Recently, Theopolis has been publishing a critical retrospective symposium on the oeuvre of Michael Heiser (d. 2023).
Heiser, for the unfamiliar, was an influential and widely read Old Testament scholar whose work often attempted to recontextualize the Bible in the mythological and religious traditions of the Ancient Near East. His writing uniquely stressed the cosmological significance of the “angelic” divine council. It also underscored the importance of the Enochian mythos in making sense of certain biblical themes and passages.
I once asked a mentor who specialized in OT and Semitics what he thought of Heiser’s stuff. On the whole, he said, what Heiser was doing was not fundamentally new or outlandish: many of his insights were fairly standard among other experts in the Ancient Near East. Certainly, some of his particular applications of that background material have parallels in other well-known biblical scholars. For example, Richard Bauckham has discerned crucial Enochian elements in Luke’s genealogy that link the text thematically to the epistle of Jude and (by extension) the historical family of Jesus. Indeed, what seems to have set Heiser apart was less the historical contexts he applied to the Bible so much as his ability to reach the general Christian public.
In this Theopolis series, Alastair Roberts and Luke Stamps have offered (for me) the most thought-provoking engagement. As an ancient historian who is often having to deal with “theological” topics, I have a host of reactions to all of this. Originally, I pounded out a much longer essay elaborating them, but it was becoming unwieldy. Because I want a wider audience to understand the fuller set of dynamics I see at play here, I’ve decided to compress the various points into a more bulleted set of theses. For that same brevity, many of these will have to be asserted more than demonstrated.
My overarching thesis, if I have one, is something like this: Heiser’s reception and criticism illustrate much deeper and older tensions between theologians and Christian intellectuals of other disciplines. We’re circling ancient questions about the function of tradition, healthy intellectual curiosity (in the modern sense), disciplinary gatekeeping, and different kinds of readership.
I.
We absolutely need theologians, the discipline of Theology, and the intellectual habits associated with both: respect for tradition and institutions, standardization, and harmonization of doctrinal credenda. This was one conclusion of my last piece for Mere Orthodoxy. What I saw below is not to be construed as a case for nuking Theology.
II.
Heiser’s readings of Scripture are, of course, fair game. I don’t buy many of them myself, such as his interpretation of the satan in Job.
III.
I broadly agree with Roberts’s position. There is undoubtedly a measure of curiositas at work in Heiser’s popularity, hence my title. When people find out I know something about ancient religion, it is often the case that they first ask me about is the Enochian literature. For reasons I outline below, however, I don’t think this interest is quite as harmful as others might. Moreover, I think curiositas is only part of Heiser’s warm reception. Meanwhile . . .
IV.
Disciplinary lanes are also a much greater factor in Heiser’s method than I think Stamps allows. Stamps acknowledges that disciplinary differences can be legitimate but doesn’t think that fully explains the flaws he sees in Heiser, whereas I think it basically does (see 6).
V.
Less so with the Theopolis contributions themselves and more in a broader reaction to Heiser, annoyance with “evangelicals”—low-church types often carrying underdeveloped systematic theologies and a streak of anti-intellectualism—is another factor working against Heiser, since these constitute his most enthusiastic readers. The sociological prestige of the readership (or lack thereof) can be a real factor, particularly in internet discourse.
VI.
Among Christians who at least aspire to historical orthodoxy, evangelicals also tend to be among the least interested in studying the leading exegetical lights of the past.
VII.
Is Heiser’s bracketing off later tradition as he does defensible? Stamps ultimately thinks not, perceiving a deeper dismissal of the broader Christian tradition when Heiser deliberately sets aside “creeds” and ecclesiastical tradition. In my observation, however, there’s an unpleasant fact that Christian intellectuals who are not theologians—classicists, philosophers, historians, and biblical scholars—are routinely vulnerable to accusations of gross innovation and heresy whenever they try to say anything “theological” that isn’t repeating accepted tradition. (To be clear, I don’t think that’s what Stamps is saying: I’m suggesting there’s a less charitable set of critics out there.)
Scripture is often this site of conflict. When charges of heterodoxy are made, it not infrequently turns out that the real friction is not with Scripture itself, but with a particular “history of interpretation.” That friction can intensify when the new idea wins over an evangelical audience that some deride and reflexively distrust. N. T. Wright’s reception comes to mind, who was not so much criticized, as I see it, for ignoring the Bible per se but for openly challenging meticulous exegetical paradigms near the heart of many confessional identities, systematic theologies, and ancillary institutions. So I’m much more inclined to believe Heiser is quite earnest in asking his readers to return to the text itself on its own terms, holding certain doctrinal assumptions or accretions in abeyance. As much as they can, judicious authors making the kind of maneuvers he was need to try to disarm charges of innovation at the outset.
VIII.
If Heiser described the later tradition as antisupernaturalist, I stipulate that might have been a suboptimal framing, at least depending on which later exegete is in view and how one defines “supernatural.” “Antimythological” might have been more precise. In my reading of him, Augustine himself exhibits this tendency (City of God 15.23) when it comes to the Enochian mythos, dismissing it as the stuff of fabulae (a pejorative in this context). To generalize, the (Older) Discarded Image that Heiser is attempting to reconstruct is “thicker” and “darker” than the later medieval one Lewis describes in the book of that same name (which would broadly describe an awful lot of the post-biblical tradition): it is more driven by narrative while being less accessible to reason and systematization. In that sense, there’s still an important difference.
IX.
And that brings up another good reason for judiciously bracketing off the tradition here and in other exegetical issues: it is a knot unto itself. In my reading, Augustine largely cut the legs out from under the existing “tradition” of angelology/demonology as evidenced in earlier figures such as Justin, Irenaeus, Athenagoras, Tertullian, and Lactantius. For these authors, the basic drift of the Enoch story was unremarkable. (I concur with Stamps that Heiser’s project would have been stronger had he made some of these connections.) Theologians may love straightening out these kinds of knots. But . . .
X.
Many Christian scholars with training in adjacent (and narrower) fields would rather not have to handle sources beyond our specialization and outside our interests. Speaking for myself, in general, my own tendency would be to prefer reading another chapter or article on Ugaritic myth than one handling what Augustine, Aquinas, or Calvin thought about Genesis 6 or Psalm 82. That’s not to dismiss them (or Stamps’s forthcoming project, by the way), but it does seem that there ought to be more space for varying intellectual tastes—unless, that is, the real problem is something else (see 3-5).
XI.
There’s also a much older and more serious impasse here, with parallels in the battles between the scholastics and the humanists, the oversimplified contrast between Alexandrian and Antiochene interpretation, and the more generic lumpers-splitters paradigm. The harsh truth is that, even aside from interests, many of us in other disciplines simply don’t much stock at all in the interpretational history, at least not when there is more to be learned about Bible itself (e.g., from the Ancient Near Eastern world). Any dozen examples could justify this wariness toward later tradition: no knowledge of original languages (e.g., Augustine), more subsequently available data (e.g., the Dead Sea Scrolls), rigid and distortive dogmatic agendas (passim), incoherence or rupture in the exegetical history (see 8), undertheorized schemas of who gets to count as “the Tradition,” etc. For that last reason especially, some of us can also be fairly allergic to the concept of sensus fidelium in anything but the most fundamental questions of dogma. That is all to say, I’m unpersuaded that it is a modern conceit to affirm that we do now know more things about the ancient contexts of the Bible than many of our predecessors—not in every case, but in many. That’s not arrogance, nor is it particularly modern, nor is it sub-Christian.
XII.
When Stamps refers to the regulatory function of tradition, I think I’d like to know more precisely which readership he has in mind: other Christian scholars and intellectuals, the folks in the pews, or the pastors somewhere between them? I suspect it has much more to do with the latter two, in which case, the point about curiositas remains a live concern. Origen frequently wrote about this same basic problem in the context of apocryphal literature (much like the Enochian corpus): there were books and ideas that Christianity’s scholars could entertain and sift that were not fitting for the general laity. In antiquity, this was a comparatively easy distinction to maintain because of social stratification: most people were illiterate. Nowadays, religious ideas disseminate much more widely and quickly.
XIII.
And it gets worse: at present, tradition and institutions are historically weak, while forms of conspiratorialism and gnosis are as appealing as ever. But I think another reason readers find Heiser compelling is that his writing fosters “imagination” in the Lewisian sense. Thus, even where it might be wrong on various particulars, Heiser’s work cracks open inherited cosmologies that have shrunk and grown stale, both secular and (I’m afraid) Christian. It holds out the eerie proposition that there’s much about creation we don’t understand, which should foster some intellectual humility and increase rather than diminish a spirit of circumspection. It’s the same reason that there’s value in studying the medieval cosmology (see 8). Where there is preference for Heiser’s reconstruction, it probably has something to do with the fact that the ancient one has much more to do with the Bible than the medieval. And being more mythological, it open up new horizons for Christians to ponder, whereas the medievals’ “rational” and systematic model has been solidly disproved by modern science, as Lewis notes. Taken judiciously, I think a lot of Heiser’s work opens up more questions than answers, and I have a hard time seeing that as a “bad thing.”
XIV.
Accordingly, when I run into Christians asking about Enoch, Nephilim, or Heiser’s broader vision, I’m frankly just happy someone is actually interested in the biblical and supernatural. It’s an excellent opening to begin a longer conversation. If Origen had advice, he might quote an agraphon of Jesus: “Be wise moneychangers.” That means the laity will have to be taught by pastors and teachers to sift the theological coinage, spot counterfeits, and keep the good specie. How to achieve that is a huge question, but it probably starts with better education: an enormous institutional lift but one that’s also been done before in history. The Moneychanger Principle is also why we should welcome the pushback on Heiser’s arguments on their interpretive merits.
XV.
The Christian community needs theologians and other intellectuals with more scholastic tendencies (see 1). But speaking as a historian, I wish there were more support and tolerance for “humanists” like Heiser who can work outside the walls of Tradition. For one, it can bring in some fresh air; the underlying curiosity (in the non-Augustinian sense) is also the raw material for effective apologetics directed at people who don’t know or accept Tradition.
XVI.
While it is tangential to the critiques of Heiser and his readership, this question about Tradition dredged up for me a much larger set of frustrations with the Christian intellectual ecosystem—to say nothing of “conservative” intellectual spaces more broadly. I believe John Ahern was recently bumping up against the same cluster of issues in a piece considering the rarity of scholars like T. C. Schmidt. This problem deserves its own book, but in brief, I think the received knowledge that defines those conservative contexts also tends to suck up a lot of the oxygen; on occasion, I’ve seen it deliberately snuff out more comprehensive but inconvenient forms of intellectual inquiry. Unfortunately, the further one’s research interests move away from consolidating a particular identity, the fewer resources and less interest there tends to be; it may even generate hostility when it becomes crosses the party line. This is not exclusive to Christian or conservative sectors, but I have an unpleasant and growing suspicion that the problem is worse there. After all, if Civilization or the “Great Tradition” have already bequeathed the right topline answers to the Big Questions, honestly why bother?
One answer: that’s what the cultivation of philosophia demands. Or, to borrow from one of Schmidt’s biblical citations, we might say that’s precisely what the scribes of the kingdom are supposed to do: they bring out new treasures right alongside the old. From that angle, it is hard for me not to see Heiser’s project as a welcome success.
