Fighting the Principalities and Powers, 2.8.2024 (Ambrose School)

C. R. Wiley

“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness,....” Eph. 6:12

The household and the church have always been under attack—you’ll see why by the time I’m done—but in our time the fighting has gotten more intense. Frankly, we’re getting kicked around. We need to get back on the offensive. That’s why I wrote a book entitled, The Household and the War for the Cosmos. And getting back into the fight is what this talk is about.

Let’s begin with households and review a few things about them. We live in a time when you can’t do that too much. Besides—it will help me to show you how our households are part of the war for the cosmos.

Just imagine...

...world without business corporations, or social welfare agencies. Where do you suppose people made a living, or got help, when they need it?

Mostly in households. And that’s the way that things worked in our civilization up until about 150 years ago or so. The reason is that a household was an economy. Household economies used to be based on some productive enterprise, usually farming, or trade.

Sometimes they were subsistence economies, other times they produced goods for the market. Either way, they were the economy. They produced food, clothing, and just about everything else. And on top of that, they were social welfare agencies, educating the young, and caring for the elderly.

The word economy is derived from two Greek words, oikos, meaning house, and nomos, meaning law. An economy is the law of the house. It directs its members toward a common good. This means a household isn’t a building. It was an authority structure.

And this is why a father’s authority was once unquestioned. People depended on him for so much life without him was hard to imagine. He adjudicated household disputes; in a world where the police were never a phone call away, he defended and enforced its boundaries, and he spoke for the household’s interests in public forums. (The Patriot by Mel Gibson) His job was to govern his household and represent it in the larger community. And a father was so important, his untimely death often led to breaking up a household and the distribution of its members to his relations.

We can say a father gave a household its vertical dimension. But verticality didn’t begin or end with him. Fathers were subject to higher authorities. Like the centurion that Jesus commended for saying, “I am a man under authority...” You could say that fathers were middle-management.

And this brings me to the most important duty of a father: he represented his household in a cosmic hierarchy. Heavenly laws were the basis of the home economy. And the welfare of

a household depended on the blessings of heaven. (Job) So a father was embedded in a structure he did not invent, and he had responsibilities that he did not choose.

As you know, things at home are different today. Our households are not economies in the old sense, they’re more like recreation centers. We’ve outsourced productive enterprise to the work place, and when it comes to family welfare, now the young, the old, the sick, and the out of work, all depend on social service agencies.

An unexpected consequence of this has been a downgrade in a father’s authority. Consider— in our time just what is a father supposed to be in charge of anyway?

Without a point of reference by which a father and husband can be said to represent a higher authority, households are now conceived as little more than networks of emotionally satisfying relationships. Marriage is now justified solely on that basis.

When it comes to raising children, dad is now a buddy. The goal of this friendship and nurture is the happiness of the child, as in, “I just want him/her/it to be happy.”

The idea that you are duty-bound to your family is not just passé, it’s oppressive. Duty can’t be reduced to emotionally satisfying relationships. Duty impresses a structured hierarchy onto our lives. Duty never says, “You do you”, or “Go ahead and do what makes you happy”. Duty says, “This is who you are, do what it required.”

Some people think the changes are all for the better; that old-fashioned households have been replaced by an open floor-plan with room for personal freedom. The people who think this way say that Christianity must adapt or die.

There are at least two problems with that. First, the freedom these people celebrate is an illusion. We’re actually more servile than ever, because we’re more vulnerable than ever. Households have been replaced by vast, impersonal institutions which use us like interchangeable cogs. We’re seemingly powerless before them.

And the other problem is that historically the household, with its hierarchical structure, and its roles and its duties, was at the center of Christian faith.

In case you haven’t guessed, I think we need to bring the old household back. We need to adapt it to the conditions of our time, naturally, but as odd as it might seem, conditions for doing so haven’t been this good for more than one hundred years.

But there’s something else to do. We must recover a larger frame of reference to build our houses in. We need to get back to the cosmos.

What is the Cosmos?

