Cosmic Warfare, Part II

The Exhilaration and the Scandal

The early Christians understood they were involved in a cosmic battle between the forces of evil--forces which were personal, albeit finite, yet much more powerful than they--and the newly enthroned King of all kings, the Lord Jesus Christ.  They understood that when they were converted to Christ out of paganism both they and their households were delivered from captivity to Satan to a captivity to Christ.  But captivity to Christ meant untrammelled goodness and blessing; it meant abundant, eternal life. 

Modern Christians, deeply influenced by the prevailing secular materialism of the West, tend to gloss over expressions in Scripture which teach just such a cosmology of redemption.  David Bentley Hart summarises the biblical perspective of the cosmological battle:

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 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.

(T)o renounce one's bonds to these beings was an act of cosmic rebellion, a declaration that one had been emancipated from (in the language of John's Gospel) "the prince of this world" or (in the somewhat 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. [David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009),  p.113f.]

In our materialist culture such biblical expressions tend to be viewed as metaphorical or hyperbolic, or even superstitious.  Even faithful Christians these days tend to parse them into referring to personal struggles against sin.  It is uncomfortable to believe in such a biblical cosmos in a time of vaunted scientism.  The more platonically influenced amongst us would artfully see reference to politics, the state, or the realms of coercion.  All the while we reveal thereby how subtlely we have drunk at the wells of Unbelief and how we have been conformed to the mould of our secular materialist world. 

When we succumb to such temptations, however, we diminish the power of Christ's redemption itself--something which Paul prayed ought not happen to the Ephesian Christians (and, therefore, to us who are their descendants) in Ephesians 1: 17-23.  We also miss the exhilaration of the divine call to battle. 

Again, given the perspective of our age, we can scarcely avoid reading such language as mythological, thus reducing its import from cosmic to more personal or political dimensions.  In so doing, however, we fail to grasp the scandal and exhilaration of early Christianity.  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--though 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 Christ 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 of his 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 of and a co-heir to a "Kingdom not of this world," and henceforth no more than a resident alien in the "earthly city." [Ibid.]

Without fail, the kingdoms of this world would progressively become the Kingdom of our Christ (Revelation 5:9,10 & 11:15).  Christians were enlisted into the armies of the Lord of hosts to see it come to pass.