Author: Andy Le Peau

I've been an editor and writer for over forty years. I am passionate about ideas and how we can express them clearly, beautifully, and persuasively. I love reading good books, talking about them, and recommending them. I thoroughly enjoy my family who help me continue on the path of a lifelong learner.

Fighting the Fear Factory (Part 1)

Every week or two somebody tells me how agitated the news makes them.

As a teenager in the 60s, I watched NBC’s The Huntley-Brinkley Report most nights of the week. I appreciated the work and partnership of the two anchors (as well as the theme music under their closing credits from the 2nd movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony).

The news was not easy that decade—Vietnam, demonstrations, assassinations, riots. But we also had elements of hope in landmark Civil Rights legislation and men going to the moon. The news industry wasn’t perfect. But with the Big Three networks dominating coverage, we had the assumption of middle-of-the-road attempts at objectivity, to help us be better, more responsible citizens.

No more. The main strategy of politicians and news/opinion outlets is not to provide evenhanded information and considered judgments but to make us distressed and angry. Talk radio and late-night comics do the same. All these fear factories are succeeding wildly in these efforts. Why put up with it?

Tell me I’m nuts. But I have an answer for my anxious friends. I firmly believe we can be better informed and better citizens. It is fourfold. Here are two. I’ll cover two more in my next post.

First, stop following the news and start reading books.

Granted, some people need to follow some parts of the news. If your livelihood is in sports, you need to follow sporting news. If your livelihood is in banking or business, you may need to follow financial news. But most of us do not need to regularly consume political news.

Inherently the news industry gives the impression that what is new today is the most important thing. It is not. In a few months we will forget the latest celebrity divorce, scandal in Congress, or outrageous comment by a pastor, politician, or pundit.

Long-term trends that don’t make the news are much more important—like the epidemic of loneliness among adults or the mental health crisis among teenagers. Books are more likely to take the long view (looking at the last ten, forty, or one hundred years), and to go in depth on issues rather than focus on fleeting sound bites.

Second, stop following the news and start helping others.  

Part of our anxiety about the news is because we can’t do anything about it. Once every couple years we can vote but that is not enough to compensate for the daily waves of worry the news can cause. 

Rather than encouraging love, joy, peace, kindness and the rest of the fruit of the spirit, the news engenders anger, frustration, and helplessness. If we intentionally fill our minds with troubles, our hearts will also be full of troubles. That’s why the apostle Paul says:

Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. (Philippians 4:8)

If we are thinking daily about how terrible, stupid, and evil people are who disagree with us, we will be shaped by that anger and become harsh, mean, and hateful people ourselves.

While we may be helpless in the face of national and international news, we are not helpless when it comes to serving people and making a difference with those around us.  We can visit friends in the hospital, donate blood, or help out at a food pantry. We can volunteer as a tutor, at a job training program, or at Habitat for Humanity.

All it takes is googling “local volunteer opportunities,” and you’re sure to find access to dozens of options, one of which is sure to fit your skills, interest, and schedule.

We have other highly practical ways to fight the fear factories. I’ll cover two more in the next post.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

The Christian Revolution

Rather than a history of Christianity, Tom Holland’s six-hundred-page Dominion is more a series of historical essays. His purpose is not to provide “objective,” even coverage of the key events, people, and trends of the last two thousand years but to make a point.

And the point? The ideas that “human beings have rights; that they are born equal; that they are owed sustenance, and shelter, and refuge from persecution”—all these, whether proclaimed by atheists or believers, derive historically from the Bible’s claim that humans are made in the image of God, that Christ died for everyone, and that in him there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female (540). We are all heirs of the Christian revolution.

He tells his impressionistic history through the use of vivid, selective stories from the past which are sometimes obscure (e.g., Quaker Benjamin Lay) but which he sees as representative of an era, epitomizing the theme he wants to emphasize.

Though he makes a positive case for the influence of Christianity in the world, he does not stint on bloodshed. Over and over he tells how Christians perpetrated violence and death against others and each other in likely every period since Constantine. The book is no whitewash.

Along the way he seems to make some odd choices, however. Though the book emphasizes the critical importance of the place of natural law, Holland barely spends two pages on Thomas Aquinas, likely the most influential theologian in all of church history who lifted natural theology to a place of near supremacy. Yet Holland finds time to spend six pages on Spinoza.

