a lot of people just don't like that the Waltons are doing it so minimalistically.

[00:22:26] I think understanding that is going to help us understand them better, and it will help us draw the meaning out of what they're saying in a way that is more helpful. Because I really do think that this idea of reference versus affirmation is a fantastic tool for us to use.

[00:22:44] Now, in my opinion, they use a lot of examples and a lot of things that don't make a lot of sense in a canonical reading. As I mentioned before, I wish they wouldn't use the idea of the firmament as an example of reference versus affirmation. A much more helpful one that they use is the idea of Sheol or the underworld.

[00:23:07] Let me go ahead and read this. This is again from New Explorations in the Lost World of Genesis. Quote, " Everyone in the ancient world believed there was a netherworld where people went when they died, even though there were vastly different concepts about that netherworld, for instance, between Egyptian and Babylonian views. A thorough study of the Old Testament reveals that the Israelites did not have any distinctive views about the netherworld. Instead, they reflect a very similar understanding to what one would find in Babylon. No distinctive hallmarks characterize what we find in the Bible concerning the netherworld. That would suggest that in the absence of new revelation to Israel, everything we find in the Old Testament about the nature of the netherworld is reference, not affirmation. The Old Testament has nothing to teach about the nature of the netherworld and therefore nothing we find there can be used to construct doctrine founded on the authority of Scripture." End quote.

[00:24:10] But I will also say that there is a difference between Old Testament and New Testament descriptions in some form. And I think that the Old Testament gives a level of hope for the afterworld that other ancient Near Eastern beliefs did not have. Does that count as new information?

[00:24:28] When the Bible is giving a polemic, say, in the creation narrative versus the other accounts around them? Does that count as new information? Can we use that to affirm theology? And I think that we can. So you see, I think that this reference and affirmation thing is really quite helpful to determine what the text is teaching The problem comes in when we just think, well, obviously this is the same as that other thing. It's not teaching anything new, therefore it has nothing for us.

[00:25:03] But on the other hand, I think the Walton's work is also more important than just giving us this model or this tool. I think it matters that they are giving us a caution. Because I think that misreading the referent as affirmation can lead to things like scientism, where we believe that the Bible teaches outdated cosmology. It can lead to endorsing ancient practices like we really do have people who believe in polygamy because of the Bible.

[00:25:35] Misreading referent as affirmation can also lead us to taking descriptions of demons, spirits, and cosmic geography as theological affirmations in specific. What do I mean by that? I mean things like the work of Jonathan Cahn and other people who take the information in the Old Testament and just plop it down into every context. It leads to over speculation and this idea that it's always the same demons and we have to figure out which false god is which and all of this thing, right?

[00:26:13] And that's something I talk about all the time. Personally, I think the Walton's work is useful in dismantling some of that. Respecting the distinction between referent and affirmation can help actually preserve biblical authority without flattening the ancient context. It can help us to avoid importing modern questions into ancient texts, and it can help us focus on what God wants us to know, not just on what the ancient people believed.

[00:26:43] That is really important to me because I want to take biblical theology and understanding the Bible in context, and I want to apply it to our world. But we can't do what I'm starting to call the lift and plop method. We can't just take what we see in the Bible, plop it into our context and say, okay, now we know what's going on.

[00:27:07] Because we don't. That's not how this should work, I don't think. And I believe that the Walton's work is useful in helping us see that that's a problem and kind of put some breaks on it.

[00:27:20] I mean, I'm gonna be honest, one thing I noticed when Dr. Heiser was reviewing John Walton's demons book, and Dr. Heiser seems to have forgotten the distinction between referent and affirmation. Walton is not de mythologizing the text to the point to say that the ancient world did not believe anything spiritual. At minimum, what we can see in John Walton's work is that he's trying to insert some caution here and it's caution that is warranted in my opinion.

