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In this exciting episode, Jimmy Akin dives into Gavin Ortlund’s recent video, delivering a friendly but incisive critique packed with biblical insights, historical depth, and real-world data. Jimmy shows why Scripture itself supports ghosts, explores purgatory and apparitions, dismantles paranoid “it’s all demons” thinking, and reveals how common After-Death Communications truly are. Thought-provoking, encouraging, and full of surprises—don’t miss it!
TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
GAVIN ORTLUND: Can Christians believe in ghosts? This may seem like a strange question.
Not to me.
GAVIN: But this is surprisingly relevant. Actually, an amazing number of people in the modern world do believe in ghosts or ghosts-like entities of some kind or another, or they have doubts when they’re staying in a big Airbnb on a windy night or after you’ve watched a horror movie, this kind of thing. Back in 2007, a poll found that one out of three Americans, slightly more than one out of three, believe in ghosts. Maybe that number would be even higher almost 20 years later.
The numbers have gone up a bit. Two polls came out in 2025—one of them by YouGov and one of them by Gallup—and they came to very similar results.
According to the YouGov poll, 38% of Americans say they believe in ghosts, and according to the Gallup poll, 39% said that, so that’s just under 4 in 10 Americans.
GAVIN: So this is something that we should think about. If we just roll our eyes at this and say, “Well, of course not. ” Then we actually miss something interesting happening in our supposedly secular culture.
Then let’s get into it!
* * *
Howdy, folks!
We’re in our second year of the podcast now, and you can help me keep making this podcast for years to come—and get early access to new episodes—by going to Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast
“Can Christians Believe in Ghosts?”
Today I’m going to be interacting with a video Gavin Ortlund recently released called “Can Christians Believe in Ghosts?”
I want to compliment Gavin for taking on this subject. It is a topic that a lot of people—including a lot of Christians—wonder about.
And Gavin has a lot of good stuff to say in the video.
But—as longtime listeners know—this is a subject I’ve made a detailed study of, and some of the things Gavin said could be improved.
So this is meant as a friendly, helpful video. I’ll be direct at a few points, but I’m fundamentally here to help.
So let’s see what Gavin has to say.
GAVIN: we find this growing and sometimes disturbing fascination with ghosts and other folkloric entities like fairies and goblins and werewolves and zombies and vampires and even weirder stuff than that. And actually, Christianity has a more surprising and more emotionally satisfying response to this trend than sometimes we even realize.
So Gavin has just identified a trend of being fascinated with ghosts and other folkloric creatures.
He says this trend is growing, though he doesn’t provide any data to support that statement.
Also, fascination isn’t the same thing as belief. You can be fascinated by things you don’t believe in, and you can believe in things you aren’t fascinated by.
But Gavin says that Christianity has a surprising and emotionally satisfying answer to the trend to be fascinated by these things.
I’m skeptical of that claim, because I’ve studied the history of the concepts he mentions. In addition to ghosts, Gavin names fairies, goblins, werewolves, zombies, and vampires.
They have all been believed in by Christians in different centuries—including Christian churchmen.
They have also been disbelieved in by Christians in different centuries—again including churchmen.
So Christianity doesn’t have a generic position on whether or not you should believe in all of them.
Further—except for ghosts—none of them are mentioned in the Bible or apostolic Tradition, so the sources of faith don’t mandate any opinion about them.
You have to look at the evidence to form an opinion about whether they exist.
Now, someone could say, “Hey, wait! Gavin was just talking about the trend of being fascinated with them, not the question of whether any of them exist.”
If so, fair enough, though I would point out that the theory Gavin ends up formulating to explain ghosts is not the answer Christianity as an entity proposes.
It is one Christian position, and it’s not even the most common position. It’s distinctly a minority position, and so it should not be attributed to Christianity as a whole.
But we’ll get to that in due course, so let’s continue.
What Are Ghosts?
GAVIN: Let’s unfold an answer here quickly by asking two questions. First, what do we mean by ghosts? This term is somewhat vague. In the pop culture sense, you might think of kind of wispy, white, human-like figures floating around a haunted house or something like this, terrorizing people. But basically, and more broadly, the term typically refers to the soul or the spirit of a dead human being that appears to the living. It can be used a little differently than that too.
And that’s a basically fair definition. I phrase things a little differently, but we’re in the same ballpark.
When I address this subject, I point out that the term Ghost is a synonym for Spirit, which is why the Holy Ghost is also known as the Holy Spirit.
Ghost is a cognate of the German word Geist, which means the same thing as the Latin word Spiritus, from which we get Spirit. So Ghost Spirit.
Well, Christianity teaches the existence of spirits, and so by that definition, Christians definitely believe in ghosts.
However, Gavin is correct to point out that the English term ghost has taken on certain nuances in colloquial speech.
One of those is the idea of a ghost appearing to the living. The technical term for that is an Apparition, which just means Something That Appears.
Historically, there have been different kinds of apparitions reported. Sometimes, it’s the apparition of a saint from heaven. Sometimes, it’s the apparition of a soul from purgatory. And sometimes, it’s even the apparition of a damned soul from hell.
Whether you believe the reports or not, all of those things have been reported.
But we can go with the basic definition Gavin proposes:
GAVIN: The soul or the spirit of a dead human being that appears to the living.
So, a Deceased Soul that is appearing as an Apparition is a Ghost the way we’ll be using the terms.
Ghosts in the Bible?
GAVIN: Now, we do find some rare instances in the Bible where a deceased human being is recalled to earth. But when this happens, it’s still different from what we typically call ghosts. So for example, these occurrences in the Bible involve the righteous being recalled from heaven. They’re not terrorizing anyone. They’re not hanging around a haunted house. They’re there for a very special and specific purpose.
Let’s be careful here. If we’re setting out to answer the question “Can Christians believe in ghosts?” and you’ve just defined a ghost as
GAVIN: The soul or the spirit of a dead human being that appears to the living.
Then when the soul of a righteous person is recalled to earth from heaven for a specific purpose, that fits the definition we’re using.
So—right there—there are cases of ghosts in the Bible.
They may not be terrorizing anyone or hanging out in haunted houses or acting like similar pop culture depictions of ghosts, but they are ghosts the way we’ve just defined the term.
They may not be pop culture ghosts, but they are ghosts.
Now, as an example, Gavin cites this:
GAVIN: So in the transfiguration of Christ, we find Moses and Elijah appearing with Jesus.
Personally, I’d be a little cautious about this example, because Elijah didn’t die.
Instead—in 2 Kings 2—Elijah is taken up to heaven in a whirlwind, so we can’t say that he’s dead when he appears on the mount of transfiguration.
There’s a better case that Moses is dead in this passage, because we know he did die before entering the promised land.
Gavin also cites this example:
GAVIN: Another interesting case would be Samuel being summoned by the medium of Endor in 1 Samuel 28. This is one of the most perplexing passages. Man, I have wrestled with this passage. I’m still actually not sure how to read this. Is this a demon appearing as Samuel or is it Samuel himself being recalled from the intermediate state? I don’t know.
I do! This passage isn’t actually that hard to figure out, because it specifically says that the spirit that appears is Samuel.
Let’s read it.
1 Samuel 28:11-16
Then the woman said, “Whom shall I bring up for you?”
He said, “Bring up Samuel for me.”
When the woman saw Samuel, she cried out with a loud voice. And the woman said to Saul, “Why have you deceived me? You are Saul.”
The king said to her, “Do not be afraid. What do you see?”
And the woman said to Saul, “I see a spirit coming up out of the earth.”
He said to her, “What is his appearance?”
And she said, “An old man is coming up, and he is wrapped in a robe.”
And Saul knew that it was Samuel, and he bowed with his face to the ground and paid homage.
Then Samuel said to Saul, “Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?”
Saul answered, “I am in great distress, for the Philistines are warring against me, and God has turned away from me and answers me no more, either by prophets or by dreams. Therefore I have summoned you to tell me what I shall do.”
And Samuel said, “Why then do you ask me, since the Lord has turned from you and become your enemy?”
Notice that the divinely inspired narrator explicitly names the spirit as Samuel. Once he appears, the narrator tells us Then Samuel said to Saul, “Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?”
And when Saul explains why, the divinely inspired narrator tells us And Samuel said, “Why then do you ask me, since the Lord has turned from you and become your enemy?”
Furthermore, notice what the narrator says after the medium describes Samuel. The narrator tells us that Saul knew that it was Samuel.
“Know” is what linguists refer to as a Factive Verb. That is, a verb that tells you the speaker regards what is said as a true fact. Communicates a True Fact.
This is the case with verbs like know and realize. They’re factive verbs, whereas other verbs—like believe or think—are non-factive.
If I say, “John knew that he had been betrayed,” that tells you that I—the speaker—believe it was a fact that John was betrayed.
If I only said, “John believed that he had been betrayed,” it wouldn’t tell you that. I might agree or disagree with John’s belief.
Similarly, if it say, “Betty realized it was raining outside,” that means I regard this as a fact. It was raining outside.
But if I say, “Betty thought it was raining outside,” then I’m not saying that this was a fact. Betty might have been mistaken.
The same thing is true of the equivalent verbs in Hebrew, and the verb for Know in this case is Yada` in case you’re curious.
So when the inspired author of 1 Samuel says that Saul knew that it was Samuel, that tells us that the inspired author regards it as a fact that the spirit was Samuel.
And since the inspired author is, well, inspired by God, that means that it is a fact.
This really is Samuel.
The idea that it’s a demon pretending to be him has absolutely no foundation in the text.
Demons are not mentioned anywhere in the account, and the inspired author clearly indicates it was Samuel.
The demon hypothesis is thus a clear case of Eisegesis or Reading into the Text, not Exegesis or Interpreting the Text.
The demon hypothesis is inspired by a completely alien set of assumptions that say, “Well, it can’t be the spirit of Samuel, so what else could it be?”
But the ancient Israelites didn’t have a problem with the idea of a departed spirit showing up.
Saul wasn’t supposed to approach a medium to call one up, but they could appear.
We can show that the ancient Israelites didn’t have a problem with this idea because Sirach 46 refers to this incident and says
Sirach 46:20
Even after he had fallen asleep [Samuel] prophesied
and revealed to the king his death,
and lifted up his voice out of the earth in prophecy,
to blot out the wickedness of the people.
For most Christians, this absolutely confirms that the spirit was Samuel, since most Christians have Sirach in their Old Testament.
However, even for people in the Protestant community that Gavin is part of, it still counts as an ancient Jewish witness to how the passage was understood, and Sirach has no problem with the idea of Samuel’s spirit showing up.
Which is also what the author of 1 Samuel believed.
And it’s worth mentioning that the message Samuel delivered to Saul is exactly the kind of message we would expect a prophet of God to give him, not the kind of message a lying demon would give.
So the demon hypothesis is twisting the text into saying something that it actually denies.
GAVIN: But on any construal, it’s not really a ghost.
Yes it is! Remember, we’ve already agreed that a ghost is
GAVIN: The soul or the spirit of a dead human being that appears to the living.
Samuel was a dead human being. His soul appeared to the living. So he was a ghost in this passage.
If we’re going to answer people’s questions, and we’ve defined our terms, we need to stick with our definitions and use them consistently—not changing them to support whatever conclusion we favor at the moment.
Ghost Belief in the Gospels
Now, before we move on, I want to call attention to a couple of passages that Gavin didn’t mention.
I won’t go through all the biblical material, but there are a couple of passages that deal with ghosts that I know Gavin accepts, because they are in the Gospels.
And they reveal that the very first Christians believed in ghosts appearing to the living—starting with the Twelve Apostles.
We know that because they more than once mistake Jesus for a ghost.
The first time that it happens is when Jesus walks on water, which is recorded in Matthew, Mark, and John.
They have just finished feeding the 5,000, and Jesus has sent the disciples on ahead in their boat, while he remained to dismiss the crowds and spend some time in prayer. Then, in Matthew 14, we read:
Matthew 14:25-27
And in the fourth watch of the night [that is, between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m.] he came to them, walking on the sea.
But the disciples, when they saw him walking on the sea, were terrified, saying, “It is a ghost!” and they cried out in fear.
But immediately Jesus spoke to them, saying, “Have courage, it is I! Do not be afraid!”
So here the disciples see Jesus walking on the water and think he is a ghost—since, y’know, living humans don’t normally walk on water, though a ghost that has no body might do that.
And Jesus clears up their confusion by acknowledging it’s really him.
The second time this happens is after the Resurrection. The disciples are discussing the post-Resurrection appearances they’ve heard about, and in Luke 24, we read:
Luke 24:36-39
And while they were saying these things, he himself stood there among them.
But they were startled and became terrified and thought they had seen a ghost.
And he said to them, “Why are you frightened? And for what reason do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet, that it is I myself! Touch me and see, because a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see that I have.”
So they’ve been hearing reports of Jesus appearing to people alive, but they’re not yet sure what’s going on—because they weren’t expecting him to rise from the dead.
Then he suddenly appears, and they think he’s a ghost, so Jesus corrects their confusion by pointing out that ghosts don’t have flesh and bones. But he does, and he lets them handle his body to prove it. He also eats fish in their presence to prove it.
Note that in both cases, Jesus does not say, “Hey, guys, ghosts don’t exist,” or, “Hey, guys, ghosts don’t appear to people.”
Instead he just says, “I’m not one of them.”
So Christian belief in ghosts goes all the way back to the very first Christians, and that’s not surprising, because belief in ghosts was inherited by Christianity from Judaism.
Are Ghosts Frightening?
GAVIN: But I cannot recall any occurrence in scripture where a deceased human being is recalled from hell or comes in a way that would be spooky or is terrorizing people or hanging around for an extended period of time or anything like that.
There aren’t any passages in Scripture that make it explicit that the soul of a damned person is manifesting on earth, though the situation is actually more complex than that.
If you study the way the relevant terms were used in Second Temple Judaism, there actually are multiple cases in the Gospels for which there is a strong case that the original audience would have understood them as the manifestation of damned souls.
I can discuss that another time if people are interested and let me know in the comments.
However, even if we grant that the Bible doesn’t record any cases of damned souls manifesting, that doesn’t mean it never happens, because Scripture doesn’t mention everything that happens.
Whether or not it happens is something we’d need to look at the data to determine.
There have been respected theologians like St. Thomas Aquinas who have held that God can allow the apparitions of damned souls.
There are also reports of it happening in history, though whether these reports are accurate is something I personally haven’t determined.
But I’m more concerned with Gavin’s statement that he can’t recall any place where a ghost
GAVIN: comes in a way that would be spooky or is terrorizing people or hanging around for an extended period of time or anything like that.
What does . . . that have to do with anything?
Again, Gavin is slipping away from the definition that he himself proposed, which was that a ghost is
GAVIN: The soul or the spirit of a dead human being that appears to the living.
By Gavin’s own definition, whether a spirit came from hell, whether it’s spooky, whether it’s terrorizing, and whether it hangs around for an extended period has no bearing on whether it’s a ghost.
All of those are incidental, irrelevant matters the way Gavin has defined the term.
Again, he’s attacking pop culture ghosts rather than actual ghosts.
And his perception of ghosts seems to be informed more by movies and tv and things like that than by what people actually report.
Because people who report ghosts typically don’t report them being spooky or terrorizing.
That YouGov poll from last year also asked people if they had ever seen a ghost and whether they perceived it to be good, neutral, or evil.
Well, it turns out that—of those who reported seeing ghosts—31% perceived the ghost as good compared to only 8% that perceived it as bad.
The rest either didn’t get an impression or got a neutral or mixed impression of the ghost.
That’s why I say that Gavin is responding to pop culture ideas about ghosts rather than interacting with actual data about ghostly experiences.
I’d also note that just because people perceive something as spooky or terrorizing, that doesn’t tell us anything.
