Israelites, Pharisees & Sadducees In The 21st Century Church

and warlocks had surrounded the area… When the flames shot up, a woman right
behind Doris [Wagner's wife] screamed and manifested a demon, which Doris
immediately cast out!"
Jehovah's Witnesses
Jehovah's Witnesses believe they are engaged in a "spiritual, theocratic warfare"
against false teachings and wicked spirit forces they say try to impede them in their
preaching work. Where their religious beliefs have been in conflict with national laws or
other authorities—particularly in countries where their work is banned—they have
advocated the use of "theocratic war strategy" to protect their interests, by hiding the
truth from God's "enemies", being evasive, or withholding truthful or incriminating
information. The Watchtower told Witnesses: "It is proper to cover over our
arrangements for the work that God commands us to do. If the wolfish foes draw wrong
conclusions from our maneuvers to outwit them, no harm has been done to them by the
harmless sheep, innocent in their motives as doves."
Criticism
In evangelism and worldwide Christian missions, former missionaries such as Charles
Kraft and C. Peter Wagner have emphasized problems with demonic influences on the
world mission fields and the need to drive demons out. Robert Guelich of Fuller
Theological Seminary has questioned the extent to which spiritual warfare has shifted
from its basic moorings from being a metaphor for the Christian life. He underlines how
spiritual warfare has evolved into "spiritual combat" techniques for Christians to seek
power over demons. Guelich argues that Paul's writings in the Epistle to the Ephesians
are focused on proclaiming the peace of God and nowhere specify any techniques for
battling demons. He also finds that the novels of Frank Peretti are seriously at odds with
both the gospel narratives on demons and Pauline teaching.
Missions specialists such Scott Moreau and Paul Hiebert have detected traces
of animist thought encroaching on both evangelical and charismatic discourses about
the demonic and spiritual warfare. Hiebert indicates that a dualist cosmology now
appears in some spiritual warfare texts and it is based on the Greco-Roman mystery
religions and Zoroastrian myths. However, Hiebert also chastises other evangelicals
who have absorbed the modern secular outlook and have tended to downplay or even
ignore the demonic. Hiebert speaks of the flaw of the excluded middle in the thinking of
some evangelicals who have a cosmology of God in heaven and humans on earth, but
have ignored the "middle" realm of the angelic and demonic.
Some critics have linked the rise in aggressive forms of prayer to the increasing
militarization of everyday life that characterizes twentieth century cultural shifts towards
the widespread normalization of highly militarized discourse. This rhetorical and
ideological stance has crept into the practices an rituals of religious prayer and
conversion, just as it has similarly expanded into sectors like technology, immigration,
humanitarianism and education, just to name a few spheres that have also been
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