Cosmic Warfare, Part I

Spitting at the Devil, Swearing Allegiance to Christ

The cosmic implications of baptism have been sadly occluded in our modern times.  This is a grave weakness in our contemporary understanding of the Christian faith.  Secularism has demoted and devalued the cosmic invisible realities in the mind of many Christians.  Even as the Bible speaks of the "powers of the air" and traces their demonic connections, we are more comfortable with material causes and effects. 

David Bentley Hart describes the ritual of baptism in the early Church--how it enacted the real cosmic battle and drama.

Whether brief or protracted, however, the 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. . . .

Ideally--again, making allowances for variations in local customs and for the unpredictability of particular circumstances--one's baptism would come on Easter eve, during the midnight vigil.  At the appointed hour, the baptizand (the person to be baptised) would depart the church for the baptistery, which typically housed a large baptismal pool or (if possible) flowing stream.  There, in the semidarkness of that place, he or she would disrobe and --amid a host of blessings, exhortation, unctions and prayers--descend naked into the waters, to be immersed three times by the bishop, in the name first of the Father, then of the Son, and finally of the Holy Spirit. . . .

Perhaps the most crucial feature of the rite, however--at least, for understanding what baptism meant for the convert from paganism--occurred before the catechumen's descent into the font: . . . he or she would turn to face the west (the land of evening, and so symbolically the realm of all darkness, cosmic and spiritual), submit to a rather forcibly phrased exorcism, and then clearly renounce--indeed, revile and, quite literally, spit at--the devil and the devil's ministers.  Then he or she would turn to face the east (the land or morning and of light) to confess total faith in, and promise complete allegiance to, Christ. 

This was by no means mere ritual spectacle; it was an actual and, so to speak, legally binding transference of fealty from one master to another. . . . In thus turning one's back upon, rejecting, and abusing the devil, one was also repudiating the gods to whose service one had hitherto been indentured, and was doing so with a kind of triumphant contempt; in confessing Christ, one was entrusting oneself to the invincible conqueror who had defeated death, despoiled hell of its hostages, subdued the "powers of the air," and been raised up the Lord of history. 
(David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009], p. 112,3.)

It is sadly ironic that the dispossession of the Devil over the Western nations as the Gospel spread was replaced by a more subtle and malevolent lie--to the effect that the Devil does not exist at all, but was a fairy-story to frighten children and the illiterate. 

This was a foolish error that the early Church could not make.  In every town and in many groves in the countryside, ubiquitous altars to pagan gods confronted Christians daily of the Devil's presence.  Repeated public celebrations, festivals and rituals, complete with sacrificial meals, structured the monthly calendar.  The common person was beholden to these beliefs, festivals, and ritual for life itself--for much of the commerce, labour, trade, and economically sustaining work revolved around the gods and their devotion. 

In our days, civic concern and public money may be devoted to facilities such as sports stadia and spectacles such as Rugby World Cups.  Public officials and government justify the expense as "creating wealth" for all.  Fortunately, our economies represent two millennia of divine blessing and so we easily see through the faux promises and public waste.  But in the Roman world of the first and second centuries most economic activity revolved around the gods and acts of devotion.  The population was in thrall to the demons. 

Thus, when a person became a Christian, the Church took seriously the biblical precept that he has passed out of the kingdom of darkness and entered the kingdom of light.  The rituals of baptism reinforced this truth.  Whilst not approbating the particular rituals (which aped pagan practices far too much for our liking and went way beyond biblical prescriptions) it nevertheless remains essential that we recover the Christian truths of the cosmic realities of death to the world and of new life in Christ.  Those realities turn around being delivered from a malicious master and being bound over as a bond-servant to the Lord Jesus Christ; of escaping and rejecting the kingdom of darkness and enlisting in the Kingdom of our Lord; and of being sworn as a fellow soldier in the armies of the Lord.