Transcription
So, at the end of the day, we have a really strange mixture of biblical theology, the supernatural world, the unseen world mixed in with all this UFO stuff, sightings, alleged alien contact and abductions. What do we do with all this? How do we process it? I really do think processing is the key. And what I mean by that is we need to be honest. The world is a lot stranger than what we think it is. There are a lot of people who just go through life thinking everything is nailed down. We've been given every answer by science or we will be given that answer by science. There are no anomalies. There's nothing really strange that transcends the physical world. We know that isn't true. There is a spiritual world.
So, what we need to do is be honest. The world is a strange place. There's a lot more going on than we might think. We need to just embrace that idea and then try to process what it is that people experience, what they see in an honest way. I don't like when people are lied to, not just about what's the content of the Bible, but I don't like when they're deceived by the content, you know, some narrative that comes from any other ancient text.
There was one major event that happened in the 19th century that sort of soured the church's opinion when it came to extraterrestrial life. And that event uh sort of became what it was going to be because of certain things in the 20th century. So in the 19th and 20th century, there were a few things that happened that really sort of account for the present suspicion or fear uh of many in the church toward the whole question of extraterrestrial life.
In the 19th century, the key event was the advent of Darwinism. Of course, Darwin published the origin of species in 1859 and that ushered in this new thing that we call evolution. Uh whole different version of human origins. Now Darwinism itself really doesn't have or didn't have I should say any impact on the whole question of other worlds but it was going to because in the 20th century the idea of life elsewhere in space other worlds began to sort of get married to Darwinism. That is since people were predisposed to think that life on Earth was the result of random directionless evolution. The thinking you know went in the direction of well if we find life somewhere else then life evolved somewhere else just like it did here. And so the pursuit of extraterrestrial life or at least evidence for it began to be viewed by some in the scientific community as a means by which we would sort of prove evolution and disprove creationism altogether once and for once and for all.
You know uh again this thinking doesn't really have to be that way. Uh we could look at this and say well that's kind of a nonsequittor to to frame the question that way and I would agree it is but that is nevertheless the way it gets talked about. You could watch any sort of subject uh any sort of special on TV today about extraterrestrial life and invariably evolution will be part of the discussion because of this assumption. So the advent of Darwinism getting married to the question of are there other worlds really turned a lot of Christians off because Christians at least many of them didn't like Darwinism they didn't like evolution and so once you marry the two the one is going to sour the other and that's sort of what happened.
Now in the 20th century there were a few other things that went on that today have really caused a lot of consternation a lot of suspicion and fear among Christians when this subject comes up in the 50s and the 60s. There's something that historians would call the contact tee movement or the contact phenomenon. And this is the era when you get lots of stories of people who claim to have seen not only things in the sky that they couldn't identify. Again, UFOs, but also claiming to actually have been contacted by the occupants of those flying saucers, those UFOs. Hence contact team movement and what really uh sort of affected the way Christians uh thought about the whole UFO the whole u alien question in regard to the 50s and the 60s and the contact team movement was the messaging the contactes you know were supposedly told by extraterrestrials that you know Jesus was one of them uh lots of Christian ideas were hijacked and sort of reformulated into space talk lots of new age kind of thinking, at least that's the way we would term it today. And that really turned a lot of people off toward the idea of there being other worlds and extraterrestrial life.
The alien abduction phenomenon that followed on the heels of the contact team phenomenon also did the same thing. People were actually physically harmed or at least they alleged they had been harmed in these experiences where they were not only contacted by beings they thought were aliens, but the aliens would do all sorts of things to them. you know, some of them quite nasty, uh, sexual violation, lots of things that in other context you would think are very overtly demonic, uh, satanic even. Uh, this naturally led to to Christians having a very low view of the whole question. Again, this whole phenomenon.
Lastly, the whole ancient astronaut phenomena uh really deserves some attention here because not only was the idea sort of popular that there were aliens and they had contacted some people and maybe abducted people and did awful things to them, but now according to ancient alien ancient astronaut theory, they had been here in antiquity and they'd raised up our great religious leaders, you know, Muhammad and Jesus and Buddha. uh these they were either taught by aliens or were the offspring of aliens or were aliens or something like that. Extraterrestrials had come here and built the pyramids. They'd given us western civilization even created humanity. All these narratives uh became you know sort of part of the popular discourse in the 70s through books like Chariots of the Gods uh by Eric von Danakin or the works of Zechariah Sitchin.