We should not be relying on our emotions, because people are often scared by things that they don’t know about that are startling or unexpected.
This is something we see in the Bible itself. For example, one of the first things an angel often says when it appears is not to be afraid, which reveals that people are often afraid when an angel shows up.
When an angel appears to Gideon, and Gideon realizes it is the angel of God, the first thing the angel says is:
Judges 6:23
Peace be to you. Do not fear; you shall not die.
When Gabriel shows up to talk to Daniel, Gabriel says:
Daniel 10:12
Fear not, Daniel.
When Gabriel appears to John the Baptist’s father, he says:
Luke 1:13
Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard.
And when Gabriel shows up to the Virgin Mary, he says:
Luke 1:30
Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.
These are just a few examples, and the same thing happens when God himself shows up.
When he appears to Abraham in Genesis 15, he says:
Genesis 15:1
Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.
And when Jesus shows up in a vision to John in Revelation, he says:
Revelation 1:17
Fear not, I am the first and the last.
And there are more examples of this, too.
The point I am making is that fear is a very common response to the unknown and the unexpected, and so even if ghosts did cause people to feel fear, it wouldn’t tell us anything reliable about the ghost, because our emotions are not reliable.
We need to go with data over feelings which—among other things—means that we need to respond to actual data about ghostly encounters and not just images we see in pop culture.
What Happens When We Die?
Gavin then seeks to give an account of what happens when we die, and he says:
GAVIN: After a human being dies, we enter into a state either of enjoying God’s presence with him or being cast away from him, awaiting final judgment. And now some people do argue that ghosts could be souls and purgatory.
Yes, and—in fact—that has been the explanation for what most ghosts are for the majority of Christians historically.
That’s not a statement about all ghosts. Some have also been apparitions of saints from heaven, and some have been reported to be damned souls from hell, but for most Christians, most ghosts have been understood as souls that are being purified on their way to heaven.
This majority opinion was then largely rejected in the Protestant community after the time of the Reformation.
On Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World, I recently began doing an occasional series in which we look at ghost reports from different periods in Christian history.
For example, Episode 414 is on Ancient Christian Ghosts, and it looks at Christian ghost encounters in the earliest period of the Church—from before the year 500.
There are a lot of ghost reports in Christian history, and esteemed theologians from every age have taken them seriously.
These include doctors of the Church like Pope St. Gregory the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas, and even St. Augustine—who was more skeptical than most—acknowledged that God sometimes lets the souls of martyrs and confessors appear to the living.
And—prior to the Reformation—the standard understanding was that most ghosts are people being purified after their deaths.
For Protestant theologians, that was the problem. In his book Ghosts: A Natural History, Roger Clarke writes:
Ghosts: A Natural History, 292-293
This wasn’t helped by one of the fundamental tenets of the early Protestant reformers being the denial of purgatory: that, at the moment of death, all souls proceeded straight to heaven or hell.
The question of whether one believed in ghosts now marked the difference between Catholic and Protestant as strongly as belief in the transubstantiation of the host or the infallibility of the pope. Many saw the ghost stories of the past as the Catholic Church’s attempts to exploit popular credulity in order to enhance its own wealth and position. No true Protestant could believe in ghosts.
So, when people kept seeing ghosts after the Reformation, against all reason, they were taught not to take them at face value. Those apparitions that were still being encountered were not to be recognized as the souls of the departed but as spirits, usually evil ones sent by the devil.
And people did keep seeing ghosts. That’s a fundamental part of Christian experience—and human experience—and the Reformation didn’t stop it from happening.
But since most Protestants don’t acknowledge purgatory, they can’t accept them as spirits that are being purified, and since a spirit in heaven wouldn’t report needing purification, they must be evil spirits and—specifically—demons.
This is what Gavin goes on to argue, as we’ll see, but just to tie up his remarks on purgatory—and an increasing number of Protestants do believe in purgatory—Gavin says:
GAVIN: Even if you believed in purgatory, you’d have to make a further argument to say that those who are in purgatory are somehow wandering throughout the earth or doing the things that we think of ghosts doing.
Yeah, just like if you want to say no ghosts are from purgatory and never appear, you’ll need to make an argument for that.
The burden of proof is always shouldered by whoever is trying to convince another person of their position.
Nobody gets to privilege their view and just assume it if you want other people to believe it.
So if you want me to believe that some ghosts either aren’t from purgatory or that human souls never appear to the living, you’ll need to give me evidence and arguments for that.
And if I want you to believe that some ghosts either are from purgatory or that human souls do appear to the living, I’ll need to give you evidence and arguments for that.
The intellectual marketplace has a level playing field, where nobody’s position has an advantage.
So—in terms of arguing that souls can appear to the living, whether they’re from heaven, hell, or purgatory, all I have to do is point to the data concerning ghostly experiences.
As we’ll see, there is a ton of evidence, so I’m quite confident in the argument I can make.
Where Are Souls?
Now, what Gavin wants to argue is that
GAVIN: So I think the essential biblical answer to this question is no. The dead are not here among us. Rather, they are in the places that we frequently call heaven or hell.
There are several problems here.
The first is that that Gavin hasn’t disproved purgatory—in fact, he elsewhere acknowledges that he does believe in a postmortem purification.
Gavin himself appears to believe that this purification is always instantaneous, but he hasn’t demonstrated that.