And then there is the peculiar claim that Irenaeus invented the canon when much consensus in the early church already existed on which books should be in the New Testament. Such swashbuckling analysis about something I know makes me wonder about his other judgments regarding things I know less well.

He is a lively storyteller who makes the pages fly by. Yet while I appreciate his efforts at artistry, his poetic prose too often lapses into obscurity. Or to put it more plainly (as I wish he did more often): his ornate sentences are sometimes so convoluted that it can be hard to understand what he means.

So, yes, while I see merit in the book’s overall thesis, a three-star rating accurately reflecs my ambivalence.

No One Wants to Be Fooled

While some conspiracy theories are blatantly ludicrous (such as, the U.S. government has dug a secret railroad tunnel from Nevada to Ohio), they often have appeal.

We don’t want to believe the world is full of chance events that have monumental consequences. Could a lone, random shooter really have killed President Kennedy in 1963? There had to be more of a reason than that, we think.  

Another reason we might be drawn to conspiracy theories is that we don’t want to look like fools. We want to think we won’t fall for a fabrication, a lie, a deception. We want to believe that we are smart enough to recognize when someone is trying to trick us. 

Of course this impulse can go both ways. We could be deceived the government, or we could be deceived by a theory that the government is lying. 

All this brings us to Area 51, the top-secret region in Nevada owned by the U.S. government. Annie Jacobsen’s book by that name details the spy planes and other weapons testing that has gone on there and nearby over the last eighty years.

Much is now known due to many documents which have recently been declassified. We learn, for example, that the use of drones is not a new phenomenon. The Air Force has been deploying them since World War II. Little has been declassified about nuclear testing, however. And there are some documents which despite repeated efforts, both by citizens and government officials, have never been declassified. 

One of the questions I have is, Why? Technology from eighty years ago is completely out of date. Why hide it? Some conspiracy theorists believe the government is covering up how it faked the moon landings at Area 51 fifty-five years ago despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Others think it is hiding evidence of alien landings beginning with Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. 

The author’s explanation for what the government called a weather balloon that crashed at Roswell is certainly more believable than aliens. What crashed, says Jacobsen, was a Soviet spy plane built with the help of Nazi scientists taken after the war. But many questions remain. Why have we never seen equivalent technology from the Russians since then? Why keep it secret even decades later?

Perhaps government agencies find an advantage in allowing conspiracy theories about UFOs and thousand-mile tunnels to run rampant. It keeps attention off what they actually have done and are doing.

At the end of the book the author presents (admittedly, with the least documentation of anything in the book), perhaps the most disturbing speculation as to why some government activities have never come to light—and it has nothing to do with secret technology. According to the author, the government has been engaged in what would be universally condemned by Americans and by the international community—human experimentation.

No one wants to be made a fool. Jacobsen reminds us several times that one of the best strategies to follow is Occam’s razor—the simplest explanation tends to be the best. A good reminder when we’re not sure what to believe.

We Never Know Who We’re Talking To

A skinny twenty-two-year-old was freezing in Chicago one November day in 1986. It was 10o. A recent college graduate, he was depressed and had lost fifty pounds. A few years earlier his father and brother had died in a crash. He kept going to Mass for a while, but he had become an atheist. He was angry and certain God didn’t exist.

He had spent much of his time in college smoking weed and reading books. Eventually he stopped smoking pot because it got in the way of his reading. In college it had been kind of cool to be an atheist. He liked nurturing the image of an intellectual. Despite his depression and smoking habit, he got good grades.

Now he had a job in Chicago. As he walked in the frigid weather, someone from the Gideons handed him a free copy of the New Testament with Psalms and Proverbs. It was small, about the size of a pack of cards. It had a green cover with a pebble finish. It was so cold that the book was frozen. He had to slap it on his knee to get the pages to open.

In the back he saw a listing of what to read when you have certain feelings or problems. “Anxiety” caught his eye. The listing directed him to Matthew 5–7, and he began reading the Sermon on the Mount. It struck him profoundly, speaking to him directly. He was amazed by how easy it was to take in and how true it seemed.