All of these things sort of run together. contact tea movement, alien abduction phenomenon, the ancient astronaut idea, uh, to really making Christians predisposed to rejecting the whole question of whether there could be other worlds. Again, something in the in the Christian past that had been embraced. It was a consensus and it was positive. Now, it didn't help that there were notable non-Christians, non-Christian authors and writers that actually agreed with the new Christian suspicion. People like Jacques Valet, who became the uh the model or the touch point for the French uh character, the French scientist in the movie Close Encounters, uh wrote a number of books, again very negative toward these alleged alien phenomena. John Keel was another one. Operation Trojan Horse was his famous book. Again, these were not Christians, but they were very opposed, thought the whole alien question was deeply sinister, and they even used words like demonic for it. All of that sort of reinforced a very negative uh flavor in the church's mouth for this whole question of could there be other worlds?
Now, for myself, I would say that it just doesn't have to be this way. uh we have uh I think to make a separation between the question of could there be other alien life forms out there and all of this other stuff uh what people alleged to you know have been contacted by aliens or abducted by aliens. I think the better way to process those things is not alien life but some kind of malevolent sinister demonic spiritual phenomenon that's happening. other words, they're not extraterrestrials. We have no proof that they're extraterrestrials. And it's sort of muddying the waters. It's sort of ruining uh what could be a good interesting intellectual discussion that the church has had for centuries and even millennia. It's sort of poisoning that water because of the influence of uh spiritual sinister forces that have become part of the narrative and that are actually being used or used themselves. the whole question of other worlds to create uh sort of an acceptance of very anti-Christian and non-Christian thinking. Again, this wasn't the way it used to be. This sort of element, the sinister demonic element was not part of the discussion in eras gone by. And so I think we need to parse the question a little bit better and sort of weed out the myths and sort of focus on you know where the discussion really ought to be.
Now again because of my background I get asked questions about the theological implications of extraterrestrial life. You know should we as Christians fear this idea? And part of the problem is the way is the way this question again. Could there be extraterrestrials? Would we have a theological problem with that? How that question gets married to some other things in pop culture and frankly, you know, within the wider orbit of the whole question of extraterrestrial life. I'm talking about things like al the you alleged contactee situations where people think they've been contacted by aliens and given lots of information that is frankly very anti-Christian. I'm also talking about alien abduction narratives. Again, whatever is happening to people or whatever they think is happening to them again is very sinister, very evil, very violent and really, you know, sort of undermines, you know, any sort of confidence that the question of extraterrestrial life is something that Christians could be positive about because if these are aliens and aliens are doing all this nasty stuff, we don't want any part of that. It's obviously demonic and satanic.
Well, my thinking is those are two actually different and competing things. The question of whether there could be aliens, whether there could be extraterrestrials is a lot different than asking the question, hey, these stories about contact and these stories about abduction, are those aliens or something else? They're actually two distinct arenas. In fact, if you actually talk to people who are not Christians, they could be atheists or anything else, but they're into UFO research, a lot of those people don't want anything to do with the contact movement or the alien abduction movement for the same reasons. They think it's ridiculous. They think that either people are imagining these things or inventing them. Some will will say, "Well, maybe there are things like demons and this is what what's happening here." But this these are not aliens. These are not extraterrestrials. We should not mix these things up. But unfortunately, those things do get mixed.
Now again, what I want to focus on and what I try to focus on is on the one hand, if you're talking about alien abduction, again, whatever people think that is, whatever it it might be, either real or imaginary, that's very obviously sinister. It's very obviously dark because of what happens to people and the way it affects them in their life. If we're talking about ancient astronauts, again, I think the proposition of ancient aliens being the explanation for things like the pyramids and the world's religions, I think it's patently absurd. As a text scholar, when it comes to the Bible especially, again, I can say it's absurd and an abuse of the biblical text. But those questions, as negative of a view as I have of them, for me don't dictate how I think about the bigger question. Could there be extraterrestrials somewhere out there? Is there a an inherent theological problem with that? In principle, no. And I want to explain why I think that way. why we have a lot of illegitimate fears when it comes to the bigger question. Could there be extraterrestrials out there somewhere? Would our faith be intact if there were? I think it would be intact and we don't need to fear uh some of these connections that have been made to this issue. Demons, the whole question of it undermines, you know, Jesus atonement, it endorses evolution. Again, it it it harms the Bible in some way. these things are not legitimate fears. And so we need to sort of unpack why that's the case and how to think a little bit better as Christians about this issue. Because hey, somewhere down the road, we might actually find out that there is life elsewhere and our faith doesn't need to crumble. It can be quite intact if that's the case.