[00:27:52] Now, I think that Dr. Heiser maybe didn't see that because Dr. Heiser was really good at being cautious. He did not just use the lift and plop method. Dr. Heiser affirmed the spiritual reality. He talked about cosmic geography, but Dr. Heiser was not trying to create a demons and monsters manual for us. And because that's not what Dr. Heiser was doing, I think he didn't really, appreciate this necessary caution that Walton was putting out for us.

[00:28:25] All right, so let's talk some specific examples of referent and affirmation. The Old Testament and the ancient world thought of Sheol and the underworld and the grave as being physically situated underground, at least metaphorically, if nothing else, that was the description. But if we understand a distinction between reference and affirmation here, then we don't have to assume that Sheol is actually under the ground.

[00:28:55] Again, we can talk about ethical standards. We can say that polygamy is not affirmed or taught. It was just part of their culture.

[00:29:04] So let's move that into the spiritual realm, shall we? In a reasonable way, right? Not in a super minimalistic way, but in a way that maybe Dr. Heiser would have agreed with.

[00:29:16] Could we say that Baal is referenced but not affirmed? Well, let's explore what that means exactly.

[00:29:25] Here's one thing that it could mean. It could mean that the understanding of who Baal was metaphysically doesn't have to be accurate, right? Like Baal's qualities and the things that Baal was said to have done, those don't have to be affirmed by the Bible.

[00:29:44] Now, that doesn't mean that there's no spiritual reality being affirmed as the Waltons go, right? That would be a very minimalistic way of understanding the text and reference in affirmation. But if we expanded a bit to being less minimalistic, then we could say that Baal is not necessarily being affirmed in name or quality or attribute, but that the Bible is actually correcting some of that. In other words, giving us new information, that is referring to the entity of Baal that people worshiped at the time, but that we then don't have to presume that there is a metaphysical reality there and that Baal---- as described in the past -- is how we should understand spiritual beings over time entirely.

[00:30:36] Referent and affirmation can help us understand that we don't have to take the figure of Baal and insert it into modern America. We could also say that the Egyptian gods don't have to exist metaphysically and ontologically, just as the Egyptians described them.

[00:30:56] Let's take the issue of Pharaoh, for instance. Pharaoh was obviously seen as a god or a deity in Egypt. He obviously wasn't, he wasn't even an elohim, but God still kind of treated him in the way that the Egyptians were treating him. God treated him like a false deity in some ways, right?

[00:31:18] We could say this is a accommodation. It doesn't mean the biblical authors weren't affirming something about spiritual beings, right? But we don't have to assume that the biblical authors were affirming all of the Egyptian deities qualities and description as some ontological reality. What is the new information that is provided, for instance? The new information includes things like those gods don't provide, rather they enslave.

[00:31:51] Even according to Walton's methodology, it seems like the polemic nature of the text shows us that something is in fact being taught and affirmed.

[00:32:02] Now, to be fair, it's really not the case that the Waltons are saying that only new material is affirmed. But they kind of come close to it, and it's one of the things that frustrates me the most, especially when we can say that there's always a whole lot of new information and how do we determine what's new and what's not.

[00:32:21] Now again, the Waltons are kind of shooting at what we would call conflict theology. Conflict theology is very strong in the work of Greg Boyd in his book, God at War. The Waltons are just suggesting that the information that we have in the text about things like Daniel 10 and and other stories, it's not really in the category of new information.

[00:32:45] The Waltons support this by saying that the people knew about spiritual reality in ways that was not just revelation from God, right? It was cultural understanding around them. They got information about their neighbor's deities from their neighbors, not because God told them that their neighbors were worshiping Baal or Marduk or whatever.

[00:33:08] They actually saw their neighbors worshiping all of these deities. The Israelites didn't go over to their neighbors and tell them, You know what? That deity you're worshiping, he doesn't exist. No. They presumed that those deities existed and they kind of presumed that they existed in the way that the people rounded them said they did. Except not entirely. The Bible is a polemic to say that Marduk doesn't actually own the universe. Yahweh does.

[00:33:37] So if we can presume that the text is affirming that yes, Yahweh actually owns the universe, then I don't see why we can't presume that it's also teaching something about the spiritual realm and conflict theology. That would be my difference between where I stand and where the Waltons are.