Further, it wouldn’t matter even if it is always instantaneous because Christian theologians who believe in ghosts commonly understand that time doesn’t work the way in the afterlife that it does on earth.
This includes Peter Lombard, St. Albert the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, and others, who all held that time in the afterlife does not correspond to earthly time.
The commonly used term for this mode of existence was Aeviternity, which had characteristics of both Time and Eternity.
So even if you think postmortem purification happens instantaneously from an earthly perspective, that doesn’t tell you that a soul experiencing it can’t manifest on earth.
That also leads to a second problem. Remember, Gavin said:
GAVIN: The dead are not here among us. Rather, they are in the places that we frequently call heaven or hell.
Here, Gavin appears to be thinking of souls as having physical locations and of heaven and hell as being physical locations and assuming that being in one physical location means you can’t manifest elsewhere.
At least, that’s what the language he uses suggests.
But all of this would be regarded by many as simply mistaken.
Since they don’t have physical bodies, spirits are commonly understood not to have physical locations.
Thus, St. Thomas Aquinas indicated that you can only metaphorically describe a spirit as being “in” the place where it is manifesting.
Heaven and hell, then, are not understood as physical places but as modes of being—either being in spiritual union with God or out of spiritual union with God.
And since heaven and hell don’t map on to physical locations, which spirits don’t have anyway, there is no problem with the idea of a spirit being in spiritual union with God and simultaneously manifesting here on Earth.
In other words, saints don’t have to “leave” heaven to appear to humans, and the same thing would be true of spirits in purgatory or spirits in hell.
And even here on earth today, you don’t have to leave one place to appear in another. You can do that, for example, by appearing on a 2-D display. Gavin himself does that all the time.
And we’re already working on Volumetric Displays that will allow you to appear in 3-D by what is often but somewhat problematically called a Hologram.
It’s like when—in Star Wars—the Jedi council is meeting and some of them appear by hologram. Those council members are in one location, but they’re appearing in another. They even look like ghosts!
And that’s something we can understand even though these people are physical beings who do occupy one physical location and yet appear in another.
If you don’t have a physical body at all—like spirits in heaven, hell, or purgatory—how much more can you be in one spiritual mode of existence and yet manifest somewhere on earth.
So we mustn’t think simplistically here. We shouldn’t understand souls as physical objects or heaven and hell as physical locations, and you certainly don’t have to leave your spiritual state to appear somewhere.
Misusing the Bible
But there’s another problem, which—and I hate to say it—is that Gavin is misusing the Bible.
Remember, Gavin is telling us what he believes is the essential biblical answer to this question.
GAVIN: The essential biblical answer to this question.
Now, the Protestant community prides itself on forming doctrine Sola Scriptura or By Scripture Alone.
This slogan is understood in multiple different ways in the Protestant community, and Gavin understands it to mean that Scripture is our only infallible authority.
In other videos, he makes it clear that he doesn’t think that it’s the only authority. He acknowledges that there are other authorities; he just doesn’t think that any of them are infallible.
Okay, fine. But in that case, one of the authorities you’ll need to pay attention to is extrabiblical data that has a bearing on the question you are considering.
It isn’t sufficient to say that the Bible says people go to heaven or hell when they die—and maybe some on their way to heaven pass through purgatory—and therefore they don’t appear to us here on earth.
We’ve already seen the problems that this argument has when you analyze it.
But a more fundamental problem is that the argument presupposes that the Bible contains all the data there is to be had on this topic, as if it gave an exhaustive description of what happens with the afterlife.
Now, someone might say that Scripture tells us all we need to know about the afterlife.
And I agree. Scripture does tell us all we need to know about the afterlife.
But what you need to know and what you can know are two different things.
Scripture also tells us what we theologically need to know about other things from a Christian perspective—like the fact that God made the material world.
But it doesn’t tell us all that we can know about the material world.
For example, Scripture doesn’t tell us how matter works. It doesn’t tell us about the atomic theory of matter, but we can know about the atomic theory of matter if we study data from extrabiblical sources, like what scientists have learned by experiment.
The scientists who study matter are called physicists, but there’s another kind of scientist who study the survival of bodily death from a scientific perspective, and those scientists are known as parapsychologists.
They’ve done a lot of studies on the survival of bodily death, including ghostly encounters, and it’s clear from his video that Gavin has not looked at that data.
That’s why he keeps going after ideas about ghosts that you’d find in movies and tv.
He only has a pop culture understanding of this subject.
But he’s relying on the Bible as if it gave us an exhaustive understanding of the afterlife, and it plainly doesn’t.
I suspect that Gavin would very quickly acknowledge that the Bible doesn’t reveal the full mystery of the afterlife to us.
In fact, almost every theologian—Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant—would acknowledge that.
The Bible tells us how to get to heaven, but it doesn’t tell us about the afterlife in detail, so there’s a lot left to know if we can just get data about it.
That means that we need to look and see what extrabiblical data is available, and it especially means that if your position is that the Bible is our only infallible authority but there are other authorities.
For example, you need to look at the evidence regarding deathbed visions and what happens to people as they are dying. That’s a subject I looked at in Episode 318 of Mysterious World.
You’d need to look at the evidence regarding Near-Death Experiences that can reveal what happens when a person is clinically dead. That’s a subject I looked at in Episodes 27 and 292 of Mysterious World.
You’ll need to look at After Death Communications where people’s loved ones spontaneously contact them from beyond the grave. That’s a subject I looked at in Episodes 306 and 307 of Mysterious World.