One of the reasons why a lot of Christians are troubled by the idea of whether there could really be aliens or not, either in the past or in the present, is that well, the Bible doesn't describe them. The Bible doesn't mention them. And so that becomes an argument against the idea. So that if they showed up, ooh, that troubles us. There goes our Bible out the window because the Bible never said anything about that. So, they'll take a stand that it can't be true because of absence in the Bible. Well, if you really think about it, that's a pretty poor argument because the Bible doesn't mention a lot of things that we know are real, like cars or microwaves or toilet paper. Okay? There are lots of things that aren't in the Bible that we just know are real.
Another one is the image of God. If there are really aliens out there, then humanity is no longer unique. Now, when I put things that way, you can already tell that people are sort of predisposed to understanding human uniqueness and the image of God in a very particular way. They'll equate it with intelligence. To make the image of God any particular quality is a mistake because not all human beings at all stages of their development either pre-birth or in old age have certain qualities that have historically been identified with the image in their fullness or even equally. We'll notice in Genesis 1:26 that we have the wording there, let us create humankind in our image. Then the very next verse it switches to singular. So God created humankind in his image. Why do we have plurals mixed with singulars? Well, the reason is because God is speaking to people, beings, probably a better word, that are already there, individuals, intelligent beings. They're the sons of God from Job 38 that were there present at the foundation of the world. He announces his intention. Let's create humankind. But when he actually does, only God is the creator. All the verbs are singular. All the pronouns are singular. Only God is the creator. So the plural language is important because he's referring to the members of the spiritual world, the heavenly host. He's bringing them into the conversation about imaging. Let us create humankind in or as our image. The plural is there because somehow God and us and them are connected in some way. And the way we're connected is we image him here. They image him in their world. We have the same creator. And we represent the same being, the same God, the same creator. But only God himself created either of us, us and the members of the spiritual world. And if you take that perspective, when you say, well, what if there is ET? So what? So what if we have intelligent alien life? That is not what imaging is. If there are extraterrestrials, they're not even in the equation. They're not even in the picture in Genesis 1. They would be created beings in biblical thinking, but they're not imagers. They're not members of the heavenly host. They're not humans. They are just intelligent beings that exist somewhere else that God happened to make. God doesn't have to tell us everything he does, everything he did or will do. And we're back to the whole it's not in the Bible, so it can't be real kind of argument, which again is flawed. The Bible is not a record of everything that God has ever done or will do. But this is the kind of thinking that goes into it. But once you take, again, it's not in the Bible off the table. Once you take, oh, they're intelligent, so that ruins the image idea off the table, then the whole idea of having intelligent aliens becomes a little less theologically threatening.
My view personally, again, if we if we take off the table the nuts and bolts kind of discussions about, you know, hey, could there be aliens or not? you know the academic discourse if we take that off the table and we talk about the spiritual messaging elements uh I think what's going on is we have intelligent beings intelligent nonhuman divine spiritual beings whatever you want to call them trying to control the language of spirituality a lot of this sort of messaging and discussion really results in for many people and again I This is the goal of intelligent evil in this regard. Redefining things like God. What does that word even mean? Who are we? What does it mean to be human? How did we get here? Who put us here? And what is our destiny? How do we have a do we have a relationship with this God? Have we offended him? Is there such a thing as sin or not? But I think the intelligent evil wants to control and redefine the terminology. They want God redefined as a transcendent extraterrestrial. They want Jesus redefined as a messenger from the transcendent extraterrestrial or an extraterrestrial himself. Uh they want the need of humanity not equated with sin, a solution for sin, but to evolve to be a transcendent being like they are. Think about it. If you had the same vocabulary that we use in religious discourse, God, Jesus, salvation, humanity, destiny, transcendence, glorification, heaven, all these things, but they all had different meanings that attached themselves to this whole extraterrestrial question. Well, guess what? You get to keep your Bible. We don't change any of the words. However, what the words mean is something different. This is something akin to conceptually at least when the nash the serpent walks up to Eve and says, "Hey, did God really say?" And then they have a conversation where Eve is misled or misdirected, led to process what God said in a different way. In our theological discussions for today, we almost let science fiction and the ET thing is part of that dictate the way we talk theology. Science fiction is like televangelism for the alien worldview. Again, we get to keep God. That inner urge to have something more transcendent than we are, that will give us a destiny that has the solution to our problems. We get to keep all that if what we're talking about are extraterrestrials. Isn't that wonderful? It's all real. It's all true. But in doing so, in keeping it and having the language redefined, having the meaning of these terms altered even slightly, we are embracing a non-gosspel. We are embracing a different Christ. And I think that's actually the goal.
