The Unseen World - Part 1: The Past Darkness

1. The Reality of the Unseen World

"For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places."

[Ephesians 6:12] 

As a kid, I was always interested in and drawn to things like traditional superstitions of the Old South, stories about my great aunt who lived in a haunted house, even that weird feeling you sometimes get walking alone in the woods, that you've silently entered something else's domain. These always seemed like little doors or invitations into a wider reality, yet one that seemed both confirming of, and not allowed by, my faith. If the Bible is true, and God is real, then for a Westerner it seems like any evidence for the existence of the supernatural is evidence for faith. (A point we'll return to later) Yet at the same time, pursuing knowledge of the more darkly mysterious side of reality seemed to lead quickly in unwise directions, and felt like a kind of secretive lure away from God.

Many years later, after coming to live in Taiwan, I have slowly realized that for the majority of people here, the unseen world was not a mysterious possibility but a part of their daily life. They were surrounded by reminders and habits that displayed this. Spending my youth in the rural American South had prepared me for this perhaps better than most Westerners, but still I had not experienced anything on this level: Daoist trigram mirrors over doors, fear over picking up dropped money that could be a lure for ghost-marriage, incense sticks offered not only at temples but at the front doors of apartment buildings, people burning paper money on street corners in ubiquitous metal cans designed specifically for that purpose, gnarly-rooted sacred trees encircled with red cords, pendants and amulets worn around the necks of both adults and children.

These tables loaded with snacks, incense, and spirit money are an offering
to appease any harmful ancestral spirits which may be in the area 

And this is not some kind of remote tribal area. Taiwan is a technologically advanced island nation with more smartphones than people, with convenience stores where you can pay your bills and buy concert tickets and send packages and pay for it all with a metro card, and where green energy and smart cities are becoming a reality more quickly than for most of the United States.
Life in Taiwan has taught me that the unseen world does not flee just because technology progresses.

Yet most Americans do not consider an unseen world in their day to day life. The excluded middle, the part of reality which touches the spirit world yet remains connect to our own as well, is something many traditional cultures fear and give great importance to, yet remains ignored if not disbelieved in by most Westerners. There are various philosophical reasons for why the West moved away from this, cartesian dualism being one, and others will be discussed below.
But it's a worldview-level difference, which is true for most conservative evangelicals. (Charismatic or Pentacostal churches would be a halfway exception) We leap from our visible surroundings to God on His throne and rarely consider that anything lies in between, and find more or less all parts of the Bible that mention non-scientific phenomenon to be something that has to be taken on faith, as evidence for the unseen world is not exactly a common phenomenon (Not like it is in some parts of the world. When spiritual fear would drive people to Church, the Enemy pretends not to exist. When spiritual fear drives people to ally with darkness, the Enemy is quite active).

For most Westerners, though, with no context of or seemingly much evidence for a supernatural world we inhabit prior to death, our faith becomes focused on a supernatural world which exists after death, but our Christian life in the meantime becomes very intellectualized, a set of propositions to which we give assent and which we defend from attack by means of logic and reasoned debate and the principles of God's revelation to us. Which is good, and necessary, but it leaves out a whole giant piece of reality, which many other cultures are quite concerned about, and which local religions exist to deal with. When we bump into people from those religions, we find that they are not interested in our logical and reasoned debate, since religion for them is a matter of the unseen reality that affects their lives, yet they find Christians have little to say about this.

To be sure, many Americans have inherited, or brought with them from their family's origin countries, certain beliefs or superstitions, perhaps reduced to a rote family tradition, which harken back to an older time. And the older, geographically-established American subcultures, places like rural New England or the Appalachians, have their own local folk culture. Folk culture always knows about the unseen world. It may have confused, exaggerated, or purely fanciful explanations for it, but there is a tacit acknowledgment there that puts them ahead of we moderns who think ourselves clever for disbelieving in evil spirits but talking about "bad vibes."

