An Interesting Beyond Extraordinary Episode
My friend Natalina operates the website "Extraordinary Intelligence" and the "Beyond Extraordinary" podcast, where she reveals information that is extraordinary, from a supernatural Christian worldview.I recommend this podcast/interview, which she released last week. It involves seeing spirits, demonic oppression, demonic scratches, and a spiritual house cleansing: all topics we've covered at Seers See.The podcast can be found here. It's fascinating. It reminds me of our own house cleansing stories on this website.My takeaway is this demonstrates the Kingdom Conflict and requires a supernatural worldview to fully understand. Work your way through the Worldview articles here to understand where I'm coming from.In Natalina's show, the Catholic church demonstrated that the gospel of Jesus was true, that the Kingdom has come, and they proved it by delivering the family from spiritual forces of darkness, just like Jesus did.I've read on forums discussing this interview much bemoaning by Christians concerned with the rosaries and other objects in the house. Someone commented that Jesus and the disciples only used words to deliver people. (Yes, deliverance is all through the gospels - the historical accounts chronicling Jesus' life and ministry).Wrong. Sometimes they used touch, sometimes mud, sometimes spit, sometimes oil, sometimes fasting, and sometimes they required actions to activate the healing or deliverance. They followed the Holy Spirit's guidance, not a bunch of rules. They followed faith, not law. And that's the crux of true Christianity.
The Catholic Church has centuries of research in these areas. In grad school, I studied history, and I recall reading about a medieval-era town in Italy that was persecuting some witches and getting ready to execute them. The Church sent a couple of investigators to see if they really were witches or just some troublesome old ladies begging for food. They concluded they weren't witches and defended the weak, reflecting God's heart, which again demonstrates the gospel.I remember this account, which happened over 15 years ago, because the professor marveled that anyone at anytime could believe in witches. He repeatedly asked, "Are witches real?" He wanted to know if magic was real, if there was a supernatural reality. At the time, I didn't think so. He didn't think so either, but he questioned, how could the most educated and intelligent scholars of their day, the Catholic investigators, take the paranormal and supernatural seriously?Because they had a supernatural worldview, and my professor didn't. Neither did I, at the time.The entire medieval world held a supernatural worldview far closer to the worldview that Jesus held than we modern Westerners. That's one reason I love "The Lord of the Rings" so much, because it's written by a medievalist with a pre-Christian but quasi-medieval worldview in mind. (I'm working on a something that will explore this further, so Tolkien fans, stay tuned! It's going to be so fun!)My education was rooted in the prevaling Western mythology of scientific materialism. This is a failing worldview, despite the awesome benefits it has produced for our society and the world (except in the area of creating more effective ways of killing people in war and controlling people in peace, of course. Hmm. There's food for thought).I don't believe that we need centuries of research to do deliverance successfully. Maybe some hands-on training is all that it takes from someone who's gone on before, someone to demonstrate, and then to send us out to give it a try. You know. Like Jesus did.
