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# The Gospel in a Haunted World
- URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-gospel-in-a-haunted-world/
- Published: 2026-10-30T11:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-30T11:00:00.000Z
- Description: Re-enchantment will be enticing for the dissatisfied but enchantment doesn’t carry an intrinsically Christian valence.
- Author: Mere Orthodoxy
- Tags: Ian Olson, Culture, Theology

On the face of it, it is strange that Christians who confess their God as the Maker of all things both seen and unseen should balk at the possibility of paranormal occurrences in the world he has made. This is not true across the board, thankfully. But significant numbers of Christians reduce to “delusion” or “fraud” any report of hauntings, strange creatures, or eerie phenomena.

But more than strange, it is not fitting that Christians should deny the reality of the paranormal. Why should we who affirm the reality of angels, of prophecies, Jesus’s virgin birth and resurrection, and the efficacy of the sacraments, dismiss the possibility of ghosts, cryptids, remote viewing, or precognition? If these things are so closely adjacent to religious phenomena then Christians have every reason to interrogate them and ask where they fit within a Christian account of the world.

## Religion and the Paranormal

Sociologists of religion [have theorized](https://www.jstor.org/stable/44282049?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) a “bounded affinity” between religion and the paranormal, rooted in how both “share inherent physiological, psychological, and ontological similarities.” It’s an affinity that is so intuitive as to be impenetrably opaque to those who have not seen and felt their common spirit.

Jeffrey Kripal is a prominent scholar whose work focuses on this overlap. His most recent book, [*How to Think Impossibly*](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo216049049.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), documents strange encounters myriads of experiencers have undergone and invites readers to consider the possibility of things they have been assured are impossible. Though these things are not supposed to take place, they do and always have throughout humankind’s history. What implications might phenomena as pervasive as this hold for us? And what resources might help us to understand these implications? 

“Much of the modern paranormal material,” he writes, “and *especially* the ufological material, looks a good deal… like what a traditional theologian might call angelology or demonology.” Such encounters are a liminal category bringing obstinately separate discourses and paradigms uncomfortably together. Indeed, as Kripal has posited in an earlier work, the paranormal is “the sacred in transit from the religious and scientific registers into a parascientific or ‘science mysticism’ register.” The paranormal resists easy categorization by either discourse and shows how the numinous exceeds the ideological limits with which we attempt to constrain it.

Kripal advocates for the experience-source hypothesis, the idea that global religious convictions are rooted in and sourced from events directly experienced by individual subjects and mediated to others. If they are derived from real events then they are more than merely social constructions and channels of power originating in superstition or deception. This hypothesis funds a renewed comparative task, allowing us to “move away from a strict social production thesis and toward a global phenomenology of religious experience.”

Kripal notes how Husserl’s phenomenological method once deeply informed the comparative study of religion. This was fitting, as the study of religion can and should draw upon religious insight and practice, and Kripal finds significant similarities between Husserl’s phenomenological reduction and the method of medieval apophatic theology. The reduction brackets “the ‘naturalist standpoint’ of the sciences and their naive sense-based positivisms about the fact-world.” This approach allows for phenomena to disclose themselves and to be studied in their givenness with all their existential import.

However, contemporary religious studies tend toward historicist approaches that preemptively flatten the possibilities of the phenomenon it studies. It settled instead for cataloguing the features of different belief systems, safely within the bounds of a detached naturalism. This approach protects the subjectivity of the researcher by keeping at bay any of the claims made by the object of their study.

## Why do many Christians dismiss the paranormal?

What is peculiar, then, is that many Christians functionally honor those same boundaries, boundaries they otherwise oppose on principle. They do so, it seems, for three main reasons. 

First, some Christians treat accounts of the uncanny and the paranormal as irrelevant, citing Christ’s victory over the powers (Colossians 2:15) as warrant for ignoring them. This approach treats these forces and entities as powerless and therefore as distractions from the tasks of the Christian life. But it risks triumphalism when it celebrates Christ’s victory in such a way that it assumes the existence and activity of these entities are unworthy of acknowledgment. 