Do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to his span of life?And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. (Matt 6:25-29)

Shortly after that he lost the book. The following week he was on a bus going to a job when he noticed that the girl next to him was reading a similar edition. “I had one of those but I lost it,” he told her.

“Oh, here,” she said, “take mine.” He has had that copy with him for the last forty years. He carries it with him in his bag wherever he goes. He doesn’t know who that girl was, but Stephen Colbert still has her edition with her underlines and her notes on the gospels.

Colbert is one of the most well-known entertainers in the country. Unusual for someone in that industry, he has been quite public about his Catholic faith and how it affects his life, his ideas, and how he interacts with people–a faith he renewed after two people took time to connect with him.

When we encounter a waitress with a blank look on her face, when we see someone in line at the store who is disorganized, when we sit next to a skinny kid on a bus—we have no idea who we may be talking to. We may think we know who these people are, but we would be wrong.

Unless we talk to them. Ask some friendly questions. Act with generosity. Treat them like human beings. And not put them in a box.

It could change their life. And ours.

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Note: Stephen Colbert tells this story on a July 7, 2025, podcast, The Spiritual Life with Fr. James Martin, S.J., which you can listen to here on Apple Podcasts or watch here on YouTube. I recommend listening to the whole interview.

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

Cancel the Past or Learn from It?

Should we learn from the past or cancel the past? We have more options than those two. But in general, it is better to learn from the past than ignore it. 

Take for example two people on opposite sides of the Civil War. As has been pointed out, even though Lincoln emancipated the slaves and prosecuted the Civil War which ended slavery in the country, he was probably not pure in his views about the races. He thought they should be politically equal but was much more uncertain about whether they should be socially equal to whites. 

Does that mean Lincoln was a reprobate we should completely denounce? No. It means he was a flawed hero.

Then take Stonewall Jackson. He was a stalwart defender of the South and slavery while he was also a very devoted Christian. In contrast to Lincoln whose Christian credentials were ambivalent at best, Jackson read and believed his Bible devoutly. 

Does that mean we should uniformly valorize Jackson? No. He was a man who embodied deep contradictions.

What can we learn from this? We can learn that people are complex. We are each a mixture of motives, of good ideas and good practices and many that are less than ideal. By learning the stories of imperfect heroes and of villains with virtues, we learn about ourselves.

No matter how pure and right, we think our ideas and motives are, they probably aren’t. We should approach ourselves and life with humility.

It means that we may be wrong. Any who have ever changed their minds about anything are admitting they were once wrong—and so could also be wrong now. History, even our own history, teaches us that we should nurture the attitude that we have something to learn from everyone.

Image by Mark Thomas from Pixabay.

My Funeral Plans

Nope. Not dying. At least not yet.

My adult children asked me recently if I had thoughts about what I’d like for my memorial service. Thankfully, I don’t think they are anxious to see me move on to my reward. Nonetheless, it’s a bit of a surprising question, especially since I have no significant health issues. Of course any of us can go at any time. And I am of an age where, statistically, it’s more likely to be sooner than later.

My initial reaction was, “Hey, a memorial service is for you. Not me. I won’t be around. Do whatever is good for you, whatever helps you.”

Then I thought more. When someone close dies, whether suddenly or after an extended illness, the shock and grief can make it hard to make decisions. The brain just doesn’t work as well. Having a bit of an outline of what to do ahead of time, especially when there are plenty of other details pressing in, can make it easier for those left behind. And a plan can help minimize disagreements.

In addition, I’ve come to realize that there is comfort in doing what our loved one wanted, of honoring his or her wishes. Some people want nothing after they die. No funeral. No party. Nothing. Sometimes they are just private people or aren’t uncomfortable with public attention, even positive attention. They’d rather family and friends move on with life with as little interruption as possible. That’s how they want to show their love and care for those left behind.

Others are comfortable giving loved ones a chance to show and share grief, to remember and tell stories of love and laughter. They are aware that deliberately taking time to process our emotions can be important and healthy in moving on.

In either case, knowing one is honoring the person we lost is healing in itself. As a result, I’ve decided to outline a few ideas, giving those I leave behind freedom to modify things as makes sense at the time. (After all, a lot can change in twenty-five years, right!?)