But Gavin is clearly unfamiliar with this and is relying on just the Bible and pop culture.
It’s similar to saying, “Hey, I’ve seen scientists in movies and tv, and they’re spooky figures that terrorize people and create monsters that kill lots of people. So I’m going to stick with the fact that the Bible says God made the earth and that the earth has four corners and stands on pillars, so it must be a flat surface.”
As someone who has written about St. Augustine’s Doctrine of Creation, Gavin knows what a mistake that would be and what a misuse of the Bible—and science—that that would be.
But that’s essentially what he’s doing in this case. He’s relying on a superficial reading of certain biblical texts and ignoring the light that science can shed on these matters.
Not Aware of the Data
Allow me to illustrate that. Now, you’ll recall that earlier he spoke of ghosts hanging out at certain locations for extended periods of time—even though that’s not part of his definition of a ghost.
He goes on to say:
GAVIN: The dead are not here among us. Rather, they are in the places that we frequently call heaven or hell. And the few cases where a human being is recalled to earth are special circumstances that aren’t really what we call ghosts.
Except, they are ghosts by Gavin’s own definition.
GAVIN: The soul or the spirit of a dead human being that appears to the living.
So—right there—Gavin acknowledges that there are ghosts. Scripture contains records of them appearing, at least in special cases.
But that’s all anybody claims—that there are special cases where ghosts appear.
Ghosts aren’t appearing to us all the time. That’s obviously the case, or we’d be seeing them all the time, and we don’t.
People only see ghosts in special cases.
Like when an After Death Communication or ADC happens. Let’s say that you’re a widow or widower and your departed spouse appears and gives a comforting, pastoral message like, “Don’t mourn for me. I’m at peace. I’m with God now.”
Or when they show up and say, “Please forgive me for how I treated you.”
Both of those being common types of messages reported in ADCs.
In fact, brief encounters with departed loved ones that can contain brief messages like this are by far the most common type of After Death Communications.
The kind of ghostly encounter that Gavin is envisioning—where the spirit of someone you don’t know hangs out at a single location for an extended period of time—is very rare by comparison.
The overwhelming majority of cases are brief appearances of someone you know and that have a purpose we can often discern—like giving pastoral comfort to a grieving family member or apologizing to them, which also serves to comfort them.
These fit the model of the scriptural instances of brief encounters with known figures for a specific purpose.
The souls involved aren’t of famous people, but they are of people who are important to the living relatives to whom they appear.
Gavin doesn’t display any knowledge of the facts that this is by far the most common type of ghostly encounter or that it has elements in common with what we see in Scripture.
And I think that you do need to look at the data if you want to understand this subject.
That’s something that is implicit in Scripture.
You’ll recall the instances where the disciples thought they had seen a ghost and Jesus didn’t correct the idea that ghosts appear to people.
He did say, “I’m not one of them,” but he didn’t give them a lecture about ghosts and how to recognize and evaluate them.
Other passages in Scripture also don’t tell us about those things, so if you want to know about what actually happens in ghostly encounters, you need to look elsewhere.
Scripture thus implies that you need to look at extrabiblical sources of data if you want to understand them.
“Could It Be . . . Satan?”
Having dismissed the possibility of ghosts—even though he admits that the Bible does show the spirits of the departed appearing to the living in some circumstances—Gavin now gives us his theory of what’s actually happening in ghostly encounters.
Hmm. I wonder who could be appearing?
Could it be . . . Satan?
Gavin says that—in regard to ghostly encounters—
GAVIN: I don’t think the biblical response is to say, oh, all of that is just totally naturalistic and fake. There can be supernatural events going on involving demons. A couple of things to observe biblically here. First, demons can and do lie. They can deceive us about what they are. We have no reason to think that the demons are always going to be honest about who they are. In fact, remember, Paul says that Satan himself disguises himself as an angel of light. If Satan were to appear in your living room one night to attack you, he probably wouldn’t look like a big red monster with a pitchfork or something like that. He’d probably try to show up and try to pretend he’s an angel.
It’s certainly true that demons lie—and lie constantly. After all, they’re working for the father of lies.
That’s a point I make all the stinking time.
It’s also true that they can disguise themselves as angels of light—or as a deceased human being.
But you know what? They can also disguise themselves as living human beings.
After all, as Hebrews says:
Hebrews 13:2
Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
So angels can take human form. They can even assume physical form, and we see examples of that in Scripture.
For example, when God is about to destroy Sodom, he sends two angels to Abraham’s nephew Lot in human form. And their forms seem to be physical, because when Lot is outside talking to the men of Sodom,
Genesis 18:10
The [angels] reached out their hands and brought Lot into the house with them and shut the door.
So angels can apparently take physical form, and if angels can do that then demons—who are fallen angels—can do that, too.
So not only can demons disguise themselves as angels. They can also disguise themselves as deceased human beings and as living human beings.
But if they can do these things, then how do we know if that’s what they’re doing?
I mean, for all I know, there is no Gavin Ortlund, and every video I’ve ever seen of him was produced by a demon in human disguise!
And—for all he knows—there is no Jimmy Akin, and every video he’s ever seen of me was produced by a demon in human disguise!
And, even if he and I are real, what about other people? Maybe Gavin and I are the only two human beings in existence, and everyone else we’ve ever met is actually a demon in disguise!