Second, it is sometimes asserted that the spread of the gospel in the ancient world unmasked the hoaxes and lies that deceived our predecessors. But this approach is wrong for how it uses some instances in which this was true to comprehensively conclude it was true in each and every case. We bear false witness if we claim the ancient or the medieval world [was wracked with superstition and fraud and nothing else](https://bookshop.org/p/books/some-new-world-peter-harrison/bae87e9d5d11c331?ean=9781009477222&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). In fact, to make such an assertion is to align oneself with the historical narrative of scientific naturalism. Like the alliance of Pharisees and Sadducees against Jesus, this cooperation between opponents reveals a motive they share that is deeper than the disagreements that distinguish them. 

Piety may motivate these denials from Christians but with that and beneath it is also, likely, a fear. It is likely a fear that such entities are real and maliciously opposed to them. But perhaps there is more lurking beneath that simple surface explanation. What does the strange threaten? This is the question we often do not allow ourselves to ask. 

The deeper fear, undoubtedly, is that such entities destabilize the order they and we take for granted: the assurance that we wield a control over the world and our destinies. Some part of us always knows we do not wield such control, but fallen human beings habitually suppress such knowledge. The denial of the paranormal and the miraculous protects the disbelieving subject from the disruptive implications of the thing denied.

One of the most dangerous positions one can be in is that of presuming they are invulnerable. Devotion to Jesus Christ can be genuine and yet coexist with a presumption of imperviousness. Consider the psalmist who in his prosperity said, “I shall never be moved” (Psalm 30:6). One need not speak those words to live from such a sentiment. Confidence in God is good, but even it must be examined; all things must, as every thing is a fallen thing. What one confesses with their lips as confidence in Christ can be haughtiness cloaked in pious garb. This warning is not only for our others, but for us: “The one who thinks they are standing firm should take heed so as not to fall” (1 Corinthians 10:12).

More than presumption, though, is this not arrogance? An arrogance not unlike that of the scientific naturalist whose stultifying certainty contends the world is nothing more than what is visible, measurable, and manipulatable. This is neither humble nor a just orientation towards the world and its creatures.

For some Christians there is also a fear that to acknowledge these phenomena is to afford them an attention they do not deserve, that endangers our allegiance and worship. But acknowledgment and study is not preoccupation, much less worship. Of course interest can become unhealthy but it isn’t inherently so. One should be cautious but this is necessary for all objects of study as mastery should not be our goal. And in the specific case of the paranormal, faith should seek understanding so as to reckon with the world God has made and to unmask the enemy’s schemes.

## Is accepting the paranormal dangerous?

There is, to be sure, a danger in accepting that strange things do occur. Pioneering paranormal researcher John Keel warns that belief is a double-edged sword as some nonhuman entities disastrously manipulate people through it. “The phenomenon is dependent on belief,” Keel observes, “and as more and more people believe in \[for example\] flying saucers from other planets, \[these things\] can manipulate more people through false illumination.” 

Keel names the process by which contactees undergo shifts in self-understanding and their orientation to the world “false illumination.” It is a process like conversion, refashioning the contactee in a new subjectivity. However, the entities responsible seem to enjoy disgracing and shattering the subjects of their illumination. Keel documents how false illumination ruins lives as contactees are supplied with esoteric information or with predictions that come to pass for a season, but are eventually abandoned to ridicule and ignominy when obsession or bogus predictions isolates them or destroys their credibility.

Conventional wisdom imagines three options available with regard to the paranormal. 

- Deny the reality of these phenomena
- Acknowledge their reality and live in perpetual fear of them
- Acknowledge them and order our lives around their veneration.

The easier option to take with regard to these phenomena is ignoring them. But convenience is rarely an indicator of the best course to take. If we are Christians worship is categorically ruled out, but so is servile fear. The irony is that if we treat acknowledgment as tantamount to serving and revering these entities then we are already living in such a way that we are dominated by fear.

We should not live in constant terror but we are unwise to pretend they are powerless against us. We have not arrived at eschatological fullness and so we are still liable to harm. That harm, however, is limited, as entities that are hostile to God can only tyrannize us to the extent we permit them to do so.

## Acknowledging the Paranormal in an Apocalyptic Key

Another alternative, however, is possible: acknowledgement in an apocalyptic key, acknowledgment that is disciplined by the gospel. This opens onto an activity of critical sifting by which Christians commit themselves to a phenomenology of encounter but not to an ontology of the things encountered. 

Scripture enjoins exactly this: ”Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1). We are not to deny the reality of non-human entities but are to critically examine them. Christians can adopt a dialectical response patterned after God’s posture towards fallen humanity. God affirms humanity as his creature, as his image bearer, and as his covenant partner. But he denies humanity’s bid for divinity, for self-definition, and for autonomy. God says both “No” and “Yes” to Adam’s race and never less than both.

