One of the challenges of introducing people to the Divine Council worldview is that the subject can sound stranger than it actually is. For modern readers, talk of gods, sons of God, heavenly councils, cosmic geography, spiritual powers, sacred space, and the reclaiming of the nations can feel like a set of exotic add-ons to the Bible. For the biblical writers, however, these ideas were not add-ons. They were part of the furniture of their world.
The Divine Council worldview is not about making the Bible weird. The Bible already is weird. As Michael Heiser liked to say, “If it’s weird, it’s important.” The goal is to recover the worldview that the biblical authors assumed as they wrote. Once that happens, passages that often seem random, confusing, or peripheral begin to fit into a larger biblical story.
Ronn Johnson has put together a concise “30-point overview” of the Divine Council worldview. The point of this material is not to encourage speculation, fear, or fascination with the unseen realm. Mike Heiser was always clear that we should be willing to let the biblical writers operate with their own categories without importing ours. This overview is especially useful because it does not present the Divine Council worldview as a closed system. There is still work to do. There are still questions to ask. There are still places where careful readers will disagree about how best to connect the dots. The task is not to build a franchise around a phrase, but to keep testing our conclusions against the text of Scripture.
The 30 points in this document offer a helpful orientation for those who are new to the conversation, and a useful refresher for those who have been studying these ideas for some time. They also remind us that the Divine Council worldview is not finally “about” the gods. It is about Yahweh’s rule, Christ’s victory, the Spirit’s work, and the restoration of creation. Handled carefully, it helps us see the Bible’s own story more clearly.
You can read Ronn Johnson’s full 30-point overview here or by clicking the link provided above:
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