Here are some initial thoughts:

  • Music. I have always loved music. Classical or traditional is good with me. But anything you want will be fine.
  • Hope. Grief and loss, appropriately, are going to be there at such times, likely whether we want them or not. Make room for hope.
  • Love. Make sure everyone knows how much I loved my wife, my kids, and my grandkids. It is a lot. More than I can possibly say.
  • Remembrance. My two older children spoke at their mother’s memorial service. Maybe the two younger ones can have their turn speaking at mine.
  • Don’t fight. That may seem like odd advice, but it is what my parents told me and my siblings before they died, and it was incredibly wise. Grief is strong at such times. Emotions run high. It’s easy to get upset and say things in anger. It’s better to go along with what you think is wrong than to risk breaking relationships.

What else should I be thinking about? I’d love to hear your ideas.

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Image: Andrew Le Peau

Concerns about The Unseen Realm

Part 5

Michael Heiser’s largely academic book, The Unseen Realm, has had a wide influence well beyond the scholarly world. I was sent a photo recently when the book was spotted for sale in the gift shop of a high-end resort in Mexico.

The fascination is not new. For millennia humans have sought to understand (and often sought to control) whatever powers may lie behind the physical world. This was not just a matter of curiosity but of survival in a wild and dangerous world.

C. S. Lewis saw two opposite errors in today’s “civilized” world–one is to not believe in the devil and the other is to have an excessive interest in the demonic. While I have given much praise to Heiser’s book over the course of this series of posts, in the spirit of balancing belief with caution, I offer a few concerns.

First, Heiser often seems too confident about his viewpoints. While I think he is largely on track, he would have been better to recognize the strengths of other perspectives and acknowledge that he may not be absolutely right at each point.

One particular example comes in chapter nine regarding predestination and free will. Though his distinction between what God foreknows and foreordains is helpful, I don’t think this solves these contentious issues as much as he thinks they do. Nor does he resolve the related topic of the problem of evil, an issue which probably can’t be answered this side of glory.

Second, Heiser says little or nothing about possible implications of rebellious spiritual beings influencing nations in our day. Might this lead us to categorically condemning all people from certain national or ethnic groups as evil and irredeemable, thus justifying violent, inhuman treatment of them?

The world is complex. Even the one nation in the Bible that was God’s inheritance (Israel) rebelled and did many evil things. At the same time, other nations besides Israel can turn to God (Ninevah). Likewise today, no nation is entirely pure nor purely evil.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously said in The Gulag Archipelago:

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.”

Finally, it is important to remember that while Heiser highlights an important biblical theme, a neglected one, and a misunderstood one, this is not the only theme nor necessarily the main one in the Bible. It is one piece of a multifaceted story.

We can, for example, view the whole Bible through the lens of the Temple. Though it is often said the Bible begins in a garden (Genesis) and ends in a city (Revelation), both images are ways of understanding all of creation as a Temple—a place where God dwells, a place where heaven meets earth.

The Exodus event is another theme threaded through the whole Bible. It is foreshadowed in Genesis, takes center stage in the book of Exodus, and then makes major reappearances in the Psalms, in Isaiah, in Mark, and elsewhere. We can easily think of others such as: creation, de-creation, re-creation; or mercy and justice; or freedom and slavery; or faith, hope, and love.

The conflicts of the earthly and the unseen realms are, as Heiser says, found from Genesis to Revelation. This and the wealth of other such themes are worth a lifetime of meditation so that we may be more fully shaped by God and his Word.

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Image credit: Susan DeCostanza

Letting the Bible Have Its Way

Part 4

The Bible is viewed in many different ways.

Some see it as a how-to book for life or an “owner’s manual” for the soul, if you will. Some see it as a collection of myths and tales from an unenlightened past. Some see it as a sacred object for use in the holiest of settings. Some see it as a foundation of Western culture.

One of the things I appreciate about Michael Heiser’s The Unseen Realm is the overall approach he uses with the Bible. Primarily, he tries to take the Bible on its own terms, in its own context.

He tries not to impose his own ideas, preconceptions, or needs on the text. He begins by wondering what the original writers thought, what kind of culture they lived in, what kind of assumptions they had about the world. As he puts it, “The realization that I needed to read the Bible like a pre-modern person who embraced the supernatural, unseen world has illumined its content more than anything else in my academic life” (385).