When people use the word cosmos today they tend to use it as a synonym for universe. But the words don’t convey the same idea. Universe stresses the singleness of reality— something that turns as a whole. It’s a fine word, even though we’ve forgotten its meaning. Similarly, most people don’t know what cosmos originally referred to.

One reason is pop science. You can see what I’m talking about by watching an old PBS television series that was entitled Cosmos. I can recall the sensation that the original broadcast created. It was a coming out party for celebrity scientist and atheist Carl Sagan.

Sagan revealed the agenda that informed the series when he famously intoned in the introduction, “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us—there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.”

It was a clever opening, let’s give Sagan credit. But we should also note that he cribbed it. It is an echo of the words of Christ in Revelation, “‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, ‘who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty” (Rev. 1:8).

(Also, oddly, a ‘distant memory, as falling from a great height’— seems to be an allusion to Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis.)

But amid the voices we should also hear the echo of the Apostle Paul from Ephesians. Cosmos is the word he uses in Eph. 1:4. You wouldn’t know it since it is usually translated with the English word world (...he chose us in him before the foundation of the world,...). You may have heard someone say, “Something was lost in translation.” That’s the case here. The word world doesn’t have the same connotation as cosmos did in the first century. When we say world generally mean the place where we live, or earth. But we can be grateful that the ESV uses the original word in Ephesians 6:12 where it takes the form of the adjective, cosmic. (...we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness,...)

In the first century, cosmos was a way of seeing things that Christians and their pagan neighbors shared in common. (Not even pagans saw the cosmos the way that Carl Sagan

did.) The cosmos was an ordered thing—the largest order of them all. That’s what the word meant. It included everything, even invisible things. And it housed microcosms—little orders that depended upon and reflected the larger one.

But there is something ironic about the way we use the word cosmos today, because what we mean is almost the opposite of what it used to mean. When Sagan insisted that the cosmos is all there is, he explicitly rejected the ancient view that an order depended on an order-giver. Instead, Sagan tried to explain how matter orders itself, without the benefit of a designer.

Some people believed that the cosmos took its present form through a violent process. In those stories order is imposed on chaos. But Biblical cosmogony is different. For one thing it is not a violent process but instead proceeds in a workmanlike way. Nevertheless, it is what biblical cosmology had in common with all the others that I want to underscore. When it came to the cosmos, Christians and their neighbors agreed that someone was sitting in heavenly places giving orders.

Verticality

Speaking of the heavens, the ancient cosmos had a top. Time for some political incorrectness: hierarchy means sacred rule, hieros, for sacred, and arche’, for ruler. And this is a good thing.

Even today we know that an order must come with a top. Being high gives you oversight. (It’s what it means to be an overseer: you’re higher in a hierarchy.) And being low means looking up to your rulers, as when someone says of someone he admires, “I really look up to him.”

Sagan’s cosmos didn’t come with a top. There is no normative vertical dimension whatsoever. It is just space, as in outer space. Paradoxically, this means Sagan’s cosmos is flat, because without verticality it is impossible to make meaningful distinctions or say that some things are more important than other things. Sagan, who liked to wax poetic, was known for referring to his viewers as “star stuff.” Just why this should flatter anyone remained unexplained. Frogs and rocks are star stuff too.

And what this reveals is that Sagan’s cosmos can only be given charm by sneaking in a little of the old cosmos here and there. According to the old way of seeing things, stars are a lot more than stuff. We see this when we read books like Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C. S. Lewis. In that book, a youthful version of Sagan by the name of Eustace Clarence Scrub remarks when he meets a star in person, “In our world a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” To this the star replies, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.”

And we also see this in Ephesians. We have heavenly places (1:3, 1:20, 2:6, 3:10) and we have the regions below (1:20, 4:8). And Christ traveled the intervening span (4:8-9). And it is this in-between space that should interest us: first, because it is a problem (1:21, 2:2, 6:12), and second, because it’s where we live.

