Theology Nerd Throwdown Spiritual Warfare to Spiritual Welfare: Bo's Four Stories of Reclaiming Charismatic Practice
Happy birthday to Haven, who turns nine today! He’s my third kid, which means the Fuller household has been thoroughly outnumbered for a while now, which also means it is absolutely appropriate that Bo and I spent a Friday morning talking about demons. This one started where all the best TNT episodes start — a text from Bo that said essentially: can we talk about reclaiming the good parts of being charismatic? And listen, I grew up Baptist, so I genuinely missed out on the whole casting-out-demons, anointing-doorframes, spiritual-warfare-as-Dungeons-and-Dragons pipeline. Bo did not miss out. And he's been spending a few years trying to figure out which of those practices were actually onto something, even if the metaphysics were a mess. He brought four stories: prayer walking with your eyes open instead of closed (spiritual warfare → spiritual welfare), spiritual mapping as a way of seeing your city's gateways as sites of partnership instead of enemy strongholds, the "My Heart, Christ Home" pre-baptism house-walk prayer practice, and a full theology of exorcism — power encounter versus truth encounter — including my own undefeated record at exorcisms, which I will not spoil except to say: baptismal font, palm branch, and a very successful businessman who was, by any reasonable definition, acting demonic. I brought my old lecture notes on Tillich and David Ray Griffin's theories of the demonic, which turned out to pair with Bo's stories better than either of us expected. Tillich's line — the demonic is the holy with a minus sign — ended up doing a lot of work. So did Griffin's lecture at Asbury. This one went places. Come for the exorcism, stay for the Nephilim teaser at the end.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
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