[00:33:57] And again, I get it, the Waltons are a little bit frustrating because they have a very either or thinking in some ways. Either outside revelation is a thing or demons aren't a thing. And I'm like, really that's, that's not how we have to see it that way, right?

[00:34:15] But again, I see a point. If everyone was presupposing that Baal or Marduk existed and that wasn't anything that was revealed through special revelation, then why should we actually suppose today that Baal actually existed rather than just being an accommodated reality to the people at the time.

[00:34:37] And I'm fine with that. What I'm not fine with is then extrapolating that fact into saying that there is no spiritual reality that the Bible is teaching about at all.

[00:34:48] The whole framework of the Divine Council worldview is simply more broad than these single referents. That's part of the point, especially when it comes down to the fact that polemical understanding of God as being the head of the council and the judge of the elohim would in fact fit the bill for being new information.

[00:35:11] So I hope you can see how the idea of a referent and affirmation itself is not necessarily the problem. The issue isn't the method itself. The issue is the Walton's insistence on the minimalistic architecture that surrounds it.

[00:35:28] It is this minimalism of theirs that tosses out a lot of the theologizing and canonical readings that the church has had over time. Besides which a redaction of the text presupposes that a bulk of the information that is gathered together in that redaction and collection of scripture is in fact something that the author is affirming and not just referencing. Because they're picking and choosing what they're including in the collection of Scripture, right?

[00:35:59] What we have in our canon today is not the only thing that the Israelites wrote. It was selected because the editors and the redactors who were inspired workers from God, they are affirming certain things in the things that they collected together. So I think it's really important not to toss out the baby with the bath water here in regards to reference and affirmation.

[00:36:24] The question for me is how minimalistic are we going to insist that it has to be? Dr. Heiser suggested that the Waltons had a fear-based approach. Maybe that's the case. I don't know. My suspicion is that because the Waltons are so focused on the idea of covenant as a unifying feature, which is another idea I absolutely love, to be honest, but we have to see it rightly.

[00:36:50] I just think that the Waltons don't really see the point of the reality of the DCW and territorial deities. Again, that's just a guess on my part. I could be totally wrong, especially because I can totally see how these things in the spiritual realm do fit really well into John Walton's Immanuel theology, but Walton doesn't loop any of the spiritual reality into that theology.

[00:37:17] So I feel like it's fair to suggest that the Waltons just have a different lens that they're using where it doesn't matter so much to them to see an explicit spiritual battle. John Walton isn't denying spiritual reality at some level. What that is and what that means for him, I don't know because he hasn't really laid that out in a personal fashion.

[00:37:41] Okay, so let's go into some of this tension that we have. When we look at the affirmed model of the Waltons, there are some problems, right? For one thing, and this really bothers me, their method of choosing what's affirmed has a really strong risk of excluding truths that the audience already knew and saying that the biblical author couldn't possibly have affirmed anything at all in their culture.

[00:38:08] So like moral norms. Justice. Cosmic order. There's a whole lot of things that fit into that. The people of the time were very much like other people around them and we shouldn't presuppose that the Bible is only teaching new information. That's just bizarre to me.

[00:38:29] So I think there is a danger of under affirming real theological truth and theological overlap that can occur between Israelites and ancient Near Eastern thought, right? Like temple as divine dwelling. That wasn't really new, but they were affirming it, clearly. And Walton even says that.

[00:38:50] Another problem that I see is that the method can presume that the text is always polemical or that we're going to force it to be polemical in order to be new information, right? I mean, like we could go into a whole lot of ethical issues here. If the ancient Near Eastern cultures valued hospitality and justice and honoring a deity, then are we going to presuppose that the Bible is not affirming those just because they're not new? But Walton doesn't deny any of that. He doesn't deny that they're affirming things about covenant.

