A Difference in Story
There has been much talk in certain Christian circles these past few years of re-enchantment – and praise God for it. The modern person, even the modern Christian, has for the past century slowly been taken in by the Enemy’s story. The story he is telling is one without faery, one in which the world consists of merely protons and electrons, cells and organs, solids and gasses, matter and principle. It’s a story that attempts to stir up wonder through Carl Sagan’s assertion that we’re all stardust, rather than God’s assertion that we are all Earth dust, and to it we shall return. The world, and our view of it, is in desperate need of re-enchantment. The story that we have is one far more interesting than the materialists’ anemic tale.
The world, of course, is protons and electrons, cells and organs and the like. But it’s not just that. And while any faithful Christian today will agree that the unseen world is real, that spirit and unseen beings exist, they have probably still bought into the modern lie to some degree or another. They may be embarrassed at the bits of the Bible that their High School science teacher saw as esoteric and superstitious, and may sympathize with the liberal theologians that some miracles of scripture might have some scientific, materialistic, “rational” interpretation. Surely the truth must lie near the fact that the ancient people were simple, superstitious, unlearned people, and simply couldn’t understand the natural phenomena around them. What these apologetic Christians forget is that the miracles are recorded by God Himself – the One who is Truth. They may also forget that the Christian faith, if it is to remain intact, is based wholly upon a miracle that breaks the laws of nature. The resurrection can’t be explained away by natural phenomena without also sweeping away the entire content of our confession. Christ rose from the dead and killed the demon gods, deposed the spiritual powers of this world, and ascended to rule all creation at His Father’s side. That’s the true story we’re telling, magic and all.
Revealed Cryptids
These demons that Christ deposed are some of the creatures that we ought to evaluate, because they’re one of the supernatural realities that might make a modern squirm. The assertion that demons are real, personal, malevolent beings seeking your personal destruction – rather than simply your “past trauma” or “sin struggles” – is a truth the modern world has forgotten or erased. The world needs to remember that the heavens brim with life, and the very air around us contains beings beyond sight, angels of the Lord, living creatures made for God’s glory.
The world needs to know that these beings are in it, that angels walk among us in the form of humans, and we entertain them unaware (Hebrews 13:2). The world needs to remember that giants once walked on its face (Numbers 13:44), that dragons – not just challenges that you can “slay” by overcoming them, but literal, fire-breathing, man-eating dragons – existed (Job 41). The same is true for sea monsters (Psalm 74:13), talking donkeys (Numbers 22), and the mutant offspring of demons and human women (Genesis 6). This world is far more interesting than the story peddled by the modern textbooks. To re-enchant this world and our worldview, we must be unapologetic about the supernatural world we live in. Don’t skirt around what the pagans see as embarrassing, because what they are embarrassed by happens to be the truth. This world is supernatural. This world is haunted. This world is full of fairies, deceptive demons, witches, magicians, and all other kinds of evil haunting our woods and cities. This isn’t only a past reality, it’s a current one.
Don’t be N.I.C.E.
The reason I referred to the materialist story as “the Enemy’s” is because Satan – the personal, evil, deceptive devil of this world – loves it. It benefits him immensely to have the majority of moderns (in the first world) disbelieve in him entirely. Satan and his sickly hordes influence this world, not only spiritually, but physically and often. They do everything in their power to deceive, to trick, to lie, and to lead humans to doom. This is why they love the story told today, the story where the main characters are quarks, atoms, gravity and nothing more. Because a story like that gives them breathing room – room to work.
A story like that that leaves no room for demons, and so leaves no room for the One who defeated them. A story like that has no room for sin, so needs no savior. A story like that says “sin” is simply a religious veneer for the concept of shame, and our issues stem instead from “trauma” (i.e. something someone else did to us, not our own fault). A story like this says that demons aren’t real and neither is possession, so things like practicing witchcraft, playing with Ouija boards, and soothsaying are just harmless fun – maybe even tapping into a natural force beyond our current understanding – but they certainly aren’t harmful. A story like this leaves no room for the miracle of the resurrection, and so leaves no room for my own personal resurrection from death in sin to life in Christ. A story like this leads to hell.
There are a vast number of helpful resources available to us as Christians to help re-enchant our view of the world we live in. There are books like C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, which shows us what a demonic cabal would look like in a modern, materialist world. He shows us how demons can deceive us into disbelieving in them, while we are speaking directly to them all the while. A demonic institution in today’s world will look very much like That Hideous Strength’s N.I.C.E. (National Institute for Coordinated Experiments), with their cold and calculated methods, their distaste for humanity, and their disregard for God’s haunted world. The N.I.C.E. paints a picture for us of what we ought not be, and what the satanic powers want to make us.
There are books like Dr. Michael Heiser’s The Unseen Realm, which attempts to capture for us the supernatural worldview of the biblical authors in a way that illuminates the more confounding texts, especially in the Old Testament. For that matter, one can simply read any book written by a Christian before the Enlightenment to better understand how Christians have historically viewed the world around them and the nature of the supernatural. Reading old books is a cure for many modern maladies.
Beyond books, there are podcasts and shows like Brian Sauvè and Ben Garrett’s Haunted Cosmos, a wonderfully engaging and well-produced podcast that explores the supernatural world around us and seeks to understand it in light of the truths of scripture. But more than any specific resource, I believe the key to our re-enchantment lies in simply believing the world we live in is the one God has said it is. It’s full of ghosts and ghouls, witches and warlocks, angels, dragons, giants, and more. Believe the world is what it claims to be, and look around at it in wonder. Don’t let the sad materialist story that has been told to you infect your imagination, and don’t let the drab scenery of what the rest of the world believes take the color out of your own vision. This world is supernatural, and brimming with living mystery. Live in it in wonder.
Image Credit: Unsplash
I would recommend the podcast “lord of spirits”- an Eastern Orthodox podcast about exactly this.
I would recommend Eastern orthodoxy in general- it has never been part of the disenchantment of the west- and that is why it is my church.