We are fortunate to live in a day of widely available access to ancient documents and archaeological research that have emerged in the last two hundred years. They give us greater understanding of the worldview and the mind of the original biblical writers. We are also more alert to how our own Enlightenment, scientific, or postmodern mindsets can lead both believers and skeptics to impose ideas on the Bible that just aren’t there.

One example: The biblical writers simply didn’t have a category for a how-to manual that allows one to take individual verses out of context for instant answers. They did however have a category for wisdom literature that requires slow, lifelong meditation on texts that may at times seem to be at odds with each other.

Another example: The biblical writers did not employ modern historical methods or criteria. They couldn’t. They employed their own customs and used genres common to their day to tell stories for their own purposes. To label these as “inaccurate” or “in error” by today’s standards is an exercise in missing the point.

In particular Heiser takes aim at the misguided assumption that a literal reading is the truest approach to Scripture, that such a method is the primary way God intends us to read the Bible. When we do, we fail to understand how much scientific and materialistic ways of thinking (which are foreign to the Bible) have come to dominate our own perspective. As he writes:

Metaphorical meaning isn’t “less real” than literal meaning (however, that’s defined). Whether we like it or not, the biblical writers weren’t obsessed with literalism the way we seem to be…. Biblical writers regularly employ conceptual metaphor in their writing and thinking. That’s because they were human. Conceptual metaphor refers to the way we use a concrete term or idea to communicate abstract ideas. If we marry ourselves to the concrete (“literal”) we’re going to miss the point the writer was angling for in many cases.

He gives this example, “If I use the word ‘Vegas’ and all you think of is latitude and longitude, you’re not following my meaning. Biblical words can carry a lot of freight that transcends their concrete sense. Inspiration didn’t immunize language from doing what it does.” (387)

We can’t completely get out of our own skin and crawl into the framework of those who lived two or three thousand years ago in a very different culture. But the journey into the world of the Bible and then back into our world is so worth it.

Note: If you would like a video summary of the book, The Unseen Realm documentary can be found here on YouTube. At just over an hour, this presentation features Michael Heiser and several other respected biblical scholars who offer a clear, succinct overview of the key points from the influential book.

Next Installment: Concerns about the Unseen Realm (Part 5)

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Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

The Surprising Difference the Unseen Realm Makes

Part 3

So what if the biblical worldview is permeated with ongoing warfare waged by rebellious spiritual beings against God’s followers? How should that affect me?

That’s the question I left us with after my two previous posts here and here on Michael Heiser’s thorough biblical study, The Unseen Realm. Surprisingly, perhaps, Heiser doesn’t highlight exorcism. What he does address is far more amazing and profound.

It starts by appreciating the different but related ways “son of God” or “sons of God” is used in the Bible. “The sons of God” can refer to spiritual members of the divine council (see previous posts) who God appointed to work with him in ordering creation (Job 38:7; Ps 82:6). The phrase can also mean the king of Israel (Ps 2:7) or Israel as a whole (Ex 4:2; Hos 11:1). It can also refer to all believers (John 1:13; Rom 8:14; Gal 3:26; 4:5), and of course to Jesus’ unique sonship (Matt 14:33).

What they all have in common, whether natural or supernatural, is the special status God assigns to them to work with him in bringing about his will, on earth as it is in heaven. When the Bible says we are sons and daughters of God, this is more than just a warm, sweet way of talking about how we are a cozy part of God’s family. It means we have a role in ruling. As God first commanded the man and woman: “Fill the earth and subdue it. Rule . . .” (Gen 1:28).

Our destiny is not just one of salvation in God’s presence eternally, as astounding as that is. We, his people, play a more profound, more mind-boggling role than we may have ever imagined. As Heiser puts it, “We are the children of God, destined to displace the defeated, disloyal sons of God who now rule the nations. Believing followers of Jesus Christ are the fulfillment of God’s plan to have humanity join the divine family-council and restore Eden” (p. 314). This is the context for Paul’s comment that we will one day rule angels (1 Cor 6:3).