[00:39:26] So he's got a problem with some minimalistic thinking as well as quite a bit of inconsistency when you end up determining for yourself, this is ent and this is affirmation. And I think those kinds of criticisms can be leveraged against pretty much anybody, but the benefit of looping in canonical approaches or historical approaches to Scripture is that it is then not just us determining the referent and affirmation.

[00:39:57] I think that we would all say that the biblical text affirms what it intentionally communicates. I have no problem with that, and that's what Walton is saying. But I would say that this can include truths that are new or truths that are recontextualize or even truths that are reaffirmed in light of covenantal or redemptive goals.

[00:40:20] And by doing that, we can include polemical rejection, we can include shared affirmations, and we're going to avoid a strict "only new equals affirmed rule," and we can embrace a more theological reading of continuity.

[00:40:38] My personal opinion is that if the Messiah came and he was actively involved in dismantling the powers, well, you got conflict theology there. I don't know what to tell you. There is no other core lens other than Christological reading of Scripture. And if you're not using that, then you're not reading Scripture correctly. And I don't want to accuse the Waltons of not using any Christological lens because I actually think they do. I think John Walton's Immanuel Theology is very Christological. He's just so focused in that area that he doesn't really care about other things of the Messianic profile.

[00:41:22] And I would say this about any kind of theology that really reduces what Jesus did into one thing or another. Because I believe that what Jesus came to do was very expansive and included so many things that we cannot just reduce it to one thing or the other thing. Like king Jesus all the way, every day, all the time. But King Jesus also came as a prophet and a priest and a judge, right? And atonement is not just about one thing. Jesus came to save us from our personal sin, but he came for much bigger reasons as well. I will also say that conflict theology is also not the only reason that Jesus came, right?

[00:42:09] So every time that we try to narrow down the focus and say, this is it, this is the model, this is the reason that Jesus came, we're going to miss really important things. So this is my basic problem with a minimalistic approach.

[00:42:28] The Walton's absolutely honor ancient context, and they want to protect the text against anachronistic readings, which is something I am really passionate about myself. We should be safeguarding against importing our modern questions.

[00:42:44] I think it's a fair point in the Walton's Demons book that they say that conflict theology tries to say that they're only doing biblical theology, and they say that on the one hand, spiritual beings can't be understood via science. But then on the other hand, they make truth claims about demons and spirits that do rely on empirical evidence. Dr. Heiser also uses empirical evidence to base his points, and that's ancient empirical evidence as well as modern, right?

[00:43:17] Because if we're doing conflict theology and we're understanding the continuity between the Old Testament and our day, then we're seeing empirical evidence and we're using that to base our value judgment and our opinion on that. And that's fine that we can do that, but we shouldn't claim that we're only using biblical evidence when that's actually not the case.

[00:43:40] Another really important key point to notice about the Walton's work is this definition of what supernatural is, right? They are supposing that the idea of supernatural means that it is something that is not known by the methods of science. End of story. So that's kind of pointing out some inconsistency in conflict theology and things like that. But that's only the case if we take the idea of supernatural as being something that's not scientific. And I don't think that has to be the case.

[00:44:18] Now, I don't think we're gonna prove God or spirits scientifically, but the fact that God and spirits interact with the material world does mean that there is empirical evidence. If God didn't interact with the real world, then okay, we could say that there is no empirical evidence that could be pointed to, but since God does in fact do that and spiritual beings can in fact influence and interact with the world, then that doesn't mean that supernatural necessarily means not scientific.

[00:44:55] So I think that's another point that they're kind of not seeing here.

[00:44:59] I will say it is possible not to use a minimalistic approach. Affirmation should be more than what the Waltons do here, but it doesn't have to mean that we affirm every detail or description that the Bible gives. Dr. Heiser taught about the Bible's affirmation in ways that I'd agree with fully, because it's affirming a reality without needing to affirm every detail of that reality and say that this is something we must bring into our world in specific.

[00:45:30] That was the genius of Dr. Heiser. He was able to navigate that brilliantly. Where you have people who are trying to get a little bit too specific and say that this thing is that thing, Dr. Heiser was able to step back and say, look, this is what the Bible is teaching. The point of that teaching is not that we then go and make our monster manual out of it.