Another passage would be Genesis 61 1-4. This is the sons of God, the daughters of men who produce Nephilim and the giants. Sitchin is quite known for this. He merges together the sons of God with the Nephilim. He treats them as though they're the same character. But Genesis 6 describes spiritual beings assuming flesh. The most traditional reading is cohabiting with human women and producing as offspring Nephilim. I believe and I'm not certainly not the only scholar who would believe this that the term means giant because there are other passages that connect to Genesis 6. But the ancient alien theorist loves this passage for some reason because well sons of God sounds like an extraterrestrial to them. And they never asked the question about are angels in the Bible really kind of described as beings that need to perpetuate their species that need to eat need to drink again have to expel and you know hate their jobs or whatever. I mean, is this the way they're really described as something being normative for them? And the answer, of course, is no, but they never really get to that question. And then once you have aliens in Genesis 6 1-4, it's the aliens who create the Nephilim. And some ancient alien theorists will call them giants. Others will say, "No, these are the men of renown." And that phrase is used in Genesis 6:4. The great civilizers of antiquity, you know, the really smart people that civilized the world or that are responsible for building massive projects like the pyramids or bail. And so this is why on a show like Ancient Aliens, you get a narrative that says, "Oh, look at this big object. We couldn't figure out how to build that. Therefore, it must be aliens. This is where it comes from. It comes from this passage seizing on an extraterrestrial parentage for certain individuals who are called men of renown.
Now, I don't as a biblical scholar buy into any of that, but it's a very familiar trajectory for anyone who reads a book by Zechariah Sitchin. They're going to get sort of sucked into this world and they're going to run across this narrative at some point. I was invited to speak at the Bay Area UFO Conference and I was invited to speak about ancient astronauts. I'm an ancient studies scholar. I'm a biblical scholar. This is great. He was on Coast to Coast and that was a wonderful interview. Let's have this guy come out and do this. I wasn't vetted at all. In other words, they thought they were getting a believer. I am not again an ancient alien believer. So I went to the conference and I basically did a lecture on a Zechariah sitch. And I went to this conference and basically tore his work apart. There's really no other way to say it. And I tried to be nice about it, but I wanted to be firm about it as well. just dissecting where his errors were. I was asked to leave the conference. I didn't get paid. That was okay, though. I've never been invited back, nor did I expect to ever be invited back. But the great thing about the event was my second session, which happened before the one that got me in trouble was a lecture on could Christianity accommodate a genuine extraterrestrial reality. When you take that topic, you have to get into things like, well, would Jesus have to die on other planets? How would aliens be atoned for? And so, it was well worth the visit and it was worth getting tossed out of the place to do it because of the way most Christians have been taught to think about demons. There's angels, there's demons, and then there's God. And that's pretty much the spiritual world. It creates some confusion when you listen to some of the things I I've been saying. You actually have a number of different groups of rebels. In the beginning, you had intelligent beings that he has created that live in the spiritual world. And then there's human beings, okay? Intelligent beings that live in the terrestrial world. That's fine until, you know, we actually get, you know, some interaction.
