I've been listening to/reading a lot of Dr. Michael Heiser's material recently (well, within the last few years). He's been brought up here quite a bit over the years. Dr. Heiser is an Old Testament scholar whose work mainly focuses on the Divine Council mentioned in Psalm 82:1, where his work is well respected by his academic peers. He also works as Scholar in Residence at Logos Bible Software. Aside from that he spends quite a bit of time interacting with UFO types at UFO conferences to debunk ancient astronaut pseudo-science, and simply evangelizing to what he considers a lost crowd. The guy is pretty busy. Outside of podcasting (he has two podcasts), and doing interviews on radio shows like The Line of Fire with scholar Michael Brown, or with George Noory on Coast to Coast AM, he writes academic books/papers as well as similar material to a popular audience, and also fictional books based on his work on the supernatural realm.
It's that last part that's the focus of this post. In his fiction (which I haven't read) he has a couple characters named Fern and Audrey. Fern and Audrey are apparently based on real people (or maybe it's the other way around) that have a healing ministry, and they apparently use Dr. Heiser's material on the Divine Council to help people who, on the surface at least, have been hurt or abused by Deliverance Ministries. "Fern" and "Audrey" aren't their real names, but it's the names that they use for themselves when talking to Dr. Heiser on his podcast The Naked Bible.
The Naked Bible is a theology podcast that helps explain hard passages in scripture, and offers commentary on different books of the Bible. It's part of Dr. Heiser's overall "Naked Bible" ministry. Now, for the record, I think Dr. Heiser's ministry has a ton of great stuff going for it, and there's lots to love about it, but there are a number of views that Dr. Heiser holds that I find a bit confusing and somewhat troubling.
Ok, so that was the prologue. Before I go further, the bit I wrote below I actually posted on another forum that I visited on my sabbatical from TWeb. I won't name the forum, but I thought it was initially associated with Dr. Heiser. They were actually pretty helpful, and helped explain some of Dr. Heiser's material I had a hard time reconciling. After a while one of the posters there started replying to me (both in thread and in PM) about the things angels had told him. At first I thought he was being funny, or was just talking Christianese or whatever. Eventually I realized that he for real thought that angels talked to him. Like, they literally pop in once in awhile (I think maybe only in his mind) to have conversations with him about politics, and what it's like in the angel realm, and the things they think they believe are probably true about what people say about the Bible (some things they're not sure about though). He talks to a lot of different angels, but the two main angels he talks to are Gabe, and his sister Gabrielle. So, now I'm thinking the guy is batty, but he's a one off. I've seen plenty of these types here on TWeb, and eventually they find themselves talking in riddles in the Padded Room. I mentioned to him that his views were wacky, and I wasn't interested. But then forum posters started coming to his defense to say that they too believed in talking to angels. And then a mod, one of the forum owners, while not defending him outright, was kinda like "it's not completely out there." So, now I'm like, "what the heck is going on here." It's then that I notice that there's a whole subforum on this website dedicated to talking to angels, people self-appointing themselves as "oracles", getting children to stop taking medication so that they can have visions, and all kinds of weird stuff.
So now I'm concerned. I write Dr. Heiser personally, and I'm like, "do you know that there's this forum that's using your material to sort of advance this angel talk nonsense?" And he wrote back right away! And was like, "No, I've heard of this forum, but I have no idea who these people are, and I'm not associated with them in any way whatsoever." (paraphrasing). So he told me that he knew a guy who he could contact who he thought might know the site owners, and would ask them to knock off the angel talk nonsense or else he'd have to write a blog post disavowing them by name and warning people to stay clear. Well, the site owners didn't want that since they built the site with his work in mind. They posted on their site that they weren't associated with angel talk, and put up a general warning about it in the forum, but they never got rid of that subforum, and people continued to post their experiences talking to angels, and having visions, and whatever. So I shook the dust off my sandals and vamoosed, and figured if Dr. Heiser wanted to deal with it he could, but I didn't want to be part of that whole deal. Ok, so that aside, please read on.
It's that last part that's the focus of this post. In his fiction (which I haven't read) he has a couple characters named Fern and Audrey. Fern and Audrey are apparently based on real people (or maybe it's the other way around) that have a healing ministry, and they apparently use Dr. Heiser's material on the Divine Council to help people who, on the surface at least, have been hurt or abused by Deliverance Ministries. "Fern" and "Audrey" aren't their real names, but it's the names that they use for themselves when talking to Dr. Heiser on his podcast The Naked Bible.
The Naked Bible is a theology podcast that helps explain hard passages in scripture, and offers commentary on different books of the Bible. It's part of Dr. Heiser's overall "Naked Bible" ministry. Now, for the record, I think Dr. Heiser's ministry has a ton of great stuff going for it, and there's lots to love about it, but there are a number of views that Dr. Heiser holds that I find a bit confusing and somewhat troubling.
Ok, so that was the prologue. Before I go further, the bit I wrote below I actually posted on another forum that I visited on my sabbatical from TWeb. I won't name the forum, but I thought it was initially associated with Dr. Heiser. They were actually pretty helpful, and helped explain some of Dr. Heiser's material I had a hard time reconciling. After a while one of the posters there started replying to me (both in thread and in PM) about the things angels had told him. At first I thought he was being funny, or was just talking Christianese or whatever. Eventually I realized that he for real thought that angels talked to him. Like, they literally pop in once in awhile (I think maybe only in his mind) to have conversations with him about politics, and what it's like in the angel realm, and the things they think they believe are probably true about what people say about the Bible (some things they're not sure about though). He talks to a lot of different angels, but the two main angels he talks to are Gabe, and his sister Gabrielle. So, now I'm thinking the guy is batty, but he's a one off. I've seen plenty of these types here on TWeb, and eventually they find themselves talking in riddles in the Padded Room. I mentioned to him that his views were wacky, and I wasn't interested. But then forum posters started coming to his defense to say that they too believed in talking to angels. And then a mod, one of the forum owners, while not defending him outright, was kinda like "it's not completely out there." So, now I'm like, "what the heck is going on here." It's then that I notice that there's a whole subforum on this website dedicated to talking to angels, people self-appointing themselves as "oracles", getting children to stop taking medication so that they can have visions, and all kinds of weird stuff.
So now I'm concerned. I write Dr. Heiser personally, and I'm like, "do you know that there's this forum that's using your material to sort of advance this angel talk nonsense?" And he wrote back right away! And was like, "No, I've heard of this forum, but I have no idea who these people are, and I'm not associated with them in any way whatsoever." (paraphrasing). So he told me that he knew a guy who he could contact who he thought might know the site owners, and would ask them to knock off the angel talk nonsense or else he'd have to write a blog post disavowing them by name and warning people to stay clear. Well, the site owners didn't want that since they built the site with his work in mind. They posted on their site that they weren't associated with angel talk, and put up a general warning about it in the forum, but they never got rid of that subforum, and people continued to post their experiences talking to angels, and having visions, and whatever. So I shook the dust off my sandals and vamoosed, and figured if Dr. Heiser wanted to deal with it he could, but I didn't want to be part of that whole deal. Ok, so that aside, please read on.
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