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But if history is any guide, no matter how deeply held our beliefs may be great religions based on demographics, migration and conversion. like much of sub-​Saharan Africa – and to decline where they are stable. a fledgling “religion” invented to foster greater commitment to action on climate change.
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To the extent that the church takes on a materialist worldview, it also fails to address the problem of witchcraft. When the church takes on a materialist worldview it cannot offer redemption through healing prayer, or exorcisms, where these are pastorally appropriate, nor can it provide security against witchcraft realities. By contrast, mainline Anglican and Baptist churches, which tend not to address witchcraft and the spiritual world, are said to experience slower growth.

Against these mistakes, and Christian versions of these mistakes, what is a biblical worldview of witchcraft? Its approach to spiritual knowledge is exclusive, in contrast to the inclusive approach found in other contemporaneous societies.

Ezekiel —14; Revelation —8. Luke As Paul writes in Philippians — God has highly exalted him [Jesus] and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. As a result of this exclusivity, witchcraft practices, common in the Ancient Near East, are prohibited to biblical Israel e. Leviticus ; Deuteronomy — This could later be embodied in a manufactured image of the victim, which is then manipulated.

Accordingly, witchcraft is prohibited because it seeks to engage the spiritual world apart from God. As such, it pursues unrelational ways of trying to integrate the material and the spiritual realms. Witchcraft seeks to control and manipulate the spiritual and physical world; even if the purpose of the ritual is said to be benevolent.

Control and manipulation spell death to any relationship and so witchcraft is the opposite of spiritual intimacy. As with any co-operation with the powers of darkness, we are robbed of our relational capacities. The subtleties of human character and personality are eroded.

Black Millennials Leave Church for African Witchcraft - The Atlantic

We become insensitive to others and lose the ability to read interpersonal signals and see our sin with clarity. Control and manipulation might look like cleverness but ultimately it isolates and dehumanises. Even so, giving up control, and the exercise of covert power, is hard. The contrast between the biblical worldview and the world of witchcraft is well expressed in Psalm 91, which can be read as a celebration of the protective power of God over against demonic threats:.

How a terrible worship song drove me from Christianity

For he will deliver you … from the deadly pestilence; he will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness is a shield and buckler. Psalm —4. We do not need to know the future, or control events, or fear death, because we have intimacy with God, who is the end of all things. Witchcraft, then, is a relational issue. It expresses our failure to enter into a relationship with God, to make discoveries about the spiritual and the material worlds in partnership with him, and to fully trust him with our lives and futures.

Witchcraft robs us of spiritual reality. With a crooked finger, it points away from the speaking God who wants to be known, who always does everything that is necessary for us to enjoy a relationship with him — and who is not far from each one of us.


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For these nations, which you are about to dispossess, give heed to soothsayers and to diviners; but as for you, the Lord your God has not allowed you so to do. The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brethren — him you shall heed. This verse is to be understood against the historical background of the Exodus from Egypt, which is, in part, a liberation from the spirit of witchcraft associated with Egypt cf.

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Isaiah There is no middle ground. It is the soothsayer or the Lord. This contrast plays out in the broader setting of Deuteronomy —19, which follows directly from the laws relating to the priesthood Deuteronomy —8. This indicates that witchcraft is structurally opposed to the priesthood and the sacrificial rituals that would later be fulfilled in Christ. Amos Yet witchcraft is parasitic upon true priesthood; aping its forms with counterfeit spirituality, rituals and practitioners. God, who is Spirit John , has made us in his image Genesis as spiritual beings.

He wants us to enjoy and express our spiritual lives in ways that are creative and which enhance our humanity. He gives us, not a spirituality of death, but a spirituality of life. So instead of closing down avenues of knowledge and spirituality, the Bible opens them up in ways that are safe, so that they can be explored fully. It was common for kings in the Ancient Near East to seek oracular consultations ahead of major battles. Texts from Ugarit show that people believed it was possible to summon up a particular person. The necromantic consultation is effective.

The spirit of Samuel communicates with Saul and provides him with information verses 16—19 , including new information regarding David verse Yet Saul is unable to manipulate Samuel for his own ends. Samuel condemns the ritual verses 15—16 and comes with his own message from YHWH. And since the flipside of living in a technological world is that some Western materialists do in fact have a genuine interest in encountering the supernatural, the Bible also presents a challenge and a warning, especially for the next generation who will have to deal with a resurgence of witchcraft practices.

But there is a deeper level of application. We take our cue from the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus showed that those who believed they were innocent of murder could nevertheless share the same underlying attitudes of a murderer Matthew — The same reasoning can apply in relation to witchcraft. After all, we have seen that witchcraft expresses our desire to carve out a space where we can make things happen apart from God,[43] and that ultimately, the manipulation of spiritual powers for our own ends is a form of human pride, which seeks to replace God with ourselves.

However, we are each guilty, at some level, of trying to manipulate people and events to bring about what we want, without trusting fully in God. But when you become an expert spin-doctor , you will be known as the Prince of Darkness. I am not, of course, saying that subliminal advertising, for example, is witchcraft. What I am saying is that in our modern secular society we give in to the same attitudes that are manifest in witchcraft. In this way, there may be all sorts of ways in which we behave that have the same dynamic equivalent as witchcraft.

There is nothing inherently wrong with advertising, or television, or technology. Nor should we find a demon behind every MBA. But we do need to be alert to how some of the ways in which our society is organised lends itself, potentially, to parallels to witchcraft. In this sense, the Western world is steeped in witchcraft. It may even be the case that the most overt forms of witchcraft are not in fact the most evil. The parallels to witchcraft may be the most controlling. In a genuine relationship you can know people and you can have intimacy, whereas in witchcraft, and in parallels to witchcraft, knowledge and control is a substitute for intimacy.

The essence of a perverted relationship is getting information about someone else, and then working out what I want to do, so I get what I want.


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    • We get things done in hidden, subversive and manipulative ways, without trusting God or fully respecting the humanness of others. They are parallels to witchcraft because they share the same attitude. They are part of the same paradigm, which is concerned with the exercise of covert power. In the mundane things of life, Screwtape is there. In parts of Africa, for example, it means being much more open regarding the prevalence of witchcraft in society, including among African churches, whilst in the British context, for example, it means realising that, as we lose the protection of Christianity, we are in danger of re-entering an age of overt witchcraft.

    Persecution in the Early Church: Did You Know?

    Unmasking witchcraft means exposing the spiritual insecurity that lies behind the attempts to create fear, the petty forms of control and the shallow manipulations. John the Divine and, far above all else, the resurrection of Christ Jesus from the dead, in the power of an endless life — a gloriously unique event in the history of the present age, but the destiny of every Christian. We turn, unmasked, from fear, death and shadows to intimacy, life, and light.

    I am also grateful to Gemma Hooper for research assistance. This paper is written in his personal capacity and does not represent the views of the University of Bristol. Jonathan previously worked for several years at the Jubilee Centre and is currently one of its Trustees. Brill, , p. In Central Africa, they are commonly known as ngangas. That is to say you start with nothing except your own beliefs and end up with the story that you expected and wanted to hear before you started.

    At the same time, how can one ever prove to a materialist that spiritual activity is at work? All Bible quotations taken from RSV. Trevaskis and Francis Landy eds. In Todd Klutz ed.

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    Craig M. Spiritual reality exists. Who knows but that our modern means and mechanisms of manipulation are in fact tapping into evil powers and principalities? Category : Cambridge Papers. Am very impressed.