It's an exploration of the mysterious, spooky, awe-inspiring realm of Halloween.
This episode looks at Halloween questions through scripture, tradition, reason, and experience—the Wesleyan quadrilateral—to uncover multifaceted answers. We’ll ponder biblical stories, explore John Wesley’s haunted childhood home, and consider contemporary beliefs about life after death. Moreover, we’ll reflect on the role of fear and how it fits into a spiritual life, examining not just the supernatural but the everyday fears that haunt us.
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In this episode:
(00:00) Christian faith, ghosts, hermeneutics, theological interpretation discussed.
(01:46) Do Christians believe in ghosts? And the Wesleyan Quadrilateral
(05:09) The haunting of the Wesley home
(08:52) Fear and the spiritual life
(10:24) What happens when we die?
(11:46) Are there angels and demons?
(14:19) Should Christians celebrate Halloween?
(15:18) Haunted by our pasts
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This episode posted on October 16, 2024
Episode Transcript:
Ryan Dunn [00:00:01]:
Hey there. Welcome to another episode of Compass Finding Spirituality in the Everyday. Do you have your Halloween candy on hand? Is your costume put together? Are the pumpkins carved? Have you started binge watching the 50 greatest horror movies of all time? It's Halloween season, and while Halloween celebrations are a bit taboo around much of the Christian space, I have to admit that I personally hold a fascination with things mysterious, strange, unexplainable, or dark. So Halloween for me becomes a reminder that there are still mysteries to our world. There are things undiscovered and it inspires a sense of awe or wonder. I think the world could use a little bit more awe and wonder. So let's do this with this episode. Let's dive into the awe inspiring and wonder inducing aspects of Halloween.
Ryan Dunn [00:00:53]:
Let's look at some questions the season and its themes may inspire from a Christian and I guess more succinctly a United Methodist perspective, actually, to be transparently succinct. We're really going to approach these questions from a Reverend Ryan Dunn perspective, which is United Methodist, met a Christian, all that, because all of these are gonna be addressed from my personal experiences and interactions with tradition, scripture, and reason. Now I know that many of you tuning in might be skeptical about faith. You may have doubts or questions, and that's okay. Let's talk about some of the mysterious, spooky, and spiritual topics with curiosity and openness like this. Do Christians believe in ghosts? This is a question that has as many answers as there are people. In theology, we utilize an ideal called a hermeneutic to interpret sacred texts and other theological ideas. Now, when I first heard that word in my theological classes, I kept wondering why this Herman individual was such a big deal.
Ryan Dunn [00:02:09]:
That's not based on a person really hermeneutic just refers to a method or principle of interpretation. In the United Methodist Church, we often turn to a fourfold hermeneutic referred to as the Wesleyan quadrilateral. And there was a theologian named Albert Outler, who looked at the writings of John Wesley, who is the founder of Methodism and Outler noted that there seemed to be 4 factors that Wesley leaned into whenever forming theological theories or ideals. And the four factors were 1 scripture, 2 reason, 3 tradition, and 4 experience. Now as a Methodist person, it's natural for me to take these four factors and to try to employ them to answer a question like, do Christians believe in ghosts? So if we start with scripture, we might actually say, yes. We do believe in ghosts. The bible does include stories that could be interpreted as encounters with spirits or ghosts. For example, there's the story of King Saul and the witch of Endor.
Ryan Dunn [00:03:21]:
This is Star Wars reference number 1 by the way, or I guess this is reference number 1 where Star Wars references scripture. Anyway, in this story happens in 1st Samuel 28. In the story, Saul speaks to the spirit of the prophet Samuel who is deceased. There's also, later on in scriptures, a moment when Jesus walks on water and the disciples are terrified and they think that they're seeing a ghost. That's our scriptural reference. And I want to add a personal addendum here. I believe that the Bible makes the claim that Jesus is the word of God. That's what John chapter 1 states.
Ryan Dunn [00:03:58]:
So Jesus is the ultimate statement of God. We encounter Jesus through the Bible then. And I note this as a suggestion that the perfect word that God wrote was Jesus. The Bible is God inspired, but human made. So it's bound by our human limitations of understanding. I believe the Bible is true in so much as the people who wrote it believed what they wrote, but their ways of interpreting their experiences may not be how we would interpret our experiences today. They employed different hermeneutics. Yeah.