Analogously, Christians can affirm the reality of strange and uncanny phenomena without divinizing them or according them a status similar to God. Acknowledgment is part of our task, not belief. Acknowledgment is not belief in the sense of faith in or fidelity to something: it simply attests that a thing is. In fact, a Christian response to the paranormal should caution against giving such entities our belief. To grant them belief is to grant them power over us. “Theological exorcism,” Karl Barth wrote in *Church Dogmatics*, “must be an act of unbelief which is grounded in faith.” Faith in Jesus Christ, the apocalyptic emancipator of Adam’s race, grounds the only substantive freedom that can be had.

An entity that positions itself as an interpreter of reality but denies the Son of God assumed flesh or that he was raised from the dead does not speak as a commissioned messenger of God’s grace. It may speak true things, as when the demon-oppressed man in the synagogue at Capernaum identified Jesus as “the Holy One of God” (Mark 1:21-28; Luke 4:31-37), but it doesn’t speak on God’s behalf. It cannot but disclose some aspect of reality but it does not in itself mediate God’s character or salvation.

Even so, God may use even such an entity as this to demonstrate his power or to dissuade someone from a path they were considering. Or he may permit an individual to take up a life of obsession with or servitude to these things to lead them to repentance and deliver them from their bondage to these counterfeit gods (Galatians 4:8).

But not all that is strange or uncanny is a minion of the Enemy. Though there is validity to this concern it is a foregone conclusion to assume this is so in all cases. Consider how nearly every angelic encounter recorded in Scripture inspires such terror that the visitant must assure the witness, “Be not afraid.” The bizarre creatures witnessed by Ezekiel may seem grotesque or monstrous but they accompanied God’s speech to the prophet. Who can guarantee God would not dispatch a Sasquatch or a sylph to do his bidding, either?

We do not have to preemptively interpret and force phenomena into preconceived categories such as “angelic” or “demonic.” Instead we can weigh and judge eyewitness accounts on the basis of what actually transpired and how it accords with the witness of Scripture. The Pauline concept of powers and principalities usefully broadens Christian vocabulary and imagination in just such a way. It forces recognition that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in conventional Christian theologies: some for good, some for evil, and some, like us, that fall between the two. 

Keel and other researchers such as Jacques Vallee have drawn attention to the similarities between the bizarre behaviors of UFOs and other strange phenomena in the modern era and fairies, goblins, and other preternatural creatures of the past. As a result they decided upon something like the experience-source hypothesis. Rather than fitting the data into a Procrustean bed of extraterrestrial or uncatalogued animal theories they attended to the details of the encounters themselves. They asserted the accounts of thousands of eyewitnesses testified to the reality of something much stranger and much older. Their conclusion was that the same strange things that have always haunted our world are still here, still carrying out their inscrutable purposes. 

Keel notes that these beings have always been accompanied by “explanatory manifestations” and that “these manifestations have always been adjusted to the psychology and beliefs of each particular period in time.” This is important to bear in mind because the paranormal encompasses an immense field of phenomena, much of it so strange, in fact, that researchers in some of its subdomains (such as Bigfoot and UFOs) routinely downplay the ghostly or magical aspects of their subjects. There is an outlandishness to such accounts that threatens the potential respectability of their study as scientific endeavors. This is why so many eyewitness accounts are ignored or suppressed as researchers construct “plausible” narratives and paradigms from miniscule data sets that fit their preconceived notions. 