[00:45:55] We need to hold a little bit of that loosely because we just don't have enough information in revelation, and we shouldn't presume that information that we have from other deities because it comes from outside the Bible, that we shouldn't presume that all of those are affirmed realities, but that doesn't mean there is no spiritual reality overall being affirmed because again, a canonical reading, a christological reading kind of has to presuppose that that's the case.

[00:46:30] So I get that there's a whole lot of pushback against the Waltons and their work here because they're not seeing that Messianic reality. And it is bizarre to do that and to be a confessional Christian. But you can do that if you're using a very minimalistic approach like the Waltons are doing.

[00:46:48] And honestly, even the idea of like affirming Baal specifically by name, I'm okay with either affirming him or not to exist metaphysically because frankly, it doesn't mean that much to us because guess what? Nobody today is actually worshiping that deity in particular, in the same way that they did back in the past.

[00:47:14] The affirmation of the Divine Council worldview doesn't mean the affirmation of these particular deities in the same way through time because we don't even see that happen. That's not even the empirical reality that we have. So we can have description, but that description is not for all of time. Because even between the Old Testament and the New Testament, we have different language for spiritual powers. We have different deities being worshiped in the Greco Roman times versus the ancient Near Eastern time.

[00:47:49] So we don't have to go down routes of like Jonathan Cahn or Gary Wayne, who are trying to connect all of these dots and saying that this thing is, that thing is that thing. There's simply no reason that the reality can't be messier than that. Because the only thing in this case that we'd have affirmed is the reality at the time, not the reality that is unchangeable through time.

[00:48:14] Here is the danger that I think Walton is rightly pointing out. He says, quote, " Even an appeal to a divine stamp of approval on common beliefs in the ancient world as represented in the Bible would suffice. Though in that case, the entire ancient world, including its cosmic geography as described in chapter one, would have to be adopted to retain consistency. However, the choice between any of these options is a matter of internal consistency within our own epistemology. It is not a matter of internal consistency with our doctrine of biblical inspiration. Whether we choose to believe in demons and spirits or not does not affect the way we read and understand the message of the Bible, because the message of the Bible was not given for the purpose of giving us information about demons and spirits." End quote.

[00:49:09] Now, okay, so this is a point that seems fair to me on some level. I do think the Bible tells us some things about demons and spirits definitely, but it might be far less than we think or want it to. Here's another thing that I find weird, okay, this is a little bit hard to explain, but i've been talking about the Walton's view of covenant and this idea of Torah as wisdom literature, right?

[00:49:38] So if covenant and covenant stipulation is wisdom literature rather than law code and rule of law for all time, then what that means is that what we have in the Old Testament is not a set of rules that we then lift and plop into our world. And this is what the Waltons are saying about covenants and Torah.

[00:50:02] But then they come and suggest that in order to take the spiritual reality as real and affirmed, suddenly we have to have that lift and plop method? That's ridiculous. That's inconsistent with how they are even understanding Torah and law and this idea of wisdom, right? So if the revelation of God is revelation for the time and it is affirming things at their time, it could be very well affirming that yes, the deity that the people are calling Baal over there, he is affirmed to be real by the biblical authors.

[00:50:44] Now, of course, the Waltons are saying that that's not the case. But the fact that it's affirmed at that time does not then mean that it is affirmed for all of time because it is situational.

[00:50:57] Nobody in the New Testament is worshiping Baal in the same way that they were worshiping him at a particular time and place in the Old Testament. They've moved on to other names and other types of demons and spiritual realities and things that they were describing in different ways. That doesn't mean that Baal and Zeus have to be the same deity.

[00:51:23] That's what I would say about affirmation. The Bible is not affirming Zeus as the same being or entity as Baal. That doesn't mean that Baal or Zeus or whoever we're talking about, can't have a metaphysical reality because it can have a metaphysical reality in that context. What we can't do is the lift and plop method like I'm explaining here.

