Does Daniel Duval Practice Spirit Release? A Clear Answer

A small number of people have said that what Bride Ministries and Daniel Duval call deliverance is really a New Age practice wearing a Christian label. The claim is that this is "spirit release" from the New Age world, simply renamed. It is a fair question to raise, and it deserves a clear and honest answer.

If you came here a little shaken by something you read or watched, take a breath. This is worth looking at calmly, and you are welcome to weigh it for yourself. Here is the plain answer first. Daniel Duval has never studied New Age spirit release. He does not practice it, and he does not teach it. The work that happens in Bride Ministries does not come from the New Age. It comes from Scripture, and our deliverance techniques are executed with the power of Jesus Christ.

The best way to show you is not to argue about words. It is to show you what actually happens in the room, next to what happens in the New Age version. And there is one more thing worth saying up front, because most people never hear it: Bride Ministries is one of the places people come to get free from the New Age, not to get entangled deeper into it.

You can understand how someone might blur the two together. Both talk about an unseen spiritual world. Both deal with something real that is attached to a person and needs to leave. However, when actually understood, the approaches couldn't be more different. It takes intentional ignorance of the facts to conflate the two approaches.

Any suggested resemblance ends the moment you ask two simple questions. What is actually done to the person? And where does the power come from? Those two questions pull the practices apart completely. Keep them in mind, because everything below comes back to them.

The clearest way to see the difference is to set the two side by side. Here is what each one actually does:

New Age spirit release is built on hypnosis, trances, and past life regression, and it works by making contact with a spirit and treating it as a guide. The founders of the practice are open about this. The method was developed in the 1970s and 1980s by Edith Fiore and William Baldwin, and it is rooted in past life regression and contact with spirit beings.

Bride Ministries does the opposite. No one is hypnotized. No one is put in a trance. There are no drugs used. The person stays fully awake the whole time. Release of demonic bondages are achieved through prayers in the name of Jesus. While there may be some interrogation involved in a deliverance session, as modeled by Jesus in dealing with legion (Mark 5:1-13), the spirit is not consulted as an advisor. If it is interrogated at all, it will only be for the purpose of learning any necessary information to promptly execute a deliverance. Ultimately, it will be dealt with harshly, sternly and removed in the name of Jesus. Often, deliverance will involve confession and repentance, practices that all Christians should understand from a surface reading of the Bible.

Let us address a follow-up question. If a spirit is ever spoken to before it is removed, isn't that the same as talking to spirits in the New Age? It is not. A medium summons a spirit and lets it speak through them. Deliverance commands a spirit that is already there to go. A Medium does not involve Jesus. A deliverance minister does everything through the power of Jesus.

One technique opens a spiritual door and invites a spirit in. The other closes a spiritual door and sends a spirit out. They are not two versions of the same thing. They are opposite.

The biggest difference concerns the power source.

New Age spirit release does not operate through the name or power of Jesus. Bride Ministries boldly preaches Jesus Christ as the Savior of the world, fully God and fully Man. We preach that Jesus died and resurrected to reconcile fallen mankind to the Father, and that he has the keys of Hades and Death. His name is the name above every name. This Jesus is the power source of the deliverance we execute and train in. That is not a small detail, it is the whole thing. It is impossible to take the name of Jesus out of what Bride Ministries does.

Daniel Duval's own teaching centers on this. In Pummel the Devil, he writes that "the name of Jesus is a powerful weapon. His name commands respect in the spirit world. His name is the name above every name." That is the engine of the whole practice. It is also the main thing that New Age spirit release does not embrace.

It does, and that warning actually helps make the point.

The Bible takes the spirit world seriously. It treats demonic spirits as real, not as superstition.

And it is just as serious about how a person is meant to deal with them. It plainly forbids the very method the New Age version uses, which is making contact with a spirit and consulting it:

Yet the same Bible tells believers to cast demons out in the name of Jesus:

Read those together and the picture is clear. Scripture does not lump the two practices together. It forbids one and commands the other. Bride Ministries is doing the one the Bible commands.

Deliverance can affect different aspects of a person's design. Terms like "soul" "spirit" and "entity" are shared across belief systems. When these terms are used in a context people haven't studied or don't fully understand, conflation is infinitely possible. Nothing about Daniel Duval's framework of understanding human design or its interaction with the spirit world is derived from New Age doctrines. In fact, many New Age frameworks are gleaned from the Kabbalistic interpretation of the five levels of soul consciousness. Daniel Duval speaks firmly against Kabbalah and its influences. The framework through which Daniel Duval and Bride Ministries understand the design of man is not borrowed from the New Age. It comes from the Bible. Scripture describes a person as having three parts: spirit, soul, and body.

The seat of human intuition is the heart, which becomes the center of man, the subconscious, and the place of interface between body, soul and spirit (Hebrews 4:12). This is the biblical way to understand human design, drawn straight from Apostle Paul's own words. Daniel Duval has taught these verses for years. In Higher Dimensions, he writes that "according to the Bible, we are made up of three major components. The soul is one of these three components, the other two being the body and the spirit." That is the source. It is a Bible verse, not a New Age manual.

Here is what turns the whole thing around, and it is the most important part.

Bride Ministries is not a Christian copy of New Age spirit release. It is one of the places people come to get free from it. After more than a decade of sitting with people who came out of these exact practices, this ministry has seen the negative outcomes of New Age practices. Some of the heaviest bondage shows up in people who once opened a door through hypnosis, a trance, channeling, or past life work. The sad part is that many of these people were simply looking for peace, for help, or for answers, but found something else instead. Bride Ministries does not teach those practices. We help people get free of them, in the name of Jesus.

So if the claim worried you, here is a gentle question to sit with. What dark spirit would point people to the one name it is forced to bow to? The accusation says a demon arranged all of this to deceive you. But the entire practice rises and falls on lifting up Jesus, the name every spirit in heaven, on earth, and under the earth has to obey.

You are not too far gone, and you are not alone in sorting this out. If the freedom described here is what you are looking for, the free BMI Healing Assessment takes about two minutes and points you to the right next step.