This shows how ideologically captured by scientific naturalism even investigators of strange phenomena commonly are. Their notions of what is impossible have not been sufficiently strained to accept the strangest instances. The average person would probably never guess that [UFOs habitually behave more like specters than spacecraft](https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2025/11/18/jacques-vallee-the-science-of-high-strangeness/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), or that [some Sasquatches](https://www.joshuacutchin.com/wherethefootprintsendv1?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and [gray aliens can be repelled at the invocation of Jesus’s name](https://m.economictimes.com/magazines/panache/ufo-researcher-investigated-700-alleged-alien-abductions-he-found-one-pattern-that-changed-his-belief-about-god/articleshow/134547251.cms?%5Fgl=1%2A1ohb0m2%2A%5Fgcl%5Fau%2AMTcxNTE2MDg2Mi4xNzkzMjIwOTY0Li0uLS4xNzkzMjIwOTY0Ljc4MzI3MzM2NS4xNzkzMjIwOTY1LjE3OTMyMjA5NjQ.%2A%5Fga%2ANDY4MDI4NTA0LjE3OTMyMjA5NjU.%2A%5Fga%5FWZ3Z4GGVRC%2AczE3OTMyMjA5NjQkbzEkZzAkdDE3OTMyMjA5NjQkajYwJGwwJGgw&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). On the other hand, [some apparitions of the dead have helped to convict murderers](https://wvexplorer.com/greenbrier-ghost-zona-heaster-shue-west-virginia-wv/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and others have persuaded surviving unbelieving friends or family to believe the gospel. This means that no single predetermined judgment is adequate for understanding the anomalous or knowing how to respond to it when it occurs.

## Reenchantment Is Not Intrinsically Christian

It is important that we reckon with these phenomena because whether they are increasing or not, they are becoming more mainstream. The question that many residents of the modern period want to ask is, “What is really possible?” The human heart desires the world to be more mysterious and more profound than the reductive stories they have had inculcated to them their entire lives. People are weary of a world and of plausibility structures that diminish wonder and meaning. They are starved in their souls and will inevitably seek sustenance for them. 

Re-enchantment will be enticing for the dissatisfied but enchantment doesn’t carry an intrinsically Christian valence. Mystery and wonder are good but they can be misleading if they do not direct the individual to Jesus Christ. Some people seeking mystery and wonder will be curiously trying doors that open onto horrific things. Others will receive entities that perceive and take advantage of their half-formed invitation. False illumination will follow naive dabbling in the paranormal precisely because these individuals have little to no formation and, lacking this, will become subject to the entities they encounter. 

Many are coming to see that what they had presumed to be impossible does in fact occur in our world. And there are many evangelists ready to shape their reception of the impossible: new stories and new gospels will interpret these experiences to the detriment of those that are persuaded by them. 

And they will need guidance as they undergo what is known as ontological shock. This phraseology, fascinatingly, was first used by Paul Tillich in his *Systematic Theology* to describe the effects of encountering the ground of all being. In recent years the term has been appropriated from its theological origins to name the radical dislocation one experiences following a paranormal encounter. This dislocation is rooted in the discovery that the world is not what the experiencing subject was assured it was. The encounter shatters the constraints and the presuppositions of the subject’s worldview. It is often traumatic because the subject undergoes deep suffering as they are forced to reckon with something that is “simply *not possible* within the framework of the Western scientific worldview.”

This shock closely corresponds to another kind of upheaval, one that, fittingly, returns to the domain of Christian theology. This upheaval is not only depicted in Scripture but informs its witness in both form and substance. For New Testament apocalyptic also drastically reconfigures the experiencer’s presuppositions of what is and what is possible. But it is sourced in the eschatological activity of the Son’s and the Holy Spirit’s missions, in the life of the age to come that arrives and invades the present evil age (Galatians 1:4). 

Life and new creation interrupt the “normal” operations of the world in its occupation by and thralldom under powers hostile to God and to his creatures. Apocalyptic, at its root, is the consistent application of eschatology to the present conditions of the world. The resurrection of Jesus Christ contests those conditions and irrevocably changes them for those who encounter Christ in the power of the Spirit. The upheaval it unleashes shatters and reconstitutes the subject for whom an entirely new world has just dawned.

A realist objector may say that there is only one world and in an important sense this is true. But its objectivity doesn’t guarantee its reception by any knowing subject. Human beings habitually resist and deny reality though they are only ever in its midst. Scripture itself testifies that a thing can be so but for the hard-hearted it is impossible to see and more importantly, impossible to align oneself with (John 9:39-41, Romans 1:18-23). Jesus could perform miraculous signs before his opponents’ very eyes and those signs could go unrecognized as good works of God. Hardheartedness will not submit its preconceptions to God’s activity and sees only the work of demons (Matthew 12:24; Mark 3:22; Luke 11:15; John 7:20, 10:20). 

The idea of the apocalyptic names the truth that the world can be what it is and nevertheless not be recognized *as* what it is. Revelation—unveiling—is necessary because the truth of the world and of themselves is not translucent to fallen human beings. Revelation, properly understood, is disclosure: not simply of propositions and prophecies but the unforeseeable and uncontrollable unveiling of the reality of God, his character and his purpose, manifested in the flesh of this man, Jesus of Nazareth. 