In our everyday lives, Paul reminds us that we live this out as temples where heaven and earth meet in our bodies (1 Cor 3:16). Even the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, as Heiser explains, are reminders to those in the unseen realm of our ultimate loyalty. We are not theirs. We are his (1 Cor 10:14-17).

When we seek to live out God’s will to unite all in Christ, we have a profound effect on the rebellious unseen realm. As N. T. Wright says regarding Ephesians 3:6, 10:

It is when the Christian community comes together across barriers which divide us from one another that the principalities and powers know that Jesus Christ is Lord. And that as long as we are divided whether black and white, male and female, rich and poor or whatever, the principalities and powers smile and say, “We are still in charge here!”*

How do we get through a day? Both the hundreds of petty annoyances, and the deep doubts, losses, and hardships of life can weigh us down, confuse us, and strike hard blows. By the Spirit, however, we can also remember who we are and who we will be.

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*N. T. Wright, in a question-and-answer session after a joint lecture with Paul Barnett, “Fresh Perspectives on Paul,” MacQuarie University (Sydney, Australia), March 16, 2006 (Vancouver: Regent Bookstore/Regent Audio).

Image by Deborah Hudson from Pixabay.

The Bible’s Grand Story in the Unseen Realm

Part 2

I love books that offer a grand sweep of the Bible that ties the whole together through a theme like the Exodus or the Temple. Seeing how all of Scripture unites in multiple ways is enlightening and energizing for me.

In that regard, Heiser’s The Unseen Realm does not disappoint. As I noted here, his book is not just a catalog of spiritual beings. Rather he tells a remarkable story of God’s plan for creation from Genesis to Revelation through this clarifying lens.

And what is that story? “The Old Testament is basically a record of the long war between Yahweh and the gods, and between Yahweh’s children and the nations, to re-establish the original Edenic design” (p. 376). And the two wars are actually one, with rebellious spiritual beings using the nations in their battle.

Here’s how it unfolds. While initial conflicts emerge in Genesis 3 and 6, a turn comes, unexpectedly, in Genesis 10 which offers an apparently boring list of seventy nations descended from Noah and his sons. But these are the nations split up in Genesis 11 after the fiasco at the Tower of Babel. God doesn’t completely forsake them, however. In Genesis 12 he promises to bless them through Abraham and his family.

What is going on here? Moses offers a striking explanation of the episode at Babel: “When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind [at Babel], he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. But the Lord’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage” (Deut 32:8-9 ESV).

God, says Moses, gave up the corrupt nations to their rebellion at Babel, turning them over to “the sons of God,” which is a reference to the divine council (a group of spiritual beings often referenced in places like Gen 6:2; Ex 15:11; Job 1:6; 2:1; Ps 82:1, 6; 89:6-7; etc.). The nations are disinherited from God at Babel and given over to the control of these equally rebellious “sons of God.” But God chooses one nation for his inheritance—through whom all the nations will eventually be brought back into the fold. That is, Israel.

As we know, that is ultimately fulfilled by God in the person of Jesus Christ, the unique Son, who accomplishes the task Israel failed to complete. When the New Testament then refers (as it does frequently) to the nations (e.g., Matt 28:19; Mk 13:10; Acts 1:8; Rom 16:26; etc.), this is more than a statement about a worldwide mission. It is a reclamation project which involves God’s plan to dethrone the rebellious spiritual beings who led the nations astray, and bring all peoples back to himself.

Many years ago I heard the phrase “territorial spirits” to describe how nations were guided by evil beings who had a certain geographic or ethnic domain. I was skeptical, thinking it derived from isolated and contested texts like Daniel 10:12-21. Heiser doesn’t employ that terminology, but he does use the phrase “the divine council cosmic-geographical worldview,” to describe what he sees as permeating Scripture (p. 349).

What difference does all this make? How does it affect our life in Christ?

Those are the questions I’ll address in my next post.

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Image: Ziggurat at Ur, modern Tall al-Muqayyar, Iraq. Such temple towers were characteristic of Mesopotamia, 2200 to 550 BC, and was likely the pattern followed at Babel (see John Walton and Tremper Longman III, The Lost World of the Flood, pp. 129-42). Image by Abdulmomn Kadhim from Pixabay.