(Ironically, despite disbelieving in this "middle world," the American church still struggles to avoid a Christian folk religion mentality, for which this article is a decent introduction)

2. The Unseen World vs. Fantasy vs. Folk Tradition, for Christians

A close reading of the Bible shows us that this unseen world is both acknowledged and treated critically as well. We have both acknowledgments that behind idols are spiritual forces of darkness, and sarcasm about how an idol is nothing but the other half of the wood the idol maker cooked his food with. (Interestingly, my purely subjective experience in Taiwan has the same dichotomy--some temples feel dark and disturbing on the spiritual level, others like a scam to fool sincere people)

I am not suggesting that Christians are supposed to accept wholesale the claims of various cultures regarding the unseen reality around us. From selkies frolicking in an Irish cove while keeping an eye on their seal skins to the gates of Chinese hell that are thought to open at the beginning of Ghost Month, there are innumerable beliefs about the unseen world across human culture. We don't need to give specific credence to any of them in particular, but we should recognize that the idea of an unseen reality in this life has been something humans always knew, and that every culture likes to make up stories about it does not mean it's not real any more than sci-fi proves that space travel never really happened.

So why did Christendom seem to move away from all this interest in the unseen world? How did Christians follow along with this idea of a material world yet retain a belief in high heaven and God on His throne? Part of the reason may be that the Bible's take on the unseen world is much darker than much of what we find in popular folk culture, or perhaps we could say it is less balanced.

We don't find any mention in scripture of unseen forces doing what C.S.Lewis once called "minding their own business." There are no little sprites or fairies just doing their own thing. If anything like the vast number of folk culture entities and creatures have ever existed, Genesis is almost entirely silent about them (the Nephilim being a sort of intriguing exception), yet it speaks of angels and demons quite straightforwardly. The part of reality that scripture is concerned with, visible or invisible, is a conflict between God and the enemies of God, and how God's redemptive plan plays out from the beginning to end of human history. Lewis and some of his friends actually seemed to mourn this fact, as expressed in his novel That Hideous Strength by Dr. Dimble at one point, that all of reality was getting caught up into the all-encompassing battle between Good and Evil. The old "elf land" or that part of the unseen world which seemed to be an almost neutral territory, was passing away, or had already done so, and now everything was drawing near to the final cosmic battle of Good and Evil; everything had to take a side, in the end. (Current and prolific author John C. Wright's Moth and Cobweb series deals with this as well--his "twilight world" characters begin to find themselves caught up in a war between light and darkness, and it becomes obvious that there is no middle ground to hesitate on for long)

As a tradition, however, even elves--which Tolkien sort of baptized into the noble Eldar--were thought of in a somewhat darker fashion before Tolkien wrote about High Elves, filled with the light of Valinor, and it became a new archetype. Before then elves and other creatures of the "middle world" had been mostly thought of as capricious beings, prone to stealing from people and playing tricks on them; if not fully bent on evil, yet also the sorts of beings which could not endure the sound of a church bell. There is a whole realm of fantasy, derived from folk traditions, of creatures which could not stay in "Old England" after the Church arrived and became established. Rudyard Kipling portrays this with a sort of nostalgic wistfulness in the story Dymchurch Flit, showing that same desire of Lewis, that what of that old world could not baptized need not be entirely banished. (But while I can feel their wistfulness strongly as expressed in their writings, I suspect it's a very sneaky form of temptation that certain well-educated people are susceptible to, rather like our "pet sins" like narrowly-focused gluttony that are so hard to confess and get rid of because they seem innocuous)

Due to this complicated idea present in English-speaking culture (I think the West in general, but I have not studied the question in other languages) that the "grey area" or twilight world, the Old things, must go away when the light of the gospel has arrived, we can see one way that the Church wasn't putting up much of a fight to retain a biblical concept of the unseen world. The entire folk tradition was relegated to anthropological studies as both the advent of the Church and the industrial revolution made it both unrighteous and increasingly irrelevant. Thus in the West, we stopped thinking about the world in terms of even having this unseen "middle" realm. 

In Taiwan, the same thing is happening in churches to a problematic degree--people either want to turn off that side of reality which represents their old spiritual bondage, or they found it more natural to become Christians because they never put much stock in traditional religion to begin with. That makes it challenging for many Taiwanese believers to share their faith incarnationally with other Taiwanese who still follow the old traditions.

3. The Unseen World in Scripture: Earth as Enemy-Occupied Territory

When we look at scripture's portrayal of the unseen world, which possesses not an ounce of the (possibly wrongful) sense of nostalgia we find in the authors I mentioned above, we learn that we live in a wider, and darker, world than we have typically been willing to recognize. The Bible was written by people who lived in that world and knew it, and it is full of commands to stop serving those unseen powers and worship God alone. Every idol and pagan altar--and even those "high places and spreading trees" I didn't understand about before I lived in Taiwan, with its divine trees and temples or shrines at every picturesque elevated spot--was a portal to that unseen world which affected all areas of life, and still is considered to do so in many parts of the Old World where traditional folk culture survives.