But at our level, we are not the only occupants. Surrounding us and just above us are principalities and powers. And I’m not just talking about City Hall. Paul actually names their chief: “the Prince of the Power of the Air.” What a great moniker; the reference to air conveys the sense of being immersed, surrounded by something as real, yet as invisible, as air.

The problem with our layer is that its prince is insubordinate. You could say he’s an ambitious and wily governor. People living in it don’t necessarily know this, although they feel the effects of a conhlict. According to Paul though, this layer of the cosmos will eventually be brought to heel beneath the feet of Christ (1:22).

Why we’re losing today

Most Christians today write off “principalities and powers” as rhetorical flourish, if they think about them at all. Oddly, many Christians today even agree with Sagan that the cosmos is an intrinsically meaningless place.

When the light of Christ’s glory appeared in the first century, it revealed to that the old gods were a bit shabby. But his glory more than made up for it. Then Christians cleaned house and the west became a capacious and vibrant place. And beneath its soaring heights new things were built, things that had never been seen before: universities, and hospitals, as well as the greatest civilization the world has ever known. It wasn’t heaven on earth; that civilization had its faults—but on a scale of relative goods, it was the best there ever was.

The telescope didn’t destroy it. Atheism did—that way of seeing that doesn’t see. Now we’re told that there is no given intrinsic meaning because there is no God to give it. Some atheists are urbane, others are violent, and yet others popularize the new creed. But they all agreed: In the end, everything amounts to nothing.

First fools rose in applause. “There’s nothing above; now we rise!” But wiser fools knew that no Heaven means no “up.” Everything is moving but going nowhere; space swallows everything but is never full. Now philosophers say things like, “A boy is a pig, and a pig is a boy.” And consciousness itself is an offense. Here’s Bertrand Russell in 1903: “I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These things have to be lived through: there is nothing to do about them.”

The War for the Cosmos Today

An empty cosmos leaves us empty. But empty places don’t stay empty for long. The cosmos is being repopulated. Jesus told a little story along this line in Matthew 12:43–45:

“When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, but finds none. Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it comes it finds the house empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings with it seven

other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first. So also will it be with this evil generation.”

The last state is worst than the first. Think about that.

We Must Re-learn to Wage the Peace

There are many paradoxes in the world, one is the adage, if you want peace, prepare for war.

Romans understood this. The Pax Romana dealt with the situation on the ground; and when it came to troops on the ground, they were hard to beat. The Jews tried and lost badly. The Roman war wagon rolled right over them and pacified them.

Before that, Rome had gotten its own house in order. The Republic was constitutionally incapable of keeping the peace over the vast territory it ruled. Standing armies were financed directly by their generals. Civil war had been practically inevitable. In the end Augustus defeated his rivals and from that point on there was no going back to the old ways of doing things.

From the perspective of the people on the ground, this was a good thing. The triumph of Augustus was celebrated in works of art, among them, the Gemma Augustea, a carving dated from the second or third decade of the first century, not long before Paul wrote to the Ephesians. The gem shows the emperor seated in a heavenly place declaiming. We know it’s a heavenly place because he’s surrounded by the gods.

I hope that you can see what this implies. Christians believed that Christ is Lord in the same way that the Romans believed that Augustus was Lord. Christ made rebellious authorities submit—just like Augustus, and that is why he is now seated in a heavenly place. (1:20) And he also governs a capacious household where former enemies live together in peace. (2:19)

What the Peace We’re Fighting for Looks Like:

Augustus commissioned Virgil, the greatest poet of the time, to compose an epic that told the story of the founding of Rome—and why it was destined to rule the world. It is called The Aeneid, and its protagonist was none other than the Trojan hero, Aeneas.

(Romans believed that they were the descended from the Trojans who had fled Troy after it was destroyed in the Trojan War.)

Jews had their own epic—it’s found in the Bible. And it begins with the story of Abraham. They also believed that they were the heirs of the world. (Rm 4:13)

And as you may have already perceived—the world isn’t big enough for two heirs.

But there is another similarity between the stories of Aeneas and Abraham. Both end with a marriage.

In the Aeneid Aeneas wages a war for a princess, and when his warfare ends he will take the throne and reign with her.

