Spiritual Warfare and the Powers of Darkness (with Clint Arnold)

Think Biblically: Conversations on Faith & Culture

Talbot School of Theology at Biola University / Sean McDowell & Scott Rae

Talbot, Church, Christianity, Christian, Culture, Biola, Sean Mcdowell, Religion & Spirituality, Scott Rae, Think Biblically

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 9 September 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Whether in the occult, astrology, or New Age, interest in the supernatural has increased in the past few years. What can we learn about the spiritual realm, and spiritual warfare, from the letters of Paul? Talbot professor Clint Arnold is one of the leading New Testament scholars in the world. He joins the Think Biblically podcast to talk about his book Powers of Darkness and to answer some of the most common questions about demons and the supernatural realm. Dr. Clint Arnold is a profe...

Transcript

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0:00.0	What do we learn about spiritual warfare from the writings of the Apostle Paul?
0:07.0	How can his writings help us to think about issues pressing today like the occult, demons, magic, and other New Age practices that are infiltrating the wider culture and arguably even the church?
0:20.4	Our guest today is leading scholar Dr. Clint Arnold,
0:23.3	who's written a fascinating book called The Powers of Darkness. As we were chatting before,
0:27.9	I've done a number of interviews, more so on YouTube about the occult new age practices,
0:33.4	and your name comes up often as like the expert on this. And I've always thought, why don't we
0:38.7	interview one of our colleagues on this? So you written the book, you wrote the book on it.
0:43.3	Thanks for coming on to talk about this.
0:44.9	Great. Thanks, Sean. Yeah.
0:46.9	Well, let's jump in. I'm really curious in the backstory why a leading New Testament scholar
0:51.7	would be motivated to study issues related to the occult spiritual warfare,
0:57.1	but distinctly through the lens of the Apostle Paul.
1:01.0	Yeah, great question.
1:02.2	And I've been asked that so many times.
1:04.4	How did you get into this?
1:06.7	Because I grew up on a farm in the Central Valley of California.
1:10.2	And so I think behind that question, sometimes people think, you know, was your mother a witch?
1:15.6	You had some weird thing in the background.
1:18.8	But actually, there's nothing quite like that.
1:23.2	It is a bit of a story because I went to the University of Aberdeen for my PhD work.
1:29.6	That's in the northeast of Scotland.
1:31.7	And I was praying for a topic that would be encouraging to my soul.
	...

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