[00:51:52] The New Testament isn't going on in the same way about deities like it did in the past. I mean, even after they left Egypt, they weren't still talking about Egyptian deities, right? Be cause they weren't in that context anymore. So for me, the answer here doesn't have to be all that complicated. It can still be situated in context.

[00:52:15] We don't have to then go and draw all of these dots and make this amazing, intricate picture that doesn't actually exist in Scripture itself or history itself. For me, the answer is not the minimalistic, it doesn't teach us things, but rather we should heed the caution that we should not over conflate things that the Bible isn't even over conflating.

[00:52:41] Now, the Bible does go like typological paths, right? It says in Revelation it describes the dragon. And we can say that that's kind of the same description as the serpent in Genesis. Maybe that's fair. Maybe that's something that the Bible is affirming because of the canonical trajectory of the text, and that's fine.

[00:53:03] But there's very few things of that nature that we can say about the difference between the Old Testament worship and the New Testament worship. But as for really lower tier deities, we can't just map the Old Testament onto the New Testament onto America today because the Bible isn't even doing that kind of thing. The biblical authors aren't doing that by and large. They might be doing it with a figure of Satan and the serpent and some things like that.

[00:53:33] But again, it's very few things that we have affirmed in canonical narrative. Again, I'm talking about the lift and plop method, saying that Baal and Marduk and Zeus and whoever the founding fathers of America were thinking about, saying that those are all the same deity, the same metaphysical, ontological being.

[00:53:57] It doesn't have to be the case. But that doesn't mean that there is no affirmation of a reality going on. We just can't tell exactly all of these specifics and nuances. And that's not the point. It's not why we're given that information is to affirm all of these specific details.

[00:54:18] So in my opinion, it means that what we can affirm is a reality because it involves the work of the Messiah. We're looking at God's actual activity in the world, right? God's activity is what's revealed, not the really specific doings and attributes of the dark forces.

[00:54:37] And since God's activity does in fact involve dealing with spiritual beings, then yes, I don't see how we can not affirm those things. But what it further means is that we don't get a D&D monsters and deities manual.

[00:54:55] Now, again, I understand there's plenty of weaknesses and tensions here in the Walton's work. A lot of evangelicals are really concerned about how their work can downplay biblical inerrancy. There's a lot of subjectivity in discerning what affirmation is. Their method can be very circular. We don't know what's central without theological commitments to the text.

[00:55:20] But that doesn't mean that everything they say is wrong. So if you wanna go and read Walton's Demons book, or if you have read it and you wanna go revisit it, then these are the things I would suggest to you. I would suggest understanding where they're coming at, understand their methodology, understand the strengths of it, understand the weaknesses of it, and then go into the text and say, what can be helpful here and what's not helpful, because you have both things going on, which is the case for pretty much everybody's work.

[00:55:54] I really appreciate how the Waltons are recovering the ancient context and trying to get us into that ancient person's head. I really appreciate that they are acknowledging that God accommodates himself to our reality and that the point of the text is not individual specific things that are rooted in that context.

[00:56:15] I think that the Walton's work can help to set up some necessary guardrails, but they do have some weaknesses in those guardrails, and that's why I think it's really great that we have both Walton's work and Dr. Heiser's work.

[00:56:31] I think we should be fair to the Walton's. We can criticize them, but I don't think they're trying to diminish the Bible's authority. I don't think they're entirely de mythologizing, and I think they are responding to a real interpretive crisis and I think they're helping to avoid anachronistic readings.

[00:56:51] The idea of functional understanding of reality and an ordered understanding of reality is really helpful. And I wanna say that I have seen people take the ideas of conflict theology and they will suggest that this means that God can be defeated. I've seen people talk about Dr. Heiser's ideas of the Messiah coming and his interaction with Satan and the dark powers . And people will think that Dr. Heiser is saying that Yahweh and Jesus could be defeated, and that is simply not the point. But that is something that conflict theology can kind of run into and it's a problem.