And Abraham’s story ends in remarkably the same way, albeit he’s not the one that wages a war for a queen. That’s a job for his heir, the Son of David. After he wins the greatest victory of all, he also wins a bride, and the Bible ends with their wedding day. And they live happily ever after. (Rev. 21)

This brings us back to the household.

The Christian Household is More than an Economy.

If making a living were all there were to it we might as well let the corporate economy replace it. But this isn’t all there is to it.

We get a glimpse of the more in one of the most politically incorrect passages that Paul ever wrote, Ephesians 5:22–33:

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave herself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his

body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

Did you see it? The household is a microcosm of the cosmos. The duties of husbands to wives, and wives to husbands, reflect a higher order, and that order points to the end of the world.

The nexus of a Christian household is the conjugal union of a husband and wife. In both Genesis and Ephesians we’re told that it amounts to one flesh. Paul tells us that this a mystery, meaning that it hides something, even as it reveals something.

One flesh begins with the conjugal union, that’s why we used to call it consummating a marriage. But it’s just the beginning; one flesh also refers to the natural issue of that union in children. It goes even beyond that: it is a union of interests, of goods, and a common life. (A legal term for it is joint tenancy.) This means that what goes for one, goes for the other. And Paul tells us that all of this applies to Christ and the Church. What belongs to the Church, belongs to Christ; and what belongs to Christ, belongs to the Church, because they are one flesh.

The New Covenant made this connection. Here’s why: because sinners are condemned to die, Christ died for his chosen bride; and because Christ was raised and glorified, the Church is raised and glorified, too. We call it “double- imputation”. It’s a form of moral

accounting. What it accounts for is the one flesh union of Christ and the Church. I hope you see what this implies.

It means that, in a real way, the Christian household is a picture of the end of the world. What I mean is, it shows us the purpose of this world—the cosmos, and it shows us what the new world—cosmos 2.0—will look like. It is a sign that reads: this is the way the world will end, not with a bang, not even with a whimper, but with wedding bells.

Guerrilla Piety

In the meantime there is a war going on and you have been conscripted and given your armor (6:13- 20). But like Christians in the Empire we are hopelessly overmatched on the ground. The principalities rage against the rule of the Lord of the Cosmos.

Inhuman machinery menaces us: technology tracks us, and increasingly it manipulates us, progressive multinational corporations standardize us, mainstream media indoctrinates us, and state-run education and healthcare make us ever more dependent on government largess. All of these things and more are arrayed against us.

Yet in spite of all of these things, we’ve has already won. We wrestle with defeated enemies.

We have two strategies that can project remarkable influence in the world so long as they are microcosms of Christ’s cosmic order.

Stratagem 1: The Household of God

When Alexander the Great swept across the East, he left behind a trail of seventy cities bearing his name—Alexandria—and one named for his horse. (Bucephala) It was more than an ego-trip, they promoted the Greek way of life. They were model communities, gifts of the divine Alexander, intended to help enlighten his new subjects.

The churches Paul planted throughout the Roman world served the same function. And in those houses, the stewards worked to make sure that these communities put the benefits of Christ’s rule on display for the principalities and powers. (3:10—...through the church the manifold wisdom of God might be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.)

It is important to keep these things in mind, because when we turn the Church into a water boy for a secular culture in the name of relevance, we lose touch with our true standard. There is something of a paradox here: When the Church reflects the world, it loses it; but when the Church reflects Heaven, it wins it.

Stratagem 2: The Household

The household is the fulcrum of the world; it gives us leverage. The principalities know this, that’s why they are obsessed with compromising it.

You may wonder how your small stake could possibly threaten the powers that be. Just remember, a household ordered by the household code in Ephesians reflects the rule of Christ. And all things connect. That little tune that your household sings carries.

So fight the good fight. Go home, build your house, and if you do it in the right way, you will give the world a glimpse of things to come. There is nothing more terrifying to the principalities than this. Because in the end, the principalities will bow and confess that Christ is Lord.