Ryan Dunn [00:04:35]:
It comes back around to that. So it's possible that how they recorded their experience may not be how we would record our experiences today, especially when it comes to things like spiritual mediums, such as the witch of vendor. Now, if we want to lean into tradition in regards to the existence of ghosts, and remember, tradition is another one of our 4 fold quadrilateral parts here. If we lean into tradition, we have a fascinating, scintillating story from our Methodist past. You see, John Wesley's childhood home was reportedly haunted. In 17/16, the family began hearing groans and knocks about the house. The activity escalated to phantom footsteps and rattling noises, and then to furniture being moved. Ultimately, there was this exorcist movie type moment when the beds of 1 of the children levitated.
Ryan Dunn [00:05:34]:
The family gave the entity the name of old Jeffrey. Maybe the naming would help diminish their fear, but the events continued. They bought a giant dog, a mastiff in hopes that the dog might scare the entity away, but the dog just hid whenever Jeffrey acted up. Jeffrey wasn't all that terrible though. John's mother, Susanna, told the ghost that she was not to be bothered between 5 and 6 PM because that was prayer time. And apparently, Jeffrey respected the request. Then in 17/17, the haunting abruptly stopped. Now, John was at boarding school during the old Jeffrey infestation, and there's no account of him having direct encounters.
Ryan Dunn [00:06:15]:
But John did believe in ghosts and thought that they might be evidence of a spiritual world. And therefore that might be evidence of God. I don't see a lot of Christianity as a whole, including the United Methodist church endorsing today, a belief in ghosts, at least not in the way that we think of them in pop culture. Instead, we focus in the Christian world on what happens after death. United Methodist believe in resurrection and eternal life. We trust in God's promise that death is not the end. And in that sense, our belief in life after death, doesn't leave a lot of room for lingering spirits on earth, at least in not in the temporal moment or the physical sense reading through Paul's thoughts in the new Testament, we can infer his belief was that people died and then they awoke in the resurrection. And to me, that sounds a bit like what we might encounter under anesthetic we're awake and then we're awake again.
Ryan Dunn [00:07:15]:
Right? Paul might say we're alive and then we're alive again. Well, that doesn't leave room for individual spirits to interact with the living. In the meantime, that said there are Christian beliefs about the spiritual or, I'm sorry about the super natural things like angels, demons, and spiritual forces. And it's important to acknowledge that for some people feeling a presence or experiencing something supernatural might be a way they process grief or loss, and that doesn't make that feeling any less real. We carry people with us. And so we do feel them even after they've departed United Methodism, like much of Christianity leaves room for mystery. Not everything is easily explained. And that's okay.
Ryan Dunn [00:08:05]:
In my experience, the closest I've come to a coastly encounter was staying overnight in an old cabin and just feeling uneasy, but there were not manifestations, no strange knocks, no levitating beds in my experience, but I was afraid. So let's talk about the spirituality of fear. Fear is a ginormous part of Halloween. Right? We tell scary stories. We go through haunted houses and watch horror movies, but fear is also something that we deal with in the everyday, whether that's a fear of the future or a fear of failure, a fear of being wrong, a fear of something supernatural, or a fear of loss. So how does fear fit into a spiritual life? Again, as United Methodists, we believe that fear doesn't have to control us. There's a well known verse in the Bible that says, there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. In other words, when we trust in God's love for us, that love is stronger than any fear that we might feel.
Ryan Dunn [00:09:17]:
But here's the thing. Having that faith in that love isn't about pretending that we're never afraid. It's about finding courage in the midst of fear. It's about trusting that we're not alone even when life gets overwhelming. Maybe the ghosts that we're really scared of aren't the ones in haunted houses, but they're the fears that haunt us every day. Things like insecurity, anger, or regret. And in the Christian faith, there's a promise that we're not facing those things alone. There's also, again, the promise of resurrection, and that promise means that the thing that we're facing right now is not the end thing.
Ryan Dunn [00:09:58]:
Revelation talks about a reality in which there's no more crying, suffering, or pain. All the old ways are gone or the former things have passed away. It's a vision of life set to rights. This is a very hopeful vision. Let's then consider death. One of these things that we might be afraid of. Our question becomes, what happens after we die? Our fear is centered on questions about what comes next. Halloween often gets us thinking about death in the afterlife, but in a very spooky shadowy way, Christians believe that death is not the final word.