I mean, it’s not logically impossible.
But you know what we say about people who believe such logical possibilities? We say they are mentally ill.
Specifically, they are suffering from a Delusional Disorder, and the specific form they are suffering from involves Paranoid Delusions.
It’s paranoid to assume—without evidence—that a person you meet is really a demon in disguise.
Again, it’s not impossible, and demons do disguise themselves. So how can we take account of this fact without embracing paranoid delusions?
The starting principle is the philosophical position known as Phenomenal Conservatism, according to which you should interpret things as they appear—until you get evidence that they should be understood in a different sense.
If you meet someone and they appear human, you should assume they are human—until you get evidence that they’re actually a demon—or an angel.
And if you meet an angel and they appear to be an angel, you should assume they are an angel—until you get evidence that they’re actually a demon.
I mean, just because Paul says that the devil can disguise himself as an angel doesn’t mean that you should assume every angel you meet is actually a demon.
If people did that in the Bible, then the Virgin Mary would have tried doing an exorcism to get rid of the angel Gabriel when he appeared to announce the birth of Christ, and who knows how that could have affected the course of redemptive history?
So stick with how things appear until you have evidence otherwise.
That means that—since we know that human souls do sometimes appear to the living, as Gavin himself has admitted—if the soul of your late loved one appears to you, you should not be paranoid and assume it’s a demon.
You should assume it is the soul of your loved one—until you get evidence otherwise.
Of course, to recognize that evidence, you’ll need to know what data counts toward something being a demon.
A handy tip sheet for things like that would include
Tip Sheet!
- False Doctrine—teaching false doctrines
- Wants Worship—wanting to be worshipped like a pagan god
- Wants Possession—wanting to take control of someone’s body and possess you
Y’know, demony things like that.
And—without evidence like that—you should assume that the spirit you’re talking to is the spirit they appear to be.
Just like the Virgin Mary did.
And you shouldn’t adopt a paranoid hermeneutic that will lead you into delusions—which is, I’m afraid, a hermeneutic that Gavin is recommending.
Some Good Stuff!
Now, thus far I’ve been rather critical of the positions that Gavin has been taking, and you can make your own judgment about who’s right.
But I said at the outset that he says some really good things in this video, and we’re starting to get to that part.
When it comes to reports of unusual experiences, Gavin says:
GAVIN: It can be a genuine contact with the supernatural, even some pretty weird supernatural stuff. So the point we’re making is Christianity has space for explaining lots of different strange and supernatural experiences.
And that’s absolutely right. Christianity does have lots of space for these experiences and deep historic resources for seeking to explain them.
My invitation to Gavin would to be to go deeper into those resources and appropriate more of the tradition rather than thinking in such narrow terms.
Gavin has shown appreciation for the thought of figures like Augustine and Aquinas and similar figures, and he should openmindedly look at what they have to say about ghostly experiences, too.
He should also look at what modern science—and specifically parapsychology—has discovered about them.
I also want to compliment Gavin when he says:
GAVIN: I’m going to put up . . . I think this is an important point for us to think through. I’m going to put up on the screen a spectrum here where on the one side you see pre-modern views, animism, polytheism, lots of other things where basically the thinking is spiritual stuff is everywhere. And then on the other side, modern Western secular views, though increasingly in the non-west as well, that tend to think that physical nature is the whole show. Okay. So you’ve got most human beings throughout space and time have looked around at the world and said, “This place is haunted.” There’s good and bad enchanted spiritual stuff all over the place. And then on the other hand, you’ve got the modern Western tendency, which tends, though, as we are saying, very inconsistently, to see things just as physical. Now, too often, here’s what Christians who have been influenced in the modern west, such as myself, a lot of us, what we do is we go with option two and then just add God. Sometimes then as an afterthought, we’ll add angels and demons, but they don’t really make a big difference. But actually, Christianity has a lot more in common with these other pre-modern perspectives on the other side of the spectrum and invites us to see spiritual realities everywhere shot through the world.
This is also dead right, and the contrary view is something that modern Christians often fall prey to.
Many do tend to assume the world is just a regular, natural system with very little influence from God and angels and demons.
Like Gavin, that was the way I initially viewed it, too.
It wasn’t until I started studying the deeper Christian tradition on these matters—and started studying parapsychology—that I reappropriated the classical Christian view.
That’s why, in my recent debate on the resurrection of Jesus with James Fodor—which you can watch in Episode 59 of the podcast—I made a point of saying that I hold the traditional Christian worldview, not a modern, minimalist one.
Like historic Christians, I believe paranormal stuff happens all the time, and so I’m not going to evaluate the odds of a miracle like the resurrection happening the way a secular skeptic will.
So I think Gavin is absolutely right that Christians need to reclaim this view and shake off the secular programming that our culture seeks to give us.
That means we shouldn’t just dismiss reports of mysterious occurrences without considering them.
We should be open to modern miracle reports—like those Craig Keener covers in his books, like the two-volume Miracles and the one-volume Miracles Today.
We also should be open to what parapsychologists have found about ghostly encounters. They are not rare at all. In fact, they are normal.
According to current research, between 40 and 50% of the population reports having an After Death Communication from a loved one at least once in life.
And it’s likely higher than that. There appears to be a reporting issue with the data—particularly due to neglecting older people who are more likely to be widows and widowers—so that by the end of one’s life, it looks like most people have had such a communication.