[00:57:32] I would caution against theological minimalism. And I would highly recommend looking at the text in a canonical way. And again, I don't think the Waltons ignore the full canon or theology, but they underutilized its interpretive weight in their methods, and I don't think that's very helpful.

[00:57:53] All right, so here we are at the end of this episode and I want to acknowledge the usefulness of Walton's work. I hope it's been helpful to understand this distinction between minimalistic interpretations and methodologies and a more maximalist or expansive use of those things.

[00:58:13] This is why I think it's really important to understand our toolkits and understand how people are using those toolkits because then we can determine what is helpful in their work or what is less helpful, where are they going wrong because they're not using the right tools?

[00:58:31] I would encourage you to go into your Scripture reading and look at this referent versus affirmation distinction. What truths does the Spirit and the canon and the church and a Christological reading affirm, and what are things that just kind of don't really matter that much to our interpretation?

[00:58:51] This can help us to not overread things and to not say that the purpose of the text is something that it's not. If we want Genesis one to affirm or teach creation ex nihilo, I'm afraid we're going to be disappointed. And if we wanted to affirm that and we try to force that, then it makes our argument weak because the text isn't talking about that.

[00:59:19] Now you can go to a different text in order to affirm that kind of thing. And we're not doing that today. I've done that before. The important thing is to look at the text, each individual text, what is it saying? What is it teaching? And honestly, I don't think it's all that hard because even people who want to affirm like a young earth creation and a six day literal creation, even when they do that, you go and ask them what the point of the text is, what the theological message is, and they don't go and tell you that the theological message is so that we understand scientific historical reality.

[00:59:57] The theological message is much broader and frankly, more interesting and better than that. The theological message always encompasses who God is. Who we are, God acting in the world and how we can trust God. Those are the things that the text is mainly affirming and pretty much anybody can go into the text and read it for those messages. It's not difficult. That's why narrative approaches and canonical approaches and all of these things, the way that we actually read is helpful.

[01:00:31] And I think that the Walton's referent and affirmation model really supports canonical theology in some important ways. It grounds us in this meaning of the text. But the referent also preserves the context and helps us understand how the people at the time were thinking of things. We can't understand things like figurative language and typology without understanding those referents.

[01:00:58] Not everything has to be mapped ontologically onto some reality that we have to understand in a scientific or historical way.

[01:01:07] Again, if the Bible is wisdom literature and it's not interested in giving us an exhaustive ontology or an exhaustive system that we then have to incorporate into our current reality and our current culture, then that doesn't have to rule out the possibility the Bible affirms real spiritual truth, even if it's not trying to lay it out systematically.

[01:01:32] The principle I would suggest is that affirmation can exist without systemization. The Bible affirms real spiritual truths without needing to exhaustively define them.

[01:01:46] All right, has this clarified anything for you? Has this helped to set the Waltons in their own context? I hope so. If you wanna come talk to me, you can reach out to me at my website, genesis marks the spot.com. You can also join me in my new biblical theology group. I have a new community that I'm building. You can find it@onthisrock.com.

[01:02:13] But keep in mind that on this rock, there's hyphens in between those words. So on this rock.com, you can go and sign up for my new community there and come and talk about this stuff. I mean, you can talk about it in my group on Facebook too, which I've had since the beginning of my podcast.

[01:02:37] But I'm hoping that my biblical theology community is going to be a place where we can talk about these things without the distraction of social media and things like that, and maybe get into a little bit deeper context with things like frame semantics that I'm always going on about.

[01:02:54] At any rate, you can go check that out. I would love to have you check it out and I'd love to hear your feedback on what I'm saying here about the Waltons and their methodology and how we can use that for our use without going down the dangerous paths that they do.

[01:03:12] I use the term dangerous there because that's the word that Dr. Heiser used. Okay. Thank you guys for supporting me at my new community. A really big shout out to my Patreon supporters. You guys are the ones who are enabling me to do new things, so thank you so very much. I hope you guys look forward to new things and new conversations, but until then, I wish you all a blessed week and we will see you later.