In Genesis 3, we have an initial rebellion. Okay? So, we have the Satan figure. Okay? That that's one rebel. Genesis 6, we have another group. that group again by all either Mesopotamian or biblical or Jewish tradition. The the guilty parties there wind up being sent into the abyss until the time of the end. It's an esqueological judgment. So that's a second group. A third group we get from the Babel incident, Deuteronomy 32:8-9, when God divides up the nations and assigns them to other sons of God and then they become corrupt. God abandons the nations at Babel and he says, "Israel is going to be my portion now. Jacob is going to be my inheritance." And so he calls Abraham and he makes for himself a new nation, Israel. This is why in the rest of the Old Testament, it's Yahweh against the gods of the nations and Israel against those nations. the sons of God that are assigned to the other nations. This is the Old Testament explanation for why those nations got their own pantheons. We read in Psalm 82 that they have become corrupt. At some point in their history, they fail. They don't rule the nations the way God wants them ruled. Now, those guys aren't bound. They're not imprisoned. The Genesis 6 ones are.
What about demons? Just using that word demon. If you asked a first century Jew, hey, where do demons come from? They would have an immediate answer. If you ask a Christian now, they would say, I don't know because the Bible doesn't tell me. It's actually not the case. A Jew would say, "Well, sure, we know where demons come from. They're the disembodied spirits of dead Nephilim." That sounds very bizarre to our ear. That's not what you hear in church. It's not what you hear in seminary either, but there are hints of it in the Old Testament. Isaiah 14, Isaiah 26, Job 26:5. These are three passages that have Refaim in the realm of the dead, what we think of as hell. Now, that tells you again where a Jew would have gotten this idea. So since they were part supernatural being and part earthly being when you killed one and this was an act of rebellion again their creation in the first place their soul as it were which is not a human soul again in in biblical thinking it goes to hell this is where they're punished they incur the punishment that their fathers incurred that gets sent to the pit in uh Peter and Jude second Peter 2 and Jude, it specifically says that the angels that sinned are in chains of gloomy darkness. They're imprisoned in the abyss. There is no other sin in the Old Testament. Angels plural that you can point to to say to answer the question, what are Peter and Jude talking about? There is no other possibility other than Genesis 6.
A lot of people think, well, there was this great cataclysmic rebellion before creation and Satan used to control the earth and then he rebelled and then he became bad and then he went to the Garden of Eden and all this whole idea about a satanic rebellion before Adam and Eve. You will never find that in any verse in the Bible, but that's part of Christian tradition that's been passed down. I personally think it comes from Milton's Paradise Lost, a great Puritan book, but you will not find it in a single passage in the Bible. The closest you get is Revelation 12, Michael, a third of the angels. Okay? But if you read Revelation 12, that story is in conjunction with the first coming of the Messiah, not the Garden of Eden, not something before Eden. So there there is is there's no other thing you can look at in the Bible to explain what Peter and Jud are talking about as far as angels that sin winding up in hell. And this is really part of our our fallen angel tradition in Christianity, but it has some of these extraneous elements kind of thrown into it in hell passages, if you want to use that term. in the Old Testament. Isaiah 14. Okay. Isaiah 26, Ezekiel 32, Job 26. You have rephim, which is a term used for the giants that descend from the Nephilim in hell. When you killed one, their spirits were then natural inhabitants of hell. But they're never said to be bound. In fact, Jewish texts, and again, you get hints of this in the Bible, too, can have them coming out and harassing people, perhaps seeking to possess bodies, demonic possession. I've just described four different rebellions or four different groups, four different bad guys. Satan, the ones in Genesis 6, then the departed spirits of their progeny, okay, who are the demons, and then you've got the principalities and powers. They're actually different guys, okay? Different bad guys. But the way we're taught about demonology in church, traditional Christianity, is all those things get mashed into demons.
As far as what I think about Genesis 6 1-4, spiritual beings are not beings from other planets. There's nothing in the Bible that orients them to other planets. And here's the surprise. There's nothing in any other ancient text that orients them to other planets. You will never find in an ancient text one of the gods coming from a planet to Earth, which sounds really shocking, especially in in light of the success of ancient aliens. You'd think, well, you'd think some text would say that. They don't. Now, there are lots of texts that have the gods flying around in chariots or, you know, some other, you know, structural thing, but you never have an instance where they come from another planet, which is exactly what you'd expect. If ancient people who wrote the Bible and who wrote other texts, if this is really what they're thinking, surely one of them would say it, but they don't.