As I mentioned above, the world peopled lived in was all the folk world, once upon a time, usually before the gospel had been there long. Grimm's Fairy Tales, at least in their original conception, harken back to a time when Germans considered the forest to be full of portals to the unseen world--with its dark silent valleys, mysterious rings of mushrooms, ominous standing stones, and hollow halls beneath the fells. For Celtic peoples, the original feasting and rituals at the end of Autumn, which have partially continued and partially re-emerged as Halloween, were originally an open recognition of the dark side of that other world, and a simultaneous attempt to rebuff and appease it. (That doesn't necessarily mean holidays with an original pre-christian influence are harmful, as I wrote about Christmas a while back)

Once, that dark unseen world reigned supreme on earth. G.K.Chesterton has written powerfully in the Everlasting Man about that Old World, which he identifies with Carthage, the Canaanite superpower finally utterly defeated by Rome (Carthago Delenda Est!) 140 years before the coming of Christ. With its dark rituals and infant sacrifices to Moloch lying underneath all the trading and sea voyaging, Chesterton argues, Carthage was the final culmination of a kind of hellish pragmatism which was happy to cooperate with dark powers of the unseen world to any level of depravity, so long as it achieved the desired results. (This article is a decent brief summary of Chesterton's take on what was hanging in the balance with Rome vs Carthage, and draws a tragic parallel between infant sacrifice and the abortion industry)

We can catch a glimpse of that darker world here and there throughout scripture, often in verses we gloss over or find confusing as modern Americans. One chilling example is 2 Kings 3:27, when Israel's armies have defeated and cornered a pagan king, who in desperation performs a ritualistic sacrifice of his own firstborn son, and summons wrath against Israel, who retreat and head back home.

When the king of Moab saw that the battle was too fierce for him, he took with him 700 men who drew swords, to break through to the king of Edom; but they could not. Then he took his oldest son who was to reign in his place, and offered him as a burnt offering on the wall. And there came great wrath against Israel, and they departed from him and returned to their own land. [2 Kings 3:26-27]

Some well-meaning commentators trying to make sense of the account miss the point and say that since it seems impossible that it could be God's great wrath against Israel, it must have been human wrath, either the Moabites being roused to angry desperation, or even that the invading army was disgusted at the display and changed their minds about attacking. Some translations use different wording on the assumption that this is the case. (I am using the NASB above). Yet this word wrath is associated with divine wrath and not human indignation when used elsewhere in scripture. At least one commentator concludes, as seems the most straightforward interpretation to me, that the sacrifice was a "success" and demonic wrath was summoned against the invading army, who departed as a result. I have heard enough testimonies when learning about spiritual warfare at seminary, and much more so from Taiwanese people about temple healings and exorcisms, and other demonically-motivated "helpful" results, to know that the Enemy will "play by the rules" and offer help on their own terms if it keeps people in spiritual bondage.

That is the spiritual darkness that Israel was surrounded by, and repeatedly ensnared by and plunged into, until God would send such severe punishment that they nationally repented and tore down the altars and high places, only to succumb to the lure of darkness once again. To understand the conquest of Canaan and ongoing fighting between Israel and the surrounding nations, one must understand that Canaanites did not merely fear the dark unseen world and try to appease it, but were outright worshiping and allying with it, especially against Israel. Canaan combined advanced cultural achievements, like iron weapons and the precursor to the alphabet we still use today, with dark rites and whatever aid from the unseen world they could muster, whether imaginary or real. (Witness their confusion as they call upon different powers to aid them in their battles, and understand that God was in a sense proclaiming Himself to them as He shattered their armies, as He shattered Egypt and their dark spiritual traditions generations earlier)

That was in the time of Moses, and the generations that followed. Even as Moses led Israel through the desert, they continued to practice rituals to appease the unseen spirit world. The book of Leviticus commands the Israelites to stop making sacrifices to demons of the desert, as they had been prone to do. (Leviticus 17:7)

