The Unseen Battle: Spiritual Warfare, the Three Rebellions, and Christ’s Victory Over Dark Powers (by Joel Muddamalle)
In his book, The Unseen Battle, Joel Muddamalle develops the concept of spiritual warfare through the Bible’s supernatural worldview. The book explains why the world looks spiritually fractured, politically chaotic, and morally contested. The book is a biblical-theological work, solidly grounded in Scripture and the Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) context. Muddamalle organizes the story of spiritual warfare around a supernatural framework of God’s supernatural and human families. He further explores how the relationship between these two households informs the narrative of conflict, rebellion, and redemption in the biblical text. The goal of The Unseen Battle is to bring understanding of the powers at work in the world and to highlight the order brought through Christ’s victory over all things.
What is the Atonement in the Bible? (Thoughts on Atonement from Dr. Michael S. Heiser)
Michael Heiser understood Christ’s atonement as a multifaceted reality best described as a kaleidoscope, where various theories—Penal Substitution, Ransom, Moral Influence, Governmental, Recapitulation, Christus Victor, and potentially others—each offer legitimate insights into the work of Christ without needing to be synthesized into a single system. He affirmed substitution as biblically essential while rejecting the notion that God’s wrath was poured out on Jesus in a punitive sense. Heiser emphasized biblical theology over systematic formulations, preferring to let the text speak in its own diversity. Among the models, he notably favored Christus Victor, seeing Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension as the defeat of spiritual powers and the beginning of cosmic restoration.