And that would be part of God’s plan, too.
So there’s a lot of stuff happening out there. We just don’t hear about it often. Given our culture, we won’t hear about it if we don’t go looking.
And Gavin is absolutely right that we need to be open to these facts and seek to understand them from a Christian perspective.
Post-Reformation Christians on Ghosts
Fortunately, there’s good material out there from a Christian perspective, and not just in Catholic circles.
Even after the Reformation, many in the Protestant community have been open on this subject.
The idea that souls don’t appear to the living, and that they should be understood as demons was a Protestant accretion that developed at the time of the Reformation, but it’s not one that is universal in the Protestant community.
One place the contrary view took hold was in Methodism. As Roger Clarke writes,
Ghosts: A Natural History, 296
[Belief in ghosts’] popularity was bolstered further by a new form of Christianity that also tacitly espoused a belief in spirits and ghosts—Methodism. In his youth, Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, had been strongly influenced by the haunting at his family home in Epworth, and these experiences were carried through to the religion he founded. . . .
In 1846, a tract was published exhorting Methodists not to backslide, to hold true to the beliefs of their founder. Intriguingly, Wesley is depicted as a ghost, appearing in a white sheet to a believer sitting by the fireside, an iconography of ghost depiction which by that time was nearly two hundred years old.
And there have been a lot of Christian thinkers in the Protestant tradition who have been open to ghosts, particularly in England. Back to Clarke:
Ghosts: A Natural History, 296-297
Several of the great figures of the Age of Reason were similarly keen to experience direct evidence of a spirit world: Samuel Johnson often spoke of his yearning to see the ghost of his dead wife and was among the committee who disappointedly declared the Cock Lane poltergeist a hoax.
So there are Protestants who have believed in ghosts and not just dismissed them as demons, and their views need to be taken seriously as well.
More About Demons
While we’re on the subject of demons, I want to compliment two further things that Gavin says. One of them is this:
GAVIN: Number one, don’t be enamored by the demons. The demons are boring losers. They’re not interesting. They’re predictable. Jesus is interesting. Be fascinated with Jesus. I say this because I think sometimes people feel this unhealthy draw toward that stuff. And I want people to say, “No, that’s not interesting.” What’s interesting is Jesus.
And I agree. Demons are boring losers, and we shouldn’t be fascinated with them.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t know about them or learn about them so we can combat them, but ultimately, they are boring losers.
Jesus is what’s interesting, and we need to study him far more than we study demons.
I also agree with Gavin when he says:
GAVIN: The second thing and to finish with is don’t be afraid of demons. . . . What I want to say to Christians, particularly here, those who’ve surrendered their lives to Jesus. Surrender to him, follow him, commit your way to him, and do not fear. Jesus has authority over every dark power in this world. You don’t need to be afraid. Here’s a wonderful verse I love to remember that the demons shudder when they think of God.
And I agree here as well. We shouldn’t be running around in fear of demons. As Jesus himself says:
Matthew 28:18, 20
All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. . . . And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Or, as St. Paul says:
Romans 8:31, 35, 37-39
If God is for us, who can be against us?
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
So no, we don’t need to be afraid of demons.
Conclusion
So what can we say in conclusion? Can Christians believe in ghosts?
If by ghost you just mean spirits, yes. Christians do believe in ghosts, because Christianity teaches the existence of spirits.
If by ghosts you mean the spirits of deceased humans who appear to the living, then again yes, Christians believe in ghosts. The Bible records instances of exactly that happening.
It doesn’t tell us how common this experience is, so that’s something we need to look outside the Bible to find out.
And it turns out that—at least if someone grew up in the modern secular west—it’s startlingly common. Basically half the population reports having After Death Communication with a loved one at least once in life.
And there are indications that the figure is actually much higher than that if you survey those who have lived a full life and are near its end.
This is part of God’s plan, and when a departed loved one shows up to give us a message of pastoral comfort to you and say, “I’m okay. I’m happy. Don’t grieve for me”—when they don’t do anything demonic like teach you false doctrine—then you shouldn’t interpret this using a paranoid hermeneutic that assumes they must be a demon.
That’s something that Christian pastors—in particular—should take seriously, as they also have a duty of pastoral care.
It would be irresponsible for a pastor to tell a grieving Christian that their loved one is definitely in hell—when you don’t know that for a fact.
And it’s just as irresponsible to tell a grieving Christian that the loved one who appeared to them and said they are in heaven is also definitely a demon—when there is no evidence of that.
When it comes to Gavin’s video, I’d say it was mixed.
Some of the things he said were really good, but there were also significant problems.
In this video, I’ve sought to be helpful. As it says in Proverbs 27:17,
Proverbs 27:17
Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.
So I’ve sought to be helpful here.
Toward the end of his video, Gavin suggests that he may be doing more videos on related topics, and that’s great. We need more Christians engaging with these subjects!
I would just say that—if he does those videos—he should take his time and do them right.
He should remember—as he said—just how much room Christianity has for the mysterious and, by extension, how little of God’s mystery we understand.
He should not adopt positions that are traditional in his particular group or rely on simplistic exegesis.
Instead, he should think through all options openmindedly and in light of the data we have—including data from the science of parapsychology—rather than relying on pop culture stereotypes.
That’s something I’ve made a special study of, and so—if I can ever be of assistance—including privately—in thinking through these issues, I’m here to help.
After all, iron sharpens iron.
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