Going back even earlier, Genesis suggests that the pre-flood world was yet more deeply under the influence of evil, and the unseen world was in fact dominating the world in a rather visible fashion. Evil spirits walked among men and, depending on your interpretation, even took human women to be their wives, and gave birth to men of unearthly power (the Nephilim mentioned above), a crime for which some spirits were imprisoned permanently in "chains of darkness" to await final judgment, referred to in passing in 2 Peter 2.
Noah's flood cleaned the world in more than one sense, then, yet in particular evil locales, enclaves, and time periods of history, wicked people have repeatedly tried to bring back that deeper darkness. Much interesting fiction has been based around the struggle to stop this kind of thing (bad group of people try to make an alliance with evil powers, good guys have to go stop them), and when we feel that somehow it's a true picture of the world even though we ourselves never seem to encounter it, we are subconsciously resonating with a truth about this world, just one that we've never been taught to see with the eyes of a biblical worldview. Yet that is the world we live in; one in which unseen evil power strives against the people of God, against the truth of the gospel, and seeks to keep lost people lost, and draw them more deeply into darkness.

3.5 Note: I am not being dark for dark's sake

I hope the reader will not misunderstand. I am not trying to be lurid or provocative in this post. Living in the spiritually darker environment of Taiwan has helped me to notice that the Bible is pretty straightforward about the darkness of the unseen part of the world we live in. It's easier to miss in some translations which seem to obscure it by choice of wording due to an unconscious cultural bias on the part of some translators or commentators which the writers of scripture did not possess.

It has also made me more sensitive to false and misleading portrayals of evil. When one has experienced the cruel hatefulness of the Enemy, the ruined lives and pain caused by satanic deception and bondage, you realize that whatever somber yet stylish aesthetic the forces of darkness are often portrayed with in Hollywood is a lie. Real evil is fearful and twisted and sickeningly ugly. At best it can temporarily pretend not to be so, but it does not love the beauty or even the intelligence it must use as tools of deception until it has enough control over its victims to drop the pretense.

I live and work in a place where that darkness is less deep than it was generations ago but has still not been effectively lifted, as it once had been in most of the West (as we continue into post-christianity it will eventually return, unless a major revival happens), and that is a burden of doing ministry here. Spiritual darkness is neither an esoteric, "best not to go there" topic to be nervously avoided, nor is it anything to be inquiring too eagerly into. It's just a bitter fact of life for many people in the world, something the freedom of Christ can deliver them from, breaking the sometimes multi-generational chains of fear and misunderstanding that bind them. It's also a reality of ministry, especially in certain parts of the world.

So my goal is not to creep anyone out, much less leave you with a morbid fascination, but to point out that the supernatural world is not something you only experience after you die, you live in it now, even if you close your eyes to it. And remember the Bible nowhere says that the devil is on a throne down in hell, that is not a scriptural teaching. (The lake of fire after judgment is punishment for Satan too.) He was cast down to earth, not to some volcanic inferno realm of Dante, and remains here, and wherever people live in spiritual bondage and serve the unseen world by following its rules, evil is behind it. When you see news articles about about weird and disturbing stuff that powerful people are caught doing, that's all part of it too.

4. But now...

We do not live in the same era as the the old Canaanite alliances with evil. Something has happened. A light has shined in the darkness, and it became our light. Our King has come, and conquered.

When the Son was born into this world as a human, he was coming to be a sacrifice for sin, but in the doing of it He was also literally invading the world, both seen and unseen. Demons were terrified of Jesus for a reason, then, and the legion possessing the Gerasene man begging not to be sent into the abyss make sense in this context. They had not expected this kind of divine invasion, not before the judgment that they knew was eventually coming. Satan seems to have more or less panicked and tried everything he could think of to stop Jesus: temptations, slander, and eventually betrayal and murder, though of course he only succeeded in doing exactly what God had already intended from the beginning. (Check and mate, God wins.) And when Christ died and rose again, He proclaimed victory over death, and over the powers of darkness in the unseen world, and His name now carries the ultimate authority:

9 

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations... [Matthew 18:18-19a]

Sometimes we skip over or rush through verse 18 to get to the "missions part." But verse 18 is what predicates the Great Commission that follows. We can carry on the mission of disciple making and kingdom growing because Jesus initiated it and it proceeds on his authority. We can take the gospel as a light into dark places, because the darkness still has strength and malice, but its authority has been taken away. Christ has won, and now His kingdom advances. And we are the servants of His kingdom, with His authority.

Let us be not oblivious to the unseen world, nor overly fearful, nor pridefully incautious, but go forth and shine in dark places, that unseen chains shall be broken and those who have dwelt in darkness may see a great light.

(Thanks for reading. We'll continue this discussion of Christ's victory and the unseen world in the Church Age later in Part II)