One of the things that always comes up in this discussion is Ezekiel 1. People will ask, "Well, Mike, you know, how can you say this about the Bible? Surely Ezekiel 1, this famous bizarre vision that often gets portrayed in science fiction movies as a spacecraft. Surely that must be a spacecraft." Well, I think the simplest thing I could say to this is we actually have the polaroids of the day for what Ezekiel saw. We don't have to guess. We actually have pictures of what Ezekiel saw. And that sort of takes people back like, "Oh, they didn't have cameras back then." No, they didn't. But they did sculpture. Okay? They did things like this. And every element of the description, the wheels within wheels under a platform were cherubam, four faces facing in different directions. On top of them, you have a round flat thrown dice with the throne on top for the deity or the king. Every element of that description is found and known from Babylonian iconography or Phoenician iconography and some cases Canaanite iconography. Now, the Babylonian stuff is important. Why? Because Ezekiel's in Babylon. >> One of the most >> what he's actually doing is not describing a spacecraft. He's describing an enthroned deity. But who does he have on the throne? He has the God of Israel on a throne that people both from Israel and Babylonians would understand that it's the Israelites God that is in control of time and space, the universe, the heavens, the flow of history, all this. And you say, why do you put it in those terms? It's because of the cherubim. It's not an accident that the four faces of the cherubam are the four iconographic images of the cardinal points of the zodiac in Babel. What is being described here is who is the deity? The question is asked, who is the deity that controls the flow of time? Who's on the heavenly throne in charge of what is happening? It's not Marduk of Babylon. It's the God of Israel. And so Ezekiel's message to the captives there sitting by the river Kavar is, "Yeah, you're in a bad place. Yes, Nebuchadnezzar just conquered you. And you might think that Marduk has conquered our God, but he hasn't. God is in charge. The God of Israel is in charge of you here. and he knows and dictates and directs how history is going to run from this point on.
In Genesis 6 1-4 has a Mesopotamian context. It's the story of the Akalu. And if you want to know what that story is, you can get Unseen Realm and read that. But basically, in a nutshell, here it is. There were gods before the flood who helped humans to produce civilization. And some higher up gods in Mesopotamia didn't like people. They decided to wipe them out with a flood. Well, the ones who liked humans and said, "Oh, well, we've invested a lot of time helping these people now. This is a terrible thing. What do we do?" Aha, we've got it. We will mate with a few of them. And then what we know, you know, will our our the children that are produced will be super intelligent like we are. And so our knowledge will survive the flood. We've got to make sure that a few of them survive and our children, you know, our direct progeny will be part of that and humanity will be saved. So this is the Mesopotamian story. So the the ones who do this are the heroes. They're the good guys. Now the higher up gods look at this and say that is not what we had planned. and they send the gods who help into the abyss forever, however long that is. Now, the biblical story inverts that and says, look, this is a transgression of heaven and earth. This never should have happened. This is not a good thing. This is evil. It's wicked because humans will use this knowledge to become better sinners. Okay? To be more self-destructive. uh biblical texts and other texts say this is why humans are so efficient at war. This is why they have a problem, you know, with lust. This is where they learn to be astrologers. All sorts of stuff that really turned out to be self-destructive in other biblical stories. The blame goes right here. And so what Genesis 6 1-4 is is it's a it's a story about both human and divine rebellion against the boundaries that God has established and the destruction that results from not staying where you belong and trying to become godlike and thinking that you know better than God. So at every point the biblical version of this kind of inverts the Mesopotamian version of this.
So to summarize Genesis 6 1-4 the most, if I can call it this, the most traditional supernaturalist reading of the passage is you have divine beings who can presume, create, and take on bodies. Okay? And when they show up in flesh, as they often do in other passages, flesh can do what flesh does. And they deliberately try to raise up their own populations, either thinking that, well, they could do better because the world is just in a bad place in Genesis 6 uh verse 5. Whatever their motivations might have been, ancient texts outside the Bible vary on this, but they're the ones who produce the Nephilim, who are these giants. Now, in the biblical story, it's this act. It's this incident that is the explanation for the giant clans that try to wipe out Israel. Later, in the book of Numbers 13:33, Moses and Joshua run into the Anakim. And it says explicitly in that verse, the Anakim are from the Nephilim. The Anakim were also known as Refim and Aim and Zamzum. There's a whole bunch of names for them. In other texts, we find that when uh you killed one of these, their disembodied spirit is a resident of hell. Okay? So, you have a demonic connection to them that is traceable all the way back to this incident.