Michael Heiser

Dr. Michael S. Heiser in His Own Words

I’m a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (M.A., Ancient History) and the University of Wisconsin- Madison (M.A., Ph.D., Hebrew Bible and Semitic Studies). I have a dozen years of classroom teaching experience on the college level and another ten in distance education. I’m currently a Scholar-in-Residence at Logos Bible Software, a company that produces ancient text databases and other digital resources for study of the ancient world and biblical studies. You can get a more detailed answer to my academic background by reading through my CV.

Basics

While I’m not anti-creedal or opposed to denominations, I am opposed to using creeds and denominational preferences to filter the Bible. Creeds are selective, historically-conditioned, limited by their context and the resources available to their formulators, and often agenda-driven. I’m more concerned with what the text says and what it can sustain in terms of interpretation than I am with creeds and mission statements. Every post-first century religious context is foreign to the Bible, and therefore is not the context of the Bible. The right context for interpreting the Bible is the context that produced it — the worldview and cognitive frame of reference of the biblical writers. (Here’s a video that explains what I mean). I’m a trained biblical scholar, but I also have what I think is a healthy disdain for the trendiness of academia and its own brand of self-assured dogmatics. I’d be a happier guy if every graduate student in biblical studies and theology was forced to take courses in logic and critical thinking. I once said that out loud in a doctoral class. I didn’t win hearts and minds that day.