By **Jamie Strickler**, Op-ed contributor
When the king of Syria sent an army to seize the prophet Elisha, his servant woke to find the city surrounded. He panicked. Elisha prayed that the young man’s eyes would be opened, “and the LORD opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha” (2 Kings 6:17).
The story never argues that an unseen world exists. It assumes it. So does nearly everything else in Scripture.
Yet many of us read the Bible as though that assumption was embarrassing. Angels become poetic symbols of God’s providence. Demons become first-century names for mental illness. The devil becomes a figure of speech for human evil. We keep the moral lessons and quietly edit out the cast.
This habit is newer than we think. In the 20th century, the theologian Rudolf Bultmann argued that no one who uses electric light and modern medicine can believe in the New Testament’s world of spirits and demons.[1] Most Christians never read Bultmann, but many absorbed his assumption: the real world is the material world, and the Bible’s population of spiritual powers is at best poetry.