War of the Worlds

 Recovering Cosmic Christianity

Conversion and baptism were momentous events for early Christians.  Both involved a rejection of one earthly realm and an entering of another earthly realm that was now also a heavenly realm--the power of God and His Christ falling upon the earth, to establish His kingdom here.

Here is David Bentley Hart's description:

To become a Christian was to renounce a very great deal of what one had known and been to that point, in order to be joined to a new reality, the demands of which were absolute; it was to depart from one world, with an irrevocable finality, and to enter another. . . .

(T)he period of one's preparation for baptism could not conclude until one had been taught the story of redemption: how once all men and women had labored as slaves in the household of death, prisoners of the devil, sold into bondage to Hades, languishing in ignorance of their true home; and how Christ had come to set the prisoners free and had, by his death and resurrection, invaded the kingdom of our captor and overthrown it, vanquishing the power of sin and death in us, shattering the gates of hell, and plundering the devil of his captives. . . .

We today are probably somewhat prone to forget that, though the early Christians did indeed regard the gods of the pagan order as false gods, they did not necessarily understand this to mean simply that these gods were unreal; they understood it to mean that the gods were deceivers.  Behind the pieties of the pagan world, Christians believed, lurked forces of great cruelty and guile: demons, malign elemental spirits, occult agencies masquerading as divinities, exploiting the human yearning for God, and working to thwart the designs of God, in order to bind humanity in slavery to darkness, ignorance, and death.

And to renounce one's bonds to these beings was an act of cosmic rebellion, a declaration taht one had been emancipated from (in the language of John's Gospel) "the prince of this world" or (in the someone more disturbing language of II Corinthians) "the god of this world".  In its fallen state, the cosmos lies under the reign of evil (I John 5:19), but Christ came to save the world, to lead "captivity captive" (Ephesians 4:8) and to overthrow the empire of those "thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers" (Colossians 1:16, I Corinthians 2:8, Ephesians 1:21, 3:10) and "rulers on high" (Ephesians 6:12) that have imprisoned creation in corruption and evil. . . .

These thrones and powers and principalities and so forth were not merely earthly princes or empires (though princes and empires served their ends); much less were they vague abstractions; they were, according to Jewish Apocalyptic tradition, the angelic governors of the nations, the celestial "archons", the often mutinous legions of the air, who--thought they might be worshipped as gods, and might in themselves be both mighty and dreadful--were only creatures of the one true God.  It was from the tyranny of these powers on high that Chrsit had come to set creation free.  And so the life of faith was, for the early church, before all else, spiritual warfare, waged between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of this fallen world, and every Christian on the day o fhis or her baptism had been conscripted into that struggle on the side of Christ.  From that point on, he or she was both a subject and a co-heir to a "kingdom not of this world", and henceforth no more than a resident alien in the "earthly city".  [David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies,  (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p.113f.

The fact that so many modern Christians in the West, if they think about such scriptural passages at all, regard them as symbolic or literary images, rather than the literal truth (such things can no longer be believed in a "rationally" scientific materialistic age) tells us just how much ground the ancient demons have regained in the West.

The right response, however, is not fear, but faith.  As Luther put it, "The prince of darkness grim, we tremble not for him.  His rage we can endure, for lo, his doom is sure.  One little word will fell him."  Churches in the West must also recover the cosmic significance--with all its implications--of conversion and being baptised into the household of faith.