I’m a charismatic, and an occasionally whacky one. It’s not uncommon for people in my circles to highlight the importance of a ‘spiritual realm’ to how we understand the world.
That’s where it can start to go off the rails. There are many mad things said under that heading, but it’s having a resurgence in non-charismatic circles too: those who are keen to remind us that demons are real and that’s normal Christianity are on the rise and pushing back against the latent modernism that all of us who grew up post-industrial revolution imbibe with our mother’s milk.
I agree, demons are real, as are angels. We can be, as Lewis famously said, easily be either too concerned and too unconcerned with them. We all think we’re in the Goldilocks zone. The powers, those that have rebelled against the Lord and those that still follow him, are writ large on the pages of scripture. Yes, they are associated with stars, and dragons, and a bunch of other aspects of the Old Testament’s deep weird. Yes, they can be personal, and they can be systemic.
I should probably talk about all that more at some point, as well as the powers that haven’t rebelled, though I think it’s easy to get obsessed. In this post I want to get a something more foundational. We’re going to try and do some metaphysics in less than a thousand words. In the first paragraph I mentioned ‘a spiritual realm.’ I don’t think that’s an accurate term.
It’s common to talk about the spiritual as separate from us and then oppose it to something. That might be the ‘physical’ or it might be ‘the world’ or it might be ‘the natural.’ I probably hear ‘the natural’ most often. I don’t think that’s right, because it implies a distinction between the supernatural and the natural that I don’t think is real.
The Bible opposes flesh and spirit, particularly within the human person, and I think we extrapolate from that in an unwarranted direction. We assume that the ‘supernatural’ must exist ‘out there’ separate from us as though we weren’t ‘spiritual’ too. This is a modern assumption, it’s a (sort of) dualism which I think gets us on the wrong foot. The best versions of it do describe humans as (sort of) half spiritual and half natural. Even that is still dualism; I suspect extrapolating from our Christology: if Jesus is God and Man then perhaps we are nature and supernature. That doesn’t follow.
My biggest problem with it is the poetic one. I don’t understand how you can walk along looking at the sky, painted just for you, and not think that it is ‘supernatural.’ I don’t understand why we think Angels, the administrators of the cosmos, are not ‘natural.’ They aren’t physical, sure, but neither is hope and that’s real enough to cut you.
There is a distinction, of course, and it’s one the Bible describes as ‘seen and unseen’ (2 Corinthians 4). Angels aren’t seen. The sky is, though I wonder sometimes; how can people not believe that there’s a God who loves them when they live under the sky? You and I are seen. But it’s not like some of them are ‘spiritual’ and some aren’t. The so-called spiritual is natural.
What I mean by this is two complementary things:
First, if the world is made by God; spoken by the Father with the word that is the Son and the breath that is the Spirit, then everything you’ve encountered, both mountains and angelic powers, are a poem from the Father to the Son. The world is a gift, first to Christ and then to us. Nothing is incidental. Everything resounds with the rhythm of the song; everything tells the story. The world matters.
If we take the spiritual/natural distinction too far we’ll end up in a world where either there’s no point in feeding the poor because only spirit matters, or where we can embrace any political methods we like to achieve ‘spiritual’ ends. Stuff matters. Matter matters. Dragons aren’t less natural than your taxes because you can’t see them (honestly your taxes might be a dragon to slay). Trees aren’t less spiritual because you can plant them and tend them. The most ‘supernatural’ parts of the Bible are a garden built around two trees at the beginning, and a city with river and tree at the end.
Second, if the world to come is physical, and it profoundly is, then we aim ourselves in the wrong direction when we elevate ‘spirit’ to the point of assuming that ‘heaven when you die’ is the point of life rather than ‘heaven when you die’ being our sabbath rest in the presence of Jesus before we rise again and go to our work administering the new earth, ruling cities (Luke 19), and judging angels (1 Corinthians 6). Rest in peace and rise in glory.
Reject dualism, embrace reality: everything is made by God. Some of the creation has rejected him. Other parts of creation have been twisted and turned in on themselves by our sin. We have made marvels, and we have made the mercurial madness of minds sick on rebellion.
You don’t need to embrace the supernatural as some separate thing, it’s all around you. You have always been engaging with the unseen. Reality is not flat, but textured, and sometimes scary. Here be dragons was not just because they didn’t know what was on that bit of the map. And, the earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it. It is his footstool. It’s his world. It runs on his rules.
Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash
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