I finished Burton Visotzky’s Golden Bells and Pomegranates just now.
On pages 141-142, Visotzky talks about a story in Leviticus Rabbah 24:3, which concerns a local spirit who lived in a well. This spirit didn’t bother the people in the town, but he “was engaged in a turf battle with an evil spirit who might also harm the townsfolk.”
Rabbinic Judaism believed in good angels and evil demons, and that a human soul went to a certain location immediately after death. And yet, for some rabbis, this paradigm didn’t account for everything in the spirit world, for there could be a spirit who didn’t fall into any of these categories. This local spirit wasn’t a good angel, or an evil demon, or a ghost of someone who died. It was just a spirit who lived in a well and didn’t bother anybody.
In 2001, I saw The Others, a movie starring Nicole Kidman (which also had Eloise Hawking from LOST). Kidman played a staunch conservative Catholic with children who couldn’t tolerate the sunlight. She had very definite ideas about where human souls went after death, in accordance with her Vatican I Catholicism.
The problem was this: she and her children were ghosts, and they weren’t where Catholic tradition said they should be! Rather, they were in their house. The role of the Eloise Hawking character was to try to adapt Nicole Kidman to the realization that she and her children had died and were haunting their home, along with its new residents. But Eloise Hawking hit a brick wall: Nicole Kidman’s Catholic views, which said that the dead go a particular realm, no ifs, ands, or buts. Eloise Hawking encouraged Nicole Kidman to keep an open mind about what happens to the dead.
At the end of the movie, Kidman realizes that she’s a ghost haunting her house, and she remembers killing her children and then herself. When her kids ask her about the Catholic realm of the dead, she replies that she’s not sure if there is such a place, but she knows that she loves her kids.
I’ve heard stories about ghosts from people I know. One relative of mine talked about a ghost who lived in her big purple house. The ghost, like the well-sprite of Leviticus Rabbah, wasn’t harmful. He just took stuff, then put it back.
At a liberal Seventh-Day Adventist church that I attended, a professor talked about ghosts in Latin America, and how people could actually see them take out the garbage!
Then there are shows that I watch. When I had cable, I watched Celebrity Ghost Stories, in which celebrities (including the late Rue McLanahan) discussed experiences of the supernatural—most often, ghosts who had unresolved issues.
And there’s the show Ghost Whisperer, in which Melinda Gordon (played by Jennifer Love Hewitt) helps ghosts resolve issues so they can go into the light, a realm of peace and tranquility. That was supposedly based on real-life.
Armstrongism and other forms of Christianity would say that these “ghosts” are demons. Perhaps. But, if they are evil demons, why aren’t they all hurting people?
Some Christians may contend that ”ghosts” are part of a grand deception. For Armstrongites and Seventh-Day Adventists, the dead are unconscious, meaning there’s no such thing as ghosts. In their eyes, the “ghosts” we see are actually demons. Their role is to hide the truth that humans are unconscious after death, and also to deceive human beings to follow Satan’s will. In The Great Controversy, for example, Ellen White says that, in the last days, mediums will tell people that ghosts from the spirit world want them to observe Sunday, the mark of the Beast!
Granted, things may not be as they appear. Paul in II Corinthians 11:14 says that Satan can transform himself into an angel of light.
But I wonder something: if we can’t trust our senses or our judgments, then how exactly can we tell what is of God, and what is of Satan? For examples, many Jews don’t believe that Jesus is the Messiah, but Christians claim that God proved Jesus was the Christ by raising him from the dead. But couldn’t a Jew respond that Jesus’ resurrection was actually a deception of Satan (or of God), designed to trick people into worshipping a man as God (idolatry), or to test the Jews to determine if they will be faithful to the Torah, notwithstanding miracles? I once heard a rabbi cite Deuteronomy 13:1-4, which talks about a prophet whose sign or wonder comes to pass, and yet he encourages the Israelites to worship other gods. The rabbi said that Jesus was such a prophet: he did miracles, but he encouraged idolatry (the worship of himself), and so Jews should reject him, notwithstanding his miracles!
Christians may respond to this by saying that only God can raise a person from the dead (but what about the Beast whose deadly wound was healed in Revelation 13?), or that we can see that Christianity is of God from its good fruit (since Jesus tells us in Matthew 7:15-20 that fruit is an indicator as to whether a prophet is true or false), or that God wants us to know the truth and wouldn’t make it entirely inaccessible to our minds, by tolerating a world in which deception utterly conceals the right path (and yet, there are New Testament passages about the deception of the world—II Corinthians 4:4; Revelation 12:9). Christians may argue that we can avoid deception by following the Bible, God’s word. But non-Christian Jews don’t think that the New Testament is God’s word, plus they believe that they’re following God’s word (the Torah) by rejecting Jesus.
My point is that, somewhere, we need to trust our senses and our judgments. If we look at ghosts who don’t seem to be harming anyone, why should we assume that they’re demons? Maybe there are souls of the departed that remain earth-bound because they have unresolved issues! Perhaps, in an overall sense, Christianity provides an accurate picture of the afterlife, and yet there may be exceptions. God may want souls to resolve certain issues before they go to heaven, hell, purgatory, the waiting room, or whatever you want to call it.
Does that mean that we should look to ghosts for authoritative doctrine? Bob Jones, Jr. once told a story about the ghost of his mother telling him that Christ wasn’t the only way to heaven, and he concluded that it was a demon, for his mom was a devout Christian, plus the spirit was going against the Bible. In my opinion (for what it’s worth), a ghost isn’t necessarily authoritative on doctrinal matters. Even on Ghost Whisperer, Melinda Gordon said that oiji boards were a bad idea, since a ghost may be playing games with people, or trying to get attention. Ghosts may be clueless about parts of the supernatural world. That could be why, even though the Torah doesn’t explicitly deny that the dead live on and may roam the earth or attempt to communicate with the living, it prohibits necromancy.