With its emphasis upon disruption and upheaval, the apocalyptic threatens the presumption of stability and mastery we in our fallenness so prize. The mood of New Testament apocalyptic literature is urgent and distrustful of appearances because it sees through the illusions we, in our fallenness, have become habituated to. It sets in motion a fervent drive to announce the astonishing news that conventional reality has been unmasked and overturned in the wake of Jesus’s resurrection and ascension. 

The theological importance of continuity across salvation history is no simple defeater of the profound disruption that is the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Even with regard to the paranormal, sometimes what is particularly frightening to eyewitnesses is how the creature they encountered and the strange behavior it exhibited showed itself in a world in which the everyday laws we take for granted held true in every other regard. 

The continuity of important features of the world’s operation or of redemptive history does not negate the unique and unusual things that determine the world or history in their actuality. The guarantor of continuity is God, not any ability or feature of human beings in general or of the covenant community in particular, but the gracious superintendence of a God whose character always remains the same. Upheaval is not so much the secret heart of reality as it is a consequence of an upside down world being turned right once more.

Ontological shock, whether in a paranormal or a theological key, means that the world we had presumed and the security we had relied upon are delusions. And because it is intrinsic to the Christian tradition and the encounter in which fallen human beings become subjects of discipleship, we can sympathetically receive those who have encountered things that burst the limits of our culture’s plausibility structures and pastorally guide them into the truth beyond the rupture they have experienced.

In an important sense this is no new undertaking. Christian witness has always been tasked with framing the world’s possibilities within a larger account than the world has believed about itself in any of its local variations. Now it must recognize stranger possibilities, as it has before, and situate them within an unlikely but beautiful story of homecoming, a story that confirms the reality of the strange things more and more people are encountering but further confirms their place in the economy of God’s works.

If an austere worldview, in screening out the possibility of the weird and the eerie, discourages those that have experienced such phenomena from embracing Christ and joining themselves to his body then that worldview fails to love. It clings, instead, to a safe comfortability it prizes more than its witness to the truth or compassion for the confused and afflicted.

This means the problem is more than just an intellectual one. For worldviews and paradigms and ideologies are always more than ways of seeing the world. They are modes of belonging, postures by which we position ourselves relative to ourselves, to others, to creatures, to place, and to God. Worldviews and ideologies admit certain features of reality and screens out others.and they do so because they are orientations towards the world and its Maker. It is always the heart that determines what we will see and what loves and fears we will justify.

What does your theology allow you to see? What does it allow you to expect? And how does it aid you in understanding events in your world as belonging to the economy of God’s purposes or striving against it? Does it allow you to recognize the mundane as pregnant with significance? Does it allow you to acknowledge the unusual and see it as governed by God all the same? Is there not a wonder that we allow ourselves to be robbed of when we dismiss these phenomena?

If not, then does your theology truly comport with the world? Or does it quarantine you from its unsettling fullness? If in our ontology and our moral imaginations there is no room for the eerie and the otherworldly; if we appropriate the promise of Romans 8 that nothing can separate us from the love of God and assure ourselves nothing can undo us or upset the lives we have built, then we live presumptuously. And if we shrink from our dimly understood fears we will not have the awareness or the fortitude to confront the darkness.

There is evangelistic opportunity in the recognition that these phenomena genuinely take place as Christians can guide contactees and the curious to the Maker of all things. Importantly, however, we can do so in a way that reckons seriously with the disruptions these individuals have undergone and accord them the dignity of acknowledging the reality of what they have encountered.

Again, acknowledging the phenomenology of the encounter doesn’t thereby commit us to the interpretation suggested by the encounter or offered by these entities or the subcultures that form around them. With this approach Christians can combat the false illumination some of these beings aim to engender in those to whom they reveal themselves. 

And we ought to do this. We are sent into the world by Jesus Christ as he was sent by his Father (John 20:21). Christ always remains distinct from us but if we love him and are united to him, then we share in his mission. By this means we can simultaneously witness to the depth and mystery of the world and witness against the inhuman actants that would degrade and destroy our fellow image-bearers. 

The question is, will we do so? Will we forgo the illusion of mastery to serve our seeking and ontologically shocked neighbors? Or will we cling to an image of our world that will, sooner or later, apocalyptically unravel?