Ryan Dunn [00:10:40]:
United Methodists hold onto the hope of resurrection just as Jesus was resurrected. We believe in eternal life. In other words, death is a transition into something deeper, something beyond what we can see in the here and now. Some may characterize that as living on in heaven. Some might suggest that we will be resurrected physically just as Jesus was, but in a perfected universe where all is set to rights, but, and this is key for spiritual seekers like you. What does that actually look like to be resurrected? Well, that's a mystery. We don't claim to have all the answers. The United Methodist perspective is more focused on living a meaningful, faithful life.
Ryan Dunn [00:11:22]:
Now it's about trusting that whatever comes next, God's love holds us. So the only thing I can claim with certainty is that God continues to love us even after our time in this temporal world is up. Now that makes me wonder about planes of existence beyond what we experience in the world. Are there other planes of existence on top of this one where angels and demons and spiritual forces are at work? These are real concepts in the Christian faith, and you'll find them mentioned in the Bible, but they may often be misunderstood or sensationalized. For example, there are a couple words in the Bible that we translate into English as angel. One of those words, Malick. Oh, this is the 2nd star wars reference because in nights of the old Republic, there's Darth Malick, which may mean messenger. And in this case, one of the words that we translate out of the Bible was originally written as Malek.
Ryan Dunn [00:12:24]:
And that means messenger. We translate that often into angel. When someone is receiving a message from God, then sometimes the suggestion is that this is coming through an angel though. They may, that may not have been the case. They just received a message from God. But in other cases, the suggestion is that real entities take action. Like when angels free Paul from prison for United Methodist angels are seen as messengers of God, sometimes playing a role in human events, but they're not again, the pop culture versions with halos and wings and then demons. Well, the Christian tradition acknowledges the presence of evil in the world, but it's not necessarily the horned creatures that you see on TV or that are taking possession of people.
Ryan Dunn [00:13:10]:
Instead, it's the more subtle insidious ways that hatred division and cruelty take root in our lives and world. Personally, I think attributing evil happenings to supernatural forces sometimes becomes a cop out. It's like comedian flip Wilson used to say the devil made me do it. Truthfully, we're compliant in our own acts of evil. When we ignore the needy among us or we disparage the vulnerable, that's us. I don't think that some evil personality is compelling our behavior. The good news is that love God's love is more powerful than any force of evil. United Methodists believe in working for justice, peace, and reconciliation as a way of overcoming evil in the world.
Ryan Dunn [00:14:01]:
So you don't have to be a perfect person of faith to do that work. And, yeah, you can also beat down the demons of the world. Now many Christians abstain from Halloween because of the proliferation of demonic imagery. So you might be wondering, should Christians celebrate Halloween? Isn't it kind of, you know, unholy? Well, here's the United Methodist take. Halloween can be fun. It's an opportunity for community, creativity, and connection. But we also recognize that Halloween has its roots in the Christian calendar. It's followed by All Saints Day, a day when we remember and celebrate the lives of those who have passed on.
Ryan Dunn [00:14:44]:
People who have influenced in faith, encouraged us and inspired us in our own spiritual journeys. So from a United Methodist perspective, celebrating Halloween, isn't about glorifying evil is about facing our fears, honoring those who came before us and reminding ourselves that love and life has the final word. And also it's not compulsory or mandatory. You don't have to do it. I want to end on this thought. Many of us feel haunted, not by ghosts, but instead by our past. There are regrets, mistakes, things we wish we'd done differently. Right? Those are the things which haunt us.
Ryan Dunn [00:15:25]:
Again, for United Methodist, forgiveness is a central part of our faith. It's not about denying what happened, but about recognizing that we can be made new. In our tradition, grace is a big thing. Grace means that we are loved not because we're perfect, but because God's love is unconditional. God loves us. There's nothing we can do about it. There's hope in that. Whatever might be haunting you from your past, there's a way forward.
Ryan Dunn [00:15:56]:
Now, as you celebrate this spooky season, I invite you to think about these deeper spiritual questions. What's haunting you? Where can you find hope and how might faith, however mysterious it seems help you face the unknown. Thanks for joining me in this Halloween themed episode of compass. If you're interested in exploring more questions like this, subscribe to the podcast. New episodes of compass come out every other Wednesday. My name is Ryan Dunn. Compass is a production of United Methodist Communications. Big thanks to the whole team who make this possible.
Ryan Dunn [00:16:32]:
I'll chat at you again soon. In the meantime, enjoy your fall season and peace to you.
