Sunday Quote!- Spiritual Warfare and Mapping the Land?

Every Sunday, I will share a quote from something I’ve been reading. The hope is for you, dear reader, to share your thoughts on the quote and related issues and perhaps pick up some reading material along the way!

Spiritual Warfare and Mapping the Land?

I recently read through Understanding Spiritual Warfare: Four Views (see my review) and found it extremely interesting. I do highly recommend the book to my readers. One of the views, I felt, may go a little bit beyond what the Bible teaches about how we engage in spiritual warfare. The authors, C. Peter Wagner and Rebecca Greenwood, argue that we should map out locations for spiritual warfare:

Spiritual mapping is the practice of identifying the spiritual conditions at work in a given community, city, or nation. By gathering objective information (including key historical facts… locations of bloodshed, idolatrous practices, [etc…]) and combining it with spiritual impressions (prophecy, revelation, words of knowledge, dreams, and visions), believers can prayerfully combine all of this information and draw a map that identifies the open doors between the spiritual world and the material world (182-183, cited below).

Now I admit that I come from a background in which spiritual warfare was little (if at all) discussed, but this does seem a little bit more than we can glean from the biblical image of spiritual warfare. Where, for example, are we instructed to try to use dreams and revelation in order to find “open doors” of the spiritual world? Where are we instructed that there might be doors for the spiritual world into our own that are identifiable? I think some aspects of this notion might be helpful for witnessing and the like–after all, knowing the landscape in this fashion would be helpful for identifying areas of conflict in a community and offering Christlike compassion in those areas–but I hesitate to think that the way they can be applied is in this fashion.

What are your thoughts on this? What do you think of spiritual warfare?

Again, I highly recommend this book with its very wide range of diverse views presented on the topic in order to get an introduction.

Links

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Microview: Understanding Spiritual Warfare: Four Views– I briefly review this highly interesting book on different views of spiritual warfare.

Sunday Quote– If you want to read more Sunday Quotes and join the discussion, check them out! (Scroll down for more)

Source

C. Peter Wagner and Rebecca Greenwood, “The Strategic-Level Deliverance Model” in James Beilby and Paul Rhodes Eddy, eds., Understanding Spiritual Warfare: Four Views (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2012).

SDG.