Many Christians swing between two opposite attitudes toward the spiritual world. When life is calm, they treat angels as symbols and miracles as metaphors. When life falls apart, they blame a demon for the headache, the breakup and the bad temper. The voices gathered here reject both. Angels, demons and deliverance are real today. The danger is not in believing that. The danger is in stopping there, without the distinctions that should come next.
Dr. Dan Morrison, a Navy chaplain and Anglican priest who specializes in the book of Revelation, sees Western Christians switch between these two attitudes depending on what is convenient. They look like opposites, but they do the same thing: each gives a person a way to avoid looking honestly at their own life. The skeptic says nothing spiritual is happening, so there is nothing to examine. The blamer says something spiritual is behind everything, so none of it is their fault. Both go wrong for the same reason. They hold a belief about the spiritual world without working through what follows from it.
Working through it means taking